#168 - How to Reverse Engineer Businesses, The Indonesian King of Coal & the Story of Adida‪s‬

this chinese indonesian guy with a politician no he was the guy it was the middleman man so what he realized was because i was like okay cool we have this call what do we do with it he's like oh we just sell it immediately as soon as we sign the paper we have the cool we sell it to exxon and i'm like oh okay so how does that work like well i bought all this coal for two million and then we like i bought all the coal for two million and then we sell it in blocks for twenty million each i'm like well that's like four hundred five hundred million how are we gonna we're turning two million into five hundred million and he's like yeah i'm like well what that's amazing like why didn't exxon why don't they just go in directly buy this yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i going to put at all in and like a days on on a roll try will never look back i just got vaccinated that's pretty cool i i've got a new toy do you wanna see yeah oh nice sam's holding up a gun i was just you i just drove by a a bass pro shop and i walked in and i was like i was just walking around just to look at like beef jerky or something and i just saw it and i've never even remotely owned anything like that and i was like hey those are cool didn't need to one ji certified or like do a background check or something you just could walk into a bass pro shop and buy again but yeah i mean i just walked up to the counter and i go oh those are handgun those are neat what's the deal like how do you buy one of those they go well just give us your driver's license and we'll run it back check and you can walk out in five minutes and i go sick i'll take that one you just held it we got like you didn't hold the gun part you held it with two fingers i'm like one sideways yeah i i have to learn how to use it i don't even have ammo it and i have like a lock on it i'm like pretty paranoid i gotta figure out how to use the damn thing very texas we have something we have well i'm a i'm a i'm a texas residence resident now we have something cool happening on wednesday yeah we are gonna interview jake paul which might be in terms of just like famous people might be the most famous person we've ever interviewed probably the most famous person i've ever met i'm at the pope once and i at feel i met bill clinton when he was in office alright you peaked so but jake jake i did that both of those when i was like eight years old so jake paul's like number three but when you say you balls coming on what does that mean you saw the pope you you shake hands on the pope what does what does it take to meet the pope shake hands as it said hi in a busy crowd not oh that's pretty you shook hands let's see who is the most or did we like more like a high five it was more like a high five bill clinton bill clinton i shook his hand and like said hey what's your what's your real first name and he goes william i hey why why do you have white hair he goes because i'm old and that was so i met him asked my name so i actually i actually met bill clinton you really shot your shot with bill clinton well i was like six year well year was at what what year you nine too whatever it was post le what was going on pre pretty yeah pre pre back when he was still young bill alright that's pretty good i met the the closest thing i ever got to that probably was have this really long or linda a bloom story that's very funny but i'm not gonna tell it but it's like if you're my friend you've heard me tell the story ten times because it's just a go to it's just a winner of a story you know there's the stories that you just like you just have in the bank if you ever need to be like you know the life of the party you press someone but then i also you know the you know the duke duke andrew or something like that i think his the name is duke andrew wow how he say his names i know the name it's either the guy he get trouble with jeffrey upside he just got in trouble for that or maybe for other things i don't know some something happened that's it's not great for him but he was doing a tour of silicon valley and so we got word that oh the duke is coming to our office prince andrew duke of york that's right he was the duke of york so i heard got word oh in the morning the duke of york is coming to the office today can you give a presentation i didn't know what the duke of york was still don't really know what the duke of york is he's just like not in the prince lineage but whatever so anyways he first a full security detail comes sweep the whole office the you know the morning just to make sure they could get the whole layout they know where the entrances are they know where the exits are and they're like okay this place is secure for the duke and he shows up at four pm and i've got this like presentation i've been working i through my whole day away and i just started working on this presentation for the duke and explaining what we do and anyway it's a great i'm like i've gave my all and the presentation is he i you've been to our office our office has like couches not like kinda chairs it's very comfortable couches so he sits down on one of our couches and it's just flank by security guards and i fire up the first slide on the big projector and i start talking and i see that he's asleep he is passed out by the fur before the first slide even starts he has no he falling asleep in his chair and nah i don't know what to do because i'll give me this presentation this one guy is asleep it's all my employees who know what the heck we do they don't need this frustration they all see that he's asleep i see that he's asleep the security guards are kind of like not saying anything they're not doing anything and so i give the presentation to the sleeping duke of york for the first twenty minutes oh my god goodness chris i i was so lame my that's actually really cringe well i'll i'll finish this story with one thing because it's kinda relevant to what we do so at the end it because we were an ideal lab and like this podcast about brainstorming business ideas and talking about shoot the shit about business ideas so we i basically paused at the end and i was like okay i could keep going but like it'd be more fun if you actually joined us in doing what we do and kind brainstorm some business ideas and so we ask a bunch of questions where we're like do you guys like what apps do you guys use and he's like we don't have phones but what he's like he's like we don't get to use our our like personal cell phones i guess at that time i i didn't know exactly what you saying but there's some limitation where they don't have they don't just have like iphones with normal apps they could do whatever they want it's like very like pre installed use this phone use what it has and like if you want more go to it and they'll they'll help you or something like that and and then i go what business ideas you have he goes there needs to be a fact checker so politicians can't lie i was like what he's like we need to hold politicians to to what they say there's so many apologize that just lie and we need them to and everything should be on the right everything should be like on the record to be fact checked at all times it should be public if you're lying that was this idea number one and then he had something else i was like about like i don't know like digitizing paperwork or something like that and i was like alright thanks fritz see so there's actually what i could rip on that there's this thing called po political po political what is it actually don't know how you pronounce those oh god everyone makes fun of me for not update no p o l i t i fact fact pull fact okay have you ever heard of that no so what it does is it looks at like when there's a big big election they analyze all the major speeches done by some by someone so in the case of trump or biden them when they were doing their debates they would they have a meter that is says true mostly true half true false right i've seen this pants on fire and they actually check all the stuff they say and they say this is or is not true here's why and it's kinda cool it a fact i guess it's called by the point i like that it goes to pants fire that's a that's a nice pretty cool i like that so your your boy was on to something not a great business but it it does exist there is something that does this right okay wait one more thing you said we got on this tangent because you said jake paul's coming on wednesday so why is jake paul coming on and what are we gonna do about it so jake paul okay so i am basically copying sean and i started investing in some companies and jeffrey wu is a friend of mine i think he's a friend of yours too yeah oh i'm i'm mildly close friends with him and he saw that i was investing and i saw that he was investing and he goes and we were just shoot the shit i go what are you doing and he said what are you doing we exchange ideas he goes hey just wanna do a phone call i i'll bring on my partner jake and i was like oh are she partnering with jake paul he goes yeah yeah i'll bring him on and i go alright sounds was good so we just do a zoom and i'm sitting there with jeffrey and or jeff and jake and jake's like hey what's yourself let's just have a text chat like a tech a group thread and by the way i love my first million and i know the hustle like can i come on the podcast or or i was like yeah sounds good so here we are it's kinda weird but kinda funny that's pretty legit i also wanna know from him well i'm gonna ask him but like jeff is like tech founder sold a company started like a a company backed by entries and h it's like a keto company and and then somehow somehow like partners with jake paul like i don't even know how they became friends is like how did this agent dude from the tech world become like good enough friends with jake paul where they start a business together like do you know that i don't i know that jeff moved miami and jeff's like a manly man like jeff's into guns and fighting and big muscles and whatever man are supposed to be into and i jake i i assume is also into that stuff so they they must have met and jeff's real real smart and savvy and i have a feeling that it's a good stick which is like jake's the famous one gets access and jack is jeff is the straight man who you know makes make sure the knows knows how to do yeah and that's gone historically a great partnership it's actually well there's this guy named brian lee who does this and he's partnered with shapiro i forget shapiro first name but shapiro was the lawyer for o j o j simpson and they started legal zoom together and he and shapiro was like the celebrity and then he did it with kim kardashian and they started shoot asshole together wait weren't car what was it kardashian dad kardashian dad was the lawyer well o j had like eight lawyers robert chap shapiro name o j had like eight lawyers so it was like kardashian and it was johnny cochran it was whatever yada yada yada was was he the one who also partnered with jessica alba for the honest guy so this guy named brian lee i guess he's korean he's a a korean american and i guess lee's korean i think and he partnered with shapiro for legal zoom and shapiro was supposed to be like the face and the famous person turns out shapiro i mean he's a really success he's a savvy business guy so shapiro goes let's do this with some more celebrities so they partner with kim kardashian and they do shoot as which raised bunch of money but i think kind of flame out but then they do it with one other company and then eventually they do it with jessica alba and honest honest company and it's the same thing jessica gal was supposed to be like shapiro kinda like the face the famous versa it turns out she's pretty savvy apparently right and good at you know whatever whatever it is she's good i guess running a business i don't know what her role is but she's great and that's what he does and so partnering with celebrities can actually work out point this company is a that's a big company that's like a like a big that's like a billion dollar company i think honest i think i think many what do we wanna talk about today i got a bunch of random random topics do you want me to start did you have when you wanted to start well i actually was researching a fair bit of your things because i found them to be a little bit interesting do you wanna talk about turned yellow is that or how about you lead i'll let you lead everything and i'll and i'll follow but i researched all your stuff okay we could talk about turned yellow so then we'll start there this is a cool business so this is in a category that our friend ryan bi said this word i here who's was the first one i ever heard say this i don't know if he started it or he picked it up somewhere but it's the term drops servicing so people have heard of drop shipping which is basically like you market it on facebook or wherever else you sell a product to a customer but it's a product that you don't hold in inventory the you as soon as you get the order from a customer you place an order with your manufacturer the manufacturer ships it directly to the person so it's a way to do e commerce without having to buy and hold inventory because you're just directly shipping to customers straight from the factory and typically kinda like lower margin but it's a great way to get started if you don't have any money in commerce that's kind of like the idea turn yellow is actually one of jack smith's favorite things jack might be an investor but i i know he's a huge customer of turned yellow right so what turned yellow does is similar it's a drop servicing company so instead of shipping your a physical product they do a service for you kind of on demand so turned yellow i actually our friend of ours i don't know if you know the guy alex who's behind it but he bought the company recently and i won't share any like the numbers or anything like that but alex too really vol vol or something like that v is how he start the spelling it his the last name you could find him on twitter he's at vol dark or something like that and he he also started this like nineties theme kind of like party or parade or thing that used to happen like nineties jam fest or somebody that was all a nostalgia which which i thought was cool that's why i first reach out to him and then i found up that our few our mutual friends xavier and c help you know invest in him when he bought turned yellow oh so sorry what wasn't jacket with c i'm i'm an investor and see if was fun that's how i heard about this yes okay exactly so what turned yellow does is they basically it's a great gift so you can submit a picture of your family or your friend and they'll send you a drawing like a illustration of that same photo or that same person turned into what looks like kinda like a simpsons character like turned yellow like you know all the simpsons characters are yellow so they make they cartoon any picture for you so it's like you you went and got this custom made for your friend so it's this great gift and simple simple business they basically on one side they have a whole bunch of artists who can crank out these like illustrations in this one art style and on the other side they just advertise on facebook or whatever and they're their number one advertisement is this like picture of howie man holding up his turned yellow where he got turned yellow and that probably bigger millions of dollars there's so many replica so if you to keep your ads on and type in turn yellow so there's turned yellow dot com which is i guess i i think the original then there's simpson simpson five me then there's art of yellow and they are all complete total rip offs the exact same website practically anything and that's kind of interesting i would have thought this would would have you would to have had to have had some type of licensing or blessing from thing i think it operates in a slightly gray area because they don't say anything about the simpsons but the art style does evo that idea that look and i think that's part of what people we're buying for sure it's one hundred percent of the simpsons i mean they're sitting in front of the country he's my friend so i'm trying i'm trying to say it a little bit softly here so but anyways the cool thing what they were doing was they bought the company company was doing well had all these competitors because everybody was kind of doing the same everybody was start trying to clone them and then they brought on this bad licensing guy who has been like in the licensing business for decades and the ideas that he was gonna go and actually talk to all the different ip holders of simpsons and and fu drama harry potter and any other brand and basically say hey we would love to cut a licensing deal with you so that we can do this and doing it like totally above board you make some money from this we we lose a little bit of money but we can kinda like knock out all these competitors who are doing this in the and they don't wanna work in the above board they all wanna be under the table here and so that was the business plan and i don't know exactly how it's going now but i thought there's really cool it's a cool business that does you know very good revenue and there's a whole bunch that are that are like this and right now what people do is they just do this for every popular theme so it's like you can do one like a lot of people like rick and morty that's like a cult phenomenon now so people are doing this with the rick and morty art style and the people are doing this with another art style and this reminds me of what our friend sully did where he got the rights to family guy and made the family guy mobile game and he made a he made a version of candy crush that was themed family guy so he took a proven game candy crush that's like super addictive amazing and monetizing and he just skinned it with the family guy branding and got family guy to help promote it and family guy got millions of dollars in revenue from the success of this game and then the same thing with harry potter yeah he did the same thing with tons of stuff but how do you think you even like i wouldn't even know the first thing what what do you do do you find someone who happens to know someone who knows someone and they introduce you to someone at fox i mean like i don't even know that seems really hard to to make happen yeah well i think that's why they brought on a guy who's done decades of licensing because he has the connections already he maybe worked with these same brands to do a different licensing deal maybe putting faces on t shirts for bud light or whatever right like so i think that's one thing he's like there is a network aspect to it where you can get your foot in the door but i don't know did you ever listen to the first episode of this podcast with su where he explained how he got the family guy rights no i insane story yeah i listened to the episode but that was two years ago what happened ago yeah basically he was like alright first why did he need this they were just making normal mobile games but distribution costs kept like up and up and up because facebook was getting more and more expensive to advertise on because all the game developers were all competing against each other bidding the prices up so he's like shit we need a way to stand out we need a way to acquire users without paying for as much in ads we need a more efficient way to acquire users so he had seen that the simpsons did a mobile game with ea and they made like simpsons like the quest you know i don't know even know what it's called like some some simpsons game with ea and he's like oh that's genius that's what we need to do and this is before the kim kardashian mobile game and before other start copying this playbook so he's like okay what's the next franchise that we can get family guy so family guys also own by i think fox yeah and so they have they have simpsons and they have family guys they go to big they get in touch with there you google around they couldn't in touch with the person to who who's in charge of this stuff and they're like yeah like okay i don't know i've never heard of your startup but we're gonna probably just go with the i mean we just did the simpsons with them i was pretty successful like ea is like a big name trustworthy that you don't get fired for going with the ea i might get fired if i go with you guys so they're like okay you fair enough but they didn't give up and so what he said was every he he had decided like the company was screwed if they didn't find like pull a rabbit out of a hat so he just put all his chips into this one strategy and it was like okay every morning when we come into the office or just have a whiteboard the whiteboard says how do we go get the family guy rights i was like what can we do and they would just come up with some ideas and then they would try it that day and then they would like fail and they would come back again the next day and like the next day and then eventually his number it was only him and two other people who knew about this plan in a company of like fifty sixty people i think and so the number two guy was like dude we've exhausted we've we tried this we tried this we you know blah blah blah and so eventually mark andre jason was on their board who's was their investors they had asked mark jason hey you you're super well connected do you know know the guy he said yeah i'll make a phone call so he makes a phone call do they get the meeting but the meeting get again is like i don't know guys so he says alright how do we pull this off he goes first we're gonna economically make this like a ridiculous deal for them so like we're gonna offer them this ludicrous upfront guarantee of x millions of dollars of you just get that money from day one number two you're gonna get this like awesome fat royalty on the back end if this game is successful and so that was kinda lucrative and they were like okay we're into that and by the way he didn't have the money to make like he didn't have the money to give them he blow promised it and and was like i'll go raise the money if he if they say yes was his plan and and then the last thing was they found out that the guy the main guy who's the decision maker his like mentor or was like a family friend of mark entries or something like that and so he's like oh talk to the mentor guy so they talked to the mentor the mentor is like okay guys i hear what you're saying i like your spun like i'll i'll help you out and they put him on the board of their company they're like dude we'll give you shares we'll put you on the board and he was like guys don't need it it's okay and he put in the word and basically that that got the guy to like lean their way of like yeah give these guys a chance they're legit don't worry about like that they're not a big household brand in fact these guys will go all out for you it's life or death for them and that's what you want and your partner so that's how they ended up getting the pitch store and got the rights to family guy and saved the company do you ever think at least i mean i think of this and do you when i think of stories like this i think to myself like why wouldn't you just go to this person with the job and just be like and just say all the obvious which is dude you don't wanna get fired you also hate your job i'll give you a hundred thousand dollars personally why are you a hundred grand can you please just like like what's stopping just like total cro i mean i guess not what's stopping maybe i should rephrase this it's pretty mind boggling that that's not more like but there's not more that more for that so okay so what let's let let's answer both what's stopping it well usually the person you wanna bribe is in a pretty high up position so they're doing well already maybe hard up from money maybe how much whole person makes a year who's like in charge of licensing for family guy i bet you not i bet thank guys i eventually that guys easily pulling them in three hundred four hundred thousand dollars okay so that's not stupid money but that's good money good so he said he's not like you know he's not desperate let's put it that way second thing you know in a big company i don't know if you've had yours yet now that you got acquired but there is like a whole like anti bribery training you have to and they really put it in your head like hey look even just like taking any gift over fifty dollars tickets to a game you know a dinner you need to report it it could be bribery blah you get it it gets put in your head and you start to think okay do i wanna risk it all because if i actually got caught doing this i would basically not be able to have a career anymore so you kinda have to pay me so much that i'm i'm willing to risk the odds of me getting completely blacklisted from my profession where i've worked so hard to become a vp after thirty and i'm not that's i'm not saying by the way i'm not even remotely implying that i'm into this i'm just saying right i'm actually of course i'm what i'm saying some other guy might be what i'm saying is i'm surprised that this doesn't i'm surprised it doesn't happen more it's just creating that we all agree that would we we mostly all agree what's right and what's wrong and we kinda stick to it because like if suing been like look man i'm gonna give you this deal if you get fired i'll give you a job right but i'm gonna pay i was gonna pay your company ten million dollars i'll give you just a million of that i'm shocked happen one is somebody said this the other day they go so how many employees does amazon have how many employees does facebook have how many employees google have order how many foreign spies work at these companies a lot it's like sounds crazy like foreign spy like what is a movie it's like no no of course it's not zero like of course there are people working for china for russia for different countries as foreign agents and there's actually been like cases of this work guys basically took the you know like the the machine learning model out on a usb stick out of google and like basically it went back to russia or like that's like a thing that has been has been found to to be happening in these companies so one is it's crazy that that's actually happening that you know i've probably worked with somebody who is actually like a foreign agent which is just like a bizarre is an agent on behalf of google i mean how many times do you think that there's someone who is a facebook employee and they're like hey look i'm gonna fire you and we're gonna act like we're not friends anymore i need you to get a job at snapchat and i'm gonna funnel you money and need you to tell me everything now everything yeah that totally exists which is that has to happen we don't talk about so then so okay so then then i was at that exactly that so i've had this experience where i thought honestly i didn't think anything was wrong with this but again this is where maybe my moral compass is a little screwed up but i was like oh for example when we got acquired we had talked to five other companies while we got acquired and for each of them they're laying out their map you know how what's their strategy how they're gonna win how we fit into that strategy you know where they're wrong where they're weak what the numbers are when we finally got acquired i i walked in and i was sort of like guys congratulations you got me you got my team you got a code base but she also got a little bit of intel right like i talked to they had no interest i didn't say anything but i was nobody asked me anything that's insane i and i was like i know i would if i was in that company shoes and i acquired somebody who had talked through the strategy with the ceo of all these different companies i don't like so like what they say do they plan like what how do they view the world that not even for like those people are tell me their secrets it's just like what were they saying it's like not it doesn't even seem wrong to me but the fact that nobody asked me tells me maybe they do think that would be wrong to ask me maybe mind just well help us a screwed up what do you this is my whole point which is and and and i just wanna say this again incredibly clear like i'm not saying i do this or support it i'm just saying i'm surprised it doesn't exist but the moral of the story is most people are actually quite ethical and particularly if you're in a room full of people they're gonna be extra ethical and so right i know i'm not surprised that so they didn't do that i told as an owner i would have been like hey come here what yeah exactly i wouldn't especially when i was like i gonna start up i act but i wouldn't start nothing to lose and i everything to again i wouldn't say like tell me their numbers i would say like i would i would just be like do they like what motivates them are they cool do assume like they have their act together like these like fluffy questions and then if you i can say honestly i totally would have asked for their numbers i would've have been like how big is it how much revenue they doing i i was guessing you know five hundred million is it five hundred million you have to ask those other questions first you gotta like see if they're gonna bite the kinda see if the person's cool with it or not yeah if you wanna make them uncomfortable but i am a bit i am surprised we you and i know someone who is involved at a lawsuit because they were hired at one company a large tech company and previously they had worked at the competitor and yeah we can we can say the names this is public information alright it was anthony pop he worked at facebook this is all public this is you can read the deposition or i believe it's deposition he didn't tell us i read i read the deposition like a nerd and that's how i know yeah and basically according to the records that we read he worked at facebook he decided to work at snapchat and they said something like here's a piece of paper write down the the organization chart tell us how it works and then go and recruit those people and he according to the deposition said no that's i'm not a chance and they fired him sam snapchat or or they like butted heads or something like that and so yeah i do they butted heads over that yeah i i think this stuff happens actually a fair bit but i'm actually shocked it doesn't happen more right i i though my only concern that situation would just be i don't wanna make my own person my teammate uncomfortable if they don't feel like sharing they don't they don't wanna share they feel like that's wrong okay no problem then but if they were down to share i would one hundred percent be asking all the questions i'm thinking for my startup up brain at a big company you sort have more to lose it's not really worth it you're not like in a like sort of you know life or death situation of the company like you don't need the information but i really have been surprised like we we'll hire people who are like from youtube or whatever and they and and wherever we're at we're like hypo like well you know like how do other companies handle this blah blah what can we try i'm like that dude work there why don't we just ask that guy like hey dude what did you guys do how long did it work what was that like is this retention number good or bad relative to what you saw like and nobody asked the question which is like maybe it's just not in the big big meeting settings but i have been surprised with that and i know if you're working like over there are other companies that don't have that same acc i worked for a guy in indonesia my first first job ever had it's kinda like a summer job and my dad hooks me up with this guy like oh yeah this guy is known as the king of cole in indonesia he owns like all the cole of indonesia i'm like oh sweet okay i'm like i go do this summer job with this guy what's it the in american or indonesian he's a chinese guy living in indonesia a fifth grade dropout can't speak like any english pretty much like very broken english i he had four women just doing his email on giant tv screens in his office because i don't think he could even type and he was just like or he like oh alright like he just say loud what he wants to reply to every email and and that's how he would do his business and so i like as i get there i'm like oh cool you're the king of cole like how to happen what you do and basically i'm what i realized pretty quickly was this guy's entire business model was big companies like exxon and bp and chevron they all wanted land in indonesia and the land was owned by the local like city province they had the rights to it so they so they had the thing and the local guy would just only like the only way to do business with this guy was to bribe him like that's the only thing that guy wanted was a bribe he the local politician wanted a bribe if you give them the bribe you can have the land rights but so this and this chinese indonesian guy was a politician no he was the guy he was the middleman man so what he realized was because i was like okay cool we have this coal what do we do with it he's like oh we just sell it immediately as soon as we sign the paper we have the coal we sell it to exxon and i was like oh okay so how does that work like well i bought all this coal for two million and then we like i bought all the coal for two million and then we built sell it in blocks for twenty million each i'm like well that's like four hundred five hundred million how are we we're turning two million into five hundred million and he's like yeah i'm like well what that's amazing like why didn't exxon why don't they just go in directly by this he's like like well if they could they would but they can't so they won't and basically what he was saying like those companies couldn't get their hands dirty they could not risk b foreign like politicians so what they did was they let this guy bribe the fallout at foreign politicians get the rights and then they would cut a commercial deal with him and this guy knew nothing about the coal like i'd be like oh is this a good asset bad asset he's like there doesn't matter where you get the paper they pay for the paper like we don't have to do any of the work we don't have to like extract it mine it don't have to do anything and now by the way this guy is in jail like you know that's the the end of the story is j the names yeah his name it well i i don't wanna personal put risk personal harm by outing this guy you know like we're a world away but but but this guy's kind of a gangster so i'm gonna say his name but you could you can use what i said in google your dad basically your dad got you a third ship with the gangster yeah me and my sister rather both of us that's crazy like i remember we were we were in his office one time and he had a friend come in and his friend is i kinda like you know when it's his friend because it's just like alcohol like starts pouring women starts showing up at the office like what's going on here who are you trying to whine and dine and it's just this one s looking dude and i was like oh like what's what's your business he's like i work in singapore i help companies on the singapore stock exchange and literally this was just straight insider trading so i'm sitting there and i'm just hearing this guy be like yeah these are the three companies you need to like buy they're like dirt cheap right now but they're gonna like they're about to announce x y z and they're gonna pop and then they would just like toast their whiskey and then they would buy this stock on the singapore stock exchange or hong kong stock exchange and like sure enough the numbers would go crazy and i was just sitting there being like wow this is like insanity that this is how like lucy goose these guys are with business well what i was gonna say was i think that like in a even though like people make amazon or whatever to be like evil you just said no like we would never even asked this ex google about x y z and i was gonna say that's like a very american thing i've have a couple friends who i work with who run chinese companies or you know they're chinese and they're either based in china or are now american or the chinese american now and i have a bunch of indian friends and they're like yeah the that's but we we don't we operate differently than you our opinion of of the right and wrong ways a lot different than you and it is far more una capitalism of just what why is copying wrong like and and they're kinda right right like why is it wrong but in anyway it is quite interesting yeah totally me alright hey anyways i know how we got on you wanna talk topic first versions we can go back to yeah what what is that i saw this website my guy chris chris who's my apprentice right now for content he sent this to me and i'm gonna actually spend a ton of time on it but go to first versions dot com check that out and i'm pretty fascinated with this i think you are too we both are like internet archaeologist we like to go find the og thing what did i did this blog post i got like ten tens to thousands of views once before i had any audience it just went viral because it was what are the first web look like for these ten big companies and this is kinda like some comment to to do like uber homepage back of the day snapchat homepage back of the day the first facebook homepage the first ebay homepage first amazon homepage and these things look like you know so basic and rudimentary and then like really just it makes you realize like dude you you need to launch and there's that quote if you're not embarrassed by v one of your product you launch too late and all these companies definitely like fall into that category so i thought first version dot com was a cool little like archive of stuff like this i think this is so cool so i actually just sent you a link to an article that i wrote i think i wrote this in sixteen thousand sixteen years ago fifteen october fifteen and i you could it probably doesn't even work entirely but anyway i what i love to do and i've always loved doing this is i use there's a few different websites web archives the easiest and what i like to do is i will get a a google doc in a spreadsheet and i'll map out the the whole journey of a company so i'll look at what air where an airbnb started and then i'll read all bottom of like alright here's when they announced they had this many users here where they here's where they announced this much funding here's where they said they had up their first fifty employees and then from fifty they actually went to a thousand in only two years and then i'll take screenshots of their website and in doing that you can actually see what like how the the evolution so aggression yeah and i'm just starting i'm just making this up with airbnb but it could be like it started as air bedding breakfast and it was about renting cuts inside of a living room and then oh wow they actually changed their their positioning to travel like a local and they started taking higher end pictures i i don't know what it is but and and and when they start actually taking higher end pictures that was actually right when they right before they raised their hundred million dollar funding and so anyway you can actually track the progression really nicely by doing this and i love doing that i love it and so you can actually see oh uber uber cap dot com they were only black car services oh when they raised all this money they actually got rid of the black car the black car became secondary so actually the black card didn't work so i switched to this you know what i mean so it's kinda cool yeah you can totally reverse engineer a lot of this stuff so some of the tools we used to this the way back machine which is the internet archive so just google them the way back machine that lets you put in any domain name and then you go back in time and they took screenshots of what the website look like on june twelve twenty yeah twenty ten and then that you can go back you can see uber what and who uber home homepage look like back then how are they describing themselves another one i do is tech crunch i go to tech crunch i search for a company's name and then i reverse sort it by the earliest mention of it so like you can go twitter so you can see the very first article is you know mike arr being like you know the buzz at the party this week was about twitter spelled without the you know without the vowels basically it's like the short messaging service it was kinda fun do you do to do this but you know who cares is you people are just tweeting about there they're just tweeting about their breakfast and it was all through sms like then you can kinda see what was going on then so i like that one that's that's a useful one another one i'll do is i'll go on twitter and you can twitter advanced search so you can type in anyone's name and you could do things like twitter doesn't make this obvious how to it there's like a format of how you write these in but you write like at the sam par before two thousand and eleven yeah and then you say minimum three hundred likes and i can kinda go see your most popular post at that point in time what were you talking about what was working for you what wasn't so i've done this with a whole bunch of people and i kinda like i really am a big reverse engineer type of guidance it's not that you could copy it but it's just data points it's a way to fast forward experience because experience the hard way is slow it takes like decades to get good at things and to learn and to like figure out what's normal what's not what's fast what's slow what's good what's bad and a better way to do it is to like download a whole bunch of data points quickly and it's not perfect experience but it's better than being blind and and just kind of like going off only your personal experience so i some ways i would actually go as far to say you can copy it you you can you actually can copy a lot of stuff and i think you should sometimes so for example this first by the way first versions dot com this is a wonderful website this is such a good website i this is so cool i wish they don't even by the way what they do it is not just internet like what like what we're talking about home homepage just because that's i account needs but they'll be like this is the this is the first version of tom and jerry like the very first pilot and like last night i don't know why for whatever reason before i went to bed i was watching the very first pilot episode of curb enthusiasm before it was even a show and i was i just love seeing that og g og the first pilot of always sunny in philadelphia where they're using the handheld camera like i like seeing that because it just as somebody who is frequently starting things it's important to go see that your favorite things started with very humble simple kinda shitty beginnings and and then you know you sort of can see how much better they got over time this is so good i love this i'm gonna link to you some link something to you so in two thousand and thirteen i created this thing i called the ceo doc it was a stupid name but i i sent it to you and you could actually see that it's so funny that you do this because i mean it we're it's it's so funny that we're similar and we've been doing this for years so i created oh is it not working i created this document where i would take i think i had a list of five hundred people and i would make timelines for each of their lives and i would say started there it was broken into apprenticeship first hit and then the self actual virtualization mode so for example jack do started to the ship at age twenty two from twenty two to twenty eight he basically was like this poor nobody who worked as a dispatch service for a taxi cat company twenty eight to thirty one started twitter at twenty eight it actually became a pretty big hit really soon at twenty nine and so i have timelines and then i have average age ages a average age for each person and so i love doing that stuff and it works so good for for just seeing like what's possible right so we're we're actually quite similar i've been doing this as well for a while yeah it's great to nerd out about this kind of stuff right here so first version is cool i have another kinda cool thing okay here's a here's a idea i would say this is not a business it's probably a very bad idea maybe this is something that this is you reminded me of it because this thing that we're doing is like the thing we're talking about is extremely nerdy and probably most people don't don't do what we're describing like kind of like go back and map out the evolution of companies or people or whatever it is so similarly i i i want a tool that i'm calling business pocket so pocket is this chrome extensions this app or service where you like if you see an article you like but you don't have time to read it you just hit pocket and it's like you put it in your pocket for later do you think that i think it used to be called read it later do you think pocket is going well i bet you was going pretty badly i bet that'd be a cool company to buy yeah i don't think it's going well it got really big and it raised a bunch of money and then like it's just been around for so long without like an exit that you wonder did it just get like become obsolete somehow along the way but anyways it was just a way to save articles now i actually don't want something what i'll call business pocket so i have this bookmark thing in my chrome that's called cup companies to watch it's basically like anytime i stumble across a company i find interesting i've been doing that it's like this thing is like ten years old now i find an interesting company and before it used to be i wanna see if this will be successful or maybe i should if i was an investor i would invest in so i wanna like flag this and then i'll come back later in three years and i'll see how it turned out whether i whether i would have made money or lost money on this thing and so i've just been collecting this for a long time now in reality i hit i'd bookmark and then like never go back and go recheck those because who's got the time but i would love a service that's almost like a programmatic news on it where i can just flag either people or companies that i say i wanna keep a watch i wanna keep watch on this company or this this this individual and like the ceo or maybe this company the startup up and then i wanted to like basically take the ten that i've flagged and send me anytime there's interesting news about them with some filter like you know they raise new funding they got a new job they they did they announced this thing they're on tv whatever and and you know my twelve that i'm tracking might be different than the twelve that you're tracking but like we might have three that are the same and so this company that's underneath that would just need to set up like a kinda like a programmatic way to like watch for the news around certain names and then turn it into an automated newsletter those kinda just like a random idea i don't think it's a business but i think it be i think it's a business when we were getting ready to decide if we wanted to launch trends or watch launch something new i wrote a landing page for this product forget when i called it but something involving the word spy and i put like the headline was like where are your secret spy spies that track your competitors and tell you everything that they do so you know and we delivered to you via email and i think this actually could have worked wonderfully and the reason i came up with this idea was i had a friend who worked at rocket internet rocket internet google it it's a it's a guy it's three brothers named ollie alex and something else sam brothers and they started this thing called rocket internet and basically the way it works right now it's a large publicly traded company they had this like guy named he was like the chief scientist and what they would do is they would research fast growing companies in america and they would clone them and they would deploy that company in africa in asia different parts of europe things like that brazil brazil and so they cloned uber but in mexico they cloned pinterest but for germany they cloned zappos but for germany they did amazon for they own like the amazon for brazil i think yeah and they also owned the amazon for thailand and they would pick a variety of companies they would do like the way fair for nigeria or something like that and they had this guy who's who was called the chief scientist and all the clones of the amazon of this country that country that country there would probably be like eight clones and he would send an email every day this is this is the story i heard i don't know if it's true he would send an email every day and it'd be like hey everyone amazon actually just moved on their homepage they moved the clothing from eight or a hundred pixels to the left it probably means that a clothing is a little bit more popular now than furniture so alright make sure you move your clothing thing or hey they they're changed their color of this button from this yellow to this orange go ahead and do that and i thought that's pretty awesome i would love to have that i would love to track my competitors because i would do a research on my competitors i would say oh which ads are they using oh i wonder why they're using this ad maybe maybe they're using this at for this this reason that reason that reason i'm gonna go and copy it and i would use a variety of similar web facebook ad archive a reps and a few other things and i would i would just i would like oh here's where they're succeeding and here's why they're succeeding i may copy them i may not copy them and i just i just know what's working and i think that that one hundred percent could be a service that you pay a hundred grand a year four and you get and you and they'll tell you the five nearest competitors and every month you meet with their team and you say alright your competitors they're doing this they're doing that they're doing this here's what's working here's what's not working like here's a higher hypothesis hypothesis as to what all this means and i think actually you could charge a six figure annual contract for all of it and i think it it'd be a really cool company right yeah i told you about my friend who i i i nudge in this direction to do this for for e commerce i'll give him another shout out here he said i got a bunch of sales last time i i mentioned it i'll do it again shopify sales data dot com basically a a way to track your competitors who and how much they're selling and what new ads they're running and and stuff like that and just in the niche of e commerce and it's you know i don't know hundred bucks a month or something like that and i pay for it i'm like this is great you know it's it's a valuable service and so you you could do it in a niche or you could do it you know more broadly but yeah i think that's cool but me give you a different topic you wanna do one more did you wanna do the pets thing you've had that here for two weeks so this actually like a really what i thought was a really random idea and then i saw an at i saw a commercial for on tv yesterday and it's like totally a thing so it's just gonna sound stupid because it was like a stupid basically i was like kids love having pets pets are like a pain in the ass maintenance wise and the your know kid wants it but they're not gonna maintain it and i was thinking about like that's why people get fish because it's kinda like self contained in this little tank and you don't have to do anything most of the time just feed it a fish die all the time it's really sad for the kid and so i was like why is there not just like ai pets so i have to just like robo pets for kids and like i was like oh fish would work because it just needs to swim around sort of aim you don't touch it so even if it was mechanical it wouldn't feel cold like a mechanical dog i don't think we'll feel great but did that you know mechanical fish you you hit home runs this is such a dud this is such a dud you you're a home run hit today is a strike out this is a stupid stupid idea you are i saw the commercial it was called robo fish yesterday and i was like oh this exists no way oh my gosh so i'm gonna go check everybody see if you could see this robo i think it's called robo fish i saw the commercial see tell me they do a hundred million dollars a year and it proved that this is not a bet so anyways that was one and then there's a a related one which was there's a medical thing that's going on for you know like pets are sometimes labels like kinda like a emotional support dog or whatever it's like anti anxiety that sort of you know that's total bullshit too right well i know most people use it for bullshit i don't know if there's any medical like like there must be some like cases where something like that no i agree that in some cases it is true but a lot like like people like oh they're certified and emotional like there's not like a certification process yeah there's no yeah exactly this dog did not get trained but but anyways i saw this company that was doing this with for for people with dementia and alzheimer's they were giving them this weighted it's the equivalent of a weighted blanket but it's a pet so it's a pet that sits in your lap it's heavy and like a weighted blanket but it feels like a pet and it moves like a pet now if you're like totally like if you're just like an adult who's has no health conditions you'll be like oh this is like clearly a robot this blink is like not really fully natural and you know dogs obviously not running anywhere it's not a real pet but to somebody with you know dementia our alzheimer's they found that this like is extremely comforting to them now they're really expensive right now they're like thousands of dollars for this like really kinda like realistic feeling thing what's the call but but they're gonna bring the price down i i know i met this guy who through my wife she she was consulting for this company that was doing it and she was showing me the videos and stuff like that about this so i thought that was kinda cool too but i i think that we will see more and more either genetically engineered pets or just straight up kind of like mechanical ai pets because if you can get sixty percent of the benefits with zero percent of the work and maintenance i think there's a whole class of people who take that trade that today just don't own pets because it's just too much cost and too much work so man i called your thing totally stupid i think for the average oh yeah hold on receipts bring you coming and tell sam tell sam about the robo i mean i don't know if this is what you're talking about but this company in two thousand twelve they sold fifteen million of these at eight plus a b in the first year well first tier that's right alright i've i'm both i i kind of take back and i don't take back so you're wrong in that you're saying like oh pets are so annoying just give them a robot pet like yeah i think that's actually silly i don't doubt that people buy a robo fish i think that's just like a cute little widget that's fun to have but dude you are the one who was like oh these ai girlfriends are great there's it's the same idea it's the same premise okay well look i'm open minded enough to like i challenge my you but i you started talking about this alzheimer's thing and that's actually quite interesting i just googled i wanted to see which ads come up i like because like you so i googled this thing i'm i it's kind of i don't really like looking at this i feel a little s but there's a oh i actually don't like the name there's a name called i just sent it to the all all store so a l z store and it stands for the alzheimer's store and they call it the all store and they sell like these lives strong bands that have your name on it so if you when you forget your name remember they actually have a robotic therapy dog and this website actually looks like it's like a entrepreneur who's just looking for a money making niche which a little weird with with this type of thing but people seem to love it it's a whole store dedicated to alzheimer's products i have zero idea if this is like actually what alzheimer's patients love and need but this is incredibly fascinating and i'm looking at their similar web traffic no i actually i think this is legit they have videos of them of the founder talking on like the today show about selling all types of products for alzheimer's stuff and i'm looking at their similar web traffic and it's incredibly popular what a fascinating business all about alzheimer's yeah no this is a legit company i'm i'm looking at the about page this they have a good background story of the the the father has alzheimer's so now they create all these products yeah yada the yada idea yada it looks pretty interesting can you believe that this exists the all stores right that's wild i had no idea but makes sense i guess i guess that does make sense i have one more can i do last two minutes billy of the week story the second billy of the week story i learned this i tweeted this thing i tweeted this out and it cut this kinda blew my mind okay so i was doing some you know shoe dog is like super popular about the founding story of nike yeah you did wanna ideas this i did one on adidas and i was i i was like okay nike great what's the story with adidas where did that come from and so i just started googling for a second and i didn't go so in but okay here is the sixty second version of adidas so for tell me if you knew these things just give me your a or an nay if you knew it or not so adidas when you were kid did did you not hear that this stood for all day i dream about sports yeah soccer all day i dream about soccer soccer yeah yeah that's right not true basically the either the guy's name was ado da who started it and he went by da dude and it's was just i was in germany at what time and someone a german was like do you like adidas i'm like i i don't know what that is is like a german brand like no it's adidas you don't know adidas like i no never heard of it and they started laughing at me that's adidas i guess yeah right you i'm sure you corrected him out of that his own hometown i all you meet yeah i know adidas that's not i don't know adi bosses so okay so the story is kinda crazy so two brothers basically dad owns a a leather shoe factory the two sons are like okay shoes are cool but we wanna do sports shoes not these like leather shoes and so they spin out and they create the do brothers shoe factory and what they do is they're like we're gonna you know adi you're gonna design the shoes and rudy you're gonna sell the shoes usually do sales and marketing two brothers they they do that right it's like a ten year grind you know building this thing up they're growing but they're growing slowly and then finally nineteen thirty six the olympics come to germany and they are a whole bunch of the athletes from germany are wearing adidas but they also get a little bit you know they go and they hustle and they get their adidas shoes in the hands of some non german athletes also one of whom is jesse owens jesse owens goes on to win i think four gold medals at those olympics and so jesse jesse owens is a black guy who basically wins gold and beats the germans in front of hitler who's like promoting white supremacy at the time and so it's like you know a big deal for for that victory at the time he's wearing adidas and this is kind of considered the first time that an entrepreneur used sports to promote their products or their businesses and he's kept doing this right like you see photos of ali versus frazier they're both wearing adidas because he was like hell bent on getting adidas into the hands of all the iconic athletes that they could which nike went and took that strategy and did even better with that strategy over time and so they you know business is going great that you know after that olympics thing where they get all this exposure next three years they sell like i don't know six hundred thousand pairs of shoes business is great you know nine nineteen forty hits and world world world war two starts and the factory just gets seized by the german military they're like this is now a war factory we need to produce war goods here no more shoes and hey youtube brothers join the army they get they get enrolled in the army so the business just goes on break adidas just that goes out of business for the whole world war okay world war two ends the brothers come back you know adi like alright he gets fifty people together that we're restarting the factory we're gonna do this again and somewhere along the way the two brothers break up so i didn't know this part yeah i know that's that's other brother goes on to start puma yeah and so one brother starts adidas their brother starts puma which i just thought was like you know the most baller bullshit you knew that already yeah i know that they gotten an argument man well no yeah well i don't know but i mean you're talking to me i think that yeah they got into an argument one of them start puma for some reason i thought that that he he like did he move to africa and start puma is is there any part of no i think he like literally moved across the river and like started of a competing factory within like you're shot that's well that's the way i read maybe i read that wrong yeah i knew and and the two brothers because they got into a disagreement on how to do oh bracelet said re box started in africa so i guess i'm getting a confused but yeah i knew that so they they they restart the factory after the war and now they're using all the war like leftover war materials in the shoes like rubber for the souls and like certain design like the look of camouflage and different things like that they come up with the three striped logo and so anyways business does good and then like there's this crazy run of death so the puma brother dies four years later the adi dies you know from adidas he dies his wife takes over she dies six years later the son takes over he dies three years later this just like this run of early deaths is like you know the defense against a dark arts position nobody can like hold this thing and so that finally now the two daughters own the thing they sell it for pennies on the dollar because adidas has just been declining for years now at this point you know they didn't have the right people running it i guess and so they sell it for five hundred million dollars you know to to this french guy french guy tries to turn around he can't do it it's on the verge bankruptcy and then they sell it to this guy this is the actually the billy of the week this guy dreyfus and i think it's like to robert dreyfus oh do you know who you know who this person's related to right no is dad was rich but i i don't know what why he's rich i believe it's a lane from side phelps that's her oh yeah julia dreyfus yes i believe i believe that's her grandpa wow okay that's crazy so this guy grows up kind of rich goes to like harvard or whatever buys this thing his his tagline i love it he goes i'm a gambler and i like turnaround that was kinda like his business philosophy so he takes a gamble takes the lead role at adidas and he basically is like alright we're doing three things moving the factory to asia we're cutting the payroll we're cutting jobs cutting two thirds of the jobs in this company so we can get profitable and lastly we're gonna take that money we were spending on people and we're gonna spend a shit ton of it on marketing and you know they were like wow you know you took it from the brink of bankruptcy three percent market share and it came roaring back and became the number two brand how'd you do it you know you must be a genius and he goes you know he was in time magazine the quote is it didn't take a genius you just had to look at what nike re rebound we're doing and do that he goes it was just easier for somebody outside the company to see what was obvious than somebody inside the company who had all this baggage and they couldn't do it and you know so he he turns it around retire a billionaire you know in in his fifties i think and and that is you know the crazy story of adidas today i thought that was wild i had no idea so there's two takeaways of this for me the first is a question that i should start asking myself and and you don't actually need follow through but how would a pe firm run your company i actually think that's a great question to ask yourself which is what would a pe firm do if they were if if they owned this right now and that's kind of an interesting way to get ideas because it you you kinda say to yourself man being in such a punk like i i could be so much better the second thing and and the opposite and the opposite would be what would you know larry page do it's so google google's you know ceo you on founder or yeah like but they took this small thing and they just kept expanding it like no we need to do google x we need do moonshot projects self driving cards you know satellites into the sky giving people internet like they had like un brutal you know ambition and were like what if you just like blew the top off this thing and ambition and then the other one is the pe the ruthless operator way what would they do i think both are valuable questions for your business and the second thing and this is actually something that i've been thinking a lot about because i've been thinking about louis vuitton not that i i don't even own one louis vuitton thing i'm never gonna own louis vuitton thing but it's pretty fascinating that i in my head i stereotype fashion brands is was just like trendy and and they they're gonna come and go like but in reality it i would bet that some of these fashion brands like adidas puma louis vuitton there actually some of the longest lasting companies i imagine i could think of and that's pretty fascinating that a brand like a adidas that went through near bankruptcy went through multiple owners is still relevant and kicks ass and that's actually pretty cool to create something that can last that long and right it it it's kinda cool i i think that's actually inspiring that's something with with all of that nonsense like it it's succeeded in spite of a in fashion especially in fashion where everybody wants to do it and fashion like literally is kinda in and out of fashion it's like a fad type of type of business where where things are in and out of style so quickly so just to last there is pretty much but what i'm saying is there's some stuff that it just it has lasted for many many decades so louis vuitton luggage i've i imagine existed at the turn of the century in the nineteen hundreds same with yeah the i'm right now i'm wearing nike cortez i just looked at the the website that we were talking about earlier first versions and the first version of nike was a nike cortez and i'm still wearing the same damn model and it's kind of interesting and inspiring to create something that can last fifty a hundred two hundred years and that's kind of a cool part of how i feel about like alto for coca cola yeah i guess you can do i mean can do it with a lot more than fashion but there are a bunch of fashion brands i have done it successfully and i think that's pretty damn cool you know like a rolex or tiffany diamonds or something like that it's kinda neat i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back