#186 with Marc Lore - Brainstorming with Billionaire Marc Lore on What He Would Build Today and the Future of Ecommerce

i wanna create a company and i wanna sell it for a hundred million plus to walmart or amazon in three years what opportunities exist in the e comm or or in the commerce world that amazon or walmart would buy my company because they desperately need something that i'm selling some type of listen that i've created would you like him to do anything else for you sam the most specific question no that that next got that specific lot yeah i feel like got the where know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back alright today we have mark lori on the podcast this guy is an og g of e commerce he sold diapers dot com to amazon for like i don't know six hundred million dollars he created jet dot com and sold it to walmart for three and a half billion dollars good guy he came on and me and sam we're pretty blown away like we kind of little fan boys of his right now so so we enjoyed the episode he had a bunch of good ideas he talked about how to go raise a bunch of money to go after a big vision he had some ideas in healthcare care sam asked him a great question like if i wanted to start a company today that i could sell for a hundred million dollars to amazon or walmart what product would you recommend i start and he had a fantastic answer so he had ideas at the at the end and at the beginning he talked a little bit about his kind of approach to why he bought the minnesota timber and how he's gonna run the team how he builds his team how he hires people stuff like that so the beginning is more philosophy to end his ideas and he also had a great a great answer i asked him like when you bought the the basketball team you just like send a huge wire like just hearing me those details are really interesting but we do a whole deep debrief long debrief at the end of this episode which you might even find more interesting in the actual episode because it's always fun to like discuss like i always find the recap to be one of the most exciting so give it a listen yeah but he was great i think you're gonna love it and we liked him so much we want him to come back on one hour was not enough and here's what we ask you to do listen to the episode if you're liking it he said he's big on linkedin so go to his linkedin his name is mark lori last name is l o r e and just go pop comment on one of his linkedin posts and just say hey if i like if you like the episode just tell love the episode come back on and that think if you get some enough messages we will be able to bring them back on and go deeper on a bunch of ideas that we didn't get to do today alright here's the episode enjoy okay cool so we have a guest here sam do you wanna you wanna tee them up who who's who is on the line yes so e commerce ty successful billionaire and as of two thousand seventeen is exceptionally jacked and ball mark i have to ask you which of these is your favorite part of jeff bezos says been polishing that one up for the last hour already been yeah no mark lori we have mark you've got a lot of stuff you've started four different things right four different startups ups that i've successfully exited the most popular one is probably there's a few more that are in stealth that i'm really excited about maybe i can share a little bit about but yeah we wanna we wanna learn all about it but the biggest one was jet dot com that's one probably everyone knows before that you did diapers dot com which you sold to amazon for five hundred and fifty million bucks ish that one might have been bigger because that was sold to amazon very early and amazon appreciated a lot since instance so maybe that one i know you tell us which one is which one ends up bigger is it the early the early one or jet i think no jet definitely i mean definitely stock doubled over the last four and a half years so that was that was a good one i gotta thank you for that when they bought you i bought the stock because i was like yeah there's plenty of room to run here for walmart e commerce and yeah i feel like i was a part of the company i want a little bit as well just off the music man you and then you also sold the company called the pit which just sold the top that was like for five point seven right back in the day in the day and you prior to that you were you worked in banking but then before that you were a runner i so i was a runner i ran the two hundred meter and four hundred meter what was your what i i ran high twenty ones the two hundred and forty eights for the four hundred yeah same with me almost exactly the same yeah high twenty one's high forty eights exactly yeah for the same i i got slower as the distance but longer and and four hundred was was sort of long i was better at sort of the sixty yard and and and hundred and two hundred but yeah what was her hundred meter p ten seventy four wow and was that a did they do seventy four yet wow well that's pretty you're moving i'm float i didn't have the endurance to keep it up you know in the in the two and the four but yeah so so you you've done a lot of stuff you've done you've done a ton of recent you've done you've done a ton of stuff in the past but even the stuff you're doing now is also interesting you just you guys made a bid for the timber walls right yeah we actually it went through so we signed agreement so yeah we're just going through the nba approval process now and then hope to close like probably like six weeks and we're was that a a dream like you know i've had this dream as a kid that you know own an nba team that's that's the point of doing business you know was a really small kid was like play professional sports of course that's where we i start every kid you eventually realized okay it's not gonna be that sports it's not gonna be that first you know and then i was like oh maybe you know it would be the catholic you know and go to olympics and then i was like okay that's not gonna happen like i forget you know what i'm just gonna like one day on a team that that's what i'll do that's amazing that was the dream you know what and i i was a huge sports fan growing up followed every sport watched every game you know it was a huge knicks fan and then you know i had two kids and you know life happens and you sort of get get a little bit detached from sports but i'd love it i'm excited to like dive back in and have a reason it's it seems like back it seems like i don't know ten fifteen years ago the sports team thing was like you've made it this is your it's like buying a car right it's like i buy my toy i always wanted this toy this is kinda like lifelong dream and i think it's obviously still like kind of a passion thing but also the business merits of of buying a team as an investment has actually become a pretty big deal because these franchises have appreciated like crazy because there's only whatever only thirty of them and there's sort of more billionaires than our teams so give me a pie chart is this what percentage of this was just i just wanna have it's like art versus this is actually a good business decision how do you think about that yeah it's probably eighty percent the former twenty percent good investment like yeah it's it's not so much about being a great investment just not gonna lose money and i'm gonna have a lot of fun anytime you can have a lot of fun and not lose money like i love going to the horse track you have a lot of fun but you also a lot of money i kinda like this you know where it's it's have a lot of fun and and maybe make a little bit of money too it's like perfect but i i'm excited about you know just innovating using i think there's a lack of like real innovation in sports in general like appliance sort of a technology mindset like how do you break augmented reality to the entertainment experience how do you move to like dynamic announcing so you can choose your announcer dynamic real time ticketing i want people to able to move to any open seat the stadium at any time like i've got all these like tech ideas on how to right augment the experience and it's just fun to have a platform to be able to you know buy these things and try and and even you know what's the money ball version of of of in basketball too you know like as a mid market team how do you win what's strategy thinking that through how do you apply the same techniques of vision capital people like what's the what's the mission what are the values what do you stand for how do you show up every day how do you live those values like treat it like a like a real startup up and and to date you know i've talked to a lot of people it doesn't really seem like anybody's sort of gone gone down that path yet and are you just gonna run this like a company i mean like because you're incredibly successful running companies but you don't i mean you know a bit about sports i imagine but like this is like a total this is totally outside of everything that you've done done eco ecommerce i i i i love the challenge because every business that i get into i don't know anything about it when i start i didn't know anything about retail when i did diapers dot com you know i i didn't know anything about the payment when i started that i started a bunch of start ups recently i don't know anything about that i'm starting building the city and doing a reality tv show i'm doing these things and you know it comes down to vision capital people it's you have to have the vision and you just think about it share it with people like a piece of clay and keep molding the vision molding and like wow this is a big vision everyone agrees this is freaking huge okay great how are we gonna capitalize it great that's what i do raise money i have lots of connections with investors have raised over a billion dollars so like okay we're gonna capitalize it and then the third part is the most important and the hardest to get right is people the pea part and it's finding a great ceo and a great executive leadership team setting the values setting the mission to corporate culture getting the org structure right getting the right people in the right spots and creating a culture where you get the very best out of each person that you bring in then you kinda just sit back then you're there as a strategic advisor i think if you try and just sit you know micro manager and make decisions when you don't have the experience that's where you get in trouble you know so if i were to come into the team and say you know i think you should draft so and so and you know why are we doing this and we should be playing you know this and that's not gonna work i just don't i i think who is the very best you know person in the world to you know run this part of the business to run that part of the business to be the chief people officer bringing in the very best talent and create a great culture with the best people in the world and get him in the right spots and the right positions if the vision is right and everybody's clear exactly where you going what what the the the north star is and you got great people and they're happy and their empowered great things will happen and that allows me to do multiple things at the same time now because you know i'm not getting into the weeds of a lot of your companies do or how much do you guys raised at diapers dot com diapers raised fifty five million okay so that's a lot but not close so i mean jet was what like a bill i mean you guys are raised us you know like eight hundred million so substantially larger although though both are quite large you this idea of being able to hire the best in the world and being able to high peep hire people to do to to to do a lot of the work that they specialize and could you have done that if you were bootstrapping your companies no i mean that that's why you know we started alex and i rod just started a venture fund called vc vision capital people we believe that there's a really big hole in the market for people with big visionary ideas to get a big infusion of capital early like when they have nothing so they can go out and hire the very best team in the world i think a lot of startups a little bit of chicken a how do you get the capital unless you have the team you can't hire the team really have the capital but you don't get enough capital until you prove it and so you get a million bucks and then you get five million bucks and then you get ten million bucks and each step of the way you're sort of on a tight wire type you know you you you're basically like one little thing goes wrong so the investors lose confidence where you under over promise and under deliver lots of things could go wrong we basically say no vision capital people you have a big vision we know this could be a really big idea we know somebody's gonna do is the right time to do it let's not how capitalize it here's ten million seat go out and hire the best team in the world that puts you in a position to have the best shot of a really successful business and if you got the best people you got the capital and you have the vision right your player now you're kind of like worst case you're gonna exit this somebody's gonna pick it up because you've got great people and it's the right time it's a big vision so you what do what do you think when so there's there's the case where jet where that clearly is what happened and it it worked and then you see like qui or something like that raise you know clearly successful people at the start raised a bunch of money raised a billion dollars or so more than that i think big vision hey we're gonna you know rethink netflix for mobile and didn't quite hit it and they're burning a lot of money so even though they raised a lot they're burn still left them with i don't know how many you know the same sort of you know two years of runway or whatever it was that like a normal startup has so how do you think about that do you think it's a look just the numbers game it doesn't always work out or do you think there's something different in the strategy that maybe they could have done or you've done differently that that leads to better results yeah i don't know that intimately do you know the story and i do think that's probably more the exception of the i i think wait listen startups don't all work so some of the mark were do i think it had a higher probability of working because it was a big vision that had a lot of cap and great people yeah i think it i think it does specifically why it didn't work the only thing from the outside looking in was were the the most talented people in the organization fully committed and all into it that's the only that's the only thing i wonder i don't know obviously you had really talented people but were they dedicating their their life to it you you need somebody in these businesses that's sort of like i'm running this business and dedicating my life to it it doesn't have to be necessarily the person that's doing the vc at the top but who is that person and and and and you know you have the the right team to support i don't know the answer for that that's where i'd probably wonder and so me and sam i'm talking about this a lot because you know we think about art what's next for us got got some money in the bank we've got time we got you know we got all these dreams about what we might wanna do and one of the past is similar to you where you as an entrepreneur you sort of can see these opportunities and it could be you can be the spark that helps start them but you're not necessarily gonna be the day to day operator in the weeds maybe like you were with your first startup right and and some people like you seem to be pretty successful with this model and it seems like it's dependent on those three things you talked about having the right vision shaping that first getting capital in and then recruiting right people on the people part take us into a job interview with you so obviously there's the standard stuff you know you ask what they've would i've hired i've trying to calculate but over a thousand people right that personally like you know interviewed in my career and i've honed over the years and it's changed my i thinking it has changed on hiring people resumes and i've i've i've gone from you know early in my career and i first started you know i just wanna feel like i wanna have a be with this person right and i realized how wrong that is and people make that mistake today and at least to all kinds of unconscious buyers and things like that it's a worst possible thing to do i spend an incredible amount of time upfront on resume read which i never used to do before used to be like hey this person's is great oh they they were cfo i'm looking for a cfo you see they're great lot of interview though i i don't listen to what people tell me necessarily about people because there's always somebody out there it'll say something good about everybody and so i kinda just discount that for the most part there might be a select couple people that i really trust it like you work with this person trust me they're they're top five percent okay right but that'll show in the resume and so when i look at the resume like i'm looking for a demons level of success in whatever they do so i'm think i get into their mind i started at the beginning when they graduate school and it doesn't matter what school they go to but but they graduate they go into into a company if if they're there for a few years did they get promoted like what did the trajectory look like and then the most important part when they leave that company go to a new company is it something that a top five percent it would do top five percent is moving in a certain way that you start to learn machine learning these these you know trends right and top five percent top ten percentage of the elite people when they move they move in step fashion it'll be a bigger title much bigger role or a better company and they'll get in that company and they will be promoted multiple times and then they'll leave there'll be another step change and so i'm looking for that like multi company movement within the company and big step changes any kind of any kind of deviation to that i don't i just don't even won't even interview so a ladder move out right you know move from a a google to kmart sorry kmart but out like i just i any any little like tap that says not top five percent and somebody could say hey but that's not fair like i'm actually good or this person's great i'm like you know what i'm not gonna interview because you know what there's a chance i get honey pot right honey pot everyone's everyone experienced this you basically bring somebody in for an interview the resumes maybe not ideal they come in you spend one hour with them and you just really like them and it throw some buzz words around they've got whole experience and you're like hired think about that i mean you're committing to like hire somebody and keep them in your company hopefully for years to be an important part of the company and like you have an hour with them maybe you have multiple people spend an hour but it's still a a pretty small amount of time and so i don't let myself get honey pot i've been honey pot many times in the past and i unless that resume may scream super superstar which again it's only five out of a hundred resumes if you say top five percent or ten out of ten and one out of ten and be really like say no no no it's hard because you're tempted like oh they have good experience this person whatever no when i interview someone i know that they're a super superstar in the resume and so i can focus primarily on core values and their sp traits so sp is an acronym i come up with for traits that look for and people i hire smart passionate optimistic ten niches adaptable kind and empathetic and the last two are really important kind and kindness and empathy i found over the years and you can get somebody that's super ten passion that run through a brick wall but also run through people and over people and they're not you find somebody that has the passion they're optimistic and ten niches and adaptable because you need that in startup but at the same time they're very kind and empathetic and you get that person that's able to balance that that's magic and so those are the things and and the interview questions have nothing to do i wanna ask one traditional interview question there'll all be questions to open them up to to try to get at what makes them tick and do they exhibit these traits and you know i i have this theory like i've i've now if you work in tech you meet so many smart people that smart becomes kind of like table stakes great yeah everybody's super intelligent well now what and and clearly smart isn't just the only thing that that leads to success you need a whole bunch of other things that you mentioned and i sort of found like what's in rare supply so which of those traits is in most rare supply i'll give you my kind of a opinion which is right i found that two really simple ones tend to be to to me the lowest in supply and it have a pretty outs outside impact in startups and those two are energy or like enthusiasm i i think bringing energy to the table every day is quite contagious and you need it at the beginning when you're starting something from scratch and so it seems like one of these done anyone can do it yeah anyone can do it but most people don't and the other one is courage so the courage to either build something new say say something that's on your mind to like not let a you know something that's below our standards go courage i feel is an an in extremely short supply yeah you you are to take risk too like i call it bold we call it bold at our company right yep but yeah do you feel like when you meet people is there something you're just like i wish more people had x what is x for you that you feel like is in short supply you know i mean what you said there so when i say you know passionate and optimism i think optimism isn't you know the sort of the optimism that allows you to be bold and take risk and it's that optimism that you believe not only great things can happen but also believe that people are good like you're starting place that it's just an optimistic view of the world i think that's really important and it allows you to trust which is one of the core values and and and in in in all my companies i think trust is really important if you wanna create a culture where the company trusts the employees and the employees trust the company that's really important to create an environment where people are happy and feel empowered and they feel sense of ownership trust is so i have this idea that you know a lot of people say you know trust of course trust but verify and i don't believe in the but verify right i think you start out trusting people and until they prove otherwise and it's very risky because you can get burned but i've seen the power of the upside of trusting somebody before they've proven that they deserve it it's incredibly powerful motivator and i've seen it in my personal life i've seen it in business people wanna they wanna run through a wall for you when you like wait you trust me but you can i can burn you i can yeah but i trust you are you gonna burn me of course not you know you're trusting me i'm not gonna burn you right that is an incredible value that i've learned it it's it's trust transparency being really open with you in place not hiding not secretive here's the cap table here's the rounds of financing here's the numbers here's all the information you need this i'm an open book what do you wanna know like there's no secrets here you right working this company you're an owner you have stock options trust transparency the other one is fairness that it's really important that people feel in order to create an inclusive a diverse workforce us you have to create a safe work environment where people feel safe coming to work they have to feel like it's fair they there should never be this feeling of like that's not fair that's why i have a open comp system where everybody knows what everybody else is making and everybody at the same level makes the same amount of money so women minorities everybody makes the same there's no like this idea that maybe it's not fair of my colleague why is my colleague that i do the same job why are they making more money than me that sort of thing which is usually a big reason why people lose trust and they don't feel like given you everything got and so i kinda take that off the table so those are the three primary values so you have the values of the organization how they live them and then the traits that you look for and people you hire i mean you kinda get that right i think it's it's magical the thing where did this where did this confidence come from because like having the confidence to hire the top five percent is a pretty big deal his high school track day sam yeah and place your confidence comes for just it's actually just trial and error failing a lot early on it it's it's you know you know well just somebody i wanna have a beer with it's making those mistakes it's getting honey pot it's you know hiring a person and having go through the pain of having to let them go and replaced them and i'm like it's so many lessons i i i make so many less mistakes now that i did early in my career because i you know i see everyone makes the same mistakes it's that's why i like to talk about it because it's like it is the same mistakes and people say yeah you know i guess you're right like there there was you know the resume kinda did but i was kinda like wow the person said they were good i like them and so i hired them you have to be really you know like extremely focused and selective in in that the other thing by the way it does help with unconscious bias too if you're you know inclined when the when you you go through the resume and you bring them in and it's not about whether i like the person you know you they've already like you know that they're they're rock solid and you really can focus on on spot and and sort of help there so i i i wanna i wanted ask you about i mean i think we got which is ask you about ideas but but before we get to that i wanted to ask one quick question so you left banking in ninety six right no it's ninety nine okay what and then i'm looking at some information here on on your timeline you started this thing called the pit the pit was a i it was it was in the internet marketing and yeah was basically a sports stock market we used to avoid gambling you know we were used baseball card as to proxy for the athlete but essentially it was meant to be a a sort of sports stock market where you buy and sell players like stock and you sold that for like six million dollars yeah that was right after the the whole nasdaq crashed in two thousand i if you guys remember like went down like i don't know eighty percent or something and yeah there there was no way to raise any venture money and we only started it maybe ten months earlier and we're able we raised five million and twelve it for five point seven we're everybody's like yeah do it this is a great exit and we're like okay we'll do it again let's that's great we'll sell this get the next idea that's what i was gonna ask you is how you could sell for six million bucks after just short about of time but i guess the answer is well because you you you raised a fair bit at least for six million dollars just i think it was just you know the tops at the time was interested in in the people that we'd had hired we hired a great team we had a we had a vision for what we wanted and they were there to provide some capital so yeah so let's talk about some ideas that you'd would need optimism about now right so so i i think we could talk about jet for example like take some courage and optimism to to go after that prize and basically compete with the the the the empire of amazon so but we'll come back to that i wanna start with where do you need to be optimistic today what do you optimistic about what ideas are are i know you've talked about startup cities i don't know if that's the one you wanna talk about or if you have some others but let's shoot us some ideas of what you think is exciting that you're optimistic about that maybe the whole world isn't you know it's not not proven yet mh i mean i i gravitate toward tend to gravitate more towards b2c businesses business to consumer i just like consumer businesses and i think it's easier to understand some of those businesses than and sort of more like a you know if you were like a a biomedical company or something like harder to grab arms around i think there's more so most of the ideas and things and thinking i do is is in be the b world across lots of different industries i've made a number of investments and i'm involved with a few companies and i'm really excited about one is archer which is the basically they're like passenger drones so i think think it's like basically an autonomous electric helicopter that basically flies passengers you know around it's it's safer than it helps us spa that you did yeah yeah did us back a couple months ago and it's going through the sec process now that's crazy super super excited that that's a great vc so the the two founders you know came over actually said on the couch right here and they said we got this vision for these flying cars these these these these drones are carry passengers it's the right time this is why it's the right time mark this is how big the industry is gonna this is why it's gonna work this is why the technology is right and i was really taken by the vision i thought they had it nailed and they said hey we need five million now we're gonna hire the best engineers in the world we're gonna take them from the best companies we're gonna go raise fifty million and build the state of the art the latest and greatest of these of these aircraft and i thought the two founders were exceptional so great start to the to the founding to the pea part of the vc and i thought okay i'll give them the five million and i'll help them you know hire this this team and i'll help them raise the fifty and then you're on your own right that's that's what we did i put five in we helped raise you know help hire the the engineering talent helped them raise fifty million and that was two years ago and then they just raised a billion through this back and so now it's a four billion three point seven billion market cap or something and it was really an idea on this couch two years ago but it shows you like what i was saying before about rather than going through this process of like seed can hire the great team the chicken and egg thing it's like here's five and then let's get the team in and simultaneously go and raise fifty so right very short order they had fifty five million dollars and they had the best team and i do think they've built the the very best aircraft in the industry right now and they're on their way like it's a it's a massive tam and so i'm looking at opportunities like that and i can tell you some other ones too yeah i go yeah yeah well another one that was in the news is is basically mobile kitchens so looking at the trends in food delivery and millennials and gen z not wanting it a cook and want food delivered and things you know i just saw that you know it sort of takes a long time to get it delivered inconsistent the quality suffers and transit and and it's expensive and i thought oh if you can solve those three things and how do you do it well what if you cooked in a mobile kitchen if the restaurant basically came to unit and cooked in your driveway hot much faster because the the trucks already on the road and so they're they're likely just minutes away and and so i made a pretty big bet on that company and you know it's still in stealth mode but i'm really excited about it i think this different how how's is that different than a food truck so so it's a mobile kitchen but it's for multiple types of food or or each mobile kitchen is a different restaurant different cuisine okay and the idea is to is to get the best restaurant of that cuisine in the country and instead of bring it to a central central place you it's it's high quality food that's piping hot that's you know delivered to your door fast that that's a an exciting i think a big tam big market food that's where the puck going i think there's there's lots lot's happening now with laws changing in in sports gambling and things i think there's really big opportunities there to maybe bring back some of what i did before with and what what what was that exactly what you said you talking about the pit yeah you said bringing it back before no just and and new now with the gambling laws changing thing are is an opportunity to create a true sports stock market and and do it right like where it really feels like you're buying selling players like stock by by leveraging some of the changes in in gambling laws have you seen something i mean sean was really into this big club have you did you see that no i didn't you don't know what big bitcoin is oh my gosh god you wanna explain i mean it's pretty much what it's kind of what you're describing you what they did was they basically took twitter and they turned it into a social network where you don't just follow the person you can invest in them so the the cool thing about this was what they did was let's say on twitter i have like i don't know a hundred forty thousand followers so from day one they what they did is they took the top ten thousand twitter accounts and they had raised i think a hundred and fifty million dollars from vcs here in silicon valley and they used it to to basically pre buy and invest in all those accounts so on day one when i walked in they said hey if you sign up for bit cloud if you claim your account and verify it like basically meaning you tweet out that hey this is my bit cloud i walked into like seventy five k worth of my own coin right worth of my own stock and others were already buying it because they were saying hey if sean joins we think that he might you know continue to to grow his following and so we wanna invest the idea being we've all had this experience where you discover a band early or athlete early or a a content creator online a blog and if you see them before they're huge but you really like their stuff you can buy their coin it's like every single person gets their own little little little bitcoin basically and and then as they get as more people buy it yours appreciates so as a curator as a fan you get to sort of go along for the ride along with the the star themselves the content value ultimately so i think that's the key a lot of these things fall down in the end so they don't have a ton intrinsic value they don't have a time in intrinsic value the one thing that it does have is now as the creator i have all these shareholders right that own my coin some people own tens of thousands of people own a thousands of people at a hundred bucks of my coin i can then basically reward my shareholders so in you know in the stock market you give out a dividend or you know that you you can reward your shareholders in this i could do the same so i could say i could do it literally a dividend i could say hey for whatever i earn this month my shareholders are gonna you know get get their proportionate share i could also say hey we're gonna do a version of this podcast that only my shareholders get to listen to right like a like like it only fans or or these different products that they sort of say if you if you're a subscriber of mine then you get the content so you can kinda pay all of the content dynamic membership almost like a membership they i can come up with whatever the perks are for my members and so then the creators all jo to offer better value to to their holders because their stock appreciates the more inc incentivize they make it now this is a one and a hundred one and a thousand idea but do think there's something interesting i think there's something interesting yeah it certainly sounds interesting i i tend to shy away from things where i don't see like the the the twenty year thirty year like the intrinsic value like how it ultimately like this could be a great exit and yeah like i i think with gambling laws changing there's a way to give players intrinsic value so you basically get basically say at the end of somebody's career i'm gonna pay you based on their career stats acts like and so know this rookie comes up you know like it has real value because the the exchange of stock market is giving an intrinsic value by giving you a pre predetermined amount of money based on certain stats over the career like that kind of that's interesting so you so you could say the house basically sets the line right let's say zion comes into the league and we say okay the house believes the zion you know the market the the line gets set the zion is gonna be a hall fame player and maybe that means x y and z stats the mvp this many points whatever it is do you think it's better than that you you you buy if you think if you think that's not gonna happen you don't buy are you short and basically the careers so so you get to predict the players journey and then the the better than it's like a super fan basically as yeah the better they perform you feel like you're being vin and you're actually gonna economically benefit from having identified somebody who's gonna perform higher than the what the market thinks that's cool yeah exactly exactly what i i think i read somewhere that you like to look at google trends a lot like you're you're and and because you're serial entrepreneur you invest in a lot of stuff you're always looking for trends you're always looking for what's popular what i wanna know is what what do you used like what signals do you look for to figure out where you're gonna go to and also what signal told you that jet was interesting because a lot of people probably said don't even think about doing this like you're you know you're i i imagine a lot of people like amazon walmart someone already owns the space what are you crazy this is like an impossible feat yeah no it's two two different things mean i think with jet i'd been intimately involved in retail you with diapers dot com and wag and selling to amazon and i'm working inside amazon and i just felt like huge market huge tailwind it's that e comm is gonna continue to grow at double digit for the next five ten years and i just believe that there wasn't you know there wasn't a winner take all that there was room for another player and i thought we can raise a significant amount of capital and hire a great team so we had this really big vision with this tailwind raise a ton of capital and have a great team i thought if you do those three things right good things will happen i don't know what's gonna happen either it works your exit a strategic wants it like if you're in the right market at the right time you have a great team and you've invested the capital wisely you've got an asset that in worst case is gonna be worth more than the capital you raised that's that's my mentality with these things in in anything you do right it's like there's the worst place to be is sort of in that no man's land where like you you spent not a ton of money you don't have the best people but you spend enough money that is kind of expensive for somebody to buy as strategic it's not really worth it you know people tend to buy it's the barbell strategy they'll buy the aqua hire you raise a million bucks and you bootstrap it and you have like three good people and somebody say like oh this is great like here's ten million dollars you're like that was like not a bad exit made a little money i'm gonna work for this company there's that and then there's like you can be big enough to matter to a really big company that has the capital to to put down hundreds of millions or billions in an acquisition there's a lot of people in like the in the middle and that's what vc is that's why it's like no ten million fifty million what's hire the very best team if it's the right market is gonna be a buyer for it right and that's kind of the strategy what's interesting is so when i sold my company we we never revealed the price but let's just say that like hypothetically it was like thirty or forty million dollars yeah i've noticed that basically a a idea i i it just for a sake of argument that a a deal in that size it seems like it was as hard of work as if i sold it for four hundred billion dollars no it's harder that's hard i think it's harder it was harder because i was doing a lot of the work i actually didn't hire a banker so i was doing most all the work and it was hell but it's not just the work on your side i think what he's pointing out is that the price tag is significant where the company can't just cut the check real quick right like you could with a a small aqua hire but you don't have enough of an asset that they can say this is a big strategic bet that they're making you're in the middle and i think that's forget the side it's always hard as an entrepreneur that really tough place yeah yeah well i'm saying that that's just one of the reasons why it was hard also it was hard really hard you must be a really good entrepreneur because it's really hard i think to exit in that middle ground like it's hard to exit most companies in that middle ground they don't exit successfully you know it's easy to do the aqua hire and i think it's easy to do the big the big acquisition of a big company it's tough that sort of like ten million to a hundred million and the entrepreneurs i know that have exited in that in that space there they're strong they're like really strong well so that's the kind of an interesting thing because i think that me will younger like even just a few months younger me as well as most people would think that well as far like if i could say sell something for twenty to thirty that's like bite sized ish that's like you know some company would bias without having to get like board approval like oh it'd be a no brainer for them to do it and what you're kinda saying and what i experienced a little bit is it's actually probably easier to be a little bit more audacious yeah and raise money and go after it or i would actually say the other way around it's easier to do that or in order if your if your goal is to build walt and have a good life is probably best maybe not to raise any money and never sell and just try to like build the company over a long period of time let's say you were you but you don't have your brand name right so let's let's bring you back we give you use but we take away your reputation right so we're gonna take you back your twenty one but you don't have the reputation but you do have the same sort of mindset that you have today you have the same knowledge let's say what spaces would you be going into and would you also be trying to do the same type of like do you think you could raise the large amount of money just through charisma hustle and and vision without having the reputation so take us take us to it through a scenario what do you think you would be interested in working on or building if you're twenty one again today without the reputation yeah no it's a great point and i think you know early on and a lot of people i think share this you feel like it needs to be something like really original or something nobody's thinking about it and nobody's doing or something niche or like and that's kinda what it is it's niche and the venture capitalists are like it's not that interesting you know and i've learned that it doesn't need to be something like niche or super invent it could be just find a really big tam like just say something like okay health care okay and what's a really big idea like where is the puck going in health care i would study where the venture capitalists are investing what types of companies i do the research like where is the money going follow kind of the money because that'll kinda give you some idea where where some of these trends are right now and you know with artificial intelligence and telehealth and things is like a lot of money poured into that so just i would look at the landscape i study the different companies who's getting funded who's doing well and think about is there another angle is there something not like invent or super original just like a just a little hook of something different that's not being done and put together a big vision that requires ultimately hundreds of millions of capital and work backwards from that and say okay you know that we think this is gonna be a multi billion dollar opportunity you know we're gonna you know start with ten million we're gonna hire this great team here's the vision here's how we're gonna get there work on that plan and that pitch deck i'd spend hundreds of hours on that deck and on the vision and mapping it out and somebody will bite because it's the right time it's the right space you know if you're really good and they they feel like you've got something and you've got this big plan and you know there's a good chance you'll get that you'll get that that ten million dollar a c check to go hire a great team and you talked about you've talked about where's the puck going give us more what do where what are some other you talked about food delivery and you've talked about how what the next evolution of that might be the restaurants on wheels that solves a bunch of problems he talked about transportation right huge tam flying cars that might be where the puck is going we see that google funded you know kitty hawk we and you know uber was working on it a bunch of people working on this maybe there's something there i'll give you a couple more yeah give some more so one i think conversational commerce so in retail i think the next big step change is the idea that you would use text and voice to order anything you want in a very conversational way so imagine you know talking to the to someone that is as knowledgeable as the most knowledgeable person in that area on the showroom of a specialty retail retailer wanna buy tv it's like you're there at best by talking to the tv expert you know and you're just con converting and somebody at the same time who knows you as well is your best friend so hyper personalized this idea of getting a one best answer the idea of like search engine twenty years from now is gonna be laugh like the cassette tape it's like wait some dad used to like go you wanted to buy a toast and you typed in toaster in this like search engine and you had ten thousand responses and you had to like read reviews and look at all this and search and filter that's not the way it's gonna be done you're basically just gonna say hey i need a a new toaster how much i don't know what what what's a good amount two hundred bucks you get a great toaster really good okay great when make a recommendation boom buy it and it just she ships it right like it's gonna be very conversational and the the we talk a lot about personalization retail but nobody's even close to doing it in a way that it it's gonna be done in the future and i think voice requires one best answer otherwise voice doesn't work you can't give you a hundred things it's voice it's gotta be like you know if you're asking your your best friend hey like you know i know you're no toaster like what should i get man you know like that kind of thing it should might be very on point who's doing this now that's exciting i like that well lot what what companies are doing this now i mean there's a lot of companies that are like again early stages of it and stuff but there's nobody again that's if you said like who's got the world class team who's raised you know significant capital you know nothing what is there is there a product i can go look at and be like oh i get it i understand what he's getting at like i i understand why is obsessed with this yeah i mean we had something called jet black when i was at walmart and we it was basically this for new york city primarily parents and it was gang buster i mean it was like you know people stopped using amazon prime it was it just dropped it it's like all the shopping the entire the entire wall chair was was given to jet black and it was multiples of what they were spending on amazon it was deep into the tail it was everything people loved it and it was a great test it was very expensive because in order to get the comments to see the conversations sorry you need to see a lot of conversations to have it automated so in the beginning you have humans in the loop to sort of bridge between the time that you know right there's ai past tense did it go away or that still exists no it it went away but not i it was expensive yeah it's expensive and there's just wasn't the right time for walmart right but i think if for just startup up world all yeah i think i think it's totally different because walmart maybe doesn't wanna you know invest hundreds of millions or billions but a startup up totally different doesn't hit your income statement everyone gets the gate knows that you put capital to work and you build something great so there's that i think in health care too i think like things i was talking about with telehealth and all the stuffs coming together i think the idea of like people taking control of their health with home diagnostics and things yep like there should be a dashboard that exists you can look up i put in my name okay mark lori here's my dashboard i've got a number of gadgets in the home that i do on a weekly and monthly basis like you brush your teeth twice a day to take care of your teeth what are you doing every day to take care the rest of your health like you don't do anything yeah there's all kinds devices and things you know monitor you know little prick of blood and then monitor blood sugar you know do the blood test once a month get all your things in there look at the trends of what's happening with your psa do you have this issue and then it basically do machine learning and through all the data to be able to see like okay you should see a doctor here you should do this then you should do this so here's the probability of dying at this age here's the you know here's the the the heart attack risk that you're running your cholesterol is too high if you get it down here's your probability of heart attack comes down like sort of make it more transparent right now it's like this black box you go to the doctor once a year do some tests and whatever like it's just kind of like a black box like i go you know here's some medicine for your cholesterol you don't know what's wide or why or how it impacts your odds and like whether you should be really worried a little worried no doctor will ever give you probabilities about anything there's no diagnostics it's like you have to go to the professional there's no home stuff i think all that's gonna change in the future i do think people gonna like really take control of their their health in a completely different way and they're gonna be doing things other than brushing their teeth to take care of themselves on a daily basis that's who do yeah i just had a daughter and i feel like when she's my age she's gonna be like dad how are you even alive back then you guys had you didn't know what the hell is going on inside your body now we have this thing that we wear that tells me everything that i need know i know when i take a bite of this my blood sugar goes up or down and i know like how stressed i am i know you know think it's gonna seem like caveman how we we today agree there's gotta be certain things you get tested at certain times you know my daughter had seal lake disease we didn't figure it out since she was nine years old i think that's i mean it's not that rare of a disease like some like hey hear the hear the things you do hear the probabilities of what's what and you know these are the test you need i was asking my mom my mom has celiac as well and she found out when she was like fifty and and she's like yeah as a kid everyone everyone's was like oh i don't know yours you just have an upset stomach all the time and she's like you know i'm a kid in india i'm sure i had this my whole life i was just like don't be ever knew and i was like soup i never gained weight because i couldn't like process any the food i was eating took i was fifty when i found out exactly everyone should have genetic profile you know that gives changes your probabilities based on genetics so we should have that it should be you know test certain times and influence your odds and probabilities and certain ways to you know structure everything that's it's more organized like right now it's not organized i don't know if you guys feel that i i feel like it's not organized at all yeah well you got like like a wolf and then an aura ring and i have a smart scale i've got like a glucose blood a continuing glucose blood monitoring i've got a smart bed like i've got like eighteen different smart things but they are quite siloed yeah they don't but they don't actually tell me the answer they just you know like they don't actually say like the this is what this all means yes you know maybe they'll say like your extra stress this morning sleep more and or don't work out as hard or your body fat is too high but it's kinda limited to like pretty high level stuff yeah it should it should be way more structured you should have be much more in touch with it like sleep apnea is another thing i don't know so many people struggle with this they're like all these things and the doctor doesn't just say like you know it takes a long time before the doctor's like you should do a sleep apnea study or something like totally there there there's things that you could have devices that are listening near your bed that can know it sounds like that sounds like i always thought it was weird do this a lot of cancers you can are cure or our are okay like if you can get a certain type of cancer and be perfectly fine as long as you catch it early and it's kind of about outlandish an our archaic that like you can have a a cancer and not over for you know many months or a year it's like what the fuck you yeah you could have known this like instantly you know and that's kind of like crazy mri by way there's mri scans that you do a whole body scan and like detailed look at you know anything cancer and then stitch it together every year you do it and you can see micro changes and things that exists now it's just not made available to you know the the people because of the the cost of it but nobody even has the option of even knowing that that's available that i should do that you could imagine like a system that basically says hey here's the probability of cancer you can take this test it's a couple grand it's up to you but at least you know okay wait maybe i should just spend the two grand because it'll increase the probability of catching it number years in advance and i know okay it's healthier no we just wait until we're sick like you said with cancer it's like alright now it's now it's you know i don't i like asking these questions because i like knowing like what meets your standards basically who in this space are you looking at where you're saying that's kinda promising is there any like one or two companies yeah i i don't i i kinda maybe i should more but i i really spend a lot of time just thinking about like a complete sometimes sometimes if you know too much about a space it's hard to clean slate and invent because you're kind of like get tied too closely into what what people are doing so i like the idea of just thinking about it through the lens of of a consumer on what is you know this trends are happening in telehealth ai you know these trends are happening and then do you stitch it all altogether that's just thinking sitting and think every day like what's the big idea and when it's really big you do know nobody's doing it and then you can reverse engineer and go back and say there any people that are working on certain things that could be helpful to it but you gotta go so big that you know that nobody's playing there and that's where i think the opportunity lies it's like yeah it's gonna need billions of dollars to pull it off you're gonna have to prove it in a in a in a in a small area it's gonna be very expensive but then when you prove it it extrapolate out to a trillion dollar business like market cap opportunity let's yeah you yes i i don't i don't i couldn't tell you like i'm not like tell you all the different little components that exist right now something that you said earlier was basically you kinda like we're we're reverse engineer a little bit from like you'd be like i'm gonna find where the money's is going then i'm gonna build this deck and i'm gonna raise money and then go build the thing what's something that let's say that i said mark i wanna create a company and i wanna sell it for a hundred million plus to walmart or amazon in three years what opportunities exist in the e comm or or in the commerce world that amazon or walmart would buy my company because they desperately need something that i'm selling or some type of solution that i've created would you like him to do anything else for you sam the most specific question no that that that actually got that specific a mean a lot i'm not i don't work amazon to you you a hundred million three years yeah no so well you said one personalized shopping conversational that's that's i think that's that's not likely a hundred million that is like way bigger or it's or it's not exist like that's a little more binary right i don't think a hundred million necessarily impossible sorry i hundred million with just some rent no you go threat number no good it's good have a goal much answer three years i think it needs to be a sort of a niche technology that could that's where the puck going that's gonna be helpful to differentiate it's gonna be something three years as fast so it's gonna have to be tech more than having shown real market traction but it's gonna have to be a technology is probably hard to build that involves you know ai the thing that comes to mind would be like fit analytics this idea that you're going online and you're buying you know a address and being able to see it fit on you without having to get it delivered to your home you know return rates on apparel are forty percent it's very expensive for retailers and it's a pain in the you know for people to buy stuff bring it try on have to send it back and things so the idea that you know my body dimensions and use artificial intelligence to know the inside dimensions the garment to see exactly how it's going to lay in my body without having to try it on to cut down return rates dramatically there's billions of dollars that you can save retailers there and apparel is definitely an area where where there's a lot of focus and like that's just one because i don't know off the top of my hand a lot of that that's a great answer a great answer there there's i still i saw this guy in japan he's a a billionaire entrepreneur and like this is like a third or fourth swing but he created a suit that had these ball like these dots on this black suit and he would send you this body suit for twenty dollars and these these white dots on this black body suit would you know like in a video game where they motion capture you yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what it was and it would it the camera was able to tell differently than if it was you weren't wearing this suit and he would use that to try to upsell you on proper fitting clothing i saw that it never wet me anywhere when i was like oh that's kind of an for every idea out there there's hundreds of people trying that's why it's never really about the idea it's about execution it's about vc so were they under capitalize that they have the best team in the world like in qui i know you said in the beginning but are there examples of you know big vision right time massive tam like raise it a lot of capital and have the world class team that's like all in other there's not the many examples i could think of in fact when i think of those examples they usually have examples of things that have worked that worked at i don't experience that many times where you have a world class team ton of capital and a big vision at the right time those come get acquired because like deep mind was a good example of this deep mind got deep mind it was a ai company got acquired by google for five hundred million when you know no usage yet it was just vision and team and then i think deep mind they said that once they've plugged it into they do the fun stuff like they will go beat the best go players in the world or the best chess players in the world so they show kind of its power it goes flexes from time to time but they also apply it to the google adwords machine learning and i think it's generated like incremental multiple billions of dollars already for google just on the slight optimization of adwords and and then on the other side you have magic leap where magic leap would probably be the current example of raised like a billion bucks huge idea looks awesome in the demo but they haven't executed it well enough where it actually works yeah or you could argue also a little little bit early yeah at that same exact company like today going forward right could be totally different game so it is kinda interesting it would be great to to map out vc against companies that have worked and didn't work and see what the hit rate is price sorry guys i'm realizing i have a four o'clock yeah you gotta run okay know what where where should people find you if they want more they want more plug how you we can follow you find you contact you whatever you want i mean linkedin is is my primary where i'm putting out a lot of business advice and things like that so i would do linkedin i just recently finally just launched instagram and and start becoming more active there but i linkedin is probably the best place right now yeah alright mark this was great thank you for coming on alright thanks guys thank you it it went way too fast yeah it was good but it ended quickly i wanted i had so much more we could talked to i had so much i think we should actually hit him up and be like dude i after after this episode goes out he gets some love we should asked him to come back because i need a part two too i had like five other things i had so many i had so many questions he would it it seems like a he seems like a great guy he his yep man he's he's really charismatic i i get like why i i understand why he's he would be he would be describing an idea off the cuff and i'd be like you know what this makes so much sense i would like i would back you to the hills yes this makes sense i could see why he's been able to raise so much money yeah he i asked that confidence question because he just ooze with that with charisma and confidence so let's talk about okay so first i really love that company i thought that was great i thought he was i agree i thought he was great and i thought he made for a great guest especially the second half his setup was bad i cannot stand with people's i think he was talking to assist on a phone or a laptop with someone who's so successful like he is why do they not have awesome zoom setup yeah it's crazy to me but i think they're just like on the go all the time so they're like i don't even have like i don't even hold my phone this woman holds my phone for me and you know i i just sort of speak out a loud i don't even type anymore that's my that's my wait a bra just said he doesn't own a computer was the i think he was quite true bra or you just bullshit in the chat that's that's what i was sold doesn't own a computer see that's what i was saying dude i knew it i knew he's in that ultra rich wait so there's the mega rich so all the the most rich is they don't own a computer nor do they even touch a computer their emails get printed out for them and they either hand right or just say things out loud and people go relay the messages i think he's one notch below that or he doesn't own a computer and he just does shit off his phone that's weird to me i mean not weird because i mean if you're a baller go ahead be baller ball out but like how what if you just wanna type long essay or doesn't you want to or if you wanna just bulbs like us can't understand the the the feeling where you don't need to type nothing ever or or you just wanna like search the web and like go run it like it just seems like easy to help if you take my computer away forget the work i would be so bored i like need to like you know browse the internet yeah that's crazy so he doesn't own a computer that's pretty cool yeah the guy is awesome he said he had a few really good ideas i i wanted to ask him so he sent us these notes ahead of time and he said this thing about million the the difference between a million and a billion and i was like oh come on i it we gotta save it yeah i wanted to know what do he what what he was gonna say i think we slow played a little too much at the beginning and just as my fault i should have gone into one of these but okay so a couple things so here's my takeaway here's my like i don't usually do takeaways because i don't think it like i don't know i just don't bother usually usually it's not like i really learned so much that i really wanna do takeaways i was just kind of entertained but in this i actually did have a few takeaways i thought i'm just gonna rattle them off insight number one the barbell of selling your company it's very easy to sell at the small end and even at the high end the hardest path is actually that middle ground where both of us actually sold our companies and i think that that's true it feels very true from my experiences and i've never heard anybody like kinda say it out loud so i thought that was that was a a good insight i liked and basically when it what way he i i don't think you summarized it or i don't think you said everything basically he said it's easier to sell a company for like he actually said ten million or under yeah or like hundreds of millions right exactly and the reason why is you know the small one you can kinda cut the check just on talent the big one you're buying like kind of a more fleshed out asset of technology or traction or or talent unique talent and in the middle he's like you've usually raised enough money where like your price you're asking price is too high for them to just just do it without blinking but you don't have enough proof and enough of an asset that they can like justify you know a big strategic purchase and so that's actually the hardest one i think he he was hinting at something that i think is true which is that entrepreneur who's done that is the most dangerous entrepreneur because they have enough money where the next thing they chase they're gonna go bigger but they didn't get enough where they're just satisfied and gonna go chill on the couch or on an island somewhere and they've been through it but they're not they're not done and i think that that's what he was kinda saying which is like those entrepreneurs are the ones you wanna bet on i also when i invest that's like a great signal to me is when somebody has had a small win under their belt or a medium sized win i should say yeah i had of andrew chen very successful asics six injuries and partners said some of the most he just said the most dangerous entrepreneur is someone who's somewhat wealthy enough that they that they're set but they have a huge chip on their shoulder exactly and he anyway those for example travis before he started uber you know he had red sw which was like a kind of tens of millions win of williams before twitter you know he he had blogger and you know that was a goodwin win but you know don't went for more and there's there's a bunch of examples mark cuban did the same thing right okay some other things i thought he was interesting so his model i didn't realize this before beforehand him but his model is basically it's kinda like moonshot is basically he's anti the the traditional playbook of silicon valley which is raise in small steps so raise a little bit of money make a little bit of progress raise a little more money make a little more progress raise more money make more progress he's sort of like find the biggest market you can go after raise a bunch of money and go make the bold bet in that market for example what he did with jet he's like e commerce huge market and growing double digits i thought it was interesting he was saying like you you know you don't need this like brand new novel invention it's like the bet is gonna be on execution and you do wanna have like a new hook or like kind of like the ten to twenty percent that's that's innovative but like eighty percent is the same as other players in the market and so he was saying do that basically go raise a big chunk of money recruit the best people the best people make great product and then go raise a huge amount of money to go you know go for the the the home run shot and i thought that was interesting most people don't use that playbook or don't talk about it and that's like his specific lane that he did as an entrepreneur and he's doing as an investor i thought that was cool he also i asked him a question that you laughed at a little bit but i thought it was a great question and a great the reason i left it was a great question and he actually gave a great answer but you asked like what's a company i could start and in three years so for a hundred million dollars to amazon walmart it was so specific but i was like it's almost like hey martin yeah i don't wanna think just tell me what to do and i'll go do it like it was to such a solved my problem for me i just laughed well i it was what was the word that you said the day or ortho ortho it was my ortho methodical way of asking of asking what is a problem that big e com that is the he have yeah that they that they had that that what are problems that need to be solved okay that yeah that was my way of asking that he gave a great answer he gave a great answer the answer he actually gave a a previous answer where he said something like conversational commerce which is a really cool thing he'll explain but the answer that he gave for that was oh fitting at virtual fitting yeah virtual fitting so he gave a ton of really cool answers and it and the guy this guy mark lori who was the he started at jet dot com which he sold for three and a half billion and then he was a ceo or president of walmart e com and then he before that he had sold the company for six hundred million dollars to amazon so like his his his his perspective is like about almost as great as it can be yes exactly so i thought that was really strong and i liked i liked some of his stuff on the interviews kind of like job interview side i think don't know how much people will love that content because it's not as fun and it's not as junk foodie as ideas right but if somebody who ever if you ever actually have to do that i thought there was some good good insights in there and even though it was a little bit like say if fact if nobody can disagree i things he was saying were good i didn't feel like it was just cookie cutter like i think that i think he genuinely believes it and that's genuinely his approach and it matters a lot to him and i think that came through during that part which is cool because you always wonder like this guy's doing this and this and this how's he doing it well it's like it's always he's got great people underneath them doing all those individual projects on a day to day basis alright well then how do you find those great people to actually make the difference between failure and success of the same idea is having you know that great operator underneath so i thought that was pretty good what would you think at that part yeah i wanted to ask him more about it but we didn't have time but basically it sounds like he's not totally in the weeds of his businesses which is the way to go you know like if you can if he can go be in the weeds of anything i don't wanna be the weeds of my marriage i don't wanna be in the weeds of you parenting the weeds the weeds or the weeds bro i don't i don't wanna be the weeds i only wanna be in the weeds of the things that i wanna be in and when do you start a company there's so much stuff that you think you have to do and it's cool i wanted to hear his perspective of it he's like look i have the vision i hired the initial people and i raised a ton of money and i just deployed that money and make everyone else specialize in what there's what they specialize in but we didn't get to ask him about it what one thing he did show was sort of like when we were you were like how do you how do you figure out what that vision should be and he talked about a couple things he's like i look at where the trends are where is the puck going right he's like one way i do that is i see where investors are pouring in money okay that tells me that these spaces are probably big or these technologies are breakthrough technologies and so it's either like a technology like ai machine learning okay cool i can apply that in in another industry or everything's you know bunch of people pouring money into commerce so okay commerce is probably really big or education and health care is really big alright that's a big space now how do i go create the most bold vision that has like you know a a slightly novel hook and i thought it was cool that he was basically like i don't get bogged down in the in kind of the details of like what what is this player doing versus this player versus this player he's just sort of like how should it be right when he was talking about health he's like i just wake up i have a dashboard that says here's what's going on in your body and it recommends that hey you should get this checked with the doctor or you should improve this and and i thought the kinda like just from a mind of a customer instead of like industry research i thought better that's a big amazon thing to do is is that which is like you just start with the customer and you say here's how their life should be that would make them really happy alright now i have a pleased customer now i'll go figure out how to make that happen instead of the other way around which is what can i do and then does that partially satisfy customer okay that's good enough and i wanted to ask them about air about amazon and working with bezos and things like that i i wonder what his opinion will be buying the timber walls i feel like there's more we could do there because he bought a sports you know one thing there's a crazy story that i'll just share here i didn't get to bring it up with him but but ben found this when he was doing some research for this was he he goes when when jet was when jet was growing or early on the jet they had a contest i don't know if you've seen this this article but had a contest it was about who can acquire the most customers for jet you become a marketer you you go spread the word whoever whoever does whoever gets the most customers gets a hundred thousand shares of jet and some guy went and did it and he he basically just did like kinda like paid marketing in in a unique way he spent eight the guy invested eighteen thousand dollars into the paid marketing won the contest and his hundred thousand shares became more twenty million when it's sold and so this guy turned eighteen granted did twenty million as a fan of the company outside the company probably made more than anyone else in the company besides mark which is amazing to me i remember that story and i was one of those people trying to this was like you could participated to this oh definitely you didn't you didn't participate like if you just it was basically so robinhood did a good job of this i believe it was robinhood club house has done a pretty good job but like basically robinhood campaign right before they launch was you're on the waiting list refer five people to move up the spot right this was jets version of that although jet was first i believe than robin before robinhood and it went incredibly viral if i remember correctly i think they had billboards promoting this the contest i yeah drew remember that go you would i think we should've have asked them him about this we'll save this one for next time but i thought this is amazing story yeah i hope could spend about two more hours with him easily so i hope he comes back let us know in the reviews what you think oh i'm quick update we're going to miami i think in eight days or something june fourth we sold three hundred tickets that's great so we have we have a few left we're releasing maybe what eighty more hundred more or something like that yeah we moved it to four hundred it was three hundred we moved it to four hundred we'll see what happens alright if you wanna come see us if you want us to to autograph your dollar bills bring them to miami june fourth i don't know how they should to find the event bright just go to m f m pod or my first million pods so m f m pod dot com and put in an your email email you the details right yep and there'll be a link on there if you go to m f m pod dot com also if you just follow one of us on twitter you could definitely see the links we're we're we're promoting it and do us a favor if you like this episode with mark when we post it we're gonna post it i don't know or i guess go on linkedin and we i wanna shower him with love of people being like dude this was great come back on and then he'll come back on so we'll we'll we need to gain linkedin a little bit i might have to dust off the old linkedin password to go and and because that's the thing when guests come on they i i've consistently heard this from the very beginning of this podcast which is dude i get way more messages about this podcast than any other podcast i've ever been on i don't know why that is i don't think our audience is bigger but something that works and when they get that that magic moment that of of people emailing them being like it works that was amazing it works they're they're down to do whatever for and come back on or do whatever else and you only need about ten twenty thirty like you don't need a significant amount right twenty emails in one day being like i loved it i love you is a lot of emails for for most people it feels like feels like a million so mark's name is m a r c space l o r e look him up on linkedin and just whatever is recent thread is just click like comment and be like this saw you in the podcast so good yeah saw you on my first really amazing yeah go go go hammer his linkedin comments or something like that yeah i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days off on a road travel never looking back