#109 with Jonathon Barkl - The Founder of AirGarage Jams Out on Ideas

yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a road travel never looking back so we got a guest with us today jonathan bar as he says rh sparkle and he's a founder ceo of air garage which is a company i heard of because invested in my friend ryan hoover fund called weekend fund and weekend can fund invested in you and he sends out these amazing updates like i don't i don't know if you get the updates but he sends out these like amazing investor updates and she talks about some of the companies he's excited about and he was excited about you got and so that's what i first heard of you we've never met but you sent me a list of ideas and i said okay that's the ticket of entry to this podcast is a lot of people reach out saying hey i'd love to come talk about my startup and i'm like yeah but i don't know if that's what people wanna hear necessarily what you did was smarter which was you said hey i got a bunch of ideas you know i can't resist that and of course we will also you know talk a little bit about air garage as well so welcome how was my intro was that was that on point yeah that was awesome that was everything that i could have hoped for and more and i'm glad that my list of ideas was a good enough ticket to get me on because i mean the reason i love and listen to this podcast all the time is because it's something that it do constantly is think about start ideas and just think about ways the things could be better in the world and like you and sam are obviously doing that constantly and so this podcast is perfect because one of the unfortunate truths about being a startup founder is like you always wanna be thinking about new ideas but then once you kinda have a sem of product market fit you just can't think about new ideas all the time you need to do one thing day in and day out and like focus and so then like my release is listening to this podcast and like thinking about new ideas on like walks through san francisco as i'm like trying to unwind at the end of the day that for sure that's that's exactly it it's sort of a it it's meant to be an escape you might learn something but it's meant just be you know shoot the shit and kind of get that part of your brain going and exercise it and for some people like you who need to be super focused on your idea it's like cool worked that muscle out and it's like tired it doesn't have like pent up you know idea juice that's just that's just wait there and on the other side for people who don't have an idea it's like oh it changes hopefully it changes the way they see the world where they just see opportunity everywhere they see different pain points that could be solved or i different business models that are interesting that they might be able to adapt that sort of thing so i'm looking at your list right now because it's got a whole bunch of interesting things on it one that i just actually mentioned on a previous podcast i've recorded is that stands out because the pain point i'm having which is lemonade dot com for general commercial liability insurance it so are you having the same problem as me which is that it's kind of a pain to get insurance for your business yeah it's a huge pain i mean it's totally fragmented like i i just don't even want to deal with it half the time and like we're we just signed a new lease on an office and the office like landlord wants to know hey what's your commercial general liability insurance and what's your like workers comp insurance and i'm like you know these are things that we definitely have like the process of even getting you a certificate of insurance to prove that we have these things and adding you as an additional insured is there's this huge pain for me and like as a founder those are the those are the things that drain my energy like just working on insurance paperwork talking to like bureaucratic agents at insurance companies and i mean when we moved into our house in san francisco this the first time i had like a house off college campus or out of my parents house right and it was this beautiful experience of like i thought that it was gonna be this awful process to get renters insurance and i was dread it for weeks and then i found lemonade went through their app in like five minutes they gave me a quote i signed up and it's like why is that same thing not being applied to the business space it totally totally is a huge market yeah i'm i literally just going through that and had the same question of like jeez why is this so hard i also think that there might be an opportunity because one of the things i struggled with was what insurance do i even really need right like i want to be protected but then they're throwing all these different they hey are you looking for this or this or this and i'm like well i don't actually know i'm gonna have to a whole bunch of research and i recently had a cool experience where there's a sky moe and he has his website called mop points dot com now and mop points dot com basically just you you book a call with this guy and in thirty minutes he tells you exactly which credit card you need to be maximizing the rewards based on what rewards you want so for like for me it was i wanna take my family on vacations and have like kind of like first class travel that would be amazing that would feel like a real reward and i spend a bunch of money on ads and all these other things on facebook cool so like which cards maximize the the rewards for that he's like boom you need to be using am mx gold for this reason and then in a year you need to switch to this one and oh by the way because i was also like you know when i redeem my points through chase sapphire i feel like i've been racking at points for years and then i go try to buy one plane ticket and it's like it doesn't work he's like here's what you gotta do first you need to transfer them to fucking like lu points and then that qualifies and you could that'll let you book on united and then that's how you get like way more bang for your buck and i'm like dude how was i supposed to know this and so i think there's a lot of general information out there but there there might be room for like these advisors so like insurance advisors yeah credit card advisors where it's literally like a fifteen minute phone call twenty minute phone call and be like hey look i have no horse in the you know no horse in the race here i'm just gonna understand your problem and i'll tell you what you need is a bop you need a business owner policy and you you need to also get this other thing you need cyber you know cyber insurance because you do x y and z and i think that there's room for that as well because i think most small business owners are insurance experts either no definitely not and i every time let talk to a broker i just am totally afraid that they're scamming me or leading me in the wrong direction because i know that they're saying paid by you know the people the other party so it's like i'm not the customer i am the product i'm being sold in this transaction and that's the status quo and it's like i i i hate like what you said is you know they they talked to you about oh hey you asked for commercial general reliability insurance did you know you also need you know workers comp and do you also need this you know earthquake insurance and you also need oh data and warehousing or you know directors insurance and i'm just like i i've never heard of these things like you're not doing a very good job of educating me and i just obviously know that you're getting paid to to shield these things and so yeah i would love to spend like thirty minutes on one call with someone that would just basically walk me through okay here's what you need here's ricky you can go to sign up for it and i was just talking to some founders yesterday they they run like this mailbox startup up basically for start it's this you know virtual mailbox like instead of us every year when we move offices to upgrade to a bigger office having to reroute our mail to different locations we just have one address and we use that address for forever and i'm super excited about that because i thought someone should build this for forever i've been waiting for someone to build this i used to work at a ups store i called it's a good good idea it's called stable so they're their friends of mine now and i've been giving that a ton of product feedback i think their website is i think it's joined stable dot com or use stable dot com one of the two and it's basically yeah like stable mailbox one place but i was talking to them about how know one of the things that they could do to improve their onboarding flow is they sent me like this long checklist that was super comprehensive of like here's all the places that you should change your address based on what we know about your business like oh you need to change it in stripe you need to change it in your bank account you need to change in your credit card i was like that was awesome i'm glad you did that you did all the thinking for me but i'm still an awful lazy founder that hates off stuff and i still didn't do it because like it's neither important nor urgent so it doesn't ever fall on a you know my calendar when i wanna do it and so basically i told them like yeah you need to sit down on a call with me and basically say during this call we are going to onboard you a aka we're just gonna watch you do this checklist so that we know that it got done so same same kind of concept of like just having someone baby me through insurance broker stuff would be exactly what i want as like a first time founder that has no idea what actually matters in the insurance world yeah exactly and i wonder so those guys are doing it for business the stable thing what what was what do you think was the calculus of why do that for business versus for you know personal yeah i think it makes a lot of sense because you know businesses move more often than i think personal people do and and like in the sense that basically like four startups which is their initial market we're constantly outgrow our office space and it is a huge pain to constantly be forwarding mail i mean they're still mail for our company that arrives at my parents house and my dad literally like scans it on their scanner and emails to me and he's like please change your address like which retired to getting this mail and so you know it's a big part for startups in that like we're constantly changing addresses we don't wanna constantly be updating our address where we're you know paying for our credit card paying for everything and with the irs which is you know a huge pain so i think it makes a lot more sense for businesses to start off with but i do think that there should be some sort of service just like this i'm a big fan of a basically come up up with ideas that will save the usps if they are competent and and execute on them so one of the things that actually is surprising to me i was doing a bunch of research on the usps six months ago the usps brings in about a billion dollars in revenue every year from from po boxes and po boxes they're all sold like if you try to get a po box at the local post office in san francisco you can't do it they're all sold out for like you know months on months back ordered and so what i was thinking is hey the p they need to make more po boxes because it's one of their only growing revenue categories there's obviously demand personal mailbox that is better since the usps is not good and they're doing a billion dollars in revenue per year and that doesn't count for like the ups store which also does personal but what i think the usps should do is basically offer a consumer service for like ten dollars a year where you can say okay you know sean your new mailing address is just like one two three virtual way and if anyone sends you mail one two three virtual way we're gonna forward it to whatever address you currently have on file so you just forever have a forever mailing address that you can use everywhere and then the usps maintains for ten dollars a year this database where it's literally a basic database all they have to do is provide a front end that has your current virtual address and then on the other end you can change what your physical address is and then they'll just forward your mail to you there and i mean they could expand that and scan your mail and things like that but i think even just that basic thing for ten dollars a year probably could save the usps and and fix its deficit so i think there's definitely demand for personal buy too two jonathan for president saving the usps i love it that's great so let's let's jump through some of these other ones on here what which ideas on here are you excited about which one which ones really pop out to you okay so one of the ones that's kind of a little weirder i guess and in terms of like you know it'd be would be an interesting idea because it's a problem that we face and i'm sure that you faced in the early days if you have consumer you know demand on your platform so basically i think that you know a lot of early stage companies want better customer service but don't have the you resources to hire a full customer service agent and they can't justify and so then i think that there needs to be some sort of like you know marketplace where you can basically hire customer service on demand and i think that that you know is a good idea by itself and i'm sure that there are companies out there doing that but i think oftentimes what they're doing is like outsourcing to other and then you're worried about like okay are they gonna have a language barrier or how's this quality gonna be you don't really know so i think what the spin here should be is basically customer service marketplace that depends on basically retired older people that are bored at home and love talking on the phone and so basically just you know finding them sourcing them training them on you know the basics of like how to respond to emails how to respond to phone calls and text messages that kind of thing and like it's great for them because a they're making a little bit of money to supplement their fixed income but b they're you know basically keeping themselves entertained during their retirement and then for startups it's more of a flexible you know you'll only need ten hours a week of support or you need twenty hours a week of support you know that is a product that we would buy into like day one if it existed doesn't have to use the old people i think it's just a great spin on the product so that they would have right you know a unique labor pool basically yeah i i thought about this before and i i looked into a bunch of the kind of like customer service like aws for customer service type of thing where you just say i need this and it like scales up as much or as little as you need and they're just like highly trained people so you don't have to go through the process of interviewing and just saying do you have the basic customer service skills and it does seem like there's some out there but i have a lot of friends who have e commerce stores and i don't see a lot of them using this i know e commerce has a ton of customer service that they need to do but what i do really like in this idea is this framework of how do you empower always said whoever can figure out how to empower the stay at home mom workforce and give them part time flexible ways to make money with without requiring special skills is gonna become a billionaire and there was a lot of caveats but if you did you gotta become a billionaire same thing with sort of the retiree market right so my parents are sixty two and sixty five they both retired now essentially my mom was one of these kinda stay at home people she was doing user testing if you've ever used user testing dot com so she started off just testing websites because it requires no skill what they want is you to be an average customer an average you know a fifty year old woman who's browsing a website and gets confused that's like the value there and then she actually got brought on by used suggesting to like rate the other users testers to help control the quality of the testers and so she does kind of like customer service like you know very simple stuff she loves it she gets to work a set you know like a flexible hours from home it's not too hard she's not trying to progress in her career but she gets money that she uses to like take us all lot of dinner like get a manic here or whatever she wants right and i think that like a lot of people underestimate how valuable that is rev dot com is another example of that which are transcribe that i like that you know english speaking transcribe of podcast podcasts and other things yep you know one challenge with these is a lot of them are vulnerable to like ai eating all the jobs but like you know you can kinda have human in the loop solutions where ai does a lot of the work but have a human just sense checking it to make sure it's good and so i like the idea of just working backwards from what are things that you know sixty five year old people who are english speakers in the us can do and then could i aggregate a bunch of supply of that workforce and then create a service you know for that i think that's a that's a really powerful way to yeah and i i think they're definitely this like under tapped under underutilized like group of people in the united states i mean my dad specifically right that he's you know kinda semi retired has been for several years and so he's like constantly basically works with my mom who has her own small business and then also works with me in air garage and like helps us out on random stuff on the ground and in like the phoenix metro where he lives and so it's like you know he's constantly just looking for things to keep him busy because he you know doesn't have a full time job and doesn't wanna just sit at home in front of the tv all day and you know that's like valuable labor where you know he doesn't want a full time job he doesn't want to go look for one and so he's looking for things that will keep him busy that'll make him a little bit of money to supplement his income it's kind of the perfect you know match there and i think it's kind of like this mixture of like how do we find work for those people that are kind of in those later stages of their lives and don't want full time employment and like how do we basically bring the gig economy like into the home in some ways where like a lot of the gig economy things that are happening are you know in person physical labor type things but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way alright today's episode is brought to you by tempo tempo dot fit is the website i actually use this i've used this for a few months now and it's this machine 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those ratings are all in different places and everybody's looking at different sources so you may go to a yelp page for a business and it has like five ratings you may go to a google you know listing for the business and it has five hundred ratings so it's not really very clear like okay what is the trustworthy source and so i think a service that one could build for small businesses would basically be some sort of service that uses the lp p api uses the google and apps api and you send this like one rate one rating kind of platform to your customers and the customer leaves one singular rating they say oh it's five stars here's what i have to say and then that one rating service then turns around it posts it to each of those individual rating sites so that then as a business you have this kinda cohesive all over the place you know brand rather than having to say oh hey you rated dust it on google we really appreciate that but actually we needed it more on yelp because our ratings over there are worse we need to improve our ratings on yelp so people will come in and so this is one of the things that we deal with a lot because we actually you know on google have listings for every single one of our individual parking lots and garages and so there's like hundreds of different locations so like this property manager that we're working with that works at a large regional property management company left us the stellar review the other day super generous of her to do that you know really kind had good things to say but she left it on like the parking lot in salt lake city that she like oh so like nobody's ever gonna see right it's like you know would have been great if she could have written that once and then it gets posted to a bunch of different places so that people actually see it in the places they're looking right right and so to tell us about air garage how did you come up with this idea so explain what the idea is and how you came up with it yeah great question so i'll i'll start with like kind of back a little bit but basically what we do now is different than what we did at the start of course that's how start ups go the way that we got into it you know i definitely never intended to go into the parking industry when i was student i was studying physics and economics at arizona state totally unrelated to what i do now and basically we had the personal pain point of not being able to find parking or parking on campus was super expensive there's a garage on campus at arizona state that's like a thousand dollars a year to park in and you know we really just thought okay well there's a garage right here and one of the interesting things about campus is across the street there were some driveway sitting empty so we went and literally just knocked on some people's doors and said hey you know can i rent a parking space from you eventually we find this guy named ari who was like yeah i have two spots in my driveway got one car so you know pay me a hundred bucks you can park here anytime for the year and so you know we did that that was cool we brag about to all our friends said hey i got this really keep parking spot across the street from campus for a hundred bucks just parked in someone's driveway and you know of course everyone was like well i wanna do that too but i don't wanna you know go knock and random stranger stores so long story short we want building out this peer to peer marketplace for parking it was like the airbnb for parking which if i had a nickel for every time that someone has told me that they've heard of this idea i would yeah not be working at a startup up at this point i guess but basically through building that you know people really liked it the news love to talk about it the homeowners liked it but it's a terrible business model awful business model could never scale because in order to get to meaningful revenue you need millions of driveway and on a one sale equals one driveway basis it just never would have made sense and so basically in may of twenty eighteen we started shifting and saying how do we make a sale and get fifty or a hundred parking spaces and so we started working with a couple churches near campus that we're already selling parking they just hired attendance off the street that they would stand there for twelve hours a day in the phoenix seat and collect cash and we're like okay look your church you're spending seventy five percent of your time managing a parking a lot and twenty five percent of your time with your congregation should be the the other way around if even that how can we automate this for you and so what we wound up doing was with those initial customers c creating what we do now which is air garage basically now is a twenty first century parking operator so we come in we work with parking lot parking garage owners we basically do everything from advertising their parking is to collecting payments from drivers to installing signage installing license wide reading cameras and even doing the enforcement to get illegally parked vehicles off the property things like that so we are you know kind of this full fledged operation taking parking lots from being this pieces of basketball stripes on them to a full fledged parking operation that generates income amazing and how how many different parking garages or or parking lots are you working with yeah good question so in august we had a little on nowhere a hundred locations across the country so that's up pretty significantly in the last few months which is awesome considering things have been slow because of covid yeah i was gonna say you're one of the businesses that prob probably are negatively affected by covid people aren't driving around as much yeah definitely it was negative impact in the short term i mean you know our our revenue dropped from like you know basically say it was like like a hundred percent in february in march it was like fifty percent then in april it was like fifteen percent so it was very painful in the short term but it actually has turned out to be this great thing in the long run because it forced us to really ask like okay why can't we grow and you know really we're such a small company when we're sufficiently small the market is sufficiently big that even in light of covid we should be able to grow regardless and so what's stopping us it's really just ourselves and so we started you know focusing on different sales channels different customers that kind of thing to get back to growth and so what is it now if your hundred percent went down to fifty then fifteen you know here we are in and start of september where is it back is it at fifty percent sixty percent is it a hundred fifty percent where where you at from where you were pre covid yeah so in august we were at about eighty percent of our pre covid levels our pre covid high which is much much faster return too normal than i definitely expected you know when we were you know because the world hasn't returned to normal right no not at all i mean you know a lot of like i basically you write investor updates every month and and our investor i said you know if you're in a astute reader you might be wondering like too is this some sort of rebound effect or is this new growth and actually last month about eighty percent of our revenue last month came from new parking lots that we signed on since like basically in twenty twenty basically since covid which which is great because when covid returns you'll sort of that you'll see the true gains of this ideally and also is it true that you know now these folks who are the the owners themselves who have lost their foot traffic and revenue they're now looking for additional revenue streams or is that not true so it's it's somewhat true you know what we've found basically in the last six months is you know basically the way the parking industry works is there's like the owners on the bottom level right above that is like the parking operators and the parking operators are the equivalent of the property managers in this world and then on top of that there's like all these tech companies that have come out the last twenty years that have tried to sell technology to the parking operators to improve the industry hasn't really worked but we work directly with the owners not with the parking operators right so we are our parking operator and so what we've seen is a lot of the old school parking operators the way their business model works is they will come to you and say hey i wanna lease your parking lot for five years at eight thousand dollars a month and you say okay sounds good study revenue you know income stream for me as an owner and then they turn around and make sixteen or twenty grand a month on your parking lot right and they take the cut and so they've been happy to take that you know upside when times have been great but then as soon as covid hit they were basically going around talking talking to owners and canceling your leases and so we were kinda scoop up a bunch of parking lots from that where people were rubbed the wrong way by these old school companies coming back to them and and canceling leases or just not making payments during covid and do you guys do it the same way you offer them a fixed rate and then you you're very you might exceed that or you you're on the hook or do you just say no rate but i'll let let's share the revenue or how does it work for you yeah exactly so we do a revenue share so we split seventy thirty with the owner in favor of the owner and so we always tell them you know this is better for you the long run because you're gonna see the upside when times are good and the biggest thing for us is there's no upfront cost to get started whereas some of these other operators they make you buy the parking machine that you need to use to sell parking and then they also charge you to manage your lot and so like for us we don't install parking machines we don't install gate arms and things like that so it's all software based so it's all you know no upfront cost it's one of the big benefits gotcha okay and i see like a bunch of your ideas are sort of like in this kind of peer to peer or you know marketplace style thing just the way that you're doing with their garage just like here's a couple of them that you have right so another usps idea is partner with them to create a a a a a real time street you know street view competitor for for google street view that's similar thing you take sort of excess capacity that they have you use technology to create new value right you have another one that is let's see this ads one that you have which is basically like it's airbnb for billboards people in cities have a bunch of unused space called their windows where you could put a bill like a mini billboard and so you could turn a non revenue generating asset your window space that you're not really using or looking at and you could start generating you know some some revenue from that so is this where your brain goes is this what you like to brainstorm some the most or or why is that the case yeah i think it definitely is kind of a theme in in startups that i talked about like just seeing underutilized resources sitting around like really just gets my i guess brain flowing and gears learning it just is exciting to think about like oh there's this thing that nobody else sees as valuable it's just a byproduct of what they're doing and you know it could be monetized in some way shape or form whether or not it's actually a good idea is a different question like the ad society one where it's like you know monetize people's windows you know i thought about that at one point that i was well but i really wanna be the person that was known for like you know create basically plaster you know ads all over every city like what i wanna be and not to say that i wouldn't wanna be but put that company like i think it's like firefly that puts ads on top of uber it's like what i really want that to be my legacy like i don't know but i think it's a cool underutilized resource same with the usps where it's like like they're driving all these miles anyway because they have to do door to door delivery as part of their mandate as a government entity and it's like what else can you do with the work that they putting in and so like for us we spend like i spend hours a day in google street view looking at parking lots determining where signage is gonna go all these things and the most frustrating thing is that street view is only updated once every year or two years some places every five years and so it's like you know there's all these miles being driven by usps carriers anyway why aren't they collecting street view imagery and data so i definitely think there's you know something to be said about like that's just where my brain goes because that's what i work on all day is finding resources that we're sitting under underutilized and and trying to monetize them like here here's another one you have on here which is a shipping service that's peer to peer basically you used when people don't use their checked bag allowance and you could use that to ship an item which i think is practically so hard to do but i love that you're just identifying what are all the inefficiencies and underutilized resources and you know some of these one of these when you get them right these really do change the world right they they really do make the world sort of more efficient more effective bring people new revenue streams where they didn't have it before yeah and and i think the interesting thing about them is like even if they're terrible ideas like that one would probably be super logistically difficult to make work and the airlines would probably catch on so fast and just cut you off but you know for example like every time i fly i'm flying on like southwest or whatever two free bags like why am i not using those or if you're flying international especially but yeah i mean it's like it's so interesting because the resource is so so just widely available like those check bags are just so widely available and if you could crack the code and get it quite right you could scale up so quickly because that resource is available among so many consumers and so many flights being done each day that if you could figure out the formula for actually how to distribute the product and make it work and not get caught and you know figure out the logistics then you can scale from you know zero to the moon really fast right yeah i i feel like two of my favorite ideas are in this category which is i forgot the name of it but there's a company that started a while back that does they go to hotels and they say hey you know person's data here for one night opened up the shampoo they use it once and then half the bottles left and you have this plastic bottle and half the shampoo and so they basically said let's collect all that we will recycle it create a new product of the leftover sort of shampoo soaps and conditioners and and whatnot that you guys can't serve to the next guest and they created a quite a big business sort of recycling this this inventory in these assets and it's a feel good story for people who want to be you know more environmentally conscious and and you know take advantage of some of this otherwise you know luxurious waste that we create and then the other one that's like that is un unplanned baggage which we talked about in the podcast before so i won't go into too much detail but basically like i know point three percent of all bags that get lost never get picked up and so like the airline has to get rid of this so they basically say they basically get paid i think to take these bags away and then they auction off the items in there and give the you know a portion of the proceeds to charities and i think like who who knew right but of course if you look around there's just excess capacity there's excess resources there's sort of these inefficiencies in the world where you can sort of tie two things together and say okay we've created value on one side and we've reduced waste on the other right yeah definitely and i i remember you know as a kid being fascinated by the concept of there are these people that basically go to like fast food restaurants i don't know if this is still a thing but go to fast food restaurants and they're like getting rid of all this oil that they used to cook those people would go and basically convert that oil in their garage into biodiesel feel i remember being fascinated by that and wanting to do that but i was like eight or nine or ten or whatever and like of course my parents are gonna let me you know make a biodiesel feel in their garage and then one of the other things that it goes along that same lines is you know i participated in a hack once in like college and and basically we talked to it was the premise of the hack was like this trash hack and so it was sponsored by the city of phoenix waste recycling you know department and there was a guy there who was super knowledgeable and he was like yeah you know you'd be surprised how recycling works like most of the things that you send to the city of phoenix for recycling we can't do anything with and you know we actually pay people to take that so was like yeah if you could figure out a business model where you can use this harder plastic that we don't have the means to recycle that we're paying a hundred dollars per ton to get rid of like we would let you have it where you could pay us fifty dollars a ton to take it away and or sorry we would pay you fifty dollars a ton to take it away and then you could use it to create a product and so i think you know someday if i am done with air garage starting another company like it's gonna be in some sort of space like that but i mean there's so many things to work on like i'm i'm also right now reading this book about like the energy grid and how broke it is it's like things like that are just exciting to think about how their they're massive problems with huge waste and and have so much opportunity to impact people's lives so you're interesting to dude what what's your information diet what do you a call i'll ask you a couple specific questions right you wake up in the morning you look at your phone what are the first two or three things you check great question so actually i try to avoid looking my phone first thing in the morning so my habit it likely is that i wake up first thing and i read a book for an hour so that's not always been the case wake up and you read a book for an hour i really i would credit i try to have to read a book for an hour so right now i'm reading this book like i said called superpower right before that i was reading this book called about angus khan which is an amazing book that's called like angus khan in the making of the modern world or something on i don't care about any book i don't care about this habit this habit is incredible to me so do you even get out of the bed you just turn the lamp on and start reading in bed yeah you get up your brush teeth if you do whatever or do you just start reading no because if i get up i will start basically getting into the morning routine and then start working and that's what i'm trying to avoid doing is i'm trying to like basically spend the first hour forcing myself to read a book because i don't get any other time to read during the day and usually at the end of the day i'm too like wired and like amped from working all day and then i don't wanna sit down and like read a book and so i'm distracted and so i try to do an hour a day in the morning because like it's the morning time nobody's bugging me none of the you know team members have asked me any questions yet there's nothing exploding so it's like one peaceful hour the morning of like getting some reading in okay amazing i'm glad asked that question i didn't i didn't expect that okay so so your information diet so you're reading books you're reading the gang con book sounds like you read books that what's your criteria for books is it stuff i see people recommending on twitter is it i like biographies and i only read biographies like how do you pick your books yeah i've been trying to make it a more diverse set lately because i realized that i read a lot of like obviously books that you know text startup founder would be a fan of about like you know biographies and you know things that are you know like tech companies that have been built and things like that so definitely been trying to diversify but you know usually what i'm doing is either seeing people reading recommending books on twitter or finding books in old used bookstores and then buying them in just going based on the cover and and totally judging a book by its cover and and picking it up and and reading it so the superpower book that i'm reading right now i saw because the guy on twitter who works at stripe in their clean energy department i think his name is ryan a workbook i don't know if i'm saying it right was you know he posted this right about you know does anyone have resources about the the grid and like how to learn more and but this is one of the books that was recommended there love it okay so that's the books side of things what else is your information diet where do you where do you find yourself spent tell me about your either your junk food or your healthy food for your information diet like what are the resources that are helping feed your brain or you know relax your brain what do you what you like let's start with the the junk food is definitely tiktok like i don't know about you but i as a as a member of the the gen z unquote like tiktok is is a driver how old you i am twenty twenty three twenty three yeah i love that you didn't know i'm i'm know the say way i actually just keep saying the wrong number and people think i'm like trying to i'm like no in my head that's just the last time i remember right my age and then i just keep saying it but i think i'm thirty two yeah okay so that's amazing you're twenty three that's great so you so tiktok is good you and tiktok is crazy like i liked the video once of someone someone saying you know what that song old town road yeah they're saying like a jesus version of it and i thought it was it was a clever little remake so i clicked it and now tiktok thinks something like this devout christian and just gives me like all of like religious tiktok right it's kind of a rabbit hole i didn't even know existed or it'll switch to like sports or whatever but what do you like on tiktok also i i think one of the things that i love about tiktok is like when i go on twitter sometimes i'm just so sick of being in the information bubble that i'm like always in which is like tech and vc twitter and like you know there's there's benefits to being inside that bubble but there's also detriment and so the thing that i like about tech tiktok is it does not have any clue that i like work in tech or that i like work on air grudge and so like i've basically curated my feed to be mostly like gardening videos cat videos because i adopted this cat from like like basically a stray cat like six months ago like all these things that are like totally just like pure fun and release and information and so like but i think there's you know there's there's value to tiktok like we get a lot of ideas for like diy projects on tiktok so like i'm literally sitting here i'm sitting in our backyard staring at these two like giant basically raised garden beds that we built this weekend over you know the weekend and used instructions that we found on tiktok and so there's actually like a ton of valuable information on tiktok but it's it's nice for me and like the reason that i like it for like thirty to forty five minutes a day is because it's just a pure escape from my reality whereas like going on twitter is just more of the same and i feel like i have more walk yeah i walk away from it just super frustrated because i'm like all these people are like an annoying and just talking about these dumb thing that don't matter like you know who is the you know vc brag meme thing so yeah yeah everybody's talking about how it doesn't matter but them they're all talking about it so so okay so i like that that's the part of the junk food anything else in the junk food category or let's go we could switch to the stuff that's feed in your brain no that's the other it's mainly the junk food i don't think there's really any of the other junk food besides maybe like going through craigslist in the free section like it's kinda my junk food too well did you go pick up the stuff where you just wanna see what's out there oh i mean we pick up stuff like most of the furniture in my house i think has come from craigslist free section like we have these adi chairs we have these like sofa in the backyard we have this you know these couches that we got for free on craigslist it's just such a dope hit to like find something cool on craigslist i think it's the same like same dope hit that i get like from like recruiting when you're like going through like on angel looking for people and you find one you know diamond in the rough and you're like this person's is amazing like match with them it's the same exact dope pit it's like trying to direct the dope pit in like a positive constructive direction right yeah yeah yeah that's been very true in fact i think more product should be designed for that like the human brain loves this like scan scan scan scan scan find yeah and then like it might not find again for a while but like you know that that that the rewards of the hunt as n would say and so i think there should be more products designed not to just give you good stuff but to give you a very easy slippery slope to browse and find something good that it could be in the most arbitrary way and people will do right now and that's i mean it's you know how tiktok works exactly and it's like you find the one tiktok that you wanna watch and it's like such a dope but then like tiktok you walk away and not haven't gotten anything except maybe information about how to build some garden beds but you know with craigslist or you know facebook you're scrolling through and you may find something that actually you know has a positive impact on your life i think right right okay i like that one and what about on the feed your brain side how how old do you get smarter or more knowledgeable but what do you like to what are the like kind of best sources for you of that of that information yeah that's good and i'm trying to think and i mean i think the vast majority of it is just through reading books like i just love reading books and like try to do as much reading as possible like i'm not gonna claim that i like read a hundred books a year or whatever those fake metrics are but like i just try to consistently do the input of reading like an hour a day or you know x x number of hours per week and i think with that comes a lot of like positive information and like you know i learned so much about for example i read this long biography of dang shopping you know basically about you know he was basically the the premier leader that the top leader of china for ex summer of years he was never actually officially premier or chairman of the party but there were so many things that i just hadn't even heard because i lived in this american bubble such as the fact that like china went to war with like vietnam in you know like the late seventies and it's like something that i had no clue existed i also had no idea that china and the soviet union were like basically arch for a while during the you know seventies and eighties and it's like those are things that in the american bubble i just assumed were not even true were not even possible right and constantly learning those things for books but i mean i do definitely listen to a lot of the podcasts just through you know walking and going walks just to decompress especially during quarantine like trying to get outside and just go for walks and listen to a podcast podcasts so you know you your podcast has been one of those that i've been listening to consistently i think my other favorite podcast is probably patrick o's is and invest like the best i think it just does a great job especially when it's like operators on there of asking them the right questions that i i want to hear so i really like that right and what what about you strike me as somebody who i think might have a good answer to this no pressure but tim ferris has this question which is like what's the best you know purchase you've made for like under a hundred and twenty dollars a hundred a hundred under a hundred dollars that's like improved the quality of your life and for you you might not have even purchase it it might have been free off craigslist but is there a thing that's improved your quality of life a purchase you've made and i if if not if not a purchase then you know maybe you haven't it you took up aside from the reading an hour day okay so the the first thing that came to mind but has not what sorry it doesn't fit the criteria of like under a hundred and twenty dollars it doesn't criteria okay so actually actually it does fit because i split the cost with my roommate but we just bought a new dyson vacuum and like before we just had like this crappy stick vacuum that my parents had handed down to me i had to all through college and the these are the electric ones right the like kinda can't cordless electric ones right very fancy like it's like this you know this amazing contraption that you can carry around your house it sits on your wall and charges and then you could just like pop it off and go walk and you know it makes it so much easier and more enjoyable to vacuum because i think they designed it correctly where you see everything that you vacuum up and so it's like this amazing like satisfaction at the end it's like the story i don't remember where this is from but some book talks about how like fabric breeze was this big flop until they added the scent and then it it came like oh you know if you clean your house and then you fabric reasons you get the nice like completed sense of like accomplishment and i i cleaned in my house and i raised it and i smell it it's the same thing of like you know with my old vacuum like a it wouldn't suck anything up because it was a terrible old school vacuum and b you know you couldn't see anything that did suck up while you were vacuuming so you didn't know you didn't know what you were doing and so i think that's one of the things that's been amazing in the last couple of weeks we just bought it two weeks ago which is why i'm weirdly still excited about it i have i have that same vacuum and i vacuum for the first probably first time of my life the other day just to like i was just trying to show my clean and lady how this like try this one i think this works and i did it and i was like oh never mind i'll do this you go do something else like i love this it was very therapeutic yeah like the suction was great the like you said being able to see like all the dirt just going away was like amazing and was like totally cordless was like the tesla vacuums i loved it but as you said that it would kinda reminded me i think somebody could make a kind of d competitor of this vacuum and brand it better because i don't think most i don't think they advertise well or advertise in the modern channels or in the modern ways and also it should release a scent it should have the fabric breeze thing where your room smells clean through the vacuuming and not just the lines on the carpet or on the wood or whatever and so i think that that would be a nice little so d d vacuum i think would be another little idea for you yeah the other d thing that i had on my list was basically d printers in ink like it seems like this is a huge market everybody hates their printer nobody likes using their printer everybody hates the ink is so expensive like why isn't there's some sort of d company that has come out and said hey we'll give you the printer for free because that's basically what they're trying to do anyway and we made a printer that just doesn't suck and also we'll send you ink and it's gonna be like five x less expensive than the other ink but we're still gonna make a margin of like eighty percent it's it's the southwest model it's hey free ink three times a year like hey this for this printer comes with free free ink re your recharge and it just has some caps so you can't like totally abuse it yeah but just build that it's like the free shipping thing like okay cool you add twelve dollars to the price of the thing and i'm happy to like you know do that or whatever i don't know how much inc cost but like whatever you get the idea and i thought printers were dead and and then now i just like somehow constantly need a printer at home i think that's like getting older you just need printers yeah it's weirdly the convenient to have a printer i mean it it definitely is not something that you should have to buy with work from home yeah right because you can't print at work anymore well and personally like one of the things that okay actually i have i another answer to your question about what has been a purchase that i've made recently i love using like paper and so like i just bought one of these paper tablets i don't know if you've heard of these but what's that one called i get ads i think for this yeah it's called the remarkable tablet remark and so i just bought one of these basic that's coming up with the version two of it but the version two is getting roasted on their subreddit because it's been delayed like five times in the last few months doesn't seem like a massive upgrade to me so i just bought the version one which now is like three hundred bucks from them directly with the like with the pen and with the case that were like an extra seventy five or a hundred before so it i like six hundred dollars before now it's like three hundred dollars i've always wanted one and i love like writing things down like when i make it to little like you too i am just like always like scrubbing those papers now like i'm all always scrubbing on papers it's obnoxious and then i always lose them and i was just like hating my workflow and this fits so perfectly in my workflow so i say this is the thing for me because then also i can read ebooks books on it i can read pdfs on it and it's been great because i literally carried around with me all the time and it's replaced like i literally like when i would read like lease agreements or documents for our company i have a printer just so i can print them out because i can't read those things on my computer for some reason i just have too much like adhd of like sock notifications coming in and emails and x y z and it's like hard to focus on reading a legal document because they're so boring and so i'd always print them out but now i've been reading them on this tablet instead and you know saving the earth fifteen pages at a time so this thing is good quality this remarkable one you know i'm i'm satisfied with it so far i think i've had it for like three weeks and i bought it because they have a thirty day unconditional return policy which was awesome but i have i have no intention of returning it and you know i've i've basically forgotten that i even paid three hundred dollars for it even though that seemed like a ridiculous sum to pay for i've something that is literally just like a digital notebook but replacement it's totally worth it their big their big claim to fame is that writing on it feels just like writing on paper and i would say it's ninety percent accurate like it it's very close very similar to the feel of writing on paper close enough that i am i'm willing to live with it because i'm not a sn about what paper feels like but people on the subreddit you are very picky picky as you might expect right yeah people on reddit you know they go to the nth degree about everything which is their blessing and their curse alright cool man i gonna have to wrap it up in a second are how should people find you how should they who should be talking about air garage and then how should people would be finding you for any more of your thoughts because i think you're an interesting guy we had never met before so this was kind of like a a first date and we did ideas and then i asked you a bunch of questions that i was curious about i don't know if people will care about your morning routine as much as i did but i sort of have this thing where when i meet interesting people and you're you're clearly an interesting person right off the bat i had tried to figure out a little bit about what is their method interesting this is a byproduct of a set of habits or lifestyles or lifestyle that you live and so i try to understand what's this person's routine what's their what's their information diet what are the products that they use because i think that that's the the thing everybody sees and and likes and gets interested in is the output and you can't copy the output the output is impossible to copy it's the input that you can start to you know pick up pieces of try things for yourself and become yourself a more interesting person so that's why i ask those questions yeah no that's absolutely true and i think you know your inputs need to be unique to you but like finding other inputs that make sense and kinda mesh with what you're interested in is always something that you should be doing in and like changing your inputs daily or like monthly or whatever to iterate and find what those inputs should be yeah exactly like i'm definitely not gonna wake up and read an hour in the morning that would be an awful input for me but i have been thinking about this because i pick up my phone every day and i because like right now i'm in some weird like financial fall fall season where i'm just reaping rewards everywhere and stock market's going up and cryptocurrency going up and all all my shit you know sales are up and all that stuff and so i'm like this is very addictive to wake up and just see the green right away but i'm like this is awful habit it first because these will turn red and not be green and then i'm letting my first kind of reaction of the day be to something i'm just not i can't control and frankly it doesn't matter it doesn't matter over any short period of time over long haul shirt it matters and so i was i was thinking to myself what should i replace that with i don't wanna go into slack or email and just start doing work i don't want be checking instagram i don't wanna be checking the stock app so i was thinking like what do i want the first thing that i take in for the day to be and that's an open question for me but i i thinking about this morning which is partly why i asked you that question so i'm gonna figure out what's the right first input that will set me up for success every day and having a great day and i i don't know what they'll but if people are listening and they have a good system tweet it at me and i i'd love to steal from your system if you figure out one that works yeah that'd be awesome because the thing that i used to do first thing in the morning was you know workout and i would basically force myself to not look at my phone not look at twitter and not look at slack not look at the wall street journal before i finished my workout and then my reward for finish finishing the workout was i got to like stand in the shower and browse my phone on twitter and you know wall journal and and just veg out after the workout and so it's kinda like this good reward system but if you give yourself the reward first thing then you never do the the harder thing which is like you could sit and you know scroll twitter for half an hour and then you're like shit i was supposed to work out and you never do so right and now you have twitter plus guilt yes cool ara where should people follow you or find your or what's the url for air garage shout that out yeah good question so the you oil for air garage is not the dot com unfortunately yet we're working on it but it's basically air ga dot ge so it's air garage with a dot before the g and the e so easier to just google air garage or you can also go to air garage dot c and i'm pretty sure it'll redirect you maybe i don't remember i haven't checked in a while i'm on twitter at jonathan bar also spelled weird so probably just google me too right okay just google air garage and find you right from there yeah listen man thanks for coming on this is fun and yeah let's let's keep a touch yeah sounds great for having me thanks