Ideation Bootcamp, Bitcoin Thieves Steal Billions, Stonks.com, and More

they find a bunch of burner cell phones. They find, like, a bag of, like, $50,000 of cash. They find a bunch of, like, the hardware wallets that had the bitcoins in them. And then they found, like, folders on their computer that were, like, fake passport ideas and, like, places to go, places to run away. Like, they found, like, folders that said that shit on their computers.

I don't even entirely understand what happened, but I have a backstory about the people.

Read today's edition of the Milk Road, you will get the full backstory in 10 bullet points.

Yeah, you need to go earlier.

Essentially, they were trying. But, but how did he— how did they even get it in the first place?

But how, how did— what, what type of idiot would use his name?

Eventually you need to get the money out. And so the problem is like they were trying to get the money out through like Walmart gift cards. They were buying like $500 Walmart gift cards with Bitcoin. They were doing like PlayStation games. They were like, they were trying all these small things, but they could never move the bulk of the money. So if you want to move like in mass, you got to do something that lets you move size. And usually those—

could you buy an NFT and then sell it?

No, you need to get the money out of the wallet. That's the problem. So, so, so the problem— so in order to do that, there's like an off-ramp, right? How do you get it into, you know, US dollars, for example, if that's what you wanted to do? Um, you know, he left it there for 5 and a half years and they were probably living off and spending in some ways, but like you wanted to actually like get a lot of it out and get, get it, uh, remove the paper trail. Of the blockchain, you need to get it as an off-ramp. But to get it as an off-ramp, you have like a, um, you know, your ID, like these exchanges, they, they require you to upload your license and like they have laws they have to comply with called KYC, know your customer. And so eventually they found that somehow the DOJ, they didn't explain exactly, but they, they identified that the money was moving towards a wallet that was owned by a known person. That's how they ended up finding these guys. Now the funny part is— That's awesome. All right, go ahead.

So that, Well, so the, I, when I read about this, I was like, wait, that name sounds so familiar. Both their names sound familiar. So the guy, his name is Ilya, I-L-Y-A. I think it was like a very like weird name. His last name is Lichtenstein. So he spoke at the first HustleCon. I never talked to him, but, um, he had a company called MixRank, which was just a normal startup, went through YC and he spoke at HustleCon. And then his girlfriend or wife, She was a copywriter and I remember talking a little bit with her because she, her name's Heather Morgan, I think. And she had a, um, a website all about writing sales emails.

Totally.

Is that right?

Do you remember her? For the hack?

She had like a red dress.

She had like a LinkedIn post on like 5 hacks for your, your cover letter for your job interview. Like, you know, like that sort of thing. And so, yeah, she was doing that. She, and so they, and the funny thing is like the reason the internet kind of went crazy with it was because here you had two very unlikely characters. So, um, we had a bunch of friends text us or text me because I was writing this, this edition of the Milk Road. And I was like, um, anybody know this guy? And you, you knew him, but some other people knew him. They're like, dude, you would never get vibes of like, this guy might just go launder billions of dollars. It was like smart, like kind of quiet, like his guy, like engineer type.

Uh, he like, he like showed very little emotion. No, I did not think that this guy, like, yeah.

And then her, she's like this, like, super strange Kanye West level weird, you know, like, person. She basically, she had like an alter ego that was called Razzle Khan, and Razzle Khan was her rap name. And then she has like these super fucking cringy rap songs on YouTube. Like, dude, okay, I have, you know, I have, you know, I think it'd be cool to be a rapper, but if I hear myself, there's no way I'm publishing that because It sounds so bad. WrestleCon, liver sucks, you better win.

Come real far but don't know where I'm headed.

Motherfucking crocodile of Wall Street.

Silver on my fingers and boots on my feet.

Always be a— And so it's horrible.

It's so bad that the top comment was Paris Hilton. I'm going to prove to everyone that you can have— that having money means you can rap good. And then it said, Heather Morgan, hold my beer.

I didn't even know Paris Hilton has like a rap song. So yeah, yeah, there's just like, she's like one of the strangest characters. Like, I watched it. I went deep, dude, for this. I was writing this thing and I was like, oh, let me get some examples. And then I couldn't look away because like the train wreck, dude, it's like there's videos of her wedding. And like she, she like forced everybody to like, they built like this golden mini Taj Mahal that she sat in and then her bridesmaids lifted it up on her shoulder and brought her in. But even the audience at her wedding is like uncomfortably clapping, like offbeat, because they're like, this is just not normal. There's like, and there's like clearly only 14 people in the room. And then she does a rap performance at the wedding that was like equally cringy. And she's just like humping the air.

Oh my God. To the guy, Ilya. Ilya goes like, dude, this freaking guy. I'm looking at these pictures. That's hilarious. This woman's really hard to look at. She is just cringe city.

That should have been her rap name, Cringe City. That would have been like, okay, I get it. You're going to be the cringiest. Cool. That's like Henry Cejudo. He called himself the king of cringe. Yeah, that's what she should have done. Like, it's super strange. But yeah, basically they recovered it. And so now what's going to happen? Anyway, it's just a bunch of interesting little bits to it. So the DOJ is going to give the money back to Bitfinex. It looks like Bitfinex had— when they, they launched their own token at one point in time called the LEO token that's like used in their— if you trade in their exchange, it'll give you a discount using the LEO token. So they had to put in a thing when they launched the LEO token, was like, hey, if we ever recover anything from that hack, um, we'll use 80% up to 80% of it to buy back and burn our LEO token, which will cause like the, you know, LEO holders to benefit from if we ever recover from this.. And so now they're gonna get like $3.5 billion to buy back. So the price of Leo token like shot up like whatever, 60% in 24 hours. 'Cause people are like, oh wow, that's gonna be a lot. But they said, we're not gonna just cause a bunch of sell pressure in the market. We're gonna do a controlled sale over like a multi-year period. Um, so that it's like scheduled and doesn't like affect the Bitcoin market or whatever.

Um, God, this is such a good story. This would make, This is going to be exactly—

that's what everyone was saying is like, here comes, you know, incoming, incoming Netflix doc. Uh, have you seen this? I saw, I just watched this clip like every day for the past 3 days and it just absolutely cracks me up. I was hoping Ben can, uh, play it in the thing, but I don't think it'll work. I don't think the sound will come through. So have you seen this clip of this interview of Bill Gates back in the day jumping over a chair? Yeah. Have you seen this?

Yeah. It's like just a normal one of him jumping.

Just the— so he's doing some interview with some woman about Microsoft and she goes, she goes, is it true that you can leap over a chair?

Is that that impressive?

And he goes, well, first of all, it is impressive, uh, for Bill Gates to be able to do that. Second of all, just, I don't know why this is being talked about. And then he goes, so she goes, Is it true that you could jump over a chair? And he goes, it depends on the size of the chair. So, you know, just like, and then they cut, it's like a hard cut to a chair, Bill Gates clearing it. Is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position? It depends on the size of the chair. I'll cheat a little bit.

Yeah, that's an old clip. You've just now seen that.

I know I came back into my life because I was thinking somebody had said something like, oh yeah, you know, back in the day, or, you know, in the good old days, somebody said some phrase like that. And in my head I go, what are they even thinking about when they, when they say that? And I go, I'm going to have— I was like, what's the funniest back in the day thing? And that clip came to mind. And so I decided anytime somebody says back in the day or, you know, in the good old days, I'm going to think only of that moment where Bill Gates says, depends on the— depends on how high the chair is.

I always think of Uncle Rico. The Uncle Rico clip in Napoleon Dynamite where he goes, I used to be able to throw a pigskin over them mountains. All right. So listen, I did something that I did not think I was ever going to do. Um, so last year in 2021 or no, uh, 2020, whenever COVID happened, I launched this course that I, I don't even know if I ever talked about it called the Ideation Bootcamp. I did it with Gagan. I invested in his company just like you did in Maven. You have already done 2 of them, I think. And you have a third coming up. I decided to launch one. I launched one the other day. I only talked about it on Twitter. I've not talked about it on here yet, but so if people wanna do it, it's called the Ideation Bootcamp. And it's basically my research, um, my research framework and how I research stuff. It's, but it's, uh, you go to maven.com. So Maven, how do you say Maven? How do you like, you say Maven? It rhymes with like raven.

Uh, yeah, there you go. With, with an M, but with an M at the end. No, no, no, that's right. That's right. Yeah.

And you could see You can see my name is on the front page, but what they don't have yet, and this is what I told Gagan, they, so me and Sean both invested in this company and as part of investing in it, he made us promise to do courses. Yeah. Um, which was actually a good kick in the ass because now I actually had to do it and it has been fun, but, um, he needs like custom URLs. He doesn't have that yet.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

It's like maven.com/blank/whatever in order to get to your thing. But I just have the, they made it for me. They made a PowerWriting, PowerWritingCourse.com.

They're gonna make it for me, but they, so that, that goes there. But they have to make it for you. Yeah. But I'm, I'm doing this thing. It, I think it's gonna be pretty badass. I think I'll continue doing it maybe once a year, but maybe I won't ever do it.

I don't know. Give an example. So give a teaser of like, okay, so, so this is about coming up with a great idea, figuring out, so coming up with ideas and then picking the ones that seem like better ideas than worse ideas. In a short amount of time. Is that the hook?

And it started with reading the, reading the annual report for 1-800-Flowers, which, uh, that sounds like the most, you know, kind of unique starting point. For finding, not even just finding specific opportunities, but just like training your brain to think about the world wider than the, the way you currently think about it. That's, that's how I would phrase it. Cause like, I don't think you necessarily find the best ideas by being like, okay, I'm gonna go read, you know, the har— the HBS Business School, you know, the Harvard Business School's annual report. And in there I'm gonna find a business idea. I think that's a little too hardcore.

I'll give you an example of this, uh, how this played out in my life. So I invest in this company. The guy actually came to our podcast, our live podcast, show in San Francisco, which was like in your office, very, you know, it was a very small crew, maybe 50 people, 75 people, something like that. I don't know what it was, but it was the very first live thing we ever did. And this guy comes up afterwards and he's like, hey, that was great. And I'm like, what do you— cool. What's your story? What do you do? And he's like, oh, I'm— I currently run the perception team on the self-driving cars division of Uber.

He was very charming, very good looking. I was sold to—

Like, uh, like public storage or something.

Public storage. Yeah, literally. Yeah. And then he'd roll up the garage on like unit 333 or whatever. And then he'd put me in it. He'd be like, all right, let's see if it works. And then we'd drive in a circle around the storage facility, uh, storage, like parking lot. And it was like, whoa, that was bizarre to sit there and just like have the thing drive me. Yeah. So it was working, but it was very, you know, like that's a closed environment. It's pretty easy to get that to work., but he was working on, okay, now let's take it out a mile. Okay, now let's go get a sandwich from the shop. And like, that's what he was doing for like a year. So anyways, um, he, at the time, the idea, the initial idea was like to be kind of like an Uber competitor, right? Like somebody will just push a button, this ride will show a roll up to them with no driver inside. They hop in, they actually drive themselves to the location, then they leave. They just walk out and the thing will drive to the next passenger by itself. I was like, oh, that's a really cool idea. We were trying to figure it out and I felt like we were hitting a wall. And this is where something like your course will help because if you're all, if you're, if all your ideas are boxed into your own life experiences and you're like a, you know, 27-year-old engineer who's worked at, you know, tech companies, like your life experiences are pretty narrow. And only once we got out of that and started like figuring out these little like, you know, like these, these, these unique spots. Like when you, when you read an annual report, you go, huh? So I was reading an annual report. Uh, we talked to, we just took a random meeting. We took a random meeting with some transportation lawyer and he mentioned that he does work for this company. And I looked up that company and it's basically like this, I don't know, like $30 billion company that I've never heard of. And what did it do? They partner with like 15 cities and they go to the city and they say, hey, um, You need buses and scooters and ferries and trains and all that stuff. Yeah. You just commission us. We'll, we'll bid for your, for the right to run transportation in your city. And they would get, and so this, the whole $30 billion company or whatever was like off of like 15 city contracts. And then I thought about, I was like, oh, of course, like San Francisco doesn't run their own buses. Like, you know, or whatever. Not every city is going to want to be in the transportation business. They just contract it out to some vendor. And I was like, man, that's an amazing business. Cuz that vendor now has lock-in. Like the city's not gonna change. They're just gonna like, they just get to eat up. They have a monopoly on city transport. And then that got me thinking about those city bike share programs. Yeah. If you've seen those City Bikes, they're awesome. And then their annual reports were online and I went and I read about it and City Bike did the same model. They went to New York and they built like a $100 million revenue business doing city bikes in New York. And they were the only ones who had the license to do it. And then they did it in San Francisco and then they sold to Lyft. For her, I don't know, some hundreds of millions of dollars. And I thought, that's a really cool model. And so then we started brainstorming, dude, could you go to a city that needs this type of transport, like a different type of transport than what they already have with their buses and whatever, and just say, we'll be the vendor for you. That's exactly what they did. They went to Las Vegas.

Did it work? Uh, yeah.

And that's what you and I do to people. So because we just study and break down stuff, I think you and I go through the same discovery and aha moment. I hope that our audience does, which is basically you see it once you know what's possible, or once you know, like what other people is possible, your standard of what's possible kind of changes. And you're like, well, of course I could do that. They did that. And they did by doing this, this, and this. I already know exactly how they did it. It's like, um, it would kind of be like me telling you, Well, just go get big muscles. It's like, I don't, I can't get big muscles. Like, I don't know what that means versus like, well, just lift this weight, do it 4 times a week. And here, I'll remind you every single time and you could do it. And so like when you know, like a specific routine or, you know, what's possible, it definitely changes your perspective on what you should be doing. And, uh, hopefully that's what the podcast does, but that's what the course will be doing. But, uh, I don't know.

I wanted to focus on— where'd it go? Maven.com.

Maven.com.

You'll see your face.

They'll see my face and it's called the Ideation Bootcamp. It's cool. And then you have one too on the, it's called the Ideation Bootcamp. You have one too, the, the power writing course. This is your third time doing it.

It's my third time doing it. Yeah.

And you did it because you're like, uh, people like, I think Gagan said that you have the second highest rated course.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, I forget who had number one, but he said, and, uh, you know, uh, second place is the best place. Uh, did I still have to reach?

Is it second or first?

But I'm still at the top.

I don't remember which one he said. It was like either one or two.

I think we don't, uh, I don't really care about highest rated cuz I was like, you know, honestly people's rating will be more based on themselves. Like it's just like actually to use your gym example, um, most people aren't like, if, if you're outta shape, it's not because you have the wrong workout program and trainer. It's because, you know, most likely you're not even going to the gym. Then if you are going to the gym, you're not working, going consistently. If you're not going consistently, if you're, even if you are going consistently, you're not working out with intensity. And then comes the program for back, biceps, and shoulders that's gonna help you get the ma— most gains. And so similarly, like I had, it's like, yeah, we had a high-rated course, but then I looked at, I was like, man, 15 or 20% of people just never showed up to a single one. They paid and never showed up. Like, damn, that's, that's on them.

I don't think you could solve that.

Yeah. Well, you know, and I, and I luckily I was wise enough to not have heartache over that cuz I was like, That's actually just like a completely common pattern with all online education is people don't finish or they don't start for something that they'll even pay a bunch of money for, which is really wild. So it's like, of the people that come, what, what kind of experience do they have? And then, you know, 6 months, 9 months later, are you still getting emails being like, yo, I used your thing. It was, you know, I got this outcome out of it. That's like, that's the only real true measure of success. And I don't think if 100 people go into the course, it's not gonna be 100 people who have that. 20 people aren't even gonna show up. You know, 60% of people, 60 of them are gonna forget everything within a year or never, never implement it. And really it's the, like the 15 to 20 out of 100 that go like use the thing and better their, better themselves.

Yeah, it sucks. Um, do you wanna talk about this Bitcoin, Bitcoin couple? What do you wanna talk about?

Uh, I have, okay, so I have a couple ideas and then I have a couple random topics, but let's do ideas first. Um, so I wanna get, I wanna shout out a couple ideas that I saw other people saying that I thought were kind of interesting. So, uh, here's the first one. So you invested in this thing, uh, stonks.com, right?

I did.

And, uh, explain for people who don't know what Stonks is, explain what it is. Cause it's actually kind of like pretty dope. I, I had the opportunity to invest. I know the guy super well who started it. Uh, he was our biggest competitor when we were doing my startup. Um, so I was like watching them. I like kind of saw how they operate. So I knew these, these guys are really good, but I didn't get the idea fully right away. And the valuation was really high because they have a good track record. So I was like, ah, okay, I'll just pass. I'll be a user, not an investor. You invested. So explain what it is.

Yeah. So it's like Shark Tank meets AngelList. And so AngelList is a platform where you can, uh, if anyone starts a company, they can go on and they can get investors and they make it easy. So anyone could invest like $1,000 into your company. And you know what Shark Tank is. And so basically Stox, you, it's spelled, uh, like the reason I was like, is this going to work? Because it's spelled like a joke. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like it's like spelled like a meme. And like their logo is like a silly, it's like the WallStreetBets guy, but it's, uh, so once a, how often, what's the cadence now? Is it every day or once a week?

No, I don't think it's every day. I think it's once a week or so.

So once a week, but then they have like big ones that are once a month and they do some pre-vetting and they find interesting startups. And all types of entrepreneurs, investors are on the phone or on the call listening, and they could ping in with a question and the whole audience can watch in real time. And so I've been a guest, I've been an investor, or they call it investors where you're like, you're able to ask questions. And I've seen people write checks for $50,000 and $100,000 live.

So the experience is like a live, like a Twitch channel, basically like an auction. So a startup goes up, they pitch their thing. The investor— some investors can ask questions in the chat, some are asking questions live, and then you just see in the chat, it's like so-and-so is investing $10,000, so-and-so is putting in $40,000, so-and-so is putting $2,000 in.

Have you seen one where people—

they'll raise like, I think somebody raised over $10 million in 10 minutes. Is that right?

I think, well, the company raised $10 million. Stox raised money from guys like me, but, and then Andreessen Horowitz, just like angel investors. And then they let their users invest and they raised like $10 or $15 million in A few hours.

Well, how did you guys invest in this? When I talked to him, I was like, oh, this is a no-brainer. I only invested $10,000, but it was because I would, I would have done more.

It was like, and I, I agree. Can I tell you what one of our friends, uh, Moiz Ali, tweeted something and it needs to be for homes, Stonks for homes. Like it's because the cool thing about Stonks is you could see what other, what questions other smart people are asking and with cars. So Bring a Trailer, my favorite car website, it has a comment section and I could see what smart people are asking. Like, is this a '67 or a 1967 or 1968? Because the 1967s offered this thing and the real collector's items are '68s. You know what? I'm just making that up. But with, and with houses, it's the same thing. Like, I remember our home, like our realtor was saying like, is this made out of stucco or this other thing? And I'm like, I don't know what any of that is. And then they're like, did you guys like spray the installation or is it like a, I'm like, I don't know what that means. I wish I could see like what questions I knew smart people were asking. And I wish you could do that live. Okay. I wish I could. I wish. And then you could have an upvote.— an upvote. And I think I would like it to be for houses.

So I think, uh, okay. That's interesting. The one that she had said that I thought was pretty cool was hiring. So stonks.com for people. Okay. So how does that work? So, okay. There's general hiring, which is like, you know, our hiring is like this, like large spectrum from like temp staffing where I just need like an hourly employee to show up today. And then like tomorrow they may not come back to like Craigslist to Uh, then you get to like LinkedIn and Indeed, which is kind of like mass market. If I'm a, if I'm a, you know, junior, you know, or I'm, I'm a mid-level marketing manager, I might get job opportunities on LinkedIn or Indeed. That might be where I go look. Then you have like AngelList, like vertical places where it's like, if I want a job in startups, I won't go to Indeed. I'll go to AngelList cuz that's where the startups hire, or the, that's a job board for startups. And so then you have this one like really interesting thing and then you have like headhunters which do executive placements and kind of like, Um, you know, how do you find a CMO? You hire a headhunter, you pay 'em a ton of money and then they get like a huge cut. So somewhere in there, I think there's an opportunity to let people hire like top talent live like this. So if you were able to, essentially it's like a reverse job interview. So instead of me going and interviewing with—

you know what this kind of reminds me of? And it's kind of, I'll say it though, this kind of sounds like a, like a, like a slave auction.

Yeah. I knew you were gonna say, I knew you were gonna go there.

And actually it makes me, it makes me a little, this makes me very uncomfortable actually. Like that. I mean, like a talent auction. Is that what we're going to call it now?

Dude? Yes. At will, bro. It's like you get paid.

You're at will.

You don't have to do it. It's like, that's like saying employment is slavery, right? It's not. Um, so, so, but there was a website. I don't know if you saw it come out that was called Developer Auction and it was controversial for this exact reason. So this came up maybe 6 years ago or so. It ended up, um, it got really hot.

So what they were doing was they're saying, Look, how did developers know about this company?

It was like part of YC or they were, they piggybacked on YC in some way. I don't remember if they were a YC company or what they did was they were like, we're only going to take developers or we're only going to let YC companies hire from this place. So it's like, if you're a dev who wants to work for a YC company, come on to Developer Auction. You get the highest dollar bid because these guys have money and they want great devs.

Which, which was just a little bit of icing on the douche cake. Like you're doing, you're doing, uh, yeah, you're doing an auction now. You're doing it all for YC. Yeah. That's the, that's the cherry on top of the douchebag cake.

The, the douche de leche cake. Yeah. So, so basically they, they kind of did that. And so what was happening was developers were getting way more money on this and they also didn't have to do like a multi-week job interviewing process. It was like they say, hey, yeah, I was at Reddit early-ish, first 40 employees. I worked on the fraud, fraud system and this and this. I'm interested in, uh, you know, companies doing machine learning. And then boom, job offer and job offer at a 20% premium. And Developer Auction, all they had to do was just say, they just had to be like Harvard. They just had to be selective. It's like, no, not any company can just apply here. We're gonna pick. And then no, not any developer can apply here. We're gonna pick. Now ultimately, I don't think the model worked cuz they're not like the biggest thing ever now. I think they ended up like kind of pivoting or softening it.

Well, all talent marketplaces are really hard businesses, I think, to scale.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, to scale. I think there you could have a lot of, you can have like, you can be a re— just a recruiter and make millions of dollars a year. You could be just a job board and make millions of dollars a year. But if you wanna be hired.com, then it, like, I don't know if it can, it's really hard to work.

So I think the trick here is to do it with something that's visual. So, okay. Stonks is cool cuz it's a live video stream. So one question is what, in what, what category does having a visual screen that's showing you something? Work way better than a resume that was attached to an email or a job board. And so I think like potentially designers or even something like more niche than that, like 3D designers, video editors, graphics, something like that. Um, like this could be maybe how like the video game industry hires or something like that. I don't know. There's, there's something there to doing this.

That's what she said, Elaine.

She said, uh, I don't know. I, I didn't, I didn't see which exact example she, she had the example of hiring and I didn't even read on. I was like, yeah, great idea. Let me just, like riff off that.

That's pretty interesting.

So I thought that was cool. And then I think there's probably some other areas where you could do that. And I think the trick is normally the reason livestream products fail is because the viewers you're competing, like you don't want to compete for viewers with people who are just doing this for leisure. Um, cause they have a ton of options. They could just open TikTok. They can, you know, go for a walk. They can do anything. You need people, you need the viewers or the buy side for this to be their job. Um, so that's why actually real estate or real estate investors, instead of maybe even, maybe it's not just for buying my home that I'm going to go live in, but maybe it's like multifamily properties get auctioned off in this way. And it's multifamily investors that are showing up to buy pieces of that action or something like that.

I think, I think that'd be cool. I think I told you this, a hypothesis I had in 2012, right? I remember when I was in the apartment business, we had like an apartment finder thing and I was like, I'm pretty sure that people, it's not that far away that people are going to start renting homes and buying homes without ever seeing them in person. Like, like, like, uh, this was before Matterport was around. And I think we're there. Like, I, I would buy a house. Would you buy a house without seeing it?

No.

I wouldn't maybe not mind rent. I for sure would rent a place without seeing it.

Yeah.

Uh, I maybe would buy, but I think I I, I, there's a world I think where we're going to buy them soon without ever seeing a house.

Right. The other one that's kind of out of left field here is, did you ever watch the Zoom Bachelor that some of our friends did? Sheil was the Zoom Bachelor. Did you ever watch it?

Uh, no, I don't watch that shit though.

Real sports.

Well, I just don't watch reality TV. You know, I watch good stuff.

It was like, it was like just people doing it. It wasn't real TV even, but it was basically like, I know, I'm joking. Here's Sheil. He's a, he's an investor. He's single. He's a good guy. We think he's great. And so as a, as a joke, as a kind of a lark, they created a, a livestream and they curated a bunch of single women and they were like, all right. Uh, and they basically in the course of an hour, it was like, here's 6 women. They introduce themselves. He cuts 2. It was like, all right, of the 4 women now he's gonna ask you a question. Like, all right, what's your ideal Friday night date? What would we do? And then one girl's like, oh, I think we would whatever, like, just how many people watch the movie, whatever. There was like, I don't know, like 500 people live watching it, which is a pretty big like livestream channel. Good. Um, and this was like, again, it was all kind of done as a joke. It was just friends. I don't think any of them really wanted to date each other, but it was just like to do the show. But maybe there's something like that, right? The Bachelor is one of the highest rated shows ever. And then you see stuff like, uh, there's like a matchmaker show on Netflix that's like Indian Matchmaker or something like that. As people pay thousands of dollars to like, uh, to matchmakers to find like kind of like eligible candidates. Like that's a, that's a, that is a niche thing that exists in every city.

You and I have a friend, you have an eye, you and I have a single friend and I, for a gift, I nearly bought him a $4,000 matchmaker and I didn't end up going through with it because I was like, I don't know if they're going to like follow through with this and that's too much money to spend if they don't do it. And I don't know if they're going to find it insulting. But I was like, I interviewed this lady 3 different times. I'm like trying to figure out if this would be the right fit for our friend. Um, I think that, I think they're interesting. I think more people should use them.

So I think that if there was a private version of this, that was, you know, it was more expensive.

Um, well, so now we're talking about auctioning off sex.

Yeah. Well, we're talking about auctioning off the things people want. Right. So yeah, it just so happens to be talent. Sex, things like that.

Um, that's cool.

Let me tell you about something that I saw. I did not research this at all for this talk, but I wanted to just bring it up. Because we were talking about something similar. Um, I'm trying to find, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to manage. So I bought this farm. I need to like get a manager to help run it. And there's these property management companies, but they don't really have like the touch. It's a little sterile and like to make this work the way I want it to work. I want someone that's a little bit more close to it. Um, so in your brain, in your head, what, when I think of an outsourced person, like what's like the image that you're, that I, that you get, can you just try to give me, can you explain that to me? No, no, just, just tell me like what, uh, outsourced VR, uh, a virtual assistant.

Yeah. Like, I don't know, somebody in the Philippines or India who's, you know, sitting at a desk, uh, you know, typing away for, for—

like in a call center style.

Exactly.

Okay. Now when I'd say, um, military spouse, military spouse, what comes to your mind?

Um, a patriot, a woman in America. White, blonde hair, speaks great English, sitting, you know, in the comfort of her, you know, her home office, talking to, you know, customers.

What attributes are there?

Any loyal, organized, trustworthy, things like that.

Exactly. So there's this company called Squared Away. So Google Squared Away—

we've talked about them on here before, by the way.

Yes, we have. But I didn't get it. We talked about one episode. We did one. We did one episode where we talked about Um, like a cool way to come up with a type of company that you want is, uh, who would you wanna hire? Mm-hmm. Like what demographic you wanna hire?

So who do you wanna serve? Right. That's another one, right? Yeah.

Who do you wanna serve?

You're ultimately gonna be serving a customer. And so it helps a lot if you care about them and, and understand them and want, want more of them to be around you every day.

So Mill, uh, go, uh, what's it called? Go Squared Away. I don't know why it's called Go Squared Away, or maybe it's just called Squared Away.

The business is Squared Away. The domain. They just couldn't get SquaredAway.com probably.

And it's the most expensive— the cheapest tier is $200 for 5 hours.

Great copy on this website. Look at this. So what— it's great. Let's compare this. So what's another— what's another outsourcing company? Like, let— can we just find like Upwork? Like, uh, go to, um, let me just Google like outsourcing or let's say virtual assistant for, uh, yeah, virtual assistant.

If they show up on the top of Google, they might have good copywriting. But while you're looking for that, so the copywriting on this page, so you go to, uh, Squared Away, it says the best company perk is personal assistance for your entire team. Our, our team of military spouses gives you your time back. And it's a picture of a lady holding up her sign, waiting for her husband to get off the plane from like coming home from Iraq.

How crazy is that? This is beautiful branding because I don't know how many people are in the military, but like a military spouse is not like, I mean, uh, that's a, it's not that ex, uh, uh, It's not that rare. So like, I may hire these people for doing all types of jobs and they are a military spouse, but as soon as they brand it as— I'm like, oh, well, you definitely are a good person. Like, even though I've— it doesn't necessarily mean they're a great person, but for some reason I think that even though you're a good person, you know, bringing this company up, right?

Bonus points. Yeah. Yeah. You're, you know, you get free, free virtue for having brought this company up as something cool.

Is this beautiful branding or what? Like, why, why did we even, why did we talk about this before?

Uh, we talked about it before. Same thing. We were talking about, uh, the stay-at-home mom workforce and like, how do you tap into that? Like labor markets that are underutilized. So excess talent that doesn't, that's, that's looking for a job. And we talked about, you know, what could you do with stay-at-home moms? And then we brought this up and they actually shared the clip cuz they were like, hey, this was cool. We got like featured on this thing. And so that's how I remember that we've talked about it before. But, uh, I don't know. How did we get here? What were you talking about? So you were talking about the—

Oh, I don't, I don't remember. We were, we were, I think you were talking about like talent, right? Like talent marketplaces. And I was, and I just, I, I didn't even research. I'm, I signed up for, uh, what's it called?

Get Squared Away.

Squared Away. I entered the, I'm waiting for them to call me back, but I signed up because I, but when I went to it, I was like, oh my God, I'm in love. I want, I wanna hire this woman in the picture. I feel like I need her to—

I hire, if I use the service, it like washes away the fact that I like don't do compost, that I forgot to recycle that bottle.

And I feel like the woman's just going to have my back so hard. Like she's just going to like, just so much loyalty.

She's not your spouse, dude.

No, but she's my partner. That's like how I feel. And I just thought they don't, this website I've never seen, I've never felt this way about a job website.

Oh, Jonathan brought up, you were talking about managing your ranch. So you were saying you might use this instead or just kind kind of, it reminded you that nobody's doing that in the product management space of making you feel the way that this makes you feel about assistants. Is that right?

I don't even remember the angle that I had, but yes, I think I'm gonna use this to manage my ranch, but I thought, I thought that'd be cool.

Cool company and good example of a, of a landing page. So, uh, all right, so let's, let's go to another one. So can I tell you, uh, or I'll do a quick one. I just wanna get your take on this. So I follow this guy, uh, and I don't know if this is his name because it sounds like a fake name. I've been talking to him. I just sort of realized, I don't know if this is his real name, but his Twitter handle is @peer_rich. And I don't know if his name is Peer Rich.

His name is Al Kahl.

Okay. His name is Peer Richelson. Peer Richelson. So that's his name. So anyways, he's another guy who tried a talent marketplace and now has pivoted to something sweet., he initially, he had a YC company and it like didn't work out. And then he like, as a, like, they just needed money and they were like, yo, we just shut down our company. Um, you can, you can hire us. We're a YC duo. You can just hire us. We'll do a project for you for like, as a contractor for like 2 weeks, cost money, but like you're getting a YC founder duo. Where can you hire that?

Oh my God.

And I was like, dude, this is fucking amazing. I was like, I would love to hire YC founder duos. And I was like, if you think about it, like some number, maybe 20, 30, 40% of YC companies are gonna shut down and like, you know, those people might just go get jobs, but actually it might be cool for them to like continue to brand themselves as a YC company, as YC founders and be able to be hired, be able for hire. So they did that for a little bit and I thought that was cool. That's how I got in touch with him. Now he is doing something called Cal.com. Have you seen this? It's a competitor to Calendly.

Cal.

Great, great domain, which domain? Just Cal.

All right. All right. So scheduling infrastructure for absolutely everyone.

So basically what they are is we've talked about Calendly, Calendly before. Calendly basically gives you a little, a link. That's a calendar where somebody can book you. And so that's great for like a salesperson who's like, uh, hey, yeah, I would love to chat about, you know, how we might be able to help you out. Here's a link to my calendar. Grab a time that works for you. And it like lets you go pick a time. It emails both of you a calendar invite. It like takes care of the whole like booking process. So Calendly had become like a, I think a billion dollar plus company, uh, uh, recently like $2 billion company. And there's, aren't they like, weren't they bootstrapped for like a really long time or something crazy?

They had like, yeah, the guy was an African immigrant who, uh, bootstrapped it to like $20 million in revenue, raised a round at like a billion and then recently raised another round at like 2 or 3 or 4.

So that business is working. So Cal.com I think is a great competitor. I'm gonna invest in this because I believe in this model that they're doing, which is commercial open source software. So Calendly is not open source. Cal.com is, is open source. What does that mean? That means you can, A, you can read the source code, B, you can basically like self-host it. So a lot of companies don't want their kind of like data and information in the hands of another company. They like to be able to self-host the software that they're using. And also be able to fork it or remix it in some way that like is customizable to them. And so these guys are growing fast. I switched over from Calendly. Now I use Cal.

Is it awesome?

Yeah, it's a sick product. And you could, you embed these on your website. So it's like, if you have a website, you're like, I don't know, uh, you give people, you're, you're a lawyer and you need people, like, instead of saying, here's a contact us form and then one of our humans will reach out to you and then we'll try to schedule a time. And by that time you already forgot how interested you are. So what this does is says, dude, just embed your, your booking calendar right here and it reads your existing calendar. So it won't let anybody book a time that's already taken. And you could set up rules like don't do meeting, like I need a minimum 10-minute gap in between meetings or whatever, right? You set some rules, you just embed that right here. So in the heat of the moment when somebody's interested, you can grab that lead right away and get them booked for a meeting. And so do—

but how do you use it? You're not a company. You're just—

so I'll use it either for if I'm gonna invest in a co— if I'm, if I'm doing, talking to a founder and it's like, hey, yeah, would love to chat sometime next week. All right. You know, here's my calendar. Feel free to grab any time that works for you. Um, and some people find that like offensive, whatever. I don't know. People are too sensitive about shit. Like, you know, just trying to be, we're trying to, trying to make it flexible for the other person to pick whatever time works for them without requiring 4 email back and forth or pawning you off to my assistant who's gonna like take it from here. Um, and you'll have to email them 4 times to find a time that works. And so, uh, so I use it for that. I'll also use it for like random meetings. So I'll have a Calendly that's just, you know, like I'll have like, you know, just backslash Sean and I'll put like a 1 hour of random meetings once per month that anybody on the internet can go book. And so those are ways that, that I just add a little like randomness and serendipity into my life. That's like in a controlled fashion of when, when it can happen.

Dude, this is cool. You, they did a really funny flex. So if you go to the website, you see a thing that says claim your username. And when you refresh consistently, you see different names in the autofilled example. And it's all people who are well-known and I bet are investors of the company. And you see that and you're like, oh, well, James Brashares and Naval, this person.

Yeah. Those guys are, they are investors.

Okay. Yeah. Isn't that funny how they did that?

These guys have exploded. They went from like nothing to a lot of traffic.

They're, they're growing fast. Yeah. You should invest too. I'll, I can introduce you.

Yeah, do it. I would love, I love this stuff. Can we talk about the Bitcoin thing please?

Uh, yeah, let's do it. By the way, I didn't even say his idea. All right. Uh, that whole thing wasn't even the thing.

Oh, uh, what's the idea?

I'm on board.

And that—

and I also think that's a— while I was Googling Anywhere School and, uh, there's nothing interesting.

Great, great name, right?

I think it's a great name.

Okay, let's, let's do the big—

I'm on board with it. Wait, really quick before we get to that, what were you gonna say about Strauss Zelnick?

Dude, you're gonna love this. So you know I know. So explain who he is.

Yeah. So there's this guy named, so there's this guy named Strauss.

How do you pronounce his last name?

I think it's right. Zelnick. Uh, I'm, I'm just doing this off memory. So correct me. I think he's the CEO of, uh, uh, Take-Two Interactive, which is basically the owner or creator of, uh, Grand Theft Auto and like, and like 8 other games that are of that caliber. So like, uh, maybe like a $5 or $10 billion a year company that owns like the biggest video games in the world. And he's probably in his mid to late 50s and he looks like a GI Joe. So he's this like jacked dude who gets up at like 5:00 AM in New York and works out really hard. And a lot of people are invited to go work out with him. Um,, but it's all like high caliber, get after it type of stuff.

And, uh, I was invited when I was in New York, but for some reason the scheduling didn't work out. I couldn't go. Yeah. They get up early.

I just hate working out at 6:00 AM. I hate working out.

I thought you'd be all about it because like, you know, the harder the better for you.

I, yeah, like I would go, but like the problem with my, my issue with working out at 6:00 AM means I've got to wake up at like 5:20, which means I've got to go, go to bed at like 9:00. And if I have to go to bed at 9, I'm in bed at 9 and I'm so anxious saying to myself, if I don't go to sleep now, like I'm not gonna be able to wake up. But I get so anxious about waking up early that it makes it not fun.

Totally.

You know what I mean? I hate that. I don't work out early. I work out as a midday break every day. So I work out 3 PM every day. And, uh, and actually I pretty much stop working at that point. Then I come back and I start working again at like 11 PM or midnight. And so I don't have to wake up early and I have a bunch of energy when I do that. But the takeaway for this, for me, the voice in my head when I heard this, I go, oh yeah, I forgot. Sean, build your cult. And I think that's just like the takeaway is you gotta build your cult. It's like, do the things you wanna do, open them up so that others can do them with you. Do them in a way that's like slightly hard and everybody's making a bit of a, everyone's stretching themselves in some way. Because that's the sacrifice and the buy-in, the blood oath that you want in your cult. And like, just fucking build your cult. Be around the type of person you want to be around.

Dude, this is, this is why I bought a farm.

Jeff, if you're building your cult, that's a great example.

I was doing it.

The General Assembly guy, what did he do? Uh, Daybreaker?

Yeah, Daybreaker. It was like a 5 AM party with no alcohol.

Build your cult, right? Like, what do I want? I want to start my day. Yeah, I want to start my day with a bunch of energy, dance, blah, blah, blah. But I don't want alcohol and music. I don't like nightclubs. So I'm gonna bring— I'm gonna build my own cult.

That's awesome.

All right. Did you have anything else you wanted to do? Or should we wrap it? That's good.