#38 - Truth about ad agencies with Brendan Gahan + Brainstorming with Daniel Gross

and i'll tell you why i wanted join so with this podcast we talk about a lot of people starting cool stuff and there's like three things or four things that like every person who graduates college what they're gonna start and it's like a roommate matching app which i did it's like a way to like buying and sell stuff from college kids and then it's like an agency and interestingly i've actually noticed that all one of my friends who started companies and sold them they're starting an agency because agencies are interested ways to make money while learning and so what i wanted to know i just wanted to ask you questions about the agency business and i think yeah and we had sort of we had a debate a couple podcast we were talking about va media and it's like sort of is this a good business or bad business and and so what one thing is like obviously it's not a shit business in the sense that like it you know they have happy customers they've got people they employ a bunch of people they make a lot of revenue but we you know we're sort of talking out our ass in terms of agency like is you know what does an agency business model look like right i know what a software company looks like i know what a restaurant looks like because i started one of those i don't know what an ad agency business looks like so i don't know talk us through like very simple you start an agency you know even even maybe the one you sold before the one you're currently at what is that what is like the first level of success look like yeah yeah yeah i'll dive in kind of like the typical agency model but i i think that's a good place to start for sure so when when i start an agency i i actually didn't mean to set out and start of a an agency i i had joined a startup up and left that but throughout my like entire career i've been like the youtube guy i was always pushing like what work with influencers let's you know you've got like implement best practices on your youtube channel and i'm this is starting back in my two thousand six so when i left my job and i thought it was gonna consult and stuff it was like this is maybe seven eight years ago and it was like right at like i totally caught the wave of when all of a sudden brands and ad agencies were paying attention to influenced they all needed this strategy and like i've just been kinda hammering on that for years so like kinda out of the wood work like all my old agency brands and and friends that had been at brands we're hitting up and they're like hey can you help us with this project can help us with this project and so pretty quickly i just kind of realized there's a bigger opportunity than consulting and so what i did was like i would take on these projects and hire on you know i hired it on a few people over time and help them with really two services one is influencer marketing so i'd you know work with them on online developing a a strategy in terms of how to integrate the brand into youtube channels i'd do all the influencer identification contracting and all that and then the other aspect of the business is basically implementing a lot of youtube best practices for brand channels you brand spend a ton of time focusing on their twitter facebook you know instagram but they don't really put a lot of time other than the video itself into the youtube channel so that was my model is that a good summary by the way do you want me to go in oh cool yeah that that makes sense i'm curious like when you get a you get your first client like with your other agency how big was first client were they a small startup over were there like an established company so pretty big company right off the bat like one of my first clients is like mountain dew and pepsi unique low and ig bev why are they going with you kinda like new guy new agency there's a lot of other options yeah i i think because there weren't a lot of other options back then like obviously there were social agencies and you guys talked about dana and so i i car got a nice white space for myself in the sense that like there weren't really that many people just solely focused on for example like youtube optimization so like i got in with a lot of the brands on like a really small retainer where whereby that was like our like our entire role what's retainer yeah what's a small retainer oh oh like this is when i was just getting started so it was like very very small it was like you know what's you know three to five grand for for for for that service and how many clients could you have it one time five or six yeah we probably had five or six going at one time on on that part of the business and then the other part was the influencer marketing part and then if you fast forward to like okay agencies mature now you sold the agency same same types of clients i assume because you you started sort of at the top of the food chain there and what are these what are these clients paying you on retainer by the sort of by the end by the time the agencies sort of mature oh something before i sold it yeah like what if if you started off with humble beginnings at five k what five k monthly yeah what does the mature look like is that fifty is it five hundred like what does an agency typically get from these type of big brands yeah so i mean the the that's the high end of the big brands is you know millions in in retainer fees a year and that's know covering everything from you know they're doing strategy to the creative development helping them plan production you know doing social media and community management so you know i mean there there are agents fees getting paid tens of millions of dollars by you know massive fortune five hundred brands and that's that's definitely like the top end obviously i didn't get to that level i i sold my agency when we're still relatively small and so fast forward to now you said we don't have to refer to your company en don't care yeah yeah yeah a company that is a fifty million dollar range what are the economics like these these businesses i mean with like a really profitable software company you could have massive margins would that be the same for yeah what's good margins right like when i ran a restaurant you if you could get to twenty percent margins you're crushing it ten percent like net income on yeah like net margin what what would it what would be good for an agency yeah good for an agency fifteen percent to twenty five percent like that's that's all that's generally accepted as like the goal well twenty five's is good fifteen i but that's sound bad i mean so then is that before and and and as these let's say that you have partners in the business is that where all of your guys income or an owners come come from is out of twenty five percent or is that before you calculate your net income it it varies depending on the agency so i'll i'll like side like specifically but generally you know i know with like a lot of big agencies it and and so there's like two types of agencies first off there's like independent agencies and then then there's agencies that are part of like a whole thing yeah the the big two or three i mean yeah yeah the wp yeah all those exactly and so i would say generally is probably you know with a lot of the the more independent agencies it's gonna be a combination of they you know get a a salary and then out of that profit get some sort of profit what are the what what would the safe on a hundred million dollar agency twenty five million dollars in income owned by one person what do you think do would that person take five million of that twenty five million home oh that's a good question i i actually wouldn't know that for sure but i i i would imagine if i was making that much money and i was a sole owner that's probably the way i would approach it and our agencies trying like is the endgame to be an agency or is it like you know agency and then as we get sort of these clients we start to see opportunities and we start investing off the balance sheet or we start creating our own products or like what do you think is the sort of endgame for the smart people that are in this business yeah that's it's a good question there are more agencies now starting to like diversify and like develop products i'm trying to remember but there was one agency i think out here in new york who recently got a bit of press and jen lane did that yes yes that's who it was and they did just that they were doing so much work with d brands and we're seeing so much success they decided to develop their own products and actually i we've got a a mutual friend i think him you know troy off off yeah i do yeah he's he's got an agency they're just a couple walks over you know they've got a nice agency mostly focused on d clients they're about twenty people and they've actually acquired a couple of their the brands that they're working with that that that's bad fantastic and that's what i i don't follow gary van vaynerchuk too much but i've heard that that's what he's trying to do and in my head i'm like that sounds good what what hell you wait for do it well what he says is he's my old ip that is like sort of low value now but that carries i say that i'm like just doing it now what do what brands you gotta thousand people what do brands in the eighties buy that ip and then relaunch it as a you know roof brand fresh with movies and products or whatever yeah it would you know the thing that's interesting is like there's almost like you can almost break the agencies up and i mean you could break it up a million ways but i i kinda think you could bring it up into to kind of almost like generations and there's like the classic traditional agency model where they want clients on retainer they wanna be focused on like the big brand kind equity building work and then there's like this you know over the last couple of years you know as people are focused more on d it's relatively simple to kind of get a small shop at shop up and running you've got a lot of entrepreneurial minded people who maybe started out as they're just running facebook ads or brands and so they understand a little bit more kind of like how to sell things and so i see more and more of those type of folks focused on broadening and building ip maybe getting into software and and expanding beyond the agency model because i mean full transparency the agency model i actually just you're to spelling that time which is to me this sounds like a cool business because you can kinda take whatever you're talented at and apply that to more people that sounds cool but there's a a lot of downsides can you talk about the downsides yeah i mean so yeah at its core you're selling through people's time you know like the the traditional model is you get a client on retainer and you basically assemble a team based on client client's needs and bill people out kind of based on an estimate of hours and incorporate kind of overhead and your profit margin into that now what's challenging is what if the client has a lot of asked there's rounds of revisions like and and then also like oftentimes it's not like you're perfectly a hundred percent having people sold through like maybe you need somebody who is like fifty percent on an account and their skill set is perfect for that but then you can't place them on another account and so that that balancing act of people is is just playing brutal like there's no way around it it's really hard and especially as you scale up because then you're trying to identify like it it just becomes a giant puzzle of like how to place people and get their time sold through as efficiently as possible and so that becomes really tough if the services business at the end of the day so i mean you haven't worked in the restaurant in industry you know if that's like it's like you know you've got clients their people you gotta keep them happy so it's a lot of late nights pitching and winning business is a huge huge undertaking you know especially with the big brands like they will go out and basically do you know rp ps with you know hand of agencies and you know the whittle down from you know anywhere from five to ten handful that they like you so maybe you're pitching against three to five other agencies for retainer which oftentimes you don't necessarily a hundred percent know what that final cost is if they're willing to pay and so you spend at time several months working got it more often than not for free i two and win rip it up the first one is then why you know so the the profit here is in charge is to out you know outsourcing your people so paying them twenty five dollars an hour and but billing them out at fifty dollars an hour why are you guys in new york then i mean why aren't you in toronto or saint louis or detroit that's a good question i would say probably the simplest answer the fact that all the brands are here and i but deep you do go ahead you mind you don't have to be there though do you you you the brand aren't here and so you definitely need people like you need boots on the ground absolutely the other thing is like this industry is super like so much stuff just happens on the fly in the office and so it definitely helps having people all in one place and then the other thing is the talent that said i'm sure and there are agencies that have a distributed workforce there's not really any that are on a kind of like i'd would say like a a big significant scale but think eventually somebody is gonna have to crack it because the overhead is really really high and but the other thing i was gonna say is that there are other avenues to generate profit it's you know you can mark up media you know production and various services but yeah nine times you know out of ten and eighty percent of the time you're marking up staff and last question and we've gotta answer this in in a short amount of time because we're trying to keep this under a certain time you did youtube in eight years ago what's the what's the niche that you think is gonna expand the fastest now i mean tiktok is the hot thing right now kicked tiktok in the live stream gaming which you you know quite well tiktok and live gaming yeah i mean twitter obviously facebook jamie but yeah the influence stuff was going back to two thousand six even hold on we have a slight debate here okay so our our next guest actually is is joining us he's in the seat you can grab the mic daniel and you can't hear you can't hear you but but you you hopefully will be able to hear him or i'll relay it so you said you have the experience on the internet basically i can't hear the people disagreeing with me wait brendan can you hear daniel yeah keep yeah yeah well i can hear you okay what what's brendan yeah brandon i gonna be able hear him nice to meet you and theory i mean i'm sure me curious i was just curious to get your take and i won't hear your answer but do not i mean the us military just ban tiktok for its soldiers and it does indeed seem of course that a lot of american software can't make it into china we do not take the view then that tiktok would at some point get banned you know if it's banned for the military maybe that kind of expands over time and if that is the case how would it become kind of more popular wouldn't it just be relegated to china or do you think that that somehow the trade war doesn't shift from from how would you say from adams to bits yeah yeah i mean i think that's i i actually just read the stealth floor which is all about that i'm trying to remember the office name but i i mean that's gonna happen then it's obviously gone but there are alternatives like right now like trailers is another one that's blowing up i think that format even if tiktok was to disappear is going to continue you know there's yeah in addition to chile there's also a fire which is an even smaller one band but one in america i the the next closest thing to fine yeah lasso yeah i don't think glass but but probably chile gotcha cool well vernon thank you for the time i'll i'll holler you after this asana this was a perfect segment i really appreciate gonna call this segment we call you and you tell us all your numbers in business thank you for being the first of event of that segment because people like hearing what is it what is the what does the income sheet income statement look like for these types of businesses so appreciate the time brandon alright appreciate thanks thank man and i'll holler at you separately thanks okay i think we're still set up to just go right can we just go just give him wow hey dude i'm sam d sam hey neil yeah we've actually never really met it there i'm sean hey hey well you guys have a met we're inference but now we're real world friends i i'm not internet friends with you but i know you you we're not friends because you and i have never interacted but i i share your stuff well well now we get to be friends it's great okay so so for those who don't know we need you to basically brag for two minutes so like brag for two minutes so people wanna listen to you is kind of at the stick and welcome to our and we'll explain what the hell you what the hell this room is and what we do okay yeah so a bit about myself so hi my name is daniel i hope you're already listening to this x i'm gonna talk as quickly as possible as soon as this bargain introduction but i came i'm originally from jerusalem israel came out to silicon valley when i i think eighteen or nineteen started a search engine called q which is kind of a machine learning powered search for kind of all your personal data because you're at slack gmail salesforce dropbox evernote know base camp in one place got acquired by apple in twenty thirteen or ended up kind of running search and machine learning across the company across ios ten a bunch of other app launched and launched apple platforms a a lot of our product basically turned into and blend into spotlight search so that's kind of what we powered in addition to a bunch of other machine learning things at apple left apple in twenty seventeen was a partner web comb for about and a half ended up funding you know i don't know dozens maybe even hundreds of companies through that and then obviously started angel investing along the way as well individual i'm an investor in a bunch of different companies from you know cruise to coinbase to uber to insta gust bunch of others fig and kind of i i think most interestingly in last year i i started a company called pioneer which is kind of like part twice c it's weird i guess merger mesh my careers it's part search engine and part y c in the sense that we try to scout the internet for promising people around the world working on kinda interesting staff and we spot that museum psycho it's a little bit of machine learning a bunch of different things and once we find them we if they seem good we create a company for them on the spot and then fund them on the spot and then try to kind of push them over the edge see it's kind of my view that one of them in on societal growth and also as well as kind of the number start interesting startups so see every year is self editing a lot of people you know that have this shower thought that they don't ever pursue and pioneer is very much meant to be a kind of a platform where people can kind of experiment with their ideas and and hopefully sucking engine if you will i would say like a a black hole force for good where we can kinda of pull people into our orbit and really almost radical them into starting their company because i think the world could stand to have many more startups and many fewer kind of large companies it's it's really a sad place where we are today where when you think of it like there are basically far five large tech companies and then even in the startup world there's like three good deals a here there's three good deals here why shouldn't there be twenty or thirty why shouldn't there be kind of an hour per lag of startups many more people working on other things and so you know a lot of people think of accelerators i really hope pioneer is a generator i think that creates founders that otherwise would been so anyway that's a it's a bit about me and how old are you yeah i am still hanging on to my twenties but towards the end i'm i'm forty eight years old wow badass ass i i discovered pioneer i think it's tweeted you maybe few months ago because on one of my internet ran rabbit holes i went to pioneer yeah and how many other browser tabs that you have opened like sixty five of them actually pioneer caused me to open like sixty five because it's like meet the pioneers and then it's like here's a list of o eighteen year olds and each eighteen year old you'll be like i'm launching you know palm sized satellites i'm a creating right a microwave that makes things cold i here they saying that what's that yeah on pioneer as all the ideas are some of the people we flagged sort of more on the you know sort of crazy sci f five i felt like there's a five super interesting yeah i mean it's gosh i i do think it's important to stress that that we try to have a mix i mean i think the one of the lies that that that silicon valley is very good at spreading is that you know everyone's working on large moon moonshot with the and and and and the reason that's a lie is because every everyone of the successful moonshot often starts as a small fairly stupid project right even spacex good god spacex the most moonshot literal moonshot company that exists today people forget but it started as this thing called the green mars oasis project end send a plan space and put it on mars do everything using russian rockets be as lazy as possible well that's a huge project but it sounds like a hollywood stunt man shut the company down after compared to like self landing compared to the largest today private space company in the world yeah i mean it would basically like a rich guy's practical joke or a rich guy's project it sounds like i've like building a home gym in your house if if we lived in la and you know we had hundreds of millions dollars it sounds like the type of thing you know you shoot around with couple bunch of hands over beers but of course google was a stanford university project called back this wonderful interviews of mark zuckerberg from i think two thousand and five six whatever saying there's no reason facebook should expand this is great is a great interview he's sitting on couch in basketball shorts with the red solo up and he's doing an interview and the guy's like okay you're in whatever ex college is now what's next high schools you know anybody and he's just like why does it have to be more like it could just be a cool thing for college i think sometimes if you couch if you try to do too much it makes it less cool and then like now he's giving internet to people so that they can use facebook like expanding beyond what you got totally i mean arguably the most given the fact that they own instagram and and once have the most important company in the world and and and and so people look at that and they think well like if you look at the fully formed species you're like well we're we're of a different gen i mean there's no way i can do what elon is doing but if you realize where all of these people got started and you kind of look at the early variance of what they do it's kind of it's silly almost and if you look at the old home homepage of all these i mean it looks like a go ahead sorry so what's something that you personally invested in so like i like the story about facebook and spacex expert but what great company you invest in that today is seen as big but you remember how humble the beginnings were so like what's something that's big today that you remember how sort of small it was the the funniest example i have of this is the company called notion and and notion is kind of a next generation confluence or or or wiki it's used by a lot of the companies in here and silicon valley i'm a user that that's not how i describe it i just describe it as like a asana but better and a little bit different well i'm i actually yeah i'm certain i've been the founder would shoot me for my description and very much endorse yours i'm a user i'm not affiliated this is the website of our podcast it's just a notion doc oh okay that our domain points to we and it's just a notion doc that's it this so so i mean notion kind of a funny one ivan and i many many years ago briefly worked together which is how i got to know him originally and we kinda kept in touch over the years and he mentioned he was kind of working on this thing and you know you can envision the initial pitch as it comes through as like at the we we kind of won our separate ways you who's who who's kind of always very interested in the kind of a cognitive kind of enhancing software you know hyper productivity that kind of thing and for me that stuff is super interesting but kind of in in kind of a weekend way you know during the weekday much more interested interested figuring out how to like make something that produce revenue home hopefully be successful that way and so we kinda kept in touch and he mentioned he'd start to work on this and you know ivan is a type of person who is very brilliant but very focused on making the perfect thing correctly and in the back of my mind i saying well there's no way like it'll just take forever and i mean it did take him a couple of years to kind of how would you say the forty years in the desert of kind of you know wandering to israel but you know he he got there four instead of forty maybe but was definitely one of those things when i was started i was like i'm not just quite sure this is gonna work in similar lorraine i'm i i remember talking to kyle vote to kyle vote who two days ago unveiled to the world cruises private so dials the guy sort started well before that twitch who found a twitch which they sold to for a billion dollars and then down twitch now did cruise which i think was another billion dollar self driving car company hey it got acquired i i believe by gm for a billion dollar a billion dollars after eighteen months or so and i remember he also bought the most expensive home in san francisco which made news is pretty funny yeah well sure but anyway the the point is i i remember him kind of fundraising and it was not an obvious thing back then this is before the autonomy hype he i think in many ways created the autonomy hype with the acquisition and here's a guy who like previously worked on software twitch wasn't super popular yet he'd like done in mit he was a safe cracker that was his hardware experience who's pitching you on him building self driving cars and bear in mind again this twenty thirteen this is like before all the hype and you know i i very much believe that it would be an obvious market of the future i remember that quote from henry ford of you know once the car was envisioned it just had to exist and i think that it's the same thing is true for self driven cars like once that concept leaves the drawing board and endless reality mankind will create what you saying that you weren't sure that you should bet on him i think the question was what one of those it's very interesting situations where you you kind of have a lot of emotional belief in the founder the market is very unclear and so you know at what point does the investor decide to kind of make the bet in on hard science on an unclear capex intensive you know area because they believe in the person and i think this is one of those things where you can afford to do this kind of stuff if there's a path forward if you really believe in the person and notably if the price is low where i probably would not do this is know if you told me out you know i'm i'm raising and the valuations a billion dollars you know obviously it'd be very different if i was h had a giant fund but for me the angel investor at that point and i don't think that's you were an an angel in that one yes but it was one of those situations where super tenuous is super unclear i actually think all good investments at the beginning are super unclear a lot of the great yc darling links almost didn't get into yc airbnb was super on the fence i mean even stripe didn't properly do i see there's no actual batch they participated in and this is the truth about the world i think is a lot of the stuff that is great always starts humble and small then of course their media teams get together and retrofit the whole narrative and they'll tell you that all oh jeff bezos is always into books as a kid but it's very clear at the beginning whether something's gonna turn into something let's fill him in on kinda of who we are and what we're doing and then i've got a few questions yeah let's do it so you wanna go first sean yeah so so we as so i started this podcast when i was selling the company and i got really bored and i was like you know what would be fun if we do exactly what we're doing right now was like if i take the interesting people that are all around me some you know some i know i'll start with them yeah and then a whole bunch other people who i just have like one degree away that i could reach out to and let's shoot the shit together maybe they'll tell their story maybe we'll just talk about whatever the future looks like i don't know it'll be fun for me i don't know if anyone will listen partnered up with sam because he's already got a bunch of people listening he's got you know million people on his list wanna listen to him tell about the news and we said hey let's do this together you know let's partner up on this we started this podcast and it's grown pretty quickly but we started this it normally it was like the traditional interview style hey tell me what you did how did you start how did you get your first hundred customers real tactical stuff yeah we just started coming you know to this office here which is outside of normal studio we do the interview in and we started shooting the shit and we call it a million dollar brainstorm where basically we just say hey here's something that's kind of interesting yeah you ever noticed this here's a problem i saw and you know they're they're actually pretty half baked ideas they're you know the the name is sort of goofy they're not million dollar ideas or like zero dollar ideas but we but we have a lot of fun with it and this actually is what listeners like way more than main interviews and so there's sort of what i thought would be fun is take people out there who take people who like to look into the future people who are on the edge and observing new things have them join us as guest because a we're gonna run out of ideas pretty quickly and b is just more fun better i feel like if you're one of those people that have ideas you do not run out of them yeah well you just see everything single day yeah like man that restaurant have added with this that might epic remember okay so here's kind of an interesting thing at i'm at a level what do you guys think of is it possible to give someone a startup up idea or does it really have to does the person really have to feel like it's their own no it is possible to give ideas and i'll tell you i'll give you my reasoning so so so the hustle we we have millions of people who sign up give news and then we also have trends or we just explore different stuff when we charge a premium it's like the hustle but more depth like harvard business reviews like this a cool thing i'll show you later and in doing that i've met all types of cool people mean sean have a circle of friends are very badass but there are different badass and you're badass you are our friends with these guys who you're silicon valley valley badass ass yeah i would call this like austin bad yeah so we have loads of threads that have started and sold companies in the one million to hundred million dollar range very successful but nearly all of them bootstrap yeah and what they do constantly and i do is as well i've bought and sold companies with these guys or on my own is their businessmen or business women and they seek opportunity they make the products better yeah by either buying or selling other companies and then they can sell the businesses yeah and for many of them they don't give a shit about the product i mean they do it's not like they're a scam artist they like building things product agnostic and they're totally product agnostic and so if you wanna build a nine figure company this way it works for sure i see so the other way i'd put it is we talked about this last time during we did a live show and whole bunch people showed up and one guy was like you know do you do you have to be passionate about the idea or somebody said something like that somebody else raised her hand said he should absolutely be solving a problem that you're passionate about that's the way to do companies right and we disagreed and there he was like shocked that his you know why would this person say no that seems like a unpopular thing to to disagree with and we what we said was the top of the hierarchy is you're solving a real problem you're very passionate about it is scratches as a personal itch that is best case scenario it's the ga quadrant towards winning all things but but you your success bar is lower than that but if you wanna make a lot of money and have fun doing it you don't necessarily have to have that you can and that may will maybe be better you don't have to and the last thing i say is when we say these ideas we don't i don't think the people listening to this even expect to take that idea and go do it it just gets trains their brain to constantly seek out ideas yeah and that's the real value of it that's why even like doing it because now all week i'm just jot down ideas i'm training my brain because i know every thursday i gotta come with something good so all the other days i'm okay so here's rate i've been thinking about on the whole jot things down so i like you guys i i i actually view it it's funny i view this is somewhat of a problem in a disease i have this tech file of ideas of been maintaining i think for twenty years now it's probably megabytes in size and for me it's a and it's an important outlet otherwise it i literally cannot stop thinking about whatever that thing is and it's it's actually a little bit more acceptable now in my profession but you know i still run pioneer i have to i have like things i need to do i you know i have tasks i can't start off you know just thinking about some of this fran idea that i just add sorry i write it down but here's what i'm wondering on writing things down in general okay here's my contra area and silicon valley control view is writing down a terrible idea because i find the moment i write down an idea it exits the rock tumble in my brain and i get peace which is the great thing but i stopped thinking about it no i don't think it's a problem and my opinion is because shouldn't you just keep it in your head keep jumping around i think you should research it because and i think that you should research it so okay so there's two types of people those who like your the that actually will do shit and those who won't right try the the right i mean like there's people who just take action and there's those who just talk what's going on with the talker are they too extroverted no are they just talking well because they're so afraid they're afraid i think they're afraid or they don't really want it or they think it's cool to do this but they don't want they don't actually like it but my opinion is like look like i think most cool ideas or successful things they're probably not that original they're probably if you wanted to you could be like oh i stole that feature from that that from that like you just iphone wasn't the first phone right facebook with not the first social network yeah you just steal a bunch of cool parts and you package it in really interesting creative a unique way yeah yep and so what i think it's good is to actually write those down and do you can even do a little bit of research knowing that you're not gonna execute on any of them but you do is you start seeing interesting patterns and best practices and it sounds like for you when you write it down you're assuming the creative process stops at that point for i i've i find once i write the i have this for post for for post i'd like to write it as well once i write the thing down it going back to it yeah it becomes like a thread task most this is like when so we both like the u a lot we like yeah fighting and this this old wives tale that they tell the fighters which just don't have sex leading up to a fight and they're basically like no you need that pent to up you know sort of testosterone aggression there's no real science yeah bullshit but they but the fighters follow it and they sort of feel like okay if you have sex if you get that release right you won't have that same sort of hunger that same tension built up sounds like it's basically that like you know blue balls for the brain it does that looks good yeah i guess yeah i don't know it's it's been something on my mind i i i actually i think i i will do a post about this and so i haven't written it down but you know i i grew up i i i am not today but i grew up with an orthodox and in orthodox judaism there's a very interesting concept of the oral kind of to and and kind of mosaic code is much larger than the bible and for many years that was not written down but by like sheer law and that at some point they decided write it down and there are bunch of reasons that are given as to why they didn't write it down some obvious ones like they just wanted to keep it private from the christians whatever but there's some kind counter ones there one being that effectively things are much more plastic malleable when you keep them in your head or when you just discussed them and writing has this kind of cal effect to it where you put it down well one thing i was actually talking about to a a founder recently of a fairly large multi thousand person company and they were trying to figure out you know the typical thing you're trying to figure out at that company that size culture and values and you know i always send people who who go through this process the link to en ron's culture and values en ron for for those who don't know is we used to be the largest one of the largest companies in united states a little the large energy company to be giant fraud and you know put thousands of people out of business as but of course they had wonderful values they wrote on a piece of paper i think it's like you know excellence and integrity and honesty none of that matters but i also wonder in general with values whether that whole thing that whole process of writing it down doesn't work because again i think i think writing strength is its weakness which is it really cal things it instill things and sometimes you want things to be at the can this is giant tan i wanna ask you a couple of questions so what is your your you took time away from when did you quit working at why full time i quit yc see better year and a half what is your day job now it's kind of split i mean the a a lot of my time is spent on pioneer who runs it me who works on it now it's about four six other the people actually so you're the boss but your hands off yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it sounds like your hands on or you're not hands on both i don't know you ask if you jumping in and out yeah you should really ask them yeah is does it make revenue or do you fund it yourself we have a bunch we what i means it's partially funded by me with two other investors and stripe and mark entries individually it's a it's a venture capital shop fundamentally mean it's powered kind of by software not by people so if you're ask if it makes revenue no but you know pioneer holds equity positions in come in companies that have since got so you have a fund basically it's a it's it's a small fund on paper i guess it has markup ups but you know yeah as a business it looks more like an accelerator than an in other generator please but yes yeah items still yes have you how much money have you angel invested on your can you reveal that oh i mean in aggregate large number large number south of ten million yeah like much significantly south of it seven figures a decent took a change has it returned i've had some returns yeah has it returned to all of it nor or have you had a positive roi across all yeah i have invested more than it has returned if that's what you're asking that was a really inefficient way of been asking sorry what's your average check size it depends it depends like so i should i should really classify two things i mean if i'm kind of investing for me for myself it's it's fairly varied it's anywhere from you know twenty thousand dollars to a million dollars or or if the company's really large tens of millions of dollars but pioneer investments a very interestingly lea amounts are significantly smaller but significantly your investments are tens of millions i think that's what you i don't know if that's what you meant though yeah yeah but i i very rarely will do those so those will be very very small but before you do you get catch up saying yeah basically earlier you said my total agree angel investing under ten million yeah no i didn't i didn't say under i didn't say under okay okay said south that's what you meant like under ten million i i've invested north of ten million dollars just to just just just to clarify yeah but you're using saying pioneer dick is different than that and that it takes a small put smaller bets in but takes a larger prison position because it's early yeah i mean i i think it'd be quite useful to clarify this i i tend to do personally angel invest fairly rarely we'll do a fairly small number of deals of people that are i happened to you know know or or not know but really believe kind of in the company and wanna help the majority of kind of the outbound investments that i'll end up doing our through pioneer which are very small in size you know tens of thousands of dollars but much larger by total volume so pioneer last year invested in about ninety people so so the reason i'm asking this is i'm just trying to understand the structure of angel investing as a business yes i've had a few i've done a few deals trying done a field deals i'm but hopefully we'll be up a lot we'll see if it works yeah that hopefully is the important but hopefully is a very important bit basically i did one deal in the earnings i just put all that back into different ones and so what i wanna know is how roll did you roll that over with usps no nope because it was under five years yeah and so what i wanna know is angel investing in some business how how that works for you and i i imagine you get deal flow that's phenomenal given yc connections and things like that but that's what i'm getting at yeah i mean i i think as a as a angel investor i'm probably look i'm probably not as efficient as it could be because of of of really two things one you know pioneer and two i'm a bit of an introvert and so for me it's actually much more satisfying to do a small number of deals a year where i have the opportunity to work really closely with the team to fairly significant ownership in the organization as opposed to kind of doing you know every single deal comes out you know through my inbox and chasing things around silicon valley even though that latter format would probably or maybe be better depending on who you ask you know for me it's much more satisfying to kinda work closer with a with a small who's the best angel investor you know they're a bunch this is like asking what's the best movie you've seen it's hard but if you ask me what's a good movie rather who's someone you look up to they're are a bunch of i would say look i in my view the an investor i look up to just not necessarily just because of his legendary picking ability his his ability to kind of be helpful the companies on boards but more importantly just someone super interesting i i can't quite figure out in an interesting ways is mike mori who is one of the preeminent partners at sequoia capital i find a a very interesting and and and in many ways kind of end engineering person who's obviously has his fair share of you know of of correct bets be at yahoo stripe google and cisco i believe bunch of others in the angel investing world i think there's a lot of good people i mean i think you know why comb is probably the most durable animal you could kind of look to and i think it's probably the most interesting thing in in a sense that it is a platform and it seems to produce returns regardless of the partners that are there and that's quite interesting no one's really managed to do something like that i think a allied gill is quite good top of mind just also because i have i got a different question for you fairly closely to him in an office but yeah so in the brainstorm vein yes you posted this thing which is why i reach out to you yes said twenty twenty thieves yeah oh i read that and your blog is good so shout what's your blog what's the website and the it's at dc c gross dot com d c gross dot com okay so you have a bunch of good blogs this was one of them where you had a bunch of themes and i wanna hop around a couple of them and let's just chat about them sure so one one that you had there was say yes to no code yeah that was a theme and we had you know on the podcast you know founder of web flow came on and we're we've been talking a little bit about no code but i thought one of the examples you talked about which most of called britney and average people don't know too much about it the uipath right yes so uipath talk about what is uipath and what is that sort of what is rpa it's a it's a branch of no code that's not consumer facing in the same way as web flow and zapier and other things that we talk often about so talk about those the whole no code thing a circle jerk right now i can't solve as it's legit or a circle i called yeah i well didn't use those those creative words it but yeah i i might it very clear that it's over hyped which is i believe my view i know i i still think there's more to be done there but you have to be fairly careful when you're picking in an over high market because one of the things i tried to flag unfortunately i put this at the end of the post and given you know if i had my own attention span i wouldn't make it to the end of my own post but one thing i tried to say at the end is i think one of the most important things for for the kind asset allocated to realize is selection pressure and one of the great things about underrated markets is is you get free selection pressure there in the sense that if you're working on it you're already interesting by virtue of the fact that you're working on it and if you're working on a hot market you get the opposite effect one of the coolest things about pioneer is no one really knows about it and so if you manage to make your way to a goddamn website the company that doesn't even own the dot com it's pioneer dot app for christ's sake and you apply and you play like you're interesting through that effect alone and as pioneer becomes more successful selection will get harder counter intuitively right selection is really hard for harvard because it's the preeminent brand used to be amazing harvard it used to be really weird what you're gonna go to the new world you're gonna leave oxford let me get the straight you're gonna leave oxford and you're gonna sail to the new world and go to this weird ass thing same same thing for princeton sanford danielle neil and so selection pressures is the most important thing the rpa scene multi this into your point now the rpa scene and the no codes used to have great selection pressure even eighteen months ago because no one knew what it was rpa stands for robotic process automation and now of course everyone's talking about it we're about to talk about it on this podcast so you gotta be careful once once the club becomes popular i very much wanna leave i'm very much looking for the next club that no one's in right now that being said which is still talk about it too rp po robotic process automation it's a similar concept to no code but as you flagged it's a little bit more enterprise facing and the darling of this world is a company called ui uipath which is a european company funded by sequoia and a bunch of others and what they do and a bunch of others do is it's like a seven billion dollar company in where like ukraine or something i don't think it's ukraine we're insulting them now but it's let's just say it's in europe let's focus on continents here we're in america after all we don't know where the rest of the world is and and what it does is the idea is this the idea is basically macros i don't know if you ever used that on your computer so you know you can kind of let's imagine there's a task you do repetitive at you know you're large company so you're going through linkedin and you're copying the name from linkedin and you're pasting the name into the you know a google spreadsheet so what they're gonna do is they're gonna write some a macro that will basically watch what you're doing and then at some point just do it itself automatically and that is much easier than writing software that does it i mean it's basically click record click play so that the pitch sounds pretty compelling pretty interesting right like we've all done this in like in music where where you have kind of loops and they're they're made you know by just watching you play and then playing it back and so doing that with software is interesting okay so the twist is this the twisted that the macros are really brittle the really brittle on the something they don't really understand what you're doing like if i watched you do something on a computer and then you said just copy me are there's so much i'm able to do because i've used computers in the past i understand what linkedin is website and so like if the name of the person that i'm copying is a little bit different on that web page i'll i'll figure it out the computer most rpa is fairly brittle won't figure that out now ui uipath workaround around for this is they have a lot of engineers do kind of the last month if that makes sense so it's kind of mostly recorded and learn by the computer and then an engineer kinda comes in and makes it a little bit more quality check quality check it make it a little bit smarter a little bit of could a little bit of code dressing around the main dish to make sure the stakes not too bland if that makes sense are now uipath can afford to do this because their deal is so big in the margin is so big that can afford to pay an engineer to kind of take it the last mile there's there's a bunch of little teams and startups in silicon value here trying to do uipath but not brittle okay so instead of having an engineer go the last mile we're gonna get some fancy machine learning to do it and i actually think there's a lot of interesting things you can do that aren't being done today we'll go into the details but like that's that so that's kind of an interesting avenue but the thing to realize about uipath the thing to realize about uipath that i feel like a lot of people miss in enterprise startups is the innovation here is not to the software the innovation is the sales machinery and the sales channel and a lot of people in if for every sales company a common meme amongst founders as a look at and say dude dude the software is awful we're gonna make better software and you forget salesforce the software is as just as a good as it needs to be and the reason salesforce is awful is because the innovation of that company is in its sales team it is not in the quality salesforce is a database for christ's sake and so you you gotta be mindful of that you uipath does a lot of channel sales successfully and that's one of the reasons why they got big i don't think it's because they slice well what's the path i mean what's the did they did they really innovate or they just did it well they did it first ish they did it well enough and what's their sales system they have a sales team but they for the most part do a lot of channels sales they do a lot of reseller sales through a lot of other folks so then why did you say say yes to no code well it sounds like you're hating on it mostly i'm not hating on it or you just not that into i think it will continue to be a fairly strong meme yeah as far as i'm concerned i think it's somewhat comic how hot it's gotten i mean it's literally in through pioneer through my inbox there's like you know a dozen companies or teams a month working on some type of no cod thing now i wouldn't become a bear on that because i do think critics made this point about cryptocurrency in in two thousand and twelve you cannot ignore a market if there's a a lot of smart humans working on it you cannot laugh at it like something will emerge there's just too many there's too much iq working on this problem so sure there more stuff will emerge there i think that that world is infinitely vast you know i believe deloitte does forty three billion dollars of revenue every single year that's that's their valuation that's what they do in revenue and like twelve billion dollars of that is in software consulting all of that can be eaten away by software that is kind of like no code style software or rpa style software so the market is giant and it's quite possible you know how mark said software eating the world and i think two thousand and seven we may kinda continue to see software eat away at the fringes of the world through things like no code right and it just to clarify the themes that when you wrote this post you're saying what gonna continue to emerge what are we gonna see a lot of that doesn't necessarily mean there's good investment opportunities or entrepreneurial opportunities because maybe that window was in the previous eighteen months or twenty four months where that was hottest and now the popularity will surge yeah put opportunity window might be won't be smaller than than the popularity i i i i think that's right i mean i i really wrote the post as an observer hopefully sitting maybe not front we're on the court but you know somewhere hopefully where where i could still see the the sweat on the player's faces and i'm just trying to give people a sense of what's going on here and the if you're you're very correct not all of them correlate i think to to ripe barriers investment you know another one i i spoke about that i think is super interesting but i'd i think it may be hard for start today to succeed in his radar there's a lot of interesting radar companies and there's a lot of interesting radar technology with large companies we're working on project solely from google allows you to effectively manipulate your iphone with micro gestures even across the room just by sensing the position say that your hand is in by using radar this company called zen which which is building a better version of lidar for self driving cars is one that can see through snow which traditional lidar can't that being said you know is from an investment standpoint where you gotta ask yourself kind of a question of like that's capital intensive the use cases aren't that clear and mainly the thing that's changed is the regulatory environment around various areas to spectrum has changed over the years so when someone's working on that so like the a lot of the companies that we've started it's like i'm i can spend this up on a weekend and see if it's interesting or not with these companies that you're describing how on earth does someone even spot that that's a problem right and that sounds really hard right and and then that's kind of interesting not most of don't know it exists on alone that there's an opportunity right and and and that is the you know kind of to me one of the most kind of meta interesting things of you kind i i feel like if you're trying to figure out what company to start it is very interesting to find some type of community where you could be at the real frontier of a thing and so for example the two guys sort of the radar company we're previously on radar so they like were sitting at the front of the you know radar game at at at zen so they're very aware of what's going on if if if you're sitting at like yeah how would you say in in the club or in the chat room of python just python that that's what you got there's a lot of people there and so you really wanna find some type of pocket of the world where you can be at the real edge where there very few people there and i think actually of enterprise software is like this sometimes you'll meet these these guys where they'll go they you know they start one enterprise company they like sell it to cisco and then there's literally like over the course of their career three or four of these spin outs where they leave and then they start the same thing and it gets acquired in and so you what's going on here okay so one traditional answer is like great man theory the guy maybe just has an iq that i don't have sad okay i don't really believe that i think what's going on here is very few people are aware the problems and so very few people build the software i actually encourage a lot a lot of people sit shoot me emails and they're like what should i do i think a very look around maybe well it's kind of look around at a meta level of get yourself into a place where you can be looking around where there are few people looking around so what does that mean in practice you may wanna go work at a large enterprise company and just observe what's broken there and then you could literally leave after six months and start a company to fix the number one broken thing and you'll observed it and it kind of i did an experiential painful level where you'd be like wow it's really broken i'll give you an example i'll give an example so sean's actually doing this yeah okay so you we just got acquired so twitch is now like about two thousand people yeah so that's i don't know a hundred times bigger than any other company i've ever worked for we've only run my own companies and the max we got to was like twenty something yep and so i sat there and i told the team on the first day because they're you know they just went in with the mindset of like okay we're here to fit in into a job i told him i said you know you're gonna get several valuable things out of this experience in my opinion the most valuable thing that can happen in this experience is you sit at this company for this for a year and you observe and i said gonna make a list and we're gonna share this list yes called import export yes import what are things that we see problems where we would buy the solution within this company we would import a solution to this somebody could solve this problem export well what's some hack thing that we built internally to solve our own problem that we're not product packaging for the thousand other companies that are gonna experience a similar thing so we have this import export list basically the only one adding to it i've asked so long for to give me that yeah i haven't given it out to anybody yet but that's my mindset around it which sounds similar to the advice you're giving some i think you're gonna discover a lot of interesting business i'll give you i'll give you an example it's so funny to mention that i i had something fairly similar to apple for me which is i had this folder of manager scripts and all the managers scripts i wrote are ultimately really good company that it exist so here's one very simple one broadly speaking all internal hr software is awful and as a manager i i just wanted this very simple thing i ended up writing software is i just wanted to know for everyone in my org i wanna know what are the their important financial milestones this there's apple hundred thousand person company there's no software that could tell me this which is i wanna know like when are you is most of your stock gonna a cliff because you would get these refresher grants every every single year at apple and they themselves are on four to six month milestones and so the every single employee has secretly done this math where they're like oh january twelfth is when most of the money coming in and so like i am going to quit january thirteenth and so who wants to know that and an manager wants to know like what are the troops leaving got it especially especially with software engineers in san francisco who are constantly you know looking over their shoulder to to accenture enter another job which is another terrible cultural effect but given given the fact what you want is a piece of software that just gives you this data of like here is when you need to be checking in with people because if they're financially motivated here's where when they're gonna leave no one really does that yeah and there's a lot of this stuff performance review software we'd literally had to write our own performance review software at at at at my startup and then subsequently an apple because all the internal stuff is bad and okay you've another fair fairly classic one stack ranking performance reviewing this doesn't exist a large companies and people will never build it internally because they don't like stock ranking because it inherently pushes some people to talk some people to but it's the best way to figure out who's the best performer so but again i was never exposed to this stuff before i worked at a large company so you do you have a list like sean does i have a general startup up idea list you should share that do you do that like request for start sort of meme yeah we have a also a little bit of that on pioneer website where we've put up a bunch of like fairly tract simple i could do this in a weekend style and i saw your face now when he said you should share that you were like you internally you didn't want to what's the the reason to like i i i so i'm trying to figure out no i would i i'm trying to figure out how to convince myself to have your view that like you can actually give people startup up ideas and maybe i'm talking to the wrong people but i've generally found that well it's more hard than not well but but my point is so that you have people who will and will not the wheels are it's just a very few people but the will not they could still apply that across other things that they're doing in totally or you could like be like so at to which they have this phrase it's like what do what a creators care about and really this is what do people care about which is the emmett discovered early on he's like money fame and love and actually it's sort of the same meme that dave mc once said people wanna get paid they wanna get made and wanna get laid it's sort of the same thing just rep packaged and so and so and there's a specific order for for twitch where it works which is like you first wanna grow your you first wanna grow your audience and then you wanna make money so you can do this sustainably and then that all starts to feel shallow if you don't feel to love from your community and so and he discovered a fourth one from the founder of vine i think he told him he's like there is a fourth one which is inspiration and then it was like oh that's very true because anytime one creator sees another creator doing something interesting or they hear about an opportunity it just gets some that motivation to just continue on because these are always long journeys i think silicon valley does a good job of inspiration because we tell stories through the media sometimes this creates skewed versions of reality but there's a reason that exists is because a it's interesting and b people take a lot of inspiration from it and what i view when you share an idea that i it's not so literal that you're trying to get something to do this exact idea it's trying to get people to to see the see the types of problems you see use these as sort of starting points and then r on it and end up wherever they will end up and and and so i would think about it that way rather than saying am i gonna give this and are they really gonna go be able to do anything with this specific idea yep i i think that makes that sense and and i and i think that's right i mean i think maybe the best out come is someone finds their some adjacency to the idea that you gave them and so you know maybe this hr performance thing you know you don't end precisely building out be built some other related piece of i don't know hr you said something earlier you go you can't ignore know sort of the critics and what the nerds are doing on the weekend yeah is where the trends are going you said you said something like if there's a lot of iq at a problem something's gonna happen what problem doesn't have enough iq on it in your opinion give us give us some things where you think iq should go well okay so i'm i mean one word area is kind of the one we to spoke about which is i do think that like the the the the kind of twenty thirty year old person who's come maybe even technical really wants to do a thing is just not exposed to enough enterprise life so there's a lot of unmet enterprise not gonna give be another fairly simple example the your sales team really anywhere you were trying to figure out the org chart of the company you are trying to sell to this there's one company called the org that trust is i tried to do this i had the same problem when we were trying to sell there we go there's or and and we actually we pay for software that does this but it's all industry specific it's industry specific and it's like a weird sneaker style thing and like i think i think someone could really not get out of the park here and build something that over time maybe even becomes the next linkedin in just org chart as a service yeah and the information does something like that time to try only executives it it needs to be u right it needs to be where it's like like a wiki and what you wanna even think of about it as a little bit of a deeper level which is what is the incentive for the employee at the company just kinda of pseudo and anonymously update their own profile right they do on linkedin and so i think if you could figure is a great idea if you could the line cool you may build the next big social network we do use media radar and we pay them thousands of dollars and it's only people at ad agencies it's the same playbook as linkedin right which was let's put your resume on line certainly you want that so that you can get jobs well what what happens when everybody's put the resume here we could create the network of people on here and make this you know sort of the professional network total look and so like that's the thing another one and that i think is super tract don't know how makes money is why are you guys familiar with sci hub what's it science hub science hub is a very interesting thing it is naps for research papers okay too it is used by a small number of very smart potentially very high net worth people but it's small number so you can kind of think of the of the tam math here of the total addressable market in math here is it's much similar to like gulf stream jacks as opposed to prius small number of people potentially very high pay and basically if you if you work at a university and one access kind of a research paper then you're your university pays forward if not you're really you're basically your screwed yeah it's so sci is naps for this it's a terrible website the like the domain is in taiwan or somewhere it's not been posted well if you were to build a better alternative for sci that had all the research papers i don't know if about like reality of it i certainly think it would be moral on there that would be a separate issue i think you could you would basically have the highest kind of intellectual under management website on the planet right like you would have hedge fund managers you know kind of leading scientists all using your website and do you have to get clever on how you've monetize them to boy like i think that's a if you be if you wanna become the star the internet the people that matter that'd be the number one thing to do there's a company that was doing something similar they were actually on inc five hundred fastest growing companies by revenue ops remember what it was later it's a this would be a little bit of a weird project because it's not gonna be legal because i have itself is not legal but again i think things that are at the intersection of morally acceptable and illegal are are often quite interesting mh you know that's all always an area where of course crypto has you know since space to shine let's see i want else if i we're playing the game of you're the asset all of iq you're just shuffling iq around to different areas where you you're like we need my iq over here yeah totally i i mean there's another thing which is i think a a pet pet peeve people i'm amongst a lot of us which is just like better good reits good good eats this company was doing quite while until amazon and unfolded it into kindle has been awful sets but inherently the the experience of kind of reading material online today is very single player and should should be significantly normal multiplayer i mean every time i highlight something or you high like something on them on your kindle should be shared kind of automatically into a group and we should be able to talk about it and i think this thing executed properly again would be a social network for the air date so like i don't think you would get a billion people but you could probably get a hundred million people that you could charge off like i don't know a hundred bucks a month from so you'd end up in the same revenue math or at you you'd end up actually with a an audience base that you could sell incredibly high end ads too like like the same way town country does but but again you could literally do that in a weekend you know mozilla owns this thing called pocket mh which like oh they bought pocket they bought what do they pay for i don't know a lot but it's like no shit really just make a better pocket for christ's sake it's not that hard and pocket is not that good i think you i don't agree with you on that because there's the those types of businesses work really well they've worked so far really well in japan japan and in china so smart news things like pocket i see so there's this thing called smart news in japan have you heard of them they're they either are valued or public at a billion dollars there's three or four more but anyway in america we've tried to do that three or four different times not once i don't think has it made a good business maybe they've sold for a lot of money but it's not made high revenue and profit that doesn't of course that doesn't mean it can't be done but i think i think there's a class of products in the you you guys familiar with super human yep super humans this email client and the it's like twenty bucks a month for an email client that like quick reminder gmail free do you use it no but the effort for for a separate reasons it is used by a lot of people i don't think they're profitable but they were definitely doing quite well and i think to me that that that is kind of a model here going back to our gulf stream or luxury software luxury software is a great way of putting it and i think no one's executed a pocket on that thing so that's cool super high end super fast charge a thousand bucks a month and you're not gonna get a lot of users but you're gonna get a few super high pay i think the high end businesses are better than nope certainly easier i'd rather have less customers soup charge or i charge more than a lot of who charge little and that but that's like not what most people tend to do it seems i i think that's right i add another thing on the spirit of high end is i think better software for people to interface with their admins with on i think should exist in the world and so like today really you're i i actually think is again really easy to do is basically had messaging app that's really durable really stable and the main difference you may have why is it different than what's out it's because the only person on the messaging app is your admin right it's it's like call you called the bat phone whatever you want but basically i think messaging goes through these ebb and flows of saturation and des saturation and right now everything is incredibly over and messaging in many way is kind of becoming the next social networks so these private groups and so it's really hard to keep track of everything and so you know you get message six different times six different channels but if you just have one app where it literally is only way to reach you i think that alone you could charge people before deployed yeah yeah you would only see that if you're at a big company probably right like i didn't have it yet love that twitch i wasn't gonna have one at my story do you have one now yeah that's awesome or not awesome well it's great like you it's a free perk right which is which is awesome and like i told you i hired my chief of staff now so like i need the bat phone for him we have a slack which is just me and him but that's like five layers i have to do to just get to my conversation with him which is slow yeah and also doesn't have any of the features that we would want for that use case i guess i think you now i'm just really brainstorming to keep going into deep space there's a lot of online forms that are still quite active i'm talking things like flyer talk or a similar one for running let's run dot com i'm a huge let's run guy but on the front page four times there you go okay so okay so this will be contextual bulletin that's bolt both v bulletin yeah software that was literally built when you know we were still i was gonna ask you if you're a runner you look like one i yes very much of a runner and bought the the like v bulletin you bulletin in like the blink one eighty two of software it's awesome okay like let's run of all the new forums that one that was launched in maybe early two thousand i think it's still the best well the software is the best or the community is the best the community is amazing i please have tell me the software is good just tried using yeah if you use on your phone at sucks yes but when it allows you to post without signing up yes very much no sucks old old school internet yeah and i think that's like i love that and anyway what i would build is i've literally build a app that all it did was it was a professional scraper of v bullet so you get really good at scraping all stuff and then you turn all those things into like a wonderful beautiful mobile blah and it's just a client a reader client i've read your client for all this stuff that's really smart that's really smart i think if you did this correctly you can start building the their credit yeah because it's not owned by like a a company that's just gonna shut off your client yeah so quickly right i don't think go with run guys well joe weld then johnson i only running i have one forum that i used to go to is like a basketball one called the collie and this call and they basically they sw off v bolt into some other all a really bad one and i remember over i've never seen a community to do this literally overnight someone was like you know what we're tired of this mobile app sucks and this thing always crashes during big games i'm making a new one come over here everybody and literally overnight everybody deserted that first place went to the second place and they sort of referred to the old one like the hamster are still running the wheel trying to keep that other one still up okay so this so that's her interesting and that you should remind us of a point that i think should inspire anyone who's thinking of the building stuff everyone forgets everyone forgets that this exponential social network growth cuts both ways yeah the decay is it decay and and i don't know how you guys think about this at twitch but like actually think the these whole network effects the concept of a network effects super overrated i think you'd we build a better experience people just swim there immediately but yeah i agree with you but that just proves their strong network effects no i i see you're saying you're saying you if you build something better people will swim there immediately i totally disagree with that one but i do agree that if you do the voodoo magic yeah to get to the tipping point where the decay begins yeah i've seen we've seen the mass migration app a couple times right dig to reddit sort of thing wow that was like one of them but they they're very very rare when they happen and that's why and but i believe that people are building better software solutions like right right now i'm at twitch and i shouldn't say this but like there's competing products that i think have cleaner interfaces load faster and you know if if you just compare feature to feature better products so you're you're right like the you have to be in a club that is also getting bad and there has to be a better club available it maybe it's a composite function but but here's so here's the interesting thing i think we'll hopefully doesn't happen to twitch i am and this was kind of in the poster we were talking about earlier i think we can have a guaranteed bet that all of the giants all the large companies that their software will get worse over time it must get worse over time as as as as durable as like newton's law as durable as gravity these guys must produce more revenue quarter after quarter after quarter and so i know if you saw someone actually posted this the other day amazing graphic of how goo has changed its ads over time from like at the extreme when the got founded it it's very clear to nothing here at today you literally cannot the first page is like you cannot try buying something on amazon try buying like an electronic product on amazon it is like stepping into a flea market in the middle of shenzhen you've no clue what you're buying reseller fake product fuel products why do they do this they do this because in the short term it creates more revenue in the long term it creates this kind of weird sense of life dissatisfaction right and i think don't i like i don't follow amazon reviews i you don't trust amazon it used to be like amazon rules it was life now it's well the google search thing is interesting right because you could see how much root what percent of the screen is an ad over time it's like starts with zero percent goes to ten percent and now it's basically like eighty percent of the results you'll see on a like without scrolling are gonna be an ad you know from google which is crazy hey google go back of course to nineteen ninety two and can read the memo written my larry page sergey b about how our advertising models are at odds with the customer on almost quoting verbatim are at odds with the customer experience and search engines but of course these guys are checked out and now their own companies headed in that same exact direction so here's another tract idea on on this very concept super simple to do build the wire cutter for one specific domain so i talked about this constantly on this podcast sure what what do you mean by this go on well like amazon reviews are bad and what are reviews in in in in a sense it's it's you how would you say it's a quest during your thinking on a particular topic to another brand where you say that okay this brand is trusted that is trusted and so like i don't have to think i will just trust that brand so you need to recreate that and you could potentially recreate that in many different ways but i think simplest way as you focus on nailing it really in one particular domain maybe one way to bootstrap this is you can get kind of celebrity endorsements because that's really what celebrities are there they're known brands that people appreciate and no these are bootstrap companies they so so maybe you don't even need wire cutter was bootstrap they way too early they sold for thirty million they should sold for two hundred million a lot of people try to do wire cutter for for business software what that's what i've bought should i use yeah it's chat client should we use what well if you go to like use best crm dot com it's people who only talk about or i bet you there's if you type it in i bet you there's pipe drive versus salesforce dot com right and i bet you that can make a million dollars here if people try to seo game that you know yeah x alternative the problem is two two problems one you should never or you could have in the past i think it's scary to rely on google now and two you have to look at who your affiliate is if your affiliate is amazon amazon could just say alright we're not giving we're not gonna get amazon gets four percent affiliates to wire they would say alright we're done with this program and you us lost yeah i would i would actually propose with a little bit of ambition that the person doing this tries to do without amazon you just try to sell the products yourself and that's why i think it's super probably focus on vertical and topic of running like i think if you focused on sneakers which by the way i totally agree you have tremendous margin in sneakers holy shit but if you google like best cycling equipment or best running shoes full green maker it's it's so it's so dc right is answer oh i know i read him he's great but he's good for like garmin in paris there's he's utter away he but he's just a blogger he and he's it's it's a horrible site and i love it and it's i'm yeah i'm sure the bank account not horrible i totally agree and what i would do is that joe ro needs to launch this joe these somebody who was like an a yep oprah level oprah level character the chocolate supplement and yeah no i i think that they're that that's interesting i've never thought about shipping it out though that's kinda i think that's a sounds like a pain in the ass but it could be worth it yeah you know at the end of the day like life in adventure and you have to do some of the pain in the ass stuff if you want i think if you wanna like take some of these guys down and i think the trick the reason why one folks on a verticals i think it's quite important as quickly as possible if you're doing the company in any relative area to this to do with amazon did very effective to get to become a destination and to get out of google surgery so mean we forget before prime before prime amazon had this giant existential threat which is i think sixty to eighty percent of traffic came from google and this is what killed deal yelp at the end of the day because at some point google is like we're into maps and just promote maps over yelp and then you know jeremy s went to congress to complain but that never works i worked in work for him amazon did something much right where they became a destination now when you buy something you go to amazon dot com and then you search there oh amazon's is like i think the fourth largest search engine now so so i think you must pick a vertical because it is easier to become and the consumers mind a destination if your particular vertical like i associate this this is the app that i go to to get sneakers because this is the app that i go do to get we wouldn't i wouldn't even to say electronics too big two get like cables and dongle the cables and dongle dot com and then i think you can become the destination and and if you pick a small vertical you can also handle all the shipping there companies like ship which will take care of the logistics for you it'll be hard to compete on the two day thing with crime that maybe over time here's here's a different angle at this what we talk about earlier about luxury software so sometimes when i want something i just wanna know what is the actual best what is the best that money can buy yeah and like what are the top three of like that's best money can buy and so you know whether it's socks or anything else you basically just start to curate so it's not necessarily a vertical of products right but it's a vertical of like buying habits that dot com what's that that's like a top three dot right top three exactly what are the top three and we go to extraordinary lengths to identify test and sort of and ensure that these are the top three at any given time blue ratings for products yeah that's it's that's interesting and and to extend on the wire point make the funny thing is you know the that you have to go to the bottom actually to get the best best thing because they actually focus on value right well they have a budget pick right a best for most people pick and a upgrade pick yeah i i remember where i was i was finding an air filter and i was like you know what like it's the air that i'm breathing it now i'm i'm willing to pay well i did this with a mattress i was like i don't want a eight hundred dollar mattress like what's like the fanciest one i could ever get and will that actually make me sleep an hour extra by the way i mean yeah i if if that math is true you shouldn't invest half your earnings and that because like get pound over time sleep just the the drug everyone forgets to take so so yeah top is interesting because yeah you'd also track like you know the the best customer the extreme variant of this topic fear that what the craziest version of this is i think there's if you really shoot for super high end i think you can take down all the traditional blogs on that are covering like the latest on private aviation the latest on like crazy homes i don't think those guys are at the top of the game right and i think you'd probably build an alternative again you're gonna get like ten thousand visitors a month but i imagine a get month it so there's this company i brought up before it's called inform it has a market cap of ten or fifteen billion dollars three or four billion a year in revenue and they own roughly a hundred brands and it's all high end so it's like they own like i could be wrong but the idea is right like monaco yacht week right or they and they own like i'll never they own a magazine that probably reaches only ten thousand people a month and it's up for people who are buying hundreds of semi trucks right and so they update you on manufacturers and things like that i think so at hu calling one guy i think his name eric ryan or something the founder of the big event we we host yeah conference so so he he had this talk that i thought was the best talk there and he said something at the beginning it's like yeah he created method soap and like you know one in the soap category then he created all the vitamins he won in the vitamin category now he's doing well he's gonna win in the band aid category and it's like okay what's the formula here is it just like walk down the aisle and pick one of target and he said yeah pretty much you know you know he's was like i look for a c of same ness and he said every time i see a c of same in the in the in the aisle i start to do it and he goes the second thing is then i have to pair that with what's the culture shift where's the culture going but these brands that succeeded fifty years ago and the culture was different that they don't understand so for method it was hey the culture shift is now when we pick up a product we don't look at the brand we turn around and read the ingredients and hey look all these soap brands they you can't recognize one ingredient because with there toxic chemicals that we use to clean our house so we should have you know chemical you know we should have cleaning products with chemicals you you understand a trust for olive on vitamins i was like the culture shift is around you know getting these benefits around like you know i don't take bio i want thicker hair you know i don't do this i want better sleep you know personal wellness as personal fitness basically and so he so he start talking about this i like this concept and i see this with like when you talk about taking down the incumbents so the way i look at this was snapchat was probably the last big let's say threat to one of the big companies the most recent big threat to one of the big companies because a they wouldn't sell to facebook and b they took them on at social and succeeded and what i think they did was they recognize recognized that the the pendulum had swung where facebook was everything's public you're connected to everybody and everything's permanent we we save all your photos forever in your post forever and snapchat just went and zag you know they they zig zigzag where it was like how about private how about photos that delete and not permanent and because the culture is going this way where when everything's online you sort of wanna be you know not everything wants to be sort of public and plastered everywhere yeah and so think an important thing when you look at this is like where's is the culture going so when you said this about luxury brands what i was thinking was i couldn't give less of a fuck about yachts or or private planes or anything so what is luxury for somebody who's gonna be who's who's twenty five and getting wealthy and over the next ten years they're not gonna buy fancy watches maybe they want what are the luxury experiences right like i think fire festival was closer to what people actually the supreme it well supreme scarcity right that but that's still like i think sort of part of the old old world of like it's a it's a physical material good that's scarce now they did some differently but i'm curious what like we know our our generation cares more about experiences the material goods than any generation in the past so what is a luxury experience right we've talked about using museum of ice cream and all this other stuff what are these luxury experiences what's what's super large luxury i'm very curious about ideas around that that seems like a fun company to run yeah yeah yeah i mean i think there's a i mean in many ways the real kind of rent seeker in this world in my company apple i mean i think i think ultimate luxury is being you know having the airpods pro to whatever when it comes out and i i mean i think apple will do well price discriminate even more they should have some crazy air variant that's like a thousand dollars right and that it's not quite gold trim not tacky but it looks cool in some way the watch is a beautiful kind of exploitation of this and so at at that that that's probably the the millennial luxury like uber and post nights i think are millennial lux where it's like hyper convenience like ludicrous convenience there's a company called puffs or go puffs know this company they basically it's a little mobile vending machine that rolls around college campuses and will bring you like you know cheetos and red bulls yeah it's condoms what awesome and they're doing like i think i i don't know the exact numbers but i saw at one point you know hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on this very simple business which is what if the vending machine and your college dorm what if you didn't have to like go across the quad and and walk into that that building and get it what if it just rolled up to your door that's awesome can you do i about that that the air last night i was like don't wanna want way i saw some investor was like when i saw that the convenience store was literally like steps away and still this goddamn machine kept rolling up to a dorm he's like i knew that was like some weird phenomena that i didn't understand but i needed to in i i've but just on the apple point here's an idea i i have to i've written down multiple times i cannot get out of my head i have to really just i i usually tell the team it's just struggle all sorry i in miss my goal today i have to see focus but boy i think it'd be relatively easy and so much fun to build a new laptop to build a new laptop i actually don't think it would be that part and i think you could fairly easily you you focus on an niche here of kind of the innovator creator founder developer would have built in lte it have like lte is wireless you don't need to i holding yeah you don't need to the t all is all sucks that has done cinch chip inside it has all the right cables it's a little bit thicker because the battery will last all goddamn day and it has some type of notable color i think you could build something where again you won't find this you know in mumbai but you will find this in every single coffee shop in new york city in san francisco and i think that'd would be quite fun to do i like the one yeah a great one i think it'd be yeah to your point about luxury i think that that'd be the real luxury i think you build a really good operating system this where things get a you would build the operating system and not just use apple well you would be he would apple you know linux but i think you can build something really fast where everything was just focused on auto complete and and again it would be the type of thing your mom's never gonna use but i think that's okay i think we can totally discriminate and and you know build the right software for the right person the related thing to do is to i think to build a brand new messaging app and of course the one point you may bring up is when we spoke about this a little bit with the admin been messaging app but it's i think it's directional kind the same idea i think messaging apps are basically like bars and so even if like the feature of one bar over the other bar is like the delta is nothing right both gonna serve you the moscow mule but one bar has a different community people in it a different eye different feeling and so again like actually actually think slack position is quite vulnerable like i mentioned the stuff moves fairly quickly i hate slack there you go what do you mean i hate it my god i don't have on my phone did hear when we were talking it was going off i hate that noise it's so annoying off noise i have the no noise it i it's it's made so many fights with me and my coworkers because i get reactive find it so don't you i don't know if you have this six experience sometimes i i'll come by by a colleague desk and they have slack on with the notifications and the dings on every single message oh it's horrible and then i got messenger up and then i got texting so i'm texting him i'm renting this other guy and i'm fucking hate i hate slack i wanna get rid of it well so speaking to counter culture that's i don't think you're alone email is i think better because you have to it you don't write like a hey you there or like or like are your awake like let's talk like you can't really do that and email it's more thoughtful mh i can't stand email or slack i mean i that's that's very interesting so maybe we can envision i don't have a weak sponsors or slack no even if it was i wouldn't care don't that's not what we do but i that's real sponsorship left right i i'll i could we i would endorse it because we've paid them a lot of money i i mean and there is some cool stuff about it but i fucking hate slack and i don't wanna use it ever i don't have it on my phone i don't think you're alone by the way and then one one lens on how to kind of do startup up ideas is really just focus on them the kind of the the availability cascade if if you guys are familiar with that or the or the mean that's exciting like i think if you if as simple way thinking about this maybe or better way thinking about this is what is a good stand up comedy joe like i think if you went up on stage and you said who here hates don't you hate it when slack zen you the everyone's laughing and so there's something there there's a lot of truth there yeah and you i think you can line it up on fire and so what would this be so maybe the messaging app is called like quiet and yeah maybe you need to send things longer form i don't know exactly what it is but you can take advantage of that energy somehow i have a a hard issue coming up with those product ideas those are i think are hugely challenging like i got like when i think how they create slack and like crane that from scratch challenging whereas creating something else that's like slightly better version like we were talking about sweet greens earlier and i was like oh i could totally see how that's so easy to make envisioning software from scratch is so challenging there's a difference right right like so we talk a lot on this podcast it's about two two types of businesses but we use them interchangeably there's businesses in the traditional sense and then there's like startups which end up trying to be hyper growth dominate their market you know the the goal is monopoly and the outcome is like multi billion dollars right i would say that for you and your world you're geared to the yc world it's all geared focusing on these hyper growth start as most of silicon valley it should be and this is very exciting and then there's like you know we have friends that go on flip and will buy a shitty fba business and be like oh let me double the prices and great i turned to one million dollar business into a two million dollar they'll have like head of them yeah and they'll then they'll do that five times and whatever it's very it's just two different worlds i like them both i both i don't call them what they are he told he said it's took two or three or four years for ivan i think i his names to make notion i'm like fuck i can't even imagine what star different yeah i i think it's a very good distinction really the main thing going on here is yeah i think you put it very well starbucks are once they work just meant to grow and think much faster clip you know we're we talk about five ten percent week over week non nonstop relentless growth whereas as traditional businesses i mean they may start that way but they usually ask them to over time and both are fine right and the thing you the thing the startup up world needs to be careful of is venture funding is the incorrect financial instrument for most businesses mh i think of there's a lot of founders that made in a mistake of taking venture funding where they have been much happier off taking debt funding from a bank owning much more of the business and just leaving an amazing life that many founders would secretly wish they have just like you know i have a thing and it meant you know ten million dollars of free cash flow year and that's kinda it and i own it goodbye startups ups you know are are thing where owning two percent of it should should be you know enough for to never work again in another day of your life because it really has to achieve t tiktok scale for tour did your search engine girl like that in in many ways yeah i did the we faced this interesting challenge which is it's a very the way you ended at our startup up all of our of the entire search engine was hosted on aws on amazon's cloud services to became really expensive to run and the way it runs on your iphone today is it runs on your iphone so it's much more efficient if if that makes sense so we we we came up with with had a terrible business model winds up selling obviously you know i i think we we could have craft the company in other ways isn't in potentially taking it took to greater heights but yeah i mean it's my first rodeo and so no means said i know how to run p and l properly i'd imagine you're your audience who was probably better in me and you know properly running a p and l because i i i was very capable of taking all the extra money that we had and sending it directly to amazon my a broker no my big job i mean the the yeah the the real literal rent seekers by the way that are basically taking venture capital money not stop not producing much of societal value with it are landowners owners since san francisco that's really work it's the the the the what my bet is i'm buying multi family units in fast growing b b c b cities like now fill things like that because i think that remote work is gonna change everything yeah remote work and that's an interesting one certainly i i mean i think he went other way because whether it's remote or whether it's other startup hubs i don't think we'll be able to pop the blister of san francisco so it's clear that the pressure is gonna go elsewhere i think it'll be interesting to see how many companies are successful that's one of those by the way reverse network effects if if the if the tide shifts and people from here leave but go to a single destination rather than dis bursting it it it it'll happen quick and people forget but like it is very clear decade of two thousand and nine to twenty nineteen was the decade of san francisco but like prior to that it wasn't as half right cool kids were in mountain view all the cool kids were in palo alto and what really happened is there was a point a tipping point about from two thousand i think actually ten to twenty twelve maybe where it all very quickly moved to s f because air airbnb was here dropbox access here and then the strike moved here and zinc yeah later on maybe pinterest and because they they all moved and they became unicorns people just assumed oh okay mountain view pretty much gone back to s but it could tilt very easily again it could tilt to like redwood city it could tilt to austin it could tell london so if you were a city what would you do right it's so that's that's funny i was gonna mention you guys the other podcast format that doesn't exist i think that would be very interesting is in addition to brainstorming ideas if you were this ceo of x what do you do so if you're evans sp what do you do right so you're asking yeah if you're the mayor of the city what do you do or we get evans speaking and say if you're the ceo of this hey ceo of ex if you were your competitor see you interesting question so look what do you do by the way if you're mark zuckerberg right now but do you do fucking retire fail like hide you yeah i'm mean the guy knee deep in a video game he's not shutting in it down right now but anyway to your point okay so if you're the mayor i think let's let's take the the the most difficult version of this question like you're the mayor of a small town literally nowhere but you're a really good mayor because london's kinda lander wyoming yeah exactly what do you do so i think you need i think the way this soak so so you know a lot of people will say wow you know first you gotta bring in the money and then everything will follow wrong in my opinion i think the money pretty much follow venture capital money at least follows wherever the start seem to be emerging from venture venture capitalist they're like water they'll the full shape of exactly of whatever cup their they're being molded against so you have to very quickly get to a point where you can say we are a startup hub look at x and y and z so how are you gonna get x and y and z in many ways it's the strategy and recent har what's took so andres har is the largest just newest venture capital firm him to come out of silicon valley really the only successful kind of mega launch in the last decade and what they did is to get big quick the testosterone and they took the human growth hormone when they took is they didn't call by a brand strategy where he went out of the gate and he put up on his website you know skype and facebook i think they bought secondary in both companies which is not too far for me saying welcome to my venture capital fog investment apple amazon after the exact because i own equity in those companies that i mentioned i bought it last quarter but nothing to see here so i think of your city you try to do that and so what you try to do is you try to you call up maybe stripe is to big but you know strike grew four years ago and you stayed look you guys will move hey air table you're gonna make your main engineering office here we had i had people who recruited to me and try to do that bend oregon they did the exact same thing they flew me up for free and hosted me for five days and the pitch is what okay okay so you're gonna make what you're gonna call your engineering capital here i don't care if you have large engineering off of elsewhere we will fore taxes for you for you for i don't know five years whatever forever and housing for your employees and i don't know some some well i i think i think if you gave companies the ability to control and truly build a campus s those that have been dealing with the legendary california regulation kind department and environment and you tell them look we'll just work with you move here we've got if you really wanna like this on steroids the really crazy thing to do it would be to do type of special economics zone i mean that's how nations think about this stuff you set have special economic zone and you can actually do interesting new stuff here that's a little i like i a lot of the stuff is federally regulated so like if you wanted to so which means what you it's not a taxation thing you're talking about you can it's more like zoom you're left and right all day you know up and down in the air basically the internet you could think of the internet as the ultimate specialized special economic zone where you could do whatever the heck you want pretty much on the internet but when the physical word is a little bit harder to do so for example the airspace is heavily regulated there's a lot of things biology that are heavily really regulated a lot of things in chemistry that are affiliated regulated is now we've we've kind of gone from what of the mayor of the city do to like what should k stand do right what which should a country do but if you're at a special economics where you could do more experiments with crispr you could fly weird planes you could really advance the frontier there and i wanna attract a lot of founders self driving cars that don't work yet let's let's go bumper cars of four you know you read research about you know america and and it's kind of frontier nineteen sixties seventies and to some extent the eighties there was a lot of this kind of swatch buck style research every literally every single artificial sweetener that exists today has the origin discovery story which would never happen in in modern day world which is scientists working on some other drug like trying to develop something else just oh it's sweet oh let's me know looks surfing like oh that tastes good that sweet that's interesting and so we have and so we have super close and saf the same discovery story and so things you just same with lsd i believe alfred hoffman literally like drank it like like a night coat one day the microwave wave itself by the way the microwave itself was a way to kind of heat up food i'm forgetting the name of the guy but he's basically walking around chocolate bar and his front yeah melted and it melted by the way always important to give the chocolate part in your front pocket and but it melted by the way you know what else was melting his heart probably but this used to be the way we you know we ran research where things were a little bit more kind of fast and loose yeah fast and loose that's what i think if so this is like for crypto when crypto took off in zoom switzerland whatever that is i don't know i've never been but they were like yeah crypto we love it and love here right but i think iceland too yeah but i just remember like where is the ethereum foundation zoom where is this new ico happening here zoo well because like free shelter for all of you crazy crypto kids and like it you know a a brought innovation because those were that's that's the edge that those people were on and you know an incumbent did not wanna take additional risk but a challenger would take that risk i think it's very interesting to apply the models that we think of that we think of so clearly for the companies but two cities and two countries and and and they're not always the same but there are some similarities there where yeah i mean this s f is basically an in incumbent city it's very risk ave hers moving to slow you know kind of new york with all of its d somewhat similar i was reading the other day okay i was reading the origins of hbo which started out as a company lane cable underneath manhattan and their lane cable at you wanna guess the cost per mile no know i i even have a range i don't know okay the cost per mile to millions okay so he's laying cable at three hundred thousand dollars per mile which inflation adjusted is about one point eight million dollars per mile if you turn to to spend in manhattan today i guarantee you probably can't do it even if you could would literally be fifty millions well google bailed on it because they're like even this is too expensive well this what with elon with the tunnels right he's like look the tunnel today cost i don't know whatever it was hundred million dollars a mile yeah that's ridiculous there has to be better way the yeah i find the the most by the what are you getting at but my the thing i was getting at is well there's general kind of cost as disease here everyone the us but like that's in many ways because it's kind of an come city people are risk ave ave it's harder to change things once you set that got it when manhattan is kind of originally getting started i mean chicago itself the city i believe late nineteenth century literally the entire city was lifted three inches into the air so that they could build a sewage system and then like put back down again building by building block by block by block you cannot do that i think today in any modern city but you can do that and kinda of early stage of chicago so so cities in many ways are like startups and you in an early stage start up it's kinda hard to compete with on they're moving quickly they have no state whatever large city like a large organism in anyways ways like a large human body like you develop a lot of cells and it's just like harder to do new things right so yeah special economic zone i think would be would be the real tricky thing to do as the city but but i think going all the way back pulling the stack all the way back your your your idea of just buying property in other cities is quite good and i think the related kinda interesting startup ideas what is other if you have the money to buy real if that's easy if not i think there's a lot of other kind of adjacent stuff you can be building within those cities to prepare for the how would you say san francisco going from like the sole capital of startups to one of many mh so that was great daniel gross president yeah for for mayor i could do it i wasn't born here i according this i'm not i'm a citizen i horn so sad so was this what you expected yeah yeah i i i was i i didn't realize and know i in fact happy that that that this was gonna have the shape of like tract startup ideas that's very i kind of inspiring to me i get i think you stay san francisco for too much to you get stuck with i i spent a lot of time trying to tell people you know stop trying to do this like crazy high intellectually pleasing an idea just build the goddamn website that does ten k mr and call me afterwards well that's step one the the high end stuff is like cool worry about that at step fifteen yeah or even it's i actually think it's fine to have a big dream it's just like what are you doing get one right that's what i mean yeah i think that's right and i think the trait the problem that a lot of people get caught in is at the end of the day like the interesting question i think for every single person that i i at least ask myself in my head when i meet people is pull up who are you performing for mh are you trying to please at the end of the day and the problem in itself the strength of the culture is the weakness that which is that a lot of people are performing for kind of intellectual approval from from the elders of the community you i want i wanna be known as the person who's working on the space satellite thing and a lot of those people get stuck in a black hole where they don't produce anything which is of course the real way to get approval but they they kind of produce status in the form of twitter likes and whatever mh and the problem with status is that it's infinite so it's very easy for me to give you a like it cost me almost nothing it's much harder for me to give you money that's why i at the end of the day revenue is is a much healthier thing to chase because that's how you know you're creating something really useful for people jason's status you you don't really know if it's valuable oh good you know paul graham liked my tweet that didn't cost him anything try get program to give you a hundred dollars for a thing you made so what's your what's your answer to that question who are you performing for for me you mean i don't know i think that kind of shifts i mean early on who did you perform for look well i'll tell you the the so i i i although i grew up in israel i you you know was kind of born online a child of the internet was reading a lot and i remember i to silicon valley i was eighteen and i met i had i met mark zuckerberg for the first time it i came to speak somewhere and i've i visceral remember kind of minute by minute that entire evening because i i felt like i was experiencing my entire brain reform itself because i have gone from mark zuckerberg i mean it's basically not human as far as i can tell from israel to my god this guy sitting in a room and oh my god he's just okay he's actually that's the greatest chance ever happened to me about moving to san francisco he's same exact thing i you think you're human yeah i'm like you're smart not that much smarter i yeah you're like you're smart but it it's like the same thing that when you use don't meet your heroes because people say you will get be disappointed and the exact opposite reaction which is absolutely meet your heroes you'll realize they're not superheroes that's why a lot of professional athletes come from one neighborhood or why the four minute mile the three guys broke it in in a couple months yep i mean the way i've forgetting the name but a ban when he broke it i i don't the story is amazing was literally like had a bunch of work at university ate lunch he only ran a bunch of lot thirty five forty miles a week and then was like yeah no i'll go take another stab at that's broke it a been a mile and i went back to class afterwards anyway sir but you're you're yeah yeah i i completely agree with that me i've met a lot i've had a lot of our my heroes actually invest in our company and i talked to them and sometimes they'll ask me for and i'm like yeah wait a minute you weren't your grandson and why happened i'm like what what do you what do you love what are you doing that's when you said you in the pandora guy you went to go get a haircut together yeah that that's awesome yeah i wanted you to finish the loop on this though the question i like which is who you're performing for so early on you were perform for who and then what do you think the right answer now like something that people can because i think everybody if they answer that for themselves the first answer is kind of the embarrassing one which is you know some people perform for their parents they were they crave their love some people who crave the love of their boss their manager their friend who's more successful their mentor whatever it is i find well we'll answer what's happened for me is it's kinda i i mean it it it it it shifts over time is there's my goal my dream you know i'm from for myself is i i i really care little in fact i would prefer not to be known by the masses i've really struggled with i mean in honesty i'm you know i'm i'm kind of on walking on the way over here psych myself even can for a podcast like this because i i don't like the attention of the masses is but there are kind of a few people in my world that i i think have been very successful you know more it's as we mentioned as one of them that i very much kind of look up to and it's in the way i benchmark myself as a human in terms of like whether my career at least is going in the right place is i think you know what would they think of kind of where a stand where i am it's very much not the masses is very much you know the few and i think i think it would do well for everyone to figure out who that is in and to realize okay here's the most important thing to realize that the correct way to like you have to figure out what type of performer you are if the way you're gonna perform is through like tweeting or sending people ideas like that's one thing but i think the correct way to perform and the the reason i know this is when i think of people that i find interesting what i find interesting about them is their career success it's not that they wrote a really nice tweet or that they sent me a joke or cute thing on whatsapp if that they've made a successful thing their captains of a successful ship and so like my performance if you will yeah you know is the work that i make are the investments that i make is pioneer and so that i use that as my north star hernandez as i think the the the the important part of the conversation it's it's like gross of who you're performing for your performance should hopefully be you know i think in a in a thing that plays in the world of money again because money is scarce since that's how you really know that the thing you're doing is useful important and interesting more accurate and less captions basically you just make that up that's a drake line yeah okay but nice if you didn't know that you could attributed to me you i recognize recognized the greatness of that line and brought it up i'll i like that hey man we're gonna wrap up because we went way over but it was good so i know you don't want the attention of everybody but where do they follow you okay check out pioneer if that sounds like something you're interested in yeah okay so i think the easiest top level like thing to find that we'll give you links to everything else just on twitter daniel gross and then pioneer is pioneer dot app one day we'll buy the dot com who owns it the the japanese company speakers yeah the speaker guys yeah i don't think a got some have ways to go exactly good so it's a good and then yeah scattered on the internet everything's like link but i thank you so much for having me was a lot of fun i mean for me it's it's it was quite interesting maybe the listeners will experience this too i felt like pot it's always funny when pie start there's like i almost feel like it's the first few miles of run when you're a little bit yeah you get into every about twenty minutes and i don't know what that is that warming but anyway if felt like it happens so thank you yeah there's a i bet this dude and gave me this great insight he goes there's two types of friends there's friends that you consume with this will have most most of your friendships are you go watch movies together you eat food together you're just consuming stuff and he's like but the best friends i have and if this is true for me too is the ones you create with is like the simplest version of con creation is just a conversation yes which is kinda you know what this is essentially but like people you start companies with teams you're on where you create like a culture and you know you you go and you you play games or whatever and those end up being the strongest and best friendships that end up having itself so so find friends that you create with not just consume i think that's that's that's wonderful advice and i'm gonna hate yeah end it we're gonna end it in a second i think right now