#216 - Why Today Is the Day to Ask For a Raise

would you rather own a small piece of something huge or a big piece or everything of something much smaller yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back sam you dude this looks awesome you're at like a pool a backyard you're in the hampton what's going on i spent the weekend at my in law's house in the hampton and i felt pretty sick yesterday so i just stayed the night here i didn't feel well but i i'm feeling fine now but i'm in i'm in the hampton it looks good right i mean it looks amazing yeah it looks like what i i've never been to the hampton not even close never got an invite i don't know anyone that lives in the hampton let me let me tell you my way okay my opinion of the hampton incredibly overrated you wanna know another thing that's incredibly overrated central park central park so overrated central park and the hampton both overrated the hampton not it's not that pretty it's not that pretty at all so very the appeal what what is good about it if you're in new york it's only an hour hour and a half away without traffic so you can go to the beach there so it's a little bit like a sonoma or napa like i think those places are nice they're not the best they're kinda boring as far as napa is napa and sonoma are prettier than the hampton without a doubt in my opinion oh okay interesting and do you like do you feel different you walk around every car is like a bentley or better you have to have a range rover to fit in it's crazy man i this it's not my style at all it's very it's not it's not even remotely my style did you see the jake paul and tyrone tyrone wood leave fight last night did i tell my wife i can't help with the kid's bed bedtime routine because i'm watching the jake paul fight yeah i did that and watched that fight and i thoroughly enjoyed myself it was an amazing fight i thought it was a good fight i thought jake paul i had higher expectations the drama was there right i'm not time where the technical boxing was great i'm saying the drama was there i didn't know what was gonna happen beforehand and then every round it still felt like anything could happen which is what you want the drama was so high my my my anxiety level was equal to the best u fight like like the best grudge u fight my like anxiety level was equal to it i thought it was amazing we had jake ball on the podcast he was way different on the podcast than he was in like for the for this whole boxing thing but anyway it was was gonna tweeted it out i was like hey congrats to to guest of episode one hundred and seventy on your victory tonight yeah it it it was it was a fun fight i'm happy i got to watch it it was more it was more intense than any you have as intense as any u fight i've ever seen it was pretty bad they've done an amazing job well let's talk about it a little bit so they for for those who don't know or kinda just roll your eyes oh you're watching jake paul and jake paul fight this guy is this rigged what's the point of this is any a youtuber like i got a lot of respect for what they did i'm pretty impressed by this i think that this move they did to go from youtuber vine to youtuber and then youtuber to basically one of the best business models you can do as a as as a single person is basically sell pay views and why is that right so like this fight i wouldn't be surprised if they sold a million paper views and so you sell a million paper views at you know roughly sixty bucks of paper you know per paper review you know that's sixty million dollars and then they partner up a showtime to do that do that whole thing and so you know they can make ten million bucks in one hour doing this right and and basically a single event and you you that's totally different and it and it grows their brand but like this whole thing makes them more famous because espn is talking about it and twitter is talking about it everybody's talking about it and they're doing kind of like a hobby that they like which is boxing right they train hard so it's not easy but man is it lucrative so like pretty impressive jump from one platform to the next and as a business person i think they're geniuses i think they are whether it's intentional potential they are geniuses the way that they approach this the way that they promote these things way they leverage the brand it's genius also getting in a ring in front of a million people getting in a ring in front of fifty people it's incredibly frightening now to do it with someone who's like even though what he at the end of his career is forty he fucking kills people like he crush people like he could he you definitely could die i mean it's not likely but you could and that's incredibly bold and likely you could get humiliated backed out brutally by this guy you know in front of everybody yeah one hundred percent and so i do think it's incredibly courageous even though whether i agree or don't agree with like a lot of the shit they do it's wild i can't believe they've pulled this off it's wild it's incredibly wild the crowd on tv i've been to like three or four or five i i how many you have sea fights and i've been to some of the big ones at madison and square garden the crowd on the tv like on the x in cleveland last night yeah felt the same as when i saw u fight like the same energy it was pretty wild they built this they yeah they they did they pulled it off i also went to a live mma fight a local one here in san francisco where in the the dragon den dragon house yeah amazing you went to one went to together the this weekend i went to one i've been doing a bunch there it's badass ass right it's way scarier that you have seen it weighs way more so so we get cage side seats because they're only fifty bucks right like the yeah you know it is not a huge stadium keys our stadium it's a very small place but we went there we get cage seats for fifty bucks since covid you know started and they said like oh everything's everybody's gotta be vaccinated they didn't check anything at the door so that was not so great but i walk in and the crowd is just lit i don't know what they're all like super drunk with yeah so i think there's like four or five factors going in so first of all it's their friends fighting usually so like there's a whole in every fight there's at least like twenty people that are there because they're friends with this person because these are amateur fights these are people who by day you know they deliver for door dash or they like working in at you know consulting company or whatever and then this is like a nighttime fight club thing for them where they just like decided screw it i'm gonna try this because i get there early i there for the amateur price i find those way more interesting than the pro profiles and so first of all there's there's twenty people that for that's that's their friend that's their brother that's their kid i'm seeing moms just yelling like kill them because it's like their son in in the in the ring or whatever second thing is it's like people are drunk yeah so people are drinking there's only like drink there if one concessions in and it's only beer like they only sell they only sell beer and costco pizza right yeah exactly like beer and things that make you want beer and then third thing is i think so while i think the third one would be i'm so used like you're in the hampton right now dude i i just hang out online on tech twitter and crypto twitter and like the group of people i normally hang out with are so nerdy and like they're there's just concerned about different things so priorities are different i went to this thing and he's like super dressed up like not like fancy but they were dressed up like i might i might meet someone here like this is like a club to them right i just feel like everybody here it was like more real people than the like kind of bubble that i usually live in and so it was just different it was like shocking there was three fights that broke out in the crowd just after after if i would be done i if i would break out in the crowd and i'm in there with my sister my brother lo we're just hoping it doesn't happen near us and the last thing was covid like covid i think has wild people up like when i came in i was telling my brother and i was like dude this crowd is way better than the last time we came to dragon and coffee goes do people are ready to live he's like people were just ready to get out and you could see it dude people were just like i i don't know what i don't know how the kids use the word lit but people were lit at this event this was the whole event was lit it was go to those i've probably been the three of them where the mongols there i guess they weren't there because they can't travel no i've been there and there's they have there's like a large like contingency in mongolia and and they have to one mongolia fighter and he yeah his crowd was like his crew was pretty crazy and then that he fought this irish dude and i i swear to it was like conor mcgregor came out as soon as the guy comes out it's like oh ole the whole crowd is chanting ole i'm like where did this huge irish contingent come from he's got a tattoo silhouette of ireland on the side of his body he gets in the ring and they had a crazy fight and so it was it was a lot of fun first all so if you have like a i don't know if people i don't know if it's only people who like fc but if you like the of which is like maybe one percent of our audience go to show i bet it's more go to a local show i i didn't think it would be this good it's like amazing it was like truly amazing but it also made me feel like what is it about people who what why would anybody sign up to do this and then i know you are the type who you sign up to get punched in the face quite a bit what's the appeal and would you ever do this well i signed up for a smoker so what a smoker is is it's amateur so there's no judges and typically you can kinda have like in a like you can like say ahead of time like hey i'm new you're new like you're you you don't actually at the fight that you went into they're going in with bad intentions you know they wanna hurt you with the the thing that i sign up for sometimes like you you'd be like hey let's let's get after it and you'll try to knock people out and you might get knocked out but it's like not nearly as angry and you could like say hey you're we're going too hard let's take it easy so i've it's like a a spa session it's above a spa session but it's not up quite a real fight at least it have to be and i signed up for it because it makes me feel alive it makes me feel like i feel soft when i just sit in front of the computer all day it makes me feel good to survive getting beat up because i know that i'm not gonna be stressed out about anything else that i wanna do throughout the day because like when i stress out about like this podcast or if i get mad that our freaking internet wasn't working really well i'm like dog i just got my ass kicked like like this like everything else is fine exactly i went skydiving once and we did it in the morning it was like eight in the morning and so the rest of the day like you know from a thirty onward you kind having only last like five minutes like you're just you fall for sixty seconds and then you've kinda float down gently for five minutes and then it's over but the rest of that day i was like i couldn't be bothered by anything else do i jumped out of a plane this morning and you think i'm gonna worry about this presentation i have or this person who didn't call me back or this person who cut me in line like but i i flew i was flying in the air this morning and so it was like if i could bottle that feeling up and have it more often which it sounds like you get by by spa will whatnot that's pretty good i also have been re rewatch breaking bad so did you watch breaking bad like once yeah so i just i just started re rewatch it and it's like enough years have gone by where i kinda forgot it and that's basically the premise of the show the show is basically this guy lives kind of his whole life you know by the book and was like always like kinda just like worried about you know it didn't wanna offend anybody didn't take much risk blah blah blah then when he finds out that he's got you know if he wants to live he starts doing this stuff initially to help his family like how do you how do i provide my for my family if i pass away i don't want them to have nothing because i'm just a teacher i didn't save up too much money and then once he starts to do it it starts to feel good he starts to feel alive and so this has become kind of like a theme i'm thinking about and like if we wanna tie this to business i'll i'll force it here which is there's probably a whole set of products or experiences that just makes somebody feel alive and they're kinda counterintuitive like why would you choose to get punched in the face why would you choose to take this risk and almost get caught by the cops and then how do you bottle that up and package that in a product or service so that because i think a lot of people do want this feeling and once they get it i think it's very addictive but i would say that that's what you do with a lot of your investments right like when i think about what you're doing with an n or what you're doing with crypto to me it's a high adrenaline high risk type of thing right kind of i think you'd think i'd i take more risk than i actually do but but yeah i i could see that that's definitely a piece of it there's a bit of the roller coaster that you get to go on and a roller coaster for a thrill seeker but i just think in general like you know we were in la i went to disneyland what why are there even roller coasters right well because people in thirty seconds you can get that feeling like you might die and then you live and that little package that thrill it taps into this thrill secret part of people and i i just feel like there's probably more experiences that could be built that i like that i think if you're building in vr for example instead of trying to build a vr like kinda like fantasy land i would build things in vr that make people feel little bit afraid a little bit scared a little bit alive and i think a lot of video games try this right like why a lot of video games around shooting people and stuff like that because it's it's cool and it's an escape and it's something you can't do in real life so you get decide live car through this but i just think there's a lot more that could be done so instead of talking about fear can i tell you something that i read recently that's it's about happiness can i tell you something that totally like kinda like i read something recently and it the data seems pretty clear and it totally like goes against what we've been told previously can can i tell you about that so layout lay what we've been told and then what you saw so the you know there seems like things that you see headlines so one of these headlines is like the average american doesn't have five hundred dollars in savings or something like that that's that that's that's mostly bullshit by the way that's that's a bullshit headline but the other one was that after you make seventy five thousand dollars your perceived happiness level doesn't really go up significantly and i read about that a while ago we read about mean when did that come out you think like in two thousand twelve or something thousand thirteen yeah i feel like i've heard this kind of my whole professional life so maybe at least twelve fifteen years something like that i've always thought that that was bullshit i've always thought that was bullshit for deep been past the sniff test for you not even a little bit not even a little bit and so i came across the study and so what these guys did was they got forty thousand people to install this app and this app at random times would ask you like on they would ask you a bunch of questions but it would be on a scale of like one to five or one to ten i see you're highlighting the app you could click it and you could see it it's called contract your happiness yeah and and it's pretty cool it's just a simple app and what they did was they got thirty five forty thousand people and they ranged that all types of ranges and they asked people how they felt during different periods of the week of day and they would track your income and what they found is is that while it is true that after you get past a certain point your happiness levels doesn't necessarily go up in proportion but what this study found is like up until like five hundred six hundred seven hundred thousand dollars a year it it was definitely still going going up like yeah we can we can show this graph if if you're watching on youtube we'll put this graph on the screen and it's basically two lines it's your life satisfaction and your experience well being and they're both like from fifteen thousand dollars of household income up to five hundred thousand dollars they're tracking like up into the right just like a straight line so the more income you were getting the more sort of life satisfaction you were having during at each step of those it didn't just plateau at seventy five thousand like the the old kinda like that quoted quoted study is and it may like the difference between two million and three million probably won't be significant but like according to this study like the difference between ten million and one million is significant and does impact your happiness and that totally like kinda broke my frame even though i always thought it would be true i thought this study was actually really interesting and there's a few reason why a few reasons why basically the other one was nonsense was the first one was remembered feelings so the seventy five thousand dollar study basically what they did was they asked people how they felt in the past and that's kinda bullshit because you always think that you remember things better than you actually did or like during the during one period you'll think it's great and then you say how you remembered it and you'll think it or sorry you'll during the time you think it's horrible then you'll look back like oh that was actually awesome right this actually asked you right then and there how you fell the second thing was before it said were you happier then or were you happier now and that's kind of nonsense because there's no variance like the variance is too low and like you know sometimes like it could be a lot a little bit better and that matters and so that's too binary it's it's just yes or no there's no like there's no granularity yeah so i don't know i thought this was interesting i wanted to bring this up because that's one of the that's one of the studies that i always thought that people base like you read this headline and you believe this to be true and a lot of people probably make decisions based off of this and i think it's important to say no that's i think it's bullshit and and you shouldn't base life on that data or that study right yeah yeah yeah i and i i like i love this topic by the way i think it's great it's sort of like myth busting of these like common things you hear like another one who's like the ten thousand hour rule that got really popular because malcolm glad wrote this book called outliers and he's like oh you know to be great at something you gotta spend ten thousand hours and and so then a lot of people run with that and it's like well there's obviously a bunch of caveats but like the caveats gets stripped away as the thing just gets kinda like turn into a fortune cookie tweet right it's like ten thousand hours that's the rule and and sure there's instances where somebody spends ten thousand hours gets really great it's something but there's definitely instances where it doesn't take ten thousand hours to get great at something i've had many of them in my life and and so you wanted like i guess question a lot of these things that you're told and try to figure out what what's the truth and what's the truth for me what am i gonna experience what do i choose to believe and so i'm with you on on looking into stuff like this i also think this app is cool to track your happiness app i'm gonna actually use it where at my previous company when i was running the ideal lab i it was my first time like as ceo of like a larger group we had like twenty something employees at that time and that was i was twenty five years old who was the most people had ever managed and i was like okay well how do i manage people i was like well there's a bunch of books on this but i created something pretty simple i one of the programmers i went to the guy quinn and he's like this young hacker guy and i was basically like hey quinn i would love to know i would love to just kinda like if i could go have a conversation with each person each day saying hey how are you feeling how's it going i think i could be a better manager but that would take way too much time and it would just also be like a full long conversation with each person as it can you just set up a thing so that at the end of every like workday so at like four thirty pm or whatever it just pings everybody individually in slack and it just says hey sean how you feeling today you know one to ten and what what's your happiness right now and it would just i it would basically do what this app does and they would put it in and then had a dashboard as the manager is the ceo that would show me all these different people and what what i found was two things the first is some people have a very narrow range of emotions that they feel so like there's like our cto is this british guy paul and he's like he's very kinda like stoic he's sort of you know like british sort of dry humor and so like he never got too too high up too high down like he was always like a you know like a seven or an eight he didn't he never hit a ten he never hit a five he always stayed in that range so i had to interpret his data differently because i was like for this guy his self assessment of his own like kind of like happiness or well being his his range is different so i can't just say oh eight you're good eight is actually great for him and a seven is actually quite bad for him whereas for other people who were like you know the hot mess folks it's like some days it's a one and some days it's a ten and i had to interpret them differently so that was the first observation the second was when i would go and i i could i could ping them afterwards i could just say you know it could basically ping them at once they submit their score i would say cool do you wanna add a note on why and the reasons that affected people's happiness were so different than what i would have expected i thought people be unhappy because you know they feel like underpaid or over overworked or you know maybe the colleague sent something to them and it was always like the smallest shit it's like like what it'd be like you know it'd be something like oh you know at lunch today you know i whatever you know this table was full so i kinda had to go sit over there or it'd be like you know at you know we we're were working on this project i really wanted to get more done but i got a phone call i got distracted it's like they were like some people were like real some people got off on high output and so they're happiest was like it's like oh yeah we had to do that team meeting so i didn't get to go work on my product i didn't get to write enough code today or it'd be like something really really small it's like yeah i'm really dealing with this kinda like back pain so this chair really uncomfortable it was always things that i wouldn't have otherwise seen and so it brought those to the surface and then i could decide i is this something i could affect and like improve or do i just like at least i get a better understanding them so that was like one of the better products that we built we probably should have product it and made it an actual like work tool for other people to use yeah i used to use this thing called fifteen five you remember that company they're doing pretty well dude i think they're they have pretty successful i bet that i i would bet they are so they kinda like went quiet for a little while and and typically that means it's failing horribly or it's actually quite large like it's usually like one or the other and so it it was called fifteen five and basically they would send you five the whole product it was very simple and it's probably thrived during covid but basically they send you an email every day and it takes is it fifteen questions at for five minutes to answer or it's fifteen minutes to answer five questions one of those and yeah that's all this is they just send you an email at the end of day and they say what did you get done today how do you feel yep and that's all the product is and i would imagine that it's quite large yeah yeah i think it it raised at like a hundred thirty million dollar valuation recently or something so you know maybe that's a out of that's twenty nineteen so i i bet it's doing doing pretty well alright let's do a different topic what do wanna talk about let me tell you about a different a different company that i recently cup discovered so it's called es have you ever heard of that no sounds like a government agency kinda okay so es so basically there's this entire sector the tire industry that needs important map information if you scroll all the way down to where it says felt you'll see where i am yep but basically the idea here is there's this company called es it was started in nineteen sixties it's one hundred percent owned by this one guy and his brother so one hundred percent owned by the same family no debt they've ever taken any outside funding you can't find anything about it it does over a billion dollars a year in subscription revenue and basically what it does subscription revenue nice yes it's software it's a software i i guess it i guess you could call it information but probably at this point software because it started in the sixties so at the time it was basically information but what it what it does is very simple so twenty thousand plus cities use it so most cities most like reasonably sized cities in america use it most states use it most fortune five hundred companies use it and what it does is they have loads of of information on maps and so if you're a government and you wanna build new gas new new pipes or something like that in your city you're gonna take their data and you could also give them more data and they're gonna give you an interactive map that you can use to figure out where the other pipes are and you're gonna be able to build this this this pretty complex system that you can continually use year over year that's gonna show where your pipes are it's called geographic information system you never heard you you never heard of that term yes yeah i've heard that yeah i thought for sure you would have heard of that so it's almost like google maps on steroids so in the same way that apple or sorry same it's like b to b google maps yes in the same way uber uses one of the apple or either google maps this is what like the city of like the hampton would use when they're building new roads and when they're building new electricity now the the there's a few reasons why this is interesting one it's one of the most complex and one of the most interesting family owned businesses i've ever seen total monopoly so in the way that they got their monopoly is they go into colleges and so they work with engineering students they've worked really hard on i'm making sure all the colleges they give their software to for free so the engineering students start using it at a very young age and they're used to it then when i graduate they go yeah let's just use es so they know exactly what they're doing and it has a total mode also because selling to a government is impossibly hard it's incredibly difficult why because when you're a government you wanna make sure that the vendor that you're using takes one hundred percent responsibility of something f up and so when you're like signing up if you're a government employee if you're working at a fortune a five hundred employee you want cover your ass insurance you know you want a company that's like well known and like not new and like they're gonna take responsibility if something bad happens that's es alright crazy fascinating company but i'm curious about which businesses are gonna because whenever you see something old you know from the nineteen sixty that's a software company you think well like surely they're like you know you can't crush it forever also the founder of this company probably worth ten billion dollars at those point i think he's like eighty five years old so he's gonna die he's gonna they're gonna lose its way like this is just inevitably how it works did this guy's name by the way jack danger is that his name right this danger i mean come on that's how old see i can see why people don't wanna compete with this guy he's pretty old i don't know and i'm looking he's like he's eighty it looks like he's you know well he's rich sixty seventy something like that yeah personal four billion dollars himself yeah and he started with his brother when he was like twenty seven crazy fascinating business crazy fascinating business and i take it a cent outside of a five thousand dollar initial loan from danger mom's mother crazy right crazy fascinating any company and and he seems throw i mean you know what i read about he he's like a good guy him his wife he so he's an environmental so he started this because he cared about like wildfires and things like that and he was building software to help create maps that somehow reduced wildfire which i'm gonna explain in a second but basically there's a new company there's a bunch of new companies coming out the first one is called felt so go to felt dot com it totally not went to this it looked it looked it looked well this is like a early access site but my i saw it and i said oh this is kinda interesting so i started looking into i've read your notes on it this felt thing seems pretty cool you investing in this this seems like kinda awesome nope i i we just i've i've never talked to this person so it started by a guy named sam hash sashimi he's his first company was called remix it was a city transportation planning startup but he sold for a hundred million dollars when he was doing that he learned all about the ina inaccuracies of like basically using maps and grading maps for your service and he said well i'm gonna credit create a better map business so something that people can add stuff to and it's almost like where where es is like google maps this is like ways so people can contribute to it if you use it kinda of fascinating and it seems very very interesting and i always like these old school companies i mean i look like this company this guy jack started i think it's badass ass i love seeing the new guys that are gonna try and take this and and kick their ass i think it's very fascinating yeah this is cool i i like this a lot there was a company called named they're based in they spun out of like this lab hold on i think you actually might have their name here it's and and while you're looking for that so felt it they describe it as a world's first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases so i imagine they haven't said this but i imagine actually anyone can use it a user can use it so if you're going hiking with your friends if you're planning a trip you're allowed to use this i imagine what they're doing is their grand scheme though they're their niche their wedge is to help wildfires go down and so the way that you could do that is you can actually use data and you could figure out where wildfires are where they're gonna happen and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires and i imagine what they're gonna do is they're gonna create this really cool because if you go to felt dot com it looks very user focus whereas it it's they're gonna make all their money from b to b so it doesn't look the same it doesn't look like a b b product i imagine what they're gonna do is like just like ways they're gonna let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit and then they're gonna go and sell the data and mapping tools to b to b to businesses and that's how they're gonna win crazy fascinating go ahead yeah i i think it's cool so the company i think is called discard his labs and what this i met the founder of this at a dinner he was telling me about it and i was like wow this is kind of amazing and this became one of my one of my misses i was like gosh i really should invest in this and at the time i wasn't really investing super actively and i missed the boat i think this has become like a very big company but at the time i was like pretty convinced that is gonna be a winner and why why is that so they spun out of los alamos alamos national labs or whatever which is like in new mexico albert albuquerque or something like that it's like this like it's kinda like you know nasa or something like that so this is like highly kinda scientific community they spin out they create this commercial company that's called des scar labs and what they do is they do satellite imagery so they would basically take i i don't if it was their own satellites or other people satellites but they would take the imagery of like cool this image from a satellite of a field and then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year or they could give you know so it's like if you ever watched billions they they they kinda do something this sometimes where it's like oh look how many trucks are leaving this factory so before the earnings call i can figure out you know how much volume they're doing because i can see the rate of change from before to after things like that so so they have a whole bunch of different products but basically at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it i think he told me the story and this is many years ago so i may be getting this wrong but i think what he told me was at the time they didn't have that many customers but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they're like that they're putting their own they were their own balance sheet there were just betting basically and they were showing that like look we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that's how valuable our data is and i think since then i i think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it but either of them or them in a partner doing that and now i think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this whether it's like you know i have a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict you know the way that the world is changing the way that the the the the way that anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery basically what they do so i really like that business model as well some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it making more getting more actionable like data and insights from that so did you say the name of the company in front of the founder the name of what company oh you know she told me am i saying wrong i i is it a french have you heard of the philosopher yeah what's the french philosopher name renee des maybe maybe that's what it is what did you call it des is it's it's day yeah it's des it's like it's like the i don't i forget renee des is he the guy who said i think there i am anyway it's that's the i think therefore i know i know that i i got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong i i met this guy years ago i even fully remember the the idea i just remember thinking oh that's interesting all my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to do lists and stuff like that and this guy's basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it and it my two takeaways where i should probably invest in this guy and the second thing was why am i i doing something more interesting with my life because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do and so that was a you know a takeaway i had during that process do you want me to keep going or you want one no do one alright let me tell you a quick story about a guy named wayne he i love wayne he i read his book i believe it's called building blockbuster so there's this guy named wayne he we're alright now i'm gonna sound un cultured is he from i always get it confused holland in the netherlands in dutch are they all the same thing dutch is a way to describe people i think from the netherlands i think holland might be a part of the netherlands i'm not sure dude i don't know i'm sounded culture i'm sorry but what what does it say what does wayne his say so he's of dutch descent we will dutch descent cajun it's from net from the netherlands alright good alright so he's born in nineteen thirty seven alright so listen to the story of this guy born in nineteen thirty seven parents divorce had a young age went to the army and when he was in his twenties he started this company called waste management basically he had one moving truck air or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door thrown away your trash and eventually like after only a short amount of time like two years he starts realizing that these this this business is incredibly there's there's loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces and he goes well fuck i'm just gonna buy all of them and so we starts buying a a shit ton of something like two or three a a week and is of a business eventually call has become waste management today it's got a sixty four billion dollar market cap it's the biggest waste removal company in the country it's incredibly big and he left that in nineteen eighty four so he built those huge business and you'd think alright so that's great going chill next when he was still in his fifties i believe he starts a company called blockbuster and so this is a nineteen eighty seven he bought he he found one blockbuster it was one blockbuster store he bought it with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later so this guy guy's like a financial arbitrage machine so he's like he's really good at raising money and deploying cap so he raises this money and so blockbuster after like two years it has seven million dollars in revenue nineteen stores and then in just a handful of years he gets it to four billion dollars in revenue in three thousand stores in eleven countries and eventually he sells it to vi come in nineteen ninety four this is about eight years after starting the company for eight and a half billion dollars and so it's pretty crazy and if would've have invested twenty five and so he would let some friends invest and if you would've invested twenty five thousand dollars in into black blockbuster when it went public and in nineteen eighty seven it would've have been worth about a million dollars when they sold so he's pretty amazing i mean he he's he's got a good track record he also started something else right he started yeah yeah so the guy alright so he's in waste management he's in blockbuster at this point he's in a sixties you think alright now you're just gonna chill absolutely not he starts auto nation which is at this point it's the largest seller of used cars in america so he went from waste management to blockbuster to cars and then throughout this whole period he's also doing the same with resort resorts so have you ever heard of a extended stay america i believe now home by marriott you never heard of extended save of america so basically they've got they've got something like five six seven hundred motel that are nice enough that you could stay for like a handful of or for like a month they're like two or four weeks at a time he started that he also started a bunch of different golf clubs and then in the nineties he eventually buys the miami dolphins and and i think he bought another florida what's the florida football team well the so that's the dolphins and then he buy the the florida marlin also the baseball team the marlin pretty amazing is this and and and so i always was amazed at this guy and the reason i was amazed at adam is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing and so here's a few things what here's a few quotes that i have from his biography that he talked about for his philosophy the first we made small acquisitions in different states around the united states it was just easier faster and cheaper to go in and buy guy who was already established in a market even if it was very small then i'd hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth the plan was always to have internal growth but order to get internal growth growing quickly it would sometimes eager to grow out a certain mart and just buy by a guy who had three or four trucks and say okay let's do this on her own and that's what he did over and over and over and over again and he did it in all those businesses except for blockbuster but even then he did it with blockbuster because he started the brand but a and they grew on their own but eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and top mom and pop movie stores and this was his whole strategy there's another guy who did this his name is bradley jacob he's is worth like five or ten billion dollars he did this over and over and over again and i think that there's still a ton of room to do this so what what what other industries could you do this in i've been thinking about this a lot and i'm not entirely educated on the topic but i think i think you could do it for all types of moving businesses because moving businesses there's not actually one leader that you trust who's like the best right it's like a lot of mom and pop stores what other industries could you do this like consolidation stuff in i mean these roll ups happen kind of in every industry feel like people have done it with dentists dentist house right now dentist is like the hottest thing going there's also like pet you know vet vets you know veterinary hospitals or veterinary clinics there's pet ce that somebody told us about that that's like a pet cremation basically is like another one that you could do again fragmented market there's there's a lot of these there's rural wireless internet service providers there's there's a a huge number of these where in a local market there's somebody who has maybe not a local monopoly but a large local footprint and and going in you can't it's very it be it would be too expensive to go in and try to rebuild that it'll take too long and be too hard to do that in a small place so you buy it at a fair price but you buy a whole lot of these and you make the the sort of the sum greater than than than the than than the parts and so i think this roll up strategy is one of the more like i would say intriguing ways to build a monstrous empire like otherwise you kinda gotta build a you know build a facebook build a youtube but it's very hard to build a multi billion dollar individual company from scratch i think it is far easier to execute one of these roll ups and create you know a hundred million dollars create even a billion dollars of value in you know five to ten years it doesn't interest me personally but if i wanted to become a billionaire i think this would be the one of the lower risk ways to get it done one murdoch did this with local newspapers also so rupert murdoch this is kinda of what he did local newspapers and then local radio stations local television stations whatever he basically about bought local media companies and then aggregated them and rolled them all up and created like giant basic news corp which is his his like mothers ship brand so yeah by the way this guy wayne his if you're watching on youtube to put put this guy's face on here from his wikipedia looks like a evil steve balm so that that's what this guy looks like bradley jacobs the other guy you mentioned who's done this with xp logistics and a couple other companies literally looks like couldn't be a sweeter see you someone's sweet sweetheart dad who you know coaches the local soccer team i i i love looking at these tech because i think to do this you gotta be pretty i don't wanna say ruthless but extremely aggressive ambitious a great deal maker and and and you're moving like at a freight trained pace and so i love to meet these people now you can't meet them sometimes i love to just even look at their photos and just just then read their bio who's is this person where did they come from because it takes a very specific attitude to be able to go do this with self storage or local you know landscape pool construction companies rolled in them all up i've read a lot about both of those guys and i've seen them talk you on youtube and my opinion of them is that they seem highly ethical they seem incredibly high energy super high energy and they seem very entrepreneurial even though they both look like wall street suits that don't like create these guys definitely are creators even though they buy stuff and you think well that's not like and you're not inventing anything and maybe they're not inventing anything from scratch but they're definitely creators and i because i remember i saw like bradley jacobs and i already looked like and i'm like dude this fucking suit like he's just like he's just some arbitrage where and he's not he totally he's like he's a creator and it's really interesting he's maybe not like mark zuckerberg where he's like coding shit but he's a different type of creator and i really like these types of folks doesn't this seem a little lows guy's net worth was two point eight billion and when he died i feel like how because net worth hello low compared guys doing auto automation block waste management system doing doing blockbuster like how is that how does that add up i think that the number that we have there could be wrong but i think it's wrong what i read about in his biography was that with what with waste management because they raised so much money because they bought so many companies they simply didn't own that much of it i mean they owned a smaller piece of a massive pie and they were okay doing that and so when he started waste management and when he left he was the largest individual shareholder i believe but he probably owned like single digit percentage right yeah you even just owning the dolphins i feel like the dolphins themselves are gonna be you know five hundred million to a billion dollar franchise so so that seems a little low but yeah this guy definitely the billy of the week extremely impressive career you know shout out to to this guy he pat it looks like he passed away yeah a couple years ago at age eighty so you know respect okay what else do you wanna talk about i have a i i have another kind of fast growing company i think worth talking about this thing called picasso have you seen this no i'm gonna google it is that hud spelled picasso yeah p a c a s o so two execs at zillow spell spun out and created this thing i think a year ago and it's already worth one or two billion dollars kind of sort evaluation world so i think they created all that value in a basically a year to year and a half and and what does it do it's basically a fucking time share so what they do is they buy homes they convert them to llc and then they sell fractions of that home to investors so they bought like you know let's say a house in napa valley they go buy a million dollar house they converted into slices of one eighth so you can own a eighth of this house for whatever a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars you can buy a piece of this home so you're a fractional homeowner and it's meant to be for second homes so you don't do this for your home you do this for your like second your vacation home and when you buy that one eighth of the house that gets you forty four nights of a stay in that home for the year and you can either use them yourself you can gift them to others i think you can rent amount or get let them rent it out for you and this company takes this insane rate so they take twelve percent of the purchase price upfront just straight off the that and then they charge you a monthly management fee because they have the app that you and the other owners use to coordinate who's booking what what's the what's the rental share what are you how are you sharing expenses all that good stuff and if you know if the house goes down you you know you're on the hook for they took their money up upfront so i thought this was kind of a incredible r on a time share that i'm surprised frankly i'm surprised is growing this fast i didn't like it doesn't it's not something i look at and i say that's awesome i wish i had done that or thought of that idea i actually think this is kind of dumb what do you think so times shares i mean time shares is a huge business i i like the idea of a time shares is not bad i would i would be into owning one it's just that i don't wanna go like through the s of of of you know what i mean like you wanna sit through the webinar yeah i don't wanna i i don't wanna go to the seminar so it's it's weird so i think it could be cool why is it worth so much so fast yeah i don't know i don't know i mean they've grown you know so picasso valuation i saw it because there was a big protest going on so picasso raises seventy five million goes from launch to unicorn in five months so i think part of it is what was the protest what's that you said there's a protest oh the protest was basically like in napa the home that they bought the neighborhood was like yeah what is this like we don't want we don't want this we don't want this like times share rental we don't want all these different people coming through why why are they doing this and so so they basically you know there were was trying to like they were trying to say hey time shares are not allowed and what this company says is it's not a time share in a times share you own a block of time in unless you actually are a part owner of the home so it's different than a time share and then people were like dude you can't just call it cooperative ownership make up a new term and like it's a time and so they're kinda going back and forth about that so the guy who started his name is spencer spencer ras is that how say the same so he started well and austin allison so she's actually the ceo they were both execs at so yeah so one of the c cofounder name is spencer have you seen what this guy's has done before no i the name sounds familiar it wasn't he one of the original like founders of zillow like yeah so check us out at ninety nine at the age of twenty four he founded hot dot com a leading travel internet company i mean obviously well that's the hotels right they sold it for seven hundred million dollars then he started zillow and he took it public he was a ceo through its ipo and bought loads of different companies he's resigned in two thousand twenty so i guess he's out entirely then he started dot la which is a media company for california startup up so i guess that's kinda like a passion project and then now he started picasso do this guy's prolific and he's on the board of palette here this guy thing this is why it's worth a billion dollars because it's like oh the ceo of zillow is doing this new real estate thing cooler we're we're in and we're sort of price insensitive on the valuation so i think it has more to do with the team than it does probably the traction in terms of that valuation yeah this guy's a badass i mean he's he's a hardcore badass would you would you want when i think of these types of things these companies that raise all this money we talked about zillow or we talked about this company picasso and the this guy looks like spencer that's fisheries also a podcast you got office hours podcast there you go oh we should have them on here spencer if you're listening come on do you think that do you like this strategy of raising would you rather own a small piece of something huge or a big piece or everything of something much smaller i don't think about that like that wouldn't be the deciding criteria if if it was just between those two i rather own the whole thing of a smaller of a smaller thing i find it to be more fulfilling and i think economically you end up doing better you have more because when you own a small piece of a bigger thing if it happens to go a little sideways and doesn't have big unicorn exit the doesn't go public doesn't get sold for three billion dollars it's very easy to kinda walk away with very little because you raised all this money so now you you the first hundred million dollars go back to investors and maybe you only sold it for for seventy or something like that whereas you owned like a huge amount of the hustle i think that path is better because you could sell for twelve million dollars and walk away with ten million dollars you know like out of it and so and so i think it's it gives you more options on how to build your wealth now that being said there's something fun about building something massive and going for something that's like truly game changing with three extra zeros on the back of so like you know i respect both paths if if i was picking between those two i would own i would wanna own more of a smaller thing because it gives me more options what do you think is easier oh for sure owning owning a small thing now easier in one sense which is it is easier i think on a day to day basis because you don't have to worry about fundraising shareholders other shareholder management and you can begin you can exit for smaller amounts the harder perk when you go rate like these guys just raised seventy five million dollars they're not gonna feel like they're like rough it every day whereas when it's your company and like i don't know you probably ran payroll for you know in the first year of the hustle and and you probably had to worry like let's say you know advertisers pull out you know you probably were feeling that pinch because you were more or less bootstrap you raised a little bit of money but like right i don't think you ever felt like you know you have this huge cash cushion that you can just fall back on well yeah i did not but my pit i i normally would agreed with you but well we had mark lori on the podcast and i talk i had a lot of his coworkers reach out to me after the podcast and basically mark lo r judge dot com what he's done is he he what was his vision he had his like he had this like phrase and i forget the phrase but it it was like vision capital people is that what it was yeah it that's his his his fun name now so we can look it up but yeah it's vision capital people yeah you gotta write vc vision and so he like that was his whole premise he's like everything i come up with the vision i get the capital we get the people that's what we do and when he says that i'm like that like what does that mean like that's a pretty like a vague fluffy thing but i started talking to people who worked with them and they're like he did that so well where he would raise all this money and he really like he did a lot of work but it wasn't like it he wasn't like doing like like like like you know the shit that you do when you're just starting out when you don't have any money you know you like i i ran my own payroll i did all the banking i did you i would go out and get all the vendors he was like he just like hired amazing people and they did most of the work and he just took care of the hard part of like selling people to join the company and selling people to give them money and i thought about that i'm like dude that does sound so easy yeah it's not crazy i thought that it's easy it's awesome i thought i'd put it nothing's easy yeah anything anything valuable is typically you don't go to it because it's easy necessarily but i i i'm totally with you i what's what's more fun a small vision or a big vision a big vision right what what's what feels better having a lot of ammo and you know in terms of capital or being strapped for cash was we're not only having to worry about how to get customers and grow but can we pay the bills every single month yeah on the other side if sean wants to fuck off for a little while you can do that yes you know check you could you could you can bail for a little i optimized for freedom i optimize for freedom above above most things and so like if you asked me would i rather my my dad taught me this a long time ago he told me once because what or my first startup was a sushi restaurant chain and i was like i was talking about you know why it's fun about milan he goes he was trying to convince me to come work in the energy industry he's like he he worked at bp so he worked in the oil and gas industry he's like he's like you know the minimum is like you like to play poker right now when you go to a poker table you can either sit down with a hundred dollars or you can sit down the ten thousand dollars or hundred thousand dollars you're still playing the same game you're still gonna sit there for six hours he's like it's why not play the bigger game and he's like in energy industry the minimum stakes are in the millions nothing happens in the hundreds of thousands of dollars like you're saying a restaurant one location if it works can produce a hundred thousand dollars a year event net income or a hundred twenty five thousand dollars of net income he's like why not just he's like a small project and a big project if you make it your your obsession which is what you're gonna do when you go start a start up they both take the same amount of time they're both gonna be all consuming alright so mine as well do the one that has the bigger payoff so when he said it like that i was pretty sure like that's why my next start i i stopped the food thing and i went did a biotech company because he was right in biotech like are well we made one deal it was worth five million dollars and i was wow that would have taken us like five years and twenty five locations to do in the restaurant industry and this was like one one great meeting one great presentation and like you know a year of technology development and boom five million dollars came through the door so i kinda got to taste both sides of and so if i was gonna a big project and a small project both take the same time a big project more fun but what i don't like is big companies because in big companies i feel like i lose my freedom of my time and my energy of how i wanna spend my day and so that's why i'm trying to find this mix of my perfect situation is i work for myself and pretty much by myself but i'm working on things that i feel are big and can pay off big and the with the world of the internet that's now possible one of the most expensive mistakes ever made so trends now makes millions of dollars in subscription revenue it's a really good business had we made relatively minor changes like not that different like it wouldn't have cost us more money we made able would've have had a few more people we and we right now we charged three hundred dollars a year there's a world where wouldn't have had to been that much different and it definitely would have been a similar amount of work we could have charged thirty thousand a year right and i didn't understand that for a long time now i completely do where it's like actually we were talking about that with hu con when you were doing hu con the hu con ticket was what like two hundred dollars three hundred dollars something like that yeah on average and you had told me because i was like dude why you doing this like events business shift dude events business gonna be big look at this one look at that one and i went and looked at them because you were right they did actually like make tens of millions dollars but i was like dude the ticket price of this is three grand minimum and it looks like they have a fifteen thousand dollar ticket package for like some people yours is like ten times cheaper than that and you were like yeah we should we could but you didn't feel comfortable to going that route or whatever i don't know what your reason was because you want yeah i knew i was being a there's a few things one i was a pussy so i was just i was being fearful and number two when i started my company i was like twenty four what i don't and i had a job before what i don't understand is how these young guys like people who are twenty one twenty two twenty three like when the folks who started box dot com which is an enterprise cloud company they were like twenty or nineteen like in college deal what i don't understand is when you're a nineteen twenty or in my case i was twenty four when i thought about the company i was like well like i don't have any money i would never buy something that was two thousand dollars now that i'm older and i have more experience i realized well two thousand dollars is not a lot of money and so what i wanna understand is how these young guys who are in their early twenties they don't have a lot of experience how they even fathom that someone's willing to spend all this money on their product they're either just courageous or they have more faith i don't know what it is but i but i kudos to them because when i was twenty four and starting my thing even though i could have charged way more money and i tell help everyone to do it now i did not have the courage or the knowledge should do it back then right and you see now because you're inside hubspot you see how much companies spend on just stuff like what amount of money it's like it's like going into a really wealthy person's house and then you see them tip you know you they tip some guy a hundred bucks so they you know they buy this this fancy espresso machine for eight thousand dollars it's like oh these are normal expenses for them so then when you're on the outside you're like i should be charging a lot more but when you've never been inside one of these big companies it feels like a three thousand dollar ask dude i i'd better be giving them like my emi my left arm and it's like actually they feel more comfortable with larger price tags and that's like yeah in fact a three hundred dollar product is a little bit off putting to them and sort of strange to them yeah it's and it's like disrespectful it's like dude this this thing isn't good charge more right so like when knowing what i know now and i think mark and jason's have like i forget like this is it it it was a very like headline y quote but it was something like if mark jason had one advice for his his startups it would be simple charge more he was two words charge more and because most startups ups do what i did you charge way little way less than you should because you i don't know you're trying to be cute i i don't know what it is it it's just it's cute to be cheaper but it's like insecurity right because at the beginning you're like i want some customers it's not that big of a deal then you kinda then that becomes the anchor point that you mentally anchor to and the market anchors you to and then you're afraid if you raise raise prices everybody gonna run out the door you know what happens if i raise prices i'm gonna get complaints people are gonna quit you know blah blah and so it's it's really like a form of insecurity and it's like a corporate insecurity and and so if you're out there i i tweeted you this the other i was like if you're working at a company go ask for a raise today but do you think anyone did that there there's a scott cycle i just got a go ask for a raise today but i'm i'm i don't know i haven't really proven my go ask for a raise today everybody should go ask for a race inside of a big company why because there's almost always wiggle room like like when i was hiring they would they had what they're called a compensation band what does that mean it means for the same role we can pay this much on the low end or there's much out the hire end and guess what you start people low or in the middle of the scale and then you flex up when you need to when do you need to when they ask for more money and so like so there's already in your exact role without getting a promotion there's is more money that can be had the second thing is what's the worst that happens they say no and when they say no you might learn something they might say no because like they might give you essentially a soft hell no what's what's a soft hell no hell no is sort of like they say no and they they're like look if you want more you can go elsewhere and get it that's kind of a you're not so valued here like go for it or there's a no that's like look we love you we value you i would love to give you more i just can't right now because of x y z or can you can you hit these goals because that will help us build this case and hey you're one step closer making more money than you were before you asked and so or they say yes and boom you get more money like there's no there's no loss i was if you work for me don't come ask me for more money that doesn't count because i gave this advice so don't ask me but you know other people this for other people i was notorious at the hustle because when people would ask me for a raise had to always say yes it was i was horrible like confrontation i just said yes everything like my god i don't feel like dealing with this i not true did you told me a hilarious store we complete this out a feet out of tell i don't if you remember me you and and our fred su we were at del rosa or we were at some some restaurant and you tell the story of okay bleak this do you remember this no i don't remember fully but you were just like no and you can leave you think that i know just like it wasn't just nose like you understand like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so the story was like call you well yeah so i remember this so i should rephrase this when people do good i'm i say yes to everything when people do bad they're like well i wanna raise i'm alright so you're like you are a machine to me that's sounds horrible but it's like look like our business is a machine and like humans are like part of the input humans effort are part of the input right and you're asking me for a raise right now i think that the money that you are paid like breaks even so like we put money into this into this machine we put amount out and we get the save amount out if i were to give you more amount of money i'm putting more input how much bigger the output could be because right now i don't think it's i don't think that it's worth it and so i don't think it's worth it it's and and so if you don't think that that's fair then you should go to some other machine and figure out where that input can have a bigger output because right now it ain't working right yeah exactly so i love the i love that because it eight it was honest b it was a little bit brutal and you know it was it like i would say you have many many super strengths like a plus skills like i would pick you over anybody softly wording things is not not one of them so i found it to be super funny but it but really again even if you find that information out and it hurts in the moment that this person says look it's not like it's not on the table with the way things are currently at if you find that out you know that's a good that's a good piece of information it hurts in the moment but it's a good piece of information no because you might say should i need to create more value here what would it mean and you can have a conversation you could say well what would i be needing to do for you to feel great about paying me double what i'm making today that's a question you can ask they might not know the answer on top that but they'll come up with it they'll they'll help work with you on and then you'll realize oh that's where the value is created in my business and so maybe in this machine that's where the machine needs the oil i should go oil that part of it and create all this new output and then of course they'll give me some more because i've created all i've created disproportionately more value out of it and so it's a good conversation to go have if you haven't had it you know with with the people you work with alright good well let's feel we're gonna do that alright good pod yeah let's get out here i feel like could i know could be what i want to never looking back