#94 - Is GPT-3 the Next Big Thing?
All right. What's up everybody. It's July. The whole world is locked down or not locked down. We don't know what the hell's going on, but, uh, me and Sam just recorded this episode. We talked about a bunch of things. We talked about a project that one of the podcast listeners has launched, erotic newsletter that's doing $6,000 a month very quickly. And I think he built the project in about a month. We talked about this crazy thing called GPT-3, which is this AI project that came out of OpenAI that everybody's losing their mind about. We talk about BNI, this old school business referral network. And then we talked a lot about— Sam asked me a bunch of questions about life at a big company, which we're not sure if it's interesting or not. So I think we're going to put it at the end of the episode. We're going to chop the episode out of order. We're going to toss that at the end. Maybe it's not interesting. Maybe it's interesting. It's up to you guys to decide. All right. Hope you enjoy this episode. As always, let's do it. Boom.
All right.
What's going on, dude? I had like a perfect day yesterday. I did everything that I'm supposed to do, which is great. Like perfect in that my actions were perfect. So I feel good.
And where you are, I'm obsessed with weather where you are. High of 82 today, currently 72. You have nice California weather.
I was just outside. I take all my calls by the pool. It feels fucking great. It's excellent. Can't complain.
So in San Francisco— San Francisco has been horrible weather lately. It's currently 60 degrees, so it's been like 60 and cloudy the past week. Do you think you're happier with the sun?
For sure. Yeah, for sure. Greenery and the sun, uh, you know, I'm a human. I think that works on humans.
So my wife is from Manhattan, like her mom and dad live in like the heart of Manhattan, and she's trying to convince me to move to New York And my down— so there's two, here's the pros and cons. The cons are New York's pretty like objectively horrible weather, like at least 9 months of the year, it's just like cold and like kind of wet and gray. Yep. And then taxes suck. And then like, it's pretty, it's fairly dirty. Right. And crowded. And the pros, and crowded. And the pros are like, you're like, if, Sometimes if you're in the hustle and bustle, it can make you more ambitious and it can be inspiring, but also wear you out. But so my question is, where you've moved out to, there's way less people, it's more space. Do you think that the risk of getting fat and soft is worth the being happy with space and weather?
Yes. Given where I'm at, if I was 24, I'd be like, yo, this is not the right move. In fact, when I was 23, 24, I was living a sweet life in Australia and Australia is like sunny, you go to the beach, people don't work that hard. Uh, everyone in the country basically has a truce like, yo, I won't work hard if you don't work hard and we'll all stay, you know, at the top. And I was like, I gotta get the fuck outta here. Like, I'm definitely gonna become less ambitious, less motivated. Uh, I'm gonna become less of a person because I'm not gonna challenge myself if I stay here. I'll be so comfortable. But now where I'm at, 32 years old, sideburns all gray, you know, got a kid, got a wife, got a dog. For now, that slowdown pace and being less in the hustle and bustle and having experienced it, I'm good. I'm ready for that next chapter now. So, so this is— I feel good about it. But then again, I'm human and we just justify whatever the fuck we do anyway. So, but I believe it. I don't, I don't think I'm talking myself into a, into a bad decision. I think I'm in a good decision here, especially now that everything's online, dude. I actually believe this. Silicon Valley is on Twitter. Like Silicon Valley moved to Twitter some number of years ago. And like San Francisco, you know, South Bay, New York, London, it doesn't matter. Twitter is where the heart of the action is. Actually, you can build a world-class network on Twitter. You can get access to great conversations. You can see ideas and get, you know, become a part of them. You can raise money through, you know, through the internet. Twitter is Silicon Valley. I'm pretty convinced. Of it.
Yeah, I agree. I, I've been getting sick of it lately. Uh, I'm like, I don't want to— it's been getting a little, uh, what's it called, uh, you can say Twitter, homogeneous. Yeah, so I'm having to like follow different stuff. I watched the, um, this docu— or this TV show where the Ford versus Ferrari thing, and they were in like racing cars, and I was like, this is way cooler than the internet. I need to surround myself with these people, dude.
I had a moment like that where yesterday I was listening to, I opened up Clubhouse, that app that's like still in beta, I think.
Yeah. I quit using it out of principle.
It was like, you know, the notification was like, Mark Andreessen is talking to, you know, whoever, you know, a bunch of people. And so I was like, oh, Mark Andreessen's on. I went in and they were talking about like, if an asteroid was coming to the earth, what would be our mitigation strategy? And then it's like, you know, they had all looked into it and I was like, who looks into this? You know, they look into this. Like I look into conspiracy theories and like I look into the, the drama behind MTV's The Challenge. So, you know, they were like, oh yeah, I've read about our, what we would do and here's what would happen. And then I like happened to like kind of swipe and just like miss, like I like switched apps into Twitter and then at the top of my feed was the guy from Barstool Dave doing a watermelon, watermelon eating challenge against this kid. And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna watch this instead. And I was just like opted into like the mindless entertainment of that. And, um, no regrets. That choice. That was the right choice for me.
And so I agree. Similar topic, have you seen the TV show Peaky Blinders?
I actually started it. I watched 15 seconds of it. I haven't gotten into it. I watched yesterday, I started it.
So I love that show and I love Boardwalk Empire. And, uh, I started rewatching Peaky Blinders from the beginning. And the, the— for anyone listening, It's, uh, fiction, historical fiction, so it's mostly fake but supposed to be based on real stuff. But I don't—
it's, it's like a crime family or a mafia or something.
Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, so they just like— it's these— this guy Thomas Shelby, and he has this family of 5 or 6 family members, and they start out mostly illegal, so gambling, selling liquor, fighting, betting, just like your traditional 1920s gangster.
Story of me and your life.
Yes. Yeah, and then they get a little bit legit, but they're always still kind of doing bad stuff. They just drink and smoke and fuck and fight and just all bad stuff. Just not bad stuff, but love vices. And I was like, this guy's way cooler than like Mark Zuckerberg.
Like, let's just like— Mark Zuckerberg on his surfboard with his white face and huge ass.
Yes.
I'm like, dude, this guy, like, this guy's a rock and roll star.
Whereas like Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't survive a day in Peaky Blinders, right?
But you know, who knows, maybe. I mean, he's pretty gangster, but in a dork way. But, uh, it was just like, let's, let's, let's, uh, I need to figure out who I look up to.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a good point. Uh, you are who you admire and, uh, and like, you know, whatever, no judgment. They just go through, go through phases. And I think both you and I are at a phase where it's like, I'll speak for myself. I went like pretty deep on the admiring the people who did great things in tech and startups and kind of modern day business. I don't know, you shifted to like, fuck modern day, historical business is where it's at. Historical pioneers and settlers and shit like that. Generals. And then, uh, but it's cool to admire different things but not get stuck in the admiration. And so, um, so yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's a good question to ask yourself. Who do I admire right now? And then should I, should I stay admiring them or do I need to switch it up?
Well, and also I read a lot of personal finance stuff, so I read a lot of subreddits around personal finance stuff and some of it, it's like people who have high net worths and how they're doing personal finance. And they're like buying a $3 million home and they're like making all these justifications and, or buying a fancy car. And every once in a while I'm like, the only justification for me doing this is because it's fucking cool. And since like, we need to remember that, that doing something just because it's cool is oftentimes a wonderful reason why you should do anything. And it's a life worth living. And like, I get, I'd get too caught up in like, well, you know, if we, if I annualize this out over 15 years, like it's right. Like it would be cheaper.
Yeah.
And I'm like, oh yeah. But also like rock and roll. Like, let's just do stuff just cause it's awesome. That this is, that's, it just makes me happy.
There's, you know, people say like, you know, what advice would you give to the 21-year-old self? And like, I asked that question too, to when we have guests on here, if you were 21 again, what would you do? Um, and it's, there's all this like, what would you tell the, your younger you? But also good question is what would 12-year-old you or 21-year-old you say to you now? If, if, if, if 18-year-old me or 21-year-old me came out of a time machine and got to see 32-year-old me, what would he say? He'd be like, dude, you got fat. What's up with that? Like, yeah, yeah, this is all cool, but like you got fat.
Aren't you lose? Aren't you getting fit though?
I'm getting fit, but like to 18-year-old me or 21-year-old me, this would be fat. And he'd be like, wow, that's lame. Or it'd be like, Dude, you're a millionaire. Like, okay, what are we doing with all this money? What is the cool shit we're doing? Like, are we going here? We gambling? Are we, are we taking our friends on trips? And it's like, oh, you're buying equities? Like, all right, well, like, you know, so I actually like the other way. I want, I want in some ways 20-year-old— it's like, I think forward 20 years and I think backwards 20 years. Would 21-year-old me, um, be proud of the way I'm living my life? And then would 51-year-old me be proud of the way I'm living my life? And these thought experiments helped me make these adjustments and get out of the fog of like, just the orders, the routines that I'm in, because these routines are really fucking dangerous.
I agree with all that. And I think it's good questions to ask. It's— I find myself asking that stuff all the time of like, it's just so easy to get caught into this optimization type of mentality. That's— and this is what I told— we had a meeting today at my company. I was like, you guys, less optimizing, more innovating. Like, let's, let's remember, let's just do cool shit and not like worry as much about the click-through rates, right? Well, you want to bring up BNI?
Yeah, I, I've been talking to Sam about it and I've gotten access.
Ah, man, I— there's a lot going on. Let's make it really simple, which— okay, which is, do you remember SmarterChild when you were a kid? That, uh, that AOL— that AIM bot where you could ask it the weather and you could ask it like, is God real? And it would come up with like things. It's like that on steroids. So from my understanding It's an AI tool where you can— a lot of people are using this thing. So the guy who was the leader of Y Combinator quit Y Combinator to become the CEO of this. And it's basically this— I think Elon Musk is considered a founder as well. It's basically this engine where you could tell this AI bot to do stuff and they do it. For example, someone's like, create a website where there's the Google logo and a search engine. Somehow this bot like turns it into a search engine and it just so happens to look like Google.
Yeah, exactly. So, I don't even know what GPT stands for. So, that's how much I know about this. But basically you feed it little inputs of text, but you can also feed it actually images they've shown as well. But you get most people what they're doing with it right now. They feed it small snippets of text. So for example, somebody can feed it a snippet of, You can just say, you can just ask a question and it'll answer like SmarterChild. Then there's a website called learnfromanyone.com, I think. Someone built a little tool which is you pick who you want to learn from. So you can be like Einstein and you can ask a physics question and it'll answer based on what Einstein would say to this. And it's like shockingly good. And so you can kind of like pick a teacher and then ask a question and then you can get an answer from that teacher based off of whatever that teacher had put out into the public domain that this this, uh, this algorithm has ingested all the, all this like raw text from the internet and through it has found, okay, what would this person say? And so there's all these crazy use cases. Like you said, like, um, I have a friend Sharif who's the guy, his tweet went viral where he basically was like, just described what he wanted a webpage to be and had spit out the HTML code or the JavaScript code to build that site. So he was like, make a to-do list. Where I can add a to-do and then I can mark a to-do as done. And then it actually built an app that was a to-do list app just off of that description.
That was your buddy?
Yeah. And he did, he did the Google one too, where he's like, um, put the Google logo up top and then add a search bar and add two buttons. One says search, one says I'm feeling lucky. And then return, um, return the answer to whatever question is asked in the search bar. And he built like a Google competitor. It spit out a Google competitor.
So, but let's talk about like real, like, do you think that this is actually going to be legit?
We all know that AI is pretty transformative technology. It's going to be whenever AI, you know, as AI progresses, it'll be the next big tech shift. You know, the previous tech shifts were from, you know, non-computers to computers, computers to the internet, from the internet to smartphones, and now it's smartphones to AI, and that AI is either really narrow, like it can only do a specific set of things, which is like when you see an AI beat the best Go player or chess players or poker players in the world. That's very narrow. It can only do that one thing. Or if you said, okay, this AI is going to identify faces and it's like, cool, facial recognition, that's a narrow AI. This seems a lot more general. And the more general AI gets, the more exciting things are, because that means it can do a lot of different stuff that you can't really predict. And the kind of— if you want to get real futuristic and crazy, general AI, or AGI as they call it, is considered the last invention, the last human invention that will ever be needed. Because once you have AGI, then AGI invents everything else.
What— like, I think I'm a little bit of a normal, like a pretty normal basic-ass person when I think, well, this is just like the end of everything I ever believe in, right?
Believe in meaning what? Like, I don't know what's man-made versus created by a robot. There are— what is the point?
Of a human being. Like, we exist to do work. I think like we exist to like do stuff. And if this thing is doing everything, then what are we supposed to do?
We're going to consume it and we're going to become entertainers and podcasters and artists. And we're going to— if you take the long view, when this gets really, really good, we're all just going to be playing video games and making art.
Okay. Uh, well, this thing can definitely do that already. Like, but do you think it's actually good?
You mean, is that a good outcome?
No. Do you think that this technology is good at them? Yeah. Or is it still pretty basic and overhyped?
It's not good enough, but it is shockingly good. Like when you're like, oh, it's like when you see your niece after like 3 months and they had a growth spurt and you're like, whoa, like you're now you're up to— wait, last time you were up, came up to my hip and now you're like eye level with me somehow or whatever. Like now you're up to my shoulder. Like, That's crazy. You're still not a full grown adult, but like, damn, I didn't realize you grew this much. That's what happened with this project is there was a damn, I didn't realize it was this good. Um, where like, holy shit, these conversations seem very human-like. Somebody put in like the first half of their, um, blog post about how to run a board meeting. And then it spit out the second half and finished the blog post about how to run a startup board meeting. I was like, wait, how does it know that? How does it know what I would write in my blog post? It was like kind of indistinguishable. Um, the first half and the second half, and the first half was written by a real VC and the second half was written by the robot who was just basically guessing what the next word should be. Uh, which is like kind of insane.
I almost want this to fail. Like I'm like nervous.
That's not gonna happen.
Yeah.
That's the best inventions. They always say like the best technology seems like magic. Um, and when you see real magic or you see magic, you're like a little bit scared. Like when you see David Blaine do some crazy shit, you're like, whoa, hold on. Hold on, what's, what's going on here? How did the card end up in my boxers? Like, that doesn't make any sense. That's kind of how this feels. It's a little bit scary.
So, but that's my question. Do you, do you think that what your buddy did, do you think that it's actually good, or do you think it's like— do you think that it's still like a, a car in 1930?
It's still like a car in 1930, uh, and I don't know what those cars are like, but basically in a sandbox, if you can control the inputs and you can kind of play around with it you can demonstrate, you can create really cool demos, really cool, even prototypes. We're not at products yet, but we'll get there. Like this GPT-3 is improving on GPT-2. So it's like, fuck, how good is 4 going to be? And 5, like, it's like, you know, the original iPhone really wasn't that great either. And then now it's like, if I can watch movies on my phone and, you know, like it's amazing and like things get amazing pretty quick. And so I think this is going to get amazing pretty quick.
I— yeah, I'm, I'm a little in awe. So I, um, I've got— or I've applied to get access, and I've talked to Sam about it, and he was like, yeah, our— the person who gives access is, uh, on vacation for like 2 or 3 days, but they'll get back to you. Like, all right, well, I guess I'm waiting on her to reply. But I, I want to use it for writing articles on the—
I was going to say, you guys should write the news through a robot one day, you know, basically. Like, one day we could just see what—
well, that's what we're— yeah, so I'm waiting to get access for that. We'll see.
I wanted to run our transcripts for our podcast through it. I basically just wanted to be like, hey, it's Sean and Sam talking. What would we say if we talked about X? And I bet it could recreate our, you know, stupid conversations.
Well, can't you ask your buddy to set that up?
Yeah, I can. I just got— so I'm gonna bring him on. So next week I want to do a segment where I'm gonna bring on the guy who built that thing, as well as either Furkan, who's kind of my trusted tech, like you know, a sounding board. Cause he's also realistic. He doesn't get caught up in the hype. Um, and then there's also this VC at Founders Fund who wants to come on and talk about it. Um, and so who, the young guy, Dylan?
Yeah. I don't know him.
Good. I like that. Uh, well, I'm curious to learn more. I just feel like I'm not smart enough or educated enough to actually know what's legit and what's not. And I want to know, like with your buddy, was it as simple as you literally just type in a Google Doc and you tell this thing what to do and it does it? Or does it require more? Is there more stuff to it?
Yeah. We'll, we'll, we'll ask him. So yeah, we're noobs, but we know enough to know that, hey, this is inter— this is interesting. This is worth understanding more.
Yeah. But it's like, there's so, there's been so many things like that where, I mean, there's a lot of, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. This is everything. And then you dig into it.
A lot of false starts.
Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. What's BNI?
Okay. BNI. So let's go to the exact opposite end of the spectrum. The most fucking dumbed down old school, thing that I discovered that I didn't know about. So BNI is a business referral network. I don't even know what BNI actually stands for either.
Is it company?
BNI is a company. Go to bni.com. So these guys, um, I think are making about $50 million a year. And what they do is, let's say you start a local chapter. So this is kind of like the Vistage model that both of us are interested in. Like, um, so, so this is a little bit different though. So what happens is they have 10,000 chapters. And they have 270,000 members. So you can do the math on kind of how much they're making in their membership fees. But the way it works is in a local chapter, there'll be like one, let's say, financial advisor, one plumber, one, you know, whatever the other occupations are that people have. A whole bunch of like kind of self-employed people. And it's a referral network. So it's like, cool, I'm in this chapter, I meet you guys, you're my homie now. So now whenever I know a guy who needs a lawyer, I'm going to refer the lawyer in my circle to any of my customers. I'm a financial advisor. And whenever you're— hey lawyer, whenever your guys need a financial advisor, you refer them to me. And so it's a referral network for basically tradespeople to swap customers. And super simple idea. Obviously it drives a lot of value in that if I'm, you know, every business wants more customers. And if this is a trusted way to do it, great. And it also has the kind of benefits of like you meet other people who are kind of in similar buckets and you're like, oh cool, like we're kind of brothers in arms except for you do law and I do financial advising. And then this guy's a mechanic and then that guy's a whatever. Um, pretty cool. Been around for a while.
Hadn't heard of it. Since 1985. Yeah. I'm looking it all up now. Is this a— the guy who is the chairman of it, he just, his photo, he looks like a slick. He looks like a—
so we're looking at a photo. He's got his hands out. He's on stage. He's trying, he does the thing where he put a keynote speaking thing of his, which is always a tell. That this guy's insecure.
And then, I mean, he could be a great guy.
I mean, wearing a suit and tie, hair slicked back. So that's why I'm saying what he's saying. We have to paint the picture so people understand why you would just say that.
Yeah. And I'm not actually saying this guy—
nobody knows.
We don't know this guy. I don't know. But so is this a scam? This is so weird to me. The first, the top searches is BNI a pyramid scheme? That's what the top search is. Like if you type in BNI.
Yes, I believe that.
And, um, you do think it's a pyramid scheme?
No, I believe that people would be curious about that because it's organized like an MLM in a way. You become a local chapter owner, then you recruit members in your local network, and then all of you paid dues to the mothership. And like, that's, you know, whether it's affiliate or actual, like, you know, MLM, like that's a similar model. And so I understand why people would be skeptical. Um, but I found this really interesting. This is something, a business I had never heard of.
Uh, I'm looking at it now. It says they have over 270,000 members in 2019. Members generated $16 billion in revenue through referral business. I just never would've thought that this many people would buy into this. Yeah. You know what I mean? How big you— yeah, I'm a little flabbergasted. I'm looking at everything I can. I'm flabbergasted. How'd you find this?
Uh, I was talking to somebody, uh, like, so I run these mastermind groups, right? And I was talking to the guys and I was kind of like, yeah, I run 3 of these groups now. And they're like, oh, it's great. You know, you have so many people signing up. I want, you wanna open up more? And I was like, yeah, but I don't know if I wanna do this anymore. I kind of am tired of these. Uh, like this is kind of a lot of work. And then I was like, you know, there's these interesting, like either I wanna scale it up and make this a big deal or I wanna wind it down and not do it at all. Like I don't want to be in this like little bucket where I'm like doing a few and it's kind of a time suck, but it's not making a shit ton of money. Um, and so he, one of the guys in that, one guy, Ben, he told me about this and I was like, oh, interesting. I never heard of this. And then they were all, they were actually all aware of it, which I had never really, because they're all small business owners. So they had been contacted or, you know, offered to join this thing.
Yeah. What I've learned about though, so I, I've been investigating this, those, these like groups, they are, they, they do scale. It is hard work. Yeah, it is very hard work.
Yeah, this is your business. It's not like, uh, like it's like everything. If this is your business, your business could be pretty hard work. And this is actually a pretty decent business. I think it's a good— I think it is a good, well-designed business. Uh, there are many worse businesses than, than this one or the Vistage YPO model also. And so, uh, but you'd have to make it your business, which I don't personally want to do.
Do you want to talk about one more thing?
Yeah, sure.
Wait, did we talk about the erotic newsletter?
I don't remember. Did we bring this up already?
We did not.
No. Okay. A listener to the podcast launched an erotic newsletter 2 months ago that is currently making $6K a month and uses Pornhub as an acquisition channel. I don't know anything about this, but let me tell you guys some background here, which is I've done tests by creating like Audible for erotic novels. And in the process, I learned a few things. One, women are absolutely willing to buy this stuff. Two, erotic and like romance novels is like the— I believe it's the largest category on Kindle and it's the most engaged category. And I'm a man, so I think of this differently, but like women, like this is pretty much like porn to women. Like this audio, like for a lot of women, they just loved like these audiobooks and written texts that describe sex and all these types of— I don't even know how to discuss it because it's so foreign to me. But like there's all these subreddits where it's like where they just like write erotic stories. And then there's like Wattpad and all these websites that get hundreds of millions of monthly unique visitors and all they do is write erotic stories.
It's just—
right. Yeah. It's totally new to me and so interesting.
And Abreu, do you know more about this? Can you tell us more about what he did? So the guy's Latane. He's a cool member of the group. He's done other projects too. He's the one who launched that church tipping app as well, Altar. He seems to be a hustler. What's his story?
Yeah, that was basically it.
He had launched the church app. I think it launched, but I'm not sure if he's still working on it. He's got another business, which I think is growing. That's his main thing. And that's like, uh, you can book—
influencer thing, right?
Yeah. That seems to be doing well. It's like an influencer booker thing. And then he did just did this as like a side thing. Thing, has someone running it. He basically set it up in a few weeks and is using—
What is it?
Customers?
What is it? You sign up and what do you get?
So like an erotic story, like every week or however.
Have you read any of them? I pray you.
I have not. No, that is the truth.
Do your research. Yeah. Do you know the name of it? What's the name of it?
Yeah. I talked to this kid. What's it called?
All right, hold on. I gotta go to it now.
Yes. Hinge Club. It's for, uh, it's erotica for, uh, black women specifically.
All right. Beautiful. Hingeclub.com.
I can't find the URL.
Yeah. Neither can I.
We should bring them. We should bring them on for like a 10-minute segment. I want to hear how he did this. I also want to hear about using Pornhub as an acquisition channel, what that's like. I've never done, I've never done anything like that. It's hingeclub.com.
Okay. One quick idea and then one, um, one, one, one story. All right. Quick idea. Uh, employee onboarding at a company. So every company onboards new employees. So pain point every company has. I've hired somebody, I need to onboard them. Uh, every company kind of makes their own little process.. And there's, you know, not really like a seamless way to do it. It's like, oh, okay, cool. You're going to talk to the IT guy. He's going to get you hooked up with XYZ. Uh, talk to the HR person. They're going to get you hooked up with, you know, ABC. Uh, talk to your manager. They'll tell you about this. Oh, this other thing, you'll learn about it 4 weeks later because we forgot to tell you about it. Um, oh, you should get some swag or like a computer. Like there's all these different systems, right? I think Rippling is trying to do this. In one way. But I'm curious if there are other angles to it. Rippling seems a bit like the utility side of things, like the, the getting set up side on payroll with, with your IT stuff. What about like the sort of human side of things? So how do you, how do you welcome employees? How do they learn about your company culture? How do they— is there like an easy way to do these like kind of customer, uh, sorry, like company culture, like training, indoctrination, welcome to the cult type of things. I think companies really care about culture. I think they care about like people learning like what it's like to work here, what the origin story is like of the company, all these good things. And there's a lot of like folklore that gets passed down and a lot of like tribal rituals that get done informally. Can you do that formally? Is it kind of a question mark? Can you do Rippling but for the info, for the non-utility stuff?
Is that a question you think that people have or a problem that people have?
Like, I think so. Cause like, for example, at Twitch, I know that one of the earliest employees, like there's only a few OGs left now, or, you know, 8, 9 years in or whatever. And one of the OGs was putting together like a kind of a little booklet that was like, here's the history of Twitch. Like all the cool, crazy moments that have happened in the company's history.
I do like a, uh, I do that with you.
You do like a welcome thing, right?
Yeah. Where I say like, here's like the history.
That's hard to scale, right? Cause it's like you're using the most valuable people's time, which is good. They get face time with the CEO and whatnot. I think small companies deal with that that way, but as you get bigger and bigger, those become less, less personal and also harder to do every Monday, you know? Um, because every Monday you're hiring new people as your company grows. Like, I don't, I don't know how many people you guys hired this Monday, but like you probably had either, you know, between 0 and 1 employees hired per week., max, right? And like, but at a bit, at a bigger company, they're hiring tens of employees or even hundreds of employees per week. And so how do you, um, get them in? So I think there's a service there. There's like a welcome week and you go through the bootcamp of the, of the company and you like, you get both the utility stuff and the, and the fun stuff, but they're all pretty lame. And as the world goes remote, I wonder, like, can you simplify this to being a link? And can that be a really well-designed page? That tells your story.
That tells— well, this is what we've discussed earlier, Sean, of like, like a high school newspaper paper for your company.
Right. But that's like with the recent stuff I'm saying, there's just like, I think this is more like a drip campaign, right? It's like everybody needs to go through this sequence of getting this information and you don't want to be the one retelling that joke manually every, every, every month.
I know. But if you build this product that we've discussed over and over again, which I think you can do it. Yeah. Like what you've just said is you need a drip campaign for a company that, so you need like a media company for it. I mean, it is quite fascinating. I understand what you're saying. I haven't, I don't want to work on this because I think that that is kind of boring, but I understand the need and I totally get what you're saying. And I bought it.
So, and also a bunch of people, I think 3 different teams have reached out to me since we got excited about that idea and are working on prototypes of it. So I'll show you when we, when somebody has one.
Um, any of them have cool names?
I don't even know if they have names yet. I don't think they're like, we're working on that thing you said, here's the mockups. And I said, all right, send me a link when you have it. Uh, when you have a prototype.
I'm very interested.
Uh, okay. One other last, last little thing. So are you a basketball fan? You don't follow the NBA much, do you?
Uh, during like the playoffs, I'll, I'll pay attention a little bit. Why? What are you talking about? The bubble?
So the bubble started, uh, there's something interesting here. So In general, sports leagues are trying to come back. They're having great difficulties doing so. The NBA is trying like the most robust attempt at this. They're creating like a biological seal, a bubble basically.
Aren't they like at Disneyland or something?
It's in Disneyland or Disney World, sorry, in Orlando. And basically it's like a summer camp for rich NBA athletes.
And so like— And they're like complaining that they're like, they put them up in like a Marriott and they're like complaining. They're like, oh my God, this is only one room in this hotel.
They're complaining about the room, because at the beginning when they come in, they have to quarantine for 7 days. And, uh, so it's like 7 days not leaving that room.
And so anybody, even if you just stay in a hotel room, yeah, I would hate that. I would, I would, I would retire.
The food that gets delivered, they're showing the food looks like, you know, worse than my middle school lunch somehow. I don't know why they're serving these guys such horrible food. And then, um, they can't have like their side chicks come to the place because it's like a, it's a bubble. They can't have new people coming in. So like, you know, these guys who are used to being, you know, out there, you know, you know, popping bottles at the club, they can't do that anymore. So all these funny things are coming out. But what I thought was interesting— hey, I'm just interested, can sports come back, you know, during COVID And I'm an NBA fan, so I'm into it. But the second cool thing that happened was a bunch of the players, because there's only like 2 media members in the bubble, and so they're reporting on ESPN. But way more interesting is all these stories and vlogs that are coming out direct from the players inside the bubble telling their story. So there's one guy, uh, this guy named, um, um, Matthias— I don't know how you say his name— I think it's Matthias Theibel. So he's kind of like a rookie on the 76ers, not that great of a player, but he's cool, he's interesting rookie. Uh, but he's doing vlogs like Casey Neistat.
And so that's pretty neat.
He started this thing 2 weeks ago, uh, when they entered the bubble, which is like 10 days ago or so. He put up his first vlog, didn't even— he started his YouTube channel He's already over 200,000 subscribers. Casey Neistat posted a comment on the first video being like, this is awesome, well-made video. And like, this guy was, this guy was like geeking out about Casey Neistat. He's like, dude, I love your videos. Yeah, I'm trying to emulate your style. And he's like a multimillionaire NBA, you know, athlete. And, um, so I think it's cool what's going on. And these guys are telling, they're showing the food, they're showing what they're, you know, how the COVID testing works every morning. They're showing these little Disney MagicBands at the buzz in and if it's green, you can go into this area. If it's red, oh, you gotta go get tested again. And like, and I, it reminded me, the reason I'm bringing this up is because a lot of people ask me, oh, how do I get more customers? How do I market my business? I just want growth. Could you have any marketing ideas for me? And this is like the universal marketing idea. And I saw this, uh, Hiten Shah tweeted this out the other day. He goes, the timeless content marketing idea, show your work. And I was like, that's so fucking true. Um, and that's what these guys are doing. They're just showing their work. They're going about their life as an NBA player and they're just showing it and that they're editing it into a good vlog. But like, it just works. And this works for your company too. If you don't know how to market your company, just show how you're building your company. And trust me, that will bring you attention.
Yeah. There's so many different words for this. It could be like document, don't create. There could be a show your work. There can be, um, Learn then teach. Um, it's like, it's the same thing though. It's just like, yeah, do everything out in public.
Right. And Ryan Hoover always says work in public. And I, I used to say that I like show your work a little better cuz I remember taking math tests back in the day and like you could get the wrong answer, but if you showed your work, you'd always get partial credit. And if you got the right answer without showing your work, the teacher would mark it down. And it's sort of the same thing in business. If you're showing your work along the way, even if your business is not successful yet, you will get a big halo effect of people who wanna work there. I mean, you guys do this, you guys put out a lot of content. Uh, you know, Barstool does this even more. They show the behind the scenes. Yeah.
I like posted the job listing that we had. I got like 200 applicants in 24 hours.
Yeah. You've, you've shown your job listing, you've put out your writing, your writer's guide for your writers. You've put out like, um, what else do you put out? Have you put out more stuff that you've worked in public?
A little bit. I'm gonna, I'm gonna create a newsletter course.
Right. So there's like a whole bunch of things that you can do that are, and, but there's, there's more that are just like, showing the life of, uh, right, you trying to do what you do.
And it's easy.
It's, it's easy. It is. It does take time, but it's actually quite fun.
And it— well, what I mean is it's simple, right?
Right, exactly. It's in your control and you don't need to look for some other external genius idea. Hey, here's a simple idea that'll work for everybody. And it works for some better than others. So like, for example, you— it'll work well for you because your customer is also business-oriented and a business owner or an aspiring business owner. So you showing how you build your business, where it brings you customers, your customers are directly interested. For others, it's more niche. Like a portion of your audience will care about that and a portion won't, but the portion who cares will like love you. And that's really ultimately what you want to do with marketing is get people to love you.
Yeah. Most people are just really bad at creating content. Um, but this stuff definitely helps. Like you just write, what you are learning and you post it on Hacker News and you do that 10 times and probably 2 of them might work.
Right. And we should do that with this podcast. We should be like, cool, how we grew the podcast to a million downloads in 6 months. Like that's an easy thing I should be putting out there to work in public, to show our work about how we're building this podcast up that people would be interested in that I haven't done. So I got to take this lesson for myself as well.
Yeah. Well, let's fucking do it.
Great. I'm going to write a book called 100 Great Questions, and I'm going to write the best questions that have helped me in my life. Either questions for yourself or questions you ask others. 100 Great Questions. I'm going to commit to writing that book.
That's a great one. 100 Great Questions. Yeah. Because I feel like you already have like 15.
Yeah. I have a little note sheet on my little— like, because sometimes I'll hear somebody ask a question, I'm like, "Oh, great question." I'll give you a really simple example. This is not a great life question, but this is— A great question. This is like more of a management tip. So probably wouldn't make the book, but I'm gonna say it anyways. You know, when you are talking to somebody, and this often happens with engineers, you're talking to an engineer and you're like, all right, when is this gonna happen by? Any leader is always asking their team, all right, I want this thing to happen. We want this thing to happen. You say you're doing it. When is it gonna happen? And like, you know, the problem is people suck at forecasting and predicting things. And also there's this weird, like, incentive. Like, first, like, I'm kind of overbearing when I say shit like this. I get like really— I'm excited, but it sounds aggressive. And so they're like, they don't want to say too long because they know I'll be like, what the fuck? Like, we're planning to do this in 6 months? Like, that's way too long. Um, also they don't want to say too short and then not deliver that because they, you know, they don't want to be seen as somebody who missed it. So they don't— they kind of sandbag into like some middle ground. Um, so I've always just like been like, fuck, people suck at predicting. This question is useless to ask, when are we going to have this buy? And I was in a meeting the other day and Dan, who's my manager at my company now, he's way more experienced than me. He's like kind of the gray-haired guy at our company, super smart and way better at managing people than I ever am. So he asked, so the CEO of Twitch asked this question, when are we going to have this buy? And I could see the person shrinking. And trying to like go through this, do I underestimate, overestimate? I have no idea what the real estimate is. And then Dan came in and he goes, let me ask you a different question. At what date would you be surprised that this hasn't happened by? And the person like relaxed and they were like, well, you know, I'd be shocked if we didn't have this by Q3 or whatever. And they were able to like answer a different style, like just ask a better question, get a better answer. And so I was like, that's a different way of thinking about this. Would you be shocked that, that if we're sitting here, what date would we be sitting here? Would we be surprised that this hasn't happened by or shocked that it hasn't happened by now? Um, that becomes the upper bound. Okay, cool. Now I know that. And it's like, you know, what's the— and then he has another one, which is sort of like, what's the soonest you could expect us to start to see results from this? Like where we would look at it and we would be, you know, we'd be smiles in this meeting because we'd see some some tangible results. And that became the lower bound. And I was like, dude, this motherfucker is a smooth operator. Like he knew how to get to the, and the crux of this answer I always want without like the bullshit of the person's psychology getting in the way. So I liked that little one.
This is not going to be about an idea, but something similar that people will like. And I'm just going to interview you a little bit, Sean. So I've never worked at a company really. I mean, I've worked at my companies and You've up until recently worked mostly at your companies, but now you're working at Twitch with 2,000 people. You also interact, I imagine, with a lot of Amazon people, which is supposed to be the best of the best. So I have a couple questions. First is, your company, I think, was kind of similar to mine, which was mostly young people who were inexperienced but smart and kind of figuring it out.
Very much so.
Now you're at a company that Does it have a lot more experienced people? Yes, very much. Okay. Uh, so what I want to ask is, does that matter that the people are experienced, do you think, or not?
Like, um, yeah, I don't know if it's experience, but there's a certain level of wisdom that comes over time. And also, um, I wouldn't say it's everybody, right? I would say everybody is more experienced or just like generally smarter, better resume, better talent than the people that we recruited for the most part. 'Cause we were recruiting these like kind of underdog, jack of all trades, non-specialists who had never done it before, but were hungry and were smart and could learn. And we were taking bets on people and we were—
but is that good?
That, that was good for what we had. So now I realize, 'cause at some point I was like, dude, when do these people work? 'Cause I, my calendar became booked. Every 30 minutes was a meeting. And I was like, so when do I go work?
'Cause I was used to, you know, you probably did this with your company less so now I think, But I, we had a meeting today at our all hands and I go, we're going to start, we gotta, you guys, let's innovate instead of optimize. And also like, uh, cancel all the, cancel all meetings and start over. There's way too many meetings.
Right. So, so I used to do that where I'd have a couple meetings a day, 2, 3 max. And then for the most part, I was working on something. I was looking at the data. I was trying to figure out what to do. I was working, sitting next to my designer and like working on a feature or sitting next to the marketing guy and working on a campaign or engineers, figuring out what the fuck's going on. And, um, I felt like I was in the work and I felt that that was real. And now I'm like, the schedule is just meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting. And so when I first got here, I did the normal startup guy thing where you judge a big company. You're like, yeah, these fools, you just sit in meetings all day. Nobody here is doing any real work, blah, blah, blah. I think there's an element of that's true, but what I figured out was, okay, what do you actually need at this, at the top of these companies, right? I mean, this exec team, like the top, like, let's say 20 people of this company, um, that's like 1% of the workforce. And this 1%, their job is basically to be this, like, uh, two things. One, they have to be the accountable party to everybody. So they need to be like good cop or bad cop depending on what's needed for their, like, chain of command. And so, um, if even if you didn't do any work, if you're the scary meeting of the day, for the next layer of leaders and the next layer of leaders below that, you become a forcing function that helps that whole org work. It's kind of abstract, but that's one job that you have. The other job that you have is basically to call bullshit and redirect when you think that resources are being wasted. And so you sit in meetings all day and you're like a computer. You're like, I feel like I don't use my hands anymore. I, my brain is just in a vat and it's in this like vat and basically I'm I come into the meeting, there's a memo I read, so I'm ingesting all this information and then I make a decision at the end of it, or I approve a decision at the end of it. That's all I do. I approve or I make a decision. Um, or sometimes I audit when I'm like, wait, this doesn't make any sense. Why is this? Why does this have all these holes? And, um, that's the role of an executive, I think, at a big company. And like, we try to say it's about all these other things. Like, it is about recruiting. Sure. It is about strategy.
Sure.
It is about setting up systems, sure. But like fundamentally on a day-to-day basis, I'm a brain in a meeting room and then I get fed information and I either approve or I make a decision or I audit a decision that's being made. That's all I do.
So do you like that? No. Uh, and do you think that the people that Twitch needs to run their company, these high Highly paid, probably very wise older folks, people with great judgment, whether you're great judgment because you're experienced, great judgment because you're a domain expert, or great judgment because you have awesome intuition on some shit, like whatever.
It's a great judgment person. Typically easiest way to get there is a bunch of experience.
So do you think that those folks actually make the company better, or would you— do you think it would be better if it was just like a bunch of startup-y people like you hired?
Yeah, I think they make it better, but I think they are great with established systems. When you need to innovate, that brain in a vat doesn't work. Um, and so, but you know, a company of this size that's doing so, you know, so much revenue, so many, has so many users, most of the company is just to make sure the ship keeps growing naturally and reducing risks. Like, oh, you know, like I bet I was actually thinking about this the other day. I was sitting in like a 2-hour meeting that was about a topic that was like, there's a whole team called trust and safety. I bet at The Hustle you don't have a trust and safety team or like a, um, you know, Facebook, you know, I don't even know how many resources now, how many millions of dollars, how many thousands of people are just working on the like abuse, spam, porn, uh, fake news and like account takeovers, fraud. Like there's just a huge amount of that at any big company. Cuz when you get big, you become a target. And, um, so you have a huge amount of your emphasis is just on that. And that's just making sure the ship doesn't sink. It doesn't make the ship faster. It actually makes it slower. It doesn't make it like go to new destinations. It's just making sure this valuable thing doesn't sink due to all the vectors of possible attack. And I was sitting through these meetings and I hate those meetings because I'm not good at that. My brain doesn't help there. And I get super impatient. And, uh, but now sitting there, I recognize like, holy shit. I didn't even know this was a problem that big companies have. I, you know, if you had said it, I would have agreed, but I didn't understand. I didn't really understand how much time and energy goes into shit like that.
At what point did Twitch become this thing where it no longer required innovation? And maybe like innovate, like saying they no longer innovate, innovate, I'm sure they would disagree. So we, and, and, and they're probably, it could be argued. They're like, well, we do innovate and they're right. So that's maybe not the best word, but basically huge drastic changes kind of is what you're saying.
Yeah. I think the first 3, 3 years, 3 to 4 years were more of the scrappy innovation hustle, throw shit at the wall. Oh, there's something broken. Uh, I don't have time to fix it right now. I gotta work. I'm, I'm going to keep growing this thing and like, yeah, we'll deal with that later. You know? Um, I think that was first 3 or 4 years. That's my guess. And we'll bring Emmett on. I gotta bring him on. He's got a shit ton of business ideas too.
So how will they innovate? You know, Amazon has kind of definitely innovated even after— I mean, you know, Amazon had like 2,000 employees, I think, after 3 years. How do you think that they were able to continue to innovate, and how do you think Twitch will be able to continue doing that?
So I got put on basically the core, like one of the core, like innovation or like big like new things at Twitch. Cause basically Emmett was like, okay, this guy's like good at that. He's a startup guy. He's good at the zero to one phase. Most of our company, the people we hire are not the zero to one. They're the one to end. They're about growing an existing thing that's working and making it work better. This guy's good at making something that's not working or doesn't even exist today, exist or work. And so he put me on that. And basically what he did was he carved out a team, called it a strike team. Other companies call it a tiger team. A SWAT team or whatever. And so he carved out a strike team. He said, what do you need? I named my resources. He's like, boom, here's your resources. So I have basically a team of 30-something people. And, um, and I actually wanted less. He was like, don't you need more? I was like, no, no, no, less. In fact, even 30 is way too many. I actually think I need less initially.
And so we started smaller. 30 is so, yeah.
We started smaller than that, but it quickly adds up. And so, um, and he was like, okay, you know, you guys are gonna operate over here. You don't have to do these traditional processes. You're gonna report directly to me. And you have a clear mission and you have a blank check and break all the rules. Actually, you're new here. You don't even know the rules. Good. Go. And so that's what he did. And we've made like amazing progress today because he was able to carve out a system like that. And I think other companies frequently do that. Now, this was in response to like a risk to the company. So companies are good at like, oh shit, there's a risk. Boom, assemble the SWAT team. Facebook always had this thing called lockdown. We'll go into lockdown and nobody leaves till we solve this problem type of thing. And so that's as a risk. Then there's other areas where it's like more opportunistic. It's like, eh, it'd be nice if like we should be innovating. I think that's harder for big companies. Big companies are pretty good at responding to like existential threats and risks, at least more so than just continued innovation driven by their own motivation, you know?
And Emmett, When Emmett started the company, he was a college kid, uh, and it started as one thing. And then after 6 or 8 years or something, I mean, a while, it evolved into Twitch. Uh, how do you think he has done going from being a college kid who's just like creating some stupid thing in his dorm room to now running a massive—
I think he's great, but I, I didn't know him before, so I only known him— I've only known the guy for a year. And in that year, I'm like, this guy's great. He does all these, you know, I can see he still has the entrepreneurial edge and the, like, in the meetings he'll be like, cut the bullshit. Like, we need to go fast. And like, why are we not going fast? And then we'll be like, oh, excuse, excuse, excuse. And he's like, okay, cool. Let's kill all those excuses and let's do it. Um, and he has those moments, but, um, there's all the other shit you have to do to run a large company that's managing a P&L and trying to get profitable and as mature. And you have to deal with these trust and safety issues. Like, I know that wasn't his base strengths. Like, his strengths are he's super strategic. He's super smart. He used to be a programmer and now he's not programming. He does strategy stuff, but he's not the product person anymore. And he's got all these people in his company. And so I think he first surrounded himself with other people. So he hired Sarah, who was the CEO of Pandora. She's the CEO of Twitch now, and she's a great operational, like, kind of, she could whip an organization into shape. Then he brought in Dan. Dan was at Google, he ran YouTube's engineering and product, and then he was at Nextdoor as the CPO. So now he's the chief product officer essentially of Twitch. And Dan knows how to also run an organization. So what Emmett didn't know, he brought in people to do it. And then he just kind of kept doing the thing he's good at, which I think is the right way to be. And like, you know, I said that thing about a brain in a vat. Like he literally just sits in a meeting room essentially all day and a different team comes in and then they have a memo. His job is to read the memo and respond in a way that like helps the team be better in some way. And this dude, like, within 5 minutes, the memo is digested. He's figured out the, like, he's found the one inaccuracy of the memo. He'll call that out. And he's found the two, like, important things of the memo, and he'll focus the discussion on that. He does that better than anyone. I think he does it better than anyone because he's probably been doing that, that one exercise for 5 years straight. And plus his brain already had, like, very high horsepower. So it's pretty impressive.
I like, I enjoy talking about this because I think that when people who are listening, and me included, are building companies, you forget that you can build your own reality and you can kind of make it what you want to make it. And I enjoy hearing about this because sometimes I'm wondering, I'm like, which, which reality would I enjoy? Right? So I like hearing about other people's reality.
I also looked at his life now and I was like, I would not want that life. And I thought that's what I wanted, which is really actually important right? When you realize your dream is actually a nightmare, not a dream. And it's not that extreme, but like the dream of what if I built a big company like a Twitter or YouTube or Twitch and I was a CEO and we had this really unique— we were the market leader with this cool company culture and all this bullshit. When I see what his day-to-day is like, I'm like, okay, I think it'd be cool to build a thing like Twitch, but I wouldn't want to be the CEO of this. I don't want this headache. This headache is not a fun lifestyle for me.
Well, I think people don't realize is that A, it's shockingly boring, and B, you actually have to just do a lot of negative stuff all the time.
Yeah. The amount of time that he's thinking about what is the future of Twitch, how do— what's our strategy, how do we get there, how do we build an awesome culture, um, is small on the pie chart compared to dealing with headache of the day, headache of the week, headache of the month, and then like recurring headache of the year. And like, those are— it's mostly dealing with pain in the asses, either people or problems. And that's what he gets paid the big bucks to do, right? But I realized, well, shit, that's not what I would want as my lifestyle, uh, which is good to know because that's what I was shooting for before. So it's good to see it and be like, oh, swerve.
I love hearing the story. I love hearing this stuff.
So I did one smart thing, and I recommend anyone does this. So I, I think I mentioned this before, but I asked Emmett, I said, hey, can you send me the earliest Pitch decks, memos, meeting notes, anything you got from the early days of Twitch. Just go to your email and sort by earliest and just forward me anything with an attachment. And, uh, he did, he sent me a bunch of stuff. And so I saw the first slide decks when they're pivoting from Justin.tv to Twitch or his user interview notes when he called 100 streamers and was like, hey, how do I get you to switch to Twitch? You're on this other platform today and how they became the market leader. Um, and just seeing the way he— and then now it's funny cause like. Now everything's so structured. It's 6-page memos formatted in a certain way. Like you have to say, you don't say like growth is really strong. You have to say we grew from X percent to Y percent, which is plus or minus this percent month over month, which is plus or minus our quarterly goal. And that's the format. And if you ever say something like, you know, um, things are going well, or this is a big risk or whatever, like you need to back everything up in this formatted way. But back then, like his, Obviously as president, we're like a startup, right? Like it was just, you know, shoot from the hip. Yeah. Shoot from the hip. All right. So then I went to this guy, Ethan, who's become kind of a cool little mentor of mine. Ethan is like, uh, uh, L10, which is like one of the top levels, but under Bezos, um, at Amazon at a, and he's, he runs the Prime division. And so I asked him, I said, so here's my email to Ethan. I said, AWS Origins, that's the subject line. So I said, were you involved at the birth of AWS? Such an incredible business. I said, was this a high-profile big bet that they knew, oh, this could pay off big, let's bet big? Or was this like some unassuming little project with modest aspirations that happened to become a monster? I said, did this start with one of those 6-page memos? Is that memo now framed and hung on the Hall of Fame walls? I've read some articles, but I want to know from the inside what actually went down. And so, um, this is great. And so then he was like, he's like, I was around, I wasn't directly involved. And so then he answered question by question. He goes, It started small as far as I know, because there's 3, 3 little services, you know, SimpleDB, S3, EC2, a database, storage, and compute. It started with a small team of engineers, which is like the Amazon 2-pizza team. I don't know if you've ever heard that. Like they want every team to be small enough where you can be fed by 2 pizzas. And he's like, you know, S3 came out first. It worked. It was, you know, modest fanfare when it launched, but then EC2 came out. It was an instant hit, hockey stick growth, no looking back. We all realized, holy shit. Holy shit, this is actually going to be pretty big. We started adding services and then those services we added were just, we just looked at what people were doing on top of EC2 and, oh, they're hacking that together. Let's build a really good service that everyone can use that does exactly that. Or hey, they're using the service in a way that's breaking it. Let's quickly protect the service and make sure it can't break in that way. So he's like, if you think about like a VC portfolio, AWS was 3 bets. One was a, we can get our money back with a little bit of profit acquisition exit. Like S3 was like a small win. EC2 was like a unicorn IP that went to IPO. And one was a small loss, which was SimpleDB. But you know how, you know how it goes. The unicorn pays for all the other losses that you had. Um, so it ended up working out. How does this match with the, with the public lore, the public story? And then he lastly came and I came back and I said, you know, this all kind of is interesting, matches up. I said, how come? AWS didn't do payments. You know, it seems like payments is a core infrastructural service. Stripe did that. Stripe was basically AWS payments and built like a $25 billion company. What happened? You guys launched payments early on. Why didn't it work? And he was like, you know, our failure in payments was due to us like wanting to narrowly control them rather than our old playbook, which was give up margin and use that to get to mass adoption. Every payment thing we ever done has flopped. We overthink it always. Stripe was a big win, but we didn't catch it. And then he was looking for the memo to send me, the original memo to send me. And I was like, I love being an internet historian in this way.
I don't know if I like to name this stuff, but— I love hearing that. Another thing is that I was listening to a venture— Madonna, or I forget whichever guy gave Bezos their seed money. Apparently he was telling a story when he interviewed him. He was like, basically was like, yeah man, I think this might be a $100 million business. Right. And I just love hearing those stories like that.
Yeah, and there's people who tell these other folk stories, like so for example, and you gotta know that a lot of this is bullshit. So Chris Sacca is pretty famous for this. He tells stories, he's like, the greatest entrepreneurs I know, from the first conversations, it's like they could see in the future. They knew. He's like, I remember I bumped into Kevin Systrom from Instagram, Instagram in a coworking space. And he was telling me like, you know, he was showing me his little app that nobody had even used it. It was just on his phone. And he is like, yeah, like when we get to 5 million members, we'll do this feature. When we get to 50 million, we'll roll out this feature. And he's like, I remember thinking 50 million, dude, you're smoking crack. Like nobody even knows what the hell your app is. Um, he's like, but he knew. And so there's like, it becomes a story. He's telling this on CNBC. And then I've heard Peter Thiel tell the story of like, You know, I'm on the— I was the first investor in Facebook and Facebook was doing well. And then Yahoo or whoever, I think Yahoo offered them $1 billion to sell. And Mark came into the board meeting and was like, hey, you know, this shouldn't take long, maybe 5, 6 minutes, just a formality. But yeah, we've received this offer. We're obviously not going to take it. And, and then so Peter Thiel is telling the story to make Zuck seem like this, like, you know, this monster who just kind of always knew this, like this omniscient person who just knew what the future was going to be. And was so courageous to just turn it down. No brainer. And you know, us mere mortals would never do that. We would be like so excited to get a billion dollar offer. But then you hear the real stories behind these things. And apparently, um, and I'm going to have Josh Elman come on and confirm this story, but from what I know, Zuck did say no to the initial offer. And then Facebook started doing kind of like, had like kind of a down year. Um, growth was kind of low. They took a down round, but before they took that, Zuckerberg actually went back and actually agreed to a deal to sell to Yahoo for, I think, $1 billion or $900 million. And it was going to happen. And then like a week later or so, Yahoo came back and tried to renegotiate the deal down to $650 or $750 or something like that. And Zuckerberg was like, all right, fuck this. Like, no, we're not taking that deal. And they went back to independent. But like, let's not forget, he was going to take that deal. And like, same thing with all these other, you know, famous stories of like, oh, you know, Chris Sacca talks about Uber. He's like, Travis Kalanick, who would come to my house in Tahoe, sit in my hot tub, and we'd talk about we're gonna destroy the taxi industry and all this shit. Yeah, but also Travis Kalanick didn't think this was a big enough project to be CEO of and like recruited a random CEO of Twitter to kind of run his pet project until he realized this thing's gonna be big and then he took over. So like, let's not pretend like these things don't have humble origins and really humble beginnings. And, you know, Zuck was like, you know, there's interviews of him on a college couch being like, why does this have to expand past colleges? It's just a cool college thing. It doesn't have to be more. And like, now he's putting satellites on, you know, above the earth to give people in India internet access so they can use Facebook. Like, these things start humble.
I think that like, there are occasions, like I've been reading Henry Ford's book where it's like, there's definitely people like him and Edison who are visionaries. And it's like, oh, everyone in America should have lights. That those people exist. But then there are also people who are described as visionaries. And it originally started out as like, Isn't this neat, this little widget I made?
So I love hearing those stories.
Okay, that's all I got. This long episode. Tell us how this was. I think this was my— maybe a C- episode. Give us, give us a grade. Just throw a letter at us on Twitter. Our Twitter handles will be in the description. Just tweet at us a letter grade or go on our Facebook group and give us a letter grade. I want to know, I want to know what you guys thought of this.
I guess we'll find out.
But yeah, hope you enjoy this episode as always. Um, cool. See ya.