#200 - When to Go All In, Teenage Side Hustles, & the Crypto Exchange That Could Have Been

i think this is a good strategy you say no to most everything then when you see the thing that you're like this is it you go one hundred percent all in on it yeah i feel like i could rule the world and i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back alright we're live you you didn't know enough about red ventures to bring that up i talked to somebody who sold their company to red ventures and they were telling me about it and i was like oh i just made to note i was like fascinating gotta go research more so i put it on here just to be like i'm gonna go research more and then you added i know a lot in all caps so you a lot which is great maybe we we we could talk about later also another thing that i actually forgot to add i was watching the u fight and do you remember about four weeks ago maybe two weeks ago we discussed this business of giving away like cars and have to i saw an ad at the bottom of the u fight and i think that like one way that i find ideas is anyone who's doing brand advertising so there's two types of well i guess there's many types of advertising but there's the first type is performance which is you click on something and i could divert i could see one hundred percent when you purchase and i could see everything about that and i could like a tribute it's it's attribution market marketing performance marketing is what it's called the second is brand marketing so like billboards or that's another example i don't i don't even know yeah just tv commercials right you you do a commercial you don't know necessarily and they try to measure it but in reality budweiser when they run a commercial with to super bowl because they're trying to build awareness they want budweiser to be top of mind maybe they wanna talk about their zero calorie beer they're trying to build awareness and they're not directly hoping that you watch that open up your phone buy budweiser right at that moment that's not the way that that that marketing is designed they hope that you eventually walk into the store and it influences you this is what geico code does and often early stage companies particularly tech companies who are like savvy with internet marketing start with performance and then when they exhaust that then they go alright now like we need to like just we just need more people in the world to know about this product and so what i love doing is i like looking at who's doing brand advertising because not always but often that means that they're like crushing it yes buying art if you're buying art you're rich if you're buying brand ads your company's rich yes that's a great example and i saw u they have this ad for watch gang and i think watch game maybe sponsored and an embedded episode but then also like before one of the fights it said this episode is brought to you by watch getting a rolex every month and i was like what is going on with that what is i've never heard of watch and i know a little bit of lot watches so at least i'm a fan and so i don't wanna i even though i am kinda bringing it up but i don't wanna get into it too much but they were doing i went to watch dot com and they were doing a contest for a rolex given away my rolex yeah this so my coworker at twitch when i was there he he came up to me he shows me his watch i'm like hey man nice watch he's like i got this in this this watch club that i've in so tell me more and he tells me about watch and he's like yeah i found this website i no idea if it's a scam or not he's like it's crazy this watch is like a two hundred fifty dollar watch and i'm paying thirty bucks a like i don't really understand every month they sent me another watch i was like i was like okay sounds fishy like he's like yeah exactly so didn't even know if anything would come but like look at this it's here and and so then i went and and played it and it's like one of the like super optimized websites it's like you you open up the website bam let me get your email for this thing oh you don't want the email spend the wheel and win some more oh you spun the wheel okay you have thirty seconds to finish your checkout or else you're gonna like your family will be taken ransom and so it's like this like and if you go to it it's just like one hero image and then it's like you know the tagline basically is you know getting new watches sent right to your door do you keep them you sure do are the watch is good no sir they're amazing right so it's like well written copy huge hero image of like this site prints money and so just made a mental note about watch at that moment and it's like a mystery box like you don't know which watch you're gonna get you might get works thousands of dollars watches or you might get the like hundred dollar watch you're always getting a watch good value and the weird thing is who needs this many watches i don't know nobody needs twelve watches a years as far as i'm concerned but maybe i'm just not the demo yeah so when i see this stuff like if you're in in the internet long enough which you know it's not that you don't need to do it that much in order to see that when you see something like this you're like something is going on to where it's maybe a scam in full of it but also like if if you told me this just made two hundred million dollars how i would be like yeah yeah i i totally buy it it's arbitrage place so it's the same way that like you know most of the d brands they're not like truly making the best products but they're like look if we're really good at facebook marketing or we're really good at affiliate marketing are really good at whatever influencer marketing then we could build like movement watches they built a hundred million dollar plus luxury watch brand in two years they made it sound like an old school brand they you know they they partner with all these influencers they used this it's it's a marketing company not a watch company really and so that's what this is for sure this is a marketing company not a watch company they could swap this out and do this with golf clubs they could do this with shoes they could do this with whatever you could you could take this watch website and you could do it with sneakers right now and i think you would do pretty well i think there's something with there must be something where they're getting the watches you know super discounted somehow like these might be like out of style watches or refurbished or don't know what they're doing but there has to be some way that they're able to give you this watch and still make money in the something what i don't know if it's thirty bucks still or i don't know how much this i don't know why i i saw the ad whenever i see people advertising on the u i think there like there's a lot of new brands like man advertisers there and i had heard a landscape and then they advertising in the i'm like oh they they must be monsters you have to be okay with your logo getting covered in blood and i think most brands just don't want that and then the brands that were okay with that got this big upside of huge amount of eyeballs for a very low very low ad cost and so early on you know it looked like nascar they every fighter would come out and they'd have like fifty logos of like from their mom and pop like barber shop in their local town to like you know some random insurance company or you know energy drink or whatever and they've been trying to get it more and more mainstream although they just announced a hundred and seventy five million dollar deal with crypto dot com or my crypto microsoft is crypto dot com scam me or legit i don't know anything about it well they offer eight percent return a eight percent cash back so so that's how you know it's it's probably not totally it's not that it's a scam it's again it's like these sort of hand wavy types of things it's like yeah you get our crypto card it's a metal card it's awesome and then when you spend you earn eight percent in crypto bucks say wait what's a crypto book that's our own currency we created it's like oh god it's like you gotta hold five thousand crypto bucks and then you earn the eight percent it's like oh dude do i wanna go buy five thousand dollars of your crypto book in order to earn eight percent here i don't know i don't think so yeah they they let a lot of stuff like that and and advertise with them but i wanna bring up a couple topics you have a few ideas but you talked about this house thing so i wanna ask you about that some vacation yeah first time since covid we went to vegas and i'm staying in a house i'm staying with somebody and their house is unbelievable dude i in like i like a family member this is somebody related to yes so this is this is a house that's i think it's worth like probably fifteen million dollars and fifteen fifteen million dollars in san francisco will give you a fat house fifty million dollars in vegas let's give you what what i meant you i'm in a resort i'm in a personal resort like i was walking in and i was like trying to not trip into the coy ponds along the way just to the door door opens up there's a freaking you know from the hotel that little what the bell has that carts to take your shit to your room have one of those because the room is so far away from the door because they're just so big of a house and so i use that i get to my room my room is like you know everything's magical dude we were eating dinner and then all of a sudden like a convertible to roof retracted from over our heads the walls disappeared they went away and then we all went swimming in this pool that surrounds the dining room while looking out it at downtown vegas it's it's unbelievable and the reason i say this is because i thought i knew how much money i wanted i thought i knew what i wanted and now that i've stayed this house i'd like some more money please that's that's my brutally honest how much feeling my raw emotion that i have twenty four hours into this house is oh fuck this okay y yeah i can be happy without this but but why can't i do this too this is this is pretty nice i've never seen how much you need to have to have a fifteen million dollar house what do you think you're you're you're like invest asset like relatively liquid net worth needs to be like sixty seventy i think a hundred to be safe seventy if you're sixty seventy if you're like if fit fifty sixty i guess if you're if you're just kinda like playing it you're you're comfortable with with it being risk here i guess or like if that fifty sixty that you have is not totally at risk you could say oh okay you know i've i've got that cashed out i'm gonna put it in safe investments in fifteen million i'll put into my house this house was previously owned by somebody who like kind of what their grandfather started like caesars or one of the casinos two of the casinos downtown and so it's like a billionaire family and then they sold the house to these guys and then they and then actually the funny thing is they sold the house and then they regretted it as soon as they sold it to them the day later they were like hey you know the broker calls broker says my client really regrets selling that house oh i know and it was one person living here so it was like this it's as enormous like you know thirty car garage bowling alley type of thing i know if there's is i haven't even explored the whole house yet i've only seen like one fourth of the house so far but she call back i'll give you a million dollars extra cash just to have the house back one day later and they turned it down dude i think that's cool i i love visiting that in my head i think i actually don't want that maybe maybe it's because if you're wealthy enough to buy that and you just have people who to take care of it but when i think of owning something that expensive and that nice i'm like oh my gosh i need to take care of it yeah that sounds like a lot of work i think that's true for most things i feel differently about a house for two reasons one is i think a house like this makes sense when you have what they have like tons of kids basically so you have you have a like a full family i think i four kids and it's like this is your family's compound it's like this is your home base your kids like you kind you wouldn't really really do this i don't think if you're a bachelor if you're bachelor you wanna be you know penthouse in manhattan and or something cool like that but this is different this is like it's a suburban home right but it's like a family compound i think that's the first thing the second thing is a yacht or like cars those are like low use high maintenance whereas a house is like tremendously high use and actually quite low maintenance for for most host because for you know they have cleaning staff they have like people that can come take care of stuff and yeah there's bills i'm not saying there's no bills i guess what i'm saying is it's not like a car where you're worried about it getting scrap when it goes that when you go park it anywhere or you're drive it anywhere and most of the time you're just sitting idle unused in a garage with a tarp on top in this case for a house you're constantly in it you're constantly using it especially if you have a big family so i would say house is the one area where i would splurge almost every other material possession like fancy clothes cars just doesn't make sense to me i hear about people like this i always the same question pops up in my head which is how much do they spend per month so if you had a guess this person's total family expenses including the house what would you guess it be i i imagine and you get a mortgage on a do you get a mortgage on a fifteen million dollar house like like randy moss said straight cash baby they had they had to to in order to get the house they had to like go in home my gosh so you don't have a mortgage the house normally a mortgage i mean i what they do is they could finance it afterwards so the buy it in cash and then they'll go when they'll refinance it basically get get they'll cash out you know they'll leave thirty percent down and then they'll take the other seventy percent they'll pay you know some percentage but for this you can't even get a traditional mortgage for this yeah you so they got like a a hard money loan basically if they wanted to cash it out or overall okay so including that let's not include that that's hard to because that's even hard to calculate i even know what that i mean could be like a hundred grand a month i i don't know what it'd would be that's a but if you said life expenses life expenses not including the house which is a a a a ton yeah i would not be surprised if it was between a hundred and two hundred thousand dollars a month that'd be mike no i i wouldn't surprised i wouldn't be surprised that's so much money to spend it could be a little less it could be seventy it's definitely not less than fifty it's my guess i'll okay i'll find out when we were for that's a good question check what's your burn what's exactly what you're burn that's a good question so let me tell you really quick and so this house this there's a lot next to my house that you know that little crappy shack that was next to my house yeah it's for sale i think i'm gonna buy it and i'm gonna build a house there and try to sell it or rent it out and i'm excited to do this and and i'll talk about this on this podcast i'm excited to do it because i've never done a project like this i've never done like a physical business really i've only done you know digital stuff and i think it's gonna be exciting do you think it's a stupid idea or a smart idea no i think it's a smart idea because it's gonna like kind of change the way you look at the road a little bit and it's right next to you if this was like even two miles away i'd do be like nah dude this just a headache when it's literally right next to you that takes a lot of the like overhead of managing a project or even thinking about a project or researching whether there's a good or bad buy it's like okay what's the worst case scenario you're gonna have a house next to the house you have you already like this neighborhood you like being there your friends are roll there you're gonna be able to like airbnb this with low maintenance because it's right next door you know you'll never have to worry about it and your friends can come crash there when it's not rented out or you can like expand to it if you build your dream house right you can build your dream house right to you which is a fun fun project to do for you in sarah and then maybe you leave your house so you go to that house if you like build it it takes a year to build or whatever so i think it's a great idea and it's not like it's not it's not a financial idea in my opinion it's a it's a life idea it's a it's a fun thing to do that will probably break even and be profitable when you do it what i'm learning about finances is that you know you and i talk about investing in different stuff you can just just your your average joe has access to this as well so this isn't like it there's just if you just park it into a general fund like a general index fund life is so easy and you get almost amazing returns like compared to everything else do you know what i mean like it's so easy you don't have well you know a big base right that's the problem for most people yes that that vehicle is available for most people but let's say you're getting seven percent a year you put a hundred thousand dollars okay cool you made seven thousand dollars pre tax right now you a hundred and seven thousand you need to let that shit compound for like fifteen twenty years and like charlie mu one said when they asked him what hey you your guys playbook seems pretty simple why don't more people do it he said no one wants to get rich slow i think that's the problem is that nobody wants to take a small base and let it compound for twenty years or very few people do and that's that's the issue there yeah it is it's boring but it works and then i wanna bring up one quick topic met three interest two three interesting people this week so i think people like hearing this i enjoyed hearing this about this fifteen million dollars house alright i met this guy named jason have you ever heard of those company called block works block works now i just like a construction company no it's right up your alley it's a media it's basically like the hustle like morning brew like ax axiom but for crypto oh okay nice i think it's black works dot i o maybe dot c maybe oh was a dot c yep so black works it's this guy bootstrap hit he's only twenty seven years old i went to his house last night in new york and brooklyn awesome business probably we'll do eight figure or yeah maybe ten north of ten million in revenue this year completely bootstrap started it because he used to monetize so he was like twenty three years old and he cole emailed pop and said listen to this podcast i'm working on come to this event just like he was just like constantly emailing pop pump who's this big big bitcoin guy but who was less of a big big bitcoin guy years ago said alright you've been emailing me too much whatever you're persistent i'm thinking about launching this podcast i need help launching it and monetizing it do wanna help this kid he was a kid at the time said yes and then eventually launches a crypto media company called block work so he launches it three or four years ago it's only an llc so he completely owns it it's not like it didn't raise any money really fascinating business very simple and he just pick the right category and now they're doing conferences it's a slick looking website right yeah you go to it it looks like bloomberg or something you know it looks like a proper you know it just looks like a template of a good new site in general and so i think like the subscriber base to this right so like is this done through email or it's done through direct site visits they make a lot of money through email and then they have podcasts so so they're and they have conferences and so they they have a conference for for what it's worth showing them close to half a million visits a month yeah well so it's not it's probably that's like if you look at our traffic at the hustle dot c maybe we were two times that and i know that we had eight hundred thousand to a million a month right and and we had talked about coin market cap recently which was probably the bigger player in this space so coin market cap sold to finance i think and how much they sell for it was like hundreds of millions right hundreds of millions or if it didn't suffer for it's worth that and the shocking thing was that coin market cap had like a larger monthly traffic volume than i think the new york times or or wall street journal i think it was which just shows you like the level of interest like when we talked to we we joked about this we was like oh like do we make this podcast grow and i was like pivot the crypto there's just like this insane appetite for crypto content because people get in they think they're gonna get rich in every day there's a news cycle of like the world is the world is you know we're going to the moon or the world is crashing and like what's going on and so crypto was a a phenomenal place ago so i like block works i wanna share one thing but did you have something else on block you us here i have a topic related to block works no he it's just an interesting business i just thought it was interesting it's just not how big it seems it it look at their about page it looks like they have twenty people on board i don't know who's full time and who's not full time but and then if you click your podcast they have like twelve podcasts it's like a type of company where you it it it is sexy in that like it's a meaty company for crypto i mean that's definitely sexy but the guy is he's twenty seven but he runs it just like a small business where he just he just slowly adds and ads and ads and i think it's really fascinating i think they're i think if i had a bet and i don't have i i just got to know them and i don't but we didn't even talk about this if i had a bet i i would imagine you're gonna see this company sell for in the forty to fifty million dollar range in the next eighteen months and i just wanted to bring it up now to call it out about like see it before it actually happens right i i would take the over on that i think it's gonna sell for more if the numbers you're saying or or what it is just looking at it i think traditional sell for that much if it's only i don't know what the revenue is exactly but i it's in the range of ten million if it if they only do let's say nine million in revenue that's probably only worth twenty five million dollars you're not putting the crypto premium right so that so company self based on their story and i think the story here is gonna be that hey look this is where this where financial news is going financial news being probably the biggest kinda of most valuable segment of the news not biggest in terms of popularity but most valuable per per user so wall street journal you know it's very valuable publication as every one of their users interesting and interested in investing somewhere between thousands or millions of dollars and so i think if you're crypto if you're the crypto bloomberg the crypto wall street journal like we saw that coin market cap sold for several hundreds of millions not necessarily because of revenue was that much higher but because a big exchange wanted to grow and exchanges are worth like coinbase worth eighty eighty to a hundred billion dollars so finance similar like these company the exchanges are so big day we're like great we need a media arm right this trend we've been talking about hubspot oh we want a media arm robinhood we want a media arm and so they've been buying up media companies in order to own their own media arm which is basically cheap user acquisition for them and so whether it's them or it's a traditional media company that will buy i don't know but i do think that a crypto new site is gonna get whatever whatever a normal media site would sell for i'd put a two and a half on it for for crypto right now because could be i i went doubt it and and and what i told him is what i would tell the audience as well which is sell to a tech company don't sell to a media company if you wanna credit a media company build it in hopes of selling to a text i'm like make a list of enterprise saas companies then such just like take an all stock deal alright now now you have set yourself up no i'm i'm just saying like do you think that a media company is gonna three x in market cap value like pretty quickly or do you think that coinbase will yeah i think keep you would much rather there go right but yeah but would i would rather their own fifty million dollars of coinbase based stock than i would have kept of new york times stock right right another sort of related thing on this so i was thinking about i doing some reflection yesterday actually i was thinking about crypto and and i don't know if told you the story but basically very early on my crypto story was like this we were at lunch at the i was running an ideal lab so that's a good good position to be in when new things happen running an idea lab got a bunch of engineers and designers you already have funding and you're ready to take a new idea and just chase chase to market so bitcoin i think at that time had its first kinda of pop from like the seven dollar range to like i don't know what it was twenty bucks and then a hundred bucks and it was all happening within a period of like one or two months that that first spike happened and then it came crashing down after a hundred back to like seventeen or something like that exact numbers are wrong but ballpark bitcoin is very cheap back then and our our sis admin guy pete who's like kind of like a very early internet guy like would hang out all day at work he'd be in the irc channels not slack and he's talking to other sis admins at other companies and shit like that and this guy's like and he always like a security like he was always like these big companies are tracking us and like you know he's the kinda of guy that would use duck dot go early on type of thing and so people like in the right community for something like bitcoin and so he starts telling us he's like oh bitcoin bitcoin is amazing dude we're mining he's like mining it on our servers in the office he's like yeah it's great i love bitcoin and we're like oh here's pete you know pete who's kinda like a like a more of like a neck beard arch archetype right it's like pete's you know really into some something again great yeah so what's he worth now well i didn't dig it too seriously but i think he was more like a lot of people who early on they weren't putting a ton of like cash into it they were mining it or they were like earning it for doing a job and then spending it because they were like wanted to be a part of this new economy by the way if you ever heard that story about andreas anton mh no do you know who that guy is no he may maybe is he the guy who looks like is he greek he i think he's was greek yeah based on the name but he's basically he was like the bitcoin of evangelist so he was just when the bitcoin came out he was going talking everywhere everybody's talking about i know who he is as a person bitcoin amazing he wrote this bitcoin book it's great and so anyways he's given like he's spread the gospel he's like what you need when you have a new movement it's like this guy was out he was i i don't know much about the bible but like you know wasn't jesus but he's like you know paul or whoever you know taking the gospel and go to spreading it and so he he'd been doing this for years and he had been earning on any money he had he would only take bitcoin and then he would spend it on his rent and he would spend it on his coffee he wanted to live in crypto and live what he was preaching that this new financial system with real kind of like hard money true money sound money as they say is is the is the way to go and so anyways bitcoin price keeps going up and up and people are like oh andreas you must be like a millionaire hundred times over by now no and he's like well no like i was living off bitcoin i was spending it like i was like i was earning it for talking at some things but i didn't charge a ton because just wanted to get the word out he's like and then when i had it i was using it to pay rent and i have a family and like no i actually i i actually didn't have a ton like he wasn't saying it like you know pity me he was just like you know contrary to believe probably believe here's the case and so there's this guy on on twitter friend's name he's like this famous guy who he fork bitcoin and like he he owns bitcoin dot com it's kind of like this he's not very well liked in the bitcoin ecosystem roger van roger ver or something like that as his name so he starts to making fun of andreas on twitter he's like oh my god the biggest bitcoin like you know like carnival barker for all these years didn't even make money when bitcoin shot up and price to thousands of dollars per coin like like what a joke like three like nice one sc it starts making fun of him and then the bitcoin community rallied and overnight donated anonymously to his wallet and made made andreas a millionaire in bitcoin overnight of people people donating money because they were like no i got into it because of this guy is getting made fun of because he didn't profit off this like fuck back so i thought that was like a pretty cool moment like one of the cool parts not the like annoying front anyways back to my story i'm i in the idea ideal lab and basically my cto catches the bug too he starts saying he's like yeah fiat is trash i'm like what does feet fiat a car like what are you talking about and he's like fiat currency that means currency that you know the government makes up and prints like by there by their fiat they create this currency he's like it's bad i'm like well okay why like the dollar name fine and he's like yeah it's fine till it's not fine look at the history and he starts telling me about this is this i'm like yeah but that's like ancient history he's like just yesterday japan announced that they're gonna double the money supply in the next ten years i was like i can't be good right he's like yeah that's massive dilution that's like if you just double the shares in this company right now i would be pissed and he's like he's like so he's like we should do something i'm like paul run it what's the idea normally paul was the guy i would give directions to he's not the idea guy he's like tell me what to build i'll build i can build anything and in this case he's like mocking up a website and he's basically like crypto doesn't have any of the basic like financial instruments that that that the normal economy has all we gotta do is build either an exchange or a like kind of like a maybe like an ach protocol or like a place to deposit in a savings account like we just need something like that for crypto so he mocks it up we start going with it and our ideal lab was backed by this couple michael and z bur just makes an individual couple who's you know independently very wealthy and so that he come michael comes by for lunch the next day is he's like hey the lawyer like our lawyer susan told us that you're you're doing like a bitcoin project and i was like yeah kind of exciting like and i don't really know it myself i wasn't the one with conviction it was like my team and i was just backing them and so he's was asking he's like isn't that like like kind of like for the silk road and like isn't that like kinda scam me and i was like now i think there's merit to it but i couldn't like make a strong case he's like dude i i don't know man like if we do something wrong here in the financial space like look if we if we make a social app that fails whatever i burned a million dollars of funding if we do something that's illegal the sec comes after us i could lose everything so like let's put the k on on our crypto exchange that you guys are trying to like create like he launched tomorrow and i was like oh shit so i go tell the team in mobile and we long story short we do nothing so we don't launch the thing we i don't buy any bitcoin at that time when bitcoin like under a hundred dollars and we we move on with our life and then like now years later i'm just chasing that you know crypto dream the whole time buying it at like you know twenty thousand dollars a coin instead of when it was at twenty and i was thinking back on it i was like what was the right move there and i saw i'll kind of lay out my thinking here i think the right move and i think many people will come into these situations where a new trend happens and you're you know you wanna chase it but there may be risks associated with why you should or shouldn't do it and here's kind of like my my revision is thinking you tell me if you tell me you actually a pause there tell me what you think i should've have done in that situation did i make the right move or what could i have done differently because i think it's important to kinda learn from our game film as entrepreneurs well so like objectively you made the wrong move in that you you didn't we know what the right move was now but looking back knowing what you knew being who you are i would say i wouldn't say you made the right move but i would say you didn't do anything wrong right okay so fair enough so let's say door one is do nothing always right so do nothing that's what that's the way we ended up taking door two was create and launched this like kind of crypto exchange slash money transit or whatever that was like where we were headed what i think was i should've have looked at what does door three four and five look like so the first thing i should've have done is it should've have bought the currency right that that's kind of an obvious one if you believe in this thing enough to build a startup up around it you should own some of the underlying asset as something you own i was like the first part second was when i got pushed back from somebody richer smarter and more experience than me and i didn't have the answer the answer shouldn't have been okay no okay i'll stop it it should've have been well let's let me put together a case for doing this give me a week to put together a case of why we might do this why this might not be such a bad idea i agree with your logic let me put together a case and let's start with that and so i could have took a pause breath and i could have said alright let me go in actually like get to conviction myself and if i have conviction i'll convince anybody in the world to do that we should do this but if i don't have conviction it's just a matter of i haven't really thought this through enough and the third option was or the the next option was what are the other things you could have done so what are the no risk ways to ride this wave that's what i think block works did that's what coin desk did that's a coin market cap did so there there was other things you could have done you could have created a media company i said alright i'm not gonna like try to be a financial exchange and that has some risks but why don't we spin up a media there's gonna be if this is gonna be a thing people are gonna be interested in the content we could build that and then that gives us options to launch more stuff so that would have been a smart move that was zero risk financially as far as like the the sort of regulations and sec goes but still would have been writing that way i didn't think about that because i didn't have all these other business models in my tool belt of like what else i could do another would have been to instead of just launching like a media company it could have been agency so we have several friends like andrew from meta lab our friend greg who launched late checkout you can launch agencies that help big companies understand what to do with this thing and you can actually charge a shit ton of money to do this consensus is is the big one right now that's the big kind of consultancy for this think they do a one hundred million dollars yeah we talked about them there be here multi billion yeah right just from just from this just from consulting with big companies saying hey do you know how to spell blockchain we can we could spell it for you and so so basically there was other business models i could have done so looking back i would say that that's one learning i had and i i guess like going forward that's i think it's important when these like new waves come out to like dive in on them learn about them and then think about alright should i try to build the big risky thing should i bad try to build a community should i try to build a media site should i try to build an agency like i have ten options and depending on my level of conviction i can go in either one of those directions i can build the audience first i can build the technology first i can try to land grab and do something there we could've have created our own currency there was ten other ideas that we could have done but anyways this just like a but to continue talking about that strategies it is to continue talking about strategies my opinion is that you should actually take door number one in most cases do not and yeah and when you see something that you think is like that this is one life strategy and i think this is a good strategy you say no to most everything then when you see the thing that you're like this is it you go one hundred percent all in on it right and and so there's a few examples of this so i'll and and when you go all in on it it's a high risk but it's high reward type of thing so examples are you become buzzfeed and facebook gets popular you launched an entire media company on buzzfeed cheddar did this as well they launched an entire media company off facebook live and they sold for two hundred million dollars now you have loads of examples of it not working for people more examples of it not working than it does does work right but when you when you spot these waves i actually think that like the the the risk versus reward is far in your favor of doing it and bitcoin is one of those where of course we know now you know you didn't know it what what are the hallmarks of a wave but roll some recent waves and then what how do you know when it's a wave versus just shiny object distraction i think engagement for sure so i think it's it's not the wave is not how many people are using it but the few people who are using it how much are they using it right and so i does feel like a cult do these people seem crazy that's actually a very positive science for waves yes i think that's the the the biggest one is our people like how into it are they so like i was just talking to a guy that was selling who did a multi level marketing scheme where and he didn't know it at the time but he was like he thought it was multi level but it was pyramid mid scheme he was like well i'm just like a salesperson for this energy truck participant in it yeah yeah yeah and he was like i loved it and i thought it was okay it was and then it took me forever to realize that it was a pyramid team and then i was like scamming people so i a bail but for a long time i was so into it and like when you see like people who are so into something like am way like herbal life they actually become huge huge companies even if most people don't get it you'll you only need a few people that are passionate about it so it's all about engagement yeah i would say that so i was say what are gonna look for with the wave second one is complete behavior change so like facebook early on was a good example of this where all of a sudden people were checking something like thirty times a day there really were websites that you would go check thirty times a day and facebook was one and so similarly like fortnite or twitch or something like that it's like what you're just streaming a webcam of yourself for eight hours like playing video games like yeah not a lot of people do it but the people who were doing it were doing this completely weird behavior that made no sense and had no like real parallels to what people were what that same person was doing before and so if it's been able to consume this person's life and change their whole like workflow then it's gonna do that for other people right like remote work is is like that in a small way but that's that's another one a third one is go ahead a third one is just a technology wave so a new device comes out that can do something that the other devices couldn't like oh this is a phone it has a acc in it in a gps so now what what can you create when you have a gps in your pocket well you could push a button and someone could come find you and pick you up and take you somewhere else using that same gps and so like you know ride chair became available because this new device was there or you have a camera in your pocket at all times well then i guess people are gonna take way more photos than they were before alright that's when you get instagram you get snapchat so i think the technology waves is the other one yeah there's a bunch of these and and and it's actually fun to talk about like we all know what the waves are but there let's talk about some of the waves that we've seen recently that actually turned out not to be waves or likely won't be waves club house is one of them a lot of people dedicated a lot of stuff to don't i could have seen a a startup up raise money on top of a club house show or something like that right and but i don't actually hate people taking that shot and i think that a lot of people do it right and i think i think it's the measure how much do you have to lose like for example in that scenario i was talking about i would have launched the crypto thing because i had nothing to lose our investor who's like basically a billionaires is like hey you know what i don't mind if you fail on the startup but like don't have the sec come after me like that doesn't seem good let let's not hold like if this works we're gonna have like a hundred million dollars of user deposits that we're like on the hook for that sounds bad i don't you know i it wasn't easy to get this billion dollars i don't wanna lose that so for him was the correct decision to say let's not risk ruin when you're you know you have nothing well you have nothing to lose and so feel free to go more all in and take more risks faster and if hey if club boss turns out to be a dud what you lose six months of your life you know like two thousand dollars it's okay so since we're talking about reflection and stuff let me tell you a quick story so i'm gonna send you this guy's linkedin i met this guy this week i so like just last week we were off i was off so i i just went and hung out with people my friend joe introduced me to this guy named val i don't even know how to say his last name but val i went out to lunch with this guy named val so this guy's story basically he came from a soviet union country i forget he came from soviet union i forget what it's called now like area that he was from is what is from he's a like a jewish immigrant from he at the age of eighteen listen to this he started a cell phone ringtone business he was the only employee and it did ten million in revenue in the year three he was started when he was eighteen so this was when he was like twenty one ten million so ten million in profit he said he goes based on tones to americans yeah he goes i was the only employee oh kid from where i don't know what you said u believe selling ten million dollars with a ringtone to stupid americans isn't that beautiful i love that and that american amazing i believe it's called you could scroll it out and talk tone media i believe that's what it is on his linkedin something like that or tone fuse i don't i don't even know which one it is to get so many of them and the reason why this guy interests me is so i'm gonna tell you everything that he has done since but it's all been bootstrap no outside funding and all in different industries so the first one and he probably has more but these are the ones he told me about so a a phone business the ringtone business he's he's like the revenue and he goes by the way revenue and profits are pretty much the same thing because i was the only employee he was like it went like two million four million like ten and then i sold it his second thing was called mobile fuse which is a ad tech company it's that's boring that's not that exciting but it's a big business something like i imagine he didn't tell me but i imagine like fifty sixty million in revenue pretty big then while he was getting that started he noticed that peer to peer lending was popular so things like you know so yep stuff like that so he created a company called prime meridian capital i've never even heard of it but i think their url might be poised lending basically at this point they've given out billions of of peer to peer loans so totally different from ad marketing or ad tech then from there he started a a thing called i don't even know how pronounce this gia chicago but he was tell me all about this but basically a company like za have you you know za or do you know jake k jeweler jared ernest jones pee there's a bunch of them so it's all owned by this company called sign net sign net is a multi billion dollar diamond business and what they do is they own all of these brands and he was telling me he was like i was thinking about what makes that company special and he was like basically they have this headquarters where they just look at which diamonds are most popular which which brands and which cuts are selling the best and how can we tell all of our brands what we think are gonna be the next big thing how can we help you optimize that brand by selling a little bit more efficiently how can we buy and bulk things like that so it was basically it was just a normal mom and pop store but we just multiply it by however many and so we just created these these this trends bit and then this economies at scale you know buying in bulk stuff no not particularly special but but just executed really well and so he goes well you know i'm gonna build software so i'm gonna help all the mom and pop jeweler do that same thing and so we went and started this new company and if you look at his linkedin and go to the website you could see it looks like really jan really simple but they what they do is a mom and pop brand can sign up and they'll the the the the name of the company i think it's called jack i even not pronounce it it's a horrible name how do you say that chicago jacob chicago yeah it's yeah it's really bad so jacob chicago will help you get bulk discounts but then we'll help you spend your marketing so it's almost a little bit like a part agency part buying in bulk part crm where you could like look at sales and like fit help predict which is gonna be the most popular in order in bulk and i believe this company is gonna be doing around eighty or so million in revenue wow and so this freaky guy we'll have to like he's he he he he's english has a as a second language and he's real quiet and he's real understated very low key and he was just telling me all about this and i had a few learnings the first is just it it's crazy the story so i haven't done shit in my life the second this guy's are fucking beast third yes he it just and he didn't he's not flashy i mean he had a a nice watch on but he had normal clothes and he and he didn't brag about himself i had a pull i pulled it out of him and he the the a few things what we tell ourselves about why we can't do something it's bullshit it's mostly bullshit i mean some people are more talented than others but you could just get so much done just by just by working really hard so what we tell ourselves about why we can't do blank if that's nonsense second there's this i don't know like some people call it like the i think it's called the red pill and i forget what people call it where they like see the world differently i've hung out with enough people that just crush it and a lot of people who don't never even heard of and and it and oftentimes like when i'm at this house i'm like oh i buy this lot i gotta sync this money into it it's gonna fail but there's so many there there's a few people in this world and know i know a lot of these people who just be like yeah of course just let's do it and they're just so confident i actually think you have a little bit of that in you they're just so confident in they default to optimism optimism and it works so well it's like this this ability it it in this case it's money but it could be anything it it could be you know we're just gonna fly there and we're just gonna figure it out but does like deep default to yeah of course it's gonna work so a few people have that and that attitude gets you so far and and i i've been able to experience that just by being around some of these people but it just a really fascinating person wow i love this i love that little story i love this guy this is extra that this is really cool and yeah i'm impressed i love meeting these kind of like under the radar you know self made kind of like business bad that have helped from industry to industry it's like the there's zero luck involved when you're gonna do that right there's luck is the luck is a like kind of a scalar it's like a multiple of like the thing was successful whether ringtone were gonna be worth ten million or twenty million or fifty million one million it was hard to say but if you're the type person that's gonna make the business the mobile ad business the jewelry like independent business the whatever the appear to peer your lending company you have you know the track record speaks for self you know what you're doing as far as like identifying an opportunity and then chasing it properly and i just googled this guy i it looks like he has a twitter but like no followers and he has two hundred followers on instagram and he posts pictures of his vacation with his family like nothing sexy i mean yeah he's got actually some fancy cars that's sexy but i guess this whole point of like you get caught in this bubble of you have to build an audience no you don't yeah don't don't you don't you don't you can and maybe that could be fun for you you don't you could do something that no one has ever heard of you you could just cold call and you could get done what likely whatever you wanna get done and another thing that i've learned is just intensity so this idea of what you have to ring is business that's kinda silly it's like yeah it maybe but i bet you i i mean it could make ten million dollars a year which is like crazy rich and just like stepping it up things the on the stepping it up on the amp up format on on the intensity idea so i was working out this morning with the guy house him in and so he was like hey like i don't know if you're up but like trainers coming in at eight am if you wanna get a work workout it yeah fantastic come up let's do it so i go downstairs home gym crazy inside trainers there we're doing a thing and and i don't particularly work out i'm not like a super intense workout guy like i'm trying to do well but like my default is like i i i feel the way most people feel in the work workout like i'm getting super tired i'm like my muscles are failing like they're not i don't feel like i can do that anymore you know like i'm trying oh like if she she's like alright how much do you wanna squat i'm like well i don't really know and alright let's start with like a little bit and then like let's go up from there i'm not like trying to like prove something every second of the of the workout but he was talking about intensity during the workout he's a very intense guy and so he at the end we were doing abs just to finish and so we're were doing like a a russian twist thing or whatever and he's facing the other direction he's doing the other ab workout and we're just taking turns i'm doing mine he's doing his i'm doing the russian to twist and he heard me asked the trainer ago show i have my legs in the air she yeah that makes a bit harder and i was like cool let me try and so he's was just doing it it was just kinda like a off offhand comment and then when it was his turn to go to that it is like the second round second set he's like i gotta gotta him move my legs up now and she's was like no don't have you can just put it down he's like no if he's gonna it then i gotta do it and he's like he's like that's the best part of i'm working out with somebody is that their intensity picks you up and if you pick the right partner then you match their intensity and you just get that little action that you're working again if you're on your own he's like that's the best part and i think that's what this podcast is for a lot of people is we are like their workout buddy for their like kinda like the brain workout basically of just thinking about businesses being excited about things learning new shit and so i think that's the benefit we're giving some people through this podcast but it's also what what like when you go meet this guy and you you know what's the benefit of me and this guy you're not gonna do a deal with him you're not gonna invest his company but literally just having met him and here heard his story all of a sudden now you you can you got red pill you're gonna see the world differently just because you know that he exists and when we tell his story now hundreds of thousands of other people listening to this are gonna know he that he exists i think that's really cool and i it's something you should be intentional about of getting around other people so that you have those red pill moments and you get around other people's intensity so you raise your game so let me give this guy a shout out i'll spell his name code don't i think i said his last name his name is val v a l last name cat k a t a y e v i don't know how to i'm sorry val but anyway that that's his that's his name pretty interesting dude if you click like contact info all his companies or there's emails are on his linkedin interesting guy okay so we're like forty five are we gonna go to ideas are we gonna are we gonna are we gonna you wanna keep it to this like little i don't know what do what what do you wanna do so i have one that i think is gonna be a good segment but finish on that well if feel let's finish strong people are gonna be by the end of this people are gonna be hyped up alright so somebody i think by the way i i think they will dan are they gonna be hyped on this very tight okay very hyped thanks see sounds dan trapped somewhere dan is trapped on inside my computer right now it sounds like alright so so i wanna finish up with this idea of teenage side hustle so somebody emailed me and they said hey you know love the pod my kid is i think twelve thirteen years old like i wanna get him into entrepreneurship my daughter's is like eleven my son is thirteen i want them both to learn about business do you have any ideas for side hustle or a little like kind of like mini hustle that a a teenager could do and so got me thinking and so i started going down this i thought this would be a fun brainstorm for us i do have some ideas that i i wrote down for this but i basically gave it fifteen minutes of thought and i was like okay cool i'll do this on pod live what do you think great you you gotta kick it off though folks you you spent more time thinking about it and then i will i'll come up with a few while you're talking alright so here's the teenage side hustle i break it down into four categories so the first one is called blue collar stuff okay so this is stuff people teens have been doing it for a long time but with a twist here so local you know a normal blue collar stuff you go you mow lawns in the neighborhood you deliver the paper you shovel snow depending on where you're at i think that's all cool so here's how i would step it up so i would say hey here's one thing we could do right we're gonna provide a service to our neighbors but let me teach you in business about leverage right we don't wanna trade our time for money i don't wanna be the one mowing the lawn i don't wanna be the one shoveling snow so you could do two things you could teach them to hire up other kids and basically have the other people in the neighborhood doing the work while you are doing the sales and you're taking the money and you're paying out from there so you could teach them labor leverage there the other way of doing this is you have them learn two things at that so you have door door sales in your neighborhood but secondly you teach them about lead gen so instead of actually having to do the work all you need to do is make the sale or or get the warm lead even so i was thinking you could go in a neighborhood you could go to door to door so here's my specific idea for for them go go around your neighborhood and you're gonna you're gonna knock on the door and you're gonna sell one of two things either pest control so you're gonna say hey we live in the neighborhood you know our house and other houses have had issues in the past with pests and infestation and it's better to catch it early before it becomes like a major problem and you have to get the whole kitchen because you got this you know mice infestation or rats or or or cockroaches or whatever and so would you be would you want a free inspection would you be interested in an inspection to let you know if your house good condition back or needs needs some work and then basically what you do is you call up the local you know pest control service and you say hey i have fifteen houses in my neighborhood that are interested in getting an inspection and and you know i think that even if ten percent of them or twenty percent of them convert that you guys will get some good business out of this so i'm calling up local service local service providers and seeing if anybody basically would want to want these leads and i i have all their information for you i did the the first first contact with them i have their name their number and i have the details about what they're interested what they're worried about what they're interested in and basically i would sell those leads to a local pest control company i think you can make good money doing that just around your neighborhood and other neighborhoods and you would learn that hey you know where is the value capture the value capture is in getting the customer not in actually going and looking under the floor boards for cockroaches okay so that's the first first blue color one the other version on that hold on listen this so i'm i'm just trying to find there here it is okay so i i know a guy he's spoke at hustle khan his name's gabe gabriel una ass os second does guy so what he did was he he he's a friend of mine he started this company where basically they did lead gen so it was called cal finder so if you google california home painting california pest control you get brought to their website they just do a better job of displaying information you submit a lead they sent it to a pink company and that pink company pays them five dollars for that email address yeah the way it started is he bought a yellow notepad and he went door to door to find people who would be interested in having their home painted he collected a a list of a hundred names in the first day and then he sold that for ten thousand dollars to a variety of different like different pink pink companies and he did that a couple more times and then he eventually created a proper company that made twenty million dollars a year in sales so that's the outcome or potential outcome to that yeah so the downside of this is your kids might start making more than you do a year but the upside is they'll learn a lot about business alright so that's the first one you you could do this with anything pool fencing hey i notice you have a pool if you don't have a fencing you know it's against california law to to have a fence without a pool when you have kids you know would you like us to come out and give you an estimate of how much that i would cost to keep it safe and you know so you could do pool fencing pest control home painting whatever doesn't matter so i so my specific idea would be blue collar lead gen that's number one number two events so you've hosted conferences and events i think that you could if you're a teenager i think you could host a neighborhood fair here's how this works you go out you rent the bouncy house the slip and slide all the stuff that like for one individual home to do it's kind of an expensive birthday party but if you're gonna do it and am it a cost around across the the cost of the whole neighborhood it's actually not a bad idea and so i would create the neighborhood fair i would charge for entry i would i would have a local sponsor you know the local bank who could sponsor it because who could turn down your kid's smile and saying hey i'm hosting the neighborhood fair would you be a sponsor for us for five hundred dollars or whatever and you know all the proceeds go to us as kids and you know to fund my own education and so i would basically rent a bunch of cool stuff have cotton candy have all the stuff charge tickets and maybe heard fair that's my second idea events what do you think of that one i think that's okay i would do the first one over the second one the second one sounds like a pain the butt i'm just giving them option options here i'm giving them option that's i three it's playing three the theme of this one is little kids acting like adults so we've all had the like kind of fundraiser thing where you you go to order door you say hey would you like to buy you know cookie dough and ice cream and wrapping paper for our like school charity great so here's my twist on that my twist on that is that you call it the the bitcoin junior coat club or something the bitcoin kids club and basically you go door to door and say hey i'm really interested in bitcoin have you heard about bitcoin yeah i've heard of bitcoin well hey the neighborhood we wanna create we you know two of us three of us kids in the neighborhood we are creating the first kid's bitcoin club and what we want is for every house to invest somewhere between you know about a hundred dollars and we're gonna buy bitcoin it and you're gonna own it and we're gonna take a management fee on top of what we of of the of managing the money right so we're gonna create a little investment club we wanna learn about finance and money is a great way for us to do and for you you'll be owning bitcoin and we're we're gonna help you out we're gonna teach you all about it we're gonna give a presentation at the end and you know hey if your kid wants to be involved in the club they can too and so i would create this little and i would create a small little money management fund and i would try to get houses to give me you know a thousand bucks if they can depending on your neighborhood this is either impossible or it it'll be easy and i would go to the rich neighborhoods and i would say that's what we're doing and for them they actually get to own an asset so there's not only they're just given away the money they're actually gonna get the asset but you're gonna charge you know your well instead of a normal two percent fee we're gonna call it a ten percent fee that you're gonna take in exchange for managing money and then you're gonna send out a newsletter of the report about what's going on in pick i think it's awesome i think that it's just like yes the this is an easy it's just it's cute enough that it justifies setting your kid to hang out with people exactly so those are three ideas the way i was thinking about this and this is another piece is like how do you even brainstorm this so when i brainstorm i don't think about what's the idea right i'll think about two things so the first thing i thought of was what do i remember for my childhood and then what's the twenty percent twist i could put on this right so that's the fundraising idea but the twist is now it's for bitcoin right or i used to mow lawns but the twist is actually i'm gonna like sell those leads to a mo lawn mowing service that's the first way i think about things what do i already know that i can just put a twenty percent twist on to make it fit this situation the second thing is i don't look for answers when i brainstorm i look for questions so here's the questions i wrote down before i brainstorm this i said what's cute when a kid does it but annoying if an adult did that's a great brainstorming ideas right the second one is what's fun for kids but boring for adults like you know my daughter she loves like cleaning like if you i let her clean she'll clean a folding she loves to fold kids actually like i used to have a lot of fun mowing lawns but i got an adult i hate to go mobile on at my my lawn now and so if i know something that's fun for a kid born for an adult we can have them do it the next one is what are kids actually just good at and adults are bad at so there's just things that kids are just better at okay what are those and lastly what amount of money is a win for a kid but would not be a win for an adult because then the kid can do it and they would be happy with it but nope and don't won't do it because this is not enough money there for for the to fill the void of what they're looking for the opportunity cost and so that's how i brainstorm this so that's just a little peek under the hood about how to think about stuff like this is don't look i would answer look ask a bunch of questions and then spit ball if i for my kid i would probably have them i would think of what skill should they learn now that they won't have time to learn in the future so for for them and that that will have a big impact for them i think it would be door i so i think door door selling and i would sell i would send them to it like an am or i think it's or sorry cut c or some type of like door to door knife or door to door books some type of cut throat time where like look you're gonna spend three months for two two different summers in a row you're gonna do this you're you're not gonna like it at first but skill that you learn you're never gonna be able to learn this again like this in your life and it's gonna it'll it'll change your world okay you can at this yeah exactly we're we're not going to baseball camp we're going to cut c camp you're gonna learn how to sell knives door to door this summer that's what one what gonna do that that i think that would be the right move yeah anyway so those are my teenage side hustle to like i forgot the person who rode to whoever wrote in that's my answer sorry i haven't emailed you dan what do you think did we we me a little bit yeah i really liked the end i used to sell calendars in high school door door got a from by the way another here my brain still firing on ideas here's another one digitize the neighborhoods home videos everybody i know who's like kind of like my parents age they have a bunch of photos and albums and videos on like little cassette great business they're worried that those are all gonna go away and you just say hey i'm gonna drop this box off in front of every door i'm just gonna put a sticker on it and i'm gonna say put your put your photos and videos here in here i'm gonna give it back to you you sort of i'm gonna send you it'll i'll put it in the cloud for you so you'll have these forever in good quality and i never have to worry about these going bad or or losing this box or water spilling it on it or anything like that let's first let's save your memories i everything just wanted that's the the g that's incredibly smart because you don't need to be that good at at doing it use with that time yeah exactly you we could basically just go drive it to like costco or whoever does this before you could do it yourself costco i don't if it's costco but like some of these yeah one of the retailers they do this they'll it's a great service offer off offer because your your times free yeah right i would that's a good one that's what i would do i would pick that one alright i guess that's the episode we'll see what people think that i thought it was actually quite good i enjoy hearing stories love people so we'll see if it's good yeah let us know tweet at sam he's the sam paul on twitter tweet me i'm sean vp and let us know what you think of the episode episodes we take that feedback and that's how we adjust a little less randomness little less life advice a little more idea a little more stories about wealthy people or whatever you guys want so let us know how how you want us to i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back