#197 with Dharmesh Shah - Frameworks for Becoming a Billionaire (From a Billionaire's Perspective)

here's what i say here's what i even have a seven figure domain name picked up for you i will write the five million dollar check for you to go do it as far as a seed round or up to five million if you wanna let other people in that domain thing this just got spicy okay know i god let the david they have i am i'm dead serious yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a less travel a looking bag alright we just got done like thirty seconds ago talking to the guy who were gonna introduce you to now that was amazing he's a he that guy's da mesh is amazing he's very cool so we have da mesh i don't even know what is star is name dha shah i think shah just known him as da he's the c cofounder he's like beyonce you know they just go with the one name at a certain point wrong although beyonce da that's that's it so da is the c cofounder of hubspot he's the largest shareholder i mean we we got pretty like into it right away we're like just tell like tell us what what's it like to be a billionaire there like so i'm just googled your net worth and it appears you're worth a billion dollar yeah so we asked how does that feel and he's like no i told him i was gonna talk him about that so we talked to him about just like well which was let's let's rattle off some of the dope things he's done so started hubspot hubspot like i have whatever twenty five billion dollar company or something like that but he's done some other cool things early investor in coinbase dropbox and loads of different stuff just right and then also just has kind of like he's like us he's got that itch that entrepreneurial itch so he like we talk a little bit about he's got like twenty domain names some domain names that are worth like you know millions of dollars and others that are you know just simple idea ideas i already got an idea by the way hundreds of domain names right but he's like got ideas loaded into them like oh here's what you might do with this idea and then here's a good domain name for it and so i think he's you know he's sort of like he's one of our people in that sense like he's an idea person he's a frameworks person so he shared some frameworks he shared a bunch of ideas two two really big ideas my idea on air you go sean if you wanna start this i fund you right now for five million dollars yeah he made me an offer i pretty much couldn't refuse i just had to sort of you know yes squeeze my thighs and sit still here so so you know that but i thought it was i thought the i actual ideas were really great so i think people are gonna like that we talk a little bit about the we're talk a little bit about wealth we talked a little bit about kinda like early days you know hubspot and and the hustle acquisition and then we talk a bunch about ideas and then we some those ideas are about a new different type of linkedin or remote community we talked about oh he talked about his framework for evaluating if it's set of an idea is good or not if you should pursue it that was actually incredibly educational it it was awesome to dude it was great so we'll get to the episode can you guys do me a favor though click that sub subscribe button on itunes and that follow button on spotify that would mean a lot do we have to tell them anything else well there's a thing going around where if you just post on your social networks and you're just like hey you know psa to whoever needs this this podcast you know makes my commute amazing this is the best business podcast hands down you know good karma comes to steve you in your next life so that's just something if you're interested in having a good next life i would just do that yeah and i'll res share that for sure i mean because it impacts my ego and we hit i hit i i share all i share all compliments so go ahead and do that make sure you share the itunes or spotify link with it thank you very much have to about me i like compliments alright yeah alright did enjoy this episode i don't remember what i was gonna say but right before you came on i was asking dark mesh what he listens to and he says that he listens to us almost every day in the past sixty days amazing has that changed to you have you you probably become a worse person you seem like a pretty good person i feel like if you listen us for sixty straight days is gonna be a part of your brain that's good but a part that gets like corrupted slightly you know it's i think that's true that's a two it's you know we've just have i won't say like completely diver paths so i'm just a yep it's been good though i i'm a believer in and like this is kinda more phenomenal things i like this not stuff i'm like you know looking at retail businesses or like you guys have a wide array of stuff but i think that kind of like builds a different muscle group and i think it's been it's useful for me i'll i'll put it to you that way it's not i think we're not so afraid birth findings actually we have things of that you know what do we have in common but there are things that i'm just yep and then they'll come out the pipe sir i'm a we want we're we're on now so this is the pod but we yeah this might i have a feeling this might go a little long and i'm okay with that sean do what you want but we i like or in my world so i was just hanging out with heat and s yesterday and your your name came up we were just talking to nathan berry the other day your name came came up sean and i are this text group where people talk about bit cloud your name comes up your name comes up everywhere like you're you got you're like a little like like you got like a spider web like you get your hands and all these little things and i i think part of it because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful but do you so this is da mesh da mesh is the you you the c cofounder founder of hubspot is your title cto yes c can do you are you active like are you working really hard at hubspot like how do you have time to have your hands and all this different stuff so the answer is yes hubspot is my obsession and pre preoccupation anything else that you see me doing there's probably some dia thread that connects it back to hubspot so that's number there is right so yeah it's my baby it's the thing that i spend pretty much all of my kinda of non family time non personal time on so it's fine and i just wanna describe for people who are not watching so so you should go to the youtube channel it's youtube dot com slash i think hustle khan and you'll see the videos but so here's what i see so da sitting there he's got a keyboard like a piano keyboard to his right and he's got a i think steve jobs piece of art behind him or is a lenin or something like i can't tell exactly who is john maybe and you're in this room so just to is this where you work on a day to day basis so this is well yes and no so that's you're getting a trick sean you're getting trick listen this is my living room but it's a us like a capture a moment time when living room was somewhat less disorganized that it usually would be but it's a virtual background i've got the green screen and things set up so i can oh okay that's pretty good because he usually when you have a green screen it's like half your head also turns into like the background and this one's actually pretty good i'm impressed i've i've done like a multiple green screens so i'm sort of surrounding with it so if i need to twist the camera one way or the other still so you're kinda doing the oasis thing we talked about you basically you have a virtual background but the virtual background is not just you on a beach like a fake situation it's your actual living room when it's like clean and perfect the way you want it or whatever and you're like that's what i want my background to be regardless of the reality of the the current whatever your current situation is i like that really cool is that the keyboard itself is actually real that's not part of the background so i've been you'll see nothing pretty traffic big sound so it's just talk so let me let me do like a a very brief intro and like an overview of what we're gonna talk about so der sent us like a list of ideas we're gonna get into them but i need to give a background here so the listeners entirely understand so hubspot today is like a twenty five or thirty i don't know whatever the market gap is so twenty five billion dollar publicly traded company you c found it fifteen years ago i think prior to that you had another startup up that you sold for a significant amount of money we can talk about that throughout this whole time you own i believe millions of millions of dollars worth of domains like you you bought your wife like as a a gift human ism dot com which we gotta talk about that's pretty funny you've you're an a or an angel investor in a lot of different startups ups including coinbase base and things like that you've got your hands and all these different things like you according to w mine or wall street mine dot com you're worth today eight hundred and fifty million dollars so like you you do a little bit of everything in the world of business is incredibly fascinating and so i wanted to talk today talk about you might be well you might be the wealthiest person we've ever had on this podcast i'm gonna ask you questions about that i don't know you're gonna it's fine we're gonna we're gonna ask you questions question it doesn't really matter and that's the one thing i've learned we can talk about that too well that's that's okay if it doesn't matter we're gonna talk about it we're also gonna talk about your ideas we're gonna talk about building hubspot we're gonna tell about why you invest in what you invest and we're gonna talk about do you ever invest in non start so if we're gonna invest about we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff sean what do you think well i would have asked them okay so here's my question my question is actually not about der message it's actually about sam so so you so i've always wondered this so you acquired the hustle and i hope you could be as as transparent as you want here think sam will we'll will not care so i would say dna wise the hustle is kind of a unique company sam a pretty unique dude that you kinda of brought into your company different dna probably then the vast majority of employees there give me kind of like well and you know you're you're part of the deal too sean so you're on the book sure you don't have to deal with me on a day to day basis so so doing that deal and bringing these guys in i like i don't know are there any inter interesting observations any entertaining little stories about either pre acquisition or post that had to do with you know sam and the hustle i'm just curious kinda like what's your view on that side of the table because i've only been on the same side that sam on yeah and we haven't hubspot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past we've done a handful of them pretty much most of them have gone well but the one thing that made this different i think as you as you observe is the dna of the hustle is different than hubspot and and that's both the good thing of bad thing so the thing i was worried about is and and and i'm told now i don't think sam and i have actually i ever had a one on one chat so this this is my therapy fashion for you guys like therapy for two people and i talk a lot i'd slack he's like buddies thought but the thing i was worried about is that you know so sam is a kinda what i would think i was a kinda type a personality just like he's out there he's hustling in that fence the name of the company which is fine but it's just not most of the makeup of hubspot is not that we're a very where i don't know what the right it's gonna overly stereotype but we're not typing we're like a kind gentle humble just quieter or kind of get me so that's the little thing oh here let me explain it this way so sam would be described as bras i don't think anybody would ever described hubspot as bras today karen the guy i work with technically my boss he was like you should probably hire someone outside of hubspot for this role for your growth and i was like well why he goes i think you're too direct for anyone who works at hubspot it's like that's an example i think that was good advice but but it's worked out it's worked out well so the there been like the one kind of minor strike i can recall there was a like a twitter back and forth that i think sam had with ram fish that i know you recall sam there was something that was said about vcs or investment or something and ran been a good friend it's like that and but i'm like oh okay well it's fine i'm like okay you it's like no fuck that and not like either party was the right runner or and different but i know them you know at least now a little bit both but they so but it's been fine okay in my defense i i i hope and even our podcast defense our goal is we will disagree with people but i hope that it never comes from a place of like disrespect or yeah i'm trying to like hurt your feelings no what i will say i do put entertainment first sometimes so sometimes i will poke the bear for the entertainment you of it when you know the kinder nicer simpler thing to do would be to do to do nothing or just back away so so i do like to have fun either on twitter or pocket i'm hubspot too much but the one thing i will say this was as far as the deal itself it was one of the better things hubspot has done in terms of like the strategy behind it i think is strong in terms of like it gets hubspot into a thing which is where i think the future of kinda saas companies has is going to be heading which is more and more that we're gonna control their own kind of distribution versus kinda renting audiences versus from other people reason resorts is and there's other deals that have been done around the same timeline but i'm a believer in companies kinda controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus constantly just buying from buying audience and renting them from someone else see this is where you should just say just drop a one line to like you know and we got it at a fantastic price just to drive sam that crazy for the next seven years just leave them constantly josh himself look i think there yeah could we have sulfur from more definitely maybe like that always is a maybe right i think that when we sold hubspot i felt was undervalued i think when i think the day the deal closed was or maybe like what was the stock in january was it like it was worth like three hundred and fifty dollars or was it even less two hundred and fifty dollars i don't remember yeah today today it's six hundred bucks so like our guess my guess was that i think hubspot is undervalued and also i wanted to create a reputation of someone who was like a fair deal maker and like like i think people will know that like if i built something i sold that the all all parties got a good deal lens so okay alright sounds we gonna make him switch off the helps the hustle acquisition so let's do some ideas no like i wanna talk about one thing really quick i let's talk about money stuff okay because i told dark mesh i was gonna ask them this so first of all is it weird that i know what your net worth is today because it's like public information it's not weird for me honestly and like i'm a i'm generally like transparent i believe in kind of the openness of the web it's and i'm and since it's a publicly traded company like that's you know where i want my like bank accounts and all my accounts kinda published on the web no but the fact that i'm an executive in a publicly traded company and most of my net worth is in the form of shares which you can take the number of shares which is on a public record to multiply by the current price and get which is probably roughly eighty five ninety percent of my overall network because that's where all my money is is in hubspot shares i i don't find that weird it's yeah has your life changed as this as this has like accumulated and and things got didn't different or has it based you you had another company before this how much did do you sell that for ten fifteen in that range based on how do you count it and has your life changed since that moment significantly because that's a that's a significant number in itself right yeah so i here here's the thing it's i'd like to say no i you i wasn't focused on money i'm not focused on at at the time when i was younger i was very very focused on money and i had very kind modest upbringing and i was like okay well when it wasn't like the money and accumulation of it it was the freedom know ever since i was little i i always wanna kinda configure the universe to my liking so to speak because i got my court so like these are things the way i to do things and having to kinda work in a normal kinda of classic job doesn't give you a whole lot of control over your you're part of the universe you don't get to control who you work with all that much or who you hire you don't have a lot of degrees of freedom so yeah i've been thinking back and then i had you know i kinda thought about money and like the first i'll say five million or so has a dramatic impact had a dramatic impact on my life right because that buys you an inordinate amount of freedom right you don't have to work again you can invest in things you can do pretty as long as you're not out you know buying small islands and overtaking countries i mean that's a decent amount of money for for folks right and then after that and there other kind of i don't know exactly what the d are where you know more money adds on a marginal basis a little bit more freedom you can do more things but yeah like the kinds of things i do like i enjoy food and restaurants there's only so much you can actually spend as a reasonable human being even if you'd like the to five your things it's like okay unless you're trying to make a statement and spend a hundred times what the average of a whatever x is it's kinda hard as yes well even if you have kind a high end taste honestly the most common thing i've heard i don't know if you degree your disagree degree is like there's these levels so it's like first in in if when you're in debt to no debt that's like the first jump freedom got this weight off my shoulders yep then there's kind of like you know what call there's the zero to one million where it's like oh my god you know mentally i'm a millionaire that's kind of just like a mentally freeing concept in interesting concept what's why we named the pod what we did but also you know that that'll afford you a certain type of lifestyle and then the next jump i've heard is like at ten or ten or ten ish where it's sort of like okay at ten ish you sort of you don't have to work like at a million you still gotta work at ten you don't have to work you can kinda like have a couple places to delay you could do whatever you you don't really need to check the prices when you go do things yep and then there's sort of like a hundred or more which is sort of like you know the ego gets involved it's like okay now i'm keeping score against you know in the in the business olympics against against these other folks and also you know i could do some like you know like i can i can i can buy an island i can buy a piece of an nba team i can i can go do these different things that are like kind of like bucket list and and the joy of what i've heard is sort of like you know for most people is sort of like the joy actually like dee from the from the beginning there like getting out of debt is sort like the most relief most joy and then sort of like it starts to diminish sort of step by step as you go like the ten what hundred feels a lot less impactful and less sort of changes your your joy your mood than like going from zero to ten yep just too friends i wanna pull on as long as we're talking about money so one is one thing that's kinda helped me reconcile it in terms of you know having to be in the in the net worth now is you know the plan my wife why can i talked about this the plan is to donate ninety plus percent of it right like we we we have one child we're not gonna spoil them so it's not like we're trying to build a multi generational dynasty that is right not the goal and so then like you know if i make a really good return on a startup or something like that it's like okay well i'm discount ninety percent for my wife's foundation that's essentially what it comes down here so like most percent of whatever it is and i don't i think it'll end up being higher because just don't think we're capable of actually spending the spending the money but yeah so that makes me feel better but just kinda thinking it back the early days one kind of lesson i learned early early on this is useful beginning part of my career is kinda the relationship between time and money and one thing is that when we spend the better part of kind of first half of our lives converting time into money right and you're looking for the hour you're looking for and yeah you wanna get that you rate up as as you can and then the latter half of you're desperately trying to buy time back with the money have our best you can so that's and it varies a little bit as to kinda when that kinda turn happens but the thing that i kinda learned this was and i thought about it probably a few after that so i was making three dollars and sixty five cents in my first job when i came over as an immigrant and i i worked all the way through school to me seven degrees to get my four seven years to get my four year degree i was working full time the whole way through and that wasn't a lot of money and as it turns out i had to do pretty much i think nothing was del but then once i got the point where i was making ten twenty fifty dollars an hour it's like okay well now and like all of by time i can make as much billable as i want to it as much as why i'm humanly possible wind to work there was someone willing to pay me for that i was an engineer like that's how things work back then it was and and the the pivotal point for me is i i got this you it's in my early twenties i got this bumped to like a hundred and twenty five dollars an hours was working as an engineer and that was an un undocumented amount of money i was birmingham alabama this is you know the the nineties that was like real money right and i was working lot i was making a fair amount so then they made the decision that if there's anything i've been doing with my time that could be done by spending less than a hundred and twenty five dollars an hour i'm being an idiot by actually doing it right if i enjoy it that's a different story but if i'm not it's just stupid and so i've carried that kind of ideas like okay so what value would i place on my time right what is occupying my time that i can kinda delegate or even if i'm paying a premium like okay i could i could pay seventy five dollars an hour just up for someone to pay you know to mow my lawn hey i hate it but it's still profitable right like if you like why would you do that like i would do that every day of the week so the one thing that's changed for me so now like i went back into the math is know was gonna be on this podcast and you might sequence like numbers so if i i let's say i've worked on average sixty hours a week and i've done that for about thirty years give or take it's my kind of professional career my average hourly rate across the thirty years would be like ten thousand dollars an hour right and now it's back loaded right that be effectively my hourly rate and so now it's like okay well if there's anything and and i would actually pay a premium right now right above that right like so i would not spend my time even an hour on anything that wasn't worth at least that it's like okay well like the future me would buy for fifty a hundred thousand dollars there's some option value on that time anyway the the short message is most people don't value their time enough and don't think about it objectively enough and it like anything else is a resource but it's finite but put a number on it and then ask yourself like what are the things i'm doing with my time that are not worth that right and so neville has this phrase in his like kinda how to get rich podcast or whatever how to get rich that getting lucky he says he he because you know put it put it put a i don't know what he calls it like outrageous out or outrageous just hourly rate for yourself like an a super ambitious rate ambitious one one that's way beyond wherever you're at he's like you since i was young this one of the smart things i did i just said five thousand dollars an hour so like really aspirational hourly rate he's like my friends used to laugh and joke like did you bought this blender you're not even using it i go return it and he's like no i'm not gonna go return it i don't i don't enjoy it and it's gonna get me back thirty dollars for the hour round trip you know going training this thing at target so like i will throw it away i will give it away what i would not do is i will not give my time back into that because hourly the rate just doesn't make sense i i love that i so i've done a similar thing and it's kinda funny to like pick that hourly mark because it sounds crazy like i my mom will get mad at and she'll come to my house and then she'll see the way i'm living and she's like oh my god like this you this bill is late they're gonna there's a seventy five dollar fee if you don't do it and i'm like i'm not calling them and they can charge me seventy five dollar fee they could charge it to me ten times like i'm not gonna use this hour like and i'll tell her like look literally my hourly rate is x right it's x thousands of dollars so so are you that's my early rate so i'm gonna trade that hour i to go do this thing i don't enjoy because her other argument is well you go watch tv and i'm like well that i enjoy so that that i'm i'm actually spending the money but sam i know you're a little bit different like when i went to go visit sam austin he had like cvs receipts that he had been saving in his like glove compartment of his super fancy car like he's a dichotomy right he's got he's likes to spend something but he's also enjoys being frugal it's like yeah that makes me feel good about myself like do you i guess the question i have for you is do you also have an hourly rate you do think about that or you don't do that that framework sam this for you oh for me yeah i have that framework yeah so like yeah i mean it makes me feel good not to waste stuff like i feel good about myself and i feel guilty if i waste it so i feel i feel happy when i do that and i feel it's hard for me to go to bed at night i if i if i waste something or i don't return it yeah i have that hour i mean i mean i have that rate like i just assumed that i'm gonna make i i assume that i'm gonna make three million dollars a year so whatever that hourly rated is but i i think i'm i'm gonna make three million dollars a year and anything that like will make less than that i don't do it but that said like mowing the lawn i get joy from that so i have i don't prob i don't like put a money thing on anything but like if someone's like hey well you back sean someone asked us to fly to london to come speak at some event or something and i i afford it to you but they're like yeah it's october i'm like i don't wanna go there i'm like how much money would they have to pay me to go do i'm like they have to pay me a lot like right because you pay fine yeah yeah it's like i just don't it just that just is a pay they have to pay me a hundred thousand dollars to do that and like that does not make any sense but i just hey i just hate it and so der i a couple more rich guy questions and we'd like these because honestly you'd never get to ask these even if we were just hanging out personally i can never ask you this but for some reason with the podcast it's like sort of okay for me to just like ask you ran out questions like this and i told them i when he wanted to come on or i we i asked him to come i go over i'm gonna ask you this stuff and i and we gave him an easy i said if you don't wanna answer anything just say you don't wanna answer it right and and i'm sort of projecting here where you know i guess like i i think i put myself in your shoes what if i had more money that i could ever spend what i do so my question to you is what whether you did it or did or you just considered it once say sort of outlandish issues of funds that you've either considered or done like so for example you know some people are like yeah you know like some people like jets that's not i'm not buying a private jet i'm but what i really care about is i love this sock so i bought every i love jordan sneakers so i bought every pair of jordans i this closet in my house just full of these things that i always wanted it when i was a kid right or if they overs spent in some area and they they're just happy to have done it or like it could be like feeling philanthropic like i think if i had a billion dollars i think like two days a year i would just wire somebody like a million dollars i would literally just wire a random person a million dollars and i would just see how that plays out and i think it would bring me like tons of joy and entertainment to do that and see how they react and what happens and what do they what do they do with it like maybe some kid who's working on something interesting i would just be like look here what check your account it's there you know so give me something that is there anything that's sort of non standard that you either have done or considered doing yeah the thing that i i do is i'd like those kind of kinda micro acts of cons that says oh like someone is wants to go to this event or something like that and can't afford it or whatever it's like i'll be a sponsor like if you can find people that wanna do this they'll do this i'll do that relatively regularly i've taken this the sound so i've taken my average tip amount up to between fifty and a hundred percent everywhere i go and this is partly because i wanna make up for all the time when i was younger that did not too well so i'm trying package it out and that's as long as i can do it without like drawing too much attention because i wanna be that weirdo guy it's like okay no was like right send sometime the wrong signal i wanna do it i do that by the way modest it's like a stuff typically tip fifty percent it makes me feel good yeah it's nice it's yeah when i've worked with service industry before i know that those kind of things matter so i'm a cheap bastards so i'll stay silent here like only me a large thing so fl treatment i running joke inside the house my wife and and so she's not from the tech world at all but i'm really so i want to like own the world and she wants to save it right like she so i will make the money yeah that's something i've been relatively good at and she will be able to challenge it to good causes and and the film grapple effort so she'll will be able to do that so i don't have any like particular specific things i will say like i am a so i'm the guy like jacked with a matrix so if if there was a a world like i was like this is you know like i i live a virtual world there's no not a lot of physical things that i crave or desire other than a piano which i've wanted for a while now at piano but doesn't excite me all that much right it's like it's and because adam's there's a maintenance to atoms right like adam's versus bits like if you have it whether it's a yacht or whatever it is a plane like that takes calories i could take i don't care how much you've delegated or whatever that's something in your life that's kinda of attached to you somehow and i i just don't like that i don't like that idea that feels more wavy to me than kinda joyful but so so speaking of time we so hubspot fifteen years old i i don't know how many people are here twenty five hundred three thousand whatever it seems like you guys like grew pretty fast early on but it has it always felt like a grind or i mean like when i when i see you i'm like well you don't have to do this like you could delegate this you don't have to work here you're set you're good why are you still doing this and does it still feel like a grind and when has it stopped feeling like a grain one of the reasons why i wanted to sell to you i was like if i don't sell like in this cycle i'll probably have to wait another five years am i do i wanna put that work in or do i wanna sell that like what like that's a hard challenge did you face that and just walk me through that so a couple things it's not widely known but so brian i is c cofounder founders we had kinda hard to hard c cofounder chat which i encourage all founders to have and we have this list of questions we're gonna go through and i published this on my on on my own startups blog but one of the things was around you know who's gonna be ceo and we decided he's gonna be ceo because i suck at ceo you know i did that with my first start up for ten years i'm just not that good at it that was penn decision one but this decision two which is much much more unconventional is that i have no direct reports so what my agreement with brian was i'm not going to have any management responsibilities in this company i'm going in at a hundred percent but i'm not a good manager now i'm reasonably smart i if i spend a bunch of time i could probably with some coaching get passively okay at management like i i think i could get there i don't wanna spend ten twenty thirty years of my life getting passively good at something i'm a big believer in take your strengths whatever they are and but like all your energy and to kinda amplifying those trends and getting really really good at that thing and don't worry about your weaknesses all that much so i wanna wanna worry about my weakness managing people and so we have over four thousand people at hubspot i have zero direct works i've never had direct reports in the fifteen years and that is partly what makes it much and i don't think of it as a grind as at all like i it's completely discretionary and optional for me obviously have a lot of kind of vested interest in the company but in terms of the work that i do and i've so whittle down my life at hubspot this has been the this way for better part of a decade is is like i get it down to like three things i'm gonna work on and that i will change those every few years so for a long time it was like brand culture and what i call bold which is is the organization taking on enough risk because the temptation is always like once you start having customers and revenues are growing things like that is just the kinda what we call drag the spreadsheet it's like oh like here the numbers this is now it's growing we're just gonna drag the spreadsheet and the numbers will flow basically is to push the organization so we don't do that so what i do is i will focus on whatever those three things are and say no to pretty much everything else and and things will swap it and out so i've had you know product in there i've had platform in there but on that thing whatever it is i'm working on so what i had culture on my list it's like i spent three hundred hours you know in the on the culture code deck at hubspot i'm going to do everything i can to learn everything i can to try and get culture to be a a thing at hubspot and yeah so it's i i find enjoyable i have to kinda pick the things so my three things are different you know from year to year i like to dig into details i don't like kinda floating to fifty thousand feet in lofty the ivory towers i like to like if i'm to work on brand i'm in there with the marketing team like reviewing copy and going through the and why i'm taking the sean's the copywriting part like i i have assess over details so you did you see sean that he's in your par writing course yeah i saw that i was like how's does this guy have time to do this is amazing i have you been how's it been so far he talks to me all the time that's why i'm like what do you do all day i i found it very useful i'll say that it's and i think copywriting overall is one of the most underrated skills in entrepreneurship generally like if people do not realize the amount of leverage you get by just spending ten twenty fifty hours and you can learn a lot of what you need just by reading the top three books on it and just practicing the craft right it's and it's a doable thing and the nice thing about it and one thing i love about it it's like measurable you can objectively measure whether you got better at copywriting or not can look at your conversion rates but whatever numbers you're trying to to move as a result of your words and it's a it's a learn steal that's yeah one more question and we can move on but with the and the reason why you were able to do those node direct reports is i think that you were the first investor and so like was this was hubspot your idea or is it brian's idea but i think you invested like half a million dollars of your own money to like get it started and aren't aren't aren't you the largest shareholder of the company i am and so so the idea of hubspot just is the you have to be couple the two things so hubspot was not supposed to happen and here's what i mean by that when i sold my last company and i i've been running it for ten hours ten years and working the proverbial hours as as one would expect right that was self funded bootstrap and i promise my wife that i would not do another startup i was like okay well you know the one i'm doing i'm in i can't not be in the analogy you know i used is it's a little bit like being at like a a gaming table in las vegas right and it's like and you don't know the rules of again this is how it start up entrepreneurship works here if you're self funded it's like you're at the table and the only real feedback you get is like sometimes the chips go down sometimes when they go up you're playing you try to figure out the rules as you go you don't know but there's one like cardinal rule is that if you leave the table whatever chips you have on the table they're on every now and then the house will come to you and say hey would you like to cash in your chips they're worth x dollars and this is the position you were and i was like okay would you like to sell your company here's what someone's willing to pay for it and if you miss that opportunity you have no idea when the next opportunity to cash out your chips and like can so you keep playing right it's like and so the thing i told my wife was like i have to keep playing i did like if if i chose to get off the table was like i a lot of that sense this a hundred percent of our network was invested in this and so then eventually when i sold that was a decision like okay i'm i'm i'm leaving the table cash in my chips i don't have to do this anymore so that's why i went to grad school and my plan was go to grad school so i didn't really get a chance to enjoy undergrad because i was working the whole time too and i'm gonna like actually go to grad will be a real student i'll apply myself and not could do anything i'm how are you i was thirty five thirty six somewhere in that range yep so so third like a thirty six year old college kid living in the dream i idea i i had great time it was awesome one of the best things i did is just go back to grad school for a variety of reasons but anyway so i had not planned that's so i my plan was good grad school then maybe get like a phd and then go teach that was my kind of path that kinda chosen path and then i have brian in grad school and we both have this kinda shared passion for smb we both come from tech different backgrounds and so the first decision we made before we even decided what hubspot was going to be was that the two of us should do a company together and if like brian was not going to do a company there would be no hubspot right like i so i had registered the domain name i had little on kind of variety of things but then we kinda came together and said let's do this and by the way all through grad school we were newly on ideas right we're like okay well we'll do this and we had house hubspot we went to the business plan competition we wrote a business plan for early versions of hubspot just fun to look at but the idea came after like we had kinda narrowed it down to two companies to pass one was in marketing which was what we ended doing the other one was like a oracle for small business like an erp similar to next week which you folks were talked about the last steps so alright so let's do some ideas because i think you know one of the cool things what i love about any technically minded person who has business success is typically when when people who are non technical get into business they go in one of two paths they you're sort of become a financier they're like great still love business but i don't wanna sweat anymore so i'll invest and and lots of people invest but they make investing the main thing and what i found is that a lot of people who are technical that end up being successful they never stop loving kind of what's new what where technology is going how behaviors are changing that sort of thing and whether do they start a new company or not they sort of live as a user at the end yeah and so so tell me like i guess what's what's gonna be one or two kind of technologies or ideas right now spaces that are most exciting to you at the moment two one is around kind of broadly defined cryptocurrency and we haven't talked about yeah but i'll bring that out is a cryptocurrencies as applied to other kinda of mainstream thing so the we i if i we're not doing hubspot in which i have new plans of doing anything else but this is the idea i'm gonna i'm gonna give you my pitch sean yeah what you should do since now you're out of twitch it you should do a professional network that's powered by the blockchain that i'm gonna say this is kylie is that people love because if people don't love the incumbent right now can i can i say my opinion you know you know my opinion can you cool if i say it no not what linkedin sucks i'll or how about this a lot of people say linkedin sucks and you're suggesting bill that building a a different one on the question it out so yeah so here's what i say i even have a seven figure domain name picked up for you i will write the five million dollar check for you to go do it as far as a seed round or up to five million if you wanna let other people in that domain thing this just got spicy okay oh i got let the domain david they have i am i am dead serious i have anything yeah so and here here's why it needs to wait let's play this out yeah keep going so the issue right now is that you know linkedin yes people don't like it it was a product it was great for its time and times have changed now there's a different kinda of need and the thing i'm excited about is the intersection of a a couple of things one is you know we didn't have things like cloud cryptocurrency before now we do right one the issues with linkedin is like okay well you've got the kind of spam issue that all this is like okay well how do i separate all the noise from the signal is just it's just a pain ass over time right the acting product move for linkedin is like diminishing utility right like it's just gonna become painful and this is then there's there's a cap on where you can go with it so imagine that you and so bit cloud ended up doing twitter with the blockchain imagine if there was something else that did linkedin on the blockchain and you have your own kind of currency and then you could say hey you know what i'm a i'm an engineer that's a free agent or whatever and for five hundred dollars i will look at your company and apply for it i'll do a a reasonably good job or for ten dollars i'll open your email or for x i'll do this it's like okay there's it right now there's an inherent so the thing of the cool thing about club is everybody's got a a price right everybody's got every everybody's coin has certain value and so the beauty of of a professional one would be right now when you go in linkedin it is not obvious the level of hierarchy right so you always have people who are either recruiters or people who are at the bottom of the career ladder trying to keep connecting and reaching out to the people at the top the crew ladder and they have no real incentive to to to do it so they just sort of ignore linkedin altogether why well they can go to this site i'm just gonna get inundated with crap that i don't really want and so the beauty of this is that because everybody has a coin value you sort of inherently have baked in the sort of like career worth career value that this person is bringing to the table into the network and so you know aids somebody has a way to buy attention so they buy your coin which increases your price so it's a mutual beneficial this right now if i go pay linkedin i can send you spam in mail you do not receive any of the revenue from me paying linkedin for the right to spam you right in this case i could say hey if you wanna spam me if you want me to read your thing and you want me to to respond to it here's my prices so it becomes revenue generating for me and the second thing is that when somebody reaches out i can quickly assess their value in the network based on how how much other people believe in this person how much other people weight this person okay so now it's not this kinda like every node kinda looks the same on the surface no they would not look the same on the surface which is really cool correct and just one more thing yeah so yes so that the there's a kind of crypto angle where everyone's at a price the other angle is is we'll we'll call it page rank for the professional graph right so right now the professional that's cool including twitter it's all it's all metric right so every person you follow gets an equal number to follow value whatever their account goes up by exactly one it's not weighted into any single any anyway yeah we got explain pedro a little bit okay so so the the kind of the beauty behind google the original idea that made it the powerhouse is today is they said okay well how do we determine what the best set of results are to so show for a keyword search right and it came down to two things one is like the overall context of the page so if you're searching for real estate boston or something like that it'll look at all the pages that's indexed like okay well this these set pages are about real estate boston to varying degrees that kinda factor one in in the function so all which other what which people also just say good content yeah exactly we'll just call it quality like the context quality big content yeah but what's is the all round whole thing authority right and the authority is the where pager comes do they say okay here's this individual webpage page of sitting on the internet we're going to measure its authority by how many links are coming into that page because that's a that's a endorsement of fresh and the value of those links passed to that individual page the pager value of it the authority that gets passed through is based on the page rank of those pages right so it's a recur function to say oh well the new york times links to you that's much more valuable than if da is blog links to you because new york times has more pager mh last piece of the pager rank thing which is super important to know is that the amount of page rank you pass across the links from your page are proportional to your pager so let's say i have two units pager rank i'm making the number up and if i link to just one person it's your blog sam all the kay drink i have on that page accrue to you by draft transfer if i link to ten different people it gets distributed across those ten links yeah so it's legged graph versus just a symmetrical graph we're not so now if you imagine a professional network graph where everything was wrapped like okay well you know i endorse sam and i have a certain authority i have a certain currency if we've got a cryptocurrency underneath it that as a result of which sam's currency goes up by x amount so it's not just me buying shares it's just by that so i think the the notion of a follow should go away like if you really really like that person buy a dollar buy five dollars or something like right like that's that's the one kind of so so what you're saying is just to make sure i understand so what you were saying is instead of just following sam you have an infinite supply and you know sort of is as a pretty light signal you're saying in in this case you would be able to own some of sam's coin that'd be a pretty strong endorsement and secondly the fact that your coin is worth a lot would mean that because you a valuable person owns sam's coin sam's coin goes up not just by the five dollars you paid but buy some multiple of that in terms of the overall algorithm the way the algorithm weights sam's value now correct so that's instance if you raise money if you're startup up and you raise money from a andre or sequoia like a million dollars and million dollars that from is actually has an impact the same thing like you know follow should matter the fact it's you know that you follow me we should matter more than someone that doesn't hasn't that just joined twitter or bi bitlocker or whatever yesterday right like that's the doesn't make sense this is a tremendous idea i'm having trouble containing myself at the moment this is okay this is one of the more exciting ideas because it people know not exactly what i came here for is to put you on the spot and who's was like okay listen to this idea shop that's insane you know because i got excited about bit cloud and i got excited about it because i think that we do want a a social network that's inverted so instead of one platform controlled by one company that owns all the data it's inverted it's inside out it's basically no company all the data is free and you own you own your own business on top of it and so that you know i don't wanna say how do say decentralized without saying decentralized that's my way of saying it okay yeah so i think that's exciting and then a whole bunch of people like i can't believe you're endorsing the scam project and blah blah blah is this is this gonna make the rich richer so it's not gonna make i'll sort of like well it's besides the point it might but it's besides the point it's more like this is what the the next twitter linkedin facebook are gonna look like in either one or ten years i'm not sure and a bit cloud or the next thing i am not sure but i'm gonna play with this one and i'm gonna like give it a ride so that when the right one or does arrive whether it's this one or the next one i've i've know i know what i'm looking at i know what's real and what's not and i that's why recommended people go play with it just to see just just to be on the forefront of it you something like it needs to exist right whether it'll be the one or not i don't know and so i've been spending a fair amount of calories trying to kinda understand the mechanics the cloud itself and how much to do create on the top creators list i've been kinda moving up the up the curb so this yeah dude the thing about how much have you put in the big cloud it's gotta be a million dollars million dollars yeah i man the thing that pissed me off about big cloud was i got into this like i had i didn't get into it because i had to i i knew i was gonna get into this thing i'm not about to say but i i was getting to i wanna to get into a pissing match real fast about building clout and because there was money on the line and yeah i just like oh i i don't wanna actually wanna get this race yep i don't wanna play that game and that so that i i kinda had a little like i one part of me is i actually fundamentally agree with most everything you're saying on the other part i'm like oh it doesn't exists i'm gonna be getting a lot of like pissing matches or whatever and i'm gonna be playing more games and that kinda of freaks me out a little bit yeah i live and this is one of the issues with bit cloud right now right you have a bunch of like found a rewards games and things like that and this is this is what happens this is why we can't have nice things far right like anytime something new comes along there will be people that are trying to gain the system whatever so even back in the early days of google's like the internet wasn't a scam and google wasn't a scam but there were a bunch of people trying google to kinda show up with the results and doing kinda spam seo kind stuff you see the same thing on big cloud right you have to sorta of kinda separate that from the platform it's like okay fundamentally the idea does not feel like a scam to me yes that need to open it up and have it listed on exchange so you actually take money out you know minor details but it but they're fixing those and i talked to the to the founder like in like one of the few calls i i've had in the last twelve months because i don't do phone calls but it feels with legitimate to me and that's not to say it's going to succeed but it's i'm relatively confident it's not a scam mh that is by my by this reason for being is not a scam so one of the things that happens with like a google or a facebook is you know like you said there's a big honey pot either of users or money on the line and so then you get good people excited about it your technology thought about but joel get these sort of scammers and not even scammers but all call them scheme people who are not doing anything illegal but they're thinking oh this is a game how do i play it i get the highest score and the score is either money or followers or whatever they're trying to game yeah and whether this is like you know buzzfeed feed and upward saying oh news feed how do i gain news feed to get all this monthly traffic or you know z doing this with games on facebook or whatever yeah with a company you sort of have the like you know for as much as people hate that facebook and google can sort of censor and pull the rug out from onto you they are able to like swat down these schemes and scammers so that you know they don't ruin the experience for everybody and one thing that's interesting with decentralized platforms is that there's nobody in there's no ceo there's nobody in charge to to do that and so things gonna be very interesting how that plays out do you have a sense of if that's gonna be a problem or do you think that there's a solution to that with the the governance i'm a believer in kind self governance over time like it all depends on the time horizon will it fix itself in a year or two years maybe not i think they're still gonna be this kind dark parts of big clap that people don't wanna tread into but over time i think once big cloud kinda figures out what it wants to be when it grows up when terms like what's the actual right now you know the way i think of it is like the the kind of twitter use case is just a way to kinda prove out the protocol it just so happen they pick that one they could've have picked any number of other ones but as people kind of build real things using that underlying kinda technology because it's an open protocol i think things will settle down people will find a way that they can implement use cases that concrete solve particular problem and stay away from some of the kind of dark issues right now which is yeah what's the name that you bought for for sean you said you bought base a seven figure domain name for this idea i have one in i'm i'm in mix of negotiating the price on it i'm not gonna reveal it i i wanna be out bids but how many how many letters is it seven mh okay i'll be very just sticking with it well this is gonna be you you had said two spaces what one is the crypto crypto social network yeah what was the other space you're excited about the other one is so broadly to defined a natural language processing in terms of okay so let me i'll do a try to keep this at a quick rant so every software company that ever was has always said our product is intuitive and easy to use like okay well and reality is every one of them lies because here's what happens in order for a human to use software it's like here's the thing i wanna do and i have someone out of training and things whatever and i'm gonna translate the thing my intent i'm gonna translate into a series of drags and clicks and swipe and touches to make the software do the thing i intended to do right now imagine if you know if i were eli i'd be like okay well we should just be able to think the thought but let's put that aside for now let's just say you were like you're in photoshop it's like i wanna remove the background you should just be able to say while we're remove the background if you're in you should i want you should like you know how many new people signed up for our service up product in the last ninety days you should just be able to type that question in because that's your intent not like oh build help hubspot reporting to build this dashboard bullet here are the three columns you wanna and get to the thing you want you should just be able to say the thing you want express with you anyone better way to state it and the software should figure out like we have the technology now on the language side to be able to understand natural language human in with english and other languages and all we really need is a translation layer and so this is a broad based in my mind a mega trend to be which is in my mind bigger than mobile so mobile was a oh we're good the the thing that mobile added for us which is like oh well the thing that you used to do on your desktop you can do it from anywhere and enable a bunch of different use cases this thing is like okay well the thing that now you've been trying to learn you're trying to use this software whatever that you've never really got good that never had the time now but a billion people can use that piece of software that wasn't even possible before because they don't have to learn the puts and drag and things they can express something they want and the software can do it and then what i would do if i were an enterprise vc i like okay like so pick the categories where this thing will have the biggest impact like you know business intelligence for reporting kind of stuff b2b software is a natural fit but i think can go elsewhere yep and and we've seen the beginnings of us on the consumer side with things like alexa but like the b2b world i think is open for just make the software actually intuitive they could do what i want have you seen anyone besides i was gonna say besides the alexa have you seen any hints of what i call a magic trick it's when you see somebody build a piece of software and then they're like yeah so you just do x y z and boom it's done and you're like holy shit you got that you know you you just will your magic wand and got that and it's like when you see a magic trick you it's very hard to understand and you what kinda of can't look at the old software the same way anymore it's like instagram filters or something like that it's like oh what your photo looks like that oh shit okay well now all my photos in my camera look like shit in comparison like i can't even look at these anymore so have you seen any cool magic tricks with conversational or or natural language classes right close to i've got like i built something myself called growth bought a few years ago that we i remember that i remember type and it was for it was built for marketers to be able to get marketing data out both of your are kind of marketing systems something like hubspot or mailchimp but also just other data sources like oh were the top three keywords at uber by san ppc like that data is out there right like we know to kinda ask that and so or like when was this domain registered or like just a bunch of and i i would go through every day and look at all the questions people after this thing because there was a blank canvas they have no idea what the thing was capable of and then i gonna go back and like okay well here the repeating patterns wouldn't it be nice if i could go up update get this software to kinda do that thing so that's it came close it was i think a little early i think we're further along now people are more used to that notion right i'm a being able to express a that's so funny that you do this i'm i'm looking at the girl i i remember growth bot like people were sharing it and i just you just made this did you so you just whipped up this landing page and and you made this i made the whole thing yeah like i spent a bunch of like times just learning about what's possible coded the whole thing myself yeah that's so funny can you gosh this is so funny you see that sean yeah yeah i'm on it it's great right like it it's just cool that you do this stuff and and you have with an like everything you do is kinda related to hubspot rights it's on the same world do you also like what you're you were it seemed like you're really into website graders is that right that business a web i was talking to a heat and shot the other day heat and shot kid tricks he did every seven he start up n yeah n he's got which crazy egg kiss crazy egg yeah quick sprout all types of shit i mean he's like you he just fucking has the hands and everything but he and his partner neil have neil patel dot com slash uber suggest and then they also had neil patel dot com slash like rate your website or something like that yep why are you so into these website rating businesses and products what what the hell is going on with that no i'm i'm into so the original thing was called website greater was actually a a funny story so back when we first started hubspot it was just brian my founder and i and we would go look at people's websites and to see if they would be a good fit for hubspot to software or not right and so we would go and i would look at their age like i do a source in chrome and then look at their source codes like okay do these they do they have the right meta tags did they seem cool right you there's a bunch of signal you can look at look alexa ranking stuff that you do you folks do it all day long right now when you research companies so like a like a similar web type of saying yeah yeah and this is you fifteen years ago and so we so i like okay well when we were all doing it we are doing it manually there were no tools so it's like okay so i built something so that's what i do like i'm gonna write this tool that does automatically goes looks and it pings apis we'll bring down a source code for the html and see if they're the tags are right and kinda give it for us give it a score and then i had this had not planned it this way was you know built as a tool for just the two of us and it's like oh we're gonna put this on the web because i think this is useful and so like okay well what name can i give it a while at grades website i'm gonna call it website greater dot com domain is available this since three or fifty years ago and so i i put that out there and it like it was on fire like i had like all the early leads like tens of thousands of people right would and and then we like so they had a desire to kinda grade their website and so for your list for the listing audience something thing i would say is the power of building a diagnostic tool for your industry is immense right this is the thing that so website greater was not the solution so it's not like a freemium thing like we're gonna be a lightweight version of hubspot it was a thing that made you realize you needed hubspot and that was super valuable and that can be done in any issue whether you're in software or it's like i'm gonna help you determine whether you have a problem or not because the national thing when we do website like out i got a twenty three out of a hundred that sucks right how fucking can help like here's what we do or even just like read these blog posts and you watch these videos it's so it's it's work so i'm obsessed with kind of grading in an assessment and you folks you guys had an episode like ten twenty episodes ago around like quizzes and things like that so one thing people are so if you do build a diagnostic tool the one thing and this is what several lessons but one the key ones is that relative scores work so website greater from its early days like okay so if i give you an eighty seven what that eighty seven actually means is that whatever calculations we're doing behind the scenes this particular score you rated better than eighty seven eighty seven percent of the eight hundred thousand or whatever the number was website we've graded people love that i that just that kinda relative score versus an absolute one makes a big difference a percentile house score matters a lot to people like oh right like i fuck i'm the bottom ten percent or the top ten percent of awesome but anyway are you sean do you see his list of ideas let's just start banging them i wanna i i like it this is two things so first i think the thing you just described is like a growth hack without saying yeah i did it to a growth hack you like solved your own itch but like that's such a we've talked about it for quizzes quizzes the same thing lead gen this is an amazing lead gen tool where you basically got a bunch of qualified leads the people who self you know the self assess i might have a problem they go get it checked up your digital doctor said yep you indeed do have a problem and then all you had to do is prescribe a solution called hubspot you know here's a not a little bottle for you yeah i'm tell you how clueless i was back there so i put this thing up there and at the time we we had a meeting set with gail goodman who was ceo of constant contact at that time and she would later join have hubspot board but we met with her we're like we're work on this company call called hubspot it's kinda related to constant contact space we wanna get her advice and i showed her website greater like here's what we do and we can kinda look at websites whatever and and and and she loved it was i said you know you might consider putting like this email address box we have no way of knowing who people were they were not they were not leaving for us we had like a hundred thousand people like use the tool intentional i've never got to collect an email address like wouldn't it be nice to anyway fix that but so i like that and then also for this conversational thing i think what you just said like we con it's kind of like sometimes guests on this podcast say something in passing that i'm like whoa that's actually a really big idea and i think you actually said two i think that the crypto linkedin one a big and i think the second one is this idea that if you think about one of the biggest and what some people say is the best business they've ever seen is google right people come in there it's just a a search box it's magic genie if you go ask a question and it tries to give you some answers and the way i view this is if somebody could actually do this this is sort of like next level google where i ask any question and it and it doesn't just give me like a list of pages where the answer might be it's like it actually gives me the answer and so this might be you in the business context might be like a business google but there there's many versions of this i don't i know if you've seen this ever seen deb build we were checked out this website yeah we talked about deb build my friend sheri there's a perfect example of a magic trick thing he was messing around with gp three so gp three new technology comes out he gets access right away drops his whole startup up starts with him just hacking on this thing at night right and he throws up this he has this idea of like dude you know squarespace wix these website builder been around forever great everybody wants to be able to code without having to code but like even now it's still so complicated even after web flow after all this stuff and so he's like why can't you just describe like you know i want a website that's got like kinda like two columns and on the left i want pictures of like places you can stay and on the right i want the price of the other thing and you could literally just type that in and it'll build you a website that looks like airbnb it'll like it'll build the website that does that and you posted on twitter a again like you i mess around with gp three and watch this like you know build a website with a photo and then add a paypal button but then make it where the paypal button can only take five dollars max and like that's it and then send send the payments to this and then it like spit out a website that was that did that like the html and the css that did that and he posted that gif and i think off basically one tweet with one gift he raised like two million dollars instantly from like really smart people who when that tweet went viral because they were like oh you just showed me a magic trick and i don't know what the company is here and i think he still doesn't know what the company is but go go down this path and see what you can find it it was pretty amazing i i remember when that tweet went live i mean i i it it it went viral right away yeah right by i i played with the gp three play with it for a while across multiple things it's it's like the closest thing to like magic that in it's weird because it's it's kind of a different vector rights because it originally is like a a text generation mechanism to be able to write you know pros based on because it's got this corpus of of data behind the scenes and it's and and i talked to you know sal melt to ceo brian i had a these gracious stuff to give us some time to it's like okay well like where is this headed what's going on to see the kind impacts on hubspot the world in general and it's like that's one of those things that i right now i don't think quite there to be able to like implement like practical use cases to actually do the thing that people are trying to do and i've played it with it kind of multiple fronts but it's one of those that it's gonna go from a as peter like from a zero to a one very very quickly like all of a sudden that wasn't really possible and didn't really quite work and well enough and then gonna be like holy crap then there's like me kinda post gp three world it's a the phrase where it's like you know slowly slowly than all of a sudden or something like that yeah the it looks like it's gonna be that sam said he like some of the ideas on this list or some of the topics let's like we we we just talk about something huge that was a huge idea let's talk about something small but still cool so it looks like did you buy remote culture dot com i do okay so that that's a brainer there's a business that will make a million dollars a year remote culture online community for those building remote cultures easy right that's a brainer what would you do there i i would start a community for remote culture dot com this is i'm gonna do a blog i'm gonna do a paid community and it's gonna be targeted at people ops and hr people around the world that need to kinda figure out the new kinda of new world order right we're not gonna try and sell them software not we're just gonna connect them to each other and you and i'm a big big believer in these kind of communities and network based businesses because they're efficient in terms of them take that much yeah gotta get the critical mass that's fine but i think this one would work it's it's it's a community that's necessary at this moment in time that hasn't existed because i needed to with them and i'm sure there's people out there doing it but rather know money helps you can actually build something there's one on here that i really like speed round so so by the way these are these are what these are domains that like you don't have a idea by the way when i have like a an idea that's nothing in my head that's like okay well this this kinda cool don't like write it down a notebook i go find a related domain it's like it cost fifteen dollars if it hasn't been taken yet or right or maybe i'll spend more if it's you know something really kinda translate like fancy what's what's the most expensive real ideas what's the most expensive domain you own well you haven't had them valued i don't really sell domains i own learning at alabama dot com but live there i think that's probably the seven figure domain just bought human dot com and human dot org but also bought bought one for me bought one for you i bought the hustle dot com for you as a you gonna give you on the podcast so so i remember that you don't care about domain names all that much i'll talk a deal trophy right whenever you get acquired they have this old i don't know did you know about this deal trophies no i want a deal trophy thing so when we got acquired they gave us like it took like a few months but it was like hey sorry i've meant to get this to you like you know when the deal closed but i guess it's like in the deal making world i'm not i'm not like a mover and shaker of biz dev and like corp dev and things like that but i guess it is sort of a tradition of when the deals closed it's sort of like the this the the champagne and then what you do is you you get sort of like a little ornament that has some meaning to the deal like in our case our code name was like project whatever and was like let's just call it project sharp it was weird something we project h or something and so then they got like this like kinda like cool looking knife you know because it's like project sharp whatever here's the here's the the deal trophy so i think your deal trophy is this domain here well and and and for the record der if you like gift that to the hustle company we would love it and i actually do like domain names my whole point about domain name was it's try stop you ninety nine percent of people are not like you are not like me like we do shit like you i you're killing and you just made this little rink project called growth bot like that's done way you do shit ninety nine percent of people don't do shit and they have stupid excuses like well i don't have the domain name it's taken or i do have the domain name therefore i should do that by boy don't let it stop you but i still think it's sick and it's awesome and i love it it's like saying like just because you don't just because you don't have a sick gym doesn't mean you can't go out there and walk and lose later that's i think you know like justin was on the podcast last time and he was like there should be dating app that matches you on like kinda of your credit card spending history or something like that for me that's what it's like with this podcast where it's like if i just if you just tell me how many domains you own that you actually you bought but you you don't have like a live project on if that number is you know greater than ten we're gonna be we're gonna be thick thieves and like how many tabs do you have open right now if i just knew those two things i can kinda tell you if this podcast is a fit for you or not if you're somebody who owns zero domains then you probably aren't gonna you know really connect with this podcast in a major way i don't think well i'd like i'm gonna pull apology here is i'm gonna push that conversation on stack but one thing i wanna make sure i get out there because on a list of things just we're talking about ideas it's like how do you assess idea how do you think about ideas i know sean you love frameworks you do to sam here here's a simple one in terms of like assessing whether you're doing it for yourself or you're investing whatever it is and and i'll tell you the common mistake so the three things i look at are like profit potential like if this thing went exactly as planned as the founders envisioned what could it be like let's just assume all things like all the stars align everything works the way you expect it to and does what would it be what's the overall potential for the project what kind of like passion do you have around it it's like okay are you excited about it or not excited about it and the third one is around probability of of that success that you that you want right and i i'm a coinbase based guy so i'll take each of those factors to a zero ten square or and multiply them to get it and i'll get a score out of a thousand right and you can put the waiting differently like oh i care more about passion than you know the profit potential or something else but the common mistake people make is that they will look at the probability of success first and almost exclusively as the high order bit filter it's like oh i had this idea but the likelihood is like point zero one percent but that's actually going to work and so i'm not even gonna think about what the potential could have been or how passionate i may or may not be about it and then they just kinda discard the idea i think that is statistically un unwind and an impractical move and here's why is that the way you should be looking at ideas is is you kinda take the profit potential like here's the possible outcome this it's it's so the e the expected value statistically of this thing it's like oh i have a one percent chance at a billion dollars expected value is one percent of a billion dollar that's the value of that particular thing and so you shouldn't discard something just because the probability is low because it may have a disproportionately high potential that makes it more interesting than it would otherwise so that's the like be a little bit more structured about how you assess things so people throw things away too easily because and now the second note i'll put in a hard one lessons good ideas are dangerous and they're dangerous because what you want to buy are the great ideas right that's the thing you can kinda get behind you have them before you start the company we've can talk about that so bad ideas are easy to spot that's just a bad idea good ideas mas is great ideas and it's hard to tell them apart and they're the ones that end up kind of spinning a bunch of cycles for you and like okay well and then up being good but just it's yeah failure is not a public mediocrity the think everybody should be fearful of like just get out and try and see what happens but anyway but your agree is the the big problem because it wastes the most valuable resource of waste time okay right because it's not gonna die quickly nor is it gonna take off so it is a slow long burn at a mediocre level and so you're sort of locking in over a period of time a mediocre outcome and that's what is the base for i think the hardest about bootstrap companies especially tech companies i have a low kind of capital need is they can actually live forever and not going anywhere because it doesn't take that much stuff it's like okay you've got an aws instance somewhere that's costing you like it doesn't cost that much and you don't have investors pushing on you to say oh we need some sort of outcome and so you can run that company indefinitely and waste a bunch of your time when the next idea that you could have done was sitting right behind it right like i have i've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs by this point i have never ever in my entire life met an entrepreneur and i had just one idea so cycle go you will have more dude it's like okay right and you know try the thing if you can sell the thing sell the thing if you're not that excited about it or or you just wanna cash out take some chips off the table there's no harm and no shame but yeah did you did you but you guys didn't raise a significant amount at hubspot did you hundred and five million private money before limp public like yeah yeah i not a classic venture backed company it's like there's and and intentionally so it's and that seems interesting to me because you don't seem you seem like a guy who likes freedom and knows that he's knows what he is and knows he's a a bootstrap is what he's trying to say why don't you be at i'll i'll i'll tell you this exact conversation we had so when ryan and i started this one of the things we were firmly agreed on is that we didn't want i'm not a baseball or sports person but like we didn't want a singular or double hit right like we want to like swing for the fences and either this we we do this and we're good at every point that we have a decision to make work in the road we are going to take the one that gives us a higher chance of being this spectacular outcome even if that means we're possibly to go down and crash and burning flames right and so was was was brian was he successful like you were or was he like he didn't like need the he hadn't had like an exit because he was he hadn't got a startup up for this was his first one but he also was like okay this is my last swing at bat right this is not not this is it this is the one that's either gonna doing it or not gonna do it and so that that was a reason so we weren't worried about that you we've didn't negotiate the fair value we could we made sure the terms were meaningful had good investors but we were not worried about what our percentage stake in the company was and how that moved over time we're like okay this thing does what it needs to do the valuation and all that and the equity evolution will not matter like on the margin it just it it's it we want it to be a binary outcome either it's gonna be this huge massive thing which will change our lives and have a massive impact or those crash burning claims which is highly likely but we weren't looking to hold on to control we weren't looking this like we wanted to be we didn't wanna be king we wanna be rich i guess so when when you're doing like idea aviation and stuff though you you either i think you wrote you're wrote you wrote it here you're down with starting some a project with a bad idea because you're quite confident that you'll you can figure out but you can make it great as you get into it right yes and my my general advice is and this is not just you know my personal kinda lived experience as the new folks would say having talk to entrepreneurs and kinda looking at the history of them so many of them thing that we know them for now is not your the idea they originally started with like there are handful cases where yeah when exactly the plan this is what it was and and often the case that you will not find the great idea until after you start your company until after you start having you know contact with customers and actually try to do the thing if you sit on the sidelines trying to assess ideas and look at market metrics and things like that and it's like you're just never gonna get started that's the kinda wanna be entrepreneurs that will kinda analyze its to death it's like you wouldn't even know what what a good idea was it's hard to tell these things until you actually try something it's yeah that's just do it and try it where do we go from here sean we got i think we're think we got gotta wrap you here there's just i think we have to have you on again if you're down because i here's five topics i wanna hear about why i don't play golf from what i do instead i want that one why hate inefficiency in markets why i don't believe in karma but i believe in extended feedback loops sometimes faking it is making it engineers guide for public speaking like i i need i need all of these so we may have to do another one i have one question i wanna wrap rep with in this one which is you seem like a a a pretty astute guy like you've a very very good observations and i think you you you know kinda who we are and what what we care about and that we would value honestly so i'm curious you have an actual question aren't you can ask me the intro no not the intro question that that sam sam trying to get all the intros he can ask you that one i wanna know i'm i'm trying to make the content great so what would be the most fair criticism you could give us on the podcast what's your critique of the podcast for you as a listener and there's like you can offend you exactly that's kind of what i'm obtaining you up for say whatever it is whatever you truly feel alright so partly yeah think you have to recognize that you guys are multi channel so you're kinda solving for the audio format i know you have a youtube videos and things like that the one tactical thing that you should fix like next week or the week after is you should apply the sean twenty five headlines thing for headlines for every podcast like what's the one nugget that's gonna cost people to wanna listen to that episode even if they're not subscribed when they see in their youtube feed and youtube recommends is like oh right why this successful entrepreneur never played golf and and you shouldn't either whatever it right exactly i'm i'm on a i'm i'm i'm taking notes keep going if you do that my my guess is that the click through rate goes up because you cannot not right now you just kinda identify the episode number and who the guest is or whatever but there's no real oh maybe the topic area but right right me and sam don't even people click that means sam don't even touch the headlines but dan does it even know i see a notification it goes out and i think to i judge the headline myself i'm like that's not gonna give everybody many clicks or oh that's a juicy one that'll work i i think you've again get a free pass to the the sean copy right now i put my course yesterday that's awesome what okay what else you got anything else of course so you have more who me yeah yeah what about what more that was a weak criticism yeah that was an easy one okay this is a hard one right is around is it say like just change your voice yeah it's like your face right brown pose it's yours so it's around the it's around the brand and this is the hardest thing for an entrepreneur twitter to to kinda reconcile with so a couple of issues that i have as a amateur branding person is that anything that can be reduced in acronym will be which my first million is often reduce to that and then you kinda lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym anyone that comes like in immediate like they're not gonna know what it is if they don't know what it is yep and there's some value to that but it it doesn't compensate for the kind of opportunity you have so that's one thing is acronyms is not good but the other one is that we kind of mind first there is a cad however that word is pronounced of people that will directly res that topic will resonate was like oh i i wanna learn about that but i think your reach is much wider now and there are people there quite more people outside that fear that that particular like okay well it's fine that it's about that but really the reason i'm here is still here for full right like that and that episode which is i think one of the best episodes you've had had nothing to do with the first million and anything even we had to do with big ideas of we i actually agree with you and i and we've had this conversation the problem that we had was like fuck for pretty deep do it we can't yep yep i for fort worth think we should change just because i hate the name so i don't really care about the brand equity i'm just sort of like i don't wanna have a thing just dislike i don't yeah i i don't i don't love it it i really don't it's i don't i don't love the name i don't love the name of the muscle either if you believe that this thing is gonna get ten times bigger in the future which i do then ninety percent of our future listeners haven't even heard about us yet and so we're we're only offend of very small we're only changing on a very small population of people for the good of the long run that would be my my ten by the way if you think it's hard now you realize the direction of your head it it does not get easier right gonna get harder and harder in like year from now two years from now five years from now again it's like like should we have changed this like you know what would have been it's like not that it's gonna have a dramatic impact on the numbers or anything but on the margin these things matter and they kinda accrued accumulates type and here's why i could make like easier for for yourselves don't decide to change the name decide to come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives like okay am i willing to give up a brand equity and go through the the pain of changing the name because it just so much better and something clicks for you great and i'm make an honest concerted effort to come up with those alternatives and options and then you can still decide like yeah these are better but they're just marginally better they're not better enough to go through that headache think go try to change it right that would be my advice okay that's great sam you want anything else before we go we're gonna follow with some intros my man we got you done dan dan do we have an update are we reaching out to guest can we gotta use da mesh she knows everyone well i'm curious actually you do know everybody who's awesome who's like particularly awesome that you're just like either kind of underrated or you're just like so you know i i don't know as many people as you think like i'm kinda on the internet because i do things but i you i don't like i don't leave my house right like i it's like you have order to kinda be that person you have to sorta like interactive with carbon based life forms in real life right like i don't do that that's not a thing i do so it's hard to kinda of build those kinds of relationships but i would on your list i would have so i'm not gonna be good at intro that i like all would be awesome to have on the podcast he's like a like in that kind of apology level thinker i think it'd be awesome in the audience with with love so that would be great great we'll take that intro thank you yeah he doesn't know me i mean if he know me like loosely out i'm sorry kanye we'll call you uncle der you gotta pick it up at man think i would i i'm i'm willing to try don't don't give me wrong i know qualms about trying to make the intro just don't just match your expectations like wow i thought like actually could like swing things and make shit happen i i thought truth thing anyone else but someone i do know that i think would be good and podcast drew from dropbox i know really well so that's an intro i could make dropbox yeah that'd would be a good one i heard he's an amazing singer is that true he's he's a he's a good singer for for a founder amazing for founders is what i mean good he's legit again so dark da you da sean was pretty nervous coming up to this because he was like well i just like to over prepare and i don't think good on my feet or sorry you you're like i i you know i prepare i and i don't love like just making shit up i think you did an excellent job dan has been texting me saying der is so awesome i told you der i go i told you this yesterday i'm i'm gonna predict the future you're gonna come on and then you're gonna start wanting to come on like once a month maybe i have a feeling that that we have just accomplished that and that's gonna be true you're freaking awesome what's your twitter handle it's just da so d h a r m e s h you're you're really if you wanna get much with everywhere linkedin twitter facebook pick your anything you wanna com der dot org der mesh dot net but yeah anything you wanna you wanna pick out a promote no i'm not a promoter clinic guy not me thing well thanks man this is awesome we i talked to you a lot i gotta set up i wanna set up like times to just holler at you because i i wanna learn about you more wanna learn about hubs hubs hubspot wants to be your first direct report in fifteen years no no no i don't wanna i don't want that but this is great he was like you gotta learn from da just learn what makes hub hubspot today so thanks dude this is awesome we're gonna have you back on did it did it turn out as good as you thought i love you guys this was i this was fine this was i yeah and i say it's it's more importantly i hope it's ends up being useful for the audience that's that they am solving honestly i'm looking at the doc i feel like we left a lot on the table we have a lot more that we could do i'm sort of regretting you kinda have i always feel this way with a guest by the way i'm like the first twenty minutes were slow but it's also like i've never beats this person and like you know the audience doesn't know all about this person so there is a certain context building that has to happen yeah you got a day i never figure out why every every single guest i'm like the first twenty five minutes were slow but then it got really good and yeah i don't know if that's just my own i'm just kicking myself for for for no reason or if other people feel that way and maybe we should actually do something different and like sort of pull the future forward but like just pull just start at the pull i start at that twenty five minute mark basically this is spinal folks that's alright yeah alright that's a wrap alright yeah i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking bad