#80 - The Guide on Generating Startup Ideas

sam what's up what's going on let me pull up some of our documents okay a couple things i thought were interesting one you you posted something about this thing called mo points what is that so moe it's my my friend moe him and ramon grew up together in most from afghanistan by way of where's ramon from netherlands and then moved here and they used to have a business it shut down now so i could talk about it where they would buy and sell airline points and he became an expert on how to maximize points and so i'm getting into this now and so for example if there's all these ways that you can like if you're spending money own advertising on this on that you can maximize your points and fly for free forever for years right and so he would teach me how to do it myself and i was like oh turn this into a course and so that's what it is let's let's let's pick them out though is it low points points dot com yeah i texted it out because i was pretty interested in this like in the same way that you want like a tax guy to help you save money on the back end you know whenever you do like pretty significant credit cards spending and a lot of times if you own your own business you can rack up a lot of spending on on credit cards i hate going and figuring this stuff out i just feel like it's a waste of my brain and it's a waste of my time to go like optimize my spending and buy points so i can travel free and book all this stuff but like know it's valuable and so i was hoping to get like what's the shortcut what's the like you know either you do it for me or like what's the eighty twenty give me the the the the few things i can do that would give me the highest return on my time and effort because i know i'm sort of wasting this opportunity and i wanna go become an expert in the stuff but if you're an expert fantastic so i signed up for it you know points are interesting i just got into them recently so i earn three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand points a month and that translates to one percent of that in cash value right so if i spent a million dollars a year on through my credit card which sounds like a lot if you're just an individual and that is a lot if you're an individual but for your business that's nothing i get a hundred thousand dollars cash back now here's the cool thing that cash back in most cases is tax free interesting so in if you live in san francisco that's the equivalent of getting a salary of a hundred one grand that's a full time hundreds and yeah and so it's great and so i've actually met some entrepreneurs who earn i think you can get up to three hundred and sixty thousand dollars some account gonna like tweet at me and say got it wrong but i'm almost positive and it's it's controversial i'm almost positive you can get up to three and fifty thousand dollars in cash back and so i know this one lady who's got this flower company and she gets three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash back income a year yeah that's great i have a friend who he he he basically negotiate with his investors he's like i'd like to pay the aws bill for my company on my personal credit card and so he earned like whatever am double black platinum gold whatever it is like the highest tier for life because they were spending like you know three million a month on aws something crazy and so like he's like oh if i ever wanna fly i fly first class now oh oh i get like free e i get free of this i get free that because that's the perks of like the highest tier of am and he's like yeah i got lifetime because during my company i just asked can i just put this on this card and keep that you know tied to my name and they didn't i was like that's pretty amazing and so and so that's what moe trying to do now it's just a course and hand hand to hand combat like consultation where you're trying to help people but that is kind of interesting to like log in to a portal and or like technology and it doesn't for you that is pretty amazing and and your transaction fee is either upfront fee or you take a you skim a little right that is incredibly interesting i like okay so i have another random idea i wanna talk about so i have a friend shout out to my friend mike who he went to duke where i went to school he was duke best football player at the time like he was like i think he led the nation in tackle or something like that so he's amazing line back was football player goes he's a little under sized but he gets drafted or he he gets a try out with the with a couple teams and he ended up getting cut after a year i think from the indianapolis cult and that was sort of like the end of his football career but he built a ton of connections and still has connections with athletes in the nba and nfl i was talk to doing about it i was like you know what problems do these guys have what what stuff are they trying to do because these are often in class of people who have a lot of money have specific problems to like people with money fame and you know specific lifestyle what are some ideas that you know problems that they have that i've just never seen but i could solve because i understand them and so one of the things he had mentioned not even as a problem but i was like asking how they did it was many athletes start their own foundation or charity you've probably seen this like you know oh you know random wide receiver it's not just like the top of the it's like random randomized receiver i have a foundation back in my city it's for kids who blah blah blah kids and books it's for dustin pour pour wanna favorite fighters has one and so i was wondering i was like hey why do they do this and then b like how did they do this like could you like build a business around this and so on the why you know there's some interesting things and again the accountants are gonna be sort of out in full force correcting me on this but it seems like basically the you know there's some tax advantages to a foundation in addition to like obviously wanting to give back because often athletes come from pretty rough you know backgrounds and so they do feel this pool of hey i've made it i won the lottery how do i give back so there's the the there's the emotional poll to give back and create a foundation but then there's the financial pull as well which is there's some tax advantages to doing the to doing it this way where you basically are you're able to give and you're able to give today and reduce your taxable income and that money goes to the foundation which can then over time spend that money long after your career is over even so you can separate the the time of giving and then the time of of spending you could or you could separate the tax of it from the the giving timeline yeah that's i figured the name of it but you and i have a friend who had a large exit and what he did was he put away a significant amount of money i think very significant amount of money he put it into this charitable account and over the next i'm gonna butcher you this i think over the next five years he has to spend that on what's the called what's a non nonprofit call the four five zero one three six five about yeah he's gotta a he's gotta a he's gotta get rid of it so whenever i see like it's a interesting charity i'm like hey guy yeah these guys and there's other things like a a a da which is a donor advised fund which is what the jack do seats said i'm gonna give a billion dollars away and he did it via da so there's other ways but i guess what i my idea was cool so there's reasons athletes want foundations they're clearly doing this but i know athletes athletes are not excited to go figure out the paperwork to start a foundation to make sure they're reporting on time all that stuff so i was wondering is there a stripe atlas for foundations is there a push a button get your app get your foundation spun up without having to get on the phone without having to print out a piece of paper and go mail it some somewhere because i think you could build a pretty niche but you know potentially pretty lucrative subscription business where you know these foundations there's a spin up fee and then there's an annual maintenance basically to keep your foundation and good standing i think there's a business there so let's talk about atlas for a second so atlas is a thing with stripe and it's click of a button set up an a llc c or corp a c corp or llc in delaware why how does that make money well it makes money so it's strategic for stripe because if you're doing that you're probably gonna stand in the stripe ecosystem so they're like cool how do we get more customers let's get new businesses to get created and then they'll use stripe so it's kinda like when facebook gives away internet to people who don't have the internet like cool we'll give you the internet and then guess what you're gonna do the internet use facebook so stripes doing the same thing it's like how do we increase the rate of new startups because startups are who uses a stripe and then if they grow they grow with us and fantastic we we got them all their young type of thing then how would this make money they do hard fee so like when i did it i used tri atlas to spin up my company and i forget what it is couple hundred bucks but it's great it's like i don't wanna talk to a lawyer i trust that this will this will get set up properly it they do all the filing and documentation just email me hey here's your tax id here's your entity here's the articles of formation etcetera etcetera and so stripe out this was great took me three weeks and i don't know two hundred fifty dollars or something like that and i got my company set up and so why did you do a c corp i did an llc for me oh but if i wanted to do like c corp like if i was gonna do a startup that i gonna raise money i would do a c corp and and i would've have used it for that let's talk about the same alt thing alright so sam alt who's the guy who runs why my comb or just run it anymore actually but he was the president of y comb and kinda of one of the you know more well known guys silicon valley he put up this blog post called idea generation and he said you know one of the most common questions i get is how do you get ideas for a new start a lot of people wanna do startups but they don't quite know the idea or they don't have a lot of conviction in it and he says something interesting goes yc is he wants tried an experiment to fund people who we thought would be good founders but with no ideas goes and i think every company in this no idea tract failed and it turns out that founders have a lot of ideas about everything like great founders actually have a lot of ideas if you have a founder who can't think of an idea they probably shouldn't be a founder was kind of his mistake but then he he starts to explain alright so how do you get ideas for startups so he says thing number one you wanna be in the right environment so you wanna be around the right kind of people so he said who are the right kind of people he goes you wanna be around people who can have a good feel for the future they will entertain in improbable plans they're optimistic and they're smart in a creative way and he says they have high ideal flex which is you know pretty good for our podcast like i consider both of us idea machines and you know that's what he says that's what he calls ideal flux so those sort of rate of ideas coming in and out of their body these sorts of people tend to think without the constraints that most people have they don't have a lot of filters and they don't care too much what other people think he says this is important because the best idea is are pretty fragile most people don't even wanna start talking about them because they sound kind of silly upfront and like take the hustle for example oh we wanna this big bad media company we're gonna do an email newsletter and an email newsletter actually sounded quite silly to people who are traditionally in media this was you know back if you rewind several years so you wanna be around people who won't make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea and they certainly don't feel stupid when they mentioned bad ideas and he basically says stay away from people who are like the world has beaten them down or they're the type that be little your ambitions and unfortunately this is most of the world they hold on to the past and and if you wanna live in the future you don't wanna be around these people and then he says okay so here here's the sort of next thing that that that would help you get good idea so first is be around those types of people the second is identify a t ton shift that's happening right now how is the world changing in some fundamental way can you identify the leading edge of that change and the opportunity that unlocks it for example mobile phone comes out two thousand seven two thousand eight and then you get all these companies like snapchat uber airbnb etcetera that were launched in that time on top of that like core fundamental shift these when that when a big shift happens the big companies usually get beat by fast moving and focus startups ups so you wanna ask yourself a question like what's something that's possible this year that wasn't possible last year and pay attention anytime something like that comes up there's probably a lot of good ideas in that space the last thing is if you ever feel like something is like if you can say the statement i'm sure this is gonna happen i don't know if we'll be the ones to do it that's a good sign he's like uber was like this for me the first time i used it it was clear i wasn't gonna be hailing a cab any longer or calling the dispatcher but i wasn't clear it wasn't clear to me that uber was necessarily gonna win the space and then the last thing he says is it's important sorry this kinda long it's important to think about what you are well suited for so like if you do some intros intersection or you ask your mentor to figure out what you're good at he goes i believe that founder company fit is as good as product market fit and he goes lastly you can test a good idea if you can articulate why most people think of it think it's a bad idea but what you understand about it that makes it a good idea so that's a final test alright so i thought this a pretty interesting post anything in there yeah i think it's crazy interesting and i did break this up because i'm i i don't even care about promoting this but so guy and bi on reached out to me about three months ago and for trends we did this thing where he like just give a talk and people signed up and it was neat and he was like hey i'm thinking about maybe i wanna launch like a school or something can i like partner with you guys and you promote this course i wanna do and i was like yeah that sounds interesting and so me and him just started r more and more and i really got fascinated with this idea ideas like why is it sean that you are good at finding ideas and i was like i don't i don't know why but i wonder if i could like give frameworks behind it and so he's kinda lean the way and i'm just kinda tagging along a little bit and so we were hosting this thing it's mostly him hosting with a little bit of me and it's called the idea and boot camp and i put together what i thought was all these these frames works on coming up with ideas and a few of them that i have coincidentally i've never read the same up an article until you just told me are similar and so a few of them are like i like to do reverse engineering and so what i look at is i go like a website and see like how they do it because to me if i could see how someone does it it helps me realize what's possible another one is un unsettling so i'd i like to look at like really big things like ebay or craigslist or reddit and being like okay if usually if something's huge it becomes a victim of its own success and they can't move fast enough to adapt from an early like interesting change right and so we talk about like i i i just made up ways to figure that out and then let's see there anything else that's interesting that is relayed to that because i didn't realize it that he kinda actually discussed that oh and then another thing that i like to do and coincidentally the things that i'm talking about is like he's talking about we just go like tactically and it's like do you look at like he talked about something that's growing quickly but a you like hop nine right and that's actually quite hard and tell me what what i'm missing here the things that i'd really love to do is that i like to look at forums and comments and article comments and user reviews for apps on itunes to appear like what what about how are people using this shit that's like makes them love something or make them hate something and that's what i use to come up with ideas so what sam alt said was get something that's growing quickly early on that like you think is gonna be the feature what how else do you discover those so so there's two ways so one is your you discover a platform that's growing really pop really fast and you go on top of i'll give you a perfect example of this zoom is growing like fucking crazy right now i think it went from like ten million users to over like two hundred fifty million users during just the covid crisis you know my mom and my auntie use zoom now because that's how we celebrate birthdays during covid and they you know zoom used to be this enterprise thing so zoom growing like crazy i have this friend victor i don't remember if i mentioned this on the podcast but he created this thing called zoom url basically z m url dot com and it's basically event bright for zoom so he noticed the problem of like hey cool everyone's using zoom to meet up but zoom like kind of invite and like you know the sort to sort of like splash that page doesn't exist so there's not a cool way to like make an invite for a zoom event you just send this ugly link and you say join the zoom that's where we're gonna do this conference or this birthday or this whatever and so he just made a really pretty auto generator you put in your your zoom link and then you can upload a photo you can put the details blah blah and you make this little landing page for your event and he's growing like crazy because he's just growing he's piggyback on top of zoom very opportunistic on the platform and he's doing something that you know zoom probably isn't gonna get around to doing for a little while so he's got this opportunity to to grow solving a new problem and so the other way which is this is i think where i see you do this less is about technology shifts and i think this is where sam alt is actually talking about more which is you know when you grow on the back of an existing product or platform kinda sucks because you end up with this platform dependency and then they can often kill you or clone you or you just get stuck on that platform you never get off whereas technology shifts like oh shit we couldn't do this before but now machine learning is good enough that this is now possible or for example my friend told me about these little nfc stickers you know what that is near field communications yeah so basically i bought these on amazon they're like these tiny little stickers that cost like you know ten cents each or something like that and if you get these in bulk they're very very cheap and you just program them so that like if somebody just moves their phone into this thing it touches taps this thing it's like apple pay it will fire something open on their phone it can open up a website it can up whatever and i'm like dude this is great for marketing like i should just put these on products or you know this could be in my shoes it could just say is this a real jordan or is this a fake these little things can be embedded ever everywhere because the cost has come down and the reliability has come up and the the core platforms like iphone and android now you know by default will react to these nfc things just like they do qr codes so there's like so technology shifts is i think the one that most people don't understand because they don't have tech like technical literacy so they don't know what's going on and they don't know when something before that was impossible is now possible because it was like actually just a subtle shift over time where the cost of this chip has dropped and now it's really economical to do something that before that would have been ridiculous or now the chip is small it used to be so big so big so how how do you identify this so for example i i have a meeting every week with my former cto for my starter because he lives in that like bleeding edge of technology and i have a hour a week that it's called the cool shit hours on our calendar and he just shows me cool shit and i just told them look when we're usually in meetings i talk ninety percent of the time you talk ten percent because i'm the kind of talker sales guy but in this meeting you're gonna talk ninety i'm gonna talk ten and the cool shit hours is just you demoing to me cool shit that i don't know about because i don't understand cryptocurrency the way you do i don't understand vr the way you do i don't know about these other these other technological shifts that are going on so we've been doing this for a month now and it's fucking awesome i basically got a front row seat at this and all i had to do is ask a smart guy who is in that world but the more generic way of doing that is just to hang out with those guys so if again it's is sorta like what this post was about is like who do you hang out with ends up being what's in your what's in front of your eyes and so we hang out with a bunch of business people that figure out different ways to make money so for us how do you make money is this a question of which way do you wanna make money i know a hundred paths and i have five examples of each of those hundred paths i have five hundred different examples of how to make money i just gotta choose one that fits me whereas people who are in the world of technology they don't really know exactly how to make money but they can tell you a hundred interesting things of technology and so sometimes you gotta hang out with them and eat lunch with them you know three times a week so that you're hearing those things put yourself in that position yeah it's like you just gotta hang out like in the fringes and i think that like a great places great places to hang out in the fridge are reddit reddit hacker news just like the graham groups the way that you have to look at user behavior and you have to find this fringe behavior that's growing quickly right you know a couple podcasts ago i went off on this random i'm tangent about def defy decentralized in finance and it was just like you know i'm speaking gibberish and i don't even know what the fuck i'm talking about but it's because i discovered this fringe where i saw all this activity happening i was like whoa i don't even understand this but i know enough to know that this is unusual and there's a phenomenon and i need to know more and so like boom save that tab pin that tab open in my brain and i'm like come back to this you gotta know more about this this is unusual this is new is interesting well i think that's what you have to do when you have ideas which is you have to actually steal from a lot of different places so you like take like wow at a restaurant i only have to pay for what i order for something or with uber like i don't actually have to like have i don't have to own the cats right you know give be an example so two ideas if you if you do a little idea sex with them so cloud kitchens we've talked about that on the podcast before so creating a virtual restaurant selling on top of post made uber eats etcetera and then in the world of e commerce i was thinking about upsell upsell is you know obviously critical to e commerce it's like you're buying one thing it's like hey do you want fries with that right hey do you want this extra thing and it increases the order value by twenty percent thirty percent forty percent whatever it is up upsell are critical in e commerce in the world of delivered food delivery they basically don't exist so i was thinking like how many times where if we were ordering you know chinese food or mexican food or whatever through some restaurant why doesn't an uber eats just do a you know sort of have a cloud dessert company that's always just like do you wanna add some ice cream on top of that or hey we just made brownie whatever and like i bet they could increase the card size and it shouldn't be another restaurant it should be a up upsell across all orders of all restaurants that day and so like i don't know you can sort of mismatch ideas if you see something that's interesting or critical in one area in another area they don't do it that's usually you know makes for an interesting thought thought experiment i completely agree with this i what i'm wondering is do you can you teach people this or you got it or you you you for sure teach people this yeah i would love to say you either got it or you don't that would make it make me feel awesome because like i got it and another people don't but the reality is i didn't have it and now i do and i know exactly what i did to get there hung out with people who have a bunch of interesting ideas and i got thirsty for that so i started hanging out with them either in person or my twitter feed is just full of those people like i don't have you know i don't put sports into my twitter feed as much like i surround my feed with that so that even when i'm just browsing that's what i get the second thing is like start to come up with these frameworks so for example one framework i have you should steal for your thing is like you if you imagine this two by two grip on the left side you have what type of problem is this this is a new problem or an old problem right old problem people trying to meet their mates they wanna date somebody that's an old problem new problem hey i'm trying to throw a zoom event and i don't have a good way to share that right that didn't that wasn't a problem that existed five years ago but it exists now and so new problem old problem and then you have new solution old solution so it's like cool old solutions to things can be applied to new problems so that's what the zoom mirror all thing is he's taking an old solution like event bride or splash that or like these proven methods he's just saying cool i can specialize and tailor that to this new problem which is zoom events rather than in person events and then you take new solutions which are things like oh wow so crypto lets you have trust or like a digital contract so i don't need an escrow person so maybe you know i can take an old problem like you know escrow and a home and a home sale but i can do it or can do it your new solution no no not i yeah no worries okay cool yeah exactly so new solution you push a button somebody has gps on their phone and they come to you and they solve your problem for you they to pick you up and take you somewhere or whatever cool maybe i can apply that to this whole problem notary and so you just take that two by two grid and you say cool what are all the new solutions that are interesting to me then other one is what are all the new problems that are interesting to me you just keep jot those down anytime you see one you know whatever that is and so that's a framework you can use to understand ideas and figure out is this idea actually something novel or not well it's novel whenever you cross old problem and new solution or old solution and new problem those are the two boxes that the new ideas come in if it's a old problem old solution there's nothing new there don't do it you're blow my mind i don't understand how you come up with these like you know how people used to say obama talks in like quotes like he always like he just has these one letters that are like really great you talk in frameworks yeah it's weird i don't know why but i think it's because i like frameworks so i'm studying them and then i just naturally start thinking that way another another way to practice this if you wanna become an idea person is like james alt shared this but he was like every day i write down ten ideas doesn't have to be good just a daily practice of idea generation because if you think about it like man i wish i was better at ideas cool do you do that do you practice coming up with new ideas every day oh you don't okay you know i also wish i was fit but if i don't go exercise for then what what do i expect is gonna happen i'm not just gonna magically get fit so same thing here i have to two that i do i don't do the james alt one but the two i do one is this podcast twice a week i get up in front of a you know you know a lot of people and i try to come up with the new ideas that's a practice how do i prepare for that i have these documents on my phone and my laptop one's called the biggest idea in my head and i have every month and i just write down this month what is the biggest idea in my head and i just put it there and so like i'll go to my document right now i'll read you one of my biggest idea in my heads sean everyone has asked it you share this shit and you never have yeah you know these are i i i don't know if i wanna share these things right some of them wanna share some i don't wanna share so like in april i refinance my home and the biggest idea in my head was like holy shit that was so much work and such so painful biggest idea in my head is turning ref financing into a five minute online process i don't know how but if there is a new solution that's an old problem that i would want solved when we were doing the weight loss challenge the biggest idea in my head was holy shit everybody needs a little monitor in their body that tells them how their body's reacting to the food they eat if we wanna change people's diets and not have half the country bo b's we need to have real time feedback loops so that when you put that you know piece of chocolate in your mouth you pay a price immediately and not like five years down the road and and so the biggest idea in my head was how do we make these glucose monitors so cheap and readily available that everybody gets feedback for everything that they they eat it'll help the country eat better it'll help the world whole world eat better that was the biggest idea in my head for one month and so i just write these ideas down and then you know i basically have a place to put them i'm just i am like being a listener right now i am thinking about this but i think it's great what you guys are doing if you guys are gonna release these courses or classes i don't know i don't know i like really the truth is is that we don't have household con revenue in june and he had done all the work and i was like no okay well we well i'll work with you to do it as a business like our business like we have an an ambitious goal to build a really large company i think courses will not you be part of that yeah i think that it was simply like a thing to like well let's just try it and it actually covered our hustle kind revenue so or profit so we i will not do this i will not do whatever ever again gotcha i hate the course business i think it is it is not fun it is great for a solo it's not great for for a company no i think it's shit i think that if you're ref forge which is a five thousand dollar thing for companies that is interesting but i still think it sucks to host like i don't i don't think it's like maybe it makes some profit i don't know who he does but or it definitely does but i personally don't like it right i don't like most people even finish the shit yeah most people will don't i think they like c who created he created what you me right yeah you i think he they were the ones who came out and said less than five percent of people finish these you know at one point in time moo massively open online courses we're all the rage everybody said moo are gonna revolutionize education is gonna change the university shit and then they came out and they were like look we made a harvard education free and open to anyone all you have to do is click a button and a enroll and then you should gotta show up and take it and you could have a harvard education for free online from the comfort of your own home and less than five percent of people i think finish the course and i think that tells you a lot about like why people do a thing you know people don't go to university to learn that's a sad truth people go to university to get credential so that they can get a high paying job so if you wanna compete with the university you should actually create a credential that get you a high paying job that gives people confidence if i get this credential i will get a high ping job that's i think this is what you needed this is what you your next thing will have to be this is the area i'm most interested in and if i could just figure out an angle i'll do it because there's this other great talk that came from the yc mafia by this guy richard ham and it's called you and your research she go read it it's a speech he gives and i i didn't know who this guy was apparently he's like kind of technologist technologies from back in the day and he talks about his time at xerox park and xerox park was responsible for like some of the biggest what's it call richard richard richard richard hammond is his name ham i'm pretty sure it's hammond i don't know if this first name's is richard maybe i just inserted generic white name but xerox park is where like you know the visual graphic unit user interface like steve jobs went to xerox park and was like oh mouse points at i on screen that's how computers should work and he likes stole the innovations basically from there because they were just doing r and d and he was like trying to bring shit to the world anyways he talked about xerox park and he used to he said he he tells the stories and i was at lunch one day and i asked the the cup my coworkers these brilliant people you know all the brain in the world is stuffed in know these guys skulls hey he's like i asked them what is the most important what is the biggest idea in your head what is the most important problem in your space in your industry what is the most important problem and then they would say a thing he's like what are you researching and they would say a different thing and he's like why aren't you working on the most important the most burning question in your space the most interesting thing in your field why are you not working on it so his his message is basically ask yourself that question what is the most the biggest thing in my space what is the biggest challenge or opportunity in my industry and why am i not working it and then you should go work on it because he says the filter is you have to ask yourself do i have a novel angle and how i'm gonna attack that problem because if i just go back if i like the big problems are kinda known but you need a new attack vector of how you can solve that problem if you don't have a new attack vector you're just gonna waste your time and energy you're gonna get the same result as everybody else but if you have a new attack vector then it is your responsibility as a smart and talented person to go to it so that's how i think about this university thing for a long time i already knew the last project i do i'm i'm gonna do is i'm gonna teach you need a new attack vector i think that that's bullshit dude that's both that is only one way to do it because if you think about it like a lot of great restaurants aren't particularly novel in the solution well i mean they're like novel and branding or their novel in that sean is making it do you know what i mean so i think that is a little bullshit yeah but like i think restaurants are i think restaurants bullshit right like no they're not you're wrong restaurants are terrible business hat no you're you're wrong one of them are till for nikita owns he owns casinos but he also owns some restaurants yes he has some chains but he he owns the golden nugget and he owns a whole bunch of other stuff too yeah and like some steak houses like public insurance just like fast casual stuff that regular people go to and it's like one of the most profitable privately owned companies in america so so for example the the best restaurant chains all had a new attack vector right mcdonald's realized the new attack vector and they production eyes fast food and that they had a real estate model and a franchise model to back it up chipotle came out and they did the same thing but they had they realized sort of the fast casual model which was different which was people that case there are many cases where the the amount of success they have is not into proportion to the amount of the their new novelty is not a proportion with the amount of stuff so okay here's what i think if you're talking restaurants the analogy there is like i'm gonna create an online course too right that's me opening up my restaurant just like everybody else has a restaurant my restaurant run by me i think i'm a good cook i think some people will like my will like my my restaurant what i'm trying to do is sort of change like change the restaurant industry right so like when i talk about education it's not like i'm just trying to create a course i'm trying to make it so that i guess here's the analogy i don't wanna build a car i wanna build a road so roads basically are new platforms that anybody can create a car on and you can get a lot more leverage if you if you build roads versus if you're just trying to build a car if you're just trying to be be a car driving on the existing road system you know what i mean got it no i understand this podcast is a car it's us getting on here and entertaining people we're gonna reach a certain set of people given a certain amount of effort making it can it can scale pretty because we're using the internet and it's awesome and it's free that's that's good it's better than the cars of hold where we would just go to a event we would host a meetup up and forty people would show up and we would talk that's the old way this is a much better way it's much better car but it's still not a road a road is podcasting create something like podcasting boom you've changed you you've really changed the world and that's that's more exciting to me we're on the same page on that one i think we had an interesting podcast yeah this was fun alright let's get out of here hey guys this last part is actually me and sam talking a little bit about the protests that are going on right now and not really about the protest really it's about how we have experienced it so far and what we've been feeling with what we've been thinking you know the emotions we we've had you know i wanted to know what was on sam's mind he's traveling right now he's in he was in texas i was in california you know we we contemplated taking it out because hey this a business podcast you know we try not to get political or anything like that be you know we're definitely not experts on this and you know it's pretty easy in today's age to just get ripped to shreds for saying the wrong thing or not having the right most smartest won't take you can have about something but you know it was a conversation we i wanted to know how sam was doing and he wanted know what i was thinking and so we we chatted a little bit about it so we're leaving in here i hope you guys enjoy this part of the conversation it's really hard it was really hard to record this podcast and be like hey think of those brainstorm new awesome ideas new products we could build new businesses we could run it was really hard to do that given what's going on and so we tried our best to to put out some content we hope can take people's mind off things for a little bit a lot of people it's very heavy and it's not necessarily good to to sort of keep your mind occupied with such a stressful or sad or or emotional topic at all times so we we wanted to put out a podcast episode today we also wanted to talk about what was going on so this last part is us just talking about our our our lives right now and how we've been experiencing what's happening so hope you guys enjoy i'm in austin still and what's going what's what's what's the world like in austin right now crazy everything's crazy i don't think it's as bad as san francisco but the world is crazy i i decided to we got a new office down here and so i rented at a house to see everyone and it's cool austin's a great city what do you think is gonna happen to san francisco do you think it's gonna like is this gonna be the end of san francisco being in like the place i think so yeah i i think so for a couple reasons you know right now i'm selling my house yeah it's gonna say your your house looks different you're decorating it to sell aren't you yeah i am i i'm trying to sell my house right now so it's about to go up for sale and i'm trying to move to the to the suburbs of of the bay area but and so right now because i'm doing that i'm in the middle of the market and listening to people and just hearing you know what are they what's it like am i is the market hot to sell am i gonna get a good price when i try to go look for something else is there a lot of stuff available or is it a bidding more and you know just like you would expect there's sort of a you know a flight to the a flight to space right now and and not like the spacex again i'm talking about like physical house space people are leaving this urbanization yeah the organizations people are leaving cities they're leaving san francisco for sure so a lot of people were in san francisco are here because of the career opportunities and now that the tech companies are saying you know either we are already remote or we're going remote or we're way more remote friendly and your work from home for the sort of foreseeable future there's basically no reason to be in a city paying the premium the extreme premium i mean like one bedroom for four grand a month two bedroom six grand a month you know type of rents to be in the city and so like you know when when a studio condos is a million dollars in the city you know if you don't have to pay that you're not going to and so people want space people want more affordability and people wanna be away from like a whole bunch other people from this virus and so that is driving a lot of people out of the cities now some people say oh that's just temporary personally i don't think so i don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle once the companies start letting you be remote it doesn't matter where you're physically located why would you live in a more expensive area only if that light style really appeals to you which it will for like twenty something year olds right to be in cities but right now you get the twenty something year olds and the thirty something year olds because the thirty something year olds are there for their career and that's gonna go away i feel like i'm i've been in austin for a week now i'm i'm gonna say for another week maybe i'll stay one more week down here it is definitely happier like the way of life is for me and for many others i understand why you'd be happier here dude my new house i gotta get a pool i'm like yeah swimming pool like what what is this this is is amazing that it makes me happy you just looking at this swimming pool i like it too my thing though is i miss san francisco i wanna come back i do miss a little bit of a struggle i also missed the people the sam san francisco family is like like i hate the people i love the people san has like actual you know real problems with crime and homelessness and stuff like that i i don't think anybody wants that and where they're living and so i think you know there's part of it that's the energy of a city it's like oh love being in new york love being attempt to come around all these en merchandising interesting ambitious people a bunch of single people but then there's just like crime and homelessness and like extreme expenses that put a burden on you and i think that's nobody likes that i almost feel like and not a real way but just because i can't think of a better word a little homeless where i'm like well where the fuck is my place now like where's my right like you're wandering you know because i'm yeah you and i we're not quite similar you've done it more than i have but me to an a lesser extent of lived in many different cities and i finally felt like i had a home in san francisco and i'm like shit right it like it's way like damn it's way different and so i'm i'm pretty sad about it to be honest like i've been like depressed over it i'm also sad obviously about all the other shit's going on is it are you seeing unrest and protesting and looting where you lived i'm seeing it because i'm just glued to twitter and me i'm just scrolling and i i can't believe my eyes and it is it is so sad there's so many different things going on at the same time and then the the shitty part about that to me is that everybody pulls a different meaning away from it so like if your bias going in is you know the you know if you're racist in one way you're gonna look at this and say oh man they're rooting in they're they're looting and and rioting and this is awful what did those small business owners do why are they why are they getting the stores smashed and then if you're somebody else and you're looking at this and you're like dude people are sick of it they've hit their breaking point because it's been going on for so long this police brutality and i totally understand what's going on and then other people are looking at it and they're sort of like hey what's like why are these other malicious groups kinda hijacking the movement and just inc violence and you know antifa or some people believe you know russia china whoever it is who's dropping these pellets of bricks off trying to bait people into violence and you know some people just trying to make the world burn and so there's all these things mixed together and i think whoever you are you're gonna select the evidence that supports your feeling and you're just gonna get stronger you're you're just gonna see more evidence towards your view and it's gonna make people more divided my friend shared something and it was like four circles and it was like i'm pissed off about the racism in our country and black lives matter black lives matters has a point i'm pissed off that businesses are getting yep brewing this is not the right way to do it i'm pissed off at the police because i think most of them are good but a few bad cops ruined shit for everyone and then i forget the fourth one and then it was like at at the center all the circles had a little bit of everything and like you can be here i was like that's how i feel right i'm angry and sad well what was the fourth one was the fourth circle i don't know what the fourth one was let's see it was really great though you did did you didn't happen to i didn't see that i don't know that explains like exactly how i feel you know and how many people feel and you know i i think it's really created there's a whole bunch of things that that you hear or you learn from these experiences where you're like oh you know that is a a sort of a nugget of wisdom or and and a a bit of empathy that i didn't have before and so you know when you see people that are you know i one great quote i saw was when you have a thousand good cops and ten bad cops but the good cops don't police the bad cops then you have a thousand and ten bad cops and you know i i i believe that and then that sort of applies to my life too like in what anytime i sort of stand by and do nothing while an injustice is happening that makes me sort of comp complacent in my own way right and you know i think about little minor examples of that in my own life and then you know one it was correct george floyd george george floyd death was murdered and the police should be held responsible i think most cops are good but police departments are corrupt and there are some bad cops looting businesses to destroying properties immoral and it hurts the cause i empathize and i agree with black matter protest and believe in them and they're right to be heard and then right in the middle was like i am here and this is sad right yeah it's really crazy and i know people don't listen to this podcast to hear like you know talks about soc economic issues and racism and whatnot but you know this i think affects everybody is is very different than anything that's happened in in my lifetime where you have riots breaking out across the nation all simultaneously and things really do feel like they've hit a breaking point for many reasons i think also the fact that people were pent up at home for the last three months that's i don't think that helps necessarily because that's a sort of a bunch of bunch of you know just water boiling over you know at a certain point as well i agree i saw i i agree i don't even love discussing this stuff because i don't think about it a lot and i also tend i try to like talk about the positive but let me bring something up that i don't think i have bring brought up and i want to hear your opinion so i don't this doesn't matter and it doesn't change i don't think it should like validate or not avail validate anything i say so like my wife's black my family's black i'll have black children and this was the first time or half black or partially black children this was the first time that i was at my house with sarah my wife and like she broke down she was like i don't i don't know how she's like i don't know where i fit in on this because she's like a successful black woman she's like i haven't had a lot of racist stuff happened to me or if any like i and and it was and she's like but i yeah it was it was it was just a total mind fucked because i'm like fuck what am i supposed to how am i supposed to i don't i don't know what to feel right i don't i was like i don't i don't know what to do and it was incredibly exhausting do you you your india do you consider yourself white or no white what definitely don't get consider the resolve white and nor does anyone who sees me thinks i'm white but well i don't know like but i get i hear what you mean in the sense of like in in some ways like do you feel that you're privilege or or prejudice against i think that's a different way of looking at it and like you know my sister so we i was born in tulsa oklahoma which is like you know not the most open minded and racially friendly place and so my sister when she was in kindergarten you know students would would draw a picture of a pig and then write her name on it and cover the pig and mug and brown mud and then they would give it to the teacher and the teacher laugh and my sister always remembers this like she was i don't know six years old and she vividly remembers the teacher sort of looking at this and laughing and saying no no put it away but like being you know involved in it and i never experienced i don't understand that what what's the pig have to do just like brown pink brown dirty in the mud you know that sort of thing and and you know i remember you know when she went to my mom it was like why can't be we'd be type of thing where like you know asking questions as a kid just trying to understand why am different what does that mean why do other people think we're worse than than them that sort of thing i personally never experienced that because i luckily moved out old oklahoma when i was really young and went to different places where it was it was less so or just got lucky in sort of my experiences around who i was around but i i but guess i would say like you know when nine eleven happened you know not fun to be a brown guy in america right are are you are you any religion or muslim no i'm well i'm not really religious i would be hindu that would be hindu but you know just that's typically what most indian people are but yeah you i'm not religious but you know i do grow a beard pretty quick and so like yeah you know like when you go to the airport i don't think you think about how do i look today whereas i think about that i'm like look i'm trying to get hassle for no reason here let me shave before i get on this flight or like you know i had friends who like are are muslim who had like keys their house keys take it away from them in tsa because it was like this is you know potentially a a dangerous thing and they're like this is my apartment keys what are you talking about how how does that make you feel so the fact that you have to shave are you angry or you what where do you what's that make you feel like i'm not angry about it you know i i sort of have this opinion that my by build my personal philosophy if you're gonna boil it down to any one thing is the only thing you have control over is your attitude towards the present moment and so so that's empowering and dis empowering right it's dis empowering because it's like shit i can't control anything that's going on i can't control out how other people feel how they're gonna act i can't control the results i'm gonna get in my life but it's empowering it's like the one thing i control is my attitude towards the moment so that sort of is a superpower because then no matter what the situation is no matter what the moment is i can decide what my attitude about it is gonna be so for example when something shitty happens to me someone says something shitty or you know i you know get that extra sort of hey come into this room while i go through tsa clearance you know the meaning i put on that is of my choosing and if i put the meaning of it that you know i'm less than i'm being wrong that doesn't help me it makes me feel like shit and so i just decide not to feel that way but i know that like on the grand scheme of things i get off pretty light it's very different than never feeling safe you know going for a jog in your neighborhood or something like that i think you know there's levels to it and i haven't experienced those levels where it would be very very challenging to put a positive meaning on what's going on yeah it's it's just a confusing time because you feel so many different emotions and some of them are opposite and i had to like talk to the whole company today which were small let's say twenty or thirty people and i was like i don't know what to say other than if you guys like ever feel out of place somewhere like our company we're we're gonna we're gonna make you feel safe like we'll hire all types of people we like i and i wasn't sure if that felt like weak or like like oh like like barely anything right to be done but i was like i don't know what i was like i don't know how to fucking handle this other than you're safe here but yeah you know i i think that's the right approach because it's not about having the answer or the wisdom or the most heartfelt thing and the best speech but like i think it is important if you're the leader to show up as a decent human being in that moment and to say look i understand i'm also feeling this crazy mix of emotions i just wanna do my best with this anything you know we're gonna we're gonna try to do our best with this and i think it goes a long way to just be a decent person and try to be present and visible there versus kinda shy away from it which is what a lot of people do yeah it's crazy and i have a feeling once i have children my opinions gonna change a lot like or not my opinion but my i think i'll learn a lot yeah like having black kids i bored park black kids i think well i some maybe i'll see something that i didn't port previously see did you watch the trevor noah thing that he posted on youtube or whatever i did not i'm typically not a fan of his i think that a lot of the times the he says is the wrong take yeah i i tend to avoid him but i would watch it if you suggested that i avoid him because i don't think he's that funny but i did watch this thing and you know he he brings up like what's going on he's like yeah a lot of people are looking at what's going on and saying well this isn't right either right of course police should not merge citizens that's wrong but also rioting and looting and destroying things is also not right and what his point was which i think made me better understand what was going on his point was like you gotta think about this what is society you society is essentially a contract it is an agreement amongst the group of people of here's what's right and wrong of how we're gonna act here's the behaviors that are tolerated here's the behaviors that are not tolerated he goes so what you're saying is that one side of contract you know if we're if we're if we go into contract together and you're just breaching your side of the contract regularly and without recourse and i just see wow this guy just keeps breaching reaching his side of the contract then i also have no no desire or incentive to uphold my side of the contract he goes you'll see somebody that's homeless and you know they don't go and just murder necessarily because because they are in a bad position they say look these are the rules of the game i'm losing in the current game or i have not been able to sort of get to an advantage position in this game but like i still respect that we're in a game together in there were rules of this game he goes what you're seeing now is that a group of people you know black people in america feel like the contract has just been breached over and over and over again where they're you know unnecessary and unjust violence against us and so now we're gonna breach the contract too and we're gonna sort of make it very known what it feels like when the contract is being breached for apparently no reason and it doesn't seem like a positive thing and so that made me look at you know when somebody is either protesting whether it's peacefully or not peacefully when somebody rioting and they're creating a sort of unsafe environment for all it's sort of i don't know it's sort of explain to me why somebody would behave that way it's because if you feel like the other party is just terminal breach the contract and there's no recourse then it's like i'm gonna terminal breach the contract and and and we'll see we'll see how it feels and now both sides feel what it's like when the societal contract gets totally breached and let's see if that gets definitely feel it i feel it it i feel it definitely feels like like almost like the end of the world a little bit it's like there's it it's like a small it's like in the same way having a new puppy is just like a small taste of having a baby it's like that's how i feel right now but i'm like if like the world if like everything that i believed in is gonna come to an end it's gonna like a little a little like this right and you for every sad story there's also an inspiring story where people are you know waking up the next day and going cleaning up the city and people standing together and you know i think there's a lot of really positive things going on too and i think that's the you know that's the so know silver lining or that's the other side of the coin here where where is progress being made and i hope so