so let's do a little public math here let's break a rule he just launched this product he had more demand than he was willing to let it and he led in five thousand people that's twenty million in arr that he had on day one of launches i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less traveler saw me and sam two guys who you can't live without you know i should really think of about one of it to say with before i literally just start talking in whatever comes out of my mouth fine and then also it's nine am for me i you know i wake up don't talk to anyone from eight am to nine am so these are the first words i say period and that's what came out alright well here we are we both have one topic in both of our lists which is very very rare that we have overlap here we both have this topic because there's a business that's sold for five hundred million dollars that is a badass story and it's called follow a boss i had never heard of this company before i find out they sell for five hundred million in cash tell me about follow boss you i think you know more you know how i know about them i know about them for two reasons the biggest reason they're a hampton member and so i saw them post that they had just sold man this story is crazy so i had never heard of this company have you never heard of them till today so there's not really a reason why we would have heard of it them other than for we're just business nerds but it's a real estate platform so it's a it's a vertical software and so basically the gist of it is that if you are a real estate age or if you own a company that has multiple real estate agents who get leads from red zillow whatever else ideally you get thousands of leads per month as well as you have homes that you're selling and people who are buying homes yep track them all it's basically kind of what hubspot or salesforce does but specifically for real estate agents the guy dan he started it twelve years ago i think do you know how he started it that's what's fascinating about it i don't know how he started it but but you're right so the the gist of it is it's a niche down crm so agents get leads they need to follow up with those leads you gotta keep track of all those leads so it's a sort of hubspot for real estate agents just zoomed in zoomed way in on that one niche has it pretty been insane exit so how do they start it so they what was the final sale five hundred million dollars so four hundred million dollars upfront in cash and another hundred million earn out let's how this guy started name's dan from australia but they live in wyoming now so i guess it's it's technically it's a remote company but they're a wyoming startup it's gonna be one of the bigger tech exits out of wyoming man listen to this so he actually went through the foundation do you remember that course like ten years ago it was like a course to teach you how to start to start up the foundation no i'm not that yeah and that's what it was called and it so it's like their greatest success story i guess now but they he went to this thing and he started just trolling facebook groups and he was like working a normal job he was a marketer at a normal big company and he was like i wanna start a company i need some ideas and so he was like well i i've got a buddy in real estate that kind of interests me so i'm so he started joining these facebook groups for real estate agents and he just started like skimming in the all the posts of like what are people complaining about what's like a common thing and he saw this guy complaining he's i've been paying five hundred bucks a month for the software that i hate for tracking all my leads it kinda stinks like how are you guys like tracking your leads and he saw like okay that's interesting and so we partnered with a guy as a developer front of us as a developer they build an mvp they say that it took them like six six months and they only had one customer paying a hundred and fifty bucks a month but he said he goes man we built like this interview that i read with him is a few years old so i don't know if it was true till the end but he's like we basically built our entire business on facebook but not facebook ads he goes i would just go into all these facebook groups as the ceo and i would see them talk about like hey what's a good platform for this and it wasn't even related to follow a boss which was his software company he was like i was just like being helpful constantly and people would click my facebook profile and see that i was the ceo of this one platform or this one company and then they would click off and buy it and i would call them and become friends with them but he became they found this idea just through trolling facebook groups and they would see people complain about stuff and he would dm them on facebook and be like hey i think i'm building a solution for you i don't care if you bite it or not but like could you just give me ten minutes of your time so i could figure out and make sure i'm solving the right problem and he did it so often that that's how they came up with this idea for the software they bootstrap the whole company i don't know how much the revenue was the the the only source that i found was a source that i don't entirely trust online but it was like twenty eight million dollars a year in revenue less than a hundred employees and a huge people have to tell you the revenue when you join hampton don't you just have this can't you just take a peek a quick hip of record here but i would never cite that and so i'm and so i just googled like you know follow a boss revenue and i'm just like what could i see that's public alright so you're so i don't know yeah this this is a an awesome story and a good example of kind of the niche down the niche down zoom in pivot and i think that this is a you know there's many like business plan blueprints so for example those guys from thirty seven signals though what they're doing is they just go hey what's a super popular thing but has too many features we're gonna make it do less and take up less of your life and that's like an as an example you know hey their email client like yeah just gonna do these things in this way less features the better less clutter the better and they're doing it again with once where they're doing software that you only have to pay for one time no monthly recurring right so that their thing is it's the stripped down version of x i don't know if you saw well don't know if you saw but the guys who started tu to needle came out with a new company to see this crazy what's it called boring mattress boring mattress so the guys you created tough to needle earlier were part of the d you know mattresses were like the poster boy of the d wave that happened where kat spur and tu to needle and purple dot big raised a bunch of money burned a bunch of money kinda didn't have a great exit so these guys came back and now it's just boring dot c is the name of their website it's like this is a plain mattress our friends told us that we should tell you about all the cool benefits features that will make this quote different and quote sell but we're not convinced we don't think you'll fall for that so here's just a really good mattress that last you a while no frills and there's only four hundred dollars right or it's like it's cheap yeah five hundred bucks and so that's their new thing and so there's that's one blueprint in a business is to do the same thing with less less frills actually like you know brand less of a brand pump or or less features that you needed to to to use trello is a good example of this all productivity apps had more and more and more features trello was like hey we're just gonna have less features right it's just the equivalent of index cards on the internet that you can move around there's actually another takeaway here though which is how long so you started an e commerce company how long until you hit your first hundred thousand in revenue per month like three months probably okay okay you're involved in shepherd how long do you think it took them to hit their first hundred thousand in in revenue i have no idea i'm just six months yeah quick okay six months so we're talking months hampton took a short amount of time months as well the hustle i think it took nine months do you know how long it took follow up boss to get to a hundred million in revenue or sorry a hundred thousand in monthly well you said had one customer for a hundred and fifty bucks like hanging by a thread for a while so is it more than a year to get to that first milestone four years it's four years years four years take it to so i i was reading this interview with them it him four years and they had eleven employees and they're were at a hundred thousand in in monthly revenue they say they they said around a hundred thousand so it could have been a little bit more but what's crazy is these software companies so i don't know what their revenue was like i said i think it was between twenty five and thirty if you just google like follow up boss revenue that's what i saw they sold for four hundred to well potentially five hundred four hundred upfront what's crazy is these software companies we you and i both have this thing where we wanna go fast we need to learn and have a little bit of this attitude i got zero percent of this you are more of a stick to it kind guy do you think i mean if you're under a hundred thousand of revenue four years in are you doing this still it's hard so like alright so i have an audience now so would be think do you think you could have stuck with it it depends where i was in life if i was if it was twenty six year old sam fifty percent chance if it's where i am now i would say five percent chance it's it would be really hard it would be it it would be hard going into those meetings and be like guys we're gonna review the metrics today ear almost to everybody we're gonna send the revenue number and then i'm gonna to do this and then i say we're at we're forty two thousand in year four and then like alright but but there's other things to be excited about but we talked to dha about this and da is pretty he's pretty low about it he's like it took forever in ray reality da hubspot da is the founder of hubspot hubspot i think grew like actually a lot faster but he was like man the first like six years we only got to like four million or something in red i forget exactly what he said but he like conveyed the idea where he's like it's a s at first what's about time things just grew slower now things were much faster right the benchmarks and the expectations are way different but you have to have faith and of course we're talking about the one that worked and there's a lot there's so many more that don't work but like to have that faith of like this can work and to stick to it for ten eleven twelve years if if you have the right you know metrics this shit pays off this these software companies are so much cooler than what we typically start so i did a i remember many years ago i did a fireside chat with michael birch who was at the time was you know my mentor he was my boss he's a guy who's built four or five super successful internet companies that scaled to millions of users he's basically a billionaire at this point in silicon valley and a bunch of an entrepreneurs came over and they were asking questions one of the questions they asked was how do you know when to pivot or persevere meaning you hear the stories about follow boss or pinterest where it's like there was it was not taking off for a while and then you know they stuck with it and then it did and pinterest take a long time pinterest took a long time like the graph was you know not like some explosive social app at the beginning and and so they i i turned to him because i was like i wanna know this answer too this is like the this is the i wanna know what is the guy who's done it in silicon valley what does he what does he say and he goes this is the hardest question for any entrepreneur and it's deeply personal and situational he goes for every you know one story you hear of a pinterest that just keeps going after twelve months even though there's no signs of life you know there's a hundred people that did that and failed or you just never here hear they don't get to talk at the conference right so he's like it's super hard because you have the survivors ship bias to know which story should you listen to and so he's like like this is the one where there's no real advice you can get from somebody else the one thing that we figured out at our company was like we would set a time box we think we can hit this milestone by this date and setting that time box is really important because it keeps you honest upfront when you're super optimistic alright let's say something then we think that in the first like i i set one for this new company i haven't haven't announced it yet on the pod but i said when i said i think we can get to five hundred thousand arr in the first sixty days so i think it's a five hundred k if revenue in the first sixty days and i said that now if we don't hit that doesn't me i'm like throw in the towel or shut it down it meant like maybe not me you never know lights on the line for these companies no but but the reality is you set that so that you have to have a conversation about why you didn't hit your expectations what what were you wrong about or what assumption did you have that was incorrect because it might be a fatal assumption or might just be oh i was just i underestimated how long it takes to do x and that's okay you could have that conversation the the thing we did out when i worked with michael was we asked a question what metric gives us the most faith so what metric worries us the most and what metric gives the most faith so let's say four years and we don't have a a million or would have a hundred thousand in revenue that's the one that worries us the most we have very little revving okay but what gives us the most fate it's well of the fifty two customers we do have they love it and nobody's churning right then it's like oh okay what can i hang my hat on to give myself the excuse to keep going so i think that's a useful question to ask if you if you don't know whether i should pivot a persevere here or i think what metric is giving me the most faith and what metric is keeping me up at night and then you can almost kinda weigh the two against each other you know if the thing that's giving you faith is like and yeah that one guy told me he likes it it's like that's not a very strong counter punch to the fact that the evidence on your revenue and usage side is pretty low but it feels horrible when you're in it so i posted a link in our md document okay so it goes to a tech crunch if you i remember it goes to tech article but i remember when we were running the hustle i looked up to there there weren't that many media companies to look up to and so i really looked up to business insider and the reason i liked it was henry b it was fairly transparent about their traffic and so henry b they wrote an article it looks like maybe six years in into the company and he made a funny joke he's like we e out a net profit of twenty one hundred dollars on revenues of four point eight million dollars it's basically enough to buy a macbook pro and and he reveals their traffic and you see that it looks like this nice like arc where it's like or this nice graph where it's like exponentially going up but it i remember when i was running the hustle i was like well they're graph looked amazing like it looked amazing but then i zoomed in on this picture and you could see that it's broken down by month and if you really focus on it what you could see is basically february of o nine they hit an all time high and then they didn't surpass that until something like december of o nine so basically for whole year the the for ten months yeah the whole year which i think they it looks like they started in o seven so for ten months two years into the company the monthly traffic which for a slightly business insider that's how they would gauge if they're doing a good job it basically either went down or didn't go up and when you do that every single day every single week for ten months it feels miserable and then you zoom out and you like see like okay well it has gone up but these graphs are never a smooth going up and a lot of times sometimes i imagine for two years it'll be pretty shit three years for years it'll be shits and then after a while it starts picking up if you do a handful of things right but that requires extreme faith and it's very very very hard to manage your emotions every day when it's like that i totally agree this is a tony robbins said this thing he goes up the number one choke point of any business is the psychology of the owner like every problem you think your business has if you do the root cause analysis it goes right back into the root to the psychology of the of the owner right let's say oh we're not growing fast enough why because you know we don't have our paid acquisition sucks why because we the guys run our paid acquisition has been doing it for six months in his life you don't have somebody experience why because we're not hiring the right people why because our owner hasn't made that a priority and isn't willing to spend money right or or is afraid to spend money on on talent and so everything just comes back to the psychology of the owner which is both empowering but also i think it's scary for some people the empowering part is it's in your control the scary part is shit it's my fault and it goes back you could also like go back to like what inefficiencies or like where does the owner or ceo where do they like suck so like for example i remember at the hustle i was always fearful of overs spending and so i was cheap about shit and i was actually overly cheap and then when there there was times when facebook ads opened up it's like dude we gotta spend more here looking back i should have spent way more but i didn't eat because i was being too cheap and like why am i cheap well because of all this other shit that i experienced in life and so like it's basically like what did they say like a person with money is they it's just gonna like mag the things that the traits that they already have or like you always say that with people when they're drunk like oh you're you're the true feelings are just gonna come out right it's the same thing as with running a company and you gotta like master that inner game it's really hard yeah for sure let's do another one i wanna talk about let's do end this one peter levels is insane tell me the peter levels is insane one that's a good headline i love the sky so peter levels we had in the pod i think we've only had him once but he's got an open invitation if he wants to come on again so peter levels we both love him he has like four or five different businesses that he runs i think he's by himself doing it collectively his businesses probably do two million a year in sales and he's super transparent about all of so he puts his revenue in his bio on his twitter he shares everything really fascinating thoughtful guy did you see what he did with his stock portfolio so he basically so click that tweet and you'll see it but he basically created a google sheet and he you can kinda i i don't he doesn't explicitly say it but you can do the math he says here's how much my stock portfolio made me and it was up thirty two percent so you can kinda like just do basic algebra figure out how much he has in his portfolio and he reveals every holding that he has and i think that a i'm happy he is doing this b i would never ever do this though like it's this is like his transparency is wild but it's super fascinating to see what this guy is doing when it comes to like sharing his numbers out in public it's pretty pretty fascinating gotta say two think about peter so first peter come back on the pod we miss you you've done a bunch of interesting stuff this plus your new ai stuff that we didn't talk about it yet so i wanna do that second we've had a bunch of people on this podcast some that have big names some that have you know big big track records of billionaires or built this hundred billion dollar company or whatever nobody and i mean nobody has a higher approval rating amongst entrepreneurs on the internet at peter levels have you ever met anybody that is not a fan of peter levels i've had billionaire friends like or associates in in a in a conversation and logo that guy's doing it right everyone likes this guy put this guy's profile picture up on the on the fucking screen go go to youtube i just look at this guy's profile picture this is your personal branding seminar look at this guy's proper picture it's him on a couch in the like international pose of like guys scheming on the internet just messing around having fun on the internet by himself he's on a couch half his body's dangling off he's got his laptop he's nowhere no shirt he's got his laptop up on a pillow because you know laptop starts to just sc you after a while and he's at this messed up angle is next all messed up but you know this guy is a one man band just having fun and i this is why you're right ceos of like you know major companies are like that guy back guy's is doing it alright because everybody is jealous of being able to be this guy a guy who's just one man in a laptop travels around the world builds projects whatever he wants for fun he builds cool stuff like an artist that whatever he builds tends to have some some juice behind it because he's a very creative guy he's had many failures but who cares and he's got a bunch of successes he's very open about them he's not trying to sell you anything peter levels is a hero amongst makers and nobody i i will contend this nobody has a higher approval rating on the internet amongst entrepreneurs and peter levels he's great man he's great and i think on this podcast a lot of people like oh you're talking about just big companies too often or whatever and it's like we always reiterate this is like we like people who carve their path and that path could lead to a huge exit it could lead to something really small like just you could just be a great artist it doesn't matter if it's a big money thing or not and peter levels the reason why he's so fascinating is he has carved the hardest path and he sticks to it he's very value based really really really cool guy he he did a tweet that again he goes only four out of the seventy projects i've ever done have made money in chrome ninety five percent of everything i ever did fail by hit rates only five percent so ship more this has fifteen thousand likes is just literally a like a you know like a vs code like a a screenshot of projects that made money and group four he's got no mad remote talk re based and a youtube network this is before his ai think and then here's all of his lit all of his projects and it's stuff like ice cream chat tub gift book tell taylor telegram chatbot suit startup up pat treats dot com places to work fire calculator i don't even know what any of these are but each one of these is like you know a a great week it's like you know a great weekend that that was had by hit by him doing doing these projects you know that meme where it's like babe wake up sean prairie just tweeted again or like babe wake up you know like peter levels bought a domain yes whenever peter replies to one of my tweets it's like one of those it's like babe wake up peter just said he liked what i'm doing that's how i feel about this guy really cool guy and i have a theory that people ultimately what what is lacking in most people's lives is that they don't live life on their own terms and then the way that that expresses itself is you have a lot of fun when you're living life on your own terms when you're just doing your not your thing you're doing your thing and if you're doing your thing you're having you're having a good time peter levels that profile picture of him on his couch like all crooked just on his laptop he's doing his thing and i feel like this is honestly it's a bit of why people like this podcast we're not the most prepared or researched or well spoken or whatever but people can tell we have fun in our lives that we like we literally just do is shit that we wanna do and we're having a good time and it might be that the things we do are not at all the things you wanna right sam's like buying a ranch and like you know tipping cows and i don't know what else this shit you do i wanna do all that this but i can tell that you wanna do all that stuff and that's awesome it's great that you wanna do all those things you know builds your like gym and their farmhouse and whatever all that good stuff i think that peter levels is a great example of somebody who's just living life on his own terms and that is one of the most attractive traits that people have in general and it's so funny because what most people do is the exact opposite peter levels has a bunch of influence but when most people try to become influencers they you know strip down their personality and try to appeal to others and and people could sniff that out yeah i i i i just think he's the best and i dm him on a regular basis he replies to me ten percent of the time so peter if this makes it to you come on the pod man you come on come back on what do you got alright let's do so another person who is gone from zero to hero brian johnson have you seen a t shirt that he wears lately don't die yeah don't die don't die that's the new that's the new brand you know what i like about it it's the same look as the austin three sixteen t shirts yes guess it should've just done johnson three sixteen don't die in fact it's a good man make johnson three sixteen don't die shirts because that's who he should become alright so i was looking at the other day because i saw that brian johnson finally started to sell something and me and you had made a prediction about six months a year ago we said you know what i don't think brian's doing this for the money i don't think he's doing this for the fame although he's gonna make a lot of money and i'm sure the fame you know the attention feels good in the moment very obvious prediction very obvious prediction but we said dude is this the greatest pre like pre launch marketing stunt ever because what he did was he basically turned himself into a character and a lot of people have done this in the fitness niche but he's not a fitness influencer here that he brand himself as a longevity influencer a live forever a don't die influencer and he spent a couple million bucks on tests and content and building his brand he came on pods like ours and you can look at google trends you could see the interest in brian johnson growing over time actually we should map out when our podcast was with him on that trend because i'm curious where that was and he has built an amazing following and he's doing everything you should do as a as an influencer not he wants to be an influence he's doing everything you do like don't know if you've seen his meetups that he's having lately these runs that he's doing yeah they look awesome these take people and they chant like don't die then they like run up a hill and there were something like that and then they get at the bottom and they eat like just just a pot lint said they're all eating lentils amazing and so he's building this little cult and it's it's a pretty thing so he came out with his first paid product did you see it it was it it's the meal service right no no no so he came out with like a oh it's kinda like a meal service it's like basically it's a a part one of his blueprint diet as a rent you know ready to eat sort of like delivery package i think you pay three hundred thirty bucks a month and you get this thing twelve thousand people applied wait literally wait what is it how's is it not you you set you implied i was a little wrong with meal service it is a meal service but it's just like powder right yeah yeah it's not like meal delivery it's not like blue apron but it is like know the supplements and the drink and the one whatever it's like some version some skin down version of the of his like anti aging protocol got it it's the blueprint self experimentation study and there's like a level one and there's there's gonna be a level two a level three so there's sixty seven interventions in this and it looks like there's a couple of powder there's a bottle of olive oil and then there's a bunch of pills i like all of those things powder pills that powdered pills and oils send me out so he he got five thousand pete he i told thousand people to apply five thousand people paid so let's do a little public math here this break rule he just launched this product he had more demand than he was willing to let in and he led in five thousand people that's twenty million in arr that he had on day one of launching this front at twenty million of arr for a subscription supplements business essentially is like a two hundred million dollar business what do you think athletic of greens is that revenue wise they they raised at at one point two billion in i meant their evaluation a hundred a hundred fifty is my guess maybe two hundred wow max okay not yet you know but this day one day one come out the gate with twenty million and this is he led in less than half of the demand that he had right so he could've have been at forty million if he if he wanted to again i don't think he's doing this for the money but goddamn that's a that is an impressive start of business and it shows that i have this phrase now that i say and my wife doesn't think it's cool she's the only one i've tried it on but i say this i say all content is now marketing and all marketing is now content and this is what brian johnson did he was put out content it happened to be marketing and that that marketing is now leading to a lot of sales for his new protocol when you say that to your wife if i can just hear the world's loudest eye roll of like shut the fuck up sean that shit works on those fucking do out listen to you but take out the fucking trash sean did you worry about the back and cheese like i asked you to or yeah where you talking about it this is awesome it's sort of like have you seen that what's that movie where they talk about the biggest short and ryan go character you know they're like what are you getting out of this ryan and he goes look look listen bidding you're getting the ice cream you're getting the nuts you're getting the chocolate syrup you're get the whipped cream and when this works out i'm gonna get the cherry on top that's my beef i just get a little bit of of this that's that's that's what brian johnson is zoom with this business he's doing everything else i think actually just cause because he's a door and he enjoys this shit then it just so happened that he got famous and now i he's was like yeah yeah that's pretty cool okay fine i'll do that too you know and i dig that and isn't it weird like why do you think we have so much trust and faith in the sky it's part of it is because he already has like the f few money and so we think like he didn't give a shit he's just doing this just because but the way that he's turned himself in the character is actually really interesting in his case there was a high barrier entry he spent millions of dollars that seems doing this he also kinda live like a hermit for two years to like perfect this but the idea of turning yourself into a character and then doing it in front of a lot of people that's actually a really appealing that that's an exciting route to go for a lot of people where it's just like you change your identity and you go all in on this and you could actually make an make a great living by doing this it's the same reason i bought shoes from these over toes guy right i probably never bought shoes from any brand besides nike in like twenty years and then i see this guy who's over forty years old dunking a basketball i see what he looked like before he was doing his thing and how he had knee surgeries undeniable proof is a very very powerful lever this guy literally just does like a summer salt that he gets up and dunk the basketball he's is like this forty five year old white guy which shoes he came out with like a pair of shoes that are like you know the knees over toes like thing not great shoes by the way for the record definitely don't buy v one of anybody's anything so so you know it wasn't great but i have a a high amount of faith and trust in this guy because again all content at marketing so for two years he was just put out free content didn't sell a thing and so for two years all he did is put out very helpful content and showed an undeniable level of proof that this guy was in incredible shape that his legs were super super strong and that you know where he started to where he was this is a very powerful transformation so anybody who wants to have that transformation will trust him and then when he comes out with a thing and he says hey is what i use people will buy it and it's very very effective by the way i also bought knees over toes shoes before he came out with that shoe company he was always wearing these other shoes and i also bought them i also bought this that that white the shoe that looks like a ass stand that's like seventy dollars or something forty five dollars couldn't even really get it on i have like a thick american foot or something like it does fit in this like european shoe dude i wear the shit out of them i love those shoes i like i remember seeing the picture and like googling like what are those shoes they're not those across they look cool though what do they look great like fu or something like that like fu or it's like such the dev lots fu guys too bad they were cause yourself but can i do a quick thrill of the shale by the way okay go alright so basically at hampton we've got access to all this data and so in order to grow we just decide i love data you know they say data's is a new oil i already mentioned i love oil i don't know how to i don't how to make money off of it yet but somehow oil is good we've been doing these surveys where we survey different industries and we can get benchmarks for different different industries right now we just did one on agencies and so we did this thing where we surveyed sixty agencies they give us all their revenue all their profit and we did like a this school survey where we oh here's a benchmarks for profit per employee revenue per employee you can find it at if you just go to join hampton dot com and then you go to our blog you'll see the surveys we did one on wealth so like people say their net worth how much money they're spending each month how much income they're at making each month how much they're working each week we just did one an agency so if you're an agency owner check it out but more so that's that's the shell here's the thrill part i think sean that if i if i decide to do this have you ever heard of the have you i think this could work have you ever heard of like benchmarking i i i didn't know anything about this industry you know anything about benchmarking yeah of course i didn't know that people would ever pay for this and so there's like the the most common form of event benchmarking is salary benchmarking so there's a company called salary dot com and then there's like ten or twenty other ones who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars whatever i think in a couple years if i get enough data i think we could i can spin this off and create a data company where i do benchmarking for different industries and the problem that we'll be solving is let's say that you're an agency let's say you're e comm business and you're above fifty million in revenue you wanna know are we spending the right amount for ads are we spending the right amount for employees whatever i think we can build a cool data business office so that's to thrill the chill but i just wanted to call my shot and say maybe eventually i think we're gonna do this i don't think to call your shot if you say maybe eventually the call your shot is i'm going to do this stuff like we're sick only requirement of calling your shot is to say i've gonna do this not call them my shot ass do am i so happy to do this which probably won't but it could kinda to work it's like in babe is went like this it's at the point it is when like like a shrug dude like yeah dude also you reminded me of something i don't mean to to rain on your your thrill over your shield here but do you remember have you seen these leaked leave i'm sure you've seen this because we're both internet like what's it called like the people who look for fossils whatever yeah when mark zuckerberg had his old like aim messages leaked when he was nineteen years old starting facebook and he he's like these these idiots are downloading this here's the transcript he goes he just d a friend just because you can't wait to brag he goes yeah so if you ever need anyone and if you ever need any info about anyone at harvard just asked i have over four thousand emails pictures addresses of social security numbers as friend goes what how did you manage that people just submitted it i don't know why they quote trust me dumb bucks this is sam it is slack about hampton he's like yeah every agency just submitted their profits their revenues their growth tactics they trust me for the record x dude do that i wanna say i have access to zero of the documents that people submit for in order to join hampton i've got zero access i purposely did this just like for years i purposely didn't ask your name of your e com business i just like i don't wanna know because i wanna accidentally say anything i have zero access to this not only because i don't wanna say anything and also because i just literally don't know how to your you know like use computers and like log in and i know only have a password you that was the equivalent of you know no i'll blame glass like i got pulled over i don't even a speaker i don't even know how to use my computer i don't i kidding don't trust me alright let me stop big funny about that let's let's move on and let's do another one alright so last year i invested in this company called consensus and they basically it was like an ai company for research for like scientific research so if you wanted to like figure out like you know instead of like reading individual studies this website would just tell you in aggregate what many studies would show and they're only doing okay there it was basically just two guys and they're were still just trying to figure it out like it it it was like this sounds interesting but like i don't even know if this is gonna work let's see well something happened a few weeks ago that i think it's gonna change their business but i think that there's an inflection so basically like when the iphone came out the app store happened and we heard stories about pandora so pandora was a company before they were the music service the app store came out and they're like oh let's just use our service and pivot and build an app they're one of the first apps that's what made pandora popular when covid happened there's companies like better help which is like therapy online or there's like telemedicine because the laws during covid change were a doctor can prescribe meds cross state lines there's been all lot a bunch of these right now one just happened so i think january fourteenth so i think it was ten or january tenth open ai created an app store they've kind of did done this where they've like made their own like you can make your own gp and all this other stuff but they've they created an app store i don't even think they said what the pricing was so with the iphone app store i think the developer gets what seventy percent of the revenue apple gets thirty percent open ai hasn't even said what that what what it's gonna be so there's still really early and so this company that i invested in they're like oh well like our thing is going okay but like what if we just like went all in on this like plugin in for open store and so their version is basically like you just type in you ask it questions medical questions and it just gives you a slightly better answer than open but it's a lot better or at least enough that you wanna pay for and there's not that much traffic right now or not that many new apps in the open open app store but this is one of those inflection moments so here's a two more examples so remember honey that company that was like what do they do coupon codes for your a website and then grammar did the same thing they both did that with the chrome store you have a bunch of friends because you kinda ran in that world where people did this with with the facebook platform so z i don't know how much money they eventually made but it was at one point multi billing dollar company i think right now we're gonna see like a facebook store you're gonna see like all these mafia awards all these like weird games i think you had a buddy was the guy's name dan who went to camp f who started like o g pop or something like that what was that i called draw something was the game that everybody played and it i i think he had a multi hundred million dollar exit i think this is right now about to happen with the open like plug in store it's really fascinating what's happening i thought this was interesting you asked the guy or somebody asked the the the founder he said i think it's gonna be something between like more than the chrome extensions market less than the app store you know short term it's awesome for marketing and functionality for users and open is footing the bill on a lot of the compute costs in the medium term we have two x the usage of the next biggest gp and i think canvas the next so this is the number one gp yeah yeah it's taking off and these guys they're smart guys but it was still when they were starting their company when we invested it was like i don't know hopefully we'll figure it out and there was a time where i was like you guys better figure this out soon like i don't know if this is gonna work out and then this inflection happened this change happen this is awesome i just went to their site i didn't do the chad longevity think but just their app it's really so you go there you ask any questions so i just didn't our micro plastics dangerous for humans and then it has all these papers but then you hit s synthesized which i think is the credits that you have to buy if you but you start with twenty free credits and it says summary we looked at ten papers the studies suggest micro plastics are dangerous for humans and the ke toxic chemicals contaminate ecosystems and are linked to various health issues including cancers and i mean just system disruptions and then it says we looked at the fourteen papers yes was forty three percent of time possibly fifty seven percent time no zero percent of the time and that was the like that was the thing and then you could see below each specific paper and it's like tag like oh this is a rigorous journal this is highly cited and you can kinda get ai to summarize each of those papers this is this is a sick like this is a sick product it's cool and it but by the way just like all great stuff it did not start that way i'm imagine you didn't tell me about this this is i why don't i invest in this this is great it wasn't obvious and by way it's still not obvious this company just like any any startup it could still totally fail not work no but it's a very interesting bet right like to do a vertical localized google specifically for scientific papers and ai being the the the why now of what you could do differently than you could do before this makes a lot of sense and it was i'll give them the shot it's consensus dot app that's our website but the point being a consensus is great i think it's actually gonna work out and these guys they they kinda put their head down for like twenty four months and like are really starting to figure out there's gonna be a lot of stuff just like them on the chat g store because i think when we invested them i don't remember exactly i'm almost positive the word ai didn't come up one time like it wasn't like it was like we have this like i we know what the outcome that we want to what what what we wanted it to be but we're not entirely sure how we're gonna come to that and then they start figuring out ai i got more popular and then this chat store opened up and they're like boom we found the path and i think that path is opened right now now it's more competitive than than the app store and it's more competitive than chrome because there's more people who are doing this stuff open is already huge but that inflection is happening right now this is one of those things that's happening in real time and i wanted to call out because i think open ai even said we don't even know how what payment term we're gonna give these people like we're they're still all figuring it out but this is happening this second right now there's an opportunity here for a lot of different companies they're like a we're around like you know some celebrity relationship like we don't we don't know we don't wanna put a label on it yet so we're just we're just exploring each other it's figuring out you know who we are together and individually yeah it's definitely trying to figure it out have you seen them per complexity have you used per complexity i don't like it i don't know why people are going that's for it it's pretty cool it's just like open ai but for some reason it's like has a science spent that's one of these companies i know i don't know much about it i this is an uninformed opinion but i feel like every vc who missed like you can't get into open ai or if you could get it now but at a hundred billion dollar valuation it's not much money to be made as an investor there and so all the capital you know realize all the investors realize holy shit this is the big thing and they're like what's the next best competitor and they're like alright stable diffusion and it could complexity the next thing and the next thing and these they get be super inflated valuations and i don't know i'm not i'm not really a believer in that i think those get way ahead of the skis and i just seen that story many times this happening crypto this happened in you know when mobile when mobile is happening and you would get you know for every instagram you would then get the ten super funded other apps that didn't make any sense and yeah i i i'm i would take i would take the under or i would short that that after the pod go to your email and typing in consensus i'm almost positive that i heard about this company and you were cc on the email just i just wanna put that out there i i it was two thousand two it was two years ago i'm almost positive you you're typing into the pod take some lighter fluid porn on your eye light it hold no one's signs slides that what way happens just we're gonna burn it down and hide it do a rant about something so i've had a realization that my world like a lot of the content i'm consuming was algorithm alright that's pretty obvious you what does that mean just twitter tiktok whatever yeah everything i was using you'd go to you go to twitter it's an algorithm telling you here's the content you need to go to tiktok all algorithm can shit facebook instagram yes all of that even email email is not really algorithm exactly but it's you go there and it's here's what other people want you just to look at here's my problem hey here's my problem read me right and then same same thing with you know all news go to news say hey here's everybody's problems on the other side the world here you know you pay touch on this i'm calling it the intentional internet which is i started really being intentional about oh no if i'm going on the internet right now what is it that i wanna see what is it i'm curious about what is it that i want to learn about and then i go in and i'm stiff farming algorithms left and right you know i'm marsha on lynch on that one run where he just sheds eight defenders it goes all the way and just rumble to the enzyme that's me on the internet now and i think more people should be doing this join me on the intentional internet where you get on and you don't just you're not just you know little puppy just eating the puppy child that the algorithms give you go on with some intent and say what is it that i'm looking for i want maybe it's i want certain type of entertainment maybe it's i want a certain type of information or i wanna be inspired okay so the go look for the things that will give you but you follow it that way you follow thirteen thousand people on on twitter the trick is you don't go to twitter right what do you do well twitter's is not a great place for this right because if you go to twitter you're gonna get your first thing here to start up this there's the feed and you're gonna start scrolling what are you gotta start reading books that's very unlike you so i make a little list say you know what curious how this started or i'm i wanna learn more about this and then i'll go to youtube google or wherever looking for that but just that adding that little paper step in between me and the internet has been very very useful and i learned a bunch of interesting things the last three days i got more out of the internet so i'm just putting that out there for anybody who what's been on your list i'll give you an example i was doing research for one thing and i saw this name do you know this guy eric van yes he's amazing i have got a oh wait are you talking about ricky van bean or eric oh maybe he's ricky ricky van ricky ricky facebook guy yeah facebook dude dreamy super dreamy this guy's dreamy shit i've talked to him a bunch via email a handful science the internet pete butt ads or something no this one's great so this guy created college humor yeah and then he created a couple other things so what did he create create halt call humor and then he but he created a few other things cracked or whatever then he bundled up sold it to ia and he was running media at ia and then here forgetting the biggest thing they started which one so at college humor this was like pre youtube days they create this was like eb balm world days they created a better way to host videos yeah and that's what vimeo is which they sold the ia ia spun off and became a billion dollar plus publicly traded company so creates vimeo crates called humor goes to ia ia is a super interesting company with like a very cool pe degree of people that come out of it like tinder came out of ia you know there's there's a bunch of really interesting things about ia they they're sort of like the cook they're the pro and gamble of the internet very conglomerate of internet sites mostly media and then dot com i think came out of there now he's head of like create head of like video or head of creative content at facebook and i was like oh this guy's interesting i kinda just noted it because i i think i was thinking about call humor and so i just who who's behind that what are they doing now and i think this what are they doing now has been one of my threads so i'll i'll think of something that was cool and i'll be like where do they go i haven't heard about their new album what what are they working on and i'll go look at that that's just a very it's a very useful way to go look at things so by the way ricky ricky ended up marrying and i don't think they're together anymore but he yeah like if you just you could just google like tabloids whatever he married allison williams you know the famous like actress whose father's brian williams the famous news newspaper and if you google his name the guy is just like hanging out with like all these celebrities and stuff and he's like seems so cool like he this guy's really a shit so we acknowledge strategy facebook same anyways what what's my point so i'm i'm i'm i have a list of cool companies or cool things that were built you know ten years ago and i'm wondering what are those people doing now call humor was one of them so i go and look at this guy and then i'm like i'm researching vimeo and i'm i'm looking at him and then i'm like he gave this talk in two thousand eight at this media conference and it becomes backing in eight years later i know if you ever seen this talk but it's a it's a i mean it gets no views on the internet but for nerds like us who create media and content on the internet it's very interesting to see what somebody thought in two thousand eight which is like the iphone has come out but it hasn't changed the world yet and like literally the presentation he's like yeah i canceled all their black berries are not gonna be doing x y z and back then you know we created called humor it became the number one comedy entertainment site on the internet way bigger than cartoon network and all these other like incumbents okay that's interesting then he comes back at years his later and he's like here's what i got right and here's what i got wrong and one of the things he was talking about and he's like he's like at some point people on the internet will stop leaving the internet like they won't they they'll stop using the internet as a springboard to go onto netflix or on to get get cast into a tv show or whatever like they'll realize that their youtube channel is worth more than than those shows and they won't wanna leave to go do those and they won't view this as a stepping stone and that's happening basically he had like four or five predictions about where the where the world was going he put up the all the sites like a viral nova and worthy and whatnot he's like right now these are the hottest sites in the world their traffic is crushing ours and they're they're getting more traffic than anybody more traffic than god is like i think all of this is going to zero i think this is highly comm and it's not gonna work for these reasons it was absolutely correct and so it was a very interesting to get learn from this guy who's kind of a master at what he does and i've done this before with like but i looked up all the info influential kings so the guys who created like you know proactive that acne you know medicine like how did that story happen right but if i just log on the internet i just take the the the last thing that somebody tweeted or the late latest tick tiktok somebody uploaded you know i'm playing something their game not mine right so i'm just trying to have a little bit more intention when i when i when i use the internet it's you know i'm not the type who's just gonna go like total digital detox and that's not use internet but when i do use it i'm trying to use it in a bit of a healthier way so ricky did he he predicted that the viral nova of the world are he predicted that it was gonna go to zero and they did yeah did i ever tell you the story about my partner joe and hampton and a bunch of other stuff did i tell you a story about little things you mentioned it before that he got like really me tell you the most trafficked facebook referral right and then he had an offer to sell and he didn't take it herself yeah at the story so joe joe's an an amazing entrepreneur so he started his first company he was an ad tech company he sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars when he was like twenty five so he just had this like huge success at a young age then his next business he started was called i figured forget exactly what it was called but it pet flow it was a pet food company and they started it before chewy except he was a little conservative and he was like we have to spend money profit on ads and that's hard to do and so we're gonna go a little bit slower chewy comes in and go not after that we're gonna lose money for the first six or twelve months at a customer and we're gonna do such a good job but they're gonna come back and joe was like that's a dumb strategy turns out it was right but in order to make pet flow grow he created a blog where they just wrote content on pets and within a very very very very short amount of time they started getting ten twenty thirty million people a month coming to this blog on pets and he's like screw that let's just do this blog and so within four years they were the most shared website on facebook bigger than viral nova bigger than buzzfeed bigger than hu poe all these publishers that were huge in the two thousand fourteen fifteen era and it started getting something like two hundred and fifty million unique a month to their website and they were scaled up i think to ninety million in revenue in four years it was a huge company i went to i called emailed them i went to his office he had these studios and they're like facebook lives the next big thing we just built out this two hundred fifty thousand dollar studio in the in the manhattan office and it's gonna be the greatest thing ever we have a hundred and fifty places is gonna be the biggest thing ever the problem of course that we all know was z does with z once and they built this entire company little things dot com on the back of facebook and they got an lo to sell the business and they were literally three weeks from selling they're gonna sell for hundreds of millions of dollars facebook puts out this annual report they go we're actually changing rep pivoting from this thing to this thing and three weeks away or something like that from this deal closing for hundreds of millions of dollars the company backed out and within six months the business basically laid out everyone and had the shutdown all in a matter of like six or seven months of like we're on top of the world making a hundred million a year too now we are not and it's a crazy crazy story if you google like his name joe spy little things you'll see the story i think ink just did some big story on it but it's pretty wild the lessons we learn unfortunately that's you know that's like it's it's cool to be like yeah you learned so much for failure but it's like god sometimes it's so painful yeah he was basically neat win he posted this publicly he was like i was set to make fifty million dollars and three weeks away from the closing it went away and i he like has always crazy by the way that what's he like to work with because you pick him as your partner for hampton why'd did you pick him he's the best man he's the best he's the best he's a harmonious partner he's even ke he's very not like the partnership dynamics because you've told me about those what is he what's his edge what's he great at and what's it what is he like what is he amazing at you ever hang out with israeli guys and like israeli guys have a culture of like they're quite competent because they served in the military and they're like you're really good at stuff oftentimes they're good at spotting opportunities because that's also part of the culture of like just like negotiating well and like finding interesting deals he is so good at spotting opportunities and he's technical and he's so fast i've never met someone who's like significantly faster than i am at making stuff and going all in and like he'll just find an opportunity he'll build a website for it and he's like yep this is what i'm doing now and he pounce so fast i've never met someone who moves faster one thing that we did that was so great did you ever have this with ben or any of your other partners where you do like a you're like look before we like hop in bed and before we get married here let's just sit down and map out what do you want your life to be like what do you want in five years and ten years what do you want on a to day basis and you like write out like how you wanna live what you're willing to what you're willing to give up what you're not willing to give up have you ever done that not exactly but you know you told me you did that i think there's a version of that that do but i'm not i think everything changes so you know it sounded really great in theory and i think it's a useful exercise just to clarify your own thoughts but i don't i think people themselves are quite inc inconvenient in general yeah you change you changed but also you don't know what you want and also you say one thing because it sounds good or you think you want it but then something comes you know something comes up and your you know it's your stated preference versus revealed preference i think it's very hard to get to people's revealed preferences their true preferences or their true their true you know desires or or whatever and so i think it's a good exercise to do but i don't put as much weight in it as you did i think well i think that i think that a it starts a really good conversation so it's like look let's be transparent just like you should with like your wife or girlfriend you're like let's talk about like what type of life that we potentially want and let's be very open about that so i think that that like creating that like let's just be very clear about and we'll we'll acknowledge that it will change so i think it creates a great version of that but joe's also forty two i think he's older than me and so i would think that at that age he has a little bit of solidified the values that he stands for and so it was helpful i think if i did that exercise when i was twenty four it would not have been good in fact i did do that exercise when i was twenty four and it sucked i said i wanted do you wanna know what said i wanted when i twenty four i said i want ten thousand employees i go wouldn't it be awesome get had ten thousand employees and then i hired three people and and i'm like out the window i'm like yeah that's that that's a no for me dog like this then we gonna work but so i think if you're a little bit older and you have some experience you might know a little bit more you want but when i was younger no that wouldn't have worked my thinking on this is the buffet thing if you want some a partner with in energy integrity and intelligence i think that's the like core thing you i look for at least which is basically and in order energy is the easiest to spot and it's the easiest one to try to write off if somebody doesn't have it meaning seems like a seems like a nice to have it's actually not a nice to have for me it's a must have for me and and so energy is the first one that shows up and it's the easiest one that i've tried to talk myself out of with certain people and that's been a mistake every single time i've done it who have you worked with that's high energy and like almost exhaust you because you're like i can't keep up su like that he's super high energy but not an exhausting way now like i get energy from that so it's all good i don't mean exhausting like they wear you out but you're like oh my god dude you're you're almost hard to keep up you move so fast that's inspiring yeah everybody that yeah it's a but it's done a good way like yeah that's a good way base and that they bring their own energy to the table i'm not bringing it out of them ben is a fun so ben believe you who's my current business partner on the surface when you meet it he's more quiet guys he's more reserved he's not like he doesn't come across like this huge booming personality but ben's got that energy where he's just he comes out for him like through text message or through like you know he he'll just wake up and do something or he can't sleep at night because he's thinking about something is so energy reveals energy is not just being a wacky flowing arms guy it's do you have the are you driven yourself do you take action quickly do you think about things all the time or are you am i trying to force you to to am by dragging your brain into the conversation and do you get excited about things are you when an opportunity rises does your do you shift yours yourself so energy is the first one then it's intelligence or confidence which is like what are they great at oh this person's is great at selling there's special great at building this person's great at i'm just pushing the ball forward every day whatever it is and then the last one which is integrity is the hardest one to get a feel for which is how this person gonna treat me when they have the opportunity to be selfish will they be selfish when they have the opportunity to be selfish and it's very very hard to know that you can kind of only talk to people they've worked with for or ask them questions and try to see if they're they're pretty honest about that and then just work with them on something first before we commit so it's like we have that conversation sure but let's like and i would always trade an experience for a belief and if i can have an experience working with you on something for three weeks that's gonna be way better than me trying to put take a leap of faith on bunch of things you said or you wrote down at a google doc did you just make up that word or that phrase tony robbins special maybe cool oh yeah i gonna say you that's that's yours now do you what how late into the evening are you working on business stuff versus family time or fitness whatever else there is i basically i work out the middle of the day i worked about two two pm so basically like i've done i've done enough where i could stop working i wake up and i work i wake up and doing my morning routine the at work and then i take a break to out and then i'll either just if i've done enough that day i'll just play with my kids start playing with them and just hang out if i if i have i'll do it another hour or two of work and then i do family time till about till they go to bed so they're you know usually fully asleep eight thirty or nine and then i chill out slash work one of the two they're both kinda same me so sometimes it's just like watching a show sometimes it's working or reading something and i'll do that till eleven or twelve and i gotta go to sleep but between that eleven or between kid kids going to sleep and you go in to bed are you on the phone talking to people ever no no no that's me time that's me on the internet i've not talking to people no i i've got a bunch of friends who are like that and the even my my wife she'll try to talking and i will be like i'm doing no talking that's my for i'm doing no talking right now it's a it's a nice way of saying like i don't wanna talk to you i'm doing no talking that's do this thing there's like this like unspoken rule at my house where like at eight or nine when she wants to like ask me like hey what dates do you wanna go to this place and i just mum i go remember that means like dude i just shopped it i ikea all day i'm overwhelmed i can't look at anything i'm i can't think don't ask me a date i'm not thinking about anything you know what we've been you know what we've been doing lately it's fucking legos have you ever done legos i've never done legos i i have a whole separate pod topic about adult legos because i think it's a thing and you're one of those so we should talk we should actually do a full segment on it i'm so into it i'm so into it that's all i'll say i am so i just got into it in november i'm a lego guy now love okay we're gonna talk about that next time i gotta jump this has been good this is the pod that's the pod yeah that's the pod i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back