#112 - Why Buying Businesses Is Better Than Starting Them and The Mad Genius of Kanye West

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a days all on a goal travel never looking back what are you learning about being part of a big company like anything i don't i i imagine you're not gonna say anything negative about twitch but is there anything about a big company that that you're learning throughout this that i can be learn from you be more specific what are you what what are you curious about in the last three months what is your number one takeaway about big companies that you like and what is about you don't like what i like is that the rich get richer so when you're already the market leader or you're the biggest company in a space all the gains like if the whole industry grows you grow the most and that's been very true for twitch but i think it's just generally speaking like twitch is the biggest marketplace of its kind there are competitors but when the whole market is growing like right now gaming is getting more and more popular maybe it's because of shelter in place people have more time on their hands it's like it's growing like crazy and the people inside the company have to do nothing in order to make that growth happen all we introduce is you know you know walk out of the house with a big pot and just catch the reign of growth you know so i think that's really cool is that big companies when things go well they get to eat up a whole bunch more share more than and and like you know probably creating a value like a whole another startup up that goes from zero to a billion dollars right like i think but isn't that the same with a small company basically you're just saying like catching a tidal wave is good i'm saying when when growth happens in a market people flock to the leader they just go to the top top of the mind brand and so the small companies in our space are not growing at the same rate we're growing got so we are the biggest and growing the fastest which is usually not the case usually the big companies big but they don't grow at the fastest rate because it's hard to grow on a on a big number but when when there's a big wave the recognizable brands do the best i think this happened for calm also in the meditation space as meditation got hot calm and head space were the two brands that people knew about they had good names and they were featured in the app store they were the top two ranks in the app store and they just got a shit ton of growth because of that because the the rich get richer in many many ways the the leaders grow the fastest and so i think that's pretty cool that's a cool thing about being in a big company and seeing what that's like yeah the realization i had today because i was in a meeting and there's a lot of times when you're in a startup and it's easy to think oh my god google's is gonna just throw a thousand people at this or like facebook probably has fifty engineers working on this or even if you're not so engineering heavy just the general idea that a big company can squash you they could do this better they have more resources they have more footprint they have you know just more people to throw out the problem and then when you're in a big company you see how much like first people in a big company work eight hours a day no more or less yeah yeah or less yeah but but generally for sure not more and i would say in a startup like i used to work fourteen hours a day and so already that's almost a double day every day compared to what you get out of a big company the second thing is in a big company i don't know if it's just me but like i would estimate somewhere between thirty to sixty percent of all your work hours are in meetings about other things other than the like problem you're trying to solve so it might be like we're doing talent reviews so about promotions cool that's important you gotta do it for your organization to work but you're not if you're just a startup thinking about how do i build this product that just makes this one thing really great how do i solve this problem better how do we make our app better all you're doing is you know basically coding or in in your case maybe it's creating content but like for for most software startups is like you're just coding and you're talking to users and you're looking at the data and in a big company there's all these other things there's all hands you have to attend and then there's this you know four pm you know team building exercise that the whole company is doing because we're all remote and they wanna make sure everybody's happy and so they're all gonna do this goofy fashion show for my home and like there's all these cool things that like i could see why they're useful but if you just think about a lot of hours are not going towards the a plus problem and so that's kind of refreshing to me about like the startups where it's like yeah they have fifty people but their motivation is twenty five percent of what yours is as a start because you are trying to make your shares valuable and you're on a mission to do this also you're working double the hours per day also all of your hours are going towards making this product and in a big company i would say half of the hours at least are going towards intercom functioning just you know cooperation and collaboration this is something so we're having to re record the course that i did and bra you and i just did it and he was asking something about competition and i was like i don't think you really need to worry mostly about the big companies because smaller companies have two things that are actually the two most important things but they those the two things that they have which is focus and speed yeah and i'm like it's not resources in fact like when it comes to competition i think you're more often to die from suicide than you are from homicide yeah that i i always used to say it's starvation that you die from and not murder and like starvation bank you didn't get enough customers and so like really you should just be focusing on that and why didn't you get enough customers it's not because all the customers went to facebook or google it's like right because the customers didn't know about you didn't care about you or tried you and you sucked focus on that and not the like oh what if we get beat either either by other startups or by big companies now of course it does happen sometimes but majority of deaths starvation or or or you know suicide dot homicide i like that that's better last question about this which is about just in terms of building a great company and also building like like doing wealth creation it sounds like what you're saying is like man really just like finding that right market is incredibly important and i mean is that what you're is that right yeah i know you obviously find the great market and then like great execution to get to capture the market and to become the leader of the market i i think those are both critical but what i'm saying after that is or you know tell you to your point there there's no substitute for a great market like there's there's great marc andre entries blog posts you should go read or anyone i love that one once you can read which is basically what's more important team product or market and it's like you have the apple p who are like product it's all about product and then you have the you know kinda like founder you know oh it's all it is a people business you're betting on people and they have to make the product they have to make the they have to find the market and that's true to an extent but mark and reason like kinda said something i think at the time was little controversial a little non consensus i think most people would have said people some people would have said product and i think the least would have said market but he he said i think the market is most important and you know it's like the buffett quote a great entrepreneur goes into a shitty business the business keeps its reputation and so you know great people can't fix a shitty market but a great market even just average people can do well and and so i i've seen that you know play out in my life as well where you're get another right market and then you're just surfing a wave and then there's other times where you're you're in a market that sucks or it's dead or you know you thought it was the time was now but the time was not now you're to they're trying to create a wave and creating a wave in the ocean it's just so hard to do it's much better to get out there and surf existing waves yeah i like that i also like one thing on i'm en nvidia about with twitch and some other software companies is i wish i didn't have to make my product like we have to record this podcast every two days yeah i wish i wish i would just work all the time and it does know i like our back catalog gets listens every day so it it it's not like it's not like it only is when we record but we have to keep recreating a product every week twice a week and you know for the hustle you guys gotta rate create new content all the fucking time and that's why software businesses are beautiful and media businesses are less beautiful in that same sense right like in fact if you had media businesses without the advantage of today's software media businesses would totally suck just like kind of they used to suck and so you're lucky that you know you get to surf off a free distribution over email instantaneous to everybody's inbox overnight in addition you can research using all these tools and so a few people can create amazing content sure you know there's all these amazing advantages to software but you know that's obvious so it's not really even worth going to what do well not pitching about my problems you wanna talk about we have a a pretty interesting list here i i have a question for you and we can edit this out if you don't wanna talk about it but i saw that adam is no longer at the hustle and he's doing his something thing i don't know what that is and i was you know kinda surprised about that and i don't know how much you could say and feel free to just be like i can't talk about any of but yeah i kinda wanted to just hear like from your po you're owner of a business you have a president does he did a great job for many years he decides to move on totally fair but like what's what's that mean in your world and how are you handling it yeah so he worked he's he went and worked for this guy he started this company and sold it he basically like funds and starts companies and then like hires someone to help him start it and that's what he did and adam was always passionate about education and so he was like look i wanna i hired him as like the safe employee i forget and he's like this the this case he'll be the first employee of this company so he wanted to try it it's almost like a he told me it was zoom for education which frankly i don't understand because zoom is zoom edition yeah that's zoom but whatever no i could totally see that why you know today zoom is not built for education so but it's used for it so if you maybe there's certain things you could build that would make it better yeah i just harp yeah it might work i just don't wanna compete it against zoom i don't wanna compete it get zoom like there's like a a couple of bit we just talked about competition there's a couple of companies where like it matters if you are the big dog and like anything that involves network effects is one of them and that's zoom in twitch and so anyway he went started him how does it feel it was a bum at first but it was a blessing and disguise not at all a dis on anyone but i'm actually looking for like a ceo type and the amount the the i'm changed my opinion i talked to andrew wilkinson and he's helping me hire this and he was like no dude screw that hole like they work hard and they'll figure it out like i only want people who have been there done that and i have found a ton of been there done that and it's freaking awesome like i'm meeting these people and i've met with a bunch of them and it's been amazing and so yeah it was sad but no big deal adam did a good job of automating stuff and i did a good job of automating stuff so we just were able to like throw with someone into the mix but i'm also it gives me an opportunity to hire people who have been there done that and i like that right okay cool yeah i was curious that's great so let's let's go to some ideas i just open up the sheet and i see some juicy ones did you see this kanye west tweet about no now you did see okay so kanye west basically tweeted out yesterday like basically i'm gonna create you know i i wanna create y comb for music so like the record industry has historically had like very predatory kinda bad deals for musicians and artists and it's just not right like this the system is screwed up and the people who kind of do all the work and create all the value the creative don't go on to to sort of own their stuff and build big big enterprises off this because the way the industry set up it goes in silicon valley y comb helps create like kinda like a standard system for the up and come where it's like a standard document for how we invest standard terms for how we invest very open and transparent not like screen up obviously he can say all this in his tweet he just said we should create a y comb for music and so what do you think of this idea and also what do you just think of kanye west tweeting this i'm gonna pull this up is it literally just we should create a white comment from music i think it's like there needs to be i don't remember the exact phrasing of the quote but i think that's cool at first okay so kanye is crazy so wait there's like also him like signing a he's like tweeting out the contracts that he signed that's like his whole death jam contract he took screenshots and he tweeted out the entire thing oh my god like he tweeted out like pay like it looks like it's first forty or fifty pay twitter i checked twitter ten times and i didn't see any of this come on twitter you gotta show me kanye west peeing on his grammy and also like him tweeting out his entire contract how did i miss this but like that's what happens on twitter you miss you miss all the good stuff dude i'm wrong this is like a hundred pages yeah he just tweeted the entire thing dude he should have used like script or something but whatever he goes script this this moment is he yeah he's he said this moment is gonna change the music industry for good i feel so humble and blessed that guys put me in strong in a position to do this and he tweeted out or page his entire document crazy awesome and i see what you're talking about okay so what do i think great idea i actually think this is a great idea so loop pearl you know loop pearl no so he'd loop pearl sorry he i mean isn't that what he did basically like what they did was i mean this is how boy bands came to be luke pearl he was he's dead now but he basically was always kind of a scam artist he started a if i remember correctly a hot air balloon business daddy he like scammed people out of her not it was like hot air balloon and like b like whatever he started and kinda scanned it and then he had this weird idea to start a boy band and so he went any interviewed all these kids which sounds creepy but i don't think it's creepy and he interviewed all these kids and he's like formed this boy band and he called it in sync so this like model works another example is there's this you're korean entrepreneur who started let me pull it up but you know what b bts is yeah they're like the name nickname hottest boy you know hottest band but yeah it's a boy band it his boys right they're boy they're boys but they it's hard to tell sometimes they're boys but it's called a big hit entertainment it was started by this awesome entrepreneur who's like a tech guy and he got into and he did the same thing and they just went and ran it like a tech company and they went and found talent like they went and like recruited talent and they created bts it was like a they had like audition and so in a sense that's kinda like what kanye is doing not exactly but i think it's a great idea and you didn't puff the daddy do this with bad boy records too like we had that tv show making the band yeah yeah he did that too yeah i like that that shift chopper so the stuff is in like exact i love chopper this and dialogue yeah dial dialogue die four people listening to this that also watched that show and remember chomp and dialogue it's like i need to do go brooklyn and get me some cambodia milk yeah i know i know all this and anyway long story short i'm totally into it i think it's a cool idea i don't know how they make money i don't even know how artists make money anymore but it's seems like this is like a thing already know okay let's take a minute and tell you a little bit about this week's sponsor lemon dot io lemon is the perfect solution if you are a technical cofounder maybe you just need to delegate some of the work because you got too much on your plate or you're doing a project that needs a specific technology and you don't have that skill set in your team and you can either try to learn it and which will take months or hire somebody which will take you six weeks to find somebody you just wanna have somebody you know yesterday or you're just growing super fast and your company needs to add developers quick lemon dot io is a perfect place to find vetted remote developers in eastern europe they test and interview every developer which eliminates the risk of a failed project and there's a zero risk replacement guarantee so they'll match you with somebody within twenty four hours and if it doesn't work out it's on them so go to go to lemon dot io o and if you want a fifteen percent discount for your first six weeks of development any m m fan that's my first million fan can claim this fifteen percent discount go to lemon dot io slash m f m as in my first million so lemon dot io slash m m to claim the offer fifteen percent discount for six weeks that's not bad that's a big chunk of change they are much cheaper to use than hiring engineers with other outsourcing even even more than other outsourcing platforms like top and others so check out lemon dot io back to the week's episode well i think yeah people made other labels they made their own labels but i don't think that they have the sort of here's here's the example i talked to a founder yesterday founder it's based to la built a business in the last couple of years that was doing let's say thirty million plus in revenue and a lot of the deals that they were doing were were deals that you had to partner with influencers celebrities as big as like kardashian level celebrities and what he was saying was he was like look influencers super powerful and that's kind of the amazing part on the other hand he's like you know in silicon valley there's just kind of like you don't have to worry about getting stabbed in the back constantly when you like raise money for your company like all the firms kind of use the same like terms they use the same structures there's like kind of a well known gloss of like what what is the safe note and and what is a priced round and how much approximately does does the firm get versus the founders in each round and generally you know founder friendly is like a thing and yeah we kinda talk about it a lot but but i would say in general the the industry skews towards not trying to just like be really predatory towards you know the next twenty five year old entrepreneur and and so you know i think he was like it's the exact opposite in la he's like everybody we deal with they have their own fucking contract template that's totally different than anybody else with a bunch of shady terms and everybody has like four managers that do nothing and it's like this guy says he owns half of the you know he's this is like his childhood friend and he gets half for some reason and he's not doing anything and he's like there's just so much like just craft built up into the system and so much sort of s ness in the deal making that it it makes it very hard to do business business is hard because you're constantly looking out for land mines whereas in silicon valley like i signed a investment check today didn't even read the the contract really because it's the standard yc safe that i've read a million times and i don't really even need to check and because of that business can move quickly and swiftly and it and it the the incentives are fair it's fair deals for the most part that's an interesting compared to in the music industry you don't own your shit you can die and or you could be like i i wrote this song i sing this song and then scooter bronze like yeah but that's my fucking song you don't own that song that's my song actually and you're like but what do you mean i i wrote it i recorded it i i created it i performed it on tour he's like yeah but like also in your contract everything you make his mine and i decide if it goes on the radio or not i decide if it's an itunes or spotify you pretty much have no say well i think that there's part of me is like well okay yes there's no opportunity here the only opportunity is like those establish us just that you need to die like there like like a record label doesn't really have much of a need it seems at the at the moment you know like right no reason why anyone should own anything totally other than the heat but but i think if kanye west literally did this right so he was talking about you know some people who would partner of with i i don't think i don't take kanye seriously but if he really was like look every up and coming artist don't sign with a record label come to our come to the incubator first we're gonna take a tiny fraction and you're gonna own your own shit and we're gonna try to blow you up because today we don't need to put the same amount of money and resources into each creative talent as the record labels did before because today you're able to distribute through youtube and spotify and you get famous through your own social media you don't get famous because some record label has a deal with radio stations and that's how you get on the air that's how you get know the best example of this who have you been following what and anyone listening we have a this audience of ours i don't know if for tiktok fans but have you seen what these tiktok kids are doing how they have like they these houses yes oh my god that's a brilliant i talked to a guy that has one and it is so golden and what you're describing is almost like that it is a great great concept they also do it for youtube so that logan paul or jake paul kid had one like the tom ten or yeah team them i love those concepts there's a listener to the podcast actually who's reached out to me he runs the biggest tiktok house in ireland he just started it and he basically put in a bunch of people who have tens of millions of followers and he's like wait is this is his named tim maybe i don't know he's been emailing me i don't remember his name off top of my head well ed black guy or white guy never about it just email okay i know because they're a guy reach out to me too can't be too so if it's ireland and it's a tiktok hive house then he's he's in this guy's in uk but maybe he has one in ireland i don't know so anyways they're they're doing it and i i've been following along the progress he emails me updates every once a while and it's great i think this is awesome an awesome to do for kind of like if you're young and you're in that scene this is just a great adventure to go on it's hard to like ultimately make a lot of money doing it and you end up getting squeezed in all these different directions but but it's definitely cool and it's definitely where the influences is but hey anyways my point is if kanye west actually wanted to create yc from music i think that would be super interesting i think get enough pull to bring in for top talent to want to come to his thing and want the freedom and not be owned by the labels and you know they literally could change it now i don't think he has the focus or execution to actually go do this but i think that would be pretty awesome if you tried i'm in let's talk about domain names yeah you put this on there yeah and what i my pin so okay so you said something that i say on a regular basis you said a a great domain can make you so here's what i always say i go a the domain name will never break you but it could make you absolutely that's if absolutely right i saw it will never hurt you yes it will never i saw some name yesterday i remember what it was like it was like oak v with a number in between some of those letters and it was like you know some billion dollar company i was like wow you know i would've have never even invested this just off the hideous of this name you can you can make it despite your name but sometimes a name can really dis like define you i forgot like have you ever watched by the way this so total tangent have you ever watched the documentary wiener for anthony wiener no no dude that you dude who you had have to watch this documentary of his dick and like send it to send it to like must watch his documentary it's insane this guy well that guy's is a fucking idiot right did he like the fucking be the same thing over and over and over again yes he was recording a documentary because he wanted to like become president eventually and he was like oh and so and then caught this last this all happened the crisis all happened live while it was recording so it's like one of these amazing things and then you see him just fucking up regularly but the camera never stopped and so the documentary dope and the first screen of the documentary is some quote from i don't know whatever i'm gonna butcher but it's like you know a name you know sometimes a name can define us or a name a name destin us to whatever and then it's like anthony wei so i sort of think the same thing about startups sometimes where two examples so the first is a company i i mentioned a lot on here which is calm so a com i think is a great app and a great brand and alex originally got the domain calm dot com very early on and he had the domain and you know before the app blew up and and you know even domains don't even matter so much anymore when you're just an app but calm dot com was such a catchy thing that i think he had to go pursue this company it like gave them the juice to like yeah i can build an epic brand i could build a great company what a name and it kind of like it almost pot commits you to to a a venture because it's like the name is so good you almost have to give it a shot and an example of this i saw recently was this guy's building this thing and it's text dot com so t e x t s text like text messaging text dot com with an s at the end so text text dot com so i was like how the fuck did this guy i get this domain and i went to it and it's like if this idea that a lot of people talk about which is like oh i have all my mess i have some messages in whatsapp some on imessage some on facebook messenger some on instagram dms got it so annoying i wish it was just one inbox to just do all my messaging and that's what he's built and normally i'd be like okay whatever that's just like kind of i don't know how i feel about that product i don't if i can last it's a lot of platform dependency but this name really does make it pop it makes people want it because the name is psycho so sexy and so he has this like multi thousand person waitlist list just off the sort of the name and the the promise and i started using it and the app actually pretty dope but i just think a domain name can make you and it's not that it makes you successful what i mean by is it makes you pursue this like pure vision this like dream and you kinda stay committed because the name is so fucking good what do you think of this theory that's so i think that for a minute i thought you were right i was like yeah calm it's pretty amazing but text dot com that looks so stupid this part idea stupid i would i think it's a great idea but not a venture funded thing i mean i don't know would you invest in that thing like if i just see something was looking idea like that in my head like that's gonna be so hard to do yeah like i i think that like i i thought about it because i like the guy a lot he's like a hacker kind of like you could tell it this guy guy's like a wiz engineer based on his background and then i like the domain and i think it's a real problem that people have people do have all their shit like all over the place and if they just had one one inbox where they could do all their messaging that would be i think great i wouldn't invest in it because i think every one of these platforms holds your kill switch no matter how grain of a product you do in fact the better you do the faster you grow the more facebook's is gonna wake up one day and be like you know what i don't like that this other everyone's using this other client to do their messaging so yeah i'm no more access and so i that's why i i wouldn't invest but and i asked like i was like how you gonna get around this and he was like you know it's a good question it's gonna be hard and i you know i i don't have a great strategy but like you know i just think this is great product that people need and he's right and that in one more sense but it's makes it hard to so i think that yeah i i wouldn't say make you but i would say help you and i also would say well i i hate when people say the domain available i'm like oh my god dude to who cares like that is so not important just do it anyway and you could acquire at another point or so i hate doing you sync thinking about that as an excuse but i would say i agree with you calm is particularly special tech is a little weird like okay there's another one that's popular right now fast so fast i don't know so fast doc i think they're fast dot c but the name fast and they got the app the twitter handle for at fast and all their marketing is on twitter this like they're built basically built their entire kinda hype engine just talking on twitter and having the yeah gonna handle at fast i think has helped them did you think that was do you think that's gonna be a good thing i don't think so because i think that they're just way too focused on hype and i tend to be very very skeptical of companies that build themselves that way and that get really excited about i'll tell you what was the red flag of this one for me they like have this name for like new employees called astronauts nuts and they have like a whole bunch of swag in their store for their hoodies they're fast hoodies and you know they talk about their like culture and all this shit all the time and i'm like you haven't launched why do you even have culture why do you have a an onboarding program why do you have so many employees do you have any of this like where is your product and they also were always talking about oh running a scaling test today we can handle this many requests per second and it's like yeah but that would require customers and again you haven't launched so they're building it in a way that is anti what i believe you should focus on when you build a start up so because of that i think that they're gonna struggle i think the idea itself is actually pretty fucking great which is one click check across the web i think that's a really solid idea what do you think about there was another one of these there was like what was that guide let's name biology he had a sick domain name for his old thing it was like coin dot com yeah he had twenty one dot c and then he had earn dot com earned dot com so when it when it involves a little bit more when it involves things kinda like that i'm totally into like money related like anything where there's a transaction versus just a landing page do you know what mean yeah does that make sense i think that domain is important with calm there's a small there's is a transaction like you're buying something i think that's cool but if you're just like have such landing page i i don't think it's that important yeah i also don't think it's super important but i think it is a nice turbo when you can get it and i think most people put very little thought into their name and they just go with kind of what's available then that's fine it's not it's good to not hold yourself up but man when you get the right name onto a onto a a product that has legs it really is a turbo right now it's three thirty eight and where i am in new york what's that company snowflake went public like yeah two or three hours ago right i tried i'd never i don't buy any stocks other than s and p five hundred and facebook you tried to and and i tried buying this one i i was like i'll i'll put an order in for one twenty five i was like that's a lapse to two today hit a high of of three nineteen now it's at like two fifty or two eighty did you do what is going on with snow what's it called snowflake the worst goddamn name on her a snowflakes out a bad name dude it means like like like it's like a like a trump thing like what do you snowflake like a bunch of snowflakes like it's for cloud data warehousing i don't think they care about about the like what the you know social justice warriors get labeled as what do i think what do i think of that or what do i think the ipo like in the idea well do you wanna hear the story about this company so basically i was researching this it's crazy so first of all this company it was it's only eight years old yes and it's worth fifty billion dollars right as of now or sixty or some crazy stupid number and the way it's started was these three guys or four guys worked at like worked at oracle i'm looking looking at now and they like threw together this technology because they're definitely like geniuses i mean they're they're it's a very complicated complex it's data warehousing which is i think very very challenging and they raise a little bit of money and they get this thing going and they let one of their ceo or they hire a ceo across you guys are early owners yeah they hired a ceo who was from the venture capital firm and they like so they hit like ten million dollars in revenue in the first year sales and then like thirty and then forty and that like crazy out the gate making money how and it's three guys they were never they never had a they were always hiring a ceo then last year basically the team like this was like a company run by committee at this point like there was never it doesn't seem like it was ever like some certain but i understand it was actually inc incubator almost like at an e program it was inc incubator in the vc firm itself so they didn't just hire vc as a ceo the vc firm itself inc incubator this idea with these these four guys and one of the partners you know was ceo number one and then they've since had four ceos and it's as it's continued to grow but because of that this this vc firm sutter hill or or whatever it's called sutter hill has this like insane return on this because they were literally the cofounder of the of the company and so now it's you know fifty billion dollar crazy that's gonna be like and then what ten to twenty billion dollar return or something insane and then what they did was they basically in two thousand and nineteen they go okay current ceo you're out and they hired this guy s frank s who's taken all these things public and he comes in like a general i've heard him talk like an army general he was like we don't have time for your bullshit emotions he goes like we don't care about you don't care about that like which attracts this type a personality employee and he just crush this this is just like in terms of execution the way that these guys did this is it's so crazy it is so crazy it's it's totally atypical and like very different and i think that's somebody was saying that about one of the other topics on here which is open door open doors looking to to use us back to go public and open door really did i think the for those who don't know open door basically they were like okay home sales is a huge market and today it's not great for a couple reasons if you're the seller it can take you know ninety a hundred twenty days to sell your house which sucks because you just wanna move you wanna get your next house and you can't go till you sell this house and says anxiety written process brokers take a huge fee for doing not that much work you don't know how to price your house properly all these problems of selling house so they they created an option which was in certain markets like arizona and whatnot you can just sell your house to open door instantaneously open door just gives you a a evaluation and you just take it and if you take it you're boom you're done with your house sale process you can go on your way they on their side they had like a data modeling you know basically like a they had a a way to model what they think the house is actually worth on what it'll sell for it so that they could buy it right so they could buy it slightly under they take a smaller commission as a as a broker and they like kind of automated some of the like walked through stuff like you know using lock boxes and digital tours and stuff like that so that it needed less people to sell a house and so it's grown like crazy and one of the things people pointed out was that opened door also violated like all the traditional silicon valley rules of what you call a lean startup so open door would be like a fat startup meaning immediately started with a big a big vision not like kind of a small like wedge immediately needed a bunch of capital to do this because they had to go buy homes and every home is expensive and so they needed tens and tens of millions of dollars pretty early on that they got through equity plus debt and they didn't have like some mvp they like came out sw with a big team big big bank budget bought a bunch of homes and and grew that way and and like it was expensive it burned a lot of money but it also grew like crazy and got a bunch of market share and so it's a good example of of what they'll call a fat startup where where you know spacex or tesla is another example of of a fat startup where it takes a lot of capital takes a lot of engineering takes a lot of which i love by the way pull off like i think that i do think that myself included we've become a little bit of like kind of pussy these kinda like what you were describing earlier of like your styles to like launch soon and get customers and that is definitely my style as well but sometimes i get down on myself and i'm like this is like some soft ass like way to go about doing shit like every once in a while you just gotta i mean like i like i respect people who raise all this money and who just go at it and they just go big and it's like it's this is either gonna absolutely work or is gonna absolutely fail and i totally respect that i totally respect it and i do like it there's a a ton of ways to get something done and i'm not gonna criticize any of them because they all have great things about them but like the founder of you know flex support mh it's like a it like helps you track your international shipments very very successful company as someone i know works there and the guy ryan who's a ceo he just tell us employees he goes just so you know like we're valued four billion dollars on paper your your stock is either worth zero it's gonna or it's gonna be worth a ton like there's is no middle ground and we're either gonna go bankrupt or this is gonna be worth like at forty you know in this huge number and i just i i i just so respect that and sometimes i wonder so i i'm like i wanna do that and then i'm like well it's good to establish like you're wealth first and in some regard that's true but there's also like these young kids that just go after it and they like don't have that and i love that i had a crazy conversation the other day that i'm gonna share a little bit of it here i can't hear the whole thing but i was talking to some guy and he's got a business that we had mentioned on the podcast that is a profitable multi dollar company that has taken zero investment from silicon valley and it and i was like where did you come up with this idea and like where did you come from i've never seen you before and he was just like and i i kinda dug in and he's like i know why i'm telling you all this but like he's like actually the origin story is back in this one game called rune scape he's like you played rune scape and i was like no i haven't it but i've heard it and i've seen it on twitch so you know what what about it he's like he's like there's this kind of this like he's like when a bunch of us were like sixteen fifteen years old we were all on rune scape and like rune scape he goes rune scape is a game that's designed for you to grind up it's like this long term grind it's like there's no shortcut you just have to play a shit ton kit get really good at the game just accumulate a ton of you know points and you wanna level your you wanna max out all your stats at ninety nine ninety nine nine nine across the board and the only way to get there there's no shortcut you have to grind it out and so a lot of us who ended up getting to that level of getting to ninety nine which is the same thing in world of warcraft like the people who get to level sixty in work and wow you know they invest like years of their life into this it's like totally different than like instant gratification games like candy crush and you know stuff like that or just kind of like fun arcade games that are forget as soon as you're done these are like investments and he's like he's like there was a bunch of us that did that we got to ninety nine and then we started to figure out oh okay we're kinda of bored of just being the best characters in this game like we we have max stats what do we do how do we use this and he's like well rune skip has this little like dueling arena and they we basically created like a tiny little black market casino on top of it where people would come to dual and then we would let people wage their gold and then people would win and lose it's like so we kind of he's like there's this another skill that we learn so first thing was we weirdly got into like grinding for the for the big max prize and being willing to do this long term investment when everyone else is chasing short term things because the second thing was we started finding exploits in the game ways to get gold faster ways to like scam kids out of their gold ways to like create little you know casinos where we're the house essentially or we're just raking in gold and we're not having to risk anything and he's like so then a bunch of us started talking and he's like it's crazy he's like out of that group of people on rune scape in the in the rune scape casinos he goes there have been seven different billionaire kids who are under twenty five that are billionaires he goes most of them went to crypto and wait you mean they're they're under twenty five now and they're billionaire literally meant billionaire but i think he met like rolling in money like tens of millions of dollars at the you know when they're twenty three years old and he gave me a couple of examples and i know for those those examples those people probably are kind of like black hat billionaire kids who created you know the first big bitcoin casino or created like you know different like i know if you ever heard of these the loot boxes or the cs skin scandals that happen so they spun off eventually they were like okay yeah i we kinda like maxed out the value we can get out of rune escape because what they were doing was they were taking rune scape gold that they accumulated and they were selling it to chinese people who wanted to level up their characters faster they wanted a shortcut they didn't wanna invest five years they were like i'll buy your gold off you i'll buy your character off you and i'll pay you in bitcoin so they kept getting paid in bitcoin it's like two thousand ten two thousand eleven and and so they owned a bunch of bitcoin themselves because of this and then they were like shit why don't we just do something at bitcoin and so two thousand twelve they all started different bitcoin schemes some of them have done icos some of them created things in the like gaming see i don't know if you've ever heard of cs skins or or or this so basically counter strike is a game cs is the yeah okay and basically there's just huge multi billion dollar black market of just selling your in game cosmetic items to other people who want yeah the certain gun wraps and whatever and this all got shut down later but these guys created those marketplaces and so anyways he was telling me about he's like he was i was like dude you're kinda different what's made you this way he was telling me about the rune scape thing he's like and then the other thing is like all my friends kinda made it and he's like so even though this business is good i just look around and my peers are all like way further ahead than me in terms of how much success that they've had and there are different things he's like so you know to me this is like nothing this is like this is like chu change and i was like if i love this this is how funny of a story is that and like good for him it's gonna it's gonna pay off having that peer group well that's fascinating when you said this what what's the definition of this i can't say the name of his thing what do you mean i know like like the like what's that mean where you was like it it's a big business it's doing seven figures profit a year so you know he's making millions of dollars of profit but you know it's nothing compared to the guys who run the biggest bitcoin casino in the world right like so wait but what does this have to do with i love this story i was captivated the whole time what does this have to do with the raising lots of money thing is that you're saying that life is when you around bold people you act both i don't think it has anything to do with it to be honest i think i just randomly went on a tangent if i had to connect watch me pull pull a pretzel here alright so we were talking about for for open door or for you know big you know the fat startup up basically the things would start with the big vision take a bunch of capital take a bunch of risk and they either pay off big or or they just completely go bust but i think that there's like i said many ways to win and what i liked when i heard this guy's story was him and a group of people have all found totally non traditional non talked about things about how to win and one of the reasons they their thought process got shaped by each other was because of of all things this little game like they created the rune escape mafia i just like the paypal mafia spur you know spun out like multiple billion dollar companies due to the experience they had there i think that these early experiences can shape the way you think about business so if you were saying oh man at sometimes i think i'm kind of a pussy about the way i approach things one way to like figure that out or to change the mindset is to surround yourself with a bunch of people who did business the way you wanna do business or did business different than the way you do business to change your to break some of your invisible rules you have in your head and i think how are you gonna do that how are you currently doing that in the digital you know like it i haven't seen it i haven't been i'm currently in new york but i might as well just being some box because i don't go anywhere how are you doing that so how are we gonna do i don't how we're gonna do it because i i i've struggled with that so a big thing i'm trying to do is i'm trying to hang out with a bunch of people who are very early in the game very young so like there's this gen z mafia funny thing they they they got exposed on new york times but it's basically especially like this discord group of like twenty year old trying to build companies and like most of the companies probably suck by the way i read that i think those guys are fucking stupid right i i think it's genius what they're doing i think it's really smart to brand themselves i think it's really smart to create like their own little mini dorm of like twenty year old people who wanna be billionaires someday i wanna build cool companies and whether their company but the whole point of the article was like oh like silicon valley is elite we're gonna be more open like everything you said is elite yeah and also their thing is yeah like you can go to the website and it's like request access and then you don't get access so like i don't know what the fuck they're that's thought stupid but i'm like you are exactly i i think you don't wanna be but i think one one way i'm trying to like change my like not have these invisible rules in my head is to learn from people who are playing other games or learn from people who are so early in the game they don't know the rules themselves and so then they break all the rules unintentionally because they didn't have them to begin with they didn't know best practices and so you know the beginner mind how are you literally hanging out with them but how are you hanging out like i'm in one of these discord with a bunch of people who are like this and a huge part of me every time they're talking a huge part you just wants to be like no you're doing it wrong do it this way but now i'm like fuck it maybe there's some wisdom to what they're doing and like the the the attempts that they're taking and like the stuff that seems totally whacked to me like if i just wait some of these actually start to show results and maybe the rules are not the rules after all and so like i i've personally i've been surprised at some of the techniques they're using to grow the company or like just a lack of planning that they do and somehow that's like you know paying dividends for a few of them so i don't know it's not something i i don't know that you can manufacture totally but i think the one thing you can do is just pick who you spend your time with so like the other one i'm doing a lot of is up spending time with people who buy businesses rather than build them and because silicon valley is all about build build build and then through andrew wilkinson and some of our friends who are buying businesses rather than building them i'm like holy fuck this model is awesome this model works way better than the build model and do you think it works way better yeah yeah i absolutely think it works very better i think hit rate wise it's way better if you want and i don't even think there's like a a big cap on how big you can get yes sometimes if you build a world changing product you can you know have a billion users to make tens of billions of dollars or whatever but dude our friends who are doing this buy versus build they're making a lot of money very quickly through taking very little risk and like that's a great formula for business it's a much better formula than the startup lottery so andrew does it well do we know anyone else who bro did it well do we know anyone else we like did it save from enduring they're doing it very well brent be sure who was on the podcast while back he's done it very well and then there's a bunch of like other people ryan bi he's doing it he's he's either you know he's not he's at the beginning of the piece the beginning of his journey but he's doing it but this shit works like this just makes sense and then the fundamentals make a lot of sense i just wanna put it that way which is it's very hard to go wrong when you're buying profitable companies at fair prices and you're using cheap borrowed money to do it like that seems like a good ass formula to me i can't i'm an investor and that's a lot of those people you mentioned i can't which and i'm happy that i am because i think they're all gonna kill it i just can't decide if i think that's awesome or not oh oh not awesome or not for me awesome and not like fun i yeah i'm still because i'm i agree with you it is a great way to make killing i just think that maybe it might be too boring for me it could be as possible right i think that's so boring like the way that you it's so less stressful which is good and it's so boring though right i don't know maybe just i'm at that phase where i'm like i want off this roller coaster like thrill seeking and the ego side of things in in me is is sort of dead now in terms of building companies i just wanna have successful businesses that make customers happy and make a bunch of profit like that's just of that's the thrill now it's sort like dad mode of entrepreneurship and i'm into it can you buy companies with a rolling fund no oh that'd be cool if you could i agree well that's interesting i i you know this whole buying thing i actually learned about it live on this podcast is it is quite interesting andrew seems to be doing wonderful at it let's see ava and those guys wonderful i'm i'm happy i'm involved in their stuff maybe i should do it it seems it seems it seems neat i just can't decide if it's exciting yeah enough yeah just a ton of math it's a ton of math is what it there's one other idea i wanted to shout out in the last two minutes here so i was talking to nathan i don't know he says his last maybe res i think it's nathan res he's the founder of source he's a listener to the pod yeah he showed me that deal too not a deal no so bubbles yeah bubble yeah yeah but it's basically the prod the project is what's interesting me just like the general concept so so basically nathan a a cool guy he's got a cool story and he's helping me out for within the all access pass he's helping me on the e commerce side so i got to know him a little bit and i was like so what are you up to and he was telling me about these these things these bubble hotels that he's building and the bubble hotel that he's building and i forgot the domain i should i should really shout out i'll put it in the description after this but he's got a great domain like it's it's kind of like bubble hotel dot com but it's not exactly that i'll try to i'll try to find it maybe we'll even edit it over this and just say it but he's got a great domain and his concept is very simple which is like it's now more than ever people want to get out wanna travel they wanna get outdoors but traditional travel traditional hotels it's like kind of risky and kind of not not what people are going for so he's creating kind of a glam experience he's creating a bubble hotel so the bubble is i think literal in some ways where like the actual camp it's like a plastic seat there it's a little dome that you kinda like sleep in it's like it's like cool version of camping and and then also like you know like the right now the nba playoffs are going on in the nba bubble which is sort of like a safe place from covid and i also think that this that's also what this is gonna function as which is like a getaway safe clean way to to to have some have some travel in your life and so he's building this bubble hotel and i think it's awesome i think it's an awesome project that is like in line kind of what what you're talking about about like it's kind of risky it's totally non traditional i thought it was cool what he was doing i just i didn't get involved because it was like a part time thing for him yeah and i think you know it's a side project for him or a side hustle for him he's the reason he listens his podcast is because he's wired that way he loves ideas he loves side hustle he loves you know scheming and and dreaming the whole time so i think that's part of him that's why that's why the podcast appeals to him and so you know i can't i can't knock the guy for doing it at a side hustle so i think that's great i thought it was a cool idea i didn't go in for that reason but regardless i thought it was really neat i've just googled it i can't find it okay i think he just maybe took down but landing page you had because i he sent it to me i clicked it and it was a full website it was great and then the the great thing is because he owned source he sourced all the materials that he needs to build these bubbles himself and like cut out like a ton of the middleman man like sort of markup up on how much it would cost to build this thing so he's sort of building it at at actual cost rather than a more expensive endeavor i can't decide if i would stay in that or not i think maybe but i'm not sure why not let's say it looks awesome i don't know i don't know what do you wanna say now of course yeah i might be i might one if i get the fun of the outdoors with none of the work like i'm super in on and that's what this is maybe i would i'll do it i guess i would do it it depends how much it costs i i've grown like i do like i always say at motel then recently i sometimes i'll stay in fancy hotels pete fancy hotels are sick yeah of course fancy tele six this is the fancy hotel of camping anyways i thought this was a dope idea in a dope project so yeah i hope when it goes live we should go we should go check it out anything else before we hop off nope we'll talk to today sweet we're out peace