#48 - NSFW Tech, HQ Trivia & Auctions

alright we're good this is a podcast you know at crystal he starts he always calls his audience baby babies like like okay babies let's talk no i've ever it's hilarious i only watch his clips make sure to subscribe from this to this podcast and then unsubscribe and unsubscribe again so we climb with the charts yes we're climbing i think we were top fifty a few days ago when i checked top we were sixty five and then we were creeping to fifty five so i saw some good movement there it's like the movies where there it's like a band is like climbing at the billboard charts and they show like yeah exactly i way number one the clips that we're posting on our social they're not getting as much traction as i wish traction like what you views or comments or what i only care about views and comments in order to get more podcast right listeners yeah so i guess there you would need people essentially tagging their friends or you can just start showing up and discover yeah and it's still so starting i also i've noticed that when i i have a smaller following than our branded channels but when i share something it gets way more engagement than a bridge so i need yeah people like following people and listening to people more i also don't ever share it so i should share it it's that big nine thousand twitter followers i got and you know you have five hundred more me you have five hundred more than me but i'm gonna beat you in the next four days i think i also bought five thousand a long time ago me too they degraded they like go away because twitter like bands the accounts but when i bought the five thousand i got way more followers per day same because people wanted to follow somebody who already has a lot so i'm averaging two hundred new people a day don't been it i don't even check alright what do we got i wanna talk about talk about this idea it's not even an idea as it's a company ars yeah they've been around for about four years now yeah i know i don't know how they're doing or do you know if they're doing well they were doing okay basically the way that i knew some like media people who talked about them and knew them and i'm almost positive that it it's run like it it looks like it's run which is a bunch of kids who are good looking and rent the mansion and they just dude right so deb bot and the idea is ars is essentially playboy for the snapchat generation and so they have a snapchat channel because know the idea is like okay playboy always is big deal what would play would be like today it would not be a magazine it would be you know a snapchat channel and so they create the snapchat channel which is perfect because it's like if you follow it you get it if not it's not in your so it's not like like facebook would be little weird instagram would be a little weird and they have email to and they just have this mansion and they have all these models and it's not porn but it's definitely models who are good looking and they just have one model like sort of take over the channel at least is what it was three years ago i just think there's a great idea they raised three million bucks i don't know how they're doing so they've got books they do like tours i think that it could be doing the idea is cool it's a cash cow i think it well i because they were getting millions of views back then on their videos i can only assume it's grown unless snapchat blocked but they're not outside the bounds of what's snapchat allows porn right no they don't lot porn but they see a lot of they allowed nudity they don't if you're putting on your stories you'll get banned eventually if you're do that have a private they do they don't do nudity with for a private account you can eventually if it gets flagged they'll take it down like it's not in the rules to do new well that's far as i have heard of only fans yeah love it so explain only fans only fan so basically what happened is on snapchat all these porn stars were putting up like porn yeah like well soft core porn i don't think it was like sex but like pay me ten dollars and i'll let you follow me right and y'all all of my account where i post nude and only fans launched and what they did was it was a platform where they i don't think they started with porn but now it is that yeah so just embrace it but basically if you i don't even think it's porn i think it's like web girls like web scam girls and you pay twenty dollars however much that you want you to and you get access to their private video feeds yeah it's like patreon but porn basically yeah so you pay you you become out contributor and you would get their private photos and videos it's taken off has it yeah and the reason yeah because i was doing like who cares if i consume it or not from a business point of view and that's how i know about it well we all care if you could and and i mean no surprise like so i did research on it research takes off yeah but so here's you know why i think these things take off is the people who don't take care of the creators they they they for these types of things they they go away yes and so there's always demand the demand is always there the question is does the platform allow the supply to do what they wanna do and the big platforms don't do because it's not worth their brand and risk and all the stuff because they but big the only fans i for sure bet i would bet you for sure they're in north of a hundred million in subscription revenue and then they take their cut that's insane at one point in time when we had a we had lab like live streaming product and it wasn't working we had to pivot and we pivoted venture to video gaming but i definitely laid out a case to the company that investor was like look porn is the porn is where that porn this would be the best like these they're not fucking on camera i don't think okay well whatever you wanna call it like soft porn or whatever but like going after the sort of the cam grill market is a pretty it's a big market and the websites that are there really suck and so so sounds like fans well we had kind of a hard to hardware like is this what we wanna build and my founder felt a certain way the investors fell a certain way like kinda wanna do he was like not down to he so down with that yeah so i think it's you gotta make a personal choice in i've had a bunch of entrepreneurs reach out being like hey we saw you did lab we read your post mortem you guys got to four million users but it didn't work i have a very similar concept i think it's gonna work can you give me some advice and i tell him from the bat jump i'm like this version is not gonna work consider porn i think it could work consider the cam angle because you know that's the one stone we didn't turn when we were considering you know where to pivot this thing to make i would for sure do that because think all these like patreon on all this shit they're like we're gonna empower creators okay i'm behind that but even though a lot of times i think they don't but if you're gonna empower a creator imagine this like woman who can just crush it by not breaking the law and just using her own body i'm philosophically i'm so in favor of that right yeah i think as a business person i'm definitely in favor of i think it's just a person business person i love it as was just like a human being i'm like yeah so that you wanted to their body little ideas or trends off this so one there's this fund called vice ventures that is basically investing in we've covered it on trends that other investors won't invest in because like investors typically if you're a vc your investors they're called lps they are typically not just like rich individuals their institution so it'll be like a pension fund for firefighters in new york or this you know the school endowment will give you twenty million dollars until you can so they won't want their money going into certain types of companies this is why cannabis investments started to take off because only alternative investors investors who had a little more freedom we're able to go into them big investors knew they were good spaces but they weren't able to move on it as quickly because they had to worry about their lps so vice ventures came out and they were like look you know sex drugs alcohol right whatever right they're basically like taking sort of the the seven sins and they were like we specifically look for companies that are doing business in this in these areas and we'll invest in them and i think it's a very i think it's a if you're gonna do a event venture fund you could either just make another cookie cutter hey we're a seed fund come to us instead of all these other guys or you take a focus and build a brand around being different and i think it was a very very smart approach i like it i've i invested in this company called lucy yeah it's a nicotine replacement or it's basically nick gum we gotta get wasn't named dave dave we have to get him on because when i met him for the first time through you after hu khan he spit off seven ideas and when we were just standing there talking and i was like i'd asked for one and then he gave me like a dope idea and i was like you got more of those he i got a list and he started reading off his ideas and they were fantastic so he might be listening we gotta get him on the on the couch wanna hear a quick porn story yeah okay so i worked out of this i work given nod of approval worked out of this office called the founder dojo and it was the greatest thing ever i'll i'll tell another story about it but basically it was if you've seen the tv show silicon valley it was earl we had early bach and it was an early bach type a guy named dave who was a great guy but totally inappropriate and discussing in in a good way and the office was filthy and there was this guy i forgot his name re and chris yeah and i remember that and it was this this little skinny indian guy and he was crazy and awesome and he was like the stereotypical silicon valley hacker where he could get a job at any big company and make two hundred thousand dollars a but he was like no fuck that i'm like knock i'm fuck the corporate pigs right and so he would sleep at that office and dave would buy in pizza all the time because he was like get wanted to be poor and do this thing and so he created a app or no a site yeah a website that would crawl tumblr no i think all of the internet okay for the fastest for the gifs that had the highest velocity of growth and so if a gif launched popular he would tell you right away which one's gonna be the most popular and then you would see it on the screen and it was called the worst drug the worst drug dot tv it's not there anymore and that sounds like a silly thing but that's not why he did it he did it because what he was trying to do was a find the fastest like technology that find the fast growing stuff and if you would go to the wireshark shrug at dot time you could type in something like dog and the search feature would autofill fail like wicked fast like way faster and then you would click enter and it would be bam a high depth gif there's was a high def it was full screen and it was all screens was laser fast so the technology it is very like pod piper like the technology wasn't like whatever pod piper did it was the fact that it was all behind these scenes like it bunch your nerves being like yeah our gifs load the fastest and like look it's like hd and it happened in nano seconds and he would spend nights and i would come back and it would be just as tiny improvement but we don't gather around well so here's the cut this the the point of the story turns out the most popular shifts on the internet ninety nine percent of them are super hardcore ro porn like real ro porn and so yeah because when i went to the site it was all porn there wasn't like porn and then some basketball jail and all porn it was only porn i was this was a porn site and so at the office of the at the dojo we would have these huge screens of it like his workstation and the way that he sat was everyone could see it and we kinda got immune to it but it was like the ro should ever and we would he like guys checked this out early in the morning we would come in eleven which was early and he'd be rubbing his eyes and shit and he'd be like check this out and all eight of us would gather out this high screen and be like and he would type it in the word like like facial and like he's like watch how fastest loads and we were just so immune we we're like not looking at the we're not even looking at the at that were like oh yeah wow you could like see the shine in the liquid like it would like it was so funny and we would have like these like lawyers come into the office of people who are were actually are like investors who would try to raise money for the other companies and we would get that this was on the big screen and the what happened so this sounds like what's the end of does this guy doing now i'm into the site the site the worst drug got millions of millions of millions of visitors the the the engagement was stupidly like good he couldn't monetize it they couldn't use so there were so many restrictions no ad network where a allowed him to use it and so even though the site i think it was getting at least for sure millions i think maybe tens of millions of monthly unique and it made zero money and it only cost him a lot of money and the story ends with like someone in bulgaria or la like this like communist ex communist in country wanted to buy the site and it was all weird and they flew them out there and he's like wait these guys are like mobs and they ended up like bailing and they just shut it down because it was good what did he do now he works facebook no he bailed i've never seen them he's no my skateboard i had a skateboard i left at the office he's stole it and i've never seen it you gotta get away dude it i've never seen it if you need to transfer raj that's his name raj i've never seen raj from someone hunt this guy down because he that guy is gonna build something amazing or it's gonna be a very sad ending but either way it's gonna be not average not the year he was he was like if you think of like this idea of what silicon valley is that was that right wow okay that's incredible i like that story okay we were talking about our a quick idea so what they're doing is the playboy on snapchat if that's working and i i don't know if it's working so go look into it but if it is working in a big way i don't think that there's just gonna be one of those so like in the same way that there's all these porn brands right there's like girls gone wild it focused on college age things somebody out there could create the ars for college or for a different like whatever genre and so i just like to just to clarify verify arc arc ars is not porn modeling scant modeling more like playboy and maxim maximum yeah current playboy exactly so you could build playboy but of other genres and just or you could just literally clone them and i think it would be very low cost and i think you would be able to do a lot of you be able to drive a lot of views and i ultimately get a lot of sponsorships in the same way that maximum playboy we're able to make pretty big businesses out of what they do now they had subscriptions so i don't know if you would do subscriptions maybe you use only fans i'm not sure but we figured it out yeah i i'm gonna look up the old defense interested in this i i i i have a lot of ideas i'm gonna i'll come back a little more prepared on this because i think there is something there yeah what else you got okay so you have h hq so hq died obviously yeah i thought like it could've have been cool i'm like they could be like jeopardy jeopardy is huge so if you don't know what hq was it was a mobile app was a game show like will fortune jeopardy whatever but that was all done on a mobile app which was when i saw this product so our friend eric who does drive socks he showed me this happened he was like dude my friend went to go work with this company it's really interesting check this out and he pulls it up so at six pm every day they would do the game show so you got a notification at six you open the app there's a host live got you know live live game show host on live streaming and he would ask of your questions that you would push the button or you have ten seconds to answer you'd push the button real quick to answer and if you got all ten or twelve questions right you'd win the prize at the end which at that time it was there was four hundred players and the prize was like five hundred dollars this thing grew like crazy they had games with over a million concurrent players i think like a and a half and exactly over a million players and over i believe they had over a million dollars in prize money over time and so this thing had this run and they got tons of funding founders fund funded them ten million dollars of funding at a hundred million dollar valuation and then they had big time brands launch stuff on there so they were like you know this game is sponsored by nike it's all trivia about athletes and we're gonna drop the shoe the new shoe release is happening live on hq and that's the prize they were doing some interesting stuff but it was kind of a fad and which everyone knew which whichever everyone knew because it was like the games all have this hype cycle and then this decline over time the games aren't super super sticky most of them and this was definitely that this big novelty grew like crazy viral product in many ways as somebody bake products it's very inspiring because it was like so simple yet so awesome and i actually felt product they're i'm not trying to be hyper hypothetically but i felt like there was some revolutionary things for sure it was like oh i'm looking at the future this is this is what the future looks like i still think that's what the future looks like h hq died for many reasons psychotic founders are are fucking crazy literally one founder died he overdosed on drugs the other founders they are sort of always in fighting they were both sort of like kind of come across at least from the outside as a sort of like moody artists yeah one of them i believe started fine also us yeah yeah they both of them they are both the founders of vine so definitely sort of brilliant guys in in a way but the everyone says that russ is a dick yeah and the so and he had he got removed a ceo because he had some problems just you know he was a dick or whatever the other guy got removed also never figured it out and the the the game show host scott became this kinda like cult sensation because he was the host everyone saw him every day and he tweeted out when it shut down recently he was just like this company died for one reason alone and that's the sort of incompetence and arrogance of the founders and i was like yeah down that is like you don't usually hear that like everybody's so pc and always just worried about the careers well he's a comedian he'll give a fuck yeah he definitely did not give a fuck because that was that was pretty brutal on the day that shut down let's say can i tell you what i would do yes okay so i would be i i have no idea if they did this not i would have built this knowing now it's gonna die and so it's like i it's my thing is i'm gonna be a hit machine right and i'm gonna use this formula up and i always thought about this with remember like cro nut yeah okay you know how like these viral food things like these food things go viral i i like one day sat down i'm like what makes them go viral so it's and i've like broke it down to a handful of categories which is like it's either a it's gotta be a food that's typically side but you're gonna eat it in excess so for example only cookie dough instead of so ice cream that's just cookie dough right or you make the you make the topping the main yep so like one formula you could use yep yeah another like or like fond do so like fond do is typically an appetizer fond do only right another thing is you take the shape of it and you make it a ridiculous shape yes easy including small to big like there's bob's donuts which sizing so you make something small big a big small right the the fifth or fourth thing is color rainbow bagels so you just take the color green ketchup up instagram yes yes and then i had a fifth one which was some mash ups which is corona right krishna yeah and then and then that was the fifth one you take their doritos lo taco one of the the most successful fast food thing in like the last ten years was this three lo taco and then every fast food chain hired these agencies to be like find me the next da lo doc and so those are the five like categories that i discovered and then it's like okay so you just make it go viral by you you have to have distribution via thrill list buzzfeed and then eventually it's like well you just have your own handle and then you're just gonna these go okay and then you're gonna have a small shop outside outside in brooklyn or in manhattan and you're just gonna you're always putting out bang yeah you're just gonna fucking knock out the park and you're gonna have line all the time and then three months later boom that one shut down switch now we're doing cookie dough ice cream but every season you come out with a new one viral sensation yeah it's like alright now we're doing this we're doing rainbow cake now or green ketchup and hot dogs like you just like you just like okay and so if i was i i've always thought about like man that's the way to go you just have a small you just are banging you're just banging these out and then for the ones that last that are hits like corona might be a hit i mean that's kind of like its own category right now yep then you that's like you one of your temple franchises right it's always available yeah that's what i would do and and so with h hq trivia i would have done the same thing so this is like supreme for food it's like you have this limited scarce kind of like out there thing what you're doing is you're making these these sort of wild con con on the food side using these five different it's all formulaic yes it's just like one of these five formulas and then you you do a limited edition drop you basically say you know you tweet that at one am it's live you get a huge line people cover the fact that there's a line and then it becomes a thing in a hips town yeah this is so easy like bagel bites like pizza on and bagels so this is back when you were doing your hot dog stand if you knew everything you know now but you still needed to do a hot in you would end up doing something more like this like green ketchup up like that my stick to ketchup would only be green right and what i did back then was i had what i did was like you just have a little stick like mine was my onions i would boil them in coca cola which a lot of people do i would just tell everyone do that right and so there's this is actually a famous copywriting trick which is have you ever heard of a a time like a watch like a like a wrist watch being described as like with quartz movement yes they all have fucking quartz movement right they all do all of them do or like space age aluminum they all that's not even on a thing first of all like what's that mad men line it's like our filters are rolled or something like yeah and they're like well everyone's is and they're like well they don't know it right so space age aluminum that that that means nothing first of all all aluminum first of all nonsense yeah it's second of all quartz movement every single watch has that right and so the idea here is you just take something that they don't know even though all the insiders know just tell them right we did this experiment when we we're doing the sushi restaurant where we took the descriptions of our food so it'd be like you know you take philadelphia role which is like this american eyes it's salmon it's cream cheese and it's cucumber in our sushi roll and then we would just so dan ariel he was one of our advisors and he's the guy wrote particularly and so he would he told us like hey one of the reasons wine charges this premium is because they created a whole language around what they do you need to create a language around su sushi so that people who start to learn about it feel like they know more and are they want to pay more so they can have the better thing just teach of what is the better thing and so we would you know we started just adding words as one experiment we would have one version of our website where it was all online ordering so as one version of our of our website would be the normal website then our ab b test was the other variation was our philadelphia role would be called like we called philadelphia role and then the description would be like atlantic fresh you know never frozen salmon with you know philadelphia authentic philadelphia cream cheese and a finely sliced cucumber and we would raise the price and we would get like more orders even despite the higher price that's crazy and and so this just like a psychological thing around yeah that shit works yeah around around the descriptions around things okay back to two for a second so they did try to release other games they came out with like a word scramble type game i think they kinda ran out of time and also they had built the hype too much and lessons to be learn when you build this much hype if you start to fail you death spiral way faster because the hype the pressure of your expectations on hype will crush you well so that's what i mean is i would have built this company accepting that like we discussed that clog and they're like well they're building it so it they're gonna just capture all the value up front and then let it die right so if you would've have built that right like built that into it it would've have been it could've have been a company kinda like i imagine saying it does this switches they just have like they're like alright this game is only in the last eighty days maybe right so two quick ideas on this hq thing so hq died okay you know rest and peace but two things i you you could do if you wanted to make make use of this of the insights that were found in this i think you can do this on top of twitch or youtube or any live streaming platform that already has audience so you don't need to be your own app you should just host create a channel that's hosting a show and give away the prize money and promote it in the same way so i think somebody could build this on top of one of the existing platforms not have to build your own tech and not have to acquire downloads of your app which is really expensive and i think if you just did this every everyday at seven pm on twitch i think a bunch of people would tune in second idea around this is maybe a the hq format which is this live video streaming with this charismatic host and question and answer could be used in education and so i would love to see somebody create an after school game that parents actually pay three dollars a week to subscribe to where your kid learns science through some bill nye the science guy type of host and it's tri interactive and they get sort of points as they that's answer i thought about starting that company but i really think that could work i think it i might also have the sort of fade and interest but i remember as a kid i love brain quest and i played all these like learning games and they were great and so i think this is a modern neighborhood that's interesting that that is quite sticky i think that as we get older their i mean your kids not old enough so you'll i imagine you'll learn this once she gets old enough but these things that we use as we kids were just huge yes huge i'm into that and you wouldn't need tens of millions of people because you're not advertising you'd be on subscription because parents would be like oh i don't have to go drop my kid off at tutoring and i don't have to like learn this myself my kid already wants to sit in front of the ipad day so okay here's an ipad game that i feel good about because you're learning it's kinda cool because it's live and interactive and i could play with you and i'll pay three bucks a week for that do you wanna hear what i in that same category that i'll come back with some more research but i was just surfing around and saw it is that but for allowance okay tell me more so a friend ramon kid had i was like i was like hey victor allowance does your dad give you allowance like he better be giving you some money right and he goes yeah but it's all on this app but i was like what do mean he's like well it it is automated and i get ten dollars a week if i do everything and i have a list of everything i gotta do and then it just sends me this ten dollars but it sends it into an account and i could use those on the the places that he's already approved that i could spend it on or if he wants i can get this debit card that it only works at a handful of places that's a great idea yeah i was like of course of that's obviously that's a course idea yeah i get mad at myself for not thinking of it so i'm gonna go i haven't thought i haven't seen their financials or any i've done i i'm going to yeah when he told me i was like oh okay obviously great right what else we got so on trends we released this on tuesday two things for interesting that our guys found more steph and our guy so men and women found which we only have two people so so your guy and gal found that two things i'm i'm like thinking about all of it first everyone talks about meditation being like the most popular like being a a huge trend right now people searching for sleep is actually significantly more like like sleep products and not and and this day it makes total sense because calm i'm a subscriber to calm their sleep stories they're they're pushing sleep like crazy yeah sleep stories i think was the breakout product for the breakout feature for that's crazy and so i didn't realize this until they like pointed out and i'm like oh yeah that does make sense sleep is way bigger than meditation and meditation is huge sleep is also a lot of people search for it because so for meditation you're trying to teach a new habit sleep everybody does also for sleep a lot of you have problem sleeping so they will actively search for and pay for solutions that will help them sleep i i pay for a bunch of them i pay for what's your sleep in an alexa app called the nature sounds and they have like twenty six sounds and i pay extra money to combine them so my the one i sleep too is winter railroad and so it's that sound like it's a train it's a train going through the mountains and winter what's the winter part what is the sound of winter you hear like wood okay i love it you shared it's something very personal there i love it unless i go alexa play nature sounds or sometimes i do ship in winter because it sounds like an ice breaker and then alexa turn off in twenty minutes that's this is also like one of these you know hack projects or some developers like okay watch it just say two words and i go search the internet for sounds and i smash them together and it makes an audio thing yeah like this is cons next hack on they should build this like i don't even know what he could be like chickens in china street so and what what i was sara she doesn't i'm like does she like the say she's down with it she's down with it so do you take any sleep aids like like a like a a vitamin or supplement or cbd or something melatonin melatonin yeah does that work help or yeah it does if i really can't sleep i'll take one of those unit did my computer i think it does one of my unit unit gel is that what it's called uni off it's it's basically like a mild dosage of night will without the medicine part oh that's good so yeah okay so it's the way some people take night will just to sleep and so this is the just sleep part it's just said don't have a cough yeah it's just a light version you don't take that stuff i i heard this phrase today i could sleep in a ditch so i just when i would decide to go to sleep i instantly fall asleep and i do not wake up at night ever and so i'm blessed you the i am typically like that as well but not as bad there's this guy that we should profile he he he's a japanese billionaire or sorry chinese billionaire and he started so he's he's a big shot now and he owns like half a bank and all his other shit and he got rich by creating a melatonin he just took melatonin and rebranded that it made it sexy and called it sleep aid and whatever it got huge and then he launched the z of china and he ended up buying like the building that they lived in just like z and or they worked in and begin this huge thing we'll have to do off to bring him up because i love him because he's reckless and he's built the fortune and lost at all like three times right yeah you love that i love those guys okay and then we also talked about do it yourself perfume so apparently that's a huge community is do it yourself perfume and there's not ton of companies in the space so what's what's happening what are these people trying to do wanna buy perfume they wanna mix their own at home yeah so basically perfume is a huge business paris hilton a lot of people forget about her she has sold roughly five billion dollars of her perfume cycling back to the porn conversation earlier okay perry hilton yes yes and let's say her stuff calls a hundred dollars which it doesn't it it's typically ninety percent margin yeah incredible so huge fat margins and everyone now knows this and so the idea here is that people are trying to make their own perfume at home and it's got there's a lot of sub subreddit around it a lot of communities who discuss different perfume like how to create your own perfume but there aren't too many companies that are making it easy to make your own perfume and formulas and things like that so that makes a lot of sense this is like one of those industries where when you hear about the winner later you're like oh okay was set up for success to for example war parker you know one of the reasons why parker works so well was that the existing eyewear wear i guess you know industry was all owned by this one conglomerate that had price pricing power and was marking shit up like crazy so they didn't have to like invent something to lower the price they just had to not be greedy and be like yeah we can offer this at a fair price and still have margin and so if you own colon cologne i own cologne and so what you're saying is basically cologne vastly marked up in the same way razors are super marked up and dollar shave club came in but instead of somebody just making a dollar shave club version of clone they're giving you a diy kit and that these like probably reddit communities of home brewers for per yeah it's actually pretty great there's an infinite number of recipes and cents so you're gonna what would gonna try a bunch is if you took it a step further an interesting sense could be sold already yeah so you could create a marketplace where you could sell your yeah you too just even to your own friends family you could create a kit for people to do this and make a better kit if there's one that exists another idea you know we're were talking about kid stuff earlier like my niece would love to mix her own perfume she would that would be like great afternoon and my my sister would buy her you know this little kid friendly perfume making kit and it's like one of the arts and crafts things that she gets gets to do and she makes it and then amr everyone who comes over she gets to show him show her show them their i think you could do this for kids and wouldn't be a big deal here's another angle that we found in trends is soap do it yourself soap mh big thing people wanna make their own soap and what was the third one juice but we already knew it no that that's right juice yeah okay okay so a top that we talked about yesterday that you wanted me to look into more was auctions auctions yes i had never heard of this company that you showed me heritage auctions yeah i think that auctions particularly marketplaces i would love someone to criticize this because i wanna hear the downsides i think that they are potentially one of the a top like two or three business models auctions or well auctions of marketplaces marketplaces for sure yeah but auction style marketplace right i think they're were they're one of the best yeah you've seen a bunch of them yeah i think they're being the sort of classic yeah and i think ebay sucks by the way there's someone's totally gonna crush them i mean they're gonna be dead not dead but somebody told me this is half half half information somebody told me eva ebay has had like a revival and they they don't do the auction stuff as much anymore they're all like it's basically amazon fucking hate it hate it but i somebody said that their numbers have turned around i don't i don't know faster well they're a behemoth they're not they're not going anywhere anytime soon i mean they're like google like if you're like oh well they're talking and like okay i mean they're gonna last for another fifty years at least yeah so anyway i love auctions i like i and i love niche auctions and heritage which you pointed out they do that you you got the you you got that pulled up henry and you could pull it up on your phone so they did eight hundred million dollars in sales so it's not on the screen yeah no i so let's look at their top categories do you have it on your phone yeah still have it so coins i think was their top right yeah so they do i think three hundred million dollars in currency right okay but look at some of the more interesting ones movie posters ten million ten million dollars in sales what was comics comics is on there yeah let me just pull it up what's it say for comics henry fifty million comics fifty sports sixty million sports sixty million four collectible basically mh three hundred million luxury real estate nineteen million wine ten million crazy right tons crazy and here's what i like about it so this is a big idea we talk a lot in fact i have a pet peeve we talk a lot about these like small little business arbitrage hacks little businesses this would be a big big company if you could get this right and so what so i love i love marketplaces and i love auctions i love auctions because there's a time component to it yeah and that urgency makes you buy more and what i think is even better and so for heritage auctions i think roughly half of their sales of eight hundred million dollar sales are online and the other half are in person you wanna know another in person auction that's doing wonderfully bear jackson have you heard a bear jackson no what is barrett jackson is based in arizona bootstrap on by one guy is that his name barrett maybe barrett barrett is dead jackson is live okay or it could be the other way around one of them is dead but what they do is they actually have a they they put this on tv all the time i watch it all the time what they do is sell cars so classic cars right not all classic cars but just like rare or like interesting cars you could buy like a ten thousand dollar car there but so they'll have a car on and they'll say like this ferrari there was only five hundred of them this it sells for two hundred thousand dollars and they showed it and you're like oh awesome that sale just happening in three minutes that was great and so they'll they do i believe sixty eight shows a year and they make hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue yeah it's a huge business and i love that and so another one is bring a trailer they do cars as well and the guy who started bring a trailer also started mailbox country underwood so he's like which he sold a dropbox right and so i like these auction places and first of all i'd like niche auction so i like watches anything that's niche but but what do you what is another and i have one an idea idea what's a current marketplace that's very ill liquid and hard to sell and you wish i could go way faster houses is one luxury house they put on here because it takes while to sell a house in general and so open door trying to make that instant as a market as a a real estate company i'm not out not as much as a auction i have a friend who did this with sneakers he people are doing that now i think it's working well he did it as a ninety minute auction so he would say the sneaker goes live it's ninety minutes and we're gonna get you your guaranteed price or we they basically offer the seller they're like we will buy it at this price if the auction doesn't go higher so if you agree to that you start the process and it's ninety minutes what else i don't know what else you got small businesses okay just flip my business and this is a maybe would just fall flat this is one of those it could be amazing or it would just be horribly of the idea but if i were quiet light brokerage sponsors this or if i were another brokerage i would one hundred percent have an event and try to gather a thousand people and we we're gonna auction off these businesses my idea from yesterday the first d where you're auction future the future first future first whatever you're gonna create i think that would work really well with this as well but businesses is the hard part is you have there's so many hard parts about it there's a lot of hard price but one is just the diligence right so like when i buy the the movie posts or whatever if it has sort of the certification and the the person who's you know selling it sort of says this is authentic i don't need to look too much more into it whereas with the business you really have to sort of understand all these different components i think that's hard i agree it's hard but i think it's interesting right because like if someone just like if i knew shopify apps or something and there was just gathering and they're just auction off a shit ton of them and it's kinda like a storage war like which you you're not sure what you could get but let's just find out like it could be fun to gamble tens of thousands of dollars yeah just storage units that would be interesting like a mystery box basically that you're buying well fuck yeah actually that would really yeah that would be really fun and and interesting it it it have to be cheap enough that's interesting if someone doing store a storage unit like blind auctions yeah yeah surely they have to be right i don't know but you could tie some of these ideas together right so like what hq showed where they did basically they took a traditional tv show and turn into a live streaming mobile app where the game shows on on your phone this is the future of tv like you can do a q or i don't know what show you talked about you watched the auctions on but like well that's why jackson but there's another one called but turn these into mobile live shows and you could essentially sell these all through through you know you could take it so one way to look at show that's what i'm thinking about right so one way to look at this is you you start selling something item that's not currently sold on these auction places might be hard because a lot of time has passed and sort of like you know the law of supply demand has pulled things that wanna be sold this way into the market but maybe you could find a new niche or you just take existing platforms and you make them smaller more lightweight and mobile focused you just win that way and so like i don't know if you do a top hat yeah what are they top hat incredible company it's wish so it's a mobile app where you see a bunch of really cheap stuff from china random stuff and could be like a back brace and a ring and a you know whatever a poster a dollar dollar store crap dollar store well it's like the it's like the wish crap which is like random electronic and memory laser yeah laser pointers and class rings and like you know whatever but what they do is if which is inch interesting is it's a this the item starts so you open up the app and you see all these things in like you've never seen your adrenaline spike like this in a mobile app before all the prices are starting at like what our fifty dollars and they just start dropping and then somebody just hits buy and then they buy it and so you kinda wanna wait to get it lower you don't wanna wait too long somebody else is gonna buy so top hat a or startup up here in san francisco and they do hundreds of millions of dollars revenue very good a very interesting business i don't know how profitable it is how sticky it is blah blah but when you go into the app it's like it's like being in like this high stakes chinese it like those dollar ox like those penny auctions things it's those are all like fucking little bit like that but they but you don't have to buy credits and stuff like that it's more like wish but in instead of the what they tap into is instead of browsing and picking they pick they they like inject into your fo you know part of your brain and so you're like okay this item do i want it do want it for six bucks five bucks four bucks three i'll take it and you end buying a whole bunch of shit and it's just a bunch of moms who are bored at home that are just shopping on this thing and they feel like hey we're getting tons of value but like this is stuff you didn't even know you want it you don't even want it this is shit it's just shit and i'm gonna download it and buy some stuff i buy shit all the time pot better cool we wanna do one more or end there let's do one quick one so i have this career advice so there's this great line i think sheryl sand said a while back which was if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship you don't ask which chair you just sit down and buckle up something like that that's her quote and i see people get this wrong all the time and so you're making let's say you're listening to this and you're making career choices so we talk a lot about businesses business ideas but a lot of people who are listening to this are not yet they haven't you know they have a job and they haven't yet you know started their own company necessarily so when it comes to job selection if you think about the companies you're thinking about joining want you to classify them into cars rocket ships or titanic and basically you got the goal in your career advice is not to look at the role you know like what is the job description say it's not even really to look at the compensation package although you know it there should be a minimum there but you wanna optimize for getting onto rocket ships and so a rockets ship is a company that's growing really really fast they figured out what they're doing and there's still a whole bunch of problems to be solved there they're the right type of problems a bad problem is nobody wants our product we have to figure out how to get them to want it a good type of problem is too many people want our product we have to make sure we can keep up with this demand and so you wanna you wanna find a rocket ship and you wanna take whatever roles you can get on that rocket chip you wanna sit down you wanna buckle up because what ends up happening in these fast growing companies is if you're good and you kill it for even two months you'll get moved and promoted to a better spot because they'll be like oh this person can actually do something we have so many fires to put out okay we thought you were a junior but like hey junior you're now working on this thing because you're the best we got and we i've seen you problems solved so far and so what the mistake people make is they try to pick a role that's a higher ranking role initially or better competition initially but they join either a slow moving company where they're not gonna learn is not gonna grow or they join a titanic which is just you know about to sink but hey i got the best seat on the titanic you don't want that either and so my advice is find the rockets chip companies take whatever seat they'll give you crush it and then they'll move you up great i think that to add to that analogy a lot of people shouldn't join that fast growing thing or do they want that fast growing thing but they want something that's mildly growing that what that car is yeah i think that's that's where yeah i'm speaking to the people that like someone that is they're trying to max out but they're currently in the job track so if you're trying to max out and you're not starting your own business this is the next best thing in my opinion yes like not a lot some people a lot of people don't wanna max they have kids and they're like i want a nice life right i don't want a high risk high reward life right and to those people that advice doesn't apply right and i'm just guessing a lot of those people don't listen to the podcast because if you're that person you probably listen to like i don't know a bunch over way to work you don't listen to like a podcast about business and ideas and all that stuff sure i think we've self self selected at least i think that's good advice and by the way when you so have you had a job have you been employed let's say not like kind of like college age but like since then or have you just done businesses of your own we had like an acquisition and i was kind of employed there but i are you haven't gone and just interviewed for jobs i interviewed once a a couple times and i never got them what'd did you interview for for fun for j my best friend i interviewed for hitch up and i didn't get it happened they just didn't call me back i started call you back jack yeah can tell you the guy who's like my best friend now i didn't know him my interview job oh you didn't know him at the time i didn't know okay they interviewed me and they didn't hire me and then two years later we came best friends and you were trying to be a salesperson or what don't remember i think so by the way i have a similar story i applied to stripe i think i might have told the story already so apologies if i did but twenty twelve i applied to i i i was gonna apply for a job for the first time my life had started two companies before that i was like i'm moving to silicon valley i'm gonna get a job i'm gonna learn from other people rather than start my own thing and i only applied to two jobs one was stripe and i got to the phone screen and i i really had it made because the guy who was interviewing me his mentor in life was one of my former advisors in my startup and had written a blog post being like this guy sean is like he said it specifically he has the highest bias for action of any entrepreneur i met he made a warm intro of this guy and was like trust me this guy's legit you should hire this kid fuck did you not get that job and so i thought i was cruising too and maybe that's why i didn't get but i get to the part of the interviewer where he was like alright you know this job has a lot of sort of sales and persuasion stuff so you know we're a piece software i want you to you know we're gonna do a little a role play you're gonna sell me a piece of software and he's like you could pick any software you like whatever you're familiar with oh you probably got creative or something and i was just like i was like okay so i here's what i would do i would talk to you about this said no don't tell me what you would do like i'm the customer hello i just picked up the phone go and i was like fuck and so i i was like hey you know i'm telling you about i'd picked base camp as my software big mistake because i don't even know base camp very well and so i just like pull i just they i didn't call you back for that reason by the by the end of that role play he was just like yeah i don't think this is for you i'm just being honest with you like i just don't think you're you know i'll for this that was eight years ago some yeah i was like probably twenty twenty three or twenty four at a time how fuck how early like i i blew it like it wasn't there bad like i definitely blew that interview how early of an employee would you have been so i think they were at like fifth maybe fifty people or less or hundred like five million dollars well yeah i don't know how much equity i would i would have had to do the rocket chip thing i would have had to start in a crappy seat crush it and then get into a good seat to get equity but like i did that with uber and airbnb i had job interviews at airbnb and uber uber earlier first hundred people and one of them i got one of them i got the offer but then they res resent it because i about my resume and the other one i didn't get past the phone july i had a criminal record and i told i didn't okay so i moved all the way out my bluff for i moved i moved all the way out here and they're like oh alright don't come to work on monday dude that's hilarious at least you had good eye for picking these companies and then i applied at v and they sold for eight hundred million dollars so i always tell people find out where i wanna work at who will also deny me and then a invest there okay let's start with where would you wanna work at today if you were you back then where would you be a applying today great question do you have an answer do you wanna go first a couple years ago i i answered i was like the only place i would be really interested working with angel list at the time no that'd be a horrible place to work and so i thought angel was doing really interesting shit and i think it's gonna be big and it it did end up becoming big and this was like seven years ago so this was a while ago yeah no that would be horrible place to work though because that like all guy fucking crazy really i learned all well i don't know like he seems like a brilliant genius so a great person wasn't too but a horrible person to manage you if okay if i had to work somewhere i probably probably just somewhere with really good managers most startups have horrible managers and like when you were looking at uber airbnb you didn't know the managers so you weren't using that criteria event no but the and i don't know if it would've been successful my wife at airbnb and she loves her managers and you know how everyone's like so what are gonna do next they always say that and she's like what do you mean about ever do anything next is also gonna be for a really long time right and i would love to have that feeling i would probably now look for a company that's i would go find all the most interesting biotech based companies so anybody doing something with genetics genomics modification anything like that i think that's a big wave that's coming i'd go try to be early there self driving cars if there's someone who's awesome there i'll do something between that if or it's hard though it's really hard if i wanted to make a lot of money let's say i wanted to like i'm gonna try and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in the next three years of work just gotta work at facebook or what well facebook google or an enterprise sales role at a super boring b2b enterprise software company right where the where the average deal is like three or four hundred thousand dollars a year right that's what i would so if i my own advice i would look for who's a rocket ship so i would try to maybe like lambda school i think is interesting i would just basically try to go find who's the fastest growing start up right now that's at maybe fifty people or twenty people or what are the ten people whatever they are i would go try to find them and then i would be like hey i'll come solve of any problem you got like we'll figure it out i went to the subs office the other day they just raised sixteen million dollars in funding you know how many employees they have five five i would that would be an interesting place to work okay who does better in the long term only fans or subs okay so for creating the owner's wealth only fans for creating a valuable company that could pinch potentially sell for more subs by far so take both paths right sub is gonna either up to sell or go public and only fan ohio was might just you know spit off cash if i never so where would i work no no which business do you think nets more more money in the end which business only pants all fancy yeah because the likelihood that subs is gonna succeed is low very but if they do it right i think it could be really big yeah was talking to like guy hamish i think he he came to hear the other day okay cool i was trying to get him on this podcast and he i already asked him and he said no yeah he was like oh you know my first million i don't wanna that's what he told me too i'm shut up to sc do it yeah i was like you're overthinking this dude you're just doing interesting things we just wanna talk about your shit and a bunch of people who are interested and he was like overthinking it a little bit nice guy but i went and met with him and the their old ceo or the ceo we could probably get him on they're just engineering do they're cool right and then i think they're gonna have the same problem patreon has which is just gonna be an awesome product that supports a lot of people and people it's a really valuable tool but they're taking a very small cut up a very small amount of money yeah and so what i'm trying to do is tell them to pivot and like guys will pay you a fuck ton of money if you create pay walls for bigger companies right they're not gonna pivot they raised their money and they they have their dream we're a few meetings in we'll see yeah i think it's a ten percent chance alright that's pretty good okay cool what else we got anything else or nope we're cool we'll end it now alright thank you for listening