#23 - Disney for Dogs

who's that good looking for day we're are gonna be opening our first bark box for my dog preston of the lazy box was twenty two dollars for a month subscription so let's see what's inside i made my first million by trying to make a disney for dogs i think when you build a big business like we have now you wanna try to come up with these glorious stories about like how insightful you it wasn't really a big deal like i think it was kinda like the shitty idea of the day we definitely didn't think it'd be a big business i think what we solve pretty quickly was that it was worked you guys are doing somewhere on the order of two hundred fifty million in revenue annually five million is nine enough ten million million money million dollars hundred billion dollar half a hundred and fifty million dollars one or two people in a bedroom actually put threats to these like giant multi dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose add another zero to that price buddy at two more zeros first million every week we sit down with self made millionaires and asked them how did you do it i didn't start a podcast i started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that you find today i wanted to know the real stories what all the details like how did you get your first hundred customers what did it feel like my shit at the hand i ask them how'd do you spend your money now that you're rich and what would you do if you're starting over from scratch again today if you're like me and you wanna own your own business instead of living a nine to five job this is the podcast for you the hustle presents my first million we're here it's nice to meet you thank you i'm excited to talk to you so let's tell the people what it is that's you did and what you've built so tell us how did you make your first million i made my first million by trying to make it disney for dogs disney for dogs i think that was always kinda like the idea i made my cofounder and we love our dogs and we wanted to make cool stuff for them and so that was the premise and why disney is that like are your massive disney fan or what do you like about disney i think any sane person is a massive disney fan i think from a business point of view though what's fascinated with them is that a little bit tough to pick what they are right you know they make toys they make theme pass they make content they make all these different things and so i think what was intriguing for a slightly kinda neuro riding entrepreneur like myself was this idea that you could anger your business is not in product that you were making but in a promise or a problem you solving for your customer and we want to make our dogs happy were you a dog person on a scale of one two crazy dog person like i have a dog i'm crazy about my dog you i see people the dog park who are like they own four dogs they you know eat off the same plate type of thing give me a sense of the spectrum where are you at just before you started this business was that your life passion or no i gonna be appropriate you know monday morning confession i think i'm a little bit with you like i love my dog like my dog is my little child and i will do anything for her i'm not necessarily somebody who like have a hundred dogs at home and so i think in many ways it's the same way that i have of my kid right i love my son but like it's not that i'm going like hoo there's like twenty babies on the plane so i think for me we obviously in the company have like a lot of different kind of perm limitations crazy dog people i think the craziness for me is in the kind together ness between me and my dog and before that you know i i guess like my wife and i was force foster parents for a lot of dogs and so we would help dogs from the south where there's a lot of kill shelters up to new york and we would then host them for a few weeks until they could find it if forever home so i guess in that way i'd probably skew more into somebody who loves stocks that like the the average person person yeah but i you know like i'm not the one who kind of have like a pictures of dogs everywhere and a and a bone in my key chain right and so so given that where did the initial idea come from where were you you know where were you what were you do what were you doing before this what wish you as been where i work because that's actually a somewhat kind of embarrassing story start with the embarrassing story sure so the the headline was that i was the first time i ever met my founder was waking up in a hot shaped bed on a cruise ship in my boxer and that sounds not as appropriate it's a little bit less on a pro story as it might sound so first we're three c cofounder matt cali and i and matt and i were both kind of working in kinda like in between type of roles we'd both build startups ups before and it exited them or kinda of doing our next thing right so matt was at kind of like an incubator type place called dog patch labs yeah so he was running that new york and i had started a kind of halfway home for entrepreneurs called pre hype yep and we were on a summit sierra conference and so many years ago they had one on a big cruise ship yeah i remember that somebody summit at c right summit c and so if you were a little bit of a cheap scape you would pick the the cheap ticket which were like randomly being paired with somebody else and so matt and i were randomly paired and i checked into the cabin before heated did and they've taken this hot shaped bed and they pushed it apart right because it's too random people i thought we had hilarious to put them back together so i put them back together and kinda read redid the bed and then i went up to get i drink i guess and then i got back pretty late and matt had gone to bed earlier and so literally the first time i ever shake was guys hand we're like in this kind of awkward put under one duvet know like hello my name is henry in many ways like i think it's formed the dna of the company in the sense of we then just sat and talk for a long time and then we figure out that while we have very different people you know i'm from copenhagen and needs for iowa we shared a lot of this same values and and i think had in many ways try to build like fast growing venture businesses before and was a little bit fatigued around that right that's kinda like how the idea came around we were just sitting in spit bowling so it was during that first cruise that you guys actually came up with the idea or you had the idea oh to be more concrete like i think what i tend to do with the stuff i do is i find somebody that i think want to hang with for a long time and then we just organized i think it was friday brain yep anything on the second friday or just a little bit well i love my dog at that time i was fostering and man has a duck hugo that he's up obsessed with and like real obsessed as an insane crazy doc parent upset it's a big great dane and he was tough to find good stuff for his dog in new york city so we're like hey maybe we can make like one of these boxes and and do that and what was you know the inspiration was there another the subscription box that was doing well and we should tell people what it is let's give the people that sort of sixty seconds what is the product high level overview of the company and then we'll go back to the story so bark is the company that it's trying to make dogs happy docs and their people we have a number of different products and services the ones that like they say dogs and their people that people their dogs are get well they come first an our arthritis so the the product that we're best known for is either bark box or super chew those are two boxes monthly these subscription boxes with treats and toys and juice that gets sent their theme so there's something funny for both the dog and their parents but we also now do dental products they have membership subscription parks and all these other things and so we've kind of like branch out from being kinda of like a a one product company and so the core thing that kind of helped you guys break through was the twenty ish bucks a month the bark box and and to give people a sense i think the last numbers i saw was like you guys are doing somewhere on the order of two hundred fifty million in revenue annually now so built a very big business off of okay so that's the about the company i wanna go right back to where we were so okay what boxes were you looking at at the time that you're were like hey could we do this for our dogs the only box that really wasn't around at that time was birch box birch one so it was out new york and i knew off catch and haley who was kinda like in the area and in the kind of like the community and so we're were like hey maybe there's like a birch box ish kind of thing for docs but where instead of getting you know where we might kinda like do more traumatic and stuff like that right and so practically i wanted to respectful of them so i called email them and said hey i met them a few times so it wasn't completely cold right just saying hey we're thinking about doing this thing for dogs we think it'll be little thing but i wanna be respectful and combined tell us what you do and if we can at all like do something together as and if you wanted to be advisors to a business we'd love to have you and so they were incredibly helpful like they didn't take their adviser shares but like they did kind of help us out with advice on what pick pack and logistic partner we should have and we were very grateful for for all the the help that they provided amazing okay so decide to start this thing yep and when you were doing this what was the second best idea that you guys were were brands wife what was the name of your c cofounder founder the met me and collie drive i so i think it was matt at the time that you had met in the heart shape head so what was the second best idea you guys had you know what i don't think that was one i think when you build a big business like we have now you wanna try to come up with these glorious stories about like how insightful you were it wasn't really a big deal like i think it was kinda like the least shitty idea of the day and it was a friday and then over the weekend i would built the prototype and wordpress yep and it was kinda like shit i think it even calls something really stupid like duck back also someone of that so i would send that to matt and we would both kind of start to go like we should just see if people like it and so then next week when we met people they were saying well what do you think of you know i as entrepreneurs do like what do thinking what are you working i was like gonna work on this thing and think matt started by somebody was saying hey you should sign up when you're ready and he's like well i have square on my phone i can just take your credit card right now yeah let's see if this is real this is polite exactly right and so i think we got to like seventy accounts and then we're like holy moly now we actually have to ship something to and so at the time collie was had started uber in new york and so she was the i can't remember the eleventh hire or something like that in all of uber so she was like running around kind of like signing out limo dryers and she was hanging a lot in dark patch labs and so we were like hey maybe we should get someone to help us like actually we have to make some deliver on this so we learned her into kinda of like our little three people founder her team and then and she really just ran with it and so you know kinda is this amazing person who just very efficient of getting everything done and so i kind blinked twice and then suddenly there was like boxes appearing in front of us and so this just not way we were just packing the boxes ourselves right you know crowley would run down get some product and you know we got the brown boxes you can buy in the post office and then we start packing and i'm at this like dane cyber at happy holidays with two l's and like seventy boxes they was shouting at me and then we're kinda off right you know never really was like let's start a company he was more like hey let's just try to kinda stumble ourself into this yeah i was listening to this talk by the guy who started stripe patrick carlson and he was saying when you're actually out there doing the thing there's no like cinematic soundtrack happening behind you showing how epic this is that you're doing and that this is the moment and all the stuff it's like you felt very normal almost monday mundane yeah for a long period of time and it wasn't clear that this was gonna be a big thing it wasn't clear that you know these decisions were important and and all the stuff and so the thing i would say to that is i think we definitely didn't think it be a big business right you know we are like we should never raise or we should do a sell be a sinai nice side hustle and all those things i think what we saw pretty quickly was that it was working and in many ways i feel now that i've started a few things success kinda like is somewhat obvious pretty quickly if you have a product that customers really care about and it's a little bit more like the unsuccessful stuff that's a little bit more opaque so we put this product online and like it wasn't like obviously like we skyrocket the next day but like there was real traction like you could feel that people were into it and so what happens to those first seventy customers those are friends and friends of friends basically is that right yeah like people we randomly meet now and so what were the next i don't know seven hundred people where did they come from we started advertising how did you get that next level of traction yeah next time we again like very basic we had no wordpress based website and we were fortunate that we kind of got in in the early facebook days yeah we have product that it is very suited for facebook right because we can show pictures of dogs right and so the next thousand customers were early facebook ads and kinda like instagram kind of stuff again like we were one of the few ones i think we were one of the very early brands that really kind of leaned into it mh and i have a background in at mtv and i think in many ways one of the takeaways from there was that when making content or we're talking to customers if you can kind of like talk to the lifestyle of what you're doing instead of kind of like the thing then it's easier for people to associate with it and easy for them to wanna share it give us an example what does that mean so you're not talking about your product you're talking about the lifestyle what is giving you a different example besides your own i think our content would be more about like what do you do if you're dog doesn't like your boyfriend then it was about like five way to clean the paw of your dog right and i think everything think tend to be pretty utilitarian because most product like owners are entrepreneurs are like well i need to sell my stuff and so i need to tell you why this is amazing think in many anyways what we were trying to do was just to tap into this dog having this theme and again like we did something would be that big so in the early other days we're just posting stuff that we thought was funny and what we thought you know it'd would be funny to pretend that we were dog and trolling people on facebook right and so like we would go into political forms and going like from a dog's point of view i think that and so all those different things kinda like i think just created an atmosphere of playful and i think in many ways that's what we've been relying on ever since yeah and so you said you were at mtv before or you're doing an mtv and my background is kinda of messy i thought i wanted to be a rated of journalism and i started up at bbc doing greater journalism and then got offered to did a radio about mtv and then got to hang there and then it was kinda a funny story was i was then sitting writing my final thesis and everybody had worked thought i was working really hard because i didn't have a computer home so i'd would ride my final thesis at work and so the bosses would come up like you know when they were going home and i would still be there and they'll ask about now i was a super nerd back when i was young and this is like when the internet was just material right so this is late nineties and so they figured that out and said they were asking can you help us build a product or tv show about like this internet this is before we had a website into and it's was like so i came up with this idea which now sound pretty stupid but obvious but it was kinda u but if to show that on air it's really difficult because like the the visual clash and so i had to basically write this code that would take a camera and then kind of make the percent look like she was a flash animation and then show her in the same environment it's the other thing anyway so i came up this i pitched my boss he was like interesting but and then pitch a little bit around everybody thought it was idiotic could it because it ran through a windows like ninety five computer right and the engineers like there will never be i windows to ninety five computer running like i live tv show on the channel so i got a little bit stubborn and and figured out that all the offices was fired for broadcast and so i bribe the transmission engineer and i went live at two in the morning from my studio without permission and so back in the days that didn't kinda land you in jail at mtv so the next morning everybody's calling and like what show i've never seen the show before it's amazing we're gonna see it and everybody turns like why haven't you heard about it just hijacked mtv a in the morning and so the boss at the time which is this wonderful guy called brent hanson new ceiling guy he basically emailed me and said henri question mark and i replied back i don't know anything about it and he goes like dude don't ever do that again but i want the show on air and so i get went from being a producer to basically run product development for all channels outside the us and it did that for eight years or so and been mtv games and a lot of like you know it's sms tv and a lot of this stuff kind of outside right that's pretty cool i think mtv especially during that era was so influenced so it was like that was the pulse of pop culture and music and and sort of that intersection between the two and so yeah i can imagine how that would help you know refine your palette in terms of marketing and storytelling and building a brand that most people who sell things online don't have yeah and i think we had a lot of like thing that was kind of interesting i also found of the fascinating thing is that matt and cali have always trusted my craziness but in a disciplined way and so in the early days we would build whatever we wanted to do and then we would want it for a week and then on sundays matt would do day to day and if we had kind of dropped in numbers we would just roll back a whole week right and so i think we always kinda like intuitive have this fascinating we don't overthink what we try we try like many many many many things quite crazy things also but we're super disciplined about killing them very short after if they don't work and so that kinda like bipolar or kinda like attitude i think have served us well because we don't kind of overthink stuff but we also don't like the things way out if it's not very what's an example of one of the off the wall things you guys tried that actually did work well i think celebrity docs was kinda like i a crazy thing like we were what's celebrity dogs yeah i mean like for a while these like the famous dogs on instagram yeah i think in many ways grew up with it i'm not sure we kinda like made that environment happen or they kind of with they and we just tapped into it but at one point i think we had hundred and fifty dogs on payroll and and so like tuna ml my heart and so how does this happen though there's you see somebody else posting on their dog's account and you're like this has potential and you we find influencer or what what what happened well this is back in twelve right so the influencer thing is not really there yet and suddenly we see for example two my heart which is this wonderful dog that has like crazy faith and courtney the moment of this dog kinda like is posting and she has this kind of very sweet story and she's a wonderful person and so we just reach out and saying hey can we do something together and suddenly we start to roll up a lot of these different docs and i think we started you get you know a lot of followers i think we have about eleven million on the brands page on the brand page and so we start to promote all these dogs and in return they were promoting us and so it became like this very nice s kind of relationship between us and and celebrity docs and that's amazing and were you guys able to sort of track like now that you look back and i'm sure that at that era it was like probably the golden era of like low cost high return how much in sales do you think came from something like that i don't know because a lot of these things i think in the early days it was tough to kind of like a chip directly right but we've always been pretty disciplined by having a c that we stick to so i would imagine it was like within those i don't know what it was back in like twenty bucks of thirty bucks or whatever it was that we would offer these celebrity docs if they convert it into a sale right back then you could be a little bit more like hey we will only pay for subscribers i think these days like you have to pay for a lot of pay to play yeah so i think we've always done a lot of that we've done books we've done ten thousand people coachella for dogs events we've done where when was that this is like something called bok fest we still do some of them not as big because we found out that was a little bit in many dogs in one place but we have stand up comedy nights we have movie nights we write all these different kinds like if you search for dog mom rap we have hundreds of millions of views of seeing there are love songs to dogs and so we've always been kinda of like pretty out there and kind of what we tried to do yeah that's good i like that what other companies or brands do you think do a good job of this when you were talking i had one that came to mind so if you can't think of what i'll share with you but is there anybody that you look at that you say man they're they're doing a really good job with this sort of creative market being really sort of like understanding the customer and delivering them happiness on in all these different ways the one that comes to mind which is kind of odd that in new york city there is a own storage kind thing or like and they have these hilarious kind of like you know we're into space kinda like funny kind of statements everywhere and often they changed them up so they're kind of topical yeah and you said something actually at the beginning you said guys said both come from a venture back startup and this is sort of like a refresher right you were like i'm gonna work on a product i love for a customer i love and let's not raise a lot of money just kinda bootstrap this thing what was that thing you did before is that actually where you made your first million like i think a lot of our listeners really like to know when somebody started this when what was their circumstances were they you know doing okay financially did they have a job what was your track record before this i think i started in london i was filed the founding team or something called juice which was an an online video a kind of portal like hulu before hulu and we raised a lot of money because my c cofounder guys who started that had done skype and so it was think it was fifty million dollars seat round kind of thing right ma'am and sequoia and index and everybody else was involved and i think in many ways we hire than two hundred people in nine months i understood you know like how that type of game was being plate and then matt had been more successful than i and start of world he was part of meetup and was the cofounder of that and then i went out to join a small team in brooklyn afterwards i called hot potato and then end up selling to facebook and matt ended up joining i think a few other startups ups and so we've just been like in the venture kinda like run start world for a while right and i think we were like a little bit of like hey wouldn't it be nice if you could just build a business that was making more money that was spending right and so it was a you know it's just a little bit of like an old school the classics exactly maybe we should try to make some money and were you after those first two were you in a spot where you could just work on whatever you want for as long as you wanted or were those like singles and you're searching for a home run what was your mindset and where was your life at that time i think i've always been pretty frugal so probably been never like had the million and so it was always really about having enough run rate that i didn't have to do stuff i didn't wanna do yeah and so you know when i learned my convinced my wife to kinda move to new york i was like well let's put like i think it was a hundred thousand dollars into kinda our from taking from our savings and we were like okay if we spend this then its game over like we're back in here right and so luckily we made some money kinda like along the way it wasn't kind of like i've always like i had a good job at tv be and so i wouldn't say that i was kinda of like struggling i was kinda of like probably it wasn't rich but i wasn't poor either yeah that's helpful and it sounds like you had a mindset of you wanted to own sort of your time to work on whatever projects you found interesting and that's kind of what i'm reading from yeah and i was doing consulting at the same time right so in there early days a pre high you know we were really helping big businesses figure out how you could stop new businesses and so that kinda created some cash flow and really gave me kinda of like the time to not have to rush right and and so and what was the last job you had that you hate for fifteen they were or anything yeah i was a dishwasher and i was an usher in a movie theater and before that i was thinking i was like delivery guy for flowers but i don't know why i always like lu those things like i you liked making a dishwasher i have dishes that i hated it you know what like i it was in a restaurant and everybody was really nice and because it was such a hard work and maybe it was because was in denmark i i just felt it was like i think it was i i don't know eight bucks an hour seven bucks an hour which was like you know twenty years ago like i'm obscene amount of money for like a fifteen year old right and so i just remember like like getting that cash it was just like an this un undo the amount of money right now like then having to go back and wash yourself down and kind of dishwasher soap because you had so much of the grease on you like what's not necessarily but i don't know like i've always enjoyed being in a environment where there was other people and you had a little bit of a mission and and so no i i always enjoyed where i i don't i can't think of anything like oh that's i've definitely kinda of like being introduced to projects all all companies whether they're like hey you know you should do this and i'm like not sure that'll be good for me but i i've always loved my work and one thing i liked about so i was doing a little bit of research on you last night when i was when when i knew were gonna chat and i said like what do i find most interesting about this guy i liked that you took sort of a systems approach to things so tell me how did you find your wife you did do your search you didn't sort of just allow cupid to to shoot his arrow you you were intentional about it what tell me why you were intentional and what you actually did i think people will find this interesting so i had been single for a few years and kind of felt that experience to be both kind of like intriguing because obviously it's a productive lifestyle to to run around a meet of interesting people i kind of wanted to settle down and so i got a little bit kind of analytic about it so i started to study all the books i could find about relationship therapy and longevity and relationships and start to trying to understand well what is actually the background kind for all these dating algorithm at that time i've been married my wife for ten years so like back then it was like really e h that was out then was publishing some of their data and so i basically created these thirty forty properties that would increase the chance of whoever i met if if she had those kind of property is they'll be a good chance that will stay around for a long time so what what's an example well there's just fundamental been two ways of thinking about it at this i no expert is this just like my sheriff for me yeah either you find somebody who's very similar so very similar bringing very like similar culture stuff like that all you find somebody is very compatible so i don't know if my bricks i think that's been debunked by now but like kinda like somebody who kinda like compliment you up and and for whatever reason i thought the similarity thing was kinda like had a statistically etch and so i kinda i was looking for that problem obviously with kinda of like a features of a person is that it's difficult to map out rapport or like just chemistry chemistry right and so the thesis i have was that if you had somebody with serendipity deputy would be a good proxy for that so if you like somebody they probably hang around people that you also like now the problem is that i think most people if they're single they kind of like mind so to speak kind of their their peer group and so you need to go like one step out right you need to go to your friend's friends not just your friends exactly right so i mapped out who i'd met who had these properties that i really really liked and what were the three properties that you you really carry about for example the ones was the age range but you need that to really another one was kinda like for me it was like where they kind of like cultural background okay and because the statistical kind of element of that yeah and you looked at first your friends who match that yeah and you said okay these are my friends that share some of these attributes and then basically look like either will they be able to invite me to a dinner with some of their peer group or do they have siblings that would allow me to do that yep and so the second dinner was i used to grow up with this guy eras on my street and he's an awesome to dude unfortunately completely the on umbrella he unfortunately died in a traffic accident none of this incredible guy and i thought well he has a kid sister and has all the properties and so i basically said hey you know i'm in town next week you know it's tough to bring some of my single and then maybe you can fingers it bring some of your single girlfriends and and i'm met my wife and we you were you were hosting like these mixer or dinners or something like that you would say hey i'm hosting a dinner for single uncomfortable it makes me feel like a very kind of like i think it's great i think it's awesome what would you feel like comfortable for what i don't know like it's just it sounds so non romantic but i in many ways i do think that it's such an important thing in into your life right you know i hope that i will be with my wife forever right and so there's very few things that you can do that as permanent as as finding a partner right and and so it's a big decision and and i think in many ways if you know if you're a product developer and you're trying to get new customers and you go on a random side that's nothing to do with it like you're just less likely to be successful right and so i think this idea that you can just walk out on the street or walking up to a random bar and then kind of put yourself in a position to be lucky is a little bit naive and so yeah for me a little bit you say like i enjoy thinking about systems or frameworks for how i do stuff and i did feel that this was like a good way for me to put myself in a position where i could meet somebody and ironically i think that she my wife meta is not somebody i think i would normally walk up to in a bond like she doesn't look like what i normally would kinda like go for and and and she definitely thought out i she would think that was a way too annoying if i met her in a about right so i was grateful for kinda meeting in there and yeah and then we met and i i think you i i knew pretty quickly like i i think within three months i decided to propose i didn't had a system so i waited for a year but yeah we've been happy we have we have a little boy now and that's amazing i like that you know the things i like about this is that you're right it's such an important and big part of your life you can leave it completely up to chance or you can have some intent some people's intent looks like i'm gonna download this dating app i'm gonna go to events i'm gonna know go to a speed dating thing whatever it is so people have different ways that they sort of try to help engineer a little bit of serendipity and i think i like that what you didn't do was say cool here's the formula and if somebody satisfies this checklist great let's do it you engineered serendipity right you did some work but then you let real life take over and fake takeover over in a way where you said you know i don't know who i'll me i don't know who i'll connect with but i'm just gonna put myself in positions where maybe i can increase the the sort of odds of getting lucky totally and i think this idea by being purposeful is important like you know i now like with most elements of my life sit down and tried to think about how can become better of doing you know that thing you know being it from health through being family really ships what have you and so i think a lot of us kinda like we are we go little bit headless into the world and then we you know go like oh why doesn't this happen to me oh why does this always happen to me and you're kinda while you're kind of you know like you're standing the side road in in while it's raining like chances are that somebody was splash and water on you or so what are your other systems you said health yeah you you said you have some other frameworks maybe you know what recently i talked to a friend of mind and sc and he wrote a frame up that i use and i didn't really think that again i thought people were thought that would be completely crazy for using this framework but he wrote it up and a lot people seem to like it so i'll share it so i had this thing i called the a plus one framework and a plus one framework is really about the core elements that i'd like to kinda like be quote successful in and so the boxes what i call transact which is really how do i make sure that i make enough money to finance my life it's invest is how do i make something that have compounding interest over time it's assist how can be helpful to close of people that's kinda like more on the business side then it's learn which is about how do you become better understanding what you do as an output and then become more efficient of making that output and it's health how do you make sure the software and the hardware works right you know how you keep your mental your physical health up and then it's family how do i maintain to be a good dad and a good husband it's a relationship how do i get to allocate time with people that i like to hang with either because they're smile on the me and i learned from them all their phone or whatever and then it's ego or self kindness so how to make sure now the most important box that's the old eight boxes the most important box for me is the ninth which is really spending time thinking about this right and do you you actually have like a a grid or something you have a way that you you lay this out these paper boxes yeah i a grid i i'm sure people google that can find it yeah so i i put this out and then every week i spend you know an hour or so you know actually i do it more often i use this as a way to kind of like not being worried that i'm missing something and then a little bit like a kind of like a growth hacker i look at these different elements and i think about it what experiment can i do next week that could increase the chances of having a pasta out com so let me take a non into o one let's take my kids for example like so i have a five year old who i'm obsessed with right am my little boy anton so one terms i noticed in weekends we would play in its play room and i get a little bit kind of bored and so i've taken up my phone and you'd call me on it and it it kills me like you're spending time but it's like how many times is can i build these same blocks exact exactly many time gonna read the same book the next time west that that'd be purposeful i like i should try to figure out what experiments can i everyone that basically has a better output of that interaction model and so something as simple i said like you know when i was about five i thought to play ping pong so i bought a ping pong table right though like a little thing that you put in top your dining table right and so next weekend i i didn't can't because i'm slightly crazy i put in my little air table of my experiments and then i went down to to try that and he left it and so now we had a thing that we could do that wasn't the bad thing that we not checking your phone now exactly right and so i think you know if it every friday date night all if it's you know making sure that if you don't like to do exercise in the morning you try to figure out you can do dance lessons like you know so really brainstorm stone different types of experiments that you can apply to all those different and i think you know for me at least like that's made me much more purposeful and much more kind of like self aware of like how do i try to kinda like become better of of the things i'd like to do yeah can i tell you my system yeah don't think i've ever tell anything anyone this so this is good but i'm similar to you and then i'm weird and want to get better like i the phrase i really like is that life is not about what you get so it's not about the accolades it's not about the stuff you accumulate so life is not about what you get it's about who you become and so then i believe that's to be true so i asked myself well who do i wanna become what does you know the next version of me what does sean two point or look like and then how do i work towards that and so i wrote out for this year i wrote out i have four boxes so i don't have eight because i don't think i could juggle that many things but even four i thought was too much and so the four categories that i had was like fitness or health because after my last startup i got so fat i basically put on like i don't know thirty forty pounds in three four years of like just doing this company and i was like shit i when i looked in the mirror i was like who's this guy i don't like this guy the second one was building my money machine so how do i make it so that cool we sold our company i got this cash you know inflow how do i set this up some so my money will go work for more money and i and i start to automate that because i hadn't really i hadn't had enough money in the bank to care about that but now i could literally live off the interest if i set this up properly let me set it up properly the third one was learn so how do i learn as much as i can this year and the fourth was be a great dad so i just had a daughter like six weeks ago and i knew that was coming so i was like okay how do i set myself up to be a great the first one great family man yeah first one and so decided on my four boxes and i was like these are the four things care about okay cool i need to like you know sort of score myself how i doing an each right now let's be honest and then also how do i plan to improve all these and so i was like well i need to set up some kind of system that does not require willpower or like remembering to go do some work and so i just set up this thing that would email me every morning so i wrote down i was like okay for fitness was the most important thing i could do eat clean great and then the second part of that is like exercise great not rocket science but i just need to do those two things and so in my email i'll get an email and it has you know four or five questions it says are you gonna eat clean today i i i just reply yes or no are you gonna work out today and what time and i say yeah i'm gonna try to go at one pm today then the second one is like what are you gonna do for your family today how are you gonna invest in your family today another one is how are you gonna invest in others today to contribute and the last one is like what are gonna do for your money machine today how are you gonna set yourself up or earn one and the last one is around learning you know what's what's something you're gonna do to expose yourself to something new where you might learn you say only fault but i think you're getting to the eight that i'm also doing i have five actually contribute is a new one because i have this friend ramon who's such a good person he helps everybody else out and i i when i saw that i was like okay i need to add that i need to add that to my things that are important to me is to give to others and then in in the evening it emails me and just it emails emails me back my answers and it just says how'd you do and if sees did i stick to my word did i actually exercise or did i say i got too busy and skipped it and so that's my whole system was just that like just that little email reminder loop and the morning and in the evening and it's been so amazing and i just like if you're out there go set this up use zapier it's so simple it has really improved the quality of my life that's cool use trello so all my the system that i have is that every time i have any idea in my head it goes into basically the trello inbox and so i have an app on my phone that has the only purpose of sending it to that thing or i made an if this and that kinda like alexa or google home things wherever you are you can quickly input down and so and then i have those different categories kinda like out in the board system a basic triage kinda like at the end of the day all these kind of different things i had in my head and then i guess put them in there yeah and so you know i remember the side it's called super organizers that's the one that shippers is doing and he's basically interviewing people like you and me and there seem to be more than like i think nav us the last one that kind of have all these systems for trying to optimize their life yeah super i did read that x that's where i that's the thing i read about you super yeah check it out it's a good interview with you nave who's the founder of fours square i think he had a good one too yeah yeah like it's basically what weird systems have you hacked together to try to like improve yourself because i think one of the things that at least like i aspire to be kinda pretty good at a lot of things or like average good at a lot of things instead of like very good at just one right i think for me success doesn't look like necessarily you know a million bucks but it if that means that that i can't hang with my my son right oh that i can't be a good husband right or and so in many ways i think a how can score as high as possible on all these eight boxes right i don't hear that many people who talk about like being kinda like super average in that way or super above average right but in many ways like i would rather do that then work myself to death or in one of those categories yeah yeah what's the right way to think about that some people say work life balance right they want they weren't the life to be balanced but balance is very hard to achieve in in some ways like you said you wanna level all those it sounds like you don't think that there's like a finite amount of time or energy you don't feel like restricted it sounds like you think you can level them all up to the point where where you want them to be how do you think about it and if somebody's out there struggling to say oh man it's it's really hard to balance this and that and this other thing and oh my god i heard this guys doing eight things what's the right way to think about balance well i don't do the all eight things at the same time right so i think obviously first with the disclaimer with like you know i have the system it works for me like if there's one thing i learned about entrepreneurship and a general life advice is that just because it works for one person doesn't mean that it has to work for everybody else and so take as inspiration rather than kind of like prescription a few things i think you can take these boxes and you can overlap them and so for me for example like i work with people i really really like matt college friends or coworkers you get two for one you get good relationship and you get transact right you know sometimes if you saw joan thing you get transact and invest right because you often make both some salary and you have some stock options right and so there's a way i think of kinda like making sure that you take a lot of these elements you know you have a business meeting it's easy to say you know let's just walk around the block right then suddenly specific in san francisco like you get your hot right on because you're walking over right so i think there is ways of trying to kind of compact these kind of different things and get a little bit out of that and then i thing also it's a little bit about just being realistic with how much to achieve in the different ones you know at a short period of time these things all relative like we all want to be healthier but one of the issues we have is like we don't know what a hundred percent healthy you look like right and so i definitely do that i stress all the time like you know we're at two or three times a week is that enough you get a number and you have high cholesterol and was like you know what it mean and like you know i'm gonna die tomorrow and so i don't think necessarily there's a unique answer but i one hack for me is to try to kinda like overlap stuff sometimes the trick is to separate them so for example sometimes i mean people have really good jobs that they like whether they make a decent amount of money and they go like well i should really leave and join a startup to get equity and i was like well well maybe you should just kinda spend some of the extra cash you made and invest in some so that you don't kinda like take the risk on the cash situation and so sometimes i think it's also about separating the boxes instead of about collapsing them right i i like that alright so we'll finish out with a couple of my favorite questions just to round it up so if you were twenty one years old again today and you couldn't work on the business you're working on now what do you think you'd be interested in doing what business what idea space would draw you in if you're were twenty one years old today i think that innovation is exponential and so i think a lot of us is kinda like chasing the vision of the products that we've thought about the last twenty years on the internet and so i think some of those areas that i think just kind of like might just completely turn everything upside down is the stuff that i think everybody's obvious thinking you know buy stuff like microbiome thing i would like to understand better right it seems that there's a lot of kinda like movement there so i think i would maybe studies some biology all you know like it went san francisco but i do think there seemed to be a new space age coming you know there's we talk about m and i think in in a world where everybody is so depressed there's some nice positivity about like we can conquer new thing right it's a it's a very unique american thing like in european people it's very inspiring yeah yeah because in europe would go like why would you do that it's like here's like yeah that sounds incredible and so you know i definitely went through my twenties and thirties being like super anxious about you know everything and and so you know running into a calm app my five year old now he listened to heads space right to fall asleep and i think like being able to kinda like become much better of understanding your thoughts like if you could learn that in your twenties and thirties i think i would have super superpower right you know instead of just kinda like randomly sweating nervous chasing everything okay like and if somebody listening to this and they're like hey henri henry is great love what they're doing at bark love his philosophy love his a plus one framework what's the best way to follow you get more of you whatever if they get more your thoughts more your ideas you have your podcast so shout out how people should connect with you and and then lastly who should reach out to you who are you looking to get in touch with who do you wanna hear more from if you're recruiting for companies or deals you wanna do or whatever it is well obviously for bark we are always looking for good people we have a lot of open roles if you go to bark dot c forward slash jobs there's is a lot of world so anybody who would like to build the next disney for dogs we'd love to hear from twitter is at worth i check that too much and so so people wanna get connected that's probably the best time and obviously i have a podcast called pre hype where i really talk about people who think in systems and and so if people intrigued of that world day that you take that out great oh awesome thanks for doing ma'am is good of close thank you