#119 with Josh Elman - How To Get The Benefits of Entrepreneurship Without Starting a Company

yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking bad we're back we got a special guest we've been on fire with guests lately so we had who do we have we had austin from lambda school we had harley who's the president of shopify and now big shoes to fill so josh elm is here josh is in the house you can give you're kinda like i don't know you could give you your resume a little bit better than i can but i i'll give you the highlights i'll tell people what i think about josh about every two months or so now i called josh for some combination of life advice career advice whatever because this guys sorta of had look kind of a miraculous career at silicon valley so linkedin twitter facebook robinhood was vc an investor and just basically it's been doing growth in silicon valley for a long long time growth of product so josh what did i miss where za were you at earlier in your career look i started my career real network nineteen ninety seven with the idea of like we could put audio video on the internet and real was the company that could have grown up to be youtube plus netflix plus everything else but that sort of been the pattern in my career real was sort of to one of the companies it didn't make it all the way through but it's always been if we get this thing right it could be so much bigger for the world linkedin was fifteen people when i showed up me you know turn into the world's largest professional network facebook was like five hundred people and they got to work on the platform and we thought we get everybody to log in to websites and apps with their facebook id and launched facebook connect and now that's doing it twitter was like eighty people we got it from like ten to a hundred million users when i was there to like tune into daily information that's kind of been my kind of pattern as i have jumped around a little more than i thought which is part of why i thought i'd be a vc for a while while too i really like just building products and getting into it with teams and making stuff that matters how many people worked at facebook when you so linkedin you were number fifteen twitter you were thirty you said eighty i forgot these no eighties in the eighties and facebook facebook is like five hundred something was a little bit bigger damn so you have a good hit rate yeah he's good picker we had a good conversation before you came on and i was like oh we talked about and i thought okay there's you know the normal brainstorming of cool ideas that you're actually pretty plugged into like consumer in a way that most people aren't so i think we will do that the other thing i thought was interesting was this career path you have which was like about something in between like not the founder and ceo but not employee number two thousand five hundred like senior management but way later you have this like awesome kind of get on the rockets ship while there's still you know some seats available early enough where you could be like hey i didn't just join the already made success but late enough where you weren't like two guys in a garage just scratching your ball trying to figure out what's going on so talk about was that intentional was that accidental that you went on that career path looking back it was clearly accidental that it turned out as well as it did but i think my instinct was always to go jump on those things that i just thought to be a lot bigger for the world you know in college i intern and microsoft the summer of windows ninety five which is ancient history now for most people but this was like the launch of really personal computing in the home and it was already a giant company in nineteen ninety five and i was like you know what this is too big to work at you're working on the smallest piece i worked on custom charts with an excel and i looked around and there was you know tens of thousands of other people working on other minuscule things that added up to this giant microsoft but the next summer i intern for a ten person company then called cart and it didn't quite have product market fit and it was trying to find its way through and i was like that's almost too small like i want something with a little bit of momentum or like where i'm not where i can tell the story to myself of why it can be giant for the world as i started after graduation and just thought about this in my career i was always like what is that thing that's working enough that if i can go be a part of helping it really grow big i can both have a huge impact on the company an impact on the world because they'll get to see this product like audio video on the internet or professional networking or helping your social identity go with you across the web and still look if you get in early enough the because the company becomes really big you can still make an outs sized money versus just taking a larger company salary on a yearly basis what's the growth and the absolute threshold of like this can be big so it has to grow by this much and it has to have the potential to be what in order to pick your interest so in my mind it has to be able to get ten x bigger ten x bigger in users revenue or market cap with a shot at a hundred x and so i do that math in my head which is like why i'm joining my company over the next three to four years do you remember having that conversation with itself either for twitter or facebook or something at the time like can you take us like do you remember what your thought process was it might have been off do you remember what you talked about then so facebook when i joined in early two thousand eight a lot of people had already written it off as giant facebook ad taught seventy million monthly active users it had been valued at fifteen billion by microsoft a few months before i started so it wasn't like i was a genius for joining facebook when it was a couple of college kids and just networks on college i still went back and i said look at fifteen billion i think this can be a ten i think it's a hundred fifty billion market cap company and so my stock will grow ten x at least and the user base can easily get to five to seven hundred million people as it really connects everybody worldwide and it's gonna be the dominant platform and i was working on the facebook platform specifically and i was like every app every consumer product is gonna need to run through facebook over the next three to four years in the same way that they all have to run through google and care about seo i was like we're gonna go from kind of matter to like this is just the way the internet works and i just saw that possibility which of those projects that you mentioned or ones that you didn't mention did you make the most money off of i was gonna ask the same question because the companies all had different outcomes but you know depending on when you joined or who you are you might personally benefit more from one that wasn't as big of a success as the other actually have averaged out about the same amount from linkedin facebook and twitter in each one the time that i got in was either earlier later i got a little bit more senior you know linkedin i was really much earlier in my career but it was fifteen people so even though i had a small grant like it worked out i was more senior by the time i got to facebook and then even more by the time i got to twitter and so i got slightly larger grants than what you get at that time you know on facebook was worth i think i got in in the my common stock was worth about four billion and at twitter not not my personal share the company you know and it at twitter it was right around a billion so you know i got to see you know meaningful upside from each of those but it's funny they kinda averaged out to about the same and you probably have made more in this path than a lot of founders who you've invested and even who hit successes right because you had four different career journeys where you were able to get that ten or more even a few hundred thousand dollars of stock turns into a few million dollars every single time that's more than a lot of founders make when they succeed yeah i would say if you're a founder who manages to sell your company for over twenty five million dollars and still hold a meaningful share you start to catch up to but i was really fortunate to do but he's selling a company for twenty five million dollars and still you know not being totally diluted down to like nothing but that's not easy for most founders i have a lot of other friends that started companies raised twenty five million from vcs and ended up making it a lot less personally because they weren't able to find a a great outcome i have a friend who sold his company for nine hundred and ninety seven million dollars he walked away with three million bucks he spoke at hustle khan someone could probably google that i'm sure they will but it's so it's pretty crazy piggyback off that my wife works it facebook and a lot of people ask her because of my job they're like oh would you ever start something and in my head i'm like no don't do that you're like you're gonna or or sorry she works at air airbnb now you still work at facebook and i'm like no like she's on the fast track to get paid a lot of money probably as an executive you had probably have way less stress no so i think the path to well a lot of people sit i always say it's said like starting a small business and not raising money becoming a salesperson or climbing your way up at like a fang and netflix or a a huge tech company i think that's true i think that's what's really changed over the past decade because ten years ago actually the salary difference to being at startups or other things was much less than it is now i mean at the fangs now i have friends who make three to five times more annually than what people at startups take home with hopes that that equity is worth it but when that equity has to make up a three to five times gap in my cash to take home it's even more different than it used to be so i agree that like those are exactly the ways that you can make the most money at the lowest stress level i mean there's always stress josh give me the companies okay you're if you were out in the job market today and you're looking for okay you were looking for your next one that's in that same sweet spot right they have something figured out but they still have that ten x hundred x potential that you you know you don't know if it's gonna come true rattle off companies off top of your head that that you think would fit you'd be looking at you'd say okay i'm a take a look at these i'm gonna take the tires on on these companies so i think they have that protection sean we get asked this all the time i know and we have really shitty answer so i think josh like yeah so i'm first gonna tell the honest truth which is this is harder than it ever was because the companies have gotten funded all the good companies have gotten funded evaluations that are the three to five times higher than what they would have been five or seven years ago it's already priced when you're getting more of that multiple priced in but if we just have about the companies i think can really go public and still be really meaningful like roadblocks it was just rumored today they're filing for ipo like they're a company that is connecting kids around the world in play and i think that they have huge legs to be a much bigger sort of meta grey lock used to work as an investor so just in case there's i don't mean to have any conflicts but i figured i'd say that discord where i'm on the board so even more conflict i think it's just one of the few consumer companies that's growing and lighting things out in just the way that they connect people around the short of shared spaces in shared places which is one of the biggest trends in fintech robinhood coin and chime are the three companies that i think are gonna come out of this way and just the massive outcomes and then internationally i'm quite bullish on resolute and transfer wise as two companies i think that will still be very significant and then when you get into health this is an area i wish i knew more about but if i were telling somebody to go pick a new trend that's gonna generate these ten or hundred billion dollar companies in the future would tell them to become an expert on digital health and genomics because i think that that's actually the category that the things aren't gonna own there is so much invention and transformation that's about to happen and the biggest outcome of this pandemic is gonna be us just refreshing and looking at how we handle health and biology and data and information sean are you an investor in that levels company no so josh have you heard of the levels everyone a lot of people talk about it yeah it's the one where you just like tricked yourself for it's called a continuous glucose monitor i got it on it there's sean's thing i haven't gotten in mind yet i need to get it so i think that's pretty cool that company and it aligns a little bit of what you're saying another company that i think is interesting is zapier you know zapier yeah they spoke hustle con two years ago and back then i would have said one hundred percent and if you can get a job somewhere and get a job here i still think there's a ton of room to grow if i i'll bet money that they'll have an atlas atlas and style exit and then i would also add that new thing have you seen bubble the no code tool bubble yeah very interested in that is there any that you would add sean well i said flex port last time and you were like now fuck it doesn't count it's out to josh criteria it does which is can it become ten or a hundred times bigger and i would say yeah if it's i think it was valued at three billion last i had heard if you told me that becomes a thirty billion or a hundred billion dollar company i'd be like oh yeah freight forwarding becoming this sort of software stack around freight forwarding yeah i just boring to bring up everyone knows they're awesome you know they're awesome a lot of people don't know that they're awesome let's see what else i'm looking at about the apps on my phone well we a good one we had lambda school come and i wasn't convinced the guy austin was the guest i wasn't not convinced that was an interesting idea i actually have changed my opinion i think that is quite interesting i don't know how expensive oh how big the company is now five billion it's gonna it's gonna become five billion call it now five billion is where where it goes paul graham tweeted this out the over the week weekend and had a bunch of people talking about it which was he goes alright you know the resemblance are too uncanny i i'm calling it now stripe is the next google sam here you already reacted given it the dude it's so boring like it's a big yeah duh that's so it's such a easy like thing you you're missing his point that his point is it doesn't matter if it's already picked the question is can it still grow a hundred x from here can still grow you know ten x twenty x thirty x from here because all that matters is your entry in your multiple it doesn't matter if it's five that becomes fifty or fifty that becomes five hundred it's the same thing whatever great i buy into that but it's just like it's just such an obvious answer so so this quick company i invested is too early but i think it will win is this company called du which is basically shopify for indian shop keepers and that company is growing faster than anything ever seen and so i'm pretty sure that i was gonna go do something i like if i was twenty five right now and not like mary or a kid i would be in india i would've have been working for him for the last month i'd be like give me whatever jobs title you want like i'm gonna be right here let's take this thing to you know two billion three billion because i think it can get there in a few years josh you said the trends that interests you and sean chime in whenever you find your list but you said that the trends that interests you are some what did you say genome stuff i said genomics and sort of all that we're going with digital health and data so tell people of what's going on in those spaces that that's if you give us some examples because i think most people here will hear genomics but like most people listen to this don't meet any genomics companies any day of the week so give us some examples of what's cool so i think a lot of where the interesting companies started like grail which i'm not sure if you guys follow just got off for like seven billion dollars by a health company like they have a bunch of them started by like we're gonna sequence the genomes and we're gonna be able to go and like figure out strains of cancer and people's propensity to have certain diseases later in life and could take like precautions against certain color genomics is another company but i think is really interesting in the space they started with being able to detect breast cancer gene and be able to help you do that with much cheaper tests with their own lab they're challenge with like companies like that is they've had to go make their money by convincing companies to buy this as more like a medical benefit and buy this as way to like lower medical cost and so they end up becoming these like challenging on enterprise sales companies around these categories where i'm interested in stuff that starts more like levels or starts more like you would get your own you know test and all of a sudden it would just help you like change your lifestyle just a little bit start eating this a little bit more than this or start just doing this type of exercise that or this and you know like levels where you're doing this continuous monitoring all of a sudden now you're paying just a little bit of money on a consistent basis for this sort of like doctor coach that's giving you very very personalized advice what there that that's easier though when i think of what's easiest i would think hiring a salesforce would be far easier than dealing with millions of customers you know i think my brain and my whole career has been so b that to me the salesforce is sort of like you called straight boring like i call that sort of boring is straightforward and to convince companies to buy something as a benefit becomes very much a cost benefit scenario will they either be able to track better employees or will they lower their medical costs i actually get much orange to like can you actually change the thousand millions of people because if you can do just that a little bit you can create huge business for yourself you said that one it sounded like you actually had a few more of that in entry you i'm really interested in what some people are calling to med or the third place or basically where do we go actually spend time online i think right now a lot of our online time is spent solo we are booking at netflix or we're viewing our facebook feeds or our instagram feeds and we think we're interacting but we're not or and we're just starting to see the rise gameplay is obviously a massive phenomenon zoom calls just aren't it even though that's what everybody's doing right now so i think these places that we spend meaningful time together online is about to to grow substantially and even though we're all gonna get back in the real world soon to be able to hang out we're still gonna realize that like our time at home where we're just scrolling through facebook or instagram can still be much better spent together so roadblocks minecraft or teaching kids to do this young gameplay whether it's among us which is the hot game now or you know league of legends says that for people who figured that out but i think this is now gonna become much more of a everybody habit it but can i bring to up that are off of that which is the first i saw it last week and i think and it blew my mind it was called the replica have you guys seen replica yes i was gonna mention then oh my god the second are you using it sam or you just saw the concept you got excited i'm using playing with it it's crazy fascinating wait explain it first and yeah so that was what you're experience in i put as crude and basic as possible which is basically it's like an ai online girlfriend or online therapist they call it like your ai best friend and so go it's it's it's smarter child for those aol you know yeah and people back in the day and i don't know if they're just using what's that gp three thing they took this all from scratch wow that's pretty crazy so basically you log in you message you make your person a girl or a boy or not binary or whatever you wanna make it and you could like pick your of the avatar and then like megan or whatever you name her him is gonna become your friend and you could talk to them about yada yada yada and the reason why i think it's gonna be awesome is because i think that americans are gonna be similar to japan where they just have less sex and the guys get addicted to this type of stuff and they and this is like he becomes to their online girlfriend i also think that online therapy is booming right now and for a lot of therapy you could use this as your therapist and i think you can get kind of an interesting benefit from it i also think you could use it for group therapy but your entire group is fake except for you and i think that sam will master ask your question if you took all the guys in let's say the united states do you think there is more sex happening or masturbation masturbation easy factor of what like would you say two x five x ten x x what what do you think it's more well which generation i think that gen z is having significantly less sex than okay let's say you know our age and under what would you guess is it two or three hundred percent less okay so you think it's a two or three x difference i think it's probably like a twenty x difference i think there's probably twenty x more but let's say where there's somewhere in the middle and you would think right somebody would say oh the real thing is better and then there's all these reasons why the real thing is either unavailable or it's not better not it's less convenient it's less you know there's less emotion involved in all the all these reasons so maybe the same thing happens just with relationships like that's kind of the the that's the bold case for what you're describing which is why would i want this you know going and getting a girlfriend hard having somebody who who is you know high convenience who doesn't cause all this drama or emotional entanglement maybe this is just the easier way and so maybe there's two to three or twenty times more people who want a relationship that is the equivalent of masturbation what masturbation is to sex maybe there's something like that to having a girlfriend what do you think about that josh you answer i mean i even i'm still trying to get my opinion shaped around it but what do you think that was i was a good theory i thought i thought i put out a good thing it is my take is i don't think it's a replacement but i think it's the training graph i actually think that it becomes the way that you get better you can practice the skills that you wanna have so that when you do encounter the real relationship you have that now the risk is it gets so good that you go to have real relationships and they suck compared to how good your virtual replicate replicated right which is a problem that that people have with porn as well porn creates this like idealistic you know pseudo fantasy and you get a trained on that the real thing is like harder comparison yeah it's like a ukraine team like when i went and research them they're not from america do you know where they are is it good though sam is it like amazing like when you showed me your gp three thing that was like amazing is this amazing not yet no it's really cool but it is not amazing yet but they have a facebook group where a lot of their users are and they're fan so i went and research all the facebook users and they freaking loved it so i think it's good enough to be big but no it's not as good i actually think it's the opposite of gp three gp three is amazing at the demo it's not as great the tenth time you use it right actually replica is one of those things that gets better over time the more that you put in more you go hook now maybe the like hundred or thousand time use it you start realizing what i am talking to a robot maybe i'm gonna detach i actually think it's one of those things that ramps up much better whereas like i can blow you away with gp three but then you ask me for like a couple of harder things and then it just that's how i am with the oc right like yeah i used the quest i was like oh my god you know that first hour was mind blowing and now it's collecting dust over there because am i gonna to keep doing this you know the tenth find that novelty is now worn off and now it's you know just this box in my house josh do you actually use this replica thing or you talking kind of in theory it's like it gets better over time i used it for a while it was like two months i was having a lot of fun with it and then i started to get to that point where i would have other conversations that it couldn't kinda keep growing with me and so i sort of fell out i do know the team and they are in russia as sam was ashley about i looked at investing early and have kept in touch with them i really think they're on to something this is the closest company i've seen this samantha from her if you remember the movie her which i still think is the best movie to predict kind of trends that should make sense in the next sort of four to five years i'm glad we're on the save wavelength that gives me a lot of i i've just my confidence level has just been boosted thank you has really got new pep step here he's like hey i'm lot of something it's also like you know another place for ideas is go watch black mirror and then like actually build the startup that does it there's a black mirror episode where where i think somebody's her boyfriend and her husband dies and then she has this like synthetic replica to hang out with but it's like not quite the same but it's a pretty good echo and that's actually one of the origin stories of this company replica is the founder had a a dear friend passed away and they used a lot of the text and messages to actually recreate train bunch of that train it and there's either there's another company that just got like tons of funding that's like these x apple like og apple people like they you know this i forgot they like design the ipod and like the mac or whatever like they design steve jobs turtleneck or something and so then they spun out now and they're creating like a new wearable and they race like i don't know what was like thirty million fifty million dollars or something straight out the gate and there was some patents about what it is and it's it's straight from a black mirror episode black mirror there's one episode where it's like you have this wearable implant that basically records your whole day and then you like have your memory as like a video basically and these guys have this like wearable clip on thing that you put on your chest that's basically like always recording and you're able to go back and look at it or capture it or share it or do whatever you want from it but i think yeah there's a lot of black mirror technology out there josh you said something i forget exactly how you praise it you're talking about like things to happen because of quarantine and working home and where are people spending the internet i've got one that i've been talking about i've been talking about this since before covid and it hasn't quite picked up yet but i just wanna be on record as predicting it which is new browsers there's two or three companies that are in this space the first is called the browser company i think it's called that the second is the guy who started mix panel he's got this new one called mighty mighty and there's maybe two or three more that a quite fascinating what do you think about those i don't know about those companies to being the ones to do it but that trend is quite interesting do you have an opinion man i think there's brave too i almost feel like the browser is last year's technology or last decades technology and so i'm like a whole new browser like it just takes so much habit to change and it takes so much a change and then and then you end up monetizing off of search and so you then end up behold google now that said there was a rumor that the government is gonna try to say that chrome has to be sold by google as part of all this address stuff and if that happens then i think this trend is wide open because all of a sudden chrome is a separate company looks a lot less interesting than chrome as part of google go but i feel like it's more like that then we're all waiting for a browser that solves all our problems here's the version of that that i like i don't think anybody's doing it but there's this trend of you know multiplayer software so you know you have photoshop which is like a solo person you know photo editing thing and then you get fig which is like hey why don't we all be able to collaborate on the same thing and it's in the cloud and all this stuff and then you have the same thing for microsoft word you have google docs and you have email that's a single player experience and you have front which is like a team in a collaborative version of it so taking something the solo player and then making it collaborative is a interesting thing and so stuff i wonder if somebody's gonna do this with the browser which is today my browser is my cello player experience and nobody's built the right social or collaborative version of that where my team we also somehow share a browser that's like some good experience so that's where i'd be looking more so than what those guys are doing today that's interesting do you think someone's gonna and you're looking to fund that if i saw something that was doing that that i like yeah i'd fund that because you could see this happening over and over and over again and so anytime you take a staple tool that's today used only single player and if you actually crack the collaborative use case it's a recipe for multi billion dollar companies it just keeps happening so if i found that around the browser i'd be excited about it for browsers we gotta keep our eyes out on browsers we both said to our opinions we're gonna find out i think in a year for right or wrong josh you said something earlier about selling a company for twenty five million dollars as a bootstrap business are owning a lot of it a lot of people who we have on here as well as a lot of listeners are people who have small businesses that they can hopefully sell for potentially tens of millions but it's a very bootstrap crowd my company where we've never raised venture venture capital but everything that you've done is definitely the traditional like go bigger or go home type of mentality which is neat why have you gone that route versus the smaller business that can make ten twenty million revenue and maybe sell for a good interesting amount or use own all of it and pay yourself a lot of money i mean why one over the other you know i think for me my orientation has always been on sort of impact to the world over just a business or things for myself and i actually think i'm not sure where i got that bug maybe it actually was that summer that i worked at microsoft where i did realize you they're like hey this little thing that started up in seattle on you know i've grown up the seattle area so bill gates was my hero even when i was in sixth grade i would like who's your local hero and i would always do projects on bill gates so i think i always wanted to touch the world in that way and so everything i oriented myself to was those go big or go home get to massive scale can this reach hundreds of millions of people which is also like the power of technology and local businesses can be amazing and can be incredible the profitable and lucrative been touched some people's lives lot but i've always wanted to go for that home run how old were you when linkedin got popular got it was a base hit or home runner or whatever for you personally it went public in two thousand eleven so i was thirty five went went public was probably like twenty seven when i showed up there my theory was like well maybe you got like a base hit at a young age and you're like sick i have what i need now i can keep doing some of these moonshot ideas but that wasn't entirely the case with you i grew up that like weird version of middle class which is my parents had to take out massive loans to send me to college and i was really lucky to get to go to like stanford but they had to take out massive loans we couldn't get financial aid but they couldn't afford it and it was like that really weird middle so i had no safety net my parents were like that's it you graduate we're paying for college and then you're on your own so i didn't have any nest egg or safety net to build from but i also didn't have the sense of like i didn't grow up with parents who were entrepreneurs they always just had good jobs so so i also didn't have that kind entrepreneurial grit that i just been part of my whole life and so i also felt like i always just needed a salary so i was like how can i get a good salary it's something that has massive potential as opposed to just going to the big company and selling out already but also not the confidence to go to zero or the grit that i totally felt internally when you were at stanford were you there at the same time as like any of the kinda of like peter t max re hoffman like arrow alright i'm not sure what the timing was so i was a little bit after there era but marissa mayer who been able people know was like a very early google and then was ceo of yahoo for a number of years was my neighbor and study aids so i was like right in her era in the late nineties and you know at that time netflix right before i graduated from stanford netflix had just gone public ebay had just gone public yahoo had just gone public google hadn't even started yet and so it was like right in that sort of middle zone of the internet blowing up all around it could you could you have looked to herman and like oh she might just be the ceo of gal someday so i'll be honest yes like my when you're at a place like a stanford and you still have the people who are literally ten times smarter than you become their best friends so many of them have gone on to be incredibly myself i even had a class with larry page and i was idiot who seems like kind of a pom jerk i would sn her in the back with my friends as opposed to how do i just like i'm a little undergrad he was a grad student how do i just try to get on this team to do a project become his best friend right and he was brilliant and then and you know obviously change the world so you hung out with or in the same circle larry page at the young age mercy let's to be clear i was around around physically in the geographically oh but you were fifteen at linkedin so you clearly knew reid hoffman at least a little bit new you were idiot twitter so you must have kinda have been jack yeah i have no not really jack and then you were early enough maybe where you worked with z right a little bit little bit what well those people along with some of these other like tightens these t nerd titans were there any similarities well and you're hung out with you know the robinhood dudes those are those guys robinhood dudes you know his court dudes everybody is incredibly thoughtful about what they do and they people always say like they make fast moves and they go fast and they you know make snap decisions and the reality is i like to call it deliberate action which is they're really deliberate about just about every they do whether it's a higher whether it's a meeting they're gonna take whether it's a person they're gonna spend time with but they do a lot of things they're kind of they just are like nonstop accumulating information doing things but if you ask them why think why'd did you do that why'd did you go here why did you think about that thing why did you say that they actually always have a good reason and when something didn't work out they don't go they actually can tell you why it didn't work out and they said this is what i thought might happen and i still did it because i was looking for this kind of outcome so they're really just deliberate thoughtful reflective and v these are all some of the hardest workers i've ever been that stuck out as like whenever you meet someone that has this attribute you're like oh man i got best who or why did somebody remind you of of them so there's one other thing that they can do that's really unique which is they can paint that picture of the success in five or ten years it sounds really really compelling so they can hold that version the future and sell it really well but they can also ground it and and here's the next five things we're gonna do and here's why and i have met a lot of people that can do one of those things really really well but very few that can do both one an example when i met the founder of musical who you know that's now become tiktok which is massive i literally met him over a video call over wechat and in one meeting he was able to paint this incredible picture of what he was trying to do for creativity for the world and ground it in exactly what the product had today why i had all these flaws why he had to build this next thing and this next thing and this next thing to get there i will tell you the fact that tiktok is now just this massive phenomenon is so much a credit to his original vision and yet you know he still needed to get it there and even they didn't get it there on their own they sold it to byte dan and were able to bring their vision into all things at byte dance hat to get tiktok to where it is where where know he is now one of the he still they sold musically did he's still at byte dance so right now i'm at at twitch and you twitch is probably like a things i don't know five to ten billion dollar company and emmett is the original kind of founder ceo and has a lot of these traits you're talking about and i know that you know every time i have an interaction with him it's always like this heightened excitement right it's like i'm gonna show him something i'm working on or he's gonna ask me a bunch of questions he's gonna grill me and i don't wanna like look like a fool in front of this guy and you know there is this kinda like you know the the king of the company type of thing and i can kinda vividly remember go a lot of the interaction i've had with him or like when andy ja from aws is on the call it's like oh i kinda remember some of these do you have any memorable either in a in a good way or or embarrassing bad way interactions with suck or reid hoffman or any of these guys do that you can tell us a story about i still remember my interview with reed hoffman at linkedin in the fall of two thousand and three you know i was in business school at the time i dropped out to join linkedin i had just been in my first semester but i was like well i should go do this linkedin thing and we sat down and it was one of the like most intense firing questions but the question that he asked me was that i still remember i was interviewing gonna be a product manager and he said look most jobs have an artifact that you create if you're an engineer you're writing the code that runs in the final product if you're a designer you were designing the mock ups and the graphics and the exact look and feel that show up in the product if you're a business development person your artifact is the contracts you create and then do you get the contract details right they produce value for the company if you're a ceo like me you know it's the org chart it's the financing plan for the company but the org charge is like one of the main things that i own he said if you're a product manager what do you actually do what is actually your artifact and this way of rec classifying everybody's work and their job as the actual artifacts that they produce and what that either means to your customers or means to the company which is such a perfect crystal personalization of how precise read always thinks about sort of everybody's job and role in the network and then i asked him like explaining to me how linkedin gets big and he replied to me with his theory he called it growth then usage than revenue which i then called ge and he said first we're gonna grow and become the largest network and it's gonna have utility for a few people and then for most people they'll just be latent there but we're gonna use all the viral mechanics to actually capture the network so then we're gonna focus on usage which is we're gonna figure out how to get you using your network to make you a better professional more every day and then we're gonna focus on revenue which is selling some of those engagement services selling some of that search to people whether they're in hr sales business development or everything but the first thing we're do is we just really have to grow and they said and when it works he then painted the picture of what linkedin actually become which is you only ro it x you ever need fine and get to anybody you want get you information get you you know he hires do everything else and he was able to do that in two thousand three when linkedin had fourteen people and that was still the most like the the best interview and the lucky it's one that i've ever made it through are there any other stories like that with some of these folks i love that story by way that's a good one a want more give me more yeah i'm at the campfire fire my hands are warm from the fire and i'd love to hear another story if you got one are you know i remember one with z when we were working on facebook connect and we were really working on this very first version it was a room full of twenty some people because it wasn't that often and even that the company at that point they had you know this is like ended two thousand air middle two thousand eight so come had eight or nine hundred people so it wasn't like he could review every product every day anymore and so it was you our rare thing for this platform team to get to present him the thinking behind facebook connect there was kind of a a whole walk through and mock ups and showing the screens of what was gonna happen in facebook connect when you go to another website you hit login in with facebook and it's say do you wanna connect your facebook account with the count of like yelp or the hustle website or something so you do wanna actually connect these two things and if so here's the information that you'll share and he spent twenty minutes interrogating the designers about why would you put this icon here how can we make it easier how do we scare users last how do we make it so that they really understand what's going on and watching the level of detail that he is this sort of ceo got to but every single element of this thing and then he turned around to the rest of the room and he said if we get this right this is gonna be one of the most transformational pillars for our company we have this moment that we can show the world how your identity platform can actually become portable safe protected you guys have this mission where you have to get this right and i will just tell you that like i could see everybody in the room there's sort of like there's spine stiff up they kinda that up they look proud they were like we gotta go fight to get this right to one of the most important pieces of the company and as i left the room i realized he has a way to probably do that with every team that comes through right in order to make them understand why that thing they're working on is there and so but it wouldn't have worked if he hadn't been able to get to the level of detail at the technical level he was asking the engineers at the pixel level of what he was asking the designers and he was going straight more to the you know the product management would sometimes speak up and he would actually turn and focus on the people doing that actual work producing those real artifacts to like reel them on how it needed to work it was so impressive even at that stage of the company that's a great i feel like we could do a whole podcast on this that's great something that sean and i so we have this guy we have a sean and i have a great friend named andrew wilkinson who comes on all the time and sean and i are actually similar to him where brawl like pretty good idea guys we're pretty good at doing the first iteration but all three of us including a lot of people we have on aren't always the best at being the day day operator once it gets past a certain stage but you seem like a guy who is that guy you seem like in of operator through and through have you seen that when i think of like read what's his name reid hoffman i've never met him but i'm gonna stereotype him and i mean this as a compliment as this kinda like bumbling artist genius who like wears two left shoes and like mix match socks know what be like he comes off as kinda like a genius who like will forget certain things is that stereotype true with some of these titans that we've kind of discussed i do wanna address the first part about me being an operator too because i actually have a really interesting take on what you said there i'll answer that question about people like read no that's patent false they are not bumbling geniuses at all the ones who really become successful i will say everybody i've met who has become a billionaire with the exception of one or two who wrote somebody else is tails and truly got lucky got there for a reason they got there because they had an insight they were they've worked incredibly hard and that insight plus the hard work plus a whole hell of a lot of luck just got them there but they got there i mean because you know lots people have good insights and hard work and everything else but each one of them who did get there got there because all those things came together and it wasn't bumbling it wasn't designed at all i think you asked your question in a weird is that what you meant like i don't think you meant did he hear lucky what what did you really mean sam let me and add which is look they're really specific about the least they spend time on and there's a lot of things that the rest of us spend time on like how we look what we wanna eat how we feel wanting to get casual entertainment but i will tell you that a lot of these folks completely skip over we agree then josh because the i sean's right it was a fair criticism i didn't ask that in a good way but what you just said agrees with what i said what i the point out like if you wear shoes that don't or you wear socks that don't match or you aren't like dressed nicely that's because you just don't care about so important to you yeah you're just caring about something else is like i don't care just like please handle it so yeah a lot of folks like that literally have food brought to them they don't have to think about what to eat they have clothes set out for them every day where they just wear the same style of clothes every day because they found something that fits and feels good and they don't wanna have to change every day and i've seen a lot of lot of people in that group actually go that route so that the brain is more focused on the problems that matter that's such a boring life though right i mean can't that be considered like a pretty like at what point you just say fuck it and you just have fun do you know what i mean it's like logically buying a ferrari is doesn't make a lot of sense of course you always buy a honda civic but let what point you just ball out and just have fun just for joy sake some of those people they get different joy the joy is actually solving the world's problems having debates at the highest level of intellectual rigor you know one of the funny things people don't realize about re hoffman is he and peter t were close friends in college they always were on opposite sides of many things read being much more of a staunch fairly liberal person peter steele being a staunch conservative but their fun was debating things of how the world worked their fund was debating what might actually change the world when they were students at stanford and it turned out to be some of the most successful billionaires coming out of silicon valley i could definitely you definitely see that in fact i i think linkedin is a good example where you said something like to have a unique insight and peter hill has a different way of saying this a little catch which is just like what's the secret you know that other people feel other people would agree with you on or believe you about and i think early on they had done stuff in social i think social met or whatever linkedin whatever you did be pre linkedin right had done a social network that didn't work or didn't fully work but it was like oh shit this whole like social graph network effects i don't know if they had the lingo at the time but clearly they knew that was important that's why they wrote such a big check into facebook right because they were like oh this kid has figured out that thing that we that we know is important he's figured it out over here hey kid here's five hundred thousand dollars and like you know take it from here and then building linkedin afterwards so from your interactions at that time do you have any good stories either about that or just in general like being on the pioneering edge of like figuring out this whole the stuff that now is figured out and widely accepted like network effects and viral growth that wasn't as widely known and accepted back then is that right no it wasn't it at at all i mean it made logical sense when anybody explained it even back then if reed would explained to you what network effects were and why linkedin was gonna capture the network linkedin posted their series b pitch actually if anybody wants to read it i was in the room helping matt ko who's now over a benchmark and remake that deck but it actually goes and talks about how the web one o actually they google was network effects of the web better than yahoo which was a directory paypal was network effects of spending where you could detect fraud and move money around a much better way versus banks and it was like linkedin will be this versus all of job networks and job services and so it did this incredible job of pinning those pictures but it took a while for everyone to do it like we were figuring out user growth by me writing a bunch of random queries into the data warehouse that was a twenty four hour delay snapshot of the database from the day before i'm like that's how i would figure out what worked what ab b test work what viral mechanics works today mix panel and amplitude have a thousand times the power of my old queries running the data warehouse for people doing growth today and yet you know and it's like so much more powerful but it's the same basic queries in in the same analysis do you think some of those same secrets exist today or like you know in twenty twenty what are the versions of those secrets that you've either heard or or you believe to be true that that is not as widely accepted but fifteen years from now it's gonna be like obvious that was obvious if we have been thinking about it i think the secrets are how to get people to paper things that they've bow to you and that like it's not that una obvious and maybe it's already late for me to say that gaming companies have known this for a very long time and yet every other industry and said well just build ads business we'll run remnant ads and we'll do some direct sales and that's how we'll grow and you're just starting to see people realize that like actually people are willing to pay for things that they enjoy or that activate them or that motivate them whether that's coaching training good content subscribing to a specific writer who brings me goddamn every day but nobody has figured out how to bring those lessons fully out of the gaming ecosystem and that's where i think the biggest untapped secret star so that's an interesting say away from what i was gonna ask this is a very selfish question but i i'm gonna put you to the test so the hustle we have over one and a half million subscribers one of that billion daily users we've got trends a eight figure or over ten thousand paying users sean and i have this podcast that he started with has let's say millions of downloads how do we ten this business the best way to ten x the business is either get yourself onto to larger and larger platform so as opportunities come to think with broader re whether that's you know today tv still does have massive reach or whether that's other media platforms or you kind of can use those to keep growing your own unique audience that's one way to do it the key is everything you do has to be lead gen to grow your own core unique audience but you need to get on these bigger platforms in order for you to then scale up to become them so that's one the second one is you find ways to charge enough money that you funnel it all back into user acquisition paid user acquisition is much less of a a dirty tactic than it used to be and so you you do that and the third way is you find a way to get lots of cheaper supply you get people to spread you viral because they wanna be a part of it so they actually will go and cause you to grow by spreading your message or by becoming a small part of your community and then lets you grow and actually manage the whole community the biggest ten x businesses are marketplaces and networks because they do a lot less of the work and they're only the connective tissue so that's the other path i asked that question and you kinda have like a little bit of a framework what can i google to and what can of listener to google to learn where you learn i wish i had time to write more i learned most things from twitter i read a lot of great logs from and you know i read more blog posts and more like quick content and insights from people than i do longer form books and that's kind of how i keep learning and honing it and i got really lucky to learn by doing come back to you a question about operator i am not a scaled operator but i have been what i call the second wave at multiple companies which is take the thing that works put in the foundations and build just enough the infrastructure that people who are really good operators can come in and run the trains i think of this is like there were pioneers who the founders who found their way over the mountains and then there were people who came in and designed and laid the tracks and then there's people who run the trains to bring over the horse and i was always that sort of track layer but i learned so much by getting to do that and that sort of we'll hear framework for for that which is called pioneer settlers and town planners if you've heard it yeah that's how we he we came on i think because i tweeted out something like that sean your a quote how does someone recruit someone like you so you you're probably you don't have to confirm it tonight you're probably quite wealthy you've had a wonderful career you probably could go start your own thing you probably can never have to work again how does someone recruit you they just pay you a ton of money i mean what do they i mean like how how does someone get a guy like you you know i think a guy like me isn't totally who you want you actually want the me of fifteen years ago for your smaller company look for me now the chances is impact it's how can you get me to work on something at massive scale but if you're recruiting the guy like me fifteen years ago you tell that story of why you believe your thing will grow ten to a hundred x over the next five years and you figure out how to reveal enough of the secrets so that i go well i really believe that and i want it do you think that these founders have to come up with an idea that can ten or hundred x or they have to recruit people who can figure it out like what comes first the ten or hundred x idea or the ten or hundred x people that they hope you figure it out i think what comes first is the thing that's working a little bit i call it like binding product market fit the thing that comes next is the insights into the ten or hundred x from the founder and then the thing that comes after that is hiring people like me where the track layers the thing that comes first it's finding that thing that you think is working but it's that moment that you have the insight of how much bigger it can be that's where you capture all the value and i think founders often think they need that before they get something working in the first place which isn't true but then a lot of founders skip over that moment and like you guys are at that moment right now which is can now let's imagine what is the hundred x play and that gift and that insight is the moment that you then have a chance to go chase it i think that that's like an insight that i've had as a leader which is i'm like man in order to attract these baller people who i wanna surround myself with people who are better than me i have to have a big baller image like i have to i have a vision that can equal the type of person that i want to attract so it's almost like if you wanna so yourself with these people you have to be bold and you have to have this big vision and i found that to be an incredibly challenging i found that to be challenging to understand and grasp i mean i think that that's true on the other hand you don't have to do that you can also just build a great business and be very happy with it it's that sort of like two sided thing like the people who are joiner like me i'm not a founder i'm a joiner we want only join the things that are gonna be that massive in the world because the other thing is by the way joiner us never get enough equity that the company isn't that life changing if it's not a multi multi billion dollar outcome so joiner are also looking for that are you working right now are you are you chilling what are you doing right now what are you gonna do next i am chilling and one of the things i've been exploring is potentially going back and doing we're investing but one of the things i've been exploring is going to work at billion user scale on some products that really matter for the world and being able to participate in building something that the decisions you're making in those rooms matter to a billion people as soon as the product rolls have okay what are those i mean they're this not hard to figure out how many companies have been clean users apple facebook google amazon microsoft you know there aren't that many more that are at that scale and you know if you look at my whole career that's the one thing i've never done is you to join twitter dude twitter like succeeds despite itself i've already been there hard to go back cool josh thanks for coming on man and where should we be find you so is twitter the best way to place to follow you that's where where i follow you which is the best place it's at josh alt on twitter one l and also i blog when i do blog on medium and you have a couple good presentations i think people should go check out there was one you did at five hundred startups called weapons of mass distribution your talk was about like how to successfully grow on another platform without liking getting swallowed up by the platform and i thought that's a really specific topic that people should hear because you're like your company will grow and die if you don't get that right and it's like one are the best headlines i've read in long time i remember that very distinctly i don't remember the title but that was a good really good presentation i think you have one more i i don't remember if there's one more but i i would encourage people to go if they like the way you think of the frameworks to use around product and growth like you've put them out there it's just it's there to find go search his name and find some of those my latest one that i've been shopping this year is on onboarding it's longer onboarding always makes your product better yeah much to my grand as everybody's like hey we'd like to do an onboarding call for an hour and i'm like oh god can i just use your app and they're like no the data shows us that if we do this it's way better and i'm like i to find but what what's that one to call i'm gonna look it up have you put it out or you're tweaking it no onboarding it's called to make your product better through on through onboarding i think it's on the top of my medium right now that title is not as good as weapons of mass distribution yeah fair enough alright that's a wrap we're out of here and we're back in a couple days thanks guys