#83 - How the Koch Brothers Got Rich, Human IPOs and Why Snapchat Might be the Future
Hey, so here's the deal. At night I have this weird bedtime routine. I go to My First Million's podcast page on iTunes and I read all of the reviews. So, can you please, after this podcast or even right now, just hit pause, go and leave us a review. It doesn't even have to be a 5-star review. Just tell us how you think or what you think and it's really important to us because Sean and I look at every single review and we actually adapt to some of the feedback we get. So please go ahead and do that. And also, we have thousands of people who are part of a Facebook group. Facebook group where we talk about the ideas we discuss on My First Million. If you go to facebook.com on the search bar, just type in My First Million, you'll see the group. There's thousands of folks in there who are all schemers just like Sean and I. So come and join us.
Sam, what's up?
Hey, I'm looking at an email that I just got from Milk Bar. They have a peanut butter and jelly birthday cake. My birthday's in a few days. If anyone has a If anyone is thinking about me.
Alright, if someone's thinking about you, what should they do?
Just buy me that cake.
What is Milk Bar? Is this a brand of cake?
Yeah, it started because— what's that guy in New York? David Chang. He started the Momofuku bars and they decided to open up a dessert area and now that's spun off to its own thing called Milk Bar and they make trendy cakes. I ordered one the other day. It's pretty good.
How long does it take for it to get to you?
A week.
Oh man. See, that's the problem. I'm not, I'm never thoughtful a week in advance. I'm like the day of, I'm like, I'm going to do something, but I need something that can get done that day.
It looks delicious. Can we talk about Austin?
Yeah, you're in Austin.
Okay. I've been in Austin for 3 weeks now. I'm going to come home on Saturday. Austin is lovely. It is a great place. Sean, is like, is everyone in San Francisco going to leave?
No, everyone in San Francisco is not going to leave, but definitely some, some people are leaving.
I'm looking at, so I have a place in San Francisco. I pay like $5,000 a month or something, $4,000 to $5,000 a month. And I live in, it's like 1,000 or 1,100 square feet with a garage. I'm living in a place that's probably $3,000 a month. And it's like a 2,000 square foot house with a backyard and like furnished. I'm like, what am I doing?
Yeah, but the thing is you can go even further with that because like when I grew up, I lived in a whole bunch of different countries. I lived in Indonesia, I lived in China, and there it's like, you know, go to Indonesia, you'll live like a king. You can go live in Bali on the beach with a cook and a driver for the same amount you're paying in Austin, right? So this kind of, this arbitrage of like cost of living, it really never ends. So be careful.
Yeah, I'm just It's making me question my life. I look on Zillow all the time for buying a home in San Francisco, and the prices are dropping like crazy. It says like $150,000, $200,000 cut off of everything. Are you gonna have to cut on your house?
Hopefully not. If you're the buyer listening to this, I'm not taking one penny less than asking. That's my position.
Oh, do you have someone who's gonna buy it now?
No, I don't know. I haven't listed it yet, but soon.
Good. And so, your friends, do you have a lot of friends leaving San Francisco?
I have friends who were already in the process of it. This just kind of accelerated it. So some people just lifestyle-wise ready to go. Some people when they're like, well, if I'm not working from home and commuting, I don't need to be here. So yeah, definitely this has accelerated people out. But it also feels like things are opening back up. So I think that, you know, things can change. People can feel differently as soon as life gets a little bit back to normal. You never know what people will feel like. So We'll see as things open up.
I'm very eager. So you want to start— you want to talk about some interesting stuff?
Yeah, you got one?
Yeah, I got one. So Jeff Bezos— Bezos, Bezos, Amazon guy— he owns Washington Post. And a few years ago he goes, yeah, I'm gonna buy it and I'll let the editorial do its thing and whatever else, I'm gonna completely stay out of it, but I kind of want to take your guys's They built their own technology to publish their articles. Like, I kind of want to take that and make that like a huge business. And a lot of people try this and never, and very rarely works. But what he did was, or he didn't do it, but he was somehow part of it. Uh, they've created this thing called Arc Publishing and it does a couple things. The first thing is companies like me pay money to use it, but it's really interesting that you and I have talked about this idea. Um, but what Arc Publishing is doing is they're going to companies like BP, so the, uh, the oil company that has 200,000 companies and they are saying, hey, BP, you have, you know, 200,000 employees. We're going to help you publish newsletters and articles and stuff to your, to your employees, which you already are, but we're going to help you organize it, make sure it's read, things like that. And they're saying that in the next year or two they're going to hit $100 million in revenue. Wow. Which means, which means I bet Washington Post probably does maybe $500 million in revenue in total, but $100 million in this enterprise SaaS revenue would be worth more than Washington Post. Is. And I wanted to get your opinion on, A, that's a cool idea that you and I have been noodling with for a while, and they're just executing on a really interesting way. And B, the idea of branching out, um, from your main thing to doing more. Yeah. And like, in a totally unrelated thing, in some ways it's totally a stupid— I mean, so there's an argument to be made like, this is just a stupid idea, never do it. There's an argument to be made that a lot of people do it successfully. So, what's your take on this?
So, first, this— I've never heard of Arc, so this is my first time hearing about it. Just to clarify, they give other brands or other companies the tools that Washington Post has. They sort of productize their own toolkit. But is it always like the use case you talked about, like BP has 50,000 employees, wants to publish internally, or is it also external publishing?
I think that they're still trying to figure it out, and I think that they're building it for a variety of reasons. At first it was just for publishers and then they closed this deal with BP and they, I think to them, they're like, huh, maybe that's the way, that's the path.
No, I think there's something to that because, you know, when, when I started the podcast, I used to go to this podcast studio before you guys built a dope studio in your office. Um, I was going to this like kind of rent a studio by the hour place. And I was talking to the guy who did it and he was like, they had a sports radio station, a 24/7 sports radio station. And then they were like, well, we know how to build the studio. We built one for them. What if we turned a few conference rooms into broadcasting booths and we did— we offered it to podcasters? These hipsters in SF, they love this shit. And so, um, they didn't say that part.
And by the way, in San Francisco, there are no—
they're basically the only one. And trust me, I tried.
It sucked.
Yeah. And so I went there and, uh, I was like, hey, can I get 11 AM tomorrow? And he's like, no, we're booked up from 11 to 3. I'm like, shit, who else— who are the podcasters using this? And he was like, oh, this is Facebook. They, um, I was like, Facebook? He's like, yeah, they have an internal podcast that they do for their employees because Facebook has, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees, maybe 50,000, I don't know. But they have managers who come in and record a podcast about managing at Facebook and it gets distributed only internally. And I was like, I never heard of an internal-only podcast that a company was doing. But of course, you know, makes sense. People want to put out content. Training, you know, different things like that, whether it's in text or audio form. That was my first time hearing about these like internal publishing systems that I had never really considered.
And that is what Arc is trying to do. And like Facebook that has 50, I don't know, what do they have? 20,000 employees, some tens of thousands of people. They need to create a lot of this stuff like, hey everyone, so here's how we're addressing this situation. Here's what we're gonna say. Here's the words we're using. Yada yada yada. Or we're quitting this product, here's why, yada yada yada. Right. Here's how to use the internal software, yada yada yada. It's a great idea, I think. And you and I had discussed a slight variation of this, but I want the listeners to tweet at me and tell me— and I always hate the idea when people say like, oh, I can't do this, it already exists. But I just want to know, does this exist? Who is solving this problem?
Yeah, we've talked about a few variations of this. So let's go over them. So this is all in the bubble of the theme of what I'll call, um, I mean, I want to, I don't want to say internal publishing because that sounds lame as shit, but basically intra-company stuff. So, uh, I'll think of a good name in a second, but basically we talked about Q&A, uh, sorry, all-hands software because, you know, big companies do all-hands, you know, for their whole employee base. Also individual, uh, you know, divisions will do all-hands for their group. And what you need there is video streaming. You need chat or Q&A functionality, but it needs to be private. It needs to be internal. It needs to be behind a wall that nobody else can get to this. So a lot of people already have video streaming services out there, but that's for mass, you know, it's like YouTube, it's Twitch, it's things for to go get a big audience, but this is for a select audience. It's a little bit different. So we talked about that one. We talked about when we were, we were going over Hemingway. And how it makes you a better writer. We were saying, what if you could do this for, uh, internal— your emails inside a company, but also just a MailChimp for your company? So how does somebody get the word out within a company? How do they make nicely formatted, easy to read, you know, company announcements and bulletins that come with the kind of tools that MailChimp has, like tracking opens and clicks and that sort of thing? Um, so, so that's an internal MailChimp. Internal podcasting. What these guys are doing is basically internal, you know, Washington Post, which is like a whole bunch of different features and functionality. They have— these guys have, you know, broadcasting, like live streaming. They have blogging. They have, you know—
are you reading though the website?
I'm going through their products. They have a huge set of things, basically everything you would need to make Washington Post. So I think that's just an interesting thing to think about. What if you took the best-in-class products that people use to publish and broadcast to large audiences, and you said, how do companies need this just for internal broadcasting, internal announcements? I remember my brother-in-law, he owns gyms, you know, like 50 gyms, and he was like, yeah dude, I just need an easy way to mass text all my employees on a text list the kind of numbers for the day and any key announcements about what we're trying to do. He's like, you'd be surprised. It's really hard to like get this stuff set up and get this, make this a part of the onboarding of my company so that everybody knows this.
That's the SMB, uh, version, like the small business version. Um, which is also a good idea.
And then the second thing you talked about is, you know, when do you, when do you do this? When do you take your eye off your core business and how do you expand into other lines of businesses? I think that's, you know, generically a hard thing and it's a case-by-case thing. You have plenty of examples where it worked and it becomes a huge business unit. Let's call AWS being the best example of this, where Amazon takes its own sort of server and compute system and services system and makes it available to any company. And now AWS brings in, you know, tens of billions of dollars a year. And so that's like the best case scenario. And then you have probably, you know, hundreds of thousands of other examples that you could come up with where somebody does this it doesn't take off, it becomes a distraction, etc., etc. And you guys have considered this too. So how do you, how do you guys think about this?
Yeah. So when we consider everyone says the same thing, they go, well, Amazon did it. Let's just make AWS for them. And I'm like, well, you have to understand that Amazon did it like 10 years into their business when they were 10,000 employees and throwing 250 people at that problem ain't no thing. And so at my company, it's like, yeah, okay, I could hire a person. Like, I have no problem a couple of people like doing it. But you do need to get like your main thing right first. That said, I struggle with it because I have ADD and I want to— I want to do this shit. So it's hard. I don't know what— like Twitch. I bet Twitch is in the same boat. They're big enough that they can have these same projects and a lot of the infrastructure that they probably are built on. I bet they had to make a lot of it from scratch.
Um, absolutely.
So I don't, I don't know.
So Twitch is 10 years into the business, and you're right, they invented essentially the best in class, let's say, live video streaming at scale where you can have 100,000 people all watching one channel with low latency and it doesn't fall over, and broadcasting around the world. Nobody else really had that problem, so nobody else built a solution. And so you could imagine that Twitch could say, hey, we could make this available to others and that they could spin it out as its own business unit. And I think that might be a good decision, right? Because, um, you're taking an asset you've already have that you've, that you've refined, that's sort of, um, um, battle-tested and brandable, right? Like your sales pitch is, hey, we use this for the biggest live streaming network, you know, out there. Um, but at the same time, it's a distraction, and they wouldn't have done it year 1, 2, or 3. They, you know, could do it at year 10 because at that point your core is stable. It's not going anywhere. It's not going to die. And so, you know, I always make these analogies and I don't know if my team really likes it, but I always talk about like, you know, a startup is like a baby and like with a baby, a baby just, they need to eat, they need to sleep, they need to poop and nothing else matters. Like you don't need to teach a baby calculus right now. You don't need to, you know, do all this other stuff. And, um, but as it becomes a teenager or gets ready to go to go off for college, you know, you don't have to watch it so intently. You don't have to worry about, is it gonna, you know, uh, keeping the baby alive every single day? That's the main objective of early stage. But as you get later stage, you don't have to worry about that, which lets you invest.
Why don't they like— that's a good analogy. Why don't they like it?
I think it's because I'm always like, right now we just got to keep the baby alive. And it's just like sort of a dark— a darker way of talking about it. But, uh, like I did this with one of our companies in the Idea Lab. I was like, We had one company that was already mature, it was already profitable, making millions of dollars. And we had this other project that was totally unproven. And so anytime you had to decide, where do I spend an hour? It always seemed like a good idea to spend it on the thing that's making millions in profit, never to spend it on this super speculative thing. But if we did that, we would have never invested in the new thing. And so I made a decision. I said, hey, we can't have the baby and the teenager in the same room because they have totally different needs. They need different type of care. And, um, you know, one will always look feeble and weak compared to the other, but that one that's feeble and weak today has the most growth potential. And so we need to be investing in that too. And so let's split these two companies up and let's spin them out.
What about, um, you— do you think that you are like me where you have ADD and you like starting stuff, or are you the opposite where you like to run it?
Uh, I have ADD in the sense that I like, I, I'm attracted to doing a new thing. I'm attracted to new strategies, new ideas. But the second part of your question was, do you like to run it or not run it? Um, of course, in my ideal world, I don't have to run it. Somebody else runs it, takes the idea to fruition, and I get to own the whole thing. But in reality, I found that that is much harder, um, to implement. Doesn't mean it's impossible, much harder to implement.
Yeah, this is an interesting discussion. Um, I was reading about, um, uh, Coke Land, about the Koch brothers. You know what that is?
I, I know the Koch brothers. I saw you putting this in the Facebook group that you were, uh, you were sort of summarizing what you had learned. What is the TL;DR? So all I know is Koch brothers, super rich old white guys that I think support like, you know, the Conservative Party.
So what do I need to know besides that? So Everything that you've just said is a stereotype about them that 99% of people think is about them. And the reason I wanted to read the book about them was it was just interesting. But what I learned is they're far more rich than that, not in terms of money, but they're much richer character. They kind of get pegged. Now, I'm not saying that they don't do evil stuff, but they get pegged as these old white guys who control the Conservative Party. In reality, they're quite libertarian, and they actually give money to all types of charities. I mean, they give a lot of money to gay rights organizations, 'cause one of the brothers is gay. They give a lot of money to prison reform, because they don't want people to, they think the criminal justice system is screwed up. And they're very principled, and it just so happens that the Republicans definitely do a lot of the stuff that they wanna give money to, but they go across the board. The way that they got started was the father started an oil company and that oil company was somewhat successful. Like it was making $30 million a year in American, or sorry, in today's dollar in profit. So like successful, very successful. But the 31-year-old brother Charles took it over when the father died and turned it into the largest privately owned business in America. And so he took something that did $30 million a year profit to now probably like $10 billion a year in profit.
And he got out of oil. What did they do with— where—
yeah, so what they did was that they took their $30 million, they, they owned an oil refinery, and they did a combination of things including— so the thing about oil is it goes through this tower and oil turns into gasoline, but then, then the leftover stuff turns into kerosene, and then the leftover stuff turns into Vaseline, and the leftover stuff turns into propane. And so they just started like selling all the leftover stuff And they took those profits and then bought different companies. So they, you know, Bounty paper towels, they make those. A lot of the paper that newspapers printed on, they make that. A lot of, it's called, what's that? Gore-Tex? Is it called Gore-Tex? What's like, it's like a, and Lycra, is it Lycra? That's the material that Nike makes shoes out of that's really strong. It's like that plastic. They make that. So they just make stuff that originally started as oil, but now it expands, but it's still like making stuff. And their operations are basically this, like, let's just like start a lot of— start or buy a ton of stuff. And it all started with one thing. And that's kind of one of the reasons why I'm interested in this topic.
I like that a lot. A, that was just a great description. And B, that totally changes my like kind of like expands the stereotype I had of the Koch brothers in my head. You know, I never bothered to sort of look under the hood and be like, what is this? How do they get rich? Are they really just the sort of evil manipulators of the Conservative Party type of thing, or is there more depth to it? So that's kind of interesting.
I never— Well, I'm not saying that they're— I don't think they are evil. I think that they do some things that they're— some of the things they do a lot of people, particularly liberal people, strongly disagree with.
I told you about my friend, my friend who I'm like, this guy's going to be a billionaire. He's like 22 years old. I'm like, this guy's going to be a billionaire someday. He, he interviewed with the Koch brothers to be their like head of investments or something like that. And he was like pretty far down the interview process. And I was like, dude, do you feel like, you know, a certain type of way that it's, you know, the Koch brothers or whatever? He was like, he just laughed. He was just like, is money green? Okay, money's green. Thank you. That's all I care about. He's like, I, he's so ruthless about the way he, he looks at these things. I find it hilarious. And ultimately he didn't do it because either A, they didn't offer him enough, or B, I think they're based out of like Kansas or Nebraska or something like that.
Wichita, Kansas.
Wichita. And he was like, yeah, I don't know if I want to go live in Wichita for X number of years to do this.
So he ultimately pulled out. Well, if he got offered and he didn't take it, he's an idiot, but I'm sure he'll figure out his way.
Okay, that's, that's pretty interesting. I like the— anything else on the Koch brothers? Otherwise, I like that. That's sort of— I would say that's the Billy of the week then in this case.
That's— yeah, I'll finish it up with— I'm reading Kochland, and so that is a book that has a— it's, it's clearly trying to be negative about them. It's still a great read. And then there's Sons of Wichita, which is their biography, which tries to be objective. And then there's another book called It's, it's, it's either called, one of them's called Good Profit and then the other one's called, uh, Market-Based Management. Good. Uh, and describes the Koch brothers, um, management philosophy and it's incredibly interesting.
Nice. Okay. I like that. Uh, yeah, I just started reading a lot more recently and it's like the best decision I made, which sounds like stupid. It's not even like worth talking about, but the reality is there's probably a lot of people like me who like to read, go through these phases where you like intensely read and then like don't read anything for 2 years. Um, and if you're that person, like, just do it. Go back to the reading thing. It's great. I just did it and I don't regret it at all. I'm reading this thing called The Happy Body, uh, which is like really interesting. It's about, um, the— these guys who study weightlifters. They basically are like, you know, what, what should you strive for with fitness? And they're like, well, you should strive for these like 3 or 4 things that, um, You know, you don't want to be a bodybuilder where you're just strong, but you're slow and you're inflexible. You don't want to be a baby where you're super flexible, but you're weak. Uh, you want to be X, and they start to outline it, and there's all these little tests. And so I'm always doing them and making my wife do them.
Like, okay, stand against the wall.
Awesome. Stand against the wall, raise your hands above your head, and I'm going to count the points of contact against the wall. Okay, here's how you are in terms of, you know, body, you know, your, your alignment or your posture or whatever it is. So there's all these little tests where which makes it a lot more fun to read than—
I'm gonna buy this. Are you doing this because you feel like you're getting old?
I'm doing it because it came recommended. I think somebody said this is a great book. And then the other thing is I basically believe that everything that— the sort of common knowledge about food and fitness is just so confusing and bullshit and contradicts itself so frequently. That I'm looking for better like source material, like not sell me a fad diet or a new, you know, P90X. This book reads almost like a textbook, and I find that a lot more appealing because I don't feel like I'm being sold to some program or some, you know, diet and products and shit like that. So that's why I like it.
Great, I'm buying it. I'm getting it.
I'm gonna read it. I got two ideas for you that are both, based on Zoom. Um, actually, I have a better idea. Let me go to the better idea first. Okay, so, um, did you see today Snapchat did a, like, they did their developer conference thing?
And yeah, tell me about that thing that they introduced.
So they introduced us a few things, and they were like, hey, you know, last time we introduced games, and games are doing great. And they were talking about, they're just kind of hyping up games to get more people to build mini games on Snapchat. But they introduced other things called Minis, and Minis is actually, I think, a bigger move by them. So Minis are basically mini applications built into Snapchat. What they're doing is they're copying WeChat, which is the big messaging app in China. WeChat has like a million little apps built in, like, oh, you need to pay your bills? You just do it through WeChat. And how do you do that? Well, there's this little mini website that the the, you know, the utility company makes, that'll just pop up in your WeChat and you hit pay and it's paid. Or you want to do this, you want to buy movie tickets together, you do it within WeChat. Like, we don't do that in iMessage, we don't do that in Facebook Messenger, but that's what all these companies would love to— they'd love to be WeChat here in the States. So Snapchat's taking a big stab at doing that, and they announced, like, so for example, one of the minis is Headspace, so you can do like sort of a quick meditation with anybody else on, like one of your friends from Snapchat. They did a movie ticket buying thing. They did, you know, so they did several of these. What's interesting here is that Snapchat's sort of in a position where they have to become a platform to compete because Facebook and Instagram have sort of just declared like, we will steal your, we took your mojo already, and if you come out with some new great mojo, like guess what? You know, Evan Spiegel, you're the head of product at Facebook actually. Whatever you come up with, we are going to put in our apps as soon as humanly possible. So their only strategy— they have basically two core strategies. One is maybe they can create Snap Glasses, these like AR glasses, and they can just sort of get off the cell phone game and get into the glasses game before anybody else. So that would be like a—
what's it called? A Snap Mini website?
What do you call that? Um, they call them Snap Minis, and what they are are little mini websites that, that can pop up and be little like utility, things to do inside Snapchat besides message each other. Now, the second thing is becoming a platform, because Facebook and Instagram don't do a great job of letting other companies build shit on top of them. People distrust those companies. They've built apps on top of Facebook and Messenger before and gotten screwed, and so they don't have great ecosystems. So Snapchat's kind of pushing their chips into the middle of the table and saying, come build shit on us. We'll treat you better than those guys will. You kind of believe it because it's really their only way to compete with Facebook and Instagram. So they kind of have to actually honor this. So anyways, a quick idea. So in general, I think that being early to these platforms and these app ecosystems is a good thing. There's been several Snap Kit apps that have been like number 1 and number 2 on the App Store. So they've gotten a shit ton of distribution from it. What's a Snap Kit app? Snap Kit is basically the toolset that Snapchat gives you to build stuff. So it's like, okay, Snap Kit will say you want to access their Bitmoji. Cool. Snap Kit lets you just type one line and you get their Bitmoji character you can do stuff with. Snap Kit lets you use their whole camera with all their lenses.
I'm doing this course with Gagan, and a lot of the things we talk about are inflections. So what are inflections? There's a variety of styles of inflections. There's technology inflections, which is like basically like, oh my God, the internet is now in everyone's house. That is an inflection. There's an opportunity there. Or a belief inflection is like, wow, people really don't trust the media. What can we build to help? Or people are afraid to be in groups of thousands of people. How can we fix that? What we are seeing right now is a technology inflection. Or a platform inflation. It's really a difference. And this is it. This is like when— so Pandora, the music company, Tim told me that the company was around for 3 years and it was doing horrible. And he said, um, they heard about the Apple Store. For some reason, Steve Jobs reached out to them and said, you guys might be a good, like, place to put your shit here. And once that happened, he goes, right? And this— I don't know if it will be, but this is potentially one of those.
Yeah, these are asymmetric bets. Sure, maybe most of the time these platforms either don't work out or there's nothing cool to build and you'll waste, you know, a month of your time. Or you might catch a wave early and you might get to the top. So for example, the very first episode of this whole podcast chain is with Suli, and Suli talks about he was working at Microsoft and he realized he wants to quit and go start a company. He quits, he moves back home with his parents for like 2 weeks, and the first 2 weeks he's kind of bored. And the day he quit, basically Facebook did their developer conference and said, "Hey, we're making Facebook platform. Anyone can build an app on Facebook now." So he goes home and he's like, "All right, I don't know if this is gonna be a business, I don't think so." But he's like, "I just need to start programming again just to get the rust off." And so he builds a Facebook app that was stupid. It was like a superlatives app, like which of your friends is most likely to end up in jail or whatever. Boom, goes viral. He ends up with tens of millions of users. And that changed the trajectory of his life where Silicon Valley starts calling him and Naval flies him out to San Francisco and wants to invest in him and shit like that. So he took a bet on the sort of day the platform launched. If I'm a board developer today, or I'm somebody who's got the ability to code and a weekend, I would be building something on top of Snap Kit. The thing I would build is actually— so I think what's hard is when you want to build something that gets the user to leave Snapchat and come to your app. So you kind of have to build something that can actually do— the whole experience should just be on Snapchat and it should not compete with what Snapchat does. So here's the idea. I call it Cameo Kit. So basically, I think you could build the app Cameo on top of Snapchat. So you would basically— Cameo Kit would just say, "Cool, I wanna buy a Snapchat from one of these celebrities and I'll pay you right here through Snapchat." and then I want to send it either to myself or to my friend on my Snapchat list. So basically, imagine I— it's your birthday coming up, right? When's your birthday? It's in a few days.
So I did that last year, but, but this year I could do it through Cameo Kit, a little new invention of mine. So basically, I would go in Snapchat, I would open it up, I would see a list of influencers that are— that have Snapchat, which is like every celebrity in the world. I would request a video and I'd pay right there, and then you would receive a Snapchat from either from me or from them in your inbox, and the whole Cameo experience could be built on top of Snapchat without having to have separate websites, separate apps, all that stuff, and you can compete with Cameo very quickly. So I think that's a very simple idea that could monetize on top of Snap Kit. I think that's a great idea.
This is a good spot by you.
So, okay, so here's another one. Yeah, pay your rent I think is an easy one because younger people who split rent, they could use Snapchat or SnapCash to just do it. And so that's kind of interesting. I don't know exactly how much that's integrated, but that could be a problem that you solve. I think that you could, if you're a food delivery company, you should probably get on this because one of the little fun things I've been doing, another birthday thing instead of Cameos, somebody on my birthday just sent me food via Postmates because they know where I live. And so they just ordered me food and just showed up at my door and it just said, you know, like, This is from this person. And I was like, oh, that was great. That's like a $20 gift. That is awesome and took them no effort. And so that's my new hack. I just send people Postmates just for fun as gifts. Um, and so I think you could do something like that. Uh, but here's another one. I saw a company that's called Moonshot, a very, very fun company idea. What they did was they were like, hey, all everybody's working from home. Which is cool and convenient in some ways, but the one thing you really miss is the sort of camaraderie and interaction with your coworkers.
Because I just searched Moonshot and I don't see it. Um, search Moonshot escape room. So what Moonshot is, it's a virtual escape room that happens over Zoom. So it costs, uh, I think, I think it's like $300 to do the experience, But it's great, you know, that as a team building experience, a team building cost is nothing. Team, you know, companies will easily pay for that for their, for groups of, you know, 10 to 12 employees to get together and do something. And so I, I do escape rooms all the time with my team. I think it's a really fun way to, you know, go out and do something. And so this is done all through Zoom. They built the whole experience digitally. And I'm like, oh, this is really smart because, you know, escape rooms are actually pretty good businesses in general. But this takes out the one biggest cost of escape rooms, which is like, you know, the rent and the person, the human being you need to like facilitate a whole escape room. Doing this on top of Zoom is a really smart idea in my opinion.
This is great. I don't know, I don't know if that could ever be huge, but it could be good. Um, I'm looking at it now. It's who, what, what's Reason? Is that the company who owns it? I have no idea. Uh, how did you find this?
Uh, this was on Product Hunt and then it got shared because again, this was sort of remarkable. Um, people hadn't seen something like this, so people started sharing it. It went kind of viral.
Yeah, okay, it's—
I'm into it. So here's another one. Um, in the last 3 months that we've been sheltered in place, how many Zoom birthdays have you attended?
None.
None? What? Oh my God, I've had to do 5 of these things, including my own. Dude, I'm only—
I'm only Oh my god, Sean, did I miss your— what was your birthday?
My birthday's back in April, but basically—
oh wait, I didn't give you anything. I'm sorry.
It's all good. Don't worry about it. I feel horrible. Over this quarantine period, I've been to so many Zoom birthday parties because people can't celebrate through, you know, the normal means. Now, I don't know, I don't think this will last very long, but if you could find some way to do celebrations over Zoom, If you could find a way to make a Zoom—
oh, I have one. My coworker's getting married on Saturday. They're Twitching, Twitch streaming. I don't know, what do you call the word? They're streaming it on Twitch, the wedding.
Oh, nice. Okay, that's pretty good. Yeah, so I don't know how long some of these last. I think the Cameo on top of Snapchat, and I think the escape room over Zoom, I think that's more here to stay. I don't think the birthday stuff will last very long, but I like the idea of building stuff on top of Zoom and on top of Snapchat, especially now that people are celebrating occasions and looking for ways to socialize remotely. I would do rent payment, easy.
No, that's the first thing I would focus on. Great idea, that's a good one. You want to do one or two more?
Sure, you got one or you want me to do a different one?
Okay, so 2 weeks ago or 10 days ago, we had this guy named Mike and he started Liquid Death. It's bottled water. I had a lot of people— a few people message up— canned water— message us and say they think that the water was bad. Yeah, yeah. And I think the idea is kind of cool. I don't— I'm— I like him a lot. I think that guy's a winner.
I think he's a winner too. And, um, I went into the thing being like, I think this idea is kind of dumb. We had talked about it before, it was kind of dumb. And I came out of it being like, maybe I should hit this guy up to see if I can invest in this company. And the reason why is, um, sometimes it really just is that simple. So he's taking a mass product, like bottled water or canned water is a mass product. Water is the, like, you know, the definition of a mass consumption product. Then the second thing is, if you just did anything different in the water space and it latches on with any small percentage of that population, you're going to have a meaningful business. And I think he's doing something very different compared to how the other brands are approaching it. And I really do think this is going to be a successful company, especially once I met the guy and I was like, oh, this guy's a winner and he understands what this is and what it isn't. And that makes sense to me.
Yeah, I would like to see how he operates. He's the type of guy who I would be a little bit nervous. I would want to get to know him more because he seems like a guy that is a little reckless, and that can be both good and bad.
And that's a good call because he was talking about the previous company he built, the brandy company that he built, and I think he's a great starter, and he saw the opportunity, he starts it, he has a vision for the brand, and what the culture wants. Now, in terms of the blocking and tackling that it takes to just operate for like 7 years straight, probably not the best. In that other company, he kind of— he was kind of vague about it. He's like, I parted ways with those guys. It's all good terms, you know, I still have my shares. But basically it was like, okay, thanks, thanks for the creativity, bud. We'll take it from here. It seemed like it was kind of that. I could totally see that happening again with Liquid Death.
A person I admire once wrote that being artistic is the exact opposite of being— of making money. And— or basically, artists and capitalists are the opposite, right? And I haven't decided if I fully agree with that, but I tend to— I'd say I'm closer to agreeing with it than I am not agreeing with it, and that artists are the opposite. And that doesn't mean they're good or bad, you know. I I think a lot of art, you should— who gives a fuck about the money? It's great because it's interesting. I don't care if it's expensive. And sometimes when people are artistic, I think, okay, you're cool. I don't think that you can make a peanut, like run a company that has to make and save money. Right.
Yeah, I think that's probably true that, you know, if you have an extreme strength in one area, you probably don't have the extreme strength in the exact opposite sort of skillset area. What I hope for is you have to be just good enough to be dangerous in the other area. So like, okay, you're super creative and you can, you can build brands. You know, do you have just enough of the operational know-how and discipline to execute on this? Like, you know, Sophia Amoruso, she, when she was on, she was like, she's clearly a great brand builder. She did it with Nasty Gal. She did it with I think Girlboss, that was called. Yeah, Girlboss.
Well, she's a marketer. She's definitely a marketer.
And she did— I think it's a little more than marketing in the sense that— it is marketing, but I guess it's like to identify what's in the soul of the customer and then be able to build a product or brand that taps into that. And so I think she was doing a great job of that. I think this guy Mike is doing a great job of that. With Nasty Gal, She didn't manage the other side of it and the train went off the cliff. And so you have to know enough of that or you have to hire people that complement it in that way. And if anybody has any— wants to read something about this, I just read this blog post that was called Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners or something like that. And it basically talks about like in any given company you have 3 types of people. You have the pioneers, who are gonna, uh, you know, they want to go breach new land, they want to be the first ones there and live off of, you know, what they can hunt, they can kill, and they keep. And then you have sort of the settlers who follow in right after, and they start to set up, you know, the, the very basic systems, um, for, for life to continue. And they're not just looking for the next thing like the pioneers are. And then you have the town planners that can organize like at large-scale systems And so none is good and bad or cool and not cool. It's just a matter of like knowing who you are or knowing where you're at as a company and then making sure you have the right type of person leading, uh, based on what's needed. If you need innovation, you need a pioneer. If you need operations, you need more of a town planner.
Coincidentally, I've read this article today called Managers: The Difference Between Managing and Leading. And the idea was like people who are leaders are great in chaos, and they don't really— they're like very comfortable with chaos. They're very comfortable with ambiguity, and that's important. And, uh, people who are managers are all about, uh, creating something sustainable that can operate each and every day effectively. Uh, and, uh, I'm for sure the leader, for sure not the manager.
Yeah, right, right on. Um, okay, a couple other quick things that are, that are kind of interesting. So I want to get your opinion on this. Just give me a dumb or awesome. The website's called humanipo.app. These guys are doing a very fancy branding around an old idea. So what it does is I can go, I can go do a human IPO. So I'm Sean, I go public, I get a stock ticker, which is like, you know, SHA or whatever. And I basically IPO off share of my time. So I can auction off up to 500 hours of my time that you can book from me at a certain price. And then if people think, hey, you know, this Sean guy, he's on, you know, he's on the way up, his time is gonna be more valuable in the future, I'm gonna buy a unit of this guy's time. I can either hold it and trade it later at a higher price, or I can, I can, I guess, use it to like book an hour of my time. So this is the core idea. I'm on the website now.
It's incredibly interesting.
Tell me what you think of it.
Uh, for sure interesting, for sure innovative and wild, and whoever invented this is a nerd, and I fucking love those types of people. Um, logistically, I just don't think it makes sense because, well, so I can buy Brian's time. Well, so if it was— I'm looking at their site now. I don't understand why they call it like, it's, they're really just rebranding just like expert networks and consulting. Like, it's just like, dude, just let me have your time for— so definitely cool. Highly unlikely to work. Right. That's what I think. I think this is like an art project. That's neat. This is, I don't know.
You're, how did you find this? I saw it on, I think, Product Hunt. And I was like, yeah, I've been following. I think I talked about this on one of the previous things. I've been following these. Personal ICOs, personal, personal coins that people are creating in the crypto world. This, this is not crypto, but it's the same idea. And I think it sort of has the same pros and cons. I think it's like kind of exciting in a way to like bet on people. And I think it's kind of lame in a way, which is like, what do I get? I get an hour of their time. Like, well, okay.
This guy I just clicked on, you have to buy 100 hours of his time at $250 an hour. So what does that mean?
Yeah, $25 grand. Yeah.
So, but like, I don't think, like, if I was this guy and I just sold 100 hours of my time, I have a feeling that I would bail on a lot of that.
Yeah. So one, one piece is, are you actually going to fulfill? The second is, so what am I doing? It's actually basically like a freelancer selling blocks of design time or programming time or consulting hours or whatever it is. Um, okay, that's cool. Um, Maybe for really special, unique people that works. I don't think this is that interesting overall. The ones I think are more interesting are the ones where you actually get a piece of their earnings over the next X years. So it's like—
I would never do that in a million years.
I know, but some people would. Some people would say, cool, I'll take— you know, it's like people who raise money for their company, right? They're selling off future earnings for capital today. And some people might want— instead of doing it for your company, you might do it for yourself. So I think it's interesting.
I want to see somebody like, you know, I'm going to sign up for this. It seems— it does seem interesting. I'm just, just from like an innovation perspective, like it's just so weird and interesting. I would love to, I would love to try this.
I like it. Cool. Okay, so that was the, that was the last one I wanted to do. Do you have any other stuff you want to go over or anything else in this list interesting? I could talk about any of this stuff.
I'm obsessed with my posture right now because I've gotten like strong and fit over the last 3 months, and that's wonderful, but I have scoliosis. My, my, like, my posture is horrible, and it's making me nervous because I'm like, what's the point of getting strong if I'm like crooked and not healthy? Yeah, and I've looked all over the place for like good scoliosis workout routines. I'm like, man, I just want like a— just something, just like a posture doctor. Right. And it's kind of interesting, like a, like a posture doctor is kind of cool to me.
Yeah, I thought about that. I went for a run the other day and I was like, I think I don't know how to run. I think nobody taught me how to run. And then I started running a certain way and then I got out of shape and I think I just run like shit. And I know I don't swim the right way or there's like a better way, more efficient way to swim also. And I'm like, I need to, I want to clean all these up. I want to clean up running. I want to clean up my walking. You know, cadence or whatever you call it. And then also my swimming. But yeah, I'm similarly obsessed with these things. And you know, you've been getting jacked, which I think, you know, props to you for doing. Every time you send me one of these videos, you know, Sam sends me these videos that are like, it's not nudes, but it's definitely more than what— it's like more than friends, less than lovers. We're somewhere in between there. And he sends me the video and you've been getting jacked and it's kind of amazing. And You know, so, so that's, you know, props to you for actually doing it.
It's been a big change. I basically like just, I don't, I don't know if I do a diet. I just eat meat and only green vegetables and I just don't eat breakfast and, uh, I move every single day. Yeah. I don't know. It's, it's been easy, but it has been awesome. Amazing. Um, but you know what sucks? It's just sitting in a chair. It totally fucks you fucks you up. Yeah. And so this is why I want like a body doctor, like a, like a posture doctor to like, I just, I, I'm, I want to be more like a wild animal in this, you know what I mean?
In this book, The Happy Body, there's this picture of this like inversion chair. Uh, I don't know if you've ever done one of them, but I have.
Are they good?
I've never done one, but when I saw it, I was like, well, here's the thing. Here's the thing I'm gonna have to buy. Cause I think I need to, I think I need to do this. I think I need to invert.
Wait, but did they say that inversion chairs are good? Yeah, I just hang. I have a bar and I just hang from my bar.
Yeah, but you need to go the other way. You need to, you need to hang from your legs and so your back decompresses. That's what they basically say it's for, is to decompress the spine.
Oh, I'm gonna read this whole book. How long is it?
I don't know, it's kind of long. Um, all right, cool. Let's, let's get out of here. But now we're just talking bullshit. Um, cool. Thanks for listening. Share this with your friend. Um, you need to just go on your if you have a Facebook page or a Twitter or an Instagram, you need to just screenshot our podcast and then just say, this is the best podcast I listen to, and just post that. And you can tag me, that's also great. But even if you don't tag me, definitely post it. If you're not gonna post it, delete your Facebook, delete your Twitter, delete your Instagram, because you're not using it right. That's what we need from you. Go post this shit.
If, and if you do it, it's— we'll call this game 50/50. Do that and tag me and Sean, and you will either get a shirtless picture of me or Sean or a third party.
Or third party. Okay, how could you resist? Um, all right, excellent. Let's get out of here.