#36 - Data Privacy Tools, Food Franchises & Silicon Valley Mistruths

let's talk about food i just handed you something you're not gonna be able to see this on the podcast but it's a tiny little pouch called super fat so i discovered this at hal actually so you probably already know about it yeah so the story behind it sorry by david h david you you don't know him but i don't know him but i heard him talk once because he started grasshopper yeah he started grasshopper in boston i really admire him i look up him he's a very small angel investor in the hustle but more so a friend and someone i'd admire and he started grasshopper so scale it to i think thirty million in sales sold it for one fifty or two hundred something like that him and his partner owned it all other than five percent that they'd given a father one of their dads for like loan them money went like ten or twenty thousand dollars when they first started very savvy very frugal move to nevada before the deal happened saved a bunch of money in taxes and now is starting new projects one of them being super fat keto peanut butter i think yeah kind of it's basically like a little snack or breakfast i use it basically as a breakfast replacement i like it a lot actually but the only downside and you're good experience this now which is that it's like kind of dry and like it it turns your mouth a little bit like because it's so dense so it's like it's not like the easiest thing to sort of palate but so i buy him as well taste is good and the health is good i like it so i told david this i go david i hate these tops yeah i don't like the tops it definitely does look like baby food for adults which in some ways is okay but it's really hard to get the food out sometimes it's very it feels it makes me feel like not like a man to eat this right the way set up like i feel like i don't wanna eat this in public yeah i feel like inadequate toddler because i can't can't do it but it's cool and i buy as well i bought the variety pack to see like trial the flavors which is smart i like that's smart decision on their part to have a variety pack first and then now i know which flavor i like i'm gonna go in but i like food what what else you got on food wanna talk about food okay so i think i come prepared with ideas that are really big and hard to pull off and this is one of them and you have a little more practical zero to one but let's talk about this one okay so i'm in into fast food restaurants i don't know if i told you i been reading a lot about them do you know why castle i don't think you grew up with the white castle i didn't grow with it but yeah i'm familiar okay so background is it's ninety three years old one of the first fast food restaurants ever i think it's the first but like mcdonald's and them we're doing it at the same time and they didn't know each other but i've been believe white castle first family owned one hundred percent family owned six hundred million dollars in sales in the last couple years flat lined twelve million in profit big company no growth though shitty margins and the average manager the ceo said that not one person who reports to him has been there for less than twenty five years wow and the average manager and like throughout the company is twenty five years which is not good if your sales are flat and it's the thirty eight most popular fast food chain in america why are you looking into the fast food change you just like to know the economics because they're all kind of available or what because i think that nostalgia in america is really cool and like things that you and i thought were cool when we were eight nine ten years old now that we have a little bit of money will spend a lot of money on that stuff gotcha and so a lot of these nostalgic things some of them have done a really good job of trans transitioning so levi's has done a good job some of the car companies have done a pretty good job yep bunch of other things have done great oh taco okay so i was reading about taco bell bought by private equity did an awesome job of transitioning they've like lean into the stone late night thing right wendy's all about social i think is wendy's own i think wendy's is own by the same company maybe they own a bunch and they do the same thing where they say like funny not pc things on twitter and it works right taco bell is in the news with a hundred thousand dollar salary thing so we wrote about that and that's why i got interested in it gotcha i'm interested in chick f a because i go to chick f a all the time and i've never seen a busy restaurant than chick f so i started looking at it and basically chick f a has the highest sort of revenue per store of any fast food chain they do like two and a half million two point four million or something like that per store which is insane that's cool and then they have a pretty cool model which is you can just get a chick f a so the one of the reasons why the quality is so high is they did franchising differently so if you wanna be a franchise of chick f a you have to like apply you have to go to this like thing you cannot do it as a side business so you can't be like oh man i own like you know a shaq owns like twenty five wendy's or whatever it is you can't do that if you own a chick f that's your business so just quality control so good quality control because just a few like nuances one is you have to be the operator you can't do this as an investment second is like i think they filter pretty aggressively so it's like you know harder to get into than harvard type of thing and then they reward you know that they sort of really train those those franchisees these differently so they've gotten pretty phenomenal results and i wonder why more people don't just copy chick f a because popeyes got famous recently for trying to really own chicken sandwich but it can't be that hard to just copy their chicken sandwich formula right like i i don't no i don't think can be hard what it's never a branding thing though so if you look at i was reading about i sound like an old man at gen z i went to a conference and they're talking this is makes me sound very old even though i'm not but gen z the number one place that they spend their money on is food and the number one place is chick play and it it it's kind of interesting because gen z is arguably the most open minded generation like they they don't like when we were kids like it's easy like call someone gay or something like right i don't think gen z does that at all they're they're not into that at all which is chick f a has got a lot of crap because they're yeah so my thought is you do a if you wanna copy with chick f a you copy their chicken formula i don't know why everyone's not doing that too you stay open on sundays and you don't do the whole religious angle because that might you can just do it with a different value set three you can go where they're not there's not a lot of chick f a's outside of like let's say south and you know some some different the closest one because where we live right now in san francisco i think is thirty or forty minutes away yeah about thirty miles away exactly i can't get it delivered i got a drive across a bridge to go get it if i'm in francisco but also just internationally like these food chains do really well when they go to asia they have to change the menu a little bit but i'm surprised people aren't doing chick f a in other places without the religious sort of like weird social stance and staying open on sundays like that just seems completely agree to matter why i'm interested in white castle because why i was i was going to the list of top largest fast food i was like what think it's underperforming but has an over underperforming brand right white castle is one of them maybe water you know water burger yep i think they actually just got bought pee so buying them might likely be doing the same thing white castle is definitely one of them yeah where it's like you reinvent even if you don't like their food it's so was really polarizing which is always great for a money making point of view and anyway i was thinking a ton about white castle for all every reason you said because chick f play is just booming right now yeah booming even though they have done many things that you would think like oh i'm not gonna go there but then you're like i stay so good yeah so that's what i'm thinking if i i'm not interested in enough to ever actually do this maybe one day if i wanted to if i was into it i would one hundred percent put them as a target of they have to sell to private equity let it a young ish ceo who's in their forties un run it and do a taco balance chick fl right if you're starting a fast food chain which you're probably not but if you are i wanna know about it because a that was the first business i ever tried to start was a sushi related sort of fast casual chain so i know a little bit about it but b i just think that there's more to do there i think there's a lot more to do there also now with all the delivery apps if you started today you would start with that in mind as like one of the main ways you're gonna get your food to your customers so rather than drive thru to wrap this up you know caviar do you use caviar yeah use caviar they sold it to someone square square so the i believe it's the founders who are doing this there's a bunch of new restaurants in this neighborhood and i start seeing them all over san francisco one's is called the bruce and rice you seen that i've seen it but i i don't know anything about one's called bamboo asia okay asia bamboo those are owned by those guys i believe and what are they doing it so just restaurants are yes what they're doing is they've looked at what's sold best on caviar and now their restaurants are two rooster and rice they only sell or sorry chicken and whatever it's called they only sell chicken and rice and broccoli that's all they have and when they serve it to you it's in a paper takeout box so they're clearly setting this up to be delivery profitable for delivery right same with the bamboo asian one so piggyback off what you were saying yeah i like that you also had the ramen thing you wanna talk about that a little bit yeah so i am an angel investor and also friends with a guy named kevin he started this thing gonna be live in six months it's called emmy emmy eats i m m i eats dot com he sent me the mock ups very bullish on that when i invested he just said keto ram and i was like yeah and that may or may not be a good idea right i also did it because he's a friend and i trust him i just saw the mock ups they're doing this like momo fu brand that i like it's like it's like a cool hip brand they're not using like the millennial pink which is you know when everyone does i'm very bullish on that i have no idea how they're you're gonna how do you make a keto ramen i don't know yeah the what he told me was you know you go and you work with these things called flavor labs and you tell them what you're trying to do like look i'm looking for this outcome and then the sort of food scientists are the ones there who are like it's lab a company or no just like it's just like saying you go to a of a factory you go to a manufacturer so if you wanna make food a new food you go to a flavor flavor house or a flavor lab and i think i think the they're call flavor house is actually and there they have food scientist will say okay you're trying to create this palette like this flavor on your pallet but you want the macro nutrients to be like this or you only wanna use these types of ingredients okay and then they do batch one batch two batch three these guys will go through a very painstaking process to figure out okay how do you with you know p proteins and these other things how do you make it high protein low carb because ramen this huge category but all ramen is like real shit for you and so if you make good ramen that's not shit for you i think that's a winning formula how much do you think one are these what's it gonna a flavor what flavor house what flavor labs what where do you where are those who those like those aren't like chinese companies no is like in la this is like you know nearby here and so i had a guy with who started he started fit aid the energy drink oh yeah you know hundred million dollar beverage company and he was the same thing he was like yeah i went to a flavor blah blah larry house and i told them like look i wanna have these vitamins in it because i know that they give you energy boost but i don't wanna have be high caffeine and i don't wanna have this like sort of acidic taste of red bull and others have don't want to taste like metal and they were like it's not really possible what you're asking for how do we make it healthy and really palatable like that those don't go together usually and then he's like okay guess i'll go somewhere else then that can do it and then finally he got to one there were they were like yeah we could do this and so he that's they created his beverage formula that's bad ass yeah that's how you do it that's great because i i'm not in this space but i would have thought i had to do a lot more work too like i would have like be in my kitchen making that shit yeah i that's what i thought too and then when he said that i was oh of course of course and i actually think that food scientist are sort of in short supply right now that's cool and so there's sort of like these niche professions that i think you could you you could do like a lambda school type of model for to pump out you know we we kinda know about programmers and data scientists but i think food scientists could be one that sort of in short supply given the way the world is going that's that's awesome and how valuable like taco bell and all them that's what they do too they basically work with these they work with two things well they all their own thing i think you know well they work with ad agencies who come up with like dude do taco and then they work with the flavor they have their own flavor so they work with the flavor to be like try twenty twenty thousand za combinations this year and tell us if any of them tastes good type of thing because they're constantly trying to do food innovation that that's badass okay that's cool and had no idea about that okay let's see what else i okay a couple of things i had this tweet that went viral that was basically it's my most successful tweet so that i did that in twenty nineteen at the end of twenty nineteen thousand likes and it it struck a chord because what i did was it's just not gonna sound that genius basically anytime i see it add on instagram now then i'm like that looks kinda cool maybe i should buy that it's like there's this posture correcting brace that's all this and then just go to ali express and i just typed the same exact thing in or i could do a image search and you can find the same items so the the the brace was selling for like for whatever forty bucks fifty bucks i found it for like a dollar eighty on you end up getting it yeah i didn't buy it i i like because i didn't i didn't necessarily want it but this is the hack like most of the things you're gonna see in you wanna explain ali express yeah i didn't even entirely know it's all of those things i feel underground and i'm like wait this alibaba so some people have heard of alibaba alibaba basically is like it's like ebay but on ebay you're buying from like you know a random mom and the midwest and alibaba you're buying from a factory and so you you don't buy one unit you buy like five hundred a thousand because it's you're buying it to for your business to sell you're buying wholesale to sell retail so that's what how alibaba got big because they had all of them and manufacturers in china who didn't have a big online presence so they put them all in one marketplace and now you can find them to source products what ali express is is it takes some those same products but you can buy a one one piece this is how is powered so wish is just a layer on top of all the express essentially because the only catch for ali the express is that you're gonna have to wait like three weeks for it to arrive well and and the quality might be bullshit and if you go to the website it's very poor english like the descriptions well ali the express is actually a pretty good website but the listing might have like yeah the you know listings by the shop owner so you don't know what it's it's low trust low speed low cost right and so for some people that's a dope trade right and wish made a sort of better interface that's what i mean when you go to a product description you're like this person definitely they're not a english for right figure what am i getting myself into because it's too good to be there's also weird things like every like if you're looking for one product you'll see a bunch of the same photo so you know they didn't actually make that they're just using the the the photos so you don't know what you're really gonna get but but then it's kind of amazing like i went ordered i think like twenty five products and my bill came out to like seventy five dollars because i'm just testing different products so all these reps is kind of amazing because you're go in for like three bucks you'll be buying items that like cost thirty five or fifty five bucks when you buy them in the us and so anyways the the hack is if you see an ad you know some d pro how big the they're probably just drop shipping from ali express and you could just go straight all the express and get it at one tenth of price so how big did that how many people hollow that issue had like over a thousand like whatever re treats or like or whatever it is but my friend did my cousin did this too where he shout ronan he listens to the pod so he did it with the gun so you know that massage gun yeah so this thing sells for like six hundred bucks i know when i went yes i saw the knock offs went out ali express and got it for fifty bucks had to wait two and a half weeks for arrive and arrived and he's like it's fantastic and like like did he say it's as good do you think he was like it's really good now it might break down or you know the long term quality might not be there but you got it at a tenth of the price so you could literally buy five of these and still be all you know still coming remember when i i went to i told you i went to cs us and there'd be like the the booth i don't know actually know if they have theirs but there'd be like one like that and then the chinese knock off right door and some of the stuff was not as good yeah i'm sure i'm sure there's a there's a quality drop but okay so i just like a random thing from trends i like this airpods accessories so crazy airpods sales are going like this i'm doing a curved line with my hand and not all like let's put math on that we we had a cool stat what i don't know the exact revenue it is multi billions in revenue like a product line for apple i believe it's a faster selling product and ipod iphone or watch so it's doing phenomenally well for its first whatever two years of existence oh i know it was something like if airpods was own company it would be like bigger than airbnb or something like it was gotcha like put it in context right and so if everybody's getting airpods you know i'm sure there's already there's not a new idea there's probably people doing this but the sort of like i bought a airport replacement case because i've lost three sets of airpods so i bought a case this time i bought like a twenty five dollar case on you know non apple brand off of amazon and it was just whoever's doing that sort of the amazon fba business that has the number one rank for you know airpods replacement case so airpods replacements airpods replacement case aesthetic things that you can do to like you know make your case look better make your airpods look different i think there's just like a lot of random niche things but because this is a product that pretty much once apple remove the headphone jack everybody needs bluetooth headphones now and so i just think being in that space you could take a tiny piece and do quite well right now i agree yeah i'm i'm into and now they're actually selling i never thought apple would do this they're selling non apple brand airpods cases at the apple store oh really oh they sell other people's cases i went there the other day and they had other people's cases that's interesting okay you got anything otherwise i'll just rattle a off keep going you're on a roll alright i do but i rattle off a couple more it's so tough mud said that they were going bankrupt which was pricing late win so a tough mud i don't know what this means it says like involuntary filing for bankruptcy which i just assume bad the guy who started tough mud is a harvard business school grad so maybe he's doing some savvy yeah that's kind of there's always a thing with bankruptcy where sometimes it's like just a shrewd business the former banker so he's probably a shrewd guy but but let's assume for a let's take it at face value let's assume for a second doing poor actually this doesn't even matter basically somebody was bringing up what are these other sort of experiential events that people will go to pay a hundred bucks to be at they feel like they got a sort of different experience and they normally get in a weekend and they get a bunch of photos from it one that i think is interesting because i'm in the world of esports is essentially a tough motor for esports so most kids play video games so like more people play fortnite than play basketball in the world you know yeah wow in terms of playing and so you know they've seen people compete they've seen tournaments but it's very hard to like do your own tournament or have a tournament nearby because it takes a lot of overhead to like set up a bunch of computers get the networking to work blah blah blah so if somebody did these sort of pop up pop up you know like esports tournaments in the same way that tough mud made it fun and approachable a thing to do with friends i'd be interested to see if they could take off with you you wrote about something called sandbox vr have you heard of that i know yeah i know and explain for somebody who doesn't know and apologies the heater gonna go off just it'll stop yeah feel like this herb is haunted what's going on behind me is that we have like a the radiator that the building controls you don't control it so it's just gonna be for thirty seconds sandbox vr i think it's you're only allowed to have six people in a room maybe seven but you pay a fee of twenty to a hundred dollars and you get to run around in a room playing oc games right so the room is like four walls that are all green screened it's like a i don't know fifteen by fifteen room and you wear a backpack with a vr headset on and you're yeah they then they create these experiences like and it's a team game so that you'll go in with a bunch of people and it'll be like hey zombies are coming at you guys from all angles shoot them and then it shows you who's shooting more and who's shooting land and this it's pretty cool the downside is i think the games are only okay yeah the games are only okay but the idea is cool idea is cool it's fun to do definitely once you know this will get better and this will be a thing down the road but for now it's like a novelty yes i agree so experiences so top going out of business so the so i think the esports one is is interesting because i think that for teenagers who wanna do something and i think i think that setting up these pop up esports festivals esports tournaments where you get to come and experience playing in a competitive gaming tournament that's gonna be bigger and bigger over time i have two more of those yeah go forward you went to one you already know this one house of ice cream ice cream yep they raised twenty five million dollars at a two hundred million dollar valuation a lot of people mock them by the way i went to it under roaming under roaming under roaming always align there's always a line outside of it yeah doing phenomenally well i'm i don't know my friend bought my ticket so i i don't actually you and sue and you guys want with your kids yeah they're ramon and you brought your kids yeah it's always a line and they're real prime time i don't know if they own that place where they at least it yeah like it's a cool idea and there's cool things but may i was like man they got away with like not going i thought it would be like walking into willy won factory i don't know maybe my expectation was crazy i just thought it it'd be really well done and it was like not i mean the you just felt cramped each room is like just like this hot little small thing and then you sort of move on like so basically what it is is it's a it's a ten thousand or five thousand square foot room with multiple rooms it's like a museum yeah but it's all ice cream stuff and you could like play with it eat and take photos which is genius that's genius yes another one of those is called it's base in arizona one of my investors invested a lot of money into it it's called mia house i think it's called okay it the name has to do with cats it's either like cat house or mia house and so you have to look this up it's not popular here because basically what they do is i think they raised money at two three four hundred million dollar valuation and they're making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and basically what it is is this guy was an artist and he lived in a house full of artist and he goes we're not making money we gotta make some money here let's do something and they made their house cool it's almost like you walked through like a a haunted house where you like would walk through this house and there's like interactive things it's very similar to what you're talking about but these guys are based in arizona or nevada a place where you can like get a huge space and anyway maybe it's called meow wolf anyway they do like two hundred million dollars in sales wow ticket sales it's on a house or multiple houses i think they only have a few they only have a few yeah but they're huge but like i love only hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of people a year ago to them and they charged thirty dollars or something right and now that i have a kid my daughter's is too young to go to chuck cheese but my niece go and i don't know if you've been to a chuck cheese in like twenty years but chuck cheese is like really garbage now compared to like i guess like at the times trash at the time where the standards were or maybe i was just a kid it seemed alright now that i go back i'm like man this place is trash and but the need is there for something where kids wanna go play games eight pizza and ice cream and feel like they're in a mini disneyland land that's nearby your house instead of going to you know florida well dave and buster kinda did a good job but that too is pretty trash but i also think that's more adult i still think the kids you know kids need these kids need a place for birthday parties that sort of so there's all these other ones there's like a house of air which is a tram lean park so there's like whole bunch of these so dangerous if you're like a brick and mortar type of person i i really believe this out of home entertainment whether it's like museum buy ice cream whether it's like a new age chuck cheese it just seems like there's a lot of that made us seem there that tough mud went out of business by the way because i think they bootstrap to a hundred million in sales yeah it's very strange we should look more into it should see you were talking about privacy companies i love privacy companies and i'll explain why tim west someone i like and look up to sorry pandora he started pandora he was a ceo for a a while like he started it he i asked him what's something that you think is gonna be big soon and he goes at pandora what we noticed in pandora isn't like a hip company like average people use it not like silicon valley nerds and he goes even like moms in missouri where i'm from would care about their data and privacy and i think that's actually really gonna be a big thing and so what are some companies that are interesting here or what where do you think there's opportunity vpn aren't intriguing to me i'm also looking for more i'm really i love the space i love duck duck go do you use it i started using it because i did start getting nervous about this when i heard about duck duck a few years ago i thought it was so stupid right i saw they make all their the the number of searches they get a month they make public yeah crazy yeah you're growing like crazy i love dot dot go i love vpn other than that i i like privacy dot com you know privacy dot com i like privacy dot com a lot i love privacy dot com what else that but there's not that many there's brave browser which is maybe doing okay it's hard to say they say good things but they're basically making a private more a privacy focused browser a privacy focus search engine and that's step dot go a privacy focus sort of like you checkout experience that's privacy dot com so i agree with you that pendulum is swinging back in that direction people care about the stuff and if you can make it convenient if you can make it easy to control this stuff people will adopt it but you gotta make it easy and i think that's where you know if you make it hard and expensive only sort of the really like conscious folks will do it yeah and the thing that i don't like about the space is the majority of people were like yeah you just sign for this and then you get all your data and i'm like like i i don't know what that means man you're not making this like actually apply to my daily life and making me benefit right you're just making me feel a little better but you're not it's really hard yeah yeah exactly i think i don't know where the next sort of opportunity is in this space if i did i would you go for tell you one yeah go for it's still vague but i think about it a lot you know safe way or k target when you type in you know how they ask for your phone number every single time why why do the hell do they do that well they do it because they wanna know all the shit that you're buying in your profile right and have you read the power of habit that book no there's a great story in there about the habits are so ingrained to us that target there was i have no idea if it's true but the story school where a father saw they were getting mailed ads about pregnancy pregnancy right and he was like my daughter's sixteen she's out pregnant i don't know if she's pregnant and he went and complained to them and they go no we think your daughter's definitely pregnant and he finds out a month later than she is fact pregnant and target knew that so about so anyway when i think about that stuff i this is like i said it's fake there's gotta be something there's something there that i think about yeah very leaky you know people say things like you know you have to sign this when my signatures everywhere you can literally electronic signature you can copy paste my signature exactly as as is and and forge me my credit card is you know you give it out over the phone sometimes you put it in every e commerce site that's like trivial to to sort of like take and do something with and your social security number my email is address do buy something at nordstrom them they go okay what's your email address i'm like i don't wanna give it you and they're like holy shocked they're like you have to i'm like no don't right yeah it's really crazy and i feel like there's sort of no going back you almost have to start the system from scratch again i should bring on my friend fe who he has his own workflow for sort of price personal security and privacy but he's like an extreme he's a programmer so he's like oh cool i built this little extension where every time it asks me for my email it creates a burner email puts it in there forwards to my real email i have a separate financial email inbox that only i know about so even if you access my personal email my financial emails crazy and so he wants to like he's like dude i think i could charge five bucks a month to just make this workflow like two clicks for people i completely agree and i'll tell you insight with the hustle we have loads of people that their email will be sean plus so if you put the p plus sign a lot of people don't know if you put the plus sign in front of a like sam plus nordstrom at the hustle dot c o whenever nordstrom sends me an email i'm gonna see nordstrom in it and if and if i get a email from j crew and it says sam plus nordstrom and the i'm like oh that's where my the leak was right nordstrom gave them my email yeah we set all the time for our audience when they give us emails it'll be sam plus hu at right it happens all the time private privacy focused people there that are doing that that's cool proactive i'm into that i i and i i buried into that and when we asked in the trends group i think we got thirty replies it was really cool i wanted to tell you about something there's a group of people that have created a venture fund off of the insight that people had this weird attachment to their university do you know about these guys no so basically i see instagram ads all the time saying hey tower view ventures is investing in duke startups so tower view is a a street and i like known building at duke campus so they name it they they they create all these like subsidiary funds so the one for duke and duke alumni is called tower view ventures it's like hey we invest in duke you know duke related entrepreneurs and companies we've got you know twenty five million in in assets or whatever it is you can come in for as low as five grand and be an investor in your alumni you know fund and they do this for every they just programmatic created this for like every universe universal one company did one company owns it for all these university funds what's they advertise on facebook i forgot their parent company name is it look at is this like a legit vc or i think it's a legit vc but it's just a smart like when you normally wanna go raise a fund most people stop because they're like well i don't have access to super high net worth people or if i go pitch this you know most partner most people who invest in vc funds are institutions like pension funds and you know you know school and endowments and things like that and so you know they're gonna pick the best vc vcs they're not gonna pick it up and come that has no track record so these guys got really clever and we're like well what if we just got like twenty five k or fifty k from all the wealthy alumni of one school this for raising the fund that's how they raised the fund and then they say they invest in entrepreneurs from that school but i don't know how strict it is it might just be like well did something like this he but he had he did an fund yeah and they would these guys basically scaled that idea so our fran did this for he you know he's at wharton he created he went to he looked up the wharton and alumni database which is like public information basically if you go to the school and just started cold emailing i was like hey we are gonna invest in nba entrepreneurs you know business school graduates of wharton harvard and stanford how does that sound those guys seem to do pretty well and they've raised money from alumni i have those three schools so what these guys did was that for every school and they did it programmatic dramatically through instagram ads no to know who that is so what's the opportunity there you're saying oh you're saying that's cool i'm just saying it's cool very interesting i'm i a very interesting approach to yeah have very traditional approach to doing this when once i out what their model was i was like oh that's fucking so for anyone who's listening who wants to start a company and raise money i think the takeaway here needs to be and this is something that it's hard to know your first time the it is so easy there's so much capital right now going on and so few places to put it that people are doing these things like i so i think that entrepreneurs people who wanna start a business they value themselves they don't realize that there's just people seeking out they like we have to put this money in somewhere interesting right and what school did you go to belmont university nashville national tennessee and who who's like do you know like any of the bad asses from that school one or two i feel like this is been the reason i thought about this today was because plaid just sold to visa for six point five billion dollars and the plaid founder is a duke undergrad guy and so i reached out to him and was congrats but really i was just thinking man that like i paid all this money to go to school and i don't care what school you went to like i think duke got a pretty big alumni network that's doing things but really any school i guarantee if you're listening to this you've not tapped into the value you paid for which was to get this stamp and get basically a free intro free foot in the door with anybody who's successful and from that school i agree with you but i don't think that that value is high for most schools so i agree with you that most people aren't using all their value but one i have kids and they get older there i'm gonna tell them don't do what i did you have to either go to a duke a harvard you have to go to a top twenty university that has a brand name or you have to go to community school or a cheap state school where you can get the experience and grow right if you go to a belmont university that costs i i got a little bit of a scholarship and i also was lucky where i didn't have to take out debt if you go to a school like i went to that's it's like not even a top i don't even know if it's top one hundred it's not good right it costs thirty five or forty grand a private price but without that that is not good if you're not do that that is a horrible decision so i think it's so and i married a woman who went to a ivy league school i see the network and i know the network or i don't know your network but duke when i a duke i think of the university of california school system yeah all like you are at a huge advantage with that network totally i guess my thing is i don't tap into it enough i think most people don't tap into it at all and one of the questions i get the most i think because of the podcast people are like man dude see your network is killer that's why you're able to do x y shit they don't realize that your network and my network came from cold emailing people exactly i'm like oh you want that network here's a trivial way to do it and and then i still i'll do it most the time but it's way easier than you think and of you gotta ask like where did this come from this isn't just come from nowhere like the thing to me there's two principles on network one is you gotta be interesting like the reason you you know when the founder of pandora meets you you know the way you got there was the cold email cold email and people don't realize i called email him literally thirty times over a year right and he never answered now we're homie is in me and my wife we got dinner with him right and so like there's the code outreach part and there's a science to that and there's a persistence that has to come with that and the volume we gotta do but on the other side be an interesting person like the reason they wanna hang out with you right like yeah they did the favor after the cold email like i this guy you remember me thirty times i'll i'll go talk at household con but it could've just died there the reason they like you is because you do interesting shit and you actually do this more than i do you from the other side of someone who you have young people holler at you and you actually take them under under your wing way more than i do so yeah you have like a pretty cool alumni network like both ways of people who well yeah you did this with michael and a for your others but you have people who email you and you're like okay come hang out yeah like i'm we did a spartan race with those two without one young guy yep like you do that all the time i do it all time i do it selfish like i don't like giving back of course that's but selfish thing is like young people are more like dynamic interesting fresh and and doing more interesting stuff and so i need to actively like my my friends are now thirty or thirty one or thirty five or whatever i need to actively do something if i'm ever gonna hang out with a twenty one year old right and so that's what i try to do i try to like that really well and i asked them like who are you hanging out with and then we like hang out and i that excuse of and this it leads into one thing i wanna bring up back excuse of well sean your network's really good it's like dude my net it i did have a network right i just c emailed people i had in my wedding i had six groom like five of them i met via emailing right i met you we there's so many people who you know that you just know through twitter right it's crazy people don't understand that so i this thing called the twitter dinner have i told you about this no that's awesome so basically there's a whole bunch of people i followed on twitter that were interesting and i was like alright always just thinking of what's an excuse to hang out with cool people because that's fun and i'll grow and like doors open when i do that twitter the podcast was one of those i was like what's an excuse i haven't all these dope people in my life what's excuse to hang out with them more oh what i did to podcast same thing with the twitter dinner i hit up all these people said hey you know how you follow people who are cool on twitter but you've actually never met in real life i host this thing called the twitter dinner where i just invite eight people that i think are cool that i've never met and we all get together for dinner want you to be at the next one i think you told me about it but you told me about it like half an hour ahead of time yeah and so i've done three of these now and each time it's not only awesome but every everybody's like man thank you for doing this i also have experienced that where there's cool people on twitter everybody don't life no at no no they pay for themselves i'm not to pay for their dinner i'm gonna do a twitter dinner a good idea yeah do you have more ideas because i have something that's an idea that i can bring up i have two follow questions are you still paying to freezer sperm i pay to do it and i mailed it too late after i gave the sample and it got denied dead sample okay so i'm looking for another place to do it or yes long story short yeah okay that's that that's my other question i just wanted to just no i went to the process and i like i was an idiot i like mailed it back is kinda gross but i mailed it back on like maybe a friday and i didn't realize it had to be a twenty four hour right right so i went through the process okay give me your an idea you and i did a little live podcast here at this office two months ago maybe a month ago and someone said something that was very san francisco and they said like i don't remember exactly but something to the line of like you gotta be passionate and solve a problem and you and i both looked at each other we're like no you know like or they're like you or they said something like you can't just care about money if you wanna like really get rich you kinda like care about like the problem and and we and both looked each other and we're like no that's out true it's not true you can totally do it that way you can do it that way but you can also not give it it just be the best plumber and make a fuck ton of money right and i thought that was funny and i was thinking about that last night and i was like that was so funny how we both for like u because we know so many people that just kill it on random shit and so i was thinking of things that are not true that we all say they are because it sounds really good to tweet about it great love this okay i'm excited okay and so there's a few the first which i just mentioned is passion like you have to like care about the you've really gotta care about the the the problem that you're solving gotta wait so and this list is for things that you can make a mild amount of money okay okay so i think that to have the outliers like the huge ones i think that a lot of these will not be true but to like just make it to get your a really good win these you this can happen you don't have to be that passionate right you really don't have to it the second thing is the best product does not always win oftentimes the things that are make the most money they fucking suck right okay so you're unfortunately your product doesn't actually have to be that good the third thing people say gotta hire the best people a lot of times you don't and if everybody thinks they're doing that by definition you're not by the way yes and okay look i'm not saying don't hire the best people you can find what i'm saying is i have seen proof and i've talked to people at saying i don't do that and they have made tens of millions of dollars so i'm not saying to do this i'm just saying it is possible and there's some people and they're like man my team's just okay right we just do it every day and it worked out or i just am putting every this whole thing on my shoulders and i'm gonna hero this and do existence this is like another good one design a lot of people have slick ass design on their pages and stuff you'd be shocked there are so many websites we you talked about ramon ramon was on the podcast ramon a guy who had a soap opera blog news news website that made i don't know four hundred thousand dollars a month in profit yep it was littered with ads it was not pretty right it was a forty nine dollar wordpress it was horrible people freaking loved it the the customers loved it not the design if you have a friend who's doing a d business i can't say what it is you know we'll probably do fifteen million in his first year a first full year of existence in revenue fifty million and when i looked at the product i expected i was like oh well it's probably so sweet packaged the brand is just on point and that's the innovation and i looked at it and it looked like you know if you're at a pharmacist far you know in in the back they have these you know these things that are unlabeled that's how bad the packaging is is like you would never expect that this is the brand that's crushing it and it totally was it definitely def defines that that assumption it totally does now i think like to be great to be great great great like all time great you that you do have to have all these right that's the caveat to all these right hiring great people is a great thing big passionate about what you do is a great thing great having a great design is a great thing but what pete what trips people up is they think it is a requirement to success it is not a requirement we have seen we have exact examples that defy those rules it's like the black swan rule it's like nope you're telling me that's a requirement here's an example where we did not exactly what saying okay and another one is delegation okay so they're both this this works in both cases sometimes which we the same people we're talking about there are people who everyone else who works there is just customer service and just handles busy work and this person just everything they don't delegate a thing right we i have seen success to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars that's done the exact opposite has been true as well which is i just came up the idea and i had either had a little money or convince people to do it and i delegated it at all and i just checked in with them weekly and i focus on other stuff that has worked wonderfully as well right a lot of people don't that i didn't understand that when i sorry my coming i thought i had to do everything now i realized oh my god the business can keep growing i actually don't like i don't need to be involved as much as i thought right or you know what i mean k and the final thing is brand okay so branding and you would be shocked like everyone thinks that brand means it's gotta look a certain way or it's got a feel they're like i care about the user experience i know so many people they go no fuck that like it looks fine but i'm just when i when people sign up to buy my product and they don't buy and they give me their email i'm gonna blitz someone with emails and email fucking five times a day and like they don't give a shit about user experience oftentimes in these cases it works right people are shocked by that it's so but this is a very like it's come from a place of fear so i'll tell you one blog post that or explains why these are true have you ever read this blog post by this guy paul bo he's the creator of gmail i know who he is but i'm not the blog post is called if you're great you don't have to be good and what he said he he gives the example of apple he's like when the ipad came out and he shows the links of people who just bashing the ipad when they announced it on stage they were like oh my god this thing it's a it's a tablet but it doesn't have you can't do multitask it doesn't have a usb port it doesn't have a keyboard it doesn't have like a this attachment it doesn't do this it doesn't do that and he's like the ipad does a couple things really great he's like it's super lightweight it's basically like a browser so you can just like browse the internet on the on you know on this little thin device and it you know one other thing and he's like when we made gmail same thing everyone said when we were launching gmail dude you gotta have a an address book of course you gotta have a contact book that's really good it's gotta be great blah didn't even have the feature at launch and he's like we we decided we're gonna be great at three things for gmail we're gonna be blazing fast gonna be unlimited storage and we're gonna have threaded conversations and he's like we're gonna be great at those three things and we're gonna be literally nonexistent existent or dog shit at the rest and he's like when you're great at the right things you don't even have to be good at the other thing that's cool and i love that and if you're designing a product or a business you overthink it often and say i need to be great at all these things all these things sound important branding sounds important marketing sounds important product sounds important engineering sounds important oh i gotta you know my back office has to be important and reality is pick a couple things that you need to be great at to your customers and internally and you don't even have to be good at the rest and that's really hard to take that advice because you're like you just have like you have to say like i know this one part sucks i'm gonna let it suck and that's hard for a lot of people because i get fearful but it is very true and if you like go to the top of the fortune five hundred you go to like the top ten brands and like of course apple their products actually are great most people think they're great their brand is great they're very thoughtful but go all the way down to like maybe a fortune one thousand and look between five hundred and a thousand or even like the top twenty but not the top ten and you'll be like an hp like it's not that good right or like like but so does it exists like and you're like they're just kinda good at a bunch of stuff right okay i want i'm gonna hand you my phone this is in line with what you're talking about trying to be great not good here so i want you to just click go i i typed in the address already so we over the weekend we made a website my first million podcast dot com and we've been talking about no code we went to the extreme of no code so what you're seeing when you go to this website is a very is a extreme hack so we were trying to make a this is a google this is google it's a notion it's a notion doc that's awesome so we were trying to make a website and we were like oh should we use you know should we hire a programmer i had a bunch of people to reach out to the podcast being like i'll do this for free for you we could've used a wordpress guy an up upwork i was like no even simpler should we use web flow should we used a no code tool i was like no even simpler we basically had already in notion this like no notion is like a document editor type of thing like a text edit just like a asana yeah it's just like a this is a little like a word pattern at evernote and so we went a notion we already had like an outline of what we wanted the website to and i was like what if this was just a website can we make our website just load this because this is super easy to i've wanted something like this forever and so we found a i i tweeted the founder of notion i was like hey can do this can i make a website that's my domain name but it just loads an a notion page he's like no we i can't do that yeah i found a workaround around online that let us do this over the weekend we built this where now this is awesome my first million podcast take it out it's so it's so budget but it's so amazing dude this is better than a lot of websites i i agree i agree and so it has like the embedded player it has the transcripts of the podcast it has like i shortlist like my favorite episodes like stuff like that better and it was so easy and like literally zero code yeah and i just hate when people say the excuse if i got a hire designer i gotta do this like you don't right you don't like you're just overthinking it that would good i think i actually think that looks great and that will work really well but i was thinking about that time when someone set it to us and you and i completely looked at each other and we're like that's not true like i could give you ted examples of people who show that that's not true and i felt like we were crushing his soul a little bit and i almost felt bad but i'm like just so you know that's not true yeah because if you come to the live show it's like i look up to these people i kinda wanna hear you know things that are line with me and i think you looked at us was like oh no that doesn't mean you should like if you have those i actually think you will be better of course but you actually be plus if your goal is to like i you could make billions of dollars actually just being i totally the the way i look at it is you gotta bring energy to whatever you do so if you're gonna do something you definitely have the energy and enthusiasm to push but for some people that energy enthusiasm comes from being really passionate about the problem for some people it comes from i just like business for some people it's like want this type of lifestyle and i'll run through anything if it gets me this lifestyle of financial free right i don't care what's giving you the energy you just gotta have the energy and it actually often oftentimes doesn't even ever matter what problems you're solving because or if you're even solving a problem i know a a handful of people they make twenty million dollars a year off these scam bullshit i think they provide no value and i would never do it because think stupid but they crush it financially and it's like a click to download our toolbar and install it in your browser and they're like yeah we do twenty million dollars in sales with three employees and i'm like yeah you're you're if that's what you care about you totally can do it by doing this bullshit arbitrage right yeah there's many ways to tonight shit i'm not hating on it i think it's stupid but i don't hate them for doing it right there's this great company that i like called wonderful brands you know them no stuart and linda res they're in their late eighties they own fiji water they own palm that palm drink oh no what's that drink it's like pomegranate juice it's palm yeah yeah the palm yeah and then they own like a pistachio brand that you may heard of and then they own like twenty that you probably don't even know what they are and the way that they got started was they started selling like memorabilia like those fifty dollar like quarters that like or like it's like a president trump was elected in two thousand sixteen here's a memorabilia right coin a fifty dollar quarter that's how they got their start that's how they started making it and they still do that and i'm looking at all their brands these are great brands so they have the halo oranges fiji water palm pistachio almonds these two wine things this great yeah and when they first start they're billionaires when i think they're they got in trouble because they're they're in the news because they you were using too much water for their almond farms during a drought in california and i started reading about them and i'm like okay these brands feed you water that's a good brand but i started reading about their other brands and how they got started i'm like these are all just okay but these these family's worth like five billion dollars right and it that's kinda when i originally start i'm like man you don't actually have to do like you you you don't gotta build the facebook or you don't have to build like an apple like you can build like pretty okay stuff but be really savvy at operations and also have high perseverance right and do it for fucking forty years fifty years and if i'm reading your right you're saying this not because you're you're not trying to say build shitty products what you're trying to say is don't overthink it there's a whole bunch of things that you can do to win and you don't have to do all of them at the a plus level in order to win we know successful cases where you have to get some things right but not and i am saying that there are a thousand different ways to get it done and what a lot of people tell you is you have to have a product that's ten times that's what same alt from why commerce your product has ten times better no it doesn't have to be maybe the likelihood of succeeding or like being a huge outlier will be higher if it is ten times better but there are examples of something being actually worse but it wins right and i just don't want people to take and i have taken i just accepted everything that i've read and now that i've been around a little bit like experience a little bit more with business i'm like that's wasn't true which i didn't believe though right and a lot of my friends who didn't believe it i are better off i owe i'm always wary of advice where if you just looked at the person giving it and if they say this do they look better as a per as a human right like does this signal this this vi signaling them to look better because i always discount that advice and if i hear the opposite if i hear someone advocate for something i'm like wow that actually doesn't make them seem more virtuous and good and sort of h than now i sort of elevate i'm like wow if they were brave enough to say this they must really believe this because it's not benefiting them from a signaling perspective it is only benefiting them because they just think it's freaking true i had a guy at hu khan who had a huge company that you many people that no and he's talk with all about his employees and how he empowers his team and afterwards he came off saying i was like i know you you're really aggressive and a lot of your employees hey hate you why did you say that and he said because that's i think that's what people wanna hear and it will make my employees feel good and was like do you really believe that he goes i definitely believe it but not as much as i he's like no i'm way aggressive and i just wanna fucking win and i was like man i wish we we missed the mark on that one we should have been honest and like told the truth because i think people would appreciate that but if he thought that and he he only told me because they knew me so many more people would think that right cool you got any other no any saves the rest well we could talk about the casper us one another time okay we're back next week oh if you happened to listen to this whole thing maybe we could do a tweet about it so know how many people listen to the whole thing we're gonna consider doing these daily or more often than weekly yeah and would like to hear when people's i think we're also gonna bring in some guests to do this with us to do the brainstorm with us so i've had i've been having a lot of fun with these and what i realized is the interviews with guests are good like the last one we do with a peak design guy i think was actually a really good like story and interview people say they like these the most which is they like these the most and i actually think it'd be fun to bring in some people who either already were on the podcast or forget telling your story just come to the brainstorm and well because you can just give like a three minute background like this person is just do this right so what are i'm gonna what do think about this you know like you can like exactly okay cool that's it we're done