#174 with Andrew Wilkinson - How to Network with Billionaires, Andrew and Sam's Recent Investments, & A Better Investor Than Buffett

hey everyone we have a special episode with andrew wilkinson i'm gonna tell you about him in a second i think you're gonna like this episode but i have a huge favor so look sean and i we spend a ton of time preparing for this podcast like hours tens of hours a week twenty thirty hours a week preparing just for these two episodes and i know it sounds like we're kinda shooting the shit and in a way we are but we actually work so hard at it and i need a favor from you i'm begging you please leave us a review in itunes so if you're listening to this on spotify just click click your podcast app or what i called the android and go to the itunes store and just leave us a review click five stars and then just click like i really like it or leave one star to be like hey sam you suck whatever but we need reviews and the reason why we need reviews is we go higher up in the charts and the higher up in the charts we go the more listeners we get and the more listeners we get the more ad revenue or hubspot money we can make which we can then put back into the show and do more stuff if you've noticed we've hired a team to create videos we've done that because we've get we're getting more views and we're able to invest more into this podcast and we wanna do more stuff we actually wanna order on a live tour this summer and we wanna come to you we'll do it for free but we need to get more listeners and the easiest way to do that is just to leave a review i know you hear a lot of pot podcast ass saying and do this and most of yours like kinda skip this part but for real do it in fact if you do do it and you send me an email sam at the hustle dot c or i prefer you do this you tweet at me thus sam par and take a screenshot of your review and make sure i see it and i'm gonna call all of you out everyone who leaves a review i'm gonna call you out i'll i'll either do it on twitter i'll do this in podcast but i'm gonna recognize you for doing it so please make that happen i have a feeling that this podcast is gonna get listened by a lot of people and so get that in sooner rather than later so i don't miss it but go ahead and do that and there'll be a really big deal for us so leave a review please now let's talk about today's episode so today we have andrew wilkinson andrew wilkinson is a good friend of ours he's really interesting because he does everything so basically andrew started with this design agency called meta lab he grew meta lab to like fifty million dollars in revenue out of base out of canada and it was very profitable something like twenty thirty million dollars of profit on like fifty million dollars in sales something like that and using that profit he went and bought a variety of companies and at this point they own like twenty different companies ranging from a bakery up to different types of software so he just bought this company called girl boss he bought a few others and on this podcast we're gonna talk about what companies he's buying and why he's buying them he's also done a few interesting things like you ever read about how someone bought a lunch with with warren buffett well he did that with a bunch of different investors and that's really fascinating so give the episode of listen look up andrew wilkinson and he's on twitter he's very active if you tweet at he'll reply if you tweet at me thus sam par i'll reply as well sean did not make this episode because sean has a four week year old baby so that's why we're doing some of these extra episodes about him but please leave us a review let me know what you think bra you how did you rate this episode i forget what you you gave it i think this is definitely the ace we we we covered a lot of ground a bunch of stuff andrew brought the heat as always a bunch of opportunities i think everyone's gonna like a's today's episode is an a that's good i'll take it what what was your favorite part he had a ton of stuff on how he grows his network andrew you're super smart he has like a bunch of billionaire friends and kinda lays out his his strategy of meeting all these people i think that's app applicable to just about anybody listening alright well everyone give it a listen please please please give us a review i'm telling you i'll owe you a big time and it actually makes a huge difference in me and sean we read every review and we actually talk about all of them we'll say is this person right should we keep doing this or this guy tease us for doing next y should we actually stop doing that what should we do so we read all of them leave us review listen up see you yeah i feel like i could rude to where to know why i could be what i want to put at all in and like the days off on a road less travel never looking back alright what's going on not too much man beautiful day here in victoria what about you nothing we i've been spending all my time on this podcast trying to make it huge we've got some really cool stuff planned and i'm excited to see it work out yeah i feel like you guys are really ramping up there's a new episode in my inbox like every single day well what's yes it it's going really well and we did the math and we're like if it grows it if it if the last sixteen months repeats itself it'll be we'll be at a million downloads a month by like a december ish which is fine which is great but figuring out how to like hack this has been really hard and so we're just trying to figure out how to make it huge well what's hubspot what's their goal their goal so the hubspot has a bunch of cool stuff that they're launching basically like a bunch a bunch of content initiatives including podcasts and their goal is to reach a certain number like i i don't remember the exact number but they're they they say like how do we get to a hundred million monthly newsletter reads podcast listens things like that so a hundred million monthly audience something much and they've just done the math on you know if five percent of those people convert into hubspot customers then it makes it pays back the acquisition or something what no that's across that hundred million that hundred million is across all their content it's not just the hustle and the hustle right now the hustle we have close to two million monthly or two million subscribers of which like fifty sixty percent open rate so that's adds to the hundred million and so this podcast accounts for right now four hundred five hundred thousand eventually it'll be a million a month and then if they have other podcast that's another let's say ten million so then we're at fifty million and then where's the other a fifty million to come from and so that's kinda how they're doing the math but is has it change for you going from like staring at your p and l every month looking at the bank account freaking out about invoices not getting paid to suddenly going i don't have to do that i just have to focus on growing the audience yeah so it's pretty great like a lot of people hubspot never said this but a lot of people were like man you're only gonna work there for like a few months or a year and then you're gonna wanna bail and frankly i'm having a great time like i think i meant to start a company again and i this is my first job ever had but it's been really great and i can see myself doing this for a little while because it's awesome like and like let's like talk about the abacus obvious which is like i made money for myself so like i can relax a little bit i it's not as hard like i'm working a long long hours but it's not as hard because if i fail or screw up like i'm not kinda like cost people their jobs do you what i mean like i make it wrong decision i'm not necessarily gonna lose a lot a significant amount of money or someone's gonna have to be fired because i can't make payroll so that the lack of stress is so good have you ever have you noticed have you noticed like your cortisol levels are dropping and you're just more chill interesting dude i'm like never i've never felt that i've never felt that because i've always had there's always been so many different businesses that anytime we've sold one i've been neglecting another one for a year and then that blows up and i get all stressed out so it's been i've been thinking about this a lot but i've been going from stress to stress for yeah and like seven or eight years probably since we sold our our one of our first companies and i've been thinking lately like i'm going like holy crap i got a d stress and that sounds really nice to not have to think about any of that stuff well the way i described it so when i described when i like moved out to san francisco go and like put by steak of the ground like alright i'm gonna figure this out i felt like i've been living with poor eyesight and i finally put classes on and i'm like oh this is the world like i can do anything i could do this i could finally see now after selling it's like a different put up my glasses on and realize i had poor eyesight where i'm like to my wife now i'm like oh my gosh is this how you feel all the time like you don't have to worry about x y and z what a crazy feeling this is actually quite nice now i wanna put that stress level back on again eventually but it's nice having that break and what i think about with you is i'm en mb of what you have in some regards right i think we're always en of of other people especially our friends i'm mb that you've built this huge awesome empire that you own nearly all of it that you have virtually all the control that's very most people envy to you because of that but i also think to myself wow andrew also hasn't chilled probably for a minute and that's definitely the downsides and so like in order to be the best you definitely got the word that which you are you have to worry carry that worry backpack a a fair bit oh yeah it's crazy and it it's so funny like the numbers just get bigger right so it's like i you know i i remember in like twenty twelve one time we like did payroll we didn't have enough money and like my business partner literally lend me money out of his personal account to close payroll right so we've been at that level of stress and you know i never feel that now you know we have enough money to go for years or whatever it's a very different thing but there's still that feeling of like oh fuck there's like six hundred seven hundred people relying on me to pay for their meal ticket at every single month and there's just constantly people problems right so yeah i've got like you know a lot of control and bucks stops with me and you know a lot of the things that people might envy but at the same time like we've got thirty plus companies and there's always a problem to think about or whatever i'm realizing i'm just constantly i think i'm addicted to cortisol and stress and this year has been extra difficult because what i used to do is at work at a cafe i'd like wake up like pounding stress cortisol i'd be all pumped up i do like three or four hours of focused work get all the stuff i need to get done but then i'd go work at a cafe and my buddies would show up and we start shooting shit and go for a walk and play tennis and just just kind of f off and now with covid it's like i'm in a house from eight thirty in the morning until five and then i go see my kids and it's crazy that just the importance of like distraction you don't get that like right now working ram remotely in a house you just don't get those moments the automatic breaks and stuff and so i'm realizing like man if i'm left to my own devices i'll i'll just stress to the nth degree and just keep working do you think and i'll this the last question i'll ask about this because i think always try to be self aware of where it's like a bunch of dudes complaining about shit that maybe like is it like it's problems right yeah it well my reply to that is it is a great problem it's but great problems are still problems first world problems are still problems but they are first of world problems but do you think that it will ever get not or ever not be stressful like you know we you talked about dan gilbert last time this billionaire guy who's got all this stuff going on you said that it was pretty calm and and present do you think that even a guy like him who kind of has it all or i mean people think you and i have it all i imagine but a guy like him who we think has it all do you think that they still stressed think i think it's it's interesting i think dan's probably really stressed out or at least was because he has so many different things that he's responsible for where if he doesn't intervene it messes up there's different versions of really successful people though think about it like is someone who runs a private equity firm where they have this big pool of capital they oversee and they just buy businesses and they oversee them or whatever or or someone who like a head fund manager who buys stocks right you can have twenty employees you invest in apple and all these companies and at the end of the day apple does well or it doesn't and you don't influence that right i think the number of things you've influence is what causes the stress and i think in our business we we go oh man if i'm not scanning the sky for you know issues in all of our businesses we could lose something or mess up and i don't know it's a it's a double edged short because think about like think about like your parents or old people and like they get upset about like oh the neighbor moved in who you know that the doesn't wanna water their lawn or someone's dog keeps poop on their front step or whatever it is that stresses them out as much as you and i get stressed out about business stuff so i think everyone's programmed to be stressed and i think it's more about what tools you have to distract yourself from the stress and if you got a lot of those then you're happy okay so let's we're gonna here's the tool that we're gonna d stress you perfect segue so for the first topic today we're are gonna talk about things that both you and i have invested in most of them are gonna be things that you've invested in and we're gonna spend we have one two three four five suit okay we're gonna spend about three to five minutes depending on how interesting they are where each other whoever listed it on here will say what it is and why it's interesting and then i wanna comment and tell you what i would do if i was you and you vice versa but i wanna hear your intel or your your your behind the scenes look as to why you are investing in this and why it might not work and why it will work like why code work and so does that sound good yeah sounds great alright the first one you bought this company who we we've had sophia i'm rosa on the podcast you bought her old company called girl boss is it just girl boss dot com is that the url girl boss dot com yeah and what is it so girl boss is like a like a media company for women so sophia started at about six years ago and built up this massive following started doing amazing events podcast podcasts built like a social network and she i met her when she was first starting it and she'd done nasty gal which was like this big flame out where she built a really amazing business was doing thirty million dollars a year doing online e commerce selling more used clothes doing really really well right she didn't need the money and she ended up raising from venture to take a little bit of money off the table and then the venture investors got in and we're like hey you got a twenty x this go take risk start retail stores she starts the retail stores and it all blows up a really horrible story where she had a good thing and then she risked it and then it blew up and so she was fresh off of that and she said look i'm starting this company girl boss i think i wanna bootstrap it and i and you know i might raise a little tiny round but i'm not gonna raise venture again and so we ended up investing and falling along and she ended up bra venture again i i don't know what it was specifically i think she saw like a bigger opportunity and decided to do it and the terms were great but so she raised venture and decided to build like you know all this stuff like a social network for women building an app all these really expensive r and d projects and it got to a point where it just wasn't working and it wasn't venture scale and so she sold it to these guys attention capital in new york and they like they're joe and nick right i think they're yeah they guys yeah so and they yeah they they basically they they focused on the event business they had all these massive contracts that were booked and then covid hit and they just got themselves into a pickle where they just couldn't the numbers didn't make sense they're burning too much money they lost all these contracts and so they nudge me and said hey would you be interested in buying this and i said look i i i will buy it only if i can just buy the assets because we looked at and we said hey they've got two million social followers they've got a huge newsletter all the piece they've got a massive podcast feed all the pieces are there but the cost structure was venture right so like they had you know a big p and l they had a ton of employees and we looked at we went okay what if this company had five employees could you run it with five employees and is that how many you have now now now i think there's maybe seven or eight or something like that but we started with basically you know one person doing newsletter one person doing podcast one person doing social and then we just said as we sell more ads we'll hire more people and we ran it like a bootstrap business and so that's what we've been doing and i think you know sophia was pretty nervous when we bought it right she's like don't embarrass me you know make sure you hire the right people and so we worked you know in close partnership with her and she's actually been really stoked about what we've been doing so that's been awesome yeah i just you just you just announced a new ceo i think you hired yeah yeah totally so okay so can can you talk about any of the like the size so these two million subscribe two million social followers how many email subscribers about two hundred and fifty thousand so i can't share the the acquisition price that's fine but it it was it was you know it was let's say let's say i i felt it was a value investment based on the social followers but if you looked at it on a p and l basis it was like holy crap this is a mess right because it been losing a lot of money okay what would you be happy with this company in two years like what's you yeah what's cool about it is when we when we buy a business we're generally going you know if we're wrong about all the big opportunities and we're only right about just base hits so like hey you know we've got two hundred and fifty thousand newsletter subscribers can we sell forty or fifty thousand dollars a month of ads on that if we do that we've got a good little business and then if we do that on the podcast we've got a really good little business and then if we do that on social again it's bigger and bigger and bigger it doesn't need to be huge based on the price we paid it could do three million bucks a year in revenue and be an amazing business and give us a good return i think it's a twenty or thirty or fifty million dollar a year business once we kind of do the events we're we've been thinking about you know all sorts of opportunities within the business but what i like about it is you know if we don't do well if we don't grow it into a huge company we'll still we'll still do just fine so i agree with that assessment i actually think that so long as you're mildly competent which you are the worst case scenario is is two million dollars a year i would say a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a month yeah based off of a quarter of a million email subscribers two million social followers now it won't wouldn't exactly be exciting or it wouldn't be the most fun thing and that would be like if that was the worst case scenario it'd be like man we really missed missed the mark on this but you're you're not gonna go out of business and you're probably not gonna lose which is pretty good so i actually agree with that assessment i think that if in ten years if you were at thirty million dollars a year in revenue i wouldn't be surprised it would probably be it would probably be fifteen it'd probably be twenty million dollars a year in advertising and ten million dollars a year in user revenue so ticket sales more likely than that i don't know if you would be able to get subscriptions to this maybe i actually do think that there's i know a few people who have female focused communities and they do like three million dollars a year in revenue oh yeah i seen like much smaller communities doing way higher revenue like we've looked at a lot of stuff for m and a like for even for girl boss and there's there's definitely some people doing really really well with small communities so the way i'm kind of feeling right now like everything i look at and we're i don't know if people how familiar there with our structure but we mostly buy majority control of businesses and usually we're buying them from founders and then off the side of our desk we also do a little bit of venture investing maybe like two or three million dollars a year we've got a angel rolling fund for for another i think eleven million or something like that so my world is generally doing you have an eleven million dollar well hold on you have an eleven million dollar rolling fund yeah that's crazy right yeah we were it's it was insane we we literally were like we tweeted out as like an afterthought and we raised it in like four hours it was totally insane eleven billion yeah i think we're one of the biggest ones i think so i think that you might be like a second or third biggest i think i heard of a sixteen million dollar one but you might you guys might be number two might actually size it up because you can it's limited just by the number of people and if you have yeah there's no amount so if someone wants to do five million bucks they can do that so there's something hurting again more we've got doing it they administer everything and right who's exciting well i i decide right so basically i already make probably one one or two venture investments a month and it's usually like you know a friend of mine emails me and says hey i'm starting a company or one of our agencies is working with a company that we'd think is cool or something and i just go okay well i'll put it in a hundred grand and now instead of putting in a hundred grand i put in five hundred or a million via the rolling fund and i just invest my personal money into the rolling fund anyway so so we do venture investing i look at that as like a hobby it's kinda like ro right it's just betting on friends having fun looking at companies what i'm seeing in ventures is absolutely insane so i've seen companies of with with a founder who's a first time founder with an idea and they're raising at a forty million dollar pre valuation right like just totally crazy stuff and in the private market you know there's all this crazy you just endless money and low interest rates and stuff and almost everything we look at is just bid up like crazy like to the point where we look at it and we go i don't see any world even if everything goes right where we can make our money back at this price and so for most of this year we've basically just been sitting on our hands and waiting and trying to find hidden value and what i the way i think about hidden value is like kinda like girl boss where you look at the p and l and it looks like you know oh whoa this is losing a lot of money i don't know how to value this but you look at it and go under our ownership what can this do and you make a new p and l in your head where you're like oh i actually need five people my costs are eight aws and mailchimp and stuff and so we've been doing a bunch of that and then really we've just been kind of sitting and waiting and getting creative right and i i'll talk about this guy henry singleton later but we really are just trying to you know issue stock when it's highly valued and buy stuff back when it's cheap and so we've been looking across our portfolio and just going like how can we do m and a with our stock or how can we buy cheap businesses and bolt them in that people don't understand but it's it's crazy out there right now what okay but to play devil's advocate and this is something that i'm playing with in my head of like what what do i stand for what's gonna be my principles for investing and and i haven't settled on what those are yet although i have some guiding principles they're not solidified entirely and a good friend of mine at ent and h said don't worry too much about valuation because whatever's hot will continue to be hot and you're gonna like a lot of times the valuations looking back well be like oh that was cheap but then in the middle of it it's always appears to be expensive but the real winners it it won't matter that much of course his lens to to looking at that is quite narrow albeit effective but narrow but what's your take on that well i think i'm assuming andrew chen because i know your friends are them i think they're are amazing investors the some of the best adventure i think the hard part is you know if you've taken that same approach in nineteen ninety nine it'd be really hard to be a winner right because you see the same kind of stuff happening where historically i think we're at an all time high in terms of just like pre money valuations but back then i mean there was companies that were pre revenue selling for billions of dollars and all the same crazy stuff and the problem is that within that haystack there's an amazon right or an ebay or a google but you just don't know which one they are and so i think if you were to go out an index and buy a hundred random startups ups in nineteen ninety nine you'd probably lose money and i'd argue you'd probably lose money today if you went out and you index and i to me the only way i'll bet on a someone at a high valuation is if i know that they're a proven operator like if they're a foundry who's done really well historically and i've have all out of trust and think they're amazingly smart i don't worry too much of a valuation but dude some of the stuff i'm seeing is just wacky just crazy crazy stuff is there one thing that you are seeing that interest you a ton that you've had the chance to invest in or you passed on but you still think it's quite amazing so you're you're saying that like you've seen i and i have two like ideas from people who don't know what they're doing or at least you don't know if they know what they're doing and they're these huge valuations is there anything that you've seen lately where you're like oh my gosh this thing potentially could be the coolest thing i've ever seen i think if there's one thing i've learned over the last ten years it's when you see something and you get lit up about it ignore the valuation and just invest right like it's like there's lots of companies that i was super excited about but i was like oh i'm a value investor i'm not gonna you know do this on these terms what and i should have i mean i've got i've i've got the ultimate like anti portfolio of you know coinbase and slack and you know all sorts of other staffing running an agency in silicon valley for ten years like you just get you see all sorts of stuff right they turns out to be big i i think the most thing the thing i'm most excited about and nervous about at the same time right now is like crypto stuff and there's a company i saw recently that i i didn't get the opportunity to invest in but i think is genius so the crazy thing about crypto is like at least theoretically historically if you are a member of a website like reddit let's say and you're an early user let's say you're the first hundred users of reddit and you built it into something you actually derive no value right you don't get paid or like a wikipedia contributor and then reddit makes billions of dollars i know where you're going with this one for the first time ever i could start up andrew reddit and i could say hey all the people who move over from reddit based on the number of followers you have or whatever your rankings are i'm gonna issue coin in andrew reddit and as everyone moves over and post more you become more valuable kind of like the bit cloud thing right now bit cloud kind of whatever bs but i think for the first time social networks and network effects are actually vulnerable to this and one of the one of the businesses i saw that i thought was fascinating was a company called brain trust and what they've done is they've basically created a really nice up upwork so it's like a you go to the website it looks like a really well design version of about is this gabe yes and i know gabe i i i he called me a year ago what he was about to launch and he told me all about it because he was hiring a content person yeah i have not checked in on this okay so go ahead so i don't know what he was doing a year ago but basically you go to this website and it looks like you know up upwork it's like hey higher contractors for design and development whatever you need but then it says no fees and i was like well how the hell do they have no fees that's crazy because upwork charges like five or ten percent of all the projects and what they do very quietly is they have a coin and so they have a brain trust coin and they have people who their job is to basically be a project manager on there those people get paid in the coin all the transactions occur in the coin so as you it's almost like if uber had issued a coin tell their early drivers and then as they participate in the network they get rich and so they don't go to lyft because they're already rich in uber coin right and so it creates this lock in and it aligns incentives and before it was always this thing where it's like labor versus capital and this is the first time it's all aligned it's all you know very theoretical and early and i don't know whether it's a good time to invest right now but it's obviously the future to me interesting and so let's talk about this so for the listeners the guy who started this his name is gabe what's his last name os os ko he's got two he's got two last names him and his wife they like hyphen it so i forget his full name anyway he started a company called luna os ses or something yes yes yes he started this thing called cal i forget what it was called cal tech no like something where it was like a lead gen site for like roof and home services and it grew to like thirty million dollars a year in revenue i don't know how but in some way he cashed out maybe his partners bought him out or something like that and he started this thing brain trust about eighteen months ago i think and so i actually will would email him after this and being like hey what's going on you raising because this is really cool i think i agree with you this is really cool and he's a very proven entrepreneur now the thing i get nervous about when it comes to people like him is that will they be hungry enough to make it big i get nervous about that do you i don't really think too much about that because i think we all know like you know you you're gonna have this exit and you won't be hungry in the same way where you're like you'll cross someone's eyes out to you know to be successful you've already become successful but i think like over time it's just like you start going like okay i proved it once now i have to do it again at double the size and it's the same thing that everyone says where it's like what's the perfect amount of money it's like two or three times whatever you currently have so if you exited for thirty this time you gotta exit for ninety next time i it's just i that's it's just the way people seem to work god that's great alright let's talk about another one let's do alright i'll tell you this one that i just did the other day and this one i actually think has more reasons why it will fail than why it will not fail why it will win it's called tails let me find the url i don't even remember ko writers dot com so i just i'm gonna exit to so on the surface the this has a lot of things that i don't like it could it it's kinda like an iphone game type of thing it's pretty hit driven but i'm interested in this for a couple reasons the first basically what it is is it's this technology where authors can upload their books that they've already written and they've made it so they can turn a pre written book into an interactive story which is kind of interesting but i invested it for a couple of reasons one i've been crazy fascinated with how authors can make more money because i think books traditionally are a horrible way to make money off of someone who spends like you know two years of their life writing something like it's pretty shitty like the different like our friend jack butcher prop probably makes more money off his one course which impacts probably ten thousand people than a book that is read by a million people which is pretty confusing what anything you think i think this fascinating though because like i'm writing a book right now i don't know if i'm even gonna release it i might just turn into a bunch of twitter twitter tweet storms or blog posts or something or make a podcast out of it or that's what's interesting too is like when you have all that content you can take it and put it across all the different channels right like build it once put it everywhere and monetize it across all those different places well there is a legitimacy there's a legitimacy around i know deal able to hand someone of the book and say this is my story as i want you know to just to for you to understand it and you know it's like is like the man because of shoe dog right i agree so that like i don't think a book is gonna go away but i think that what you should do is write a book as like a loss leader and then do all this other stuff of which tails one of those things and the reason why this this has fascinated me is because i think that romance novels and anime and like entertainment like that for amongst young folks and particularly women it's like one of the biggest genres there is i mean it's just a rapid fan based people love this stuff i invested in this thing because i think an author can charge like thirty dollars for an interactive book and people will read it a lot and and consumer ton and there's a company in china i'm always fascinated with how the chinese monetized content there's a company in china called well the american translation is just called china literature it's a eighty billion dollar publicly traded company that does something just like this in china and i'm fascinated with how authors can make more money i'm fascinated with bringing the chinese habits to america also the founder of this company had invested like eight hundred thousand dollars or something like that of its own money into the business and i was like oh that's cool like you're you're you're betting it i'm interested so that's a recent one i did but there's so many reasons why this can fail it could be incredibly expensive to acquire users i don't know if the users are gonna even stay for that long and it could be a total hits driven business so this actually has a lot of reasons why i can fail and has a couple of reasons why it could work how the i think the hard part about this though is that you've gotta do all this custom work on each book like i get they've built the framework but you've probably gotta have someone illustrate like a comic almost for every single so that's the technology that they've built is like they make it really easy for yourself like you're the author to make it interactive so that's like the whole point that's like the technology behind it but we'll see if they can pull it off it it's been around for twelve months so it it it's a working mvp but tb to see if this is gonna pull they're gonna pull it off but that's one thing i've just invested in alright your turn do you got what do wanna go over which one so we just we just to we keep investing in this business and it's a lot of people don't understand it it's called medi map and let's just talk about so so up in canada yeah m e d i m a p so up in canada we have socialize health care so the government pays for it and if you want to get care you can't just call any doctor and get in right so there's this whole system if you wanna see a dermatologist do you have to go go to a you know a general practitioner get a referral at takes six months in in many ways it's better because anyone who wants it gets health care but the quality of care is probably lower overall and what it's resulted in is a system where a lot of people don't have doctors and you have to go to a walk clinic and there's always walk in clinics you know oliver canada and this this guy came to me like five years ago because i had invested in a few other health care businesses and he goes hey i'm gonna build this business called medi map and basically you're gonna be able to go to the website and you're gonna see the wait times at every single clinic in canada and i was like well why would the who's gonna fill out the times right like how are you gonna and he goes well i'm gonna convince the clinic owners that they wanna be on this site and they should punch in you know the wait times every hour and i was like this seems insane like f off i'm not gonna invest right comes back six months later and he goes hey i've got twenty five percent of all clinics in canada using this and i'm like well like how did you do that and it turns out that every single clinic every day gets ten phone calls a minute and all the phone calls are is hey what's the wait time right because everyone's trying to go where the lowest wait time is and so there's this huge incentive of all the clinic owners went oh my god i don't have to have two medical office assistants i can just have one and that that one can just punch in the wait time so now this business has eighty six percent of all medical walking clinics in canada and every single one has software installed wait time software installed on their computers so we've been investing in this business it's been you know losing money and we've been building out this network right and our thinking is once we have the network there's a lot of really interesting things we can do with the network and we've started expanding that so this is it started as a venture investment and then we ended buying we now have a like a control position in it we're about to buy even more of it and there's a lot of models globally for this like z doc and other folks and so now that we've got the network established we have no competitors even if someone raised a hundred million bucks i don't know how you go out and convince every clinic walk walking clinic owner in canada to switch to your software over ours and so we're starting the now layer in ph therapy nat pass massage all sorts of other services and then we're also integrating into the booking engines for all of these and these people can pay to promote their clinic and get more bookings and stuff like that so i'm super excited about it and it's one of those businesses you might look at and go you know i don't get it where's the value but it's it's really really cool and we're super excited about it i'm i'm on the site and i i typed in my location i'm like oh they're just con in canada like vancouver i did i i just typed in vancouver okay so so the way it works is i typed in vancouver it says crossroads walk clinic closes at seven pm as of right now they've got a thirty minute wait time i can click and i can join waitlist list and then i i select a what i'm gonna tell the doctor and how i wanna do the visit yada so how do they make money does the doctor no the doctor is totally free to use and the doctor can i believe the doctor can like make a nicer profile so they can upload their logo and stuff but we don't make any money off of that right so the idea is over time we make a stronger and stronger network and we can start to get directly like like that one you can click to join the waitlist list immediately and do that that's all free what we make money on is when you go and you say oh i want a chiropractor or i need to find a pharmacy and send in a prescription or something we can do referral agreements with all those different clinics or pharmacies but right as of right now we haven't monetized it like this is like how many people works there like five or six is very small oh it's small and it looks like you got like a according similar web you guys are getting like a hundred ish fifty to a hundred ish thousand you visitors a month and the traffic is mostly search and direct which is like the greatest thing ever i mean that's exactly what you'd want so i i imagine it's a unique database right like there's nowhere else you can go in canada to get way less times and i can't i'm so you're you're probably spending zero dollars on advertising is that right yeah we we've experimented a little bit with it but we we spend very little at this point so it's it's going back to like understanding a moat and going like oh this is like no one to compete with this we spent last five years losing money and building the network and now it's like there's no way to disrupt this and think of all the different things you can build in this i always like to say you know we like to buy airport businesses and an airport is you know there's one there's one airport in the city if you wanna go somewhere and fly you've gotta go and sit in the lobby for an hour and when you're sitting in the lobby i'm gonna try and sell you bunch of stuff so i've got all the stalls and i can put it in a massage place and i can put it in a bookstore somewhere to sell sandwiches whatever and this is an airport business and right now all the stalls are empty and we're gonna start monetizing it and filling in all the stalls that's a great analogy or a great story where did you learn that one because before you had new zealand businesses which i like where who made it up you made it up that's a good one i like that one that's really good i am going to steal that one so like yeah medi map i could see how it this is gonna work if i had a guess i would say you've lost maybe six million dollars on this so far like yeah i think that's that's like i think exactly how much we put in that was a good guess yeah i i'm just doing the math as to you're not spending you're probably only spending money on five or six salaries a month plus hosting which comes out to be probably eighty five to ninety five thousand dollars a month you've done it for five years i just made that number up so when it goes back to if that was in the states it would have been more competitive right because canada in canada health care is not privatized not a lot of people are moving into it and and there's just not a lot of venture competition so if we're in the states we would have had to raise thirty million bucks move super fast be really aggressive but we're able to kinda quietly go out and do this and build the network is z doc the nearest competitor i mean z doc i think they're a multi billion dollar company is that right well they're only they're only in the states right and so you know i think they would be a illogical if they ever if they were ever to move international they'd be a logical acquire of medi map and i think that they're a great model right now we're looking at it and going okay how do we roll out the o doc playbook or or find similar businesses elsewhere i don't mean competitor but i mean it's the z like the most years yeah the nearest yeah a comparable z doc and that's a multi billion dollar company i think yeah that's pretty cool i'm looking i i would imagine this the thing would with this company is gonna be backlinks and what's interesting about you guys is i'm looking at a i'm looking at now you've got seven hundred and fifty referring domains which is actually lower than i thought you've got seventy one hundred backlinks but here's why it's kind of actually interesting the way that you're doing it none of your all your traffic i imagine is gonna be search like it's gonna you're gonna someone's gonna type in like this clinic wait time or this clinic phone number and you're gonna show up like don't call just click to see the wait time but what's weird to me is in canada do you guys have dot gov websites is dot gov only an american thing no we have that it's like well it's like dove dot gov dot c a or something but i think i think we have dot gov the reason i'm asking is if this is if most of your traffic is gonna come from search you are gonna and all the if some of these clinics are i don't know how the canadian i don't know how your guys healthcare care system is but if they're a government sponsored or government owned health care clinic i would imagine it would have a dime this is the important distinction is they're not government owned they're government regulated so the way it works is a clinic up and they're their challenging businesses because the government basically dictates how much you can charge per visit and the government has to prove may have to be run by a doctor so it's basically like you can make sliver thin margins and that's again why having someone calling all the time saving money on not having someone on the phone all the time is massive for a clinic owner here's what i'm getting at what i'm getting is is this actually could be a much bigger moat than i realized because if you're getting a bunch of dot gov websites leaking back to you a dot gov url is worth the seo out there will correct me but something like a hundred times more valuable than a dot com and so i'm looking at this website if you could talk if the if the i'm looking at your medi what's it called medi map i'm looking at the the clinics if they all link back to you and many of them are dot gov or dot org or or whatever or dot e if they're like you're gonna have a stupid amount of backlinks and you're gonna have a significant advantage over anyone because you're just gonna crush on search because google a any dot gov are significantly high higher ranked than a dot a dot com and a dot edu use so let's say you can get a university clinic or something to refer back to you it's gonna be actually quite amazing i think and and i would imagine this is the type of company that's gonna be slow slow slow slow slow and then all of a sudden it's it's just good it's gonna be like oh like no one one's gonna catch us like nobody nobody gets this and they go oh you know there's least virtual care like tel doc kind stuff in canada and i just keep saying like when you break your arm you're not gonna go and tel it doc right there that's a this is like a certainty like death and taxes certainty is people will always need physical doctors and yeah well your actual will be twenty percent thirty percent whatever but it's it's not going away it's gonna yeah you you don't you i'm not gonna call the doctor when have a kidney stone so what why don't you tell me about hustle plus i don't know i don't wanna i wanna i wanna i wanna do you wanna do hustle plus or could we talk about bakery and then security and then yeah jump that okay totally i wanna talk about bakeries so you is this the bakery that you've already bought so no so i own i own a bakery i when i grew up my little brother worked at a local bakery just down the street from our house and we yeah it was his first job and i used i used to go there all the time i got to know the owner i used to help him with his computer when i was like fourteen and he maybe like four years ago said hey look you know my parents are getting old i wanna retire i'm thinking what's selling my business and i was like well i don't know the first thing about bakeries but he's got a really good manager in place and i don't want this to go to the wrong people like i literally grew up going to this bakery it's like an institution in my city i love it and so i said you know effort i'll buy it and so i bought it and now i own an italian bakery and delhi and it's actually a good little business it's like that thing i always think back to of like if all this technology stuff fails and all my stocks go to zero i always have a bakery you know that's that's not gonna go anywhere for forty years but the idea at the bakery so basically a couple months ago some friends and i did like a paleo diet challenge and i felt amazing but i had crazy carb and sugar cravings like i just wanted like a a treat basically and when you're doing paleo you're not allowed any grains or sugar and there's hacks around that right so you can be like okay i'm having something that's sweetened with honey or coconut flour maple syrup or whatever those are all total bs right those all still spike your blood sugar if you eat spoonful of table sugar versus a spoonful of maple syrup like it's pretty much maybe a little better but equally bad for you and so i started researching do otherwise what do you mean i would've have thought that that was obvious yeah i mean a lot of people think like i talked to like you know friends of mine and they're like oh i gave my kids these these really great snacks they're sweetened with coconut sugar and i'm just like dude sugar is sugar and like if you were a blood glucose monitor it's insane so anyway so i started researching all these non sugar sweeteners and trying to think about how to hack this and make some snacks that i could eat like like stevia asp tame all the old all all that stuff and i realized there's this whole new generation of these so a lot of the old ones they have like you know stomach problems they cause d or like stomach cramp and other stuff but there's new ones that actually taste really really good don't cause any blood sugar spikes and are relatively healthy like all and stevia and x and so i actually found a baker i contracted the baker and i just said hey like make me five or six different things i wanna see if you know i can make something interesting and i started making these chocolate chip cookies and you know blueberry walnut cookies and all this other stuff and they're insanely good and so what i would do is i'd give them my friends and say hey i baked these cookies let me know what you think and they'd eat them and say they're really good and i'd say well there's no sugar and they don't spike your blood sugar and they're all healthy ingredients like almond almond flour and almond butter and stuff and so i started thinking about it and i was like you know everyone wants to be healthy right now and they're used to go into a bakery and eating something unhealthy given the option would they choose something that's higher end and healthy but still taste the same or better so so like you know think about mcdonald's mcdonald's was the standard in the nineties now there's chipotle if you're a little more health conscious you go to chipotle and so i was like holy crap like you know i don't really wanna get in the bakery business but this seems like a great opportunity and so i've been working on developing all these recipes and i've started are you making god sure no money so yeah so i literally i'm literally starting a bakery it's gonna be delivery only to start just as like a beta test and i'm calling euphoria and you know the idea is basically you know taste as good as a normal bakery but it's actually really healthy for you and i've won a glucose monitor i've done all these experiments levels so are you using i'm not doing levels i just use a dex comp but anyway i'm i'm beta testing over with a bunch of friends right now and then in a couple weeks i'm i'm launching it on door dash and gonna experiment but like it's just like one of those random you know in like a business just like slaps you in the face you want this for myself that's so silly i can't believe this is so this is very you this is it i i find this to be i'm i'm i'm very en of you for doing this i think this is so freaking cool how much did you employ this baker time or what are you doing with them you just contract i found someone who can work part time and i'm just doing that to start it's very like eighty twenty i'm like how do i know invest as little amount of money as possible and as little time as possible to do it so i hard to designer to do a logo and a simple website and then i hired a baker to do the baking and then a photographer to photograph everything and that's it what's your startup cost gonna be five five or ten grand probably maybe a little more than that so it's again it's just probably a nothing but i it's one of those things like at the very least i just didn't yeah it's definitely gonna be a something i mean is it gonna be like the thing who knows it's definitely gonna be a thing i mean like you i feel like you kinda you if you screw this up you're kind of an idiot like yeah this well it goes back to like if i just called it a paleo bakery even if it was unhealthy and shitty it would do well right and then you add on to that like that you know the all the glucose stuff and all the other stuff that's getting hot right now i think it's quite interesting to summarize i think this is such a great idea i think it will be fun i i think that it will make life worth like little stuff like this is life worth living but maybe it could be immensely profitable this is really smart i have friend named david h who started grasshopper grasshopper how know grasshopper or a lot everyone knows dave he's a good guy grasshopper was the software company that he sold i think for two hundred million dollars entirely bootstrap it was basically like a small business phone service you pay ten dollars or something a month and you get a phone line he started this thing called nut butter is that what you know what's it called it's like a peanut butter pouch train like a peanut butter stuff as a key thing yeah and the business it is so much harder than a software company but he's having so much fun and it seems exciting i think i think like there's it's a double edged sword right so i i used to always i used to always ask people like i you always get all these tech people who make tons of money or whatever and you're like well you know what are you doing with your money like are you starting any weird things like you know i love dan gilbert which i talked about in the last episode because he went how do i make my city better right it's like doing the fun stuff with money and the way i look at this is like a i'm scratching an itch for saying i want my friends might want but i make my city better and it's just a cool you know it's a cool fun thing to play with right i think the fun part of entrepreneurship is going this should exist and making it exist but at the same time like i've done stupid stuff like that like i started a pizza restaurant and i lost eight hundred thousand dollars doing it it was a total disaster i was getting phone calls like you know we had a we had a like an alcoholic manager who was sleeping in the restaurant you know we had a sketchy landlord we had like just endless stress and bullshit and so this stuff is fun to a point and the key that i've learned is just hiring amazing people so i only like the beginning like this part is fun but i gotta get out really quick have you heard of the barber motors sports museum and race racetrack no so there's a guy in alabama where is it somewhere in alabama let's see it's in birmingham alabama but it's in the country i think of birmingham alabama his name is george barber he's probably eighty years old now his father this guy's eighty and then his father started a dairy company so like farming dairy company just like imagine like an alabama dairy dairy company that's what it was sold it to dean foods for five hundred million dollars or something like that and they were probably breaking it in throughout the entire fifty year period which they owned it he went with all the money he went and started the thing called the barber track and barber motorcycle and car museum and he has something like a thousand or two thousand cars i believe it's the largest collection of motorcycles in the whole world and he has this world class track where indy cars like rolex sponsored formula one races take place on this like people from all over europe monaco all come to birmingham alabama to start and go or to go to this barber track and it's done so much for the community i think he invested probably fifty million dollars to make it because it's a non nonprofit and you could look at how many assets they have and how much cash they i have and what the revenue is and it's amazing and it's similar to your bakery thing now a lot of people like you think like oh how much can a car museum gonna track help the community well it actually helps at a ton because people all every everyone i'm gonna go to barber soon and take this lesson yada and that's my version of a of a of a bakery or saving detroit is i wanna start like a car museum and a car track i think that was i was starting i was talking to a friend about this yesterday but do you remember like ten or fifteen years ago portland was suddenly cool i everyone's saying oh my god you gotta go to portland or whatever the reason portland became cool was because of the ace hotel right the ace hotel was just kind of a funky hotel and you had a photo booth and a good bar in it and all this other stuff was kinda new and i always think what's the ace hotel that you can add to your own city right like in victoria it's like what's the thing that people come to see and right now it's like you know some t english shops and you know there's a beautiful garden here and a few other you know historical things there's nothing cool and so i've been thinking a lot about this like is it like a crazy bar or a music venue or a hotel or something like that but what's the what makes this place the destination because i think something as simple as that can change an entire city i don't know what the answer is but that kind of stuff is really interested me earlier you brought up henry singleton i like henry singleton i've read this really good book called the outsiders i know that's probably your bible is that right i love that book okay so the outsiders it's a great book it's about twelve ceos who are quote outsiders the the commonalities is they are like kinda quiet they're kind of afraid of the press they are typically in locations like nebraska or somewhere not silicon valley or new york and they just get pretty good results but they get it every single year for like fifty years so they'll like grow something by like twenty percent or fifteen percent but they do it every year for so long that by year twenty thirty forty it's like oh my gosh they're warren buffett they're henry singleton yada who is this guy so yeah and the idea is basically that their capital all which is kind of a weird nerdy term but it basically just means they they're really good at putting their money into buckets where they can make a lot more of it versus investing in the wrong thing and what what a lot of people miss is you can have the most innovative ceo in the world but if they mis allocate their dollars and they put it into you know low return r and d versus high return acquisitions or whatever you can have a very bad result despite being very innovative and a great leader in manager so henry singleton is like everyone thinks warren buffett the greatest investor of all time henry singleton you know i think he died in the eighties but i'm pretty sure he actually is a better record than warren buffett and nobody really knows his name they only know it because of the outsiders there's been one other book written about him but he basically got into these very niche very technical fields where they would do like it'd be like navigation equipment that's on like a you know a fighter jet or random little like diodes for for circuitry and all this kind of stuff but you'd find these niches where they could kind of own it or have a very dominant position in it what's there's this very simple kind of way of thinking about investing and his whole thing was when the market is over valued and crazy that's a great time to issue stock and to sell things and when the market is undervalued you wanna be buying not only buying back your own company so if you don't own your entire company you wanna go and you know buy back more stock and you wanna be investing then and so that approach is you know it's very simple it does it doesn't sound like rocket science but i think it's a really important thing for people to be thinking about right now and i think now is a great time to be scanning your portfolio or businesses and going how can i how can i basically take advantage of valuations right now and either you know issue stock or use my stock in my business to go buy stuff or just wait for opportunities because right now it's like a crazy sellers market which is shockingly the hardest part is than not doing anything so in time like you have far more perspective in this you're more successful than i am and you're a couple years older than i am so you just a little everything that i am interested in you are but more how are you and other people who you've met that without buy into this how do you guys just sit and chill how do you not do new stuff because i i say to myself all the time i'm gonna i'm not gonna like pounce on x y and z i gotta wait i gotta wait i gotta wait i get so antsy and i can't like it's i it's hard well there's a reason i'm starting a sugar free bakery right like this that's the stuff that's honestly my my secret to not doing too much is i distract myself and you know before covid it'd be distracting myself with sports and you know playing bridge and hang out with friends and going on walks and stuff now it's starting businesses and they're really small little businesses they're like hobby businesses you know it's like me just kind of playing with ten or twenty thousand dollars but it's enough to keep me distracted and happy and active and feel like i'm doing something but in reality i'm sitting on my hands and building up cash and what like you so you still have enough time to do that and do the weak commerce thing which for those of you don't know andrew i don't know how you describe it if you started it which you owned it i don't know what the right terminology is but you have this thing that went public and is currently like i don't know what it is today but like many hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap yeah we started a business about ten years ago we met the founder of shopify and at the time we were running a design agency and he said hey we wanna launch themes on our platform we want people to be able to sign up and have different designs they can choose from and we'll let you guys sell these themes on the platform for you know a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars and so we were kinda thinking like hey it's a small little a canadian company these guys seem nice let's do it and we started doing it and shopify just grew into a behemoth and we rode the whale and did really well and we actually sold the business in twenty thirteen we didn't realize how big shopify i would get and then we bought the business back in twenty nineteen we did buy back for more than you sold it way more yeah i think it was that's five five times six times yeah so we bought it back we we and we said like we you know we're just making a big bet we think shopify is gonna get a hell of a lot bigger and we've made a holding company called commerce and we started buying businesses and kind of building a mini version of tiny within the shopify ecosystem and then we took a public in december and we're listed on the ts x exchange up in canada and as of right now i don't know if this is in canadian dollars or american but it's six hundred and sixty three million dollar market cap i think that's your canadian that's canadian so six hundred yeah six hundred and sixty three canadian dollars so it's pretty big how but i mean like you're saying you're like just sitting there and not doing anything just waiting waiting waiting it seems like you're doing something well i mean i'm we restarted this podcast by me saying i'm stressed out and busy right so i think i i don't want anyone to get the wrong idea that you know it's more i'm filling my time when i have it by distracting myself with this other stuff and that all of the things i'm focused on right now for the most part like while i'm looking at buying businesses everything's so overpriced that i don't wanna make a swing on the wrong thing so i'm filling the rest of my time with other things and one of those things is not email you told me the other day that you for the first time ever which is actually shocking to me the the first time ever you've hired someone or you've asked your assistant to completely manage your email and you said something like this is the first day i've tried it tb if it actually works is it working and what are you doing yeah so i'm doing i'm doing two things that are kind of interesting so one i fully delegated my email to my assistant so i get i i've started getting over the last couple years like two hundred or three hundred emails a day and honestly it was just making me kinda miserable like it was just i've i've tried all the best practices and we've even built a a company called mail that basically like slows down your email and and does do not disturb on it and stuff but it just wasn't enough and i hit my breaking point a couple weeks ago i was just spending like five hours a day doing email and i set up tech support software i pipe my email into it and i have my assistant and then we have another assistant we have in the philippines and they basically monitor the email and they have a set of rules so i wrote out like if someone asks me to sign a document send it to this person on our legal team they'll review it and then if they say yes you can sign it as long as it's below this amount if someone requests an interview go and look at the podcast see how many downloads it gets and if it's above this you can schedule or whatever and so i made like ten of these rules and now i'm getting like twenty emails a day because the only ones that come through to me are the ones where it's a friend asking me a direct question or it's one of our ceos or you know gon no go on an investment and so it just freed me up by like two or three hours and it's a classic example of like the em myth kind of where you're like you know desperately doing all this stuff that you don't really need to be doing because you've always done it so that's been awesome what's and then what's the i don't know what the at is oh you don't know that book i've i i i've seen it i i don't know what the myth is i've never actually read it but the myth the the entrepreneur myth i think it is but i think that's the no see always thought it meant electronic you like like it no it it's it's an amazingly badly written book but it's a very important message and it it was like transformational for me like twelve years ago and the idea is basically when people start businesses they don't build systems and they don't delegate right so the the person who loves baking starts to bakery and then before they know it they're staying up until two baking and then they wake up at seven in the morning them mop the floor and then they're behind the till all day they're miserable they're stressed and they thought they were creating this utopian business that they wanted and in reality it just sucks and they're miserable and the reason it sucks and they're miserable is because they don't delegate they don't build process they don't hire people when they do hire people that don't give them a chance and so it's all about how to delegate got it okay and what were we saying about the email thing so i and then the other thing i did which i it has been really fun i i used to like i used to do this myself so i used to cold email i still do it actually i still cold email entrepreneurs that i think are really cool and i wanna meet or asked some questions and like five years ago i started getting emails from young entrepreneurs saying hey can you look at my startup up or can you give me an opinion on this and i used to write really thoughtful responses and then as i got more email i just couldn't respond and i felt really really guilty about this name i like delete it sometimes i just like delete and other times i'd be like one line response and i'd be like fuck they think i'm an asshole one hundred saved dude have gotten that with some people and then i've eventually become friends with them and you know how like on twitter you can see like you recognize people's thumbnail over and over there's just one guy the other day that i've seen him talk to me all the time and then i've been hanging out with this other person like through a friend of a friend like three different times now and i knew his name and i'm like fuck you're the guy i've been ignoring yeah i'm so sorry man i'm so sorry i i i didn't realize it i so anyway i do the same thing and it kills me when you never know who they're gonna become or they could have this great idea if you just talk to them and get on the phone and so what i ended up doing i realized i was actually doing myself a disservice by responding because i just say like you know this is too long right me a shorter you know question or whatever it is you the douche like two business stuff don't know what you're asking so now i write them back of a template or my assistant writes them back and just says hey i don't respond to these via email what i like to do is i do an e an ama ask me anything every month and if you if you can afford to donate to charity you know it just as a way of you know paying it forward or whatever and so if someone's rich if someone has a big company already i'm like hey go donate some money if they're is first time entrepreneur we don't expect them to and then chris and i just do a monthly ama and then everyone gets to enjoy the answer we did so it's dude so it's been crazy so we we've already donated fifty eight thousand dollars to charity from this so we basically whatever the community donate we double it and then we donate it to a low charity so for we've donated fifty eight k half of which came from people who donated and then it's probably saved me two or three hours a month of i'm just not that's one of these emails so it's it's like a really great hack should i copy that i think that's great totally yeah did you make that i yeah i think we made it up that's wonderful that is such a good idea where you send the fifty six k too have you picked your yeah we did one one was like a it's called bridges for women i think i think it was and it's for women that are transitioning out of abusive households and then the other one was a gym a local gym some guy set up a gym for handicap people because there's no equipment for handicapped people in town and so somewhere you can go and work out if you're you know para or something what what's the most amount of money you've ever donated or given can you reveal that i i've given away probably like three or four million bucks i think so far wow that's crazy isn't it it's really it's it's really crazy and i'm just kinda learning i'm learning i'm going like how what's the most effective thing to do because there's everything from like local feel good right where you can help a small number of people but you know you're making their life ten percent better but you're not saving a life versus if you put the money into like malaria medication or bed nets or that sort of thing in the third world you know i i think it that's what i'm kinda debating right now is how to how to be most effective with my alt i can't believe though like you've given away that much money that's a huge amount i've like i haven't done really much of anything and i want to it the way i started was i i just started doing donating to science so i'd be like as i was researching different medical things i'd be like oh this research is really cool i'm gonna start donating monthly and i just fund their work and then over time i just put more and more into it and then you know over the last year i started the tiny foundation i don't know if you've seen that but about a year ago i started doing this thing where i would just find people who i thought were smart in fields that i thought were important and i'd say here's a hundred to three hundred thousand dollars you choose where it goes so you don't need it can go to your own research it can go to a friends anything you think is important and it just saves me from having to do all the diligence and work so i'm looking at it now even your foundation website looks pretty bad which is awesome yeah we had hired some really awesome designers for that yeah it looks really good so for this wow besides just like doing good which is like the most important thing but let's just be real is there anything that you're getting out of this i mean what i get out of it is feeling good well for example so i i don't i don't think i've talked about on here but i had acid reflux like horrible acid reflux for others years and i started researching it and i read tons of research about it and i was like holy crap if you get esophageal cancer you die like there's literally no treatment and so i actually one of the things i'm funding is a esophageal cancer research center at ubc and you know so you could argue maybe i'm trying to save myself in the future maybe if i get this but other than that it's a great way to meet interesting people as well right like i've met all sorts of amazing researchers and doctors and all sorts of other stuff as a result but no i mean it's just i'm trying to figure out how to convert money into something other than more money and we're you know more problems last topic something i wanna ask you about i don't i think it was a friend i forget who nick or my friend nick ray or i don't know who i forget who said something about how one time you bought a charity dinner or charity lunch with ac bill act and at the time everyone like made fun of you like who's this idiot for canada that would spend fifty thousand dollars on a lunch i mean they i don't realize that that money actually goes to a charity as well but they're like oh my gosh like this is so stupid yada yada turns out you actually became friends with bill i think i don't know him but i'm gonna call him bill like i do and you guys have like done business together and i'm sure you've made that money back many times over but you have this interesting way of networking you have this interesting way of getting your foot in the door one time on this podcast you just told a story about warren buffett you've told you've told me a a couple people that you've been hanging out with like in like you've had you're like oh my gosh i just did a zoom with x y and z and they're like pretty big deal people what is your whole thing about networking i mean you're just talking about cold emailing what what you have this weird philosophy about this yeah so i'm gonna first to start with i think networking is really fun if you're an ex and i'm an extreme ex right so when i feel depressed or sad i wanna be around people i wanna share my problems i wanna connect with people right so so i by default do this and i would say like starting about fifteen years ago i just started i started seeing all these interesting people on the internet and going wow they seem amazing like i wanna do business with them i wanna become friends with them and specifically there is always people in new york who are big tumblr users who just seem super cool you know the founders of college humor and vimeo and all those people and so i started i started doing a couple things one of them was i never eat alone so pre covid i'd always have lunch with somebody usually locally and i'd almost always do at least one call with a random person who i either haven't met or i'm just building a relationship with even if it's like thirty minutes first thing in the morning the other thing i did is i started paying to be in the right room so i remember telling someone ten years ago i wasn't doing super well right i maybe was doing fifteen twenty k a month of revenue or something like that and i paid ten thousand dollars to go to the ted conference and all my friends were like what the hell you thinking you're spending all this money on this when i went to the tech i have this whole thing about paying to be in the right room right so when you go to ted it's like a secret club if you get into ted every single person that's there is someone interesting and at the very least they've paid a lot of money to be there so they're legit and being in the room if you're in the room everyone goes oh they're legit too and so i was this like t with this tiny little business and i'm talking to a gore and the founders of google and you know all these amazing people and just being in a room with those people you naturally over the course of going consistently for years you end up meeting all these amazing people and making connections you end up doing business with them and so my doing that just going to ted and probably spending thirty k on on tickets for three years i think it ended up resulting in ten or twenty million dollars of of revenue for my various businesses and so i'm a big fan of doing that the other thing i like to do is host events so i try and bring someone really interesting to town in victoria and then i invite a whole bunch of other people who i think are interesting and then by doing that you know you've you've basically made this collection of people where you're the host and you know you're kind of in charge of of the whole group and you get to meet the speaker and other stuff and so an example of that is i thought shane parish from ph street was super interesting and brought him out to do is speaking event brought out all my favorite people from victoria and elsewhere and i ended up becoming friends with shane and now shane is an investor with us and we've done a whole bunch of deals and he's a good friend and so i think like one of the one of the there's just one of the things no one is there's an insane amount of optional and upside and just knowing great people both personally you know you make great friends but when you have a problem or you wanna build the business or you need investors being able to call a bunch of amazing people is the ultimate hack and so yeah that same thing happened with bill i went into that charity lunch you know actually looking at it as like a kind of a diligence thing i'd invested in his his company and i was going well if i don't like them i'll sell it and if i like whole yeah like yeah yeah how had you invested it what wait i had like five million dollars five million dollars invested in his holding company per square holdings person yeah and i don't wanna help forward this he's not he's not a he's not a tech guy like what i have no i honestly didn't really think of it as like oh this is super strategic i he's a really smart investor this was in twenty twenty seventeen i think of twenty sixteen and and so how many that was four five that was five years ago so you were like what thirty thirty one yeah thirty one or so five million dollars no matter what a lot of money but at thirty one that must have been a significant amount of your of your wealth it is my largest investment outside of the tech businesses and you put it all in that in his fund well i saw it was basically like bill bill had a series of challenging investments and so his stock traded way down and when i looked at it i was like okay i can buy a dollar of amazing stock so so it's really simple it's a holding company that owned about ten stocks and if you looked at the stocks it was like lowe's powered hughes corp which is like a real estate business chipotle like really good blue chip businesses and for every dollar of stock that was sitting in the holding company you could buy it for sixty five cents because the stock had traded down so much so it was like buying a dollar for sixty five cents so i didn't necessarily think bill was a you know genius i thought it was a very smart investor i just thought it was a very cheap stock and so i bought it and then when i saw this charity lunch come up i was like oh sweet i can like grow this guy and see if i like them and how much excited is fifty seven grand and the upside is he's just a really smart investor and me i can learn selling from him but he doesn't invest in tech or at least i didn't know he did so i had no like i didn't think i'd be doing business with him it was like a pinch me moment when you know we ended up investing in stuff together what happened to the the stock went up a lot went they doubled or more tripled or something since i bought it so it's it's done really well it's it's tripled so the five million with a fifteen in a matter of six years yeah i i think i think i actually it might have been twenty eighteen to twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen i had with them so yeah over the last over the last few few years it it traded way up he's done he's done amazingly well i don't know if you saw i think you guys talked about another pod but he had a bet where he invested twenty five million and it turned into two point seven billion and that was in that that that holding company that i'm an investor in oh my gosh that is so funny but so back to the network i got distracted the pay the payoff is that's so cool i mean obviously for business it's great you surround i i'd i really believe you're you're the sum of the five or ten of you know best friends or most interesting people around you so i think it influences you really positively but the cool thing that that's happened is now it compounds so now i don't actually do cold emails very often i don't really like consciously network i just naturally every week or two i get introduced someone really interesting and so now it's this like i planted the garden and now i'm enjoying the fruits from it my issue is i don't really wanna talk to people like that much like you and i text message and i'm okay with text like i'll text like there's like ten people who i'll text you're one of them it's like other than that like i really don't wanna talk to anyone and it kinda actually stresses me out because i don't it doesn't trust me out in one regard it doesn't trust me out because i don't wanna talk to people like i i really only want like a small group and i only wanna be with them and like you're you're one of those people all well i'll just text you to be like hey you see you the new nine eleven get released or like we just bullshit right we don't we don't talk about work we just talk about just bought this card as this as this check out this video listen to it's cool but then i feel left out because i'm like i'm like sean does us a lot sean networks with everyone and he gets access to all this cool stuff and i'm like i want that access but i don't wanna spend the time talking to these people because i just get nervous or you have the ultimate give have the ultimate hack though which is you you have this platform right i've started realizing this too there's a reason i come on i i a lot of fun talking to you guys but at the same time there's ten thousand people listening and a whole number super fascinating and they're gonna email both of us and say hey dude i'd love to do something with you or whatever so we just bypassed you know ten the problem with networking is you do five boring calls and then one amazing one right so you're constantly talking to people you don't necessarily wanna talk to where they don't turn out to be that interesting when you think they will be but it's worth it because there's a diamond in the rough and i think podcasting is interesting because it lets you you basically have like ten thousand people who kinda learn what you're about and they can either decide if they like you or not and if they opt in and they like you you've already pre you've pre like sold them almost right like when i get on the phone with someone fresh i actually tell a story about like this is how i started and this is my company and this is what we do and it's all kind of it's all not a sales pitch but it's really like hey here's who i am and you can just bypass all of that via podcast or something yeah i i i hear you and i what i usually when i talk to people i'll be like i'm like hey i wanna be pre pinterest or anything but like do you know who i am yeah because like i can save us time and i won't like do the spiel they're like oh this is the podcast i'm like sick i'm not gonna tell you anything what's going on how are you the the other day i had this guy named michael lo do you know who michael lo is yeah he he has a incubator like a big big incubator his house is the house in billions the hampton house yeah so i like this guy i i don't know him other than the few minutes that i just talked to him but i knew about and i actually admire when i read about him he started this thing called synapse i think which he sold to meredith some or time magazine for eight hundred million dollars then with that money he started price line he started with this guy named jay walker and i think they sold that for billions of dollars and i think it was the fastest time anyone has ever made a billion dollars like from launch to like the sale or the the public markets it was like like a year or something like stupidly crazy he got made all his money there bought this huge house in the hampton which if you watch the tv show billions axel rod bobby axel rod buys this house for like a hundred million dollars like something crazy and it's like the whole point is it's supposed to be like the the representation of greed and and too much money and that's the house that he buys well that's michael lo house and a couple years ago he there was this party or a charity actually a charity event and they raised like three hundred fifty thousand dollars for this event but one of his sons has a friend over who gets drunk says up smart to him so michael punches him in the face and gets arrested so he's got this if you google michael lo arrested you'll see his mug shot he's got like a white t shirt on like the clearly like pulled them out of bed so anyway so and they find out that you know michael lo is like this rich guy so the dad of the sun probably sued yada that anyway he heard he didn't but one of his assistant someone must make a list of every young entrepreneur who sold the company and they send you this email from michael and it's like hey i'm michael lo i'm such a fan and like i know this guy's like sixty something years old it doesn't i'm like i don't think this is you but that's cool like it's your assistant and he goes hey let's talk so i talk to him and i can tell he doesn't know who i am and it's it's no a big deal he wasn't he it wasn't like a disrespect or anything but i was honored that he even reached out or his people did and he's like so i'm thinking about hosting this event for entrepreneurs are you are you interested in coming i'm like dude i'm not gonna be pre contentious here i'm sorry if i come off that way but like you're talking to like the guy i host these things called hustle khan i do this i got this podcast thing i've got this email thing like i've got your target demographic and he goes yeah well like i'm wanting to host an event at my house have you seen have you heard of my house like yeah i've heard of your house obviously i've heard of your house it's like the house and i've tried to convince him now to make me a c host and i don't think he's gonna make me a c host but i hope you'll invite me to come to his house in the hampton where he wants to have like fifty or a hundred young entrepreneurs and i have a feeling what this guy does is he owns this thing called lobe enterprises and i think he owns one hundred percent of it and it's very much like tiny where they invest a small sum of money into interesting ideas and they'll c own the business with the entrepreneur starting it or they'll own it wholly and give entrepreneur a salary and they build up these companies and then they eventually sell them and they've had some great success they built up i think this thing called script relief did a hundred million a year in profit they built up a bunch of interesting things but related to networking that that's my networking story and maybe i'll be hanging out michael lo and whoever he hangs out with i don't know who he hangs out so cool i wanna invite to that event that sounds awesome i got when we got we got introduced to him when we're were in new york last time so chris i go to his office and he's like an old school barry like almost like a car salesman right like he sit down and he's like hi guys i'm michael lo and he pulls out a slide deck but it's not on a screen it's literally a printed slide deck and he goes he doesn't know his me this is my story has no idea who i am he just like that goes through this slide deck and he starts going line by line about it and i i i've i thought it was really charming and he seemed like a cool guy but it was crazy like he definitely has like a a s and he he has like a system for this stuff and it was really interesting because his house is like crazy right like i've i haven't been it but i've seen photos and you know wash on billions you go to his office and you're like oh it's just like a new york office right with the the crappy office it's like chaos there's like you know weird desks everywhere and like and disgusting it's funny like seeing you know these in new york you can be the richest person in the world but it's like you still have to ride the subway you're still you still you still have a cramped office all this other stuff it's funny yes i saw he video me and i could see in his office and it looked like all of his employees were at home except for his crew and he clearly had like this very stereotypical like i didn't actually see this woman but this is like i i could kinda tell that this person in the background this very typical like fifty year old secretary who had for like thirty years who like i could just imagine her with her flats i'd like dress on handing of coffee and like she's a nice lady just like everything about him fit the stereotype and frankly i loved it i think this guy incredibly interesting is low enterprises is that i think they're really legit they've created a couple really interesting things yeah i mean it's very legit and it's one of those things where you you go in and he's like oh we've got you know this company and this company and this company and you know one of them sends wine direct you know direct mail wine and the other one does like receipts and you take a photo of your receipt and send it and you're you're kinda going like i don't know what the bs is versus what the big businesses are like they throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and they inc a lot of businesses and like you said they have an amazing track record of ming some of these big businesses but but yeah he's he's a total character yes that guy is crazy interesting i'm so happy i got to talk to that guy i i have another meeting with those folks and i'm looking forward to talking to him and if i host that dinner or even if i get to attend the dinner lets me invite people i'm gonna invite you because inviting you and a few other people that's like maybe that's like how gonna look legit to this person super fascinating yeah i feel like i could rule to 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 back