#122 - Not Getting These Jobs Cost Us Millions

yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking bad alright we're gucci what's up sam how are you hey our friend noble just hopped on the podcast we were checking in with him the summary it seems like as we except for sean many of the crew is gonna be in austin in the next two weeks three weeks yeah that's exciting i'm kind of rooted in here now so all of my old family lives here so i'm like okay i'm not gonna move for like tax reasons or whatever reasons i don't wanna be around my family if your family's not here there's no point being in the bay area right now i think that what i've learned doing this whole airbnb thing i'm in nashville now i was in utah i was in all these places having your family and friends around you is significantly better than being in a cool place by yourself for sure absolutely people always was asking because i i lived in all these different cities where i i've lived in like ten or twelve different cities around the world whatever jak and and australia and stuff like that and people like oh which one was your favorite it doesn't matter it's just based on like who my four friends were when i was there that dictated my whole experience it's like city fine you know city my best but who cares you lived in china i would be interested in china i would be really interested right now and moving to japan for a little while even if i didn't i know anyone i think the japanese are so cool you you didn't live japan did you no but when i lived in beijing i played sports and the weird thing when you go to international school i didn't realize this but you don't like play sports against other schools locally you play against other international schools so when we would we had have like a away game we would go to osaka and we would go play against the osaka international school or we'd go to the philippines for an away game and you would go and you actually live with the family of the player on the other team so you live with them and then you play against them in their two or three times and you fly back together it's an amazing thing so last episode you said something that shocked me you said you referred to corona as like the china chinese virus and you made a couple slight towards china you've lived in china are you anti china no i was mocking on anti trump i was just mocking trump how long did you live in china two years so like we're not talking about the chinese obviously we're not talking about the private people in general because obviously of course you're not anti that but are you i just come out as racist on this episode i'm like yeah i haven't told you guys yet but are you are you i mean i'm i'm i i had i same same thing was saying earlier i had a amazing time when i lived in beijing because i had amazing friends and we had a blast with chinese or inter they were other international students at that school some of which were chinese and some of which were from sweden and other places i was gonna go live somewhere i never go live in fishing right it's like super crowded super polluted there's no like natural beauty really in the and kind of the surroundings there's no like kinda oceans or beaches or or or mountains to then you can really see or speak of and like the food is hard the language is hard like it it's just like a not an easy place to go live whereas like australia was like completely pleasant and easy and like it felt like a vacation so i would be anti going and living in china again unless i had a really strong reason to but i had a blast i was there just because of my kind of social situation when the covid started getting popular in december i had this chinese intern named hung who worked for us and in december he was like man my parents live outside of wuhan and they're telling me about how bad this is it's gonna come it's gonna be here i go hung okay whatever and then in january he goes it's so bad it's gonna be here i go hung this is america okay k we don't have sars and bird flu we don't do this we don't wear masks that's a beijing thing and then you were right about that we don't wear masks you know and then in february he goes it's here k watch it's gonna shut it down and they go whatever you're so wrong and then finally in march i was like hung i'm sorry you were you were so right and he was telling me he goes my mom and dad are texting me from wuhan they're telling me all about it i go whatever dude it's like like the cole it's a cole and anyway it was pretty funny so we like he totally like predicted this you wanna get into some ideas i came started oh love it i could see you you're you added a bunch alright give me one okay so i got into this idea of tiny home i've been very fascinated with it it's not like a particularly new thing when i was younger we'd call them trailer homes because that's what my grandparents lived they lived in a trailer home and it was just a home map was pre fab pre made and they dropped it off on a trailer and it was just is kinda like what port oh we are poor it was a poor person thing now i think that these are gonna get quite big and a new startup called a bow a bad b o d u they just raised a a few million dollars a bunch of these tiny home businesses have raised a few millions of dollars and now that i'm thinking about it like homes it seems like a pretty interesting alternative you can buy a five hundred to fifteen hundred square foot modular home and it's kind of a cool idea and i've actually met people who are buying plaza of land and putting it on outdoors and they're like making money off of it and now i'm like man i should do that with one of these modular homes and and here's why there's this new startup called getaway have you heard it no collectively getaway a where you looked this up but a getaway i think has raised forty million dollars and i've had family that have went stated and they love it it's a tiny home in a small plot of land outside of new york city outside of austin outside san francisco outside of chicago whatever the popular cities are and millennial people go and they get away from the city and they spend two hundred dollars a night or whatever it is and it's like a cute instagram home right and they're doing well and anyway i think this is a really interesting market and i'm i love it i like this one as well i also i like how when you go to getaway away dot com it's like escape from like that's instead of like we're you know like where you traveling was like i escaped from atlanta escaped from boston to stayed from new york yeah we've seen this trend there's also rent the backyard so i think it looks like a and rent the backyard are doing the same thing which is their pitch is not like outdoors or whatever theirs is put a little pre fab unit in your backyard you know your own little in law unit that you can use to live in or rent out and so you could turn your backyard into an airbnb without having guests come you know into your house and we've actually written about this on trends and we wrote about it when to we right about we wrote about this september two thousand twenty so somewhat recently very recently and we were looking at backlink data where we were looking at searches so it was something like a quarter of a million people were searching for modular homes a month there's dwell toledo which is an online marketplace for modular homes recently launched there's just a bunch of interesting stuff about these modular homes we call them the cute name for millennials or young people gen z is tiny homes but when i grew up we call them trailer homes i think this is so cool maybe i should do it by a pla lane in austin and get one of these modular homes i think you can get a mortgage on them too yeah they're not that expensive how much are they i think they're like hundred grand fifty grand list two hundred thousand dollars for this new startup up one and if you look it looks like these are like amy grand roughly i was attracted to this is you know kid rock of course you know kid rock i remember reading this article about when it was pretty funny he bought this huge pla of land in rural alabama on a lake it was like beautiful plot of land and he's like i just wanted to get away because he lives at nashville he's was like i just wanna to get away and have my own plot of land and he goes i was gonna build this big old house and i was just driving on the road and i seen a trailer park like a modular home salesperson like a lot that sold and he goes i'll just buy one of them to put on my land while i went from my home to get built and he put this fifteen hundred square foot trailer home there and he was like living at it and he's was like oh this is great this perfect i don't need anything else i don't need it any more space this is exactly what i need i was like damn that actually is pretty cool maybe we should do that i'm with you i like this trend personally i wouldn't build in this in this space because i don't know enough and i i just think that it's like there's an authenticity that comes from people who really like this lifestyle or have a background in this lifestyle or i want this lifestyle so i personally i wouldn't build in what do you think or do you think there's any opportunities here so what where would you get let's say you're like like you you're into this trend so you're like okay i might buy one of these and live in it slash rented out so that's like a simple opportunity would you start a start up in this space do you think are some of the open open opportunities yeah so there's a couple the first is backyard offices that is very very cool to me there was this company called the phone booth maybe got ryan launched this guy ryan peterson from flex actually launched it on the side and they made a foam booths for your office because those are really expensive and then when covid hit i think he was like let's just make backyard offices so i think backyard offices are amazing i think i would totally invest in that space or if i didn't have a job i would for sure be interested in that i think that there's always like i don't wanna sound like some start douche bag and be like oh this is totally new this is like i said this is tray a trailer home this is not new but i think there's a lot of money to be made in rep packaging something and on an old thank cute yeah i think there's a lot opportunity they're just a start one of these business is yeah i like it i like backyard offices i think that's pretty pretty smart because that what you could do there is basically you could have one and then you could make it a c you know a mini distributed c working space you could sell the the backyard office and then you could basically make it where you have the outdoors type of landing page where somebody can come and search for a backyard office near them but they can go work out of and you can turn people into a little mini we work you know landlords i also need to check my perspective i don't know if it's because i'm doing it and therefore i think everyone's doing it and i don't know if it's because i'm where these like yep city dwell startup nerds and a lot of people are doing it but i do think that there's this idea of people rh age or younger not wanting to permanently live somewhere and not wanting to buy a home and not wanting to own a lot of stuff yeah i think there's in general been a move towards rent versus own just in terms of housing but like why would i own a car when i can just uber on demand and use get what i need when i need it and then not own it after that not owning stuff but in general i just need just there's just not so many people right so like if you're in this lifestyle category there's plenty of others that are in that category even though i'm the opposite right like got a kid yeah know i'm not trying to be moving every three weeks like i'm living the exact opposite lifestyle as you but it doesn't really matter there's a lot of people like me and there's a lot of people like you and there's a lot of people in all these other categories too there's enough that you can serve them and that actually is where some of the opportunity comes is where somebody doing a generic catch all solution and you say i'm gonna build for this lifestyle segment i think there's a lot of people who are like me who who wanna do this i agree and then for the listeners and you sean there's this town that i i almost invested a small amount of money in and i didn't do it it's called ce go c e r r o space g o r d o ce go and nathan barry the guy who owns convertkit kit a few of my friends that i've just met over the years just internet entrepreneur type folks ryan holiday do you remember a ghost it went viral in two thousand thirteen or fourteen it was a ghost town that went viral on all the blogs and it said you can now buy ghost town in california for one point two million dollars do you remember that no but i've i heard about it later i i didn't hear about at the time so my friend ryan and all these guys my friend john was like the ring leader him and brent and they were trying to get like ten thousand to twenty five thousand dollars ahead and we're all gonna pitch it in by this town and i backed out but a lot of people did it and they bought this ghost town and it's like four hundred acres it's like four hours from la and it's very hard to get to but it's beautiful it's so beautiful and there's it's an old ghost town from the nineteen probably eighteen eighties is when they it was built and it's so beautiful and pretty well anyway the guy named brent brent runs this thing called the daily stoic with ryan holiday it's a cool business he has been living there i think for the whole bit of covid so starting in march he went out there built and he's currently retrofit fitting it by himself in the middle of nowhere turning it into like a getaway town that people can rent and i think it's really interesting and fun and he has a youtube channel that you guys should all check out and you could watch it in real time of what he's doing it's so fascinating this is amazing i love the story and i wanna go watch that and see what's going on have you haven't been there yet no but john bayer who has asked me to come on this podcast we'll have to get him on he's been asking me constantly but did you see the photos of what this place looks like well i see the photos where it was like a ghost and like i see these black and white photos i don't know what it looks like now so one of the places burned down unfortunately but this guy it's such a like romantic story brent underwood is that him brent underwood yeah so he's ryan holidays business partner rin holidays is an author who does all just os and stuff brent is his partner and they have good a good little business whatever this is like his vocational now he's like dedicated to restoring this town and he's doing it live on youtube and you could watch him do it in his youtube videos probably have millions of views and the day that they're able to host people there for money he's gonna knock it out the park this is amazing also quick update remember we talked about nathan res from source during the bubble hotels which i bailed on so this guy nathan he has his business he pitched a hotel business where it was like a bubble that you could rent and it's pretty cool but i didn't think he was gonna focus on a full time so i bailed but go ahead so the indie go campaign just launched so the other idea of the bubble hotels of these cool like sort of like glam this camping experience that you're in this like little bubble dome kind of thing instead of a tent and you know you get to sleep under the stars and it's like in joshua tree it's amazing so he just launched his indie go and the goal was twenty five thousand and he's at two hundred and eighty six thousand i checked it last night it was at like a hundred and fifty thousand or something like that so he had like a hundred thousand dollars today so far on this thing it looks like it's got a lot of momentum and basically he's pre selling like one night stay two nights stay three night days and he's basically gonna bridge bootstrap and fund pre sale and fund this entire hotel in joshua tree which i think is kind of amazing so the way that i would think about this is there's this idea called i'm stealing it someone i didn't invent this called the four fits which is a growth that this idea for idea a company and the guy who invented it his name's brian bell ford he helped make hubspot popular and he has this thing called them channel market fit not product market fit and channel market fit basically just says you need to think about where is your product gonna get popular and then adapt your product to fit that pop like where you can get popular and when i think of this bubble hotel we all think the same thing which is instagram and pinterest this is gonna be so easy to get customers well here's another kinda like channel market fit example the music industry is changing because a tiktok to make like shorter catch your songs the average song length has actually gone down why because spotify just pays you per stream not per minute streamed so is that a five minutes for a song they're doing two and a half minutes per song because why would i want a long song and the second thing is tiktok so a lot of songs are now being written working backwards from okay if this was gonna go viral on tiktok how would i do well i need to make it have a dance baked into it so the song is saying like put your right foot photo up what you know what i mean like they're trying to engineer the song so that it's gonna spread on tiktok and i think that's a great example of channel market fit channel that i think that's the that's like a very simple way to understand the importance of what that is what else you got you have like yeah i have one here so i saw a tweet from somebody whose twitter handle is tony i don't know who this is is t o i okay no bio but at t i and the tweet said you know what what like it's kind of about the stock market right so the stock market most people who invest in companies they will invest you're not just investing in what's a great company you're investing in what will the market think of this company so it's called a like a mckinsey and beauty contest you are judging the beauty of an asset not based on how beautiful it is to you but how beautiful you think it will be to the other judges of the contest and so that's how the stock market works and so tony had this tweet which was just like you know what if there was a market where you can bet on the fundamentals instead of the price so instead of investing in tesla today because i think that tesla has all this like retail momentum and its price is gonna go up if i was just betting on how many cars will get bought like tesla in the next six months and if i'm right i get paid and i you know so it's like over or under this number and if it's over then i'm right but it's on the fundamentals it's on real world business metrics and not perception and kind of like random price fluctuations based on investor moods i think this is kinda cool you know maybe there's something like this that already exists but i actually think it's a pretty provocative like simple idea that to me has legs this is sorta like when we talked about the long term stock exchange as like oh this is a cool different model for how a company might wanna might wanna be listed where it's not subject to the swings of the moods of the market what do you think of this i think that you love these ideas and i struggle to grasp them because they're very innovative and they're very not straightforward to me that's hard to understand can you explain to me more so let's say the hustle let's say the hustle is a publicly listed company instead of people betting on the hustle based off of instead of buying your stock because i think your stock price is gonna go up and i think it's gonna go up because other people are gonna buy it and you know you're gonna announce some new products and all this good stuff if it was literally just a prediction market that says will the hustle have over under fifteen million dollars in revenue and then you just say like this year for example it is a verifiable measurable metric and if i am bullish that man i think the household has got a great team i think this product they launched is gonna do really well i think they're gonna go over i can bet on the over and somebody else get bet on the under and then i can make money on the hustle you know as a prediction market rather than as i stop how is this any different than just gambling i mean this is just gambling it's gambling but it's gambling on the outcomes of companies rather than on horses or course right right you can't do this today yep you know so it's an old solution to sort of an old problem away but then why wouldn't i just buy stock and tesla if i'm betting so so this is the big grip a lot of people have about tesla because they're like okay tesla can literally report a bigger loss this quarter and the stock goes up and they're like what the fuck what is going on like i did you not read the numbers like jessica because elon went and did a cool presentation about some you know self driving and he says it's gonna be here by christmas and everyone goes and buys it like it would have been better if you could actually pick folks sweet done joe rubin right yeah yeah exactly why is the price fluctuating based on these things rather than how many cars got bought and you know and so you don't wanna value the whole company on that right because there is a some companies have such high prospects that you'll you'll say okay i will bet that in the future they'll be worth more than they're produced from today so it's not like you don't want their valuation to be based on it but it would be nice to be able to just bet on this so which i think crypto was trying to do in a way there's these different prediction market things that a really complicated i like that i think it's cool i'm into it i think that's pretty innovative and pretty interesting that's cool i think that's a it's a hard ass business to make happen because you have to and i don't even wanna talk about it because i'm so ignorant but i guess you just have to be really good odds makers or do you well yeah so you you could need to be odds makers or the marker will also settle right so if a whole bunch of just like no normal odds so a book tries to place the place the bets place the odds at a marker that will draw action and then it corrects so if everybody's betting the over then the lock the the the number goes up right automatically so then unless people start betting it over because the number went up and so so you would just need to do that just like a normal betting service that's interesting who's this tommy guy i have no idea there's no bio and but got a four letter handle with the verified check and fifty thousand followers so probably this idea probably somebody go now this idea could go viral and i would do it immediately if i was ever gonna do it because the robinhood hood nerds who are into this shit are like ra right now right which is hilarious there's a great little blog post by the way that i recommend you check this is guy he actually works at amazon yeah he writes a thing called the flywheel it's subs did this great article about breaking down the robinhood business model check it like do you know how them i think you know this but i would say most people don't do you know how robinhood had makes money no i i don't i don't know anything about so they came out and they were like you know free trades right that was like kinda like the initial i was like oh wow you're you're a man of people thank you you're giving us free trades all those other guys go and so then the question was like how you're gonna make money if you offer free trades that they do is a thing if for know it's called exactly it's called payment forward order flow or something like that which basically is when you place a trade they basically sell that trade data information in real time to hedge funds and quantitative traders who wanna know what retail buyers are trying to so for whole bunch people average people with you know thousand dollars in their robinhood account are going and buying tesla because they saw some good news today or or whatever from elon before that trade get executed the order flow is sold to hedge funds and quantitative you know traders who want to front run the market so they want to actually go place a bunch of bids before that retail traders bid even gets placed and there's a small pennies that they can sort of take per trade as an advantage by having that advanced information by front running so i'm not criticizing them but on first instinct my bullshit detectors alarm just goes off so hard where i'm like it's fine i'm not just like why over complicate things why like can that actually work why not just charge the retail investor money because they're hooked to get users was hey it's free to trade right that's how they grow what yeah but my whole thing what i thought they were gonna do is just do that for a while and then be like alright now we're charging you money no because this is more lucrative if they made like two hundred million dollars last year of order flow data it's crazy so they make seventy percent of the revenue or something like that from this payment order flow if you look it's kinda they get criticized because the traders the buyers of this data they'll pay more for options trades because options trades are usually like these like high leverage high risk trades and so an option trade is worth more than let's say if i'm just buying apple stock buying apple stock doesn't really that data is kinda useless but if people are buying options trains on small stocks that data is actually really important because you can swing a small stock or you can kind of make more on these high volatility stocks that you can on random joe buying ten shares of apple that data is worthless so the reason this gets criticized is if you go in the robinhood hood app the button to like buy options is above the button to just buy the normal stock i think and so because because you know their business model depends on more people buying options so they'll do like hey you wanna buy options most people don't even know how to how to buy options it's like most of people don't even know what the fucking option is was like know look at you know what if you i i don't know what an is i have a very loose understanding i i've made them lost a few thousand dollars doing it but i'm just for fun but like i i don't try to do this but what they do is they're like hey you could already borrow this much margin because for an option trade you put down a dollar but you're buying or selling four dollars worth of the stock or ten dollars worth of the stock and so that loan essentially that you're taking robinhood is like pretty happy to give those out because they want more people doing options treated do you think that robinhood hood is a net positive or not negative to the world and do care i don't care at all and i think it's like everything it's got positives and negatives i don't know where that nets out it's hard hard to say if i was gonna bet i would say it nets out positive because i think that i'm of the mindset that look it's on the person not the platform to make decisions for themselves and if people go and they make bad decisions like i don't blame the casino for people losing money gambling i'd like with you but that doesn't mean i wanna support it yeah sure you know that's a that's a personal so so i don't know i would invest robinhood for example like i would have no problem investing in ramen just like i have no problem investing in a casino speaking about investing and making money let's play a game it's gonna call how much money would i have made if i weren't an idiot so in two thousand and eleven i emailed the ceo i forget who the founder one of the founders joe gu a bare airbnb and i somehow got interview yada yada i got offered a job i think it was june two thousand twelve i actually and then the day before i was supposed to start they took my they fired me because i had a criminal record and i wasn't truthful about it and they found it on a background check i wasn't not truthful it's i was still on trial for a reckless driving ticket and they found out how much money would i have made if air be when airbnb goes public in two thousand and twelve i think i would have been the three hundred employee so i don't think significant but maybe significant so you do you remember your job offer because they would've have said like here's how much stock you got give you fucking an email that's like cameras amazon stock you got here's the strike price go no i deleted it i i somebody yeah i know it it because i was using i was using godaddy as like my email service provider and like they have like a one gigabyte limit i can maybe find it i was twenty one or twenty two so i i think i was using my belmont university student id or whatever anyway i think i was getting paid an hourly rate of twenty five dollars an hour and i don't think i would have gotten stock but i think i would have eventually when i got that job my mom and dad were like what is airbnb this sounds like a scam and doesn't it have health insurance you know i didn't know anything about anything but if i got in there i probably would have figured it out do you think i would've made money office absolutely sure for sure if you had stayed now you might have got itchy and left i think that's always a piece of it i had a very similar situation i think i've told the story where i just pulled up the email so september twenty twelve i the first job interview i've ever done in my life i i've only done i think like probably three total of my life and this one was with stripe so stripe in twenty twelve so basically i interview because i thought hey stripe this seems like an awesome company i think this company is gonna do well i interview and i i i reach out and the guy who gets my email to reach out it turns out like on my resume that i had sent in i had like a few references like this guy's my mentor and he was like that guy's my mentor too i called him and he speaks extremely highly of you and this guy this mentor guy loved me like he put a blog post out that said this guy has the highest bias to action of any entrepreneur i've ever met or something like that or i answer i've met the last five ten years so i had like the shoe in of shoe ins and then i like totally blew the interview like they had this you know test of like kinda like sell me this pen and i fucked up i i told the story before so i'll skip it now but i think at that time i don't know what stripe would have been worth i have it i have it okay so what what month was your september okay in february nine two thousand twelve they raised eighteen million dollars at a hundred million dollar evaluation i don't know if they raise immediately after that but let's just assume that it was a hundred million dollars what do you say worth now so they're worth about thirty five billion now so three hundred fifty x so let's pretend the hundred grand hundred thousand dollars worth of a stock you know round math you know there's dilution and there's there's all kinds of other things but that's thirty five million dollars right there which is like you if i had worked there for four years would have you know got my whole grants and probably you know like if i doing well i would've have been getting promoted and getting new grants along the way so like it is reasonable to believe let's just be conservative it it's reasonable to believe i could have made ten million dollars off that job if i had i think they had like i wanna say forty employees at the time but i i don't know i can't remember for sure it might have been like a hundred and forty or something okay so i don't feel as bad as mine i just googled mine an october two thousand twelve airbnb had a valuation of two point five billion so they were already big but if they go public at fifty billion that would be twenty x so low seven figures i think if you work there that whole entire time i think you personally wouldn't have made ten to twenty yeah which is crazy because that job wasn't like some sick job it was like i was gonna be like a biz dev person on the like sales outbound sales team or some some shit like that like yeah but what would happened is you would have gotten in there you probably would have excel and then you would have climbed your way up that's what i i would like to think i think probably i would have just stayed on that path because i would've have been like wow this this is easy wasn't we keep doing this but it doesn't matter because i blew the interview and honestly like you know ran offer for you a job no no that's what i'm saying i had the biggest shoo in going into the was like to me it was like a formality and then i fucked up the interview so badly that like he was like it's not a fit oh how many people work there i don't know i think it was like fifty people but it it might have been a hundred or a hundred and fifty people interview with with the collision brothers c and no allison what's her name call yeah patrick thought it collision pardon me that would have been cooler no i interviewed with this guy benjamin you but ask ask ben how much money he made i actually dm him the other day and i was like hey man and he didn't reply i think i i i dm him was what i said hey you're still at stripe that's amazing you probably don't remember this but i interviewed there six or seven years ago you know i've been referred department a shared mentor and i said it didn't end up working out but you know you know it was all for the best i i went on show totally different journey just wanted to say hi and then he this fucker didn't even say hi well what's going on here so the guy who fired me at airbnb and by the way his thing says he's on sa medical you know that's that's like he been at some company that that did really well for five six years and then he like yeah i'll go on sa radical for a year the guy who fired number applied to work at the hustle as an executive and i'm i was cool with him it's my fault i i got i i lied and he called it and he was like i have to do this but i'm so buddies with the guy who fired me what were you saying september twenty twelve straight at thirty two employees thought i was missing out on like a five million dollar prize until this conversation and i realized it's probably more like a twenty million dollar prize so in two thousand and eleven i had heard about this company that was making like a cab business it was called uber cap and they have this job position called the city launcher and i was like dude i'm so confident i you could they could send me to germany and i not know a single person and i will get people to use this thing i so confident they didn't interview me but in my head i'm like what would have happened if i got that and then by the way we'll play this game one more time i actually interviewed at v i interviewed with jack smith of bang and zane who are jack smith now my best friend and i interviewed at his company and he sold it for eight hundred million dollars we became friends three years later he didn't even remember interviewing me and they turned me down he said no he he said no they they i got to the final interview and he said no and i didn't get the job and now we're best friends and that's so i always joke with people i'm like if you wanna know a good company could start to invest in just figure out where i apply then i get turned down and just invest there right yeah exactly and you know there's a naval ball has this great quote where he's like you know i i want it to be where where you could you could drop me anywhere on earth with you know butt naked with no possessions to my name and ten years later i wanna be rich he's like i want my skill set to be of as such where i don't need to get lucky to be rich like if i played this game of life thousand times you know nine hundred ninety eight times i want to to end up successful you know each of those times i might end up with a different amount of success but like that lines up with a with a view i have right like when i worked with michael and z perch a lot of people asked me like are they smarter did they just kinda get lucky because you know they sold be made eight hundred and fifty million dollars but like bib is not around anymore so was that kind of just like a fluke or what had happen and and what i always said was like them being successful was inevitable they were gonna be successful to actually were successful even before bmo they became millionaires on the previous businesses but the magnitude of success is highly variable so like i think i would have if you played out the so that's that was ten years ago right roughly eight years ago we're talking about twenty twelve so if i played out the last eight to ten years of my life a thousand times i think i probably on average end up with more money than i have today so i think i actually the real world scenario i've netted out less than i would have you know on average but i think in ninety percent of those circumstances i would have ended up successful or you know richness successful either way because and that's i think the goal is to get yourself to that point so you take look out of it to the extent that you can i think we're probably both on this maybe i don't know if me more than newer you more than me but we're both on this idea of like pull yourself by bootstrap and get it done and i think that you can brute force your way to some sort of financial success and happiness like i think that if you spent ten years and took a risk and worked hard you will make a million dollars right but i will be the first to acknowledge that some number beyond that which i don't know what it is it is very very you it's luck there's a lot of variance right like even just if i think about when we sold the company the number could have been zero was like it could've have very easily cut crap out at zero or it could have been double what we got and i think we i think we ended up on the high range of like where we like i think we maximized what what could have been or should have been out of that but i'm like man that was just one scenario of many you know many roles of the dice that i've done in the last ten years and these situations they like there's such a huge amount of variance and the good thing that i take out of that is like well i wanna develop myself and my skills so that i'll i'll have some level of success if i stay at it for for ten years and then i don't wanna stress and compare myself to others because look there is a huge amount of variance and luck that's outside of your control and so you know don't get fixated on the exact numbers just keep playing the game for for as long as you can and eventually the luck just keep you know it'll it'll break your way if you play for long enough yeah and i completely agree with that do we wanna go over anything else i one more question to sort like that the only scenarios i can see myself not being as successful is if i had stayed on a more traditional path of just a job path because i think it's very hard to get wealthy from a normal job we're talking about if i took this job at stripe well stripe was like probably the top four or five investments of the last decade so like yeah being an you know average employee being a biz dev rep over there i still would have somehow ended up with a lot of money there but most jobs that i was could have taken and would not have done anything like that do you think it was inevitable that you were gonna be an entrepreneur like did you know you wanna be an entrepreneur i kinda feel like i fell into it i didn't i didn't really consciously decide until i was already doing it yes i would have done it no matter what but i would not have done the internet i would have i think that i'm i would have owned a small store like a corner store or a gas station or yeah what what switched your path to digital businesses internet medi guy named casey smith so when youtube came out i tell you about this i used to make fifty dollars a month because i would i feel horrible saying this but i'll be honest i i make videos because if you typed in the word i you would type in words and it would autofill fill did so one of the words i don't know how i typed in the word black autofill to like black guy beats up white guy and then if you autofill if you typed in the word white it was white guy beats up black guy and so i would make these youtube videos that just had a plain picture and then i would make add money on it and some of the videos got millions of views and so once i made fifty dollars a month doing that i was like oh the internet's cool and then i met a guy named casey smith and he taught me how to buy my own domain name and then i created an online store and was making money and that's when it changed but prior to that i was i would use ebay craigslist to all stuff and i would imagine that i would have opened up a restaurant or and some type of small town thing yes right i would've have done no matter what because that's what my mom and dad you know my mom and dad their business that they still own to this day it started as a fruit stand and eventually rude to be something beyond that but right and they were always encouraging to do stuff stuff so that's interesting so you knew okay owning a business starting a business is the way your parents did it that makes a lot of sense but they by way they didn't think call it like starting a business it was just this is just what you do to make a living right every single person of my family every aunt uncle except for i think one has a job and almost all of them were like engineers who got an engineering job it's some company and it was like the question wasn't what are you gonna do like are you gonna start a business you could do it was like what job are you gonna get and is it a good job or a bad job and so i didn't even think about it starting a business until it was like i had accidentally started one and then i was like oh shit okay this is this is cool and i started to meet people who did that as their life and that like you know my version of casey smith but like isn't it funny how like casey smith who the hell casey smith and like what if you hadn't met casey smith on that day you know like we're a lot of this stuff feels inevitable but it really wasn't yeah and i was just listening to this cha off what's that guy's name is that his name yeah cha paul he was talking about like the thing that changed with him was he had he was like an intern internet like a multi billion dollar company and he was walking to work and one of the vp saw him walking to work and picked him up in the car and it just so happened that the vp was carp pulling with the ceo and he got to they're like well they're like hey well we'll strive you to work every day and cha was like and like the word billionaire came up and he was like cha jamal is like what's a billionaire you can have one billion dollars and that is when he like that changed my life and i think about that all the time and i'm like having a community is so important and you have to be purposeful about it or i mean it could get lucky like i did and what he did but having a community like these gen z mafia people that's so important that they have that community yes we should probably move this at the beginning because it gonna be this gonna be interesting i should have started with this something very interesting happened me that i wanted to tell you about i gotta be careful about how much i say because i can't say too much and maybe i'll have to believe out some later so very interesting opportunity came my way in the last few days okay so what's the situation so close family friend has a very very large collectible card collection of a type of card that i had never even heard of before called do you know what that is yeah yeah yeah yeah and so they have a card collection of of a lot of that plus like you know star wars and simpsons like a whole bunch of like in a collectors collector stuff collectible items mostly cards and we're talking like a multimillion million dollar collection of millions of cards and due to the person's personal reasons so you know health and other they have to offload this and so you know because it's a close family friend long story short have the opportunity to sell this very large collection of items are you gonna buy them or you're gonna help him is it like the person on the internet person and you're just gonna help him sell them and it'll give you a cut yeah something like that so basically the the idea is how the hell do i sell this collection that if you if you if you went in and you took the best cars that you sold them individually on the internet if you just look at the ebay mark value right now this is like a dollar collection wait wait wait wait wait wait what yes and so you can't sell all these cards so like i it's just too much so you can't sell them all at the ebay mark value right like you know that's you know if it's like if you took one card that sells for ten thousand dollars he has like of that card and so you know you can't sell them all at the ten thousand dollar card price so almost certainly it'll sell for a fraction of that but the question is what's that fraction and also how the hell do i sell this and so what comes to my i don't know help me brainstorm i can only say some limited details there so help me brainstorm how would you go about this so you have three choices one you totally ignore this opportunity it's a distraction you move on with your life number two you look into it and you try to see how much you actually gets a value out of this how would you actually like sell this collection and then the third is like you go balls to the wall and you're like i'm gonna find a way to make a few million dollars in the next few months of this lucky bounce let's go with the easiest option which is an auction so you'd i would use heritage auctions or christy or southeast or is it called southeast on the beast those other i would use one of those three auction houses but you'd would probably not get a premium because it's a bulk thing but it would probably be the easiest right and also because we're talking cards they're not like graded as they say or or you know they're not all verified and graded yet because it would cost you an absolute fortune to grade a million plus cards right and this is like more than that and it would take a long time to do it so these are like you know they're good because this person's been a collector for twenty years they're like a staple and the community but you know when you sell these items you typically need to go get them graded first so even just grading like how many items does he have in the collection so even just holding the collection is an expensive endeavor they've been doing this for a long time they put in a lot of money oh my god what an interesting problem could you go to so top like you you kinda alluded it to being maybe more than just you sell it back to the tops company maybe okay so that's like one option although yeah okay so that's that's an option what else what else could you give have you seen logan paul's do with pokemon cards i have seen that so what's on your line to where you so i mean kinda doing something like that where you sell random cards to people and you know maybe they might lose a few thousand bucks or if they get the big names they might make some money that's what he mean he was signed packs for a hundred k and you might lose your money but there might be like a holographic charizard in there that's worth a hundred k let's go down of that path because i i have thought about that of like what if i just sold these as mystery boxes so look i don't wanna go through the process of grading and marking these i know that there's x millions of dollars of value somewhere in this and i'm gonna sell them as individual mystery boxes now the challenge i thought of was how do i get the word right i'm not logan paul why can't you be like this is such an interesting concept that why wouldn't this get popular in i don't know i be production they're taking a lot of time and energy to like make a big ru about this right so i'm looking i don't wanna spend months of my life doing this looking to see is there a a simple path like i don't wanna pay for a bunch of ads to try to get people to buy this because that's gonna be expensive in and of itself but i think you would need like let's say you're doing a hundred dollars hundred dollar mystery box you might end up with one of these items that has that's worth ten grand or twenty grand inside that's the game if you did that you know you need to sell like fifty thousand or a hundred thousand of these mystery boxes at a hundred bucks a pop how would you have like an insert just like could you make videos about around this just like the ce go guys said were you just document this whole journey and then be like we are gonna auction this off in person and digitally on this date everything's gonna gonna be gone forty eight hours yeah i can do that like it's a forty eight hour bona come in person and on the phone kinda like there's this car company that i love called barrett jackson that they probably do this for all the auctions by watch barrett jackson they do it live on tv and i always watch the the car auctions that you could call in and and bid yeah like maybe there's just a live stream that i do from the venue and it's just sell it right right there they're live for i i wanna strap thing though of calling christie or one of the auction houses and be like guys here's what i have get your out here and give me some opinions do you actually think be conservative what is this person's collection worth but it's hard to say until you go through the inventory in more detail than anybody's ever done because you know was bought ten years ago and it's just been in a case you have to go you have to look at the condition of it and you have to grid it graded so that the buyer feels good about it and then you have to you know figure out how you're gonna sell these things and i know nothing about cards i should say so so i you is there anything more you could tell about the story of the person before you but without revealing no it is very interesting but i cannot say and this person is a fan a fan and wouldn't be a fan like they just been doing this upper love i love yeah they're a collector oh my god as person or person is a collector do you wanna answer this question do i know them you don't know them do you want to dedicate an entire episode to this on monday i don't know how much i can share kind of the person measuring my words right now can we give the person like a voice cover up and talk to them about it no is will this be taxed at capital gains or in income for the person yeah yeah it would be like a long term capital gains wow what a weird situation situation so okay i'm gonna have to run i gotta go now but if you think of anything and let's have people tell us in the podcast reviews what they would do right and before we publish this to jonathan our editor let me think about let me just make sure i didn't say anything i'm not allowed to say okay wow yeah alright alright we'll see you okay see