#121 - So You Made $100m...Now What?

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days off on a road travel never looking back okay we're live before we get into this do me do me a favor everyone google my first million itunes leave a review and then me and sean will read the reviews tomorrow and tell us what you want us to talk about so you guys can give us some ideas i've been reading the reviews a lot yeah you just tweeted out a great review you wanna then yeah so someone tried to insult sean and i and they said i don't have it up too i i here two star review from gl over it says these two hosts are an amazing example that's the bold part because it bold like the headline and i was like this is great what's what can go wrong so it says these two hosts are an amazing example of how someone could be totally mediocre below average everything and still achieve unreasonable success if they are free of self doubt and shameless enough yeah so this be a person clearly tried to insult us as being confident when we shouldn't be confident and that's well done insult too right a little you know a little no look insults a little no past i said it was great and i tweeted it out as like a sm way to be like you know f few we don't care and it's it's been retweeted and clicked on like five or i don't know how many five hundred times maybe and people thought i was like serious and it was like an inspirational like just do it which that's not what i was going you tweeted it out you go yeah hundred percent this get review of my podcast just summarize a lot of what i believe you can suck so many things is and still crush it if you're confident i don't get why this there's a too review that's okay thank listener and i think people were like you know like kinda like defending slash like yeah like sort of like taking it as a as inspirational moment although you were just trying to be a smart ass which is great yes it was a smart ass comment that's okay i i read our reviews constantly and that's like been the easiest way to understand what we should make each week right by the way do you wanna recap anything that we did in the last ten days i feel like we've had a pretty strong or interesting ten days yeah if fucking i can guest game strong man we had the the president of shopify we had ceo of lambda school we had josh el who's like kinda like a growth god in silicon valley do we have anyone on trump tax lady we had the trump tag we had tax girl come on who else do we have we had one more i think i'm forgetting somebody but yeah we went hard on guests which is always like you know fun but but bad at the same time like i love having different people on then at the same time i feel like it doesn't have that same tempo that we usually get with the ideas kinda r because we're we're self sufficient right which is important wearing we we have these guests we're definitely reliant on their goal but a few head highlights where what's land school guys name austin yeah great dude really like him he's a smart ass online but he's a great guy in person yeah i like one of the like things you remember that i i know one where he where you were like what are the odds that this fails and like you know they've raised their series c they've raised like hundreds of a hundred and fifty million bucks or more and he was like probably like fifty percent which i think was honest and probably surprising answer for a lot of people of like look there's still a fifty percent chance that's just flops this fitness is this fizz are are more more likely not fizz like crash and burn but you know the in this podcast i said you know with this business like if it doesn't do well it's just gonna make like pretty good revenue and pretty good profit forever right if it does well it's gonna maybe gonna be huge what you mean yeah yeah i was like what about you what what what's like the low end high end mid end outcome and he goes well it's probably like it's maybe gonna be massive or it's gonna just completely bankrupt up and i was like oh okay awesome least you know the game you're in yeah i like that so that i also liked how he told me about the act and sat business i actually did research on this there's like biz there's a company launched by this young woman who used to work at gl g that's consulting thing and i forget the name of it but they've raised a lot of money and they're trying to build a new standardized test so i think that's old and i love that so so that's certainly my highlight let me look it up like why you do that the other thing i like from his was the the mormon mission like i know if we spent way too much time talking about that but that was the most interesting part to me where you know hey i'm just like that's not my world you know he's you know i i've never i've never considered doing a mission like that i didn't know what what actually it entails i knew people go on it but i didn't know like so how does this shit work i he was like he made it sound like it's fucking like harry potter where it's like you know an owl comes in with a piece of paper and now you get you read the piece of paper it's like you're going to the ukraine and then you go to ukraine and you to get need a first learn to speak russian and then convince you know some number of people you know that jesus is is is is it and i was like whoa that's that's an insane thing that like is just normal in your culture in your life and and also what an insane amount of like discipline and resilience and like what a formative thing to do where you're like okay i have to sell one of the hardest things i have to live alone i have to learn a new language i to do this twelve hours a day like that's not easy and i thought that was like really interesting as i like boot camp for you know future business yeah i like how he was talking about that i just found him to be a very almost like a common man like an everyday man but at the same time very stoic pretty brave he was definitely an inspirational character and that company called imbalance and without doing too much research it almost is like they're using video games to like come up with like a test to see how smart you or something like that i've i've i overs simplified it but raise a lot of money interesting don't make your standardized tests service sound like the word embellished but okay yeah and then we had josh the application fees saying yeah how you know some colleges bringing in ten million bucks a year just on application fees yeah and he was like there's no solution or or something like that i also liked josh el josh el has done a bunch of interesting things but he's worked with a lot of titans and i found that to be incredibly fascinating if him working with those types of people and felt like a douche bag because i was like alright josh enough about you tell about all the people you are doing hey thanks for coming on we'd love to talk you about the great man you've been surrounded by it and and hear what what they're are like yeah was that but it was so interesting yeah and he's a good sport about it he he didn't mind the attention wasn't on him which i think is like kinda what you need to be to be like alright i'm gonna have a big impact but not be the ceo and founders like you kinda have to be low ego in order to do that role and have that career and and you know he didn't take it personally when we were like hey tell us about the hero founder like we wanna know what they're like too i thought that was great he was insightful we have a few topics one that you just put on but i wanna talk about yeah tom okay so it's a go ahead you're talking about hop hop okay so i put on this sheet this is what you meant guys missed before we start recording i wrote hop two billion and sam's like hop the events thing no what and so what why was that your reaction first it it's we're saying it wall it's hop hop in h o p i n yeah what am i saying i said something else may i said it wrong i i i think i said it wrong so what what why why'd did you write two billion what's going on they're were rumored or reported to be raising at a two billion dollar valuation and this is within eighteen months of lunch what okay so david david the guy who helped start it i i think he's a c or he's a c cofounder i don't know if he's like the guy or second he's the let's say his c cofounder founder he wrote for me for trends and he first launched wow okay so the says the ceo is this guy johnny b i don't know how you say that so who's dave tell me about dave what was his last name let me i forget his last name he he was just a he wrote he was a freelancer he's in the trends group and i met him online because he had the dave dave schools dave sc it's your founder he's a head of marketing and i i thought he had said c cofounder on his linkedin let me see head of marketing let's see sorry folks head him it says head a marketing before it said c fired like that's like i love you and you're great and you're definitely part of like the early team but like let's come up with a word that like like don't don't do i've done that before where i overs sold what i did before in the past and i'm like trust me it's a slippery slope you don't wanna do it because the place where you're trying no okay so what's interesting about hop is obviously covid shut down the kind of conference industry globally so there had to be something right zoom and and zoom or or something better than zoom that's for conferences and i saw this because there's a guy do you know sem shop yes i do well i i don't know him but i i know who he is i don't know him personally either but you know fellow brown guy in tech and he he does this thing every year where he tries to call one breakout company so i'll just take you through so like you know to be clear these are companies that are always already doing well right so he's not like calling up before they're doing well but he's basically saying like of all the companies doing well this year this is the like the golden goose company that's where that's really breaking out so twenty twelve if he picked stripe twenty thirteen he picked snapchat twenty fourteen he picked slack didn't do twenty fifteen do twenty sixteen twenty seventeen he did coinbase base twenty eighteen air table twenty nineteen was superhuman and for twenty twenty he picked hop yeah good hit rate i mean a hundred percent he's right every single time and you even if you had invested in all of those at that time at whatever high valuation they were you still would have been you still would have done great because they've they just continue to grow like monsters maybe not superhuman but so it's interesting because the conference industry basically got slammed with covid something had to become come out as a solution a whole bunch of people tried it looks like this is where the momentum is going is to to hop i i didn't know about this i didn't realize this was getting that big like a two billion dollar valuation and such a short short amount of time is pretty incredible and i haven't used it yet have you yes i tried signing up i tried making an event for us when when you and i were on that kick we looked at run the world and we looked at hop and frankly i couldn't figure it out run the world sorry folks it was not good but they were early so it might be a lot better now hop hop looked a lot cooler but it what when did we do this it was like right at the beginning of covid yeah and hop really wasn't that good either yet right and so so they they seem to have they said they had tens of millions a year in annual recurring revenue already and i think they had like hired a hundred and fifty people this year or something something insane going from like ten people to a hundred and eighty people so so where this data coming from from their deck this no this was in like the news when people were talking about how much revenue do they have said tens of millions as an arr that's what i saw i i don't know what that means so this is what's interesting to me is that this is like a lesson that i hate it was hard for me to learn and i bet no for sure what's hard for you to learn it was expensive for you to learn which was that the market is far more important than your product and it doesn't matter how cute or how cool you want your shit to be oh yes the market will pull it out or it won't another way of putting that is as a founder you like to think that you are the the controller you're making shit happen you're you're a surfer and you're catching waves and you're trying to surf that wave and like yes you don't wanna get eaten up you gotta be good at surfing and you gotta know how to time the waves and and whatnot but the the size of the wave matters a hell of a lot more than you know how good you are as a surfer and it doesn't mean that you can't make other stuff work like for example like the market for like sushi is not like crushing it or growing like crazy but it's like big enough that you could you could brute force your way and make something bad ass same with be you could you could have figured out some way to brute force your way and make something mildly successful but what the market wants the market wants and i remember using coinbase or no bin do you know bin it's the i don't know what it is what do you call it it's a it's a crypto exchange that's based of asia it's one of the biggest ones i think it is the biggest one and at the time when i used it in two thousand fourteen when crypto was all the rage it was really bad we were all using it though and i and same thing with this hop thing anyway i just rolled you i said eighteen months it says in less than eleven months end to end they raised their sea round a very expensive round and now another round value two billion dollars pre money and they went from zero dollars in revenue to tens of millions of dollars in revenue already this year that's such just so crazy and so this is just proof that like even if your product ish is kinda shitty if people truly need it and there's no other option they're gonna they're gonna come to you yeah so here's the here's like the idea okay how do you use this there's a whole bunch of other kinda like covid affected businesses that are out there and the one that we've talked a little bit about that i've actually been trying to pitch this one team but i advise to like go after is trade shows and so trade shows are similar to conferences but they're different in some key ways what's happened everyone today's sponsor is kind of strange and i'm gonna tell you why but first let me tell you what it is today's sponsor is az a z o r a s that's one word it's a youtube channel so youtube dot com slash az again a z o r a s it's a youtube channel that teaches you how to master your personal finances and take actions so if you just check it out what you'll see is stories some inspirational people and how they got there and the lessons they've learned along the way hamilton the founder he's gonna give a lot of practical advice on building big businesses creating wealth for yourself and as a bonus you're gonna see how hamilton is doing it himself he has a large mortgage company and it's pretty interesting so go ahead check it out az a z o r a s just google az youtube and you'll find it it's a badass ass channel and the reason this is weird is hamilton ke the guy in the video here you're gonna see the founder of this mortgage company he's a listener and he actually emailed me wanting to just do whatever i asked him to do and i turns out i didn't reply and say the email so he somehow got in contact with those assets ss and sponsors channel channel i love the hustle so check it out az a z o r a s youtube channel so just az youtube you'll find it there's a lot of people i know who who've never been doing a trade show and they don't know what the hell it is i just think it's kind of the same thing as an event or a conference and it's not right it's this place where business happens so you get vendors and then you get like sort of you get whole wholesaler and retailers right you get vendors and you get buyers and people are looking for okay you make this product cool i wanna sell a product like that in my stores my distribution and and so you know i i've been to a whole bunch of different trade shows and and just as a simple example there was a about i think i've told this in the podcast about a year ago i wanted to run a quick e commerce experiment a drop shipping experiment because i never done drop shipping and i wanted to actually try it because like part of the the drop shipping sucks because of like many reasons one of the good things about it is really easy to start and so i spun up a drop shipping experiment around i think i you this crystals i tell you about this no yeah yeah yeah you did sounds horrible yeah so basically there's all bunch of people especially hollywood celebrities and females like adele and gwyneth pal and stuff that like really promote the shit out of crystals i just watched the u like you know first episode for the bike and jared canton yeah the guy f find and robert whitaker fights with crystals if when he fights with he keeps them bottom them like when he trains he like sets him down at the map and like yes i i don't know like you use energy i don't know what zoom or he like worship them or whatever you even sort of crystal energy crystal healing all the stuff frankly i totally didn't believe in it but i was like okay you know let me try this experiment anyway so long story short i'm like okay where do i get crystals from i need a supplier of these who who am i gonna buy from to drop ship and and and i found that the only way to do this the best way to do this like you can go through like kinda alibaba or stuff like that but the best way to find a good supplier is to go to the gem gems trade show in tucson arizona that happens twice a year and has like sixty five thousand attendees who each pay you know for their ticket they pay for their travel they pay for their hotels then they go then they get there and they're basically looking to buy and so there's just huge amount of like transaction and commerce that happens at trade shows and i think somebody could build hop in for trade shows and i think i've told you once about the the experience i saw in the alibaba app and i tell you about this i had this magical experience so the biggest trade show is called the canton fair it happens in china yes it's like millions millions of people go it it lasts like two months or some crazy shit it's like hundreds of football fields long so you like start on one and you're walking it's like oh we make socks and there's like two thousand sock manufacturers and then like you get you get out of the sock partners like now we do pants and then you like find a hundred pants suppliers and then it keeps going and you know by the end you're at electronics and like d those some crazy shit and so the canton fair got shut down this year obviously because of you know the quote unquote china virus and so they were like okay how are we gonna do like how are we gonna do how are how are chinese manufacturers is gonna still do business and so alibaba by in their app and you know i'm probably one of the only people that has alibaba on their like home homepage of their their phone i opened it up one day and it was like trade show happening now and i clicked the button and it took me on this virtual escalator and it's like what floor do you wanna get off at electronics fashion babies like you know food like it's like hop off at electronics and it loads basically like a tiktok screen so it's like a live video full screen of this woman and she's at her booth at the actual fair but there's no guess so they lined up all the vendors and booths their booths are like ten feet apart so they're all socially distant each person had a webcam in front of them like i said up webcam by the by the the trade show and they were doing a live stream with their products and then i could be their catalog was at the bottom and i could touch an item on the catalog and like inquire and then she would you'd be like she'd see it on her screen and she'd pick it up and be like oh yeah you want this foot massage yeah look it's as a real lady like we life yes exactly and so i'm touching her catalog and she's showing me what items that they have and like pointing out the specs i could ask a question be like oh like you know what's the quote what's the price per unit on this and she's was like well i'd love to talk to you like hit the exchange business card button and then we'll be able to dm each other but for now you know roughly it's we have three models the premium and this and that and i'm like what the fuck is going on i didn't need to fly to china i didn't need to go to the canton fair i didn't need to like you know get an upset stomach from eating food you know in china for the next three weeks this is amazing and so i was like this is what like okay alibaba did that for their own suppliers but like who's gonna give that to the tucson gems stone trade show so i think that's a great idea that i given board you want a history lesson here jeez i ask i ability to look this up this is what i do you know what is never heard of it okay so you know who sheldon ad is yeah he's like a vegas of casino guy right yeah so sheldon ad pretty controversial because he's very very very pro israel to the point of like i i think he's one of the biggest fund and he like eyes newspapers in order to promote israel stuff so a little controversial for that reason but beyond that he in what did he start was it the does it say on here was it the bella what whatever the biggest hotel group in vegas he started it he's probably worth thirty or fifty billion dollars he started the las vegas sands corporation which i think owns like you know a bunch of owns venetian it is bunch so sands which is like one of the largest hotel groups in the world that's basically can casinos those in hotels they have the l the sands china they have like everything whatever he's just a big boss the way that he started that was he started the thing called com which was a trade show it's stood for it was like personal computers he started in the eighties eventually he sold it for a billion dollars to soft bank and it was renamed ces oh okay and i learned about him because i was very curious about him and he so he started this trade show business and they got to be so big that in the nineties or in the eighties before vegas was i mean it was right when vegas was kinda of taken off he was like man we gotta build their own hotel to house all these people and so he built like i think it was the las vegas convention center and then he built like a hotel and that is how he got into hotels it all started with trade shows and what he said he goes people never understood this jump from trade show business to hotel business but he goes to the same thing in the trade show business i'm in the real estate business and i'm selling real estate to vendors at at s dollars per square foot look at this picture doesn't this guy just look like a thirty three billionaire yeah i mean he's he and he's known for being like super cut throat i mean he's just like a poor hardworking immigrant who like picks no shit so right good with the bad anyway he also made charge single donation to trump five million dollars yeah he also bought a las vegas newspaper like and they say that he did it just to promote israel israel stuff which no judgment there i'm just kinda saying what what he what what he's being accused of what he's known for but pretty interesting guy and it all started with trade show so i'm very bullish on trade shows i love trade shows i've written about it on trends actually a lot there's so many companies that are way bigger than you think there's just one guy who started this business called the money twenty twenty have you heard of that yeah that's the trade it's an account like the fancy fan i thought was like a conference maybe i got that wrong it's a trade show okay yeah and it's for people who like stripe and anyone in finance tech and he sold it for two hundred fifty million dollars two years after starting it and then he did it again with shop talk you know shop talk i've heard of it and it's a former tech guy this guy and his partner worked at google and they were techie and they go oh fuck let's try the trade show thing and they just like create this template okay so walk me through so what's the i know you've about this so there's a blog post you wrote i think for trends or maybe somewhere that yeah if you go it for that but i'm gonna plug it go to trends sign up get the dollar the dollar thing and then type in trade show so so give us the how do they make their money is it the attendee like kind of ticket is it the vendors booths so you you do it one of two ways what you do is you get either the tickets or the vendors to pay profit or to pay your cost and then you make the profit off the other half right and so and so what you'll do is it's all about unit economics you say you know how many what would the average sponsorship be now how do i get all of them here and then how do i get vendor or attendees to make it worth their while and so for example some events this is not like a conference you don't always wanna do a conference where it's like you charge five thousand dollars like a ted talk you know ted doesn't make profit you know that event that doesn't do that well i mean it's good revenue but it doesn't like make that much money the real money and the trade shows the and the goal is that you have to make it in the so the the speakers at your trade show all those do all those do is pull in like minded people and then all the money is gonna be made over the transaction so you need people to gather in order to transact if you don't have that it doesn't make a lot of money hustle khan was a good conference but it's not massive because there's no transaction you have to have that transaction because you have to justify it to the vendor that if you come you're going to get more business therefore it's very easy for me to say it cost five grand a day for you to do attend right right and so the economics typically are that the that the vendors that you pre sell hey for the hard goods of the event and then all your profit comes on the back end with the tickets right and now let's say you're you're my friend james and james is a james here's this idea he's like oh shit i heard sean and sam talking about trade shows and the hop hop in two billion dollars oh let's smash those together i'm gonna build the trade show you know app that alibaba thing that sounded cool how would you go about actually like where would you go from there that you get the idea give me your next three moves i would have to remember one word liquidity liquidity is the word i would obsessed with is how do i get liquidity and what liquidity is defined as is transactions so lots of vendors lots of buyers what do i do to get liquidity without that it ain't shit it's worth well that's that's to run i'm saying let's say you wanna be the hop in two trade show providers to say hey use this for your trade shows how would you go about that well you have to help me get liquidity and what liquidity means is eyeballs or attention of the right people on your computer screen and you have to make it really easy for them to transact so what would i do first of all i wouldn't do this as like a zoom thing where you are just sitting there watching people talk that is not what i would do i wouldn't just you know make and make a conference online you'd have to re reimagine the experience sort of like alibaba did what would i do it's really hard i will say that i do think it's a multi billion dollar problem i don't know what would you do let me think i think the first thing i would do is i would be like okay who are those guys that did shop talk money antonio sounds like they came from tech and they do trade shows so maybe maybe i should talk to them and what i would talk to them about i'd say hey what are you doing for your trade shows in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one are you are you guys still doing it or or like what do you what is your current alternative due to like kind of the covid situation and has your business been affected by the fact that people are afraid to travel or not willing to travel or you your venues might get canceled if there's an outbreak or whatever so i would first try to understand that so i would try to talk to maybe five trade show organizers and i would ask them about how their business is doing and what's at risk due to the changes that i and by the way to piggyback back off that i would not talk to the most popular what i would talk to is the apartment southern california southern california apartment rent landlords trade show i would talk to the crystals trade show i would talk to right not not ces yes not money twenty twenty not whoever right like and in order to find those you look up the company inform and you look up the company i forget there's a couple of them one if you google blacks stone trade show acquired there's a company that blacks zone for trade shows just bought would look at all the boring ones and so you you you find these boring maybe start with the small ones i would start first talk about the problem see if this is even a real problem see if they're interested in something like this see if see if their business being affected if it is then i would try to figure out how do i attend a trade show so i would be like what's the next trade show i could attend to actually just go observe this and then the third thing i would do is i would scrape a list of as many trade shows as i can find and i would cold email them and i say hey i you know i i i'm i heard about you know your trade show looks awesome but you know with covid i know that things are quite uncertain have you thought about taking your trade show online or doing a digital trade show you can actually get more people to attend make more money and you know have way less cost and and and risk let me know if you'd be interested in and do that we're you know that's what we do as a company i'd i'd love to talk to you about i'll show you how we do it and i would try to you know see what the response is to some cold email to a list of you know hundred trade organizers and then i think after i did that all that i would know a lot more i'd know that this is either a terrible idea for these reasons or it's a good idea but it has this big risk or this big obstacle and that's what i need to focus my energy on overcoming one thing that at all these event people are turning to and i think it's a great idea is they're turning their events into online communities and i think that's the way to go and i will say that there is a there is an interesting opportunity there but the downside is that you're competing with facebook and they're doing a very good job at that so it's an interesting problem yeah i like it okay what wanna move on we got yeah you wanna talk about okay so here's i first you you have this thing called astro and i and i kinda i got a a story about that the founder of astro was introduced me via cold email like into cold intro and the guy who introduced me i don't know him and i was kinda rude to him i was like do i know you did i say this intro was okay i was in a bad mood so i hate when people do that but so that's how i i heard of astro with astra do you wanna talk about that yeah i actually i wrote it a while back so i i don't really know too much about it but it's basically it's a debit card to support creators and so you know i i don't know what they're there's a few people that are trying to do this basically trying to provide financial services to creators whether it's like funding or it's like a patreon type service or it's this which is a debit card for creators or like how does a youtuber get a buy a house well the traditional banks don't know how to value their their youtube channel they can't get a mortgage so like maybe we could do mortgages for creators like i think that's a very interesting space but it's one of those where my spidey sense starts tingling and it says think this sounds like a good idea and maybe a bad idea and so that's that's where i'm at it's not the very informed opinion i hear you on that and i i would agree that that could be the case in some of these examples but let's play the other side which is why it is exempt it is interesting and i'm gonna be a little ignorant here but i think the way the business model works is that mastercard gets what two percent her right there's some some exchange fee you or whatever they call it so then is the way this business works is that astro or another credit card partners with mastercard and goes hey mastercard you guys take two percent give us one yes and i'll get you more questions we're gonna layer you think that's how works okay so i think in general that is a model that a lot of these guys use i just went to the website so i had it a little bit wrong this is actually more interesting than i thought so what it is is okay so we could do this for example we could issue an astro card to any of our fans and what it says is hey fans as if you wanna support me just get the mastercard as you go about your daily life you can assign that some of your value like of what you're transact acting should get shared with me and so they're taking some of that margin that they get the you know the sort of these fees and they're sharing it with creators and so as a fan no extra cost to you and you get to support your favorite content creators that's you know where that idea is stolen from no so adam a lot of people do this but adam k was famous for doing this was he had this home this website called adam k dot com slash amazon and what he did was he put his referral link on his and he goes now remember listeners if you're wanna go buy anything from m amazon this go to my website click through because the way amazon used to work it might have been up to five days so if anyone clicked on it you're a referral link and bought anything within five days you got it used to be seven percent and so he always used to adam curl that are young younger he was like to joe ro before joe he was like it was like howard stern maybe adam k then joe rogan i mean was like the guy and he would always say click through adam k dot com slash amazon you helped support us you put a little bit of win in our sales which i stole that line and that's what he used to do so i think this is a a kind of an interesting idea because i used to click through and and buy it but clicking through and buying on amazon is it's a lot easier than applying for a debit card right that's hilarious so so i'm reading getting an interview about it right now says how did the amazon relationship come about did they approach you he goes i wish i knew i think we approach them i think our salespeople approach them and basically said you know like if we send people awake can we get a rev share and that's good cruel corolla yeah that's adam k talking i wanna see i i wanted to see how much revenue but but everybody made a shit time like here a huge audience he was like the number one podcast and that's what he would do all the time and this was adam corolla is actually really innovative he started doing paid podcast podcasts three or five years ago maybe it's maybe ten years ago actually and he has his own feed he had this thing called man g which is the man version of san g he would call it man g so and he's cool man i love out of corolla he's interested him but i like a lot of the stuff he did like i don't like listening to but yeah you know what's okay here's a here's a you know on the spot idea okay so what if there was a chrome extension right like honey you know honey big big popular chrome extension app saves you money what if there's a chrome extension that basically was like once a month your favorite creator can can recommend a product and basically like like for example i just bought like this let's let's say i bought this job tripod or i just bought this you know writing thing called if figure forgot the things called so remarkable the remarkable tablet and let's say i loved this thing i'm trying to remember the last product i really really love but let's just say i i really love that product i can basically make that my product the month and i refer it and i basically have a chance to kinda like put a little video and it's thirty seconds of be showing the product and saying why i love it and you know i do get an affiliate kickback on it but i'm only able to promote one product per month as an influencer there and so you know i'm sort of selecting what i what i think is the best product that's improved you know the quality of my life recently and and so anybody who installs the extension basically they follow like i say i promote it and it installs it it follows me but then it would also see you and like ten other people that are like also on the network that i could follow if i wanna get their recommendations as well and we get a we get a share of of that it's in it's interesting the the best example of this that i've seen is this website called i forget what it's called but basically they work with all the youtubers and i guess a common question amongst the youtubers is where what shirt are you wearing or what camera that yeah yeah yeah and so they made this website and all the youtubers put it in their profile where they like click to see my gear and they have like a pinterest page it says like here's what i use for everything here's the clothes i was wearing and people click through and buy and and it's really cool because like casey neistat dad had a pair of glasses and i was like damn those special edition ray bands or do who he like how did you do that right and so i like we looked at it and then you know when we did this podcast i was like what mike's always these people doing but the problem is is that with this affiliate model is amazon just changed their their structure and they just on a whim cut it in half right so here here's a different here's a different model of this have you ever heard of the company g fuel g but i like g fuel is is a energy drink that's that's marketed towards gamers and so it's big on twitch and i think they were doing don't remember the exact number i the founder i was like over thirty million a year in revenue it might have been eighty million or something like that was it was pretty substantial i know for sure it was over thirty million i think it might have been more and and he built the whole thing just straight up so what he did was you go to the top he went to the top switch streamers i don't know if this is the beginning of how he's got started but like he created an drink which is not that hard to do he branded it as g fuel as in gamer fuel i think it stands for and then he went to the top streamers and he was like look you're gonna have your own flavor and your own shaker that this thing comes in and so like i and you're my influencer and you need to put this in your twitch bio and whatever and at that time twitch streamers were like under priced arbitrage they had a lot of fandom a lot of audience and traditional sponsors didn't know how to work with them or they were like just putting up their logo and not like a real product and so they would send these guys tons of stuff so they'd be drinking it on stream that you'd see them drinking it and they basically made gatorade but for esports sports instead of sports and so i think you could do the g fuel model for a bunch of other things and whether it's like any other product that fits that lifestyle or it's something like what you're talking about where it's your gear so i think somebody could make a a d company that basically creates pre made kits so i could get the nike the casey neistat like the it's just a box of all the stuff you need to have his setup and we pre so so partner with the influencers and say hey you get asked about your gear all the time just put this here that says buy my gear and you can buy my gear it's a prem made box and it comes with a video like instruction about like how to set up the casey neistat stat like setup or how to set up the doctor disrespect setup or whatever it is there was a okay so not affiliate so you gotta go d to c you gotta own the relationship and you gotta be selling a box that's like hundred or more dollars worth of value because somebody wants to become a creator look up quarterly box i'm familiar with this one i thought this was a good idea but i don't think it took off the way crash and burned i think it was called quarterly box and it was like smart people would send you a box ferris had a box and i remember been like oh cool tim ferris has a box it was it was when the box trend was getting big and this was like what if your influencers could pick five products and you'd get it every quarter in a box that was the country it's a hard business it's a hard business it is a hard business but i know so many box companies that do amazing right like one of our listeners leland who does bump boxes that business crush he's great bump boxes there's another one called cause box but cause box cross means it gives you is bump box pregnant yes like baby box or the mom or the baby both it's like products that you're gonna need through your pregnancy and beyond and so like okay so that serves a need though sodas does that serves a need and a little bit so does as a pets one look up cause box good go to go to cup cause like like like for a good cause cause box outcome this business does like over twenty million a year in revenue the metrics are amazing and it's basically like we put well made products in this box and these are all like i don't know like either like ethically sourced cruelty free you're supporting the call somehow we donate you know a fridge to somebody in africa every time you buy whatever you know like this some story like that this business crashes and this there's nothing special about it in that that sense no like the yes there's failures and boxes but like there's also successes for sure what's that company that started as a newsletter and eventually became a monthly box and they make like five hundred million dollars a year started as a it was a not fab fit phone yeah that's the one yeah dude it started just like my company as a newsletter and now they do like it i don't know the box i think it's two hundred million i think it's two hundred which you're still insane but it's insane i don't know we need a hustle box i you know i i either need to launch a hustle box or a credit card that's what it sounds like i'd rather go with the credit card yeah exactly no but you've been talking about the credit card why don't you do the credit we talked about that like three years ago i don't know i just haven't gotten around to it i should do this podcast dead fuck it wish i should launch any listener who wants to build a credit card i think we should i think that credit card is actually kind of interesting i saw this other credit card it have been b if you had the vision right no i think the vision is simple i think it's more like the hoo spot yeah i mean that's like the hard part if you if you know that that's what that the market opportunity was really as that big to do the credit card for startups and that if you went bulk the wall it'd be like a multi billion dollar company you would have done it like of course hindsight tony i antonio nobody knew that shit ahead of time but there's another good one where in this woman who we interviewed to work here i was like alright impressed me like what your ideas is and she showed me she was like there's this company that's doing a credit card and they work with mastercard and they what they do is they tell you the carbon footprint of each purchase which i that's important that's not really important to me but for a lot of companies it's important because i think you can get special status if you have a low carbon footprint yeah just kind of customers i think some customers really care about it yeah oh by the way you should still do bricks you should still just do that exact same thing there's a lot of people that don't use them yet and there's other competitors but like whatever you should still do that business i think it's cool is b do buy the hustle and i wanna do these businesses on top of the hustle here's the problem it's not a problem but the hustle like any company well no i mean because we're an audience company the thing is that anything that we launch well at least do mildly okay right they're well there will be two thousand people who buy everything we do no matter what ten thousand people more likely than that the problem is is that you have to prioritize or or spin out do you know what i mean it's all about focus which is i mean you have a lot on your plate are you focusing on it my i focusing on one thing no and what's better not focusing or focusing trick question focusing yeah for sure for sure focusing is better there's to me there's this like i don't know you ever seen like in design thinking there's these like two phases well and and you know those guys from id and and the people who design thinking world they have this like concept of diver and converge into this little diagram of like first you diver you go broad and then you converge and you like you settle on on the solution and so at a brainstorm they say alright we're diver right now and that's the time i like any idea is a good idea don't filter anything don't say well no that's bad because of x y z like we're just trying to get all the ideas out there and when we converge we're trying to actually like filter down and get laser focused on what we're actually gonna do and so i think that in life that happens too sometimes where sometimes you dabble and sometimes you diver and sometimes you been up a few experiments and you you let things get a little bit messy and you you you don't focus and then you go through periods of laser focus after that once you realize what you wanna do and like for me i went from i went six years of laser focused straight to up a period of experimentation dabbling it's like i'll start podcast and like cool i'll invest in companies and like i'll try these things and then i'm gonna like trim and cut and focus once i like learn about them i agree with that i mean i agree with that i think i think that acknowledging that you're on focus because you're trying to figure out what to focus on is totally a great plan right are you learning that are you what are you gonna focus on what's gonna be the the the thing okay so my my rule is like a eighty twenty rule eighty percent of my time and energy and focus goes on my main business and twenty percent is gonna go on my my side hustle or my hobby so for me my side hustle or hobby is content content production whether whether it's through this podcast or my newsletter or whatever else then eighty percent is on the main thing which today is twitch right that's like my main day job and so even over so i like that balance and so over time you know that's what i wanna get to like i don't think in the long long run which is gonna be my eighty percent and but for now it is and when that switches it'll be like my business whatever my business is will be my eighty percent and my twenty percent will always be content and and audience stuff in our last ten minutes i'm gonna ask you a question that's somewhat related it's gonna not seem related but it is but do you think about what you can make that will last like a hundred years like for example when you were working with lab did you think like let's we just gotta get traction and make it work or was it did you even at all think about longevity no i did not longevity in the sense of like i thought longevity meant like is this gonna be around next year do wanna spend two years on this through could this be a five year arc definitely not the like hundred year thing and i think when ceos is say that like i remember the ceo of evernote said that oh we're trying to build evernote as we we plan this out as a hundred year company and that's sounds good and that's cool i don't think that's actually like that functional like on a basis it's definitely not at the early stage like it's not that that great of a question there's many better questions to ask yourself and i think for the most let me sell don't think that way let me change i agree with you to say like evernote but but here's why by the way he's working on sort of a shit now and like you know sure the company might might still be around it's been like outs stripped now flank by shit and others here's why here's why he's working on something else is because he raised all this money and that company's is no longer his okay maybe that's why like for example what i've been thinking about is how do you create something and it doesn't have to be the same thing i just learned about this hr software that was built in eighteen eighty originally as like you know they did it just by paperwork and they doing machine right it just like changed from one thing to the other thing and i i just there's something i've been i've been finding incredibly fascinating about just like compounding growth and how do you make something that like for example my father owns a moving company and he bought it from someone so this moving company has probably existed for fifty years and we'll see like you know with people getting laptops like they there's less commercial stuff for them to move but like someone always needs to move and i think like what can i make that there will be demand for the next fifty to a hundred years or you know it's kind of interesting yeah i think you know i think that's a good one which is just like is this a fad is this or is this like something that will the demand for this will always be around right like bezos has this thing or he's like you know instead of because people always asked jeff bezos like you know where do you see retail going where do you see e commerce going in the next ten years he's like look we try not to like predict the futures as much as we predict what's not gonna change like customers are not gonna want slower you know they're they're never gonna stop wanting faster shipping they're never gonna stop wanting the best prices and they're never gonna stop wanting ever you know ever increasing variety of choice for what they can you know what they can buy they they wanna have they wanna be able to get get all the stuff and so those are the things that are not gonna change so we're gonna spend like the next decades making shipping faster and faster getting prices lower and lower three economies of scale and making sure that we we sell all the products that people wanna buy and like i think that's a that's a that's a really powerful way of focusing the company is like those three those three levers we can pull to infinity and our customers will thank us and have ever the he's like the best thing about customers is they have high standards and they you know they're never happy and so you know what two day shipping now but like when we have two hour shipping two days will feel like an eternity and then the want twenty minute shipping and then the want two minute shipping is like where where we need to get to so i think that's like a cool way of thinking it's a good thing to ask because i'm noticing something so our company our name main thing turned four in may and i'm like man like i wish i would have done it this way from the beginning and i'm like well what can i do what what can i do now that's the beginning that in four years i'm gonna be like yeah this was the right way to do it what about ten years and then i'm also doing this other thing where i'm living in airbnb and i'm like man i've bought so much furniture and thrown throwing it away over the years what would happen if i either a just bought close to nothing and b only bought stuff that would last for fifty years right like would i'd be happier and richer and i think the answer is yes right yeah i like that you know okay so so your question triggered a bunch of thoughts in my head one one other way of looking at that question is like i'll tell you the ways i ask questions like that one i ask right now is is this a finite or an infinite game i don't know have you ever read that book finite and infinite games truth you told me neither but read the first twenty pages and got the concept basically you know like a finite game is one like like basketball is a finite game there's a fixed set of rules there's the you know ninety four feet court four quarters twelve minutes each five players on each side and you're trying to the the game ends at a certain amount time you're trying to win that's the point the game is to win and it achieve achieve the outcome and then you have like infinite games like a relationship is more like an infinite game where it's like or like monopoly risk you know it's a game that you intend to play forever the rules are ever changing you play for the sake of playing not for winning there's no such thing as winning and like i think it's a really powerful concept because you wanna play more infinite games for two reasons one is you when you play a finite game you're playing for an outcome when playing an infinite game you're playing for the sake of play like that's how we think about you and me in the world of business right like we just it's play to us we enjoy doing it we enjoy talking about it enjoy investing in it we enjoy all factors of this it's an infinite game that we're just gonna keep playing regardless of what outcomes we're getting and then you and then when you play infinite games you have to be highly adaptable to rule changes and stuff like that so a similar way of thing think about that is when i do a project now i think if money was no if i had a hundred million dollars what i do this and that's a question i asked this guy who he got acquired by twitch also their company got acquired for you know over a hundred million dollars and he was still at twitch four years later and i asked him i said why are you still hear you've surely you've vested out by now you know i know you didn't get that whole summer of money but like and he was like oh i love it here i love the job blah blah and i was like i know this guy's job was like very like stressful and like hard and like a lot of work and limited in power like he wasn't in charge of the company like he didn't have full autonomy he was working on like you know back in infrastructure stuff and like kinda compliance and security and you know gnarly things not like what most people think it was fun and so i go i was like so why are here and just tell me oh i love it i'm growing i love my team i love the customers i love the blah i asked a bit different question i go let's say you had a hundred million dollars in your bank account tomorrow would you show up to work here and he goes well you know i was like no would you like would you continue to do this job if you had a hundred million dollars he goes well no i would probably go build a video game i was like oh okay so like you're here for the money right like all those things you said are true but i just changed one variable the money i didn't change any of those other great things you said and now you don't wanna be here anymore right and so like it's okay to be honest like i do a lot of you know know shit for the money but i as i started to think about it i so i ask myself what would i do if i had all the money and then like i should just do that thing now because the money will come anyways do regardless which path that go down and i think that's a start to stick to that but i do think that's the right advice for myself i asked myself that question all the time and i always get to depressed i'm like i don't know i don't know what i would do like i i like alright let's see like you have a hundred million like i think i would buy a a really fancy car in a very small house big car tiny house else well like like yeah i if the bigger of your house the more work it is sure i don't know what i don't figure forget about what you what would you do with your time i don't know i don't have any stuff what would you do like what what are some options because okay well let let's pray you upgrade you have a hundred million dollars in the bank and you have your free time how old are you breathe i'm twenty seven twenty seven what do what do you do what comes to mind i don't know like i was thinking about this the other day too like i have no idea i think most people don't see the answer to don't don't you think we should know this right because not that we should have a answer right maybe there's no answer but like don't you think we should think about it because we're we're working so fucking hard for financial freedom right and then we don't know what the hell we would do forget it right it's like that joker line like you know i'm the i'm the dog chasing of the car if i caught it you know i wouldn't know what to do with it isn't that crazy to me like that that seems why it is i think it's incredibly crazy but i think it's the truth i think the fun is in the pursuit like there's something in the journey like i i told sam i'm like if you ever you know whatever sold the hustle or whatever he would go and start another company like he couldn't like not work at like at something for sure i'm i'm starting shit till like die but it it it would be like what like for example there's his guy in alabama and he has this thing called the barber race racetrack and the barber museum and he he inherited his father's milk dairy business and then he sold it for like five hundred million dollars and then he opened up a motorcycle museum and a motorcycle race track and it's a profitable venture but i'm like i would do that probably that's what i would do that's cool i like that you know the guy i worked with michael birch he basically had this right it got all the money that that you can ever spend in a lifetime and then i observe what did he do and he basically did i would say three things one he's he started an idea lab because he's like dude i'm gonna stop building new shit but like no i'll do it on my terms right i'll never go pitch for money again i'll just fund the bank myself and own it a hire great people that i wanna hang out with a build a dope office like you saw the office in san francisco that the office is amazing it's probably had five million dollars furniture in there yeah exactly and you know i have a per chef who cooks us lunch every day and i'll work with great people who work on ideas right so that i was pillar one was ideal lab pillar two was he's like hold on yeah did did that make a profit or no no okay so that was a fun thing that whatever yes well it probably it probably close to no i don't know it's close to break even not not bad but okay you know could've have if you just put that money in the market it would have done way better yeah so so that that was true but again he's not trying to make money like the the idea of would would have rarely been able to move the needle for him financially obviously he wanted it to be a financial success but so pillar two was he started the battery which is basically he bought an old candy factory a sixty thousand square foot candy factory and turned it into a member's club basically designed a hotel like you know he won't he he always was fascinated with architecture and and spaces and designing spaces and like designed to kind of a dream kinda like hang out spot and then invited a bunch of members and so then he was just hanging out with cool people all the time like you know some of them are like celebrities and whatnot like you know when beyonce in town she stays there you know justin bieber stays there leonardo to cap i bumped into them at the battery right like that's cool but there's also just like other you know like i think a third of the memberships went to like artists and like other people who you know weren't kinda rich and famous does that make a profit or a breakeven even that it will never break even because the huge capex but on a like every year it's it either covers its costs or profitable but he put a lot of money into like buying the building retrofit fitting it seismic retrofit and you know in california his earthquakes and then went way over the top like you know the elevator was a two million dollar elevator like you know he he went over the top with everything and so recovering that money i think would take a lifetime but he didn't care he he basically said i don't care if this ever makes my money back i'm not doing this for profit i don't want to constantly bleed a lot of money where i start to stress so if this just breaks even once we open the doors i'm cool and and it's done more than runs it he went through i think six general managers before finally finding you know whoever runs it now and that was a hard part but you know that's the stressful part of the job okay the third thing was phil slash like i even put his angel investing in in that bucket but phil so he he's probably given over ten million dollars to to charities like charity water and whatnot even over telling him i was just a charity water probably and i always asked him like you know what do you like doing nowadays he's like well i still like building stuff like he he relearn to code you know recently because he just likes to build things he liked working with us in the idea lab and he's like but the best thing i've ever done is the work with charity water and he didn't mean that in a fluffy way like there's no interview like i was just hanging out with him asking him a genuine question and he goes with them to africa like multiple times per year takes his family there and gets to see the impact of their he's like by far that's the best thing i've done and he's friends with the family is i live now listen doing they moved to the caribbean i saw his house for sale for like twenty five million dollars he moved to the british virgin islands yeah he bought an island and then in the b and lives there what a weirdo what a cool sound india and so that's cool and is he happy what's that is he happy yeah he was a happy dude he was happy before he was happy after like the money he was like you know you know just allowed him to have cooler shirts he has like some pretty sick shirts and but but you know for the most part he was a guy before and you know at paul graham the founder of comb he he kinda did something recently where few years ago where he put somebody in charge of y comb and then he like retreated to the woods in in the uk and like just wanted to write and like i think he's like either he's writing a new programming language or was just writing essays and he was like just living in the woods with his family and like that was his version of like you know i got it all what do i do to be happy and so i think for everybody it's worth asking your question of like what's your version of the retreating to the woods in the uk and just being happy well we can end there i would love to hear other people's version of like the best example of someone living your best life you doing whatever to make them happy after the like it's like there's a great story where it's like an american visit to a resort town and this mexican guy takes him out fishing and he brings back three fish and the guy go the american businessman who's on vacation goes man this is a great thing you know you should you how many of these do you do a day and he goes i just do one for every couple of days and like guy i goes why you should do five a day and you could make this much money and then hire these people and then the the mexican guy goes why and he goes well because then you're gonna grow at this much money and then this money and by your fifteen you're gonna sell for this much money and he goes well why would you do that so you could sit around and fish all day and the guy goes but i do that right i already do that it's like relax this all day to hang out with their family at night he's like that that's that's what i do currently it's like i just all i do i mean i just fish and i get you one i get me one and that's a weed on and anyway it's a great story i would love to hear what people's examples of that our real life example showed our friend su who's you know ten times more successful than either of us and he texted me something the other day because i showed him i gave him kind of like a life update i was like hey i'm doing this and this and here's how what's going and he just goes wow like i'm so happy for you he goes he goes and i i kind of was like downplay playing it because you know i was like well you know it's still a long way to go kinda comparatively into like what you've done and what you're doing and he was like no dude you're living your best life he goes there's two people who are living their best life you and sam par goes and so i don't i don't know even know what he meant by that but he says that to me about you all the time it is like that like hey it's like a great compliment and be you kinda wanna live up to it it's like fuck man what is my best life i'm like yeah what if instead of comparing myself to all these people like what if i just what is me living my best life with you know and and that's what everybody else tells being i'd never know if he's being patronizing or if he generally is like the happiest person have met but he says that should me all the time which is funny because his brother like wants to murder everyone yeah you me yang so it's an interesting family thank you everyone for listening leave us review please we'll read them alright see you alright bye bye