#53 - Nicotine Gum, Dating Apps For The Elderly & Tax on Vested Shares

what up what's going on did we asked people to subscribe it on unsubscribe that work i don't think it worked we got a bunch of videos people doing it thank you for doing it in my opinion that experiment doesn't like it doesn't move the needle too much i don't i know if that technique is a is a big technique let's answer podcast guys keep organically but we didn't see a spike because we asked people to do it let's answer all their questions joining wanna answer them today or i think next step thursday because i didn't have them i don't i got a lot of them yeah the problem and i apologize to people who send me the things on instagram i don't check that ever oh yeah i don't you know there's two inbox on instagram yeah facebook always does that with there so i didn't know that was even a thing and i had all these nice people sending me reviews you find it like a year later yeah and i didn't even know that so apologies i listened back to one of the episodes which is a the most uber uncomfortable thing you can do not listen to one ever yeah and i don't blame you i listen back and you know you were saying you're very self conscious out because we do the video and that's how i am about the audio because i listen to it and i'm like what the fuck is wrong with me why am i talking this fast why am i breathing like that i think no i think you have a you gotta actually have a great voice i think you have good cadence and someone at one that meet up asked me he goes you guys cut out silence and i was like on the audio we do oh you do sean does that yeah oh i thought we didn't and he was like you guys are talking so fast yeah so he he cuts out ohm oz or big repetitions like if i say the same thing two different ways for no reason and then i think he cuts a little bit of a gap between us when he doesn't like it he's like a perfection i told him not to do it because it takes like six hours too keep every time he's like it makes a difference and i was like i don't know if this shit makes a difference i got compliments from it okay alright well this he's gonna justify it now that's crazy i just thought we were talking fast no people like the we do talk fast but it's the in between where he speeds it up and then he cuts out any like extraneous bullshit people like it you know i i also got tons of compliments from stew a few episodes back people liked him people like stew yeah high approval rating people like it doesn't have to drop out of the presidential race like everybody else what do we got today speaking of presidential did you wanna talk about bernie is that your first thing i have a thing up there but i didn't research enough but i i'll talk about it just quickly so a bunch of people on twitter were freaking out because bernie proposing this tax on vested shares that you haven't actually cashed in yet okay and tech people were like oh okay there goes the startup scene like well you know if you're gonna tax crazy on vested shares that they haven't actually received the prop like this company is not liquid and so there are some nuances like it's written here it's taxed on non qualified stock options of at least a hundred thousand you know if you have over a hundred thousand in stock stock options are vested andrew and employees making at least a hundred thirty k so it's not everybody and it's not all types of things it's not rs use it's iso i believe okay so i'm not an expert in this stuff at all and i'm not an expert in politics i know what i believe but i don't know the technical details so well let's agree to talk out of our ass for not gonna talk about that actually but here's what i am gonna talk about is starting a company and how it worked with us and this will a lot because i do know that a lot of people think like oh the rich are doing this they don't understand so when we started the hustle i saved up twenty five dollars to start it with that twenty five thousand dollars i made sixty grand in profit in six weeks which is pretty good and the first year in business was roughly three hundred and eighty thousand dollars in revenue and most of it was profit because i paid myself we were in i think we were an llc i withdrew two thousand dollars a month in salary salary and that's why i paid my bills my rent was cheap very cheap hundreds of hundreds of dollars a month and i lived off twelve hundred dollars beyond that beyond that it was very i lived very very very frugal and then we decided to raise a little bit of money i raised i think three hundred thousand dollars from people at a three and a half million dollar value and you had to change for being an llc at this point right yep changed to c corp an s corp i think it was an s corp probably c corp i don't remember see this is i'm not an expert in this yeah you wanna be a c corp if you're gonna take investment that's just like if you don't have to study all the differences between but if you're gonna like traditional investment they're gonna want you to be a c corp so we converted it costs five hundred to do that at this point we probably had half a million dollars in the mh three hundred thousand dollars in the bank count i don't i don't remember between three hundred and five hundred thousand by the end of our first year and we raised money at a three and half million dollar valuation and then once we started doing stock options and stuff like that we signed up carta and they gave us a what's it call the four zero nine a yep where we got so that four ninety just values your company at some numbers yeah you guys had revenue so they probably took some standard multiple they valued us and you wanted to be low at this stage yeah so they valued us in the millions of dollars of range i i don't remember it could've have been three and a half it could have been six i don't remember the number whenever these types of businesses are that's what they be you want it to be low because that's what your share prices get that's what your stock options are gonna be if you're an employee you wanna get in at the sort of low valuation so when it sells at a high valuation you get this sort of increase in value but if they if the four nine a comes back high then you're not gonna get you know as much of a lift on your share price it's at this point r four zero nine a is many tens of millions which is nice that's cool we have a valuable business but when we started it was single digit millions which was still a lot i was twenty four at the time i i said i started with twenty five thousand dollars and i was taking two thousand dollars a month i was not saving any money right okay i'm not complaining because it i worked out but so on paper i was a millionaire multiple millionaire if i had to pay i think third i forget what this i don't wanna like i know i'm talking about let's say if i if i had to pay twenty percent in taxes on that multiple millions of dollars you wouldn't have had i literally wouldn't have had any money to do it right even if i wanted to withdraw money from our business account i would have had to lay people off or right i i i like so when people say certain people are hoarding money or something like that a lot of times it's not true and i have a lot of founder friends that have businesses that are on paper worth hundreds of millions of dollars right and they have tens of thousands of dollar save that's a bank account yeah so they're not like liquid yeah i think people need to and this also happens if you're an employee you leave a company you usually have what they call an exercise window which might be thirty days sixty days ninety days i think the i i think the normal about ninety ninety days so that gives you three months to come up with the money to buy your options or you lose them yeah and a lot of people don't have that money because like you know they they leave one company it's a start up and now their shares are worth eighty grand or a hundred and eighty grand and they need to go they wanna go do a different job and now that you need to come up with a eighty or a hundred eighty grand to buy out their options that's not still a guarantee that that money's is coming back and often people don't have that money sitting in the bank so they'll forfeit their options which is a a true bummer some companies are being cool about it pinterest a couple others i don't remember we stripe they increased their exercise window to seven years or six years that's great so they're like look cool we know this practice is a little bit crazy it's hard to come up with that cash and you worked here you earned your shares so we're not gonna try to take those back you have the longer window because we might be private for longer which is kind of a cool trend so my should do that my w two income so at this point i make money in eight or ten different ways like got loads of things that just it just has added up over time and that's great and i still pay myself a salary i pay myself not that much i'm not the highest speed person here yeah and i but my w two salary i we're gonna be four years old been working on this as a project since sales thousand of fourteen we're gonna be four years old as officially in april i oh the next month i my w two salary in year one i think was twenty four thousand dollars year two maybe thirty six and then year three then i started going higher right because the business was established at that point but my w two income historically has been low right quite low and so when i saw this and i saw people getting mad at rich people i'm like bet people thought i was rich i wasn't you know what yeah and you wouldn't have qualified for this because it says you have to be making at least a hundred thirty k but like but if earlier thirty said tax on my stock now it would be painful fucking hard yeah you'd be in a really tough spot so you know bernie i like bernie but this is a little bit crazy this will really screw up the way that start ecosystem works but it can also adapt even gonna check a stand up i think it's crazy or not i just am giving a perspective of my business and i bet and i think i i now i think i have a lot more cash than even most people who have companies that are huge what's your biggest regret in the way you set up or organized or structured the company wish i wouldn't have raised money and i would have just owned it all and why that because i would be greedy and richer you you didn't end up needing that capital it's hard to say because it worked it worked if i wanted to start fresh again i would have been able to do it i can start now what about advice a lot of people think oh this person's so successful right you raise money from a bunch of cool smart successful people either in media or not in media yeah so that was helpful was that truly like so did you get your sort of values worth on the advice component because i don't i'm not sure that that typically plays out that way but i think it works okay so look our network is so fucking powerful me and you our network is so powerful i have i think thirty five investors ranging from tim ferris the founders of nerd wall which is who knows what that's worth billions of dollars the founder of the c founders a bleach jury report who else just look it up a lot of people and i text them i just write them i'll say you get a lot of them and i'll tell you two things that you do that gets a lot first your investor updates which you send you send more frequently now i send them quarterly but before i for monthly right thirty six months i send up every single month every single month and the it was so well organized it was basically like hey here's all the key metrics you don't beat around the it's like this there's how much cash we got in the bank this how much we made this month this is how much the email this grew this is how much our open rate was boom that's number one number two and how what was your second sort of i i the way that i set up was i go numbers i go just here's the numbers there's no interpretation right what alright let's get into it numbers boom okay then i go and then i do things that are going well things are not going well i need your help yeah yes or no yeah it was great and you sent that to so you did the work to keep them engaged and stay top of mind do not under under underestimate this if you're doing your business if there's people who are willing to help you you gotta find a way to stay top of mind and and part of it is you you share frequent updates and there's a very good sign if you're an investor if you're one of your companies stop sending their updates for a bit that company is about to die or they're on their way to dying and they go into a shell and paul has this great post which is just like as an investor when you see that you know it's time to go check and as a founder ironically that's when you need to help the most yep so don't go quiet when you need to help the most that's when you need to be talking and asking and maybe you actually won't die if you if you could keep that going what other mistakes have we made so i always regretted the i think that the the normal way that people give out equity is a little too founder greedy so i wish i given more equity to my team and so like you know basically i wish i just negotiated it better between what do i get what are the investors get and what does my team get i think it was balance i think some of what the investors got the team should've have got some of what i had the team should've have got because really like the people who are there as person four five six really they're taking just as much risk as you are in in a way like they were there when it wasn't obvious that this is gonna work and so for the all stars i wish i had given more and next time my next company i'll do just that i will do you make sure that core four core five people i'll make sure it's not like like typically an with the pool b so don't know exactly what the pool will be but let's say let's go what what's typical so typical company eighteen two cofounder you start fifty fifty you're gonna raise some money they might end up taking twenty five to thirty percent of the company depending on how it goes it twenty five percent and so you know as the founders you you've diluted down you're at i don't know my math bad but let's say you're both at what is that thirty something of thirty five percent each now and and so you you know that's where you're at and then your team the option pool they typically say is like ten to fifteen percent is your sort of option pool yeah so the first few employees might have like you know the key person might get like one to three percent and then everybody else is below that is below one percent essentially and i just think that's like a pretty hard skew so i would try to get multiple people in the sort of one one to four percent range i would try to have like my core my core team all be in the over one percent range for sure and whether that means i take the haircut or investors take the haircut that's what i would do if it's a tech company i think this is very different if you're not a high growth tech company could you started in san francisco again though i'd started where wherever where i live and so if i'm i'm wanna live yeah i'd started here if i wanted to live somewhere else that started somewhere else now you can start it definitely anywhere so it's just about your preferences i if i was gonna start again another thing that i would do is i would go and get job somewhere and just make like when i started i hadn't i didn't i was always self employed mostly i wish i would've have worked somewhere maybe for a little while before you did it or you mean as a do something as a side hustle before but you just get the experience yeah i think it would have been nice and save money that's interesting i wouldn't have thought you'd say that i think it would be helpful to to understand how things i think if you did it for three months you'd be like okay i'm done you would have been i got it maximum money away yeah it's fair about hey all worked out you wanna talk about some stuff yeah let's talk about some ideas okay okay let's take a quick break and let me ask you a quick question when did noah build the ark after the rain after the flood no before the rain so as an entrepreneur quiet light brokers wants to remind you to prepare before you wanna sell your business you don't just sell it right when you want to you plan your exit for six figure seven figures or eight figures quietly brokerage is a group of trusted advisors that can help you not just survive the tides but exit on your own terms for the price you want at the time you want to the buyer that you want you know as you chart your way towards an exit you gotta a first start by understanding the value of your business if you want to see a twenty five point checklist to see how well your business scores across the four pillars that they have seen drive value when they for all the sales that they've seen in their portfolio you can find that checklist at quiet light brokerage dot com slash my first million that's quiet light brokerage dot com slash my first million check out the free assessment see how your business scores if you want can get a free consultation for your business as well but no pressure no gimmicks no sales pitches you know quite light as an entrepreneur led organization the founders have built and soul businesses bought businesses before themselves they're not just you know sort of quick fly by the night brokers and they advise you to use the best data to help business owners like you reach your financial goals so grab the free guide it's over at quiet light brokerage dot com slash my first million and support the pod go check them out run the world i'll start there cool perfect timing perfect timing so these guys been working on this obviously before this two i think female founders and what this is is it's a digital conference so especially with coronavirus and you've had major major conferences shutting down so facebook's f eight conference done i only off canceled i believe g is done you know like i predict southwest by southwest but this episode will air a couple days i bet you they're gonna cancel yeah so tons of these conferences are closing and i've always this is a great experiment because i've always wondered why aren't there more digital conferences now we built a product called lab that was sort of like people used it this way a bunch of podcast through a conference on our platform and i just thought hey this is cool because you could be remote can be anywhere in the world you can attend this thing and what does a conference have it has speakers cool you can stream that online no problem it has like exhibit cool you could do that online if you wanna do it and it has the networking and that's a little bit harder to do online but you could do that as well it's missing the biggest component though which is what serendipity yeah you have to engineer that serendipity into the product that's the biggest part these guys claim that they sort of have recreated all of that i don't know i haven't used it yet but the cool thing is we're now gonna find out because with all these conferences canceling run the world is taking advantage and they're going to all the conferences as they're saying hey hosted on our platform we make this really easy for you they have a cool model where basically it's no money in they just take twenty five percent of the ticket sales who whose computers is up here k can you google run the world oh yeah pull pull it up and so they've raised a bunch of money from and h this a lot of money announced it and it's funny henry just googled google around the world at the beyonce song came up which is hilarious my friend had a company called little things which is the is that another song it's what's the boy band with harry styles that oh it's what are they called five yeah something on that right you could talk alan yeah around the world today around the world dot today is the url so live events worldwide and anyways was i think this is cool and we're gonna find out if this is like they've been dealt the best hand for their product right now and we'll see if they can pull this off that's interesting do you think that the i think we should do one of these for the listeners like just like you do the new york meetup up i think we should just just to take this for a test drive i think we should just do an impromptu one and hang out with people get let everyone meet each other i'm down i okay if we had to make predictions if this is gonna work i won't say the safe bet the safe bets always know does the safe bets always know okay but if you had a hundred million dollars would you invest two million into this business i don't know who these people are and i haven't played with the product so that's the caveat say i met the people and i played with the product and i felt like they did the thing you said which is it wasn't just a live stream of content or a chat room like there was some way to engineer the serendipity of a network of the networking in a conference or the discovery of new products right like if i felt like they did something different besides just a tele like live stream then i would buy it but i guess it gotta feel the magic that's a stock photo so there's a henry's pulling up a photo right now of a mug that says hustle we use that photo that's from last that he was again any he thought that they told yeah henry was writing up a cease to desist like during the podcast that's great okay run the world internet conferences you're in or out i am going to say fifty one percent in okay alright well we'll take it so what here's what we'll do by the time this airs i'm gonna have set up to run the world conference the link to it is gonna be in the show notes and we're we'll figure it out so go in the show notes right now if you're listening to this well let's say and get a ticket to attend our conference and we'll try this out well and then we'll let everyone decide is this cool or it's this like one of those ideas that sounds good in theory but it misses the magic it never works henry go to go godaddy dot com real quick pick a url and we'll send them to that url as well i hate going to the show notes okay either way look we i mean we could just put it on our my first million podcast dot com my first million dot com my first milling podcast dot com okay my first million podcast dot com it will be be redirect to today you wanna charge for it yeah yeah tickets will be whatever i don't know pick a number okay we'll make it cheap twenty bucks twenty bucks and what will be is what will it be we'll invite our friends so we'll invite some of the people that we think are the most interesting we'll we'll do a talk on hey how do we build you know we'll we'll get we'll do the things you do in the conference right so a couple speakers fireside chat and the networking where people can meet each other okay and we'll limit it to a hundred people yeah okay hundred people that some amount of money my first million podcast dot com yeah there you go try out alright sweet what else we got on the on the agenda oh i have one scroll down you wanna talk about some book club stuff yeah when i moved to san francisco i started a book club called the anti nba and i did it because i didn't go to an an elite ivy league school but i was always en ng of those people because when i moved here i didn't know a single soul and i felt i always like stereotypes people is like tall beautiful white teeth with pat and they had like lovely networks that as you saw all around yeah i just like these like rich white people who that's how i i was like right that's how i imagined it and it kinda was that and i was always en of that so what i did was i create a book club meeting where we would meet every week and we would read one book a month and i would convince an expert on how'd you convince people to join this where'd you throw it up wonderful just a a cold email guy i just learned how to call cold email people and i i did it online so each week we would have thirty people show up and i probably had an email list of five thousand people who would i was not a in person this is all online thirty people in person sea yeah all applaud of my best friends i met this way thirty people my friend had an office and you let me use it and we would just meet up and i would and i would read a week ahead of time and just make notes and lead discussion and sometimes we would have an expert okay and then i would send show notes or meeting notes to the list and people loved it i made close to no money off it or i don't think i made any money off it i did it for fun and it was very success successful and a lot of people said that we should make it a thing i think it's a stupid i thought it was a stupid idea but book clubs are actually kind of interesting so there's this business called book of the month club it was started and i believe it was started in the nineteen thirties at this point it's owned by it was owned by be men which is a large published a multi billion dollar publisher and then recently a private individual bought it for single digit millions of dollars and in the forties fifties and sixties this was massive i mean it was millions of people paid for it so it's quite a large business hundreds of millions of dollar probably in the sixties and seventies it's gone away once amazon came around a guy bought it a couple years ago and it's quite large still and what they do is scroll down a little bit ninety million users what the hell no that's good reads oh that's good range and so book at the month club now has a hundred thousand active paying customers laugh which means they're in the revenue range of ten to fifty million a year in recurring revenue and they the founder said in an interview he want his goal is to grow five x a year for five x a year nice for the next year not consistently i don't know if that's i think that's bogus but book of the month are is kind of an interesting thing i i suspect i've always thought that it would would not work now my opinion has changed so good reads has a hundred million users there's a thing called the watt pad have you heard a watt pad i've heard of it yeah watt pad a lot of people don't know about it watt pad it's owned by a guy in canada and they have four hundred employees it's a multiple hundred million dollar year business i believe they it's a book club for it's not a book club it's more right on it you you write original stories on yeah but it's their category is roman middle middle america romance novels yep so if you're a forty year old woman you probably have heard a watt pad you're saying that's the most popular category or you pretty much all they do oh really okay it's basically for women who it's like men do video porn romance novels says woman porn i mean it's basically what it is and so this huge business and now i'm quite bullish now on these book clubs yeah yeah reese witherspoon has a book club my wife uses it my sister so how many people have you heard of this no we haven't heard called sunshine some fucking thing but oprah oprah had hers but hers wasn't paid membership but this is really smart like what you're describing i'm like oh this is good and i think you gotta have probably not gotta have but it's advantageous here to have a brand like a rest student or whoever jennifer aniston or gwyneth pal or whoever or like the hustle could do a book club you could do a book club like i think that you have to have a bit of cache to organize people around to get the energy going that initial energy you need so here's one angle you buy the rights of the book which is expensive yeah why would you do that well because i think the margins in books are quite small i've talked to tim ferris about this he told me that he earns i he didn't say that he didn't tell me this but he told me i mean i think that he does about a million a month in revenue of his podcast and he told me that he this what he did tell me he he has made ten times more money off the podcast and all his books combined right so i i don't think people get paid a lot of money for books the margins are it might be a cheap asset you're saying yeah i think it's quite cheap so i would wanna up my goal would be to buy the rights of the book and make it popular you know who have you heard of there's this company that owns the company that owns proactive it's called got buy know what you're talking about it's the care it's a direct marketing company they the guy who owns it it's a quite large business he got his start because he bought the rights to thinking and grow rich oh really and he helped make it popular again oh wow through info so that's what i would do is i would wanna buy the rights saw the books and there's another company called mentor box that does this and ty has one of the owners so it's incredibly scam i mean like you sign up for like twenty dollars and then it rolls into like a four hundred dollar month thing it's like fucking stupid but book clubs are super interesting to me so would you do this like if you were gonna do this now how would you attack what would you do so you'd buy the right so you'd by the way if i wanted to bootstrap it no you can how how would you do so what i would do is i would look at what vinyl me please vinyl me please is my friend's business it's a probably a couple million bucks a month subscription thing so what you do is you give them fifty dollars a month and they send you a vinyl once a month right and so i would do that but for a particular type of category so what i do is i would create a facebook group and i would say it's thirty dollars or fifty dollars a month and we're gonna read one book a month i'm gonna get one expert to come and talk about the book each week or each month we're gonna do in a facebook group and i'm gonna send you notes about the whole and what category do you think you choose would you do the romance novel or would you do business or would you do well just because i have such a network in business that i could just crush it out with the bat yeah but romance novels i know this from experience because i've have invested in these types of things romance novels have the have the highest liquidity p as and people could consume them the most right so i would like v readers five five jobs the number of booked romance category is probably one of the most it's probably the most popular category on kindle yeah i bet you it is so okay personally i would start here but if i even slightly was interested in romance novels i would and i like what this guy did buying the rights to the book of the month club for you know some a popular asset that sort of decay over the last thirty years and see if you can revitalize it on the cheap either there there's these interesting businesses there's so many books that i love that are written in the sixties and seventies and if you try to buy them on amazon in their hundreds of dollars because they've just been forgotten and they don't reprint them right i just try to buy a book the other day for that that someone mentioned on twitter and it was nine hundred dollars what book it was so i just tweeted about ago that's the scam company which we can talk about if we want but the it was all about copywriting which was nine hundred bucks wow okay yeah sorry about go okay do you wanna hear about okay so go is is what it's a b2b paid newsletter company yeah barry go ahead absurd revenue go to my twitter account okay so here's another interesting company i know this because i'm in this world and it's directly related to us yeah just yeah just the same par yeah whatever that's fine okay so ago crazy interesting background so ago was started by this guy named bill bon in the nineteen seventies he was a publisher he had a magazine about money and investing and things like that and then he decided to start changing how we did his marketing and he created a newsletter that became quite popular at this point it you'll see it it's the most popular one no up higher at this point they make it's rumored to be one and a half to two billion dollars a year and the way that they do this there it is they own twenty to forty different newsletter publishers and what they do is is they buy a ton of traffic to their funnels their marketing funnels and right off the bat they'll sell you a fifty dollar product right and once you buy that fifty dollar product they now have a large data base an email list of qualified buyers who are interested in a particular topic and they typically lose money on this first purchase so let's say that they have a book that's fifty bucks they'll spend up to two hundred dollars to acquire you mh meaning the buy a ton of ads and they'll they'll lose money on you but they'll make it up because on the they call a back end on the back end they sell you a two thousand dollar paid newsletter and this company in particular they even sell supplements and shit now they'll some people think that they some people love them and when you own twenty or forty different brands you're gonna have some legitimately great products right so what's their best product money map press dot com or yeah money map presses this is for hedge funds is for for financial traders it was yes some financial traders their their typical audience is white men between fifty and seventy who who who are conservative and believe in like the government's gonna come and like take your money i that goes was like so i sign up some of their funnels and there was shit like if you go to b bar dot com you'll see an ad that says like nancy pelosi coming for your money and things like that and you sign takes you through one of the funnel u and it's a five dollar book and then yeah and then you'll you'll go through these funnels if now let's just get rid of the whole unethical part because you can learn from everyone who cares if it's unethical or unethical it's fascinating regardless and you can learn from it what their experts at is copywriting and everyone in silicon valley not everyone but you know don't you get the point is all about design it's gotta look good it's gonna be a static their websites are a blank page with text right not just text but like fucking five thousand words in a buy now button at the very bottom it's that fascinating that is fascinating and i think you're you know you know that peter two quote where it's like what's something you believe to be true that if you would agree with you on yeah i feel like you you know you might have many but one of them would be copywriting over design any day copywriting over design one hundred percent most people i i remember when i learned the word copywriting because i was what does of them talk what is copy why does someone keep saying this and like i literally was at work people like hey can you give me some copy i was a coffee what she just asked me to go get a coffee for her like i had no idea what the fuck she was talking about and and then i sort of learned oh copy means text that's gonna go on the website and then through you i realized hey wait a minute the text that's on your website is essentially your salesman and sales gives you the money i should probably learn how to do this how i deep on it it's the most important skill you can learn because i spent years learning it if you just give me a blank page i will i will make money till i die right i will always have a job because i can do that right now what i could do is do really unethical shit and scam a lot of people really easily if you know how to copyright do or you you know how to persuade via the written word yeah i would say persuasion is the most important skill whether it's through the written word verbally you know i don't know if there's some copywriting variation copywriting just the form in which you learn it now the way that i describe it is if you're a good copywriter you understand what motivates people and if you understand what motivates people you can create products set the one that will appeal to people yeah and then if you that is that's the when you do copy copywriting you just learn what motivates people and then you just happen to use the written word to right to communicate yeah when when you mentioned the bo letters and then i just went deep on that that was like my foray into so we'll do a whole section on did you read the podcast yes and and then i started like doing all the things in it because i got obsessed so the bo letters if anyone curious gary hal is his name he's dead now he died of a hospital it's actually kinda hard to find it's hard to find but there's there's one link and if you get it it's like chapter one two three minutes i against to nineteen or whatever it's this copywriter who's one of the best copywriter of all time and what he would do is he was such a good copywriter that he counted into a crook and so he would write these sales letters to buy like encyclopedia or and buy like fucking anything just shit so the moral letters are the way it starts it's like he's writing to his son he's in jail he's in jail writing to his son and he doesn't start off by being like here's how you copyright he's just writing into his son and it's one by one and each one's a teaser or every sentence teases the next sentence and every letter teases the next letter and then by the time you get twenty deep you're like this guy's a master it is awesome so read that alright what are you guys sean couple others okay so here's an idea so i was talking to my cousin and as we were talking about like one of my cousins sees is young he goes on dates uses the apps boom boom boom then like our aunts and uncles are always like oh my god look at them he's just swiping left and right he goes on dates it's like really foreign concept to them and so that was one data point okay just kind of noticed wow my aunts and uncles they really don't get when it comes to this online dating thing data point too i'm watching the debate and it was i watched so much shit online that when i watched traditional tv first of it's so slow and secondly i start to see the commercials and i'm like this is what's being advertised to mainstream america like cars it's very fascinating so like no was on there which is like the diet like nutrition plan thing that they do really really well in o we should break them down later they advertise but the other one was some it was the this gray hair woman comes on the on the screen and she's like oh online dating where do i start and then i was like well open up your browser type w w w dot and then end interview your it's like and then start clicking around like that was literally that was the ad was like how do i even get start like here's how you get started on my dating i don't remember the name oh come on it wasn't like a match or you i never heard of it before so i started thinking and i was like you know there's so many people that are sort of in my sort of extended family and whatnot that are divorced and they're alone and so i was thinking about them i was like you know it'd be great if they found someone but the reality is they don't do a lot online dating because it's so scary and foreign and it's not the online part that's scary it's the expectation that you then need to go meet somebody and so like let's take my uncle for example my i don't know sixty five years old he is divorced he gets lonely as kids are all grown up everyone left the house and you know he doesn't wanna actually like it'd be great if he met somebody who was awesome and they could just like be companions for their rest of life but he's sort of like dude i don't wanna get out there like last time i went on a date was forty years ago like i think i'm just out of the game it's easier to be lonely than it needs to put yourself out there so anyway long pre for the idea the idea is a a service that's for older people less make it just fifty and up as a as a rule and it's called just talking and the expectation is you're gonna go on here with other people who are like you are sort of single might be alone looking for companionship but it's just talking you can't meet it's not their real names it's nothing it's just somebody you could log out to the computer and just talk to either through audio or text and you could talk to them continuously or you could switch and pick somebody else and talk to them but it's just companionship as a service four and it it's not dating you're not gonna start going out with this person and you're not trying to get remarried you're just getting the reps in you just don't wanna be lonely at home anymore and honestly you can have a virtual relationship you know through this and it's because i was watching love is blind so and i was like dude somebody should make an app that's just this now off the back of the idea and so anyways these are sort of some ideas let me learn about it by i love it i love it with that's a winner what i would do is i would go and do research on the sex hotline lines that you to exist that probably don't exist anymore right and i would wanna learn how they worked i bet they crushed so i'll shout out some like tangent related so sex hotline outline related but obviously pee so one sex that killed it then there's one a startup up out here in san francisco called papa have you heard of this papa yeah no papa is grandkids as a service so it's just young people that you that will just come over to your grandparents house and just do stuff for them and like hit talk to them but like also do their laundry and like take out that trash i don't know if they're doing it well or not i just launched they've raised a bunch of money and because there's this huge aging population of the baby boomers and so there's this wealth of opportunities that are for the this the largest generation of people ever in america is now getting old and i i forgot this woman was calling it the the the grain new world and you know for gray hair and so she's like you know the grain new world it opens up all these possibilities so one is pope which is grand of as a service one is honor because i know honor there's a huge shortage of caretaker for for the elderly and so honor is a on demand caretaker platform that you know is you just dispatch track here are you going with caring for old people or helping people get laid i'm talking about just talking that's my idea but i was just tangent intentionally saying there's some other businesses that are trying to help you relationship here what do they do never heard of that no jack invested in it and he says it's going well it's called a relationship here relationship here dot com and they teach you how to do online dating okay just coaching for online dating go can you go to pull that that's how it started as it might be a little bit different for yep this this would be for younger people though it'd be for whoever i think it could be i think if you did just talking and you ran a bunch of facebook ads you could get a lot of people to pay to be a part of a community of people where they can have these for online relationships i like expectation is you do not go offline so i think it's great i think it's great is because the way the way the way that you're positioning it is as a marketplace those are notoriously hard to make but once you have them they're great yeah the reason why i like this is you can kinda fake it at first yeah so you can just hire people you can have some operators yeah that are that are providing that companion i think it's a great idea you could seed the marketplace with the operators yeah i think it's awesome we talked about only fans yeah that's trending today in twitter is it yeah worldwide because of what some gone down and i didn't get the joke i clicked on it and try to understand it and i didn't right i didn't get it one out of three twitter trans yeah was it was a top only fans which we talked about only fans great business but i love just talking i think it i think that's a great idea thank you thank you for thank you very much no i think that's that's a winner alright i have question for you now so before last week i think maybe it was when when i was with stu but i i shared this anecdote or this this sort of advice which was if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship you know don't ask which seat just sit out and buckle up and this is just career advice which is if you're not gonna start your uncover blackboard did i yeah oh i thought people loved it what do you mean well what what was the criticism a nice sized audience not everyone's gonna to be happy but what was what was the criticism based on it wasn't even controversial just stuff like titles it it was just comments like people saying titles are important much you get paid is more important things like that that's crazy disagree hard disagree okay so anyways the question why that sort of that led to a different question which is what are the rockets ships of today and so somebody by the way took that idea and made a rocket ship newsletter for jobs or whatever johnson but beyond that i was just sort of thinking just my thought experiment what companies that today are worth one to five billion do i believe we'll be multi hundred billion so what's just as a way of phrasing it simpler what five billion dollar company today could become a five hundred billion dollar company in the future like i say this because we have friends who bought facebook secondary stock back in two thousand and six and two thousand and seven when facebook was valued at over a billion dollars and today facebook's like whatever five hundred billion dollar company and that you know it was clear it wasn't going to zero it was clear it was a thing and the question but you could have invested in and got phenomenal return and i have several friends who did i had a friend alex was oh no sorry josh buckle who's a he's a good guy founder and british k yeah he's a british guy him he's and so he he was telling me we were just hanging out one day he's like yeah i'm buying secondary stock of stripe as much as i can get and i was like like what do you mean like i'm not doing that why are you doing that i should do that and he was like yeah i just think stripes a great company and there's secondary stock available and i'm just buying it i'm like well what's evaluation valuation it's already like a two billion dollar company like yeah but it's like stripes is gonna be big he's i stripes is gonna be huge so i'm just buying up secondary and now so stripes valued down like twenty billion dollars so he took essentially like a no risk at in my opinion and ten x his money on a private company that was it was already a unicorn but wasn't yet on the stock market it wasn't doing like ten percent a year you know that's a ten x appreciation so story short what companies do you think have that potential that are in the single digit billions today or less that that you think could be a facebook google amazon of our generation so a few years ago i answered this question and i i thought it was lasting and and i went in on that and i and it worked okay tell me about that what do you mean it worked back then it was and you to just look look go ahead and look go to and atlas in stock we you're busy today i i invested in atlas in stock mean it's not like like yeah i'd let at atlas and spelled with with an a at t a t there it is yeah and then go to all time i bought at la max on the far right i bought it when it when it went public so what did they go up by it three like a three x already so i three my money so i bought it last year because i read their annual report and i was like these guys are great right so their market caps now thirty five billion yeah so i bought it right when it went out so that works well what do you think can get to the over a hundred billion i because hard to get over a hundred billion how many companies are worth over a hundred billion like very very few especially if you think about tech companies so some of the tech companies that made at amazon made it google made it microsoft made it facebook made it uber did not quite make it yet but it's getting there tesla made it like i think i invested in tesla when it was at about this number five five to eight billion oh really and now it's almost a hundred billion and so like that's a that's a big lift of a company that it's out there it's not a seed save start taking a bet on right it's a company that's out there and the other way to take the bet on it even if you're not an investor is to go work at one of these companies right so like airbnb was a good candidate now it's value too high to qualify for this airbnb is like it i don't know thirty five billion or something like that we'll see what happens with this but it's not in the single digit billions anymore but when we when we moved to san francisco we could have done that right when i moved to you applied had a job offer an airbnb when it was worth a billion one billion maybe less i don't know there was only no it was less it was thousand twelve right so he so let's just say it was that a billion which it wasn't but let's say it was you yeah i would've have made ten million dollars it's thirty five x even if you had just gotten a a sort of standard stock package which was like over four years you're gonna get two hundred grand i would've made five or ten million dollars yeah that's insane and i got fired before i even showed up to work some other candidates that i put up here at flex port i think is a candidate maybe oh you oh you got some inside until that sounded like a juicy maybe well ryan told me he thinks it's gonna be massive or to go bankrupt okay which is like how you're gonna be you that's how you're gonna be that's how you some other some this was harder than i thought i also tweeted you this out so the most popular answers i got was air table and carta and i pretty much disagree with both of i don't know i i and i these is smart people were replying i was like carta why carta we should get carter to sponsor this podcast by the way yeah why are they not i don't know you guys need a sponsor and i'm gonna i i don't give a fuck a it people sponsor i'm tell you the truth carta it's the best option out there but it still needs a lot to improve right i use it i give you guys five grand a year i'm happy that i give you the money but it can improve yeah so air table air table it would have to basically replace excel in the corporate world for it to do this otherwise it will not be a hundred billion dollar company have a gust gust is a good one i think there's a lot that are in the sort of either hr tech just you need to be a huge space gust stone and rip yeah gust rip i think i would a hundred billion a high bar but yeah so other ones that i that i put up here so stripe but it's past this point so coinbase only if the bit if bitcoin actually becomes like if bitcoin actually is the thing it becomes the global reserve currency then well it doesn't have to the largest bitcoin sort of company the large bitcoin brand would be i think it just has to it become bank of america can become wells fargo yeah but i think bitcoin has to become that relevant for coinbase to be yeah i buy rent by that open doors is another one just because residential real estate is so big so if they actually have a working model they could become a hundred billion dollar company i don't buy that because what ky zillow and truly aren't that huge alright they don't do what these guys do though zillow and truly they sell leads to brokers they're now trying to copy open doors and now they offer what open door offers but open doors literally buying and selling the houses they're flipping houses at scale which is pretty crazy what else this is stuff i don't know that's all i had but i put this on here i wasn't gonna talk about it initially but i'm like i wanna bring this up i want people to tell me what i'm wrong about or what what companies i should be considering in this but i think this are a really important question because me i'm gonna go try to buy secondary stock in all these companies okay so i don't and if you're working you should go work at one of these companies a hundred billion is that's impossible i won't even i'm not gonna try to predict that because like only like a few hundred people a few a few hundred businesses have ever probably done that i don't know the number but that's really hard to say but if i had to make a prediction i i i do think that there will be some new search engines and i also think that some of the new chrome replacements could be quite large so brave is one of them what's another one replacing the browser yeah anything that are replacing browsers i think are kinda cool and could potentially be that big i think it was gonna be a lot of browser i think if any company nails ar they will they will be able to do this but that's not ways away i believe how about zoos does that what's z the self driving car company yeah so that was the other i i considered all the self driving car companies because i'm like if if one of them becomes a success a self a successful self driving car company the the market leader will be worth over a hundred billion it's just more likely i believe is more likely to be tesla or one of the incumbents rather they'll buy one of these companies rather than the that company independently going from where it is today which is one billion to a hundred billion how about this what companies are public now that could grow that much so i was talking to mo day and we were looking at stamps dot com they were crazy undervalued in the next day we were like let's buy this in the next day we didn't buy in time it went up fifty percent went up fifty percent yeah love that it was coincidental just i saw interesting stat over the last ten years if you had just brought bought the fang companies so facebook amazon apple google in the ten years it outperformed all vc or sorry it outperformed even the sort of top like expected returns of venture capital so the public market if you just bought the five most popular tech stocks you did better was a twenty twenty four percent irr over ten years okay well what what's public now that could i don't fucking know that's a great question it's that's hard you gotta really bet on industries what you got what about like whoever it becomes the leader in sports gambling it's gonna be sports betting sports betting bet good that's a good that's a good whoever is the number one whatever that is and if the legislation keeps opening up that's a good call i would do sports betting i would bet on that industry that's a great call okay we ventured off into stock so i wanna get back because we don't know shit about the stock market that's not our that's not our promise let's tell him something else that that we find interesting what else you got you wanna do one more i'll mention one of the cool company that's related to stocks actually public comps dot com so public comps he's just breaking down s ones for a companies which like a lot of people like to do nowadays but it's just a good you don't have to do the research this guy does a research for you any publishes it i like it let's do let's do a let's wrap up with made renovation you talked about this in one of our very first podcast yeah exactly so one of our very first ones i was like i saw this ad i think this is awesome idea what it is if you don't remember because you're not a die the what it was is it's a turnkey bathroom renovation so you want your bath so the ad was just a dope looking bathroom and it was like if you want this bathroom it's like five grand and if you don't have to like because what what happens today you to hire a contractor you have to come up with the vision board of what you want to be if have to choose all these different materials then he sources it and then it turns out and then it's like that's a one off so they have like four designs of bathrooms you just pick which one you you want the old victorian cool looking one you want the modern one or you want the middle of well the road one yeah i always said i which barb really and here's the price and you just push the button yeah it's like actually some barb do this you go up on the haircut number three yeah i'll take the number three large you know you know no problem so that's what they're these guys were doing for bathrooms i thought that was really smart so it turns out this was not just like some random start this is roger dick was starting this and he's a started gangster he's he's done some cool stuff in silicon valley before so he's he's not a sort of joker and they raised nine million bucks and they came out of stealth and i was like i get myself a little pat on the back that's a good one no that's good call that's a pretty good call i still think a very cool idea and i also think that anybody could compete with them because this will not be winner take all because you have to be doing local renovations look at that cities they announced it this week good job yeah can i get myself a pound back yeah one of my first angel investments lucy lucy nicotine dot com i think or i don't even know what the url is to be honest you explain what it is beautiful lucy i don't know i know but it's huge site replacing jewel my yeah so i invested in all your weight all my friends in school all your friends are buying lucy people are yeah fuck yeah money the bag yeah yay so one first age agent of i don't remember when this was three years ago the founder of soy dave who's my friend dave rent town run ten he started this thing and it was it's basically a nico so it's nick new age nic nicotine gum and he told me about it and i like alright well dave you started soil so you're pretty smart you scaled that thing up yeah i knew him well he's was a good guy and it's a it's a big market it's nicotine so i'm like okay well i this is retention is gonna be good yeah i'm a i'm a nicotine user i like the gum i i chew the gum and like that shoot nico yeah i like the i prefer lo so i'll put them in my mouth okay and but you don't smoke so you just do this just nicotine i like nicotine it's i don't drink and i don't smoke it's it's it's my it's my vice and and it's a monthly subscription yeah i was like yeah of course you'll fucking knock that one off the park really smart and they just raised a lot more money and so on paper which is completely useless on paper not gonna buy me a house or pay my rent but the valuation went up significantly so i got a little like corner store guy has it at the front by the register and i said okay whatever is at the front by the register that's what's selling that's what this guy will make money is it really i i i sent dave a picture i was like no at shit henry although although the guy the guy the asked him i said how well does this sell hey he's like it's pretty good it's not jewel but it's pretty good of course it's not jewel are are the kid kids are buying nick lucy something yeah oh fuck yeah money congratulations yeah we pay the taxes on it oh that's fuck money in the bag i i think that's a five or six x so far i'm proud that that would be a that's a good investment i like that one that will be i think we're one of the first folks in on that one fucking a i hope it works and just for the wow it is awesome i it is totally luck so i'm not take that much credit but awesome thank you give us a review and share with your friends yeah tell your friends so yeah