#85 - Why Privacy is Big Business and the Multi-Million Dollar Ideas Hidden in Plain Sight

i have a lot to talk about i bet you do too yeah i get added a bunch of things this week okay let's jump right in people been craving a brainstorm and we're gonna him a brainstorm can i tell you one thing really quick before we get to the brainstorm yeah let's do okay so i'm i'm gonna go buy a car in about three hours and i'm gonna live starting in august i'm gonna live in a new city each month for twelve months and it's gonna be i'm looking for a list of happiest cities so okay have that let me know well i've seen that once before and i think it was like you're you're talking about us only right i think like switzerland or sweden is number one or something yeah i i would go to canada i i wanna go to mexico city because i love but the corona thing i don't think it is under control there at least to drive there i wouldn't wanna drive through those cities in order to get there so where are you starting do you know number one i i think it's gonna be pro is it called pro or provost what what's it called promo utah utah the mormons like are definitely the happiest so i'm gonna go ahead and hang out with them and and then i don't know i got a planet okay well i think that's good you should figure it out as you go and somebody somebody tweeted this as a reply because i think you mentioned this maybe on the last one and they're were like dude you must have the coolest wife who's just down to do all this stuff they're like you we need to get her on the pods so i two questions for you about that hey what's her reaction to your you know life plans like this like crazy life plans is she does she feed into them does she pull you back a little bit and say hey here's what's a little more realistic is she just down for whatever like what's her what's her down yeah she's down she's a little more conservative i but she's down but does this seem like a crazy idea this doesn't seem like a crazy idea at all i don't think it's crazy necessarily but it's definitely on on unorthodox right like most people don't do this so let's say it's unusual i don't think it's crazy i think it's a good i think this is weird you work if told my wife if i well now we have babies so that's probably it's crazy when you we're childless yeah job was yeah i if i had said hey i wanna move every month to a different city she would have been like why are we doing all this like no let's not do that like okay wanna go on vacation let's go on vacation i think that would have been a reaction no if really push for it if i was like i need this she would've have got it but it helps that i don't have kids and we know that we're gonna have sarah's twenty seven so we're gonna have kids in three years so we're definitely like let's poverty right yeah that's good somebody a year older than me and so from day one it's been like y buddy i'm on the clock let's do this okay so so that's one thing that's one question and then the second question is does she listen to the podcast yeah yeah she does so alright nice well that would be interesting to have wives come on because they have to deal like how do they handle like sarah it's a handful for her to work with me for sure like because i'm so crazy we should do like crazy hour episode one time right great night happy hour episode not crazy like i wanna do wild shit all the time but emotionally i'm just like fucking nuts i i like a lot of people who create so far so if she does have to put up a shit she's patient so it's good my wife is goes crazy on the minor and is down for the major and what mean by that is like if i if i suggest something that's a minor change or inconvenience or or setback she over x and then if i'm like like she was pregnant and i was like i'm gonna quit my job we're i'm gonna have no health care i'm gonna go do this crazy thing it's super high risk high reward and she was like okay yeah i believe in you and so like on the major thing she's like the the switch flips in her head and she's like okay i gotta be super resilient now wait did you just reveal something no this was before when she was pregnant before before we had our baby because i was like look i'm gonna sell this company or i'm gonna end the company but one of two ways we're not gonna continue this as is like i'm gonna go for the sale hard for thirty days which is too short and if we if we get a term sheet we get a term sheet if we don't get a term sheet i actually wanna just go do something else that i think is higher upside and that'll mean no salary no health care no nothing and if this doesn't work out well and you moved i mean you i feel like you bought a house and moved on a whim yeah i did that too okay let's jump in let's do some of these topics what you do you wanna start okay let's start with duck duck go okay i've i was on the james alt shirt podcast james was here with us a few weeks ago james is like a like a do nerdy guy i say this would love i like him a lot he's like a nerdy guy libertarian guy libertarian and audience and i can't decide if this whole privacy stuff that we're talking about so hey dot com email service launched a few days ago a few weeks ago a week ago yeah its premise is like we're gonna one of its many promises is it's on privacy okay right and so i'm really into this privacy thing the founder of pandora told me that he is seeing his customers who are middle america people actually care about privacy and when i was on my trip i saw duck duck go billboards everywhere for those you don't know duck taco it's a google competitor it's a search engine and they it's all based on they don't track you which like fucking ruins the business model have no idea how they make money but no no it doesn't so but their thing was like it's not no ads so they still do search ads but they're like look when you search for you said you're gonna go buy new car when you go search for you know mercedes versus bmw or whatever you're gonna search for they'll serve you an ad they just don't need to know that your sam that you live in this place that you have wife you know they don't need the personal data for the ads to still be effective because search is high intense they they know what you're looking for so they can serve you a relevant ad and their insight was the slight drop off you get by not personal is not so bad if that can become your value proposition that hey we're not using personal information to serve these ads okay so i just sent you their traffic yeah so go to duck dot go dot com slash traffic so here's my question to you first of all and we're looking at a hockey stick we're looking at ten two thousand ten they're at you know this is this is queries per day or this is average yeah so they average sixty two million queries per day i have no idea i mean what do you think google's queries per day probably like like five billion yeah in saying i mean a operator see you can find see if you can find google's krishna today so we can put so three point five billion off google or doctor goes at fifty fifty sixty million a day so they're i don't even know what's that like three percent the size anyway duck dot go what do you think about that i personally love this and what i wanna know from you is do you like duck dot and do you also think this privacy thing like building products where the main feature or values in like or like the main thing the brand stands for is privacy do you think that's gonna it i think it's a hey i used to think the opposite i used to be of the camp that was like look people don't give a shit like if you just say yeah sure in theory people want privacy if you offer no privacy or privacy but when it comes down to products they're like oh this is a free good thing and i have to give up all my data alright here you go and so i used to think that people in practice we're willing to easily trade privacy i think that's still true on the whole but if you said yes where is the pendulum swinging and so i think the pendulum is swinging more towards people caring about privacy because every these things stack up right so as you you know the more paranoid you get the less lack of trust you have in the system and of the of the big companies it it doesn't matter you don't have to know which one is the straw that breaks the camel back maybe it's the fake new stuff on facebook maybe it's when you're information gets breached for the thirty fifth time and you get an email saying hey sorry you're your personal phone might have been leaked like you don't know where it is but these things just keep happening and to the point where i believe people care more than they did before and they'll continue to care more that's that's number one number two you have to do it on a global product like a product everybody uses because it's still a niche audience so right like you said google is about fifty times the search query size then than duck go so like fifty to one and so you need a product that's used by pretty much everybody for that those ones to add up and be a big enough market for you so i wouldn't do it on some niche products it's like oh you do you know some niche mailing you know mailchimp chip software thing cool i'm gonna make a privacy focus version it's like no that's that's a niche of a niche wow but if you you take your mainstream stream it works like hey dot com i call it hey dot com because i email email emails global right emails everybody yes it is global but like you don't need that many users to build a a billion dollar company totally what what i'm that's that's what saying though you need but you are only gonna get the a sort of two percent let's say that value privacy enough to make a change and so you know like superhuman did the same thing email is such a huge market cool we'll go get the one percent two percent who are willing to pay thirty bucks a month for a free instead of free email i think that's the same thing happening here bra how old are you twenty seven you're a little old for this question the zoom five years ago no it's a generational thing i wanna know do the twenty two year olds give a shit about this because the way that the zoom the way that they live and think is do really give a shit about getting coronavirus i don't know man the price of their data they don't care about their body they're a pretty conscientious group of people i think i don't know i don't i don't know how they think but that was my question okay so here's another private here's another opportunity for privacy that i'm interested in do you know that when you go to safe so in california we have safe way in the south you've got k in the other south you've got pub what else is there albert albert okay so when you go to your grocery store like your major grocery store you enter in your phone number to get a discount right what they do with that is they understand your buying behavior and they'll show you they'll send you stuff in the mail or they will just learn about inventory whatever and this is incredibly effective so effective that there's a famous story about a woman being a sixteen year old get a woman getting mailed stuff to her dad's home saying like baby supplies and the dad was like hey my daughter's sixteen she's not pregnant what are you talking about turns out she was pregnant and they knew it because in your target yeah yeah month you know what to buy anyway when you go and buy that ship did you know that you can submit like a request and they'll send you all of your do not track request well they you could do it do not track and they can send you everything you've ever bought oh that's pretty cool okay i like it so what what would you do with that data yeah i think that's just an interesting thing you could do in general like a mint dot com style i think you could say hey what's your phone number okay then you go request it on behalf of the customer and you give them cool visualizations about their spending patterns over time and other products they might like but i don't what do you what will do with that data if i was the company or if i was myself or what do you think if you're trying to build a business i would go figure out other areas where this sort of like linking and tracking will work and so so a lot of people have already done this right like the ad market it's kinda like porn where porn innovate first okay a close second or third might be the ad market so so you know fe who is kind of my my c founder or cto of my previous company his previous company was a ad tech company and they one of the versions of their app that they made so the company is called app love and so initially the premise was what apps are your friends loving we will recommend those apps to you and so it was like if i know what apps you have and i know that you're my friend because you're in my dress book then it can tell me that sam loves this app i thought it was a play out of mc love no it was i don't know that was a side benefit because every low super bad but one but then all kinds of little edge cases started fucking them up so they would you know they would tell me that you love grind or whatever right like so so first is like not everybody's app behavior they want to be transparent to their friends or they're context and i think there's one really horrible case where this so they then they switched just trying to do this for app install so they're like okay if i'm playing a game and it's awesome or sorry forget about it it's awesome i'm playing a game and they want you to download that game because they get paid nine bucks if you download the game they would show my face from your address book as hey sean's playing candy crush right now tap here to play candy crush too and that was like a super effective ad unit like they were like printing money and i think something really bad happened where like the ceo of ex media or something like that got an ad that like his deceased wife was playing this game or something like that like someone from his address book who had this app was shown to him and he's like what the hell is this and so it got back to them and they had to turn it off and they they they did they did a similar experiment around location tracking like kind of a life three sixty thing and so you gotta you're really careful with these like data oh let's use data to give you information about either yourself or others you can get the situation like the dad who finds out a sixteen year old pregnant yeah i long story short privacy the i have a privacy idea for you i love privacy idea for you so i just i it's just because i've become like i like at the older i've gotten i've gotten like more libertarian and like fuck the government like mentality well there's two things that are happening there's people will be on libertarian which is like if government and if the man in general and then there's people are becoming more nationalist which is like it's us first them and us first them may sort of keep them out and raise us up and i think in both cases you see this sort of like retreat in both cases it's a sort of not like a shelter in place physically but it's a shelter in place sort of psychologically behavioral where you you reduce your like openness and your spread you know in your behaviors and your data in in other way so i think people in general when times get little crazy people had there's a flight to safety and i see i think you see this with investing i think you see this with the way people act and behave so i think there more people do it when their when times get turbulent now privacy focused idea that i had the other day so moved into this new house need to get internet set up oh shit gotta play the comcast game comcast comes over and of course you know wifi doesn't really work great in my house so was like okay i to invest in good wifi f because not having good wifi f like not having water to drink and so i'm like looking for these like euro these kind of mesh networks that you use in your house i just bought one give you more coverage so i just bought euro but i was talking to fe and i was like i think hero sucks well i hope it doesn't suck because just bought it but the idea that i was thinking about was you know how when you what what typically happens you have your wifi router and then on your laptop you'll have like a vpn so a lot of people have vpn vpn are more and more popular some people have it for work some people have it to hide their traffic as they go boot leg movies on the internet and they don't want it to be sort of traced to them and so vpn are kinda complicated like to set up like you gotta download one you don't know if it's malware you're setting it up the average person doesn't even know what the health vpn is so the idea was actually why don't you build vpn into the router so you never need to download anything it's just vpn by default and it's into the hardware itself and so you actually the the value prop of the router is this is secure internet okay and so they're so he so fe of course was like you know there's people doing this and so i i i can't say i'm the first i have this idea but he was telling me about a couple companies to check out if you're interested in this so next dns is one of them ubi is another one and so he was showing me a few of these that today are still kind of like you kinda need to be a developer a know about these or be like know how to configure them to set them up and so i think if somebody takes the euro level of simplicity and design but they bake the value prop hey your your internet search traffic you're whatever you're doing on the internet is private if you buy this box instead of that box i think thing it behind that the hard thing about these com so first of all the vpn businesses i did a i wrote about them because i think that it's gonna explode and they already are exploding but a lot of them are based in panama because of the privacy laws there and a lot of them are notoriously scam me and weird they're also ridiculously profitable like i talked to the one guy he had one it made two hundred million dollars a year in revenue and like a hundred million in profit like right stupid but euro do you remember you know euro got bought by google i think i think amazon it like that acquired for nothing these companies are so hard to make money because it costs so much money right yeah i think hardware is hard everything everybody knows that like ring doorbell bell you know it gets a billion dollar outcome but like i don't think it was like ultra profitable at the time i think it was strategic the reason it got bought but the reason i think wifi router is interesting because wifi is like email it's like google search it's a thing that everybody has every every physical place has a router and so though two percent of that market that cares about privacy i think is still a big market and i think i do i don't believe that it's so hard to make money because again you like with this comcast box that i have here i gotta pay these guys fourteen bucks a month just for this router to sit here there's no way this router is worth more than like fifty dollars but they're gonna make money on me you know they'll break even in five months and they know i'm never gonna like get rid of my router and so so yeah i think that there's something interesting there yeah also fuck those guys yeah this episode brought to you by god what do what do you got okay here's something interesting i saw the other day alright so by the way this costco ford services that i pray you put freaking awesome but go ahead okay alright so the one i was gonna say is much more boring it's so it's about tax so i've been getting into tax stuff now because when do you get a little bit of money you're like oh shit why am paying someone's tax is there a way i think rich people avoid this how did they do that i need to learn their game and so i was learning about like what are legal sort of tax avoidance tax shelter strategies how how do you you know avoid paying forty eight percent tax which is what i ended up paying out a lot of stuff in california here and so one of the things that i learned about was so there's solar credits right so solar is one of these things that the government subsidize so if you have a building you can buy solar and you can take a hundred percent of the installation cost as tax write off so i was like okay that's cool but okay where am gonna put that on my house i don't know i've been trying to find what are these deductions how do they work i do i qualify find now interesting market that i saw so my my father i was like yeah you know with solar i was like i don't own a building he's like if you own real estate you know you can depreciate the real estate you can do solar was i don't own a building so what do you want me to do here he's like well you know technically you could buy the solar for another building and lease it to them and then you you write off your hole and your capex or whatever and so what i found was there's this business so if you ever noticed there's a long way of saying very notice when you drive by schools that schools all have solar panels on top now sometimes and and so if you see it in california especially you go every middle school high school is it's just got solar panels all along the roof and the way this works i found out was companies like chevron and exxon or whoever they want so they want tax credits and so what they do is they go to the school and say hey we will buy solar for your school and they buy solar panels for the school it becomes a tax write off to them the school leases it from chevron and so chevron gets a monthly payment from the school and the school gets lower utilities without ever taking a dollar out of its pocket so i know is very interesting and it sort of i don't know much about this yet and so i may i'm gonna dig into this but it seems like there's a there's a business to be had for basically pairing up schools churches other types of entities that want solar they want a lower utility bill they don't have the money to invest to do this whole infrastructure thing and businesses which are looking for tax write offs and just make it where you push a button the project happens and you receive your paperwork that says here's your deduction and here's your income stream coming from the lease so i think there's a business to be built basically pairing up the two sides of the marketplace a physical building like a school or whatever that needs that want solar it doesn't wanna pay any money it doesn't wanna do any work and a company that's looking for tax write offs that what that's is willing to go give that school solar in exchange for the tax write off love it i'm gonna tell you something even some very similar as well and this is in the same vein of half very half baked ten percent baked one percent baked most highway median and government property or public property has grass and the reason that the reason it has grass is grass is the cheapest way to cover land okay but grass is actually incredibly expensive to upkeep okay like if you're in a median it it you have to mow it like the way that the math works out it's something like i forget the exact that there's there's math behind us but and then plus having to mow it and water it and do all this stuff it's incredibly expensive and in la have to remember the numbers but in la i think that like twenty or thirty percent of all water went to watering wands right and so what they did was they tested this out and they gave turf to the residents they just gave it away they go right we'll we'll do it for you yeah and it reduced water usage significant them and i started thinking about i'm like that's kind of interesting what if you just went to the government and you're like i'm we're just gonna let's let's just turf all the all the median in america right i i don't and i because i heard the npr they did this whole this whole this whole thing they're like about how bad grass is and i was like that's pretty amazing i gotta look into this but no no so so let me give you one more okay so here's okay here's the general theme of these really random mass topics we're talking about is when you look around the world and this is what i'm now training my brain to do when you look around the world and you see some item or object or patch of grass just think to yourself how did this get here and what you realized is there is a business underneath every single thing like this is we're going back to when we said you know in offices you got that poster about like the kind of hr hazards or whatever like the soup stupid labor law poster you have to human your office like it's a huge business it's a human i was blind to this right i just saw this poster didn't ask how it got there i didn't ask why it had to be there why every office has this but whoever asked that question realized there's an opportunity here and they started lam these bucket posters and making fifty million dollars a year giving you this annual poster that you have to update in your office so that's the the the test for the for the listener is start to look at the world and say how did this get here who wanted this here what is the economics of this get often times the the that's that's a good great point sean a lot of times when people they they don't think about that stuff and it what if you dug deep a lot of times you could realize that there was some bureaucratic decision that was a fucking horrible decision right yeah and there could be opportunity it could be a totally broken opportunity so a lot of times there is like a scrappy entrepreneur who comes up with something cool like that signed business other times it's like why did you guys decide to like make the screws five inches instead of six inches it's like because like the six on the keyboard was worn out right right alright so here here's another example of these like hidden and plain site businesses alright you go to a you go to a airport you take a flight you go to baggage claim okay cool nine nine times out of ten your bags there now the other ten times out of a out of a hundred or whatever okay you know your bag is lost and they recover it but there still ends up being this point three percent of luggage that's never claimed and point three is that the number point three so it goes to ninety nine point seven percent of luggage i believe is gets claimed and so point three percent of of of luggage is just un unplanned baggage so i saw this business called un unplanned baggage what they have done is they went and they partnered with every airline and they said too we will take the un claim baggage because they had some protocol like i don't know what is like after twenty one days if no one claims it now we're just stuck with this shit and somebody was like hey that's not shit that's a suitcase and that's some stuff inside and so they were like six seen a sixty minutes episode on this it's it was like a series they're are they based in alabama birmingham alabama i believe they're play they're based somewhere random it's the yeah they have a a physical store in where's yeah alabama scott alabama yeah i i know this company well i love it so you can go to the website un claim baggage dot com it's the there's things as the nation's only retailer of lost luggage that caught my eye anytime you say only that means i locked up an exclusive on this shit i'm so happy that i i'm i can be the only player which means i'm gonna extract a lot of value here so what they do is they donate a bunch of stuff that they get in into bags two charities cool there's a feel good component to this they take orphan bags and they recycle them they sell them or they donate them and those three combined or a business and so this was just like to me such a cool clever idea i couldn't find like their revenue i didn't have a chance to check but you can go on the site and to call again un un came baggage it's like you'll buy this there's a rolling stones collector's limited edition leather motorcycle jacket for five hundred dollars up on up for auction on this thing what's it call un un claim baggage un unplanned bag dot com well we could find this out i i remember sixty minutes but it did a big like expose on the a while ago and it it was like oh they they have like tens of thousands of square footage right yeah they a huge huge facility there the other one that's like this which i think is more popular people know about this more is the group that takes the okay you go to a hotel you use you know two squirt a shampoo out of the mini bottle and now there's still three squirt left and then you check out and they can't they don't wanna give that empty half empty bottle to the next guest so they ditch it and so some guy was like whoa that's a lot of waste of plastic and shampoo and so someone started going into hotels and partner and said i will take all your used shampoo bottles conditioner bottles body wash whatever and so they built a huge business just recycling this i love that they take it they they reuse the goods they donate certain things to charity and it's such a good business it's like doing good while doing well and i think those are great i love that here's why i'm i just googled so doyle owens is the founder of un unplanned baggage he's he's dead now he died recently and if you google them he's just like an old southern right white looking dude i mean just a normalized looking dude and the guy who watches billy madison three times a day yeah well the reason why i like him is because or i like this is because i think that people tend to over complicate things things and like i'm very passionate about the the mission of reducing waste right just like just don't like the idea of don't consume what you don't have to consume and just don't be wasteful i i was raised catholic like this idea of like glut and like waste it just has it's in my blood like i hate it it this fucking guy this is like the definition of just like turning shit into gold of just like right she's just like because it's a super simple that it's not fancy it's in alabama which you know i'm from the south so but no disrespect to the south but like people looked down on that shit because i think they're in silicon valley that they're special and he just that this guy reduced waste significantly and got very wealthy in the process right love it and created he probably created maybe thousands of jobs for like low income people this guy is the best i love it so if you have if you know about a business like this i'll i'll call these hidden and plain sight you know super simple ideas just things that you look around the world most people just take them for granted and then somebody out there like no wait how do this get here who picks this up when it's done what's the business of that tweet those at me i wanna know what other businesses are like this out there dude doyle owens is this guy's name who started un claim baggage i love this guy i gotta cover this on the hustle this is a super interesting story an example of this that you guys covered on the hustle is the mannequin lady in oakland yeah takes you know i guess either used or damage mannequins out of stores because again what are you gonna do with this hun of plastic like who needs this mannequin and she's just gotta warehouse some mannequins and then ships them out and makes a killing so so there that's another example of these oh like these are parts of the world that you didn't realize our businesses alright brady you give us costco for services what are you thinking here so this is kinda like a pin duo duo thing right so yep copying being bulk you get a discount so this is a two part thing so what you would do is you would go to these companies saas companies say like an adobe and say hey what kind of tiers what kind of pricing you know discount per tier would you offer let's say hey if i can bring a hundred customers we can offer a ten percent discount five percent discount of our normal prices the second thing would obviously just you know have a website where people can kind of create groups and claim that discount right you can call them pods clusters let's say you get a ten percent discount for fifty people the website will show hey forty people already in this pod ten more you guys get to claim this discount so yeah what you're describing is group buying and it could be great a few companies i do something similar to this are app sumo stack social i think does it they're they're good companies i know and then there's a new one called is it called secret or ghost you know talk about sean no ghost is like a blogging platform so i think it's called secret or something like that anyway it's called secret i i think i'm looking at them because i was gonna partner with them in some capacity it's an interesting business model that a lot of people have tried founders cards is another one that's like a probably a twelve million dollar year business it's it's an interesting business no one has actually made this scale wonderfully and i talked to i'm gonna name drop a little and at the backstage of hal khan we had the founder of we work not the one that's in the news but the other one miguel is his name and he and what they did with they i don't remember how many tenants they had maybe fifty thousand at the time and he said they launched just like rewards card where they got group discounts and he said no one used it and that shocks me because what you're describing are you i'm like yeah evan you wanna save money of course you're gonna use that but for some reason people don't do it i don't know why businesses that have made this work in a in a indirect rate way or retail me not they kinda make it they made it work a little bit i mean it's that company sold for like a billion dollars i i mean it was a huge exit or maybe it's still independent but large business what do you think sean i like group buying i have a friend who taught me a lot about group buying are you was telling me a lot about group buying companies everything was fascinating but i don't retain any of that i didn't retain any of the information so we're gonna ask him to come on and explain some of these group buying companies alright let's move one on the next one i have some other interesting things first did you know jeff bezos was adopted yeah by keeping dad keeping dead i don't think he was adopted as an orphan i think his like mom left re remarried you know his dad left or his parents got split his mom rem remarried and his new does he have did he still talk to his normal i don't i don't think because for father's day he posted like this is my dad and so i don't know if he's that's like a well i read his bio he considers his cuban father which i think is a step like it's a cuban guy as his dad dad his real dad yeah and i just thought it was crazy like imagine adopting the wealthiest spend in the world he does you well you know steve jobs was a adopted too and then he met his birth father at a restaurant and his birth father didn't know that that was oh i didn't know that and part he had us and then when he went to the restaurant and he saw his birth father steve knew whose birth father was and the birth father goes oh my god steve jobs is at my restaurant i cannot believe this and like flipped out over it and i don't think he steve ever told him like he was his son that's amazing i didn't i didn't know about that okay i have another company that i think is cool i wanna talk about that's it you're just gonna say save jeff bezos was a doctor that there's that's the whole subject i just thought imagine adopting someone who became jeff bezos that's crazy okay let me tell you a quick tip then that isn't a business company's house that's the name of it and then there's the equivalent of australia did you know that in australia in many of the countries in europe if you're a privately held company that's above like forty million in revenue i think you have to submit an annual report yes i didn't know that i've went to the australia's version and the british the australia version that cost five dollars per port it's called companies house for britain it's completely free i just like looked up all these cool companies and you can see how much like dividends they make right my friend started this in in in great britain and also called due diligence this is called due deal is his company and i think it's like a a massively or last i checked it was like a massively successful company and i was like how are you getting all this private company data he's like oh it's just like you have to make it available here so what we do is we just aggregate it present it make it searchable and i was like oh my god like you know jeez not you know hey i wish that exists in the us and be what a simple beautiful business to do it was called the australian as i c australian securities and investment commission i guess that's the equivalent of the sec right and it cost money so i looked up a a research business that was similar to mine and i was curious and the founder just pays himself ten million dollars a year and it's and then i just looked at the financials is pretty big it's called them you probably know this ib world yeah yeah yeah avi world i didn't realize that's how big it it was a hundred million so you know twenty million idea is and these might these might exist already but you can build a layer on top of these just to make them more user friendly searchable sorta of easy to use clean up the data in some way and those can be pretty pretty awesome businesses import genius is a great example of this you know publicly available customs data that they make a and it's not even that easy to use but they make an interface that makes it very sort of simple and easy to to find the data that you're looking for and so you know if there's some entrepreneur in australia who wants to take asic and make it more of a consumer facing website or maybe that exists but that would be a a cool opportunity what else so i saw this company i liked called align i almost hesitate to even talk about it because i'm like very interested in it may invest may use it may like the teeth thing not the teeth thing it's it's pretty cool so you know how lambda school sort of popularized income share agreements they you know basically i train you you go get a job you have to pay me back out of that sort of like a novel way of doing student debt so income share agreements are getting more popular as lambda school has sort of proven that they work so all the lambda school clones i don't think they've proven they've worked i think that they're proven that some people are interested in them in what share agreements yeah my opinion is i'm skeptical which is here's what i think is that here's what i think is a very valid skepticism of it hey you're making an you're making this sound like a totally new thing this is just a different form of student debt like i go to school and then when i graduate i have to pay back x dollars for my education that's student debt that's how an income share agreement works so that's also how student debt works so there's a lot of people who are like oh you know student debt evil student debt big problem in the country income share agreements novel disruption and really they're both just debt instruments that work slightly differently so anyways i think that's the valid that's the valid criticism which is this is not that different the income sharing agreements is not that different you know the one difference would be with student debt you owe it regardless of if rather you get a good job or not for income share agreement you only owe it if you get a high paying job so the incentive is kind of aligned for the school to train you up and help you get a good paying job which is your goal as well as a student so i think that's a that's a fair counter but but anyways my point is they gives you agreements whether you like them or not they are getting more popular they've sort of were non existent five to ten years ago and now they're getting more popular and it's a financing instrument and so what a align is doing i think the website's hello align dot com they basically made like a sort of a stripe for share agreements so it's just a way for anybody who wants to set up an income share agreement to do so with like sort of one line of code type of thing they take care of the whole income share agreement process so let's say i which is true have ideas for new education models new schools new ways to teach people and help them earn more money i could now shut up set up an income share agreement website like without having to do any of the sort of finance you know compliance like all that work that i would normally need to pay a bunch of lawyers and spend a bunch of time doing now i just get it out of the box so it's like when twilio made sms you know an easy thing to use out of the box or tok box made it easy to use video streaming or stripe made it easy to credit card processing now these guys did it for income share agreements which i think is a very clever niche how big are they what's through traction anything they're brand new i think they're an early access right now i'm on board with that i don't think i would invest because i'm not investing in i don't wanna invest in private companies right now because i have i'm just a pussy but i'm just fucking fearful at the moment no that's fair i be the stock i'd rather be the stock market but that's cool i like it enough that i would be close to putting my money where my mouth is on right i i don't think i would invest either but i just think it's cool that somebody built this and also i think it's a good example of identify niche trend a lot of people do this when bought started getting more popular they're like cool here's a bot maker or voice you know the echo gets echo gets big and people start buying a bunch of amazon echoes and then people have made it easy to make voice apps using things like voice flow i think you wanna be on the edge where is this a trend if it is a trend i can spin up the super simple website or service like you know oh maybe email marketing is gonna get big let me build a really easy way to email a mass list and track the opens and whatnot and sure eight times out of ten that trend is is gonna be is gonna fizz out or end up being much smaller than you think but being early really matters in these spaces and so i think that's cool here's another niche thing that i thought was cool it's something called agent fire so this is a website for a real estate agent it's like a wix or a squarespace specifically for real estate so it's like push a button here's a real estate agent website this company is doing a hundred thousand dollars a month and what's interesting is that there's a guy you should follow his name is twitter handle is vin rob v i n ro and sky robin van hayden and what he's doing is he his i don't know i haven't met the guy yet but his claim is i help people product their service so here's what happened request oh my god somebody was making a service to do this for agents like you pay me x dollars i'll build you at agent website and what he helps them do is turn that into just a specific standalone saas product that will just let an agent do it automatically so now there's no human service in the loop and he posts a bunch he tweets out a bunch of examples of profitable niche services that have turned into products and so i thought this kind of a gold mine of like cool little ideas and hacks and agent fire which is the one which is one of these which is a guy who was doing this as a service turning into a product now doing a hundred calls this is amazing who's many requests like i mean you said who he is rob just right guy is this guy raising money i don't know he's based out of singapore everything about this guy i'm interested i'd like to this guy i think people should follow him because he's tweaked out gold and he's only got you know two thousand followers so so most people aren't i'm following him now alright can let me wrap it up with the one thought yeah we've talked about we've had a bunch of people on here who are investors and we had a friend is raising a fund right now you know i think i've changed my mind i think that investing is fucking stupid i would had a thousand dollars you're gonna say stupid i would've have been wrong because you said fucking stupid but like why is investing stupid i would love to hear why investing is stupid tell me if i am being like just a baby here and like but it's just like i just find this like financial arbitrage shit to be so boring and like meaningless okay and i watched the tv show billions and i'm like oh that's cool like they're doing all those big things it looks exciting and then i'm like well those guys are losers like they're not actually adding to i mean they're just they're wealthy and they're accomplishing dreams so i i respect it but i also i'm like oh my god that's so sol and that's what i think like a lot of like i've got friends that create these websites that like they're already wealthy and they're building these websites that are like they they're just hawking shit and they will admit that they are i'm like to fuck the point of this and that's kinda what a lot of investing is so okay but the friend's hawking shit that's different than investing right that's just like selling some degree for money right it's it's it's definitely from a similar yeah it's just like why like i like if you're already can if you're already have a little bit of cash which if you're still trying to get your hit you know go go you gotta go for it but if you already got a little bit of cash like do you have to cool and meaningful okay so here's here's i'll give you two two thoughts on this i'll give you the first is an example that supports your case and then i'll give you the feel good reason why you're wrong so yeah the support your case so i i mentor this guy who's twenty years old and he's at this point where like he tried to do some stuff and it kinda didn't work out and now he's like fuck do i need to go get a job i need to pay my bills i don't wanna go move back home with my parents and so he's like he's like i'm about to take this job and he's like should i you know leave this on entrepreneurial path and go get a job because i you know i need to pay bills in two months and i don't think i can spend something up in the next sixty days that will get so profitable that i'll be i know i'll be able to pay my rent and i said you know i am empathize with the problem but i said you know let's just slow down for a second before you go take that consulting job let's just let's just talk things through for a second so i said how much money need do you need to live every month what's your burn rate two grand i said okay two grand fantastic and i was like so let's say you wanted a year of runway to go try some shit you need to come up with twelve months times two grand you need to come up with twenty four grand i said i know you do some investing in the stock market you're kind of a degenerate you know you like to pick stocks so you tried to bike bitcoin and shit i was like because at the beginning of the conversation like you know my my good the thing that's going well as my investments have done well the things is going bad is i'm about to have to take this job for my my bills i was like well those two things don't add up i was i was like do you have enough money in the stock market right now that you could just sell and you could use to live off of to chase your entrepreneurial dreams he's like yeah i could but then i'd have to sell and don't wanna sell because i'm getting you know good returns i said okay let's do the math real quick what do you think you could generate per let's take just the twenty four thousand that you i don't know how much money you have you want to tell me let's take the twenty four thousand that you need how much do you think you could generate per year in return average and he's like fifty percent i was like okay mini warren buffett you think you could do fifty percent a year but let's let's assume your delusional number is correct and that you could do it consistently which is the hard part you could do it for one year for sure but consistently generate fifty percent so let's say you you do the warren buffett you you invest perfectly you get your fifty percent way above market return and you're twenty four grand has turned into thirty six grand now like fantastic congratulations you made twelve thousand dollars like you are still nowhere near where you're trying to get with your goals and if you and many years would you have to continue to get this absurd return for you to be with or your goals are i was like that any input that would never happen you would never happen right you never get the fifty percent so anyways i was like you're you're talking about this year going and trading all your time for money at a consulting gig when instead you could just sell some of your stock get twenty four grand of runway and you could live for twelve months and give yourself a bunch of shots on goal to try to build something that you believe in and you'll learn way more you'll have way more fun and you'll have way more upside than if you go take the consulting job so like you're crazy so he was of the mindset of well i heard that rich people invest so i wanna invest and and i wanna get return i want my money to work for money to had kinda hurt all these things and was in was investing for that reason so i think investing doesn't make sense when you have very little amount of capital overall and you're trying to go invest that capital and then you're trading your time for for dollars and other ways now the other so that's the argument for times when i think investing would be stupid is when you know if you take a normal return the amount of money that you're making every month it's not every year is not gonna change your life and you're locking up money in the schedule what's the second point because i think the second point for than the first point the first point that you made was that well only invest if you got a lot yeah exactly if you if you don't have a lot i'd rather you use that money if you're entrepreneurial if you're one of the five five percent of people who actually wanna build a business or do something on their own you're better served investing in yourself and investing in buying your time back yeah and and and going taking a bunch of shots uncle now the second is is investing stupid well i think you're kind of right that it is not the most exciting thing but excitement is different for everybody but here's the cool way of thinking about investing like for anything to work you need leverage right so you are on the hustle but day to day you write zero emails probably you don't write the daily email you don't do the trends report this podcast is the most active thing you do for the hustle is that correct it we could say yes for a sake of argument okay so for the sake of argument your your argument is correct i'm love so your leverage because you got a bunch of humans doing work for you cool another form of leverage is media so people are gonna we're gonna talk for one hour and then this is gonna get listen to for hundreds of thousands of hours out there so media is another form of leverage and then the last one is capital capital is another form of leverage and so here's the cool way of thinking about it which is if you have capital investing is your way of allocating capital to things that are either a gonna return the most or b gonna like change the world in a way that you care about and so capital is your way of influencing the way that the world goes because you get to assign units of of energy to different companies and causes that are gonna go do do i get that and i think that that's a great point i think that with the what i'm completely burnt out of is just lame mass investments like what's a lay mass investment like i've got a friend that gave a lot of money to some like an investor who's gonna buy a bunch of multi family real estate and it's simply a like i don't ever see this i don't touch it like the this is seven percent is simply an asset class and it's just a thing on a spreadsheet and i'm like oh my god that's so boring like like i just i can't decide if i'm being a little like bitch hate or yeah but my or like when i have we have some friends who are buying companies and they just look for anything that like checks the boxes of does is net churn this and is the acquisition costs this right and that's it that's all i mean like mechanical yeah yeah and i get it and i'm like alright that's great way to make money but it's just like so fucking lame sometimes i i'm like oh my god you guys like can you like can we please do something exciting like i think it happened when i was traveling i'm like i just see these normal people at the gas station and they're with their wives and kids and like they like i would i'm way more fascinated about how do i just make that person just a little bit happier or a little bit better not like how do i geek out a little more profit out of this service do you know what i'm saying i get him man like as like i saw these i remember being at this gas station and i saw this mom give her kid like a like generic coke and i was like oh god that kills me that this little girl but to drink this shit how can we like help this mother like a either a afford or learn that this thing or that thing is not as like how can we help her make a better decision make a better decision easy not how do i get five second net i i think i actually understand what you're saying now which is it's not that investing is stupid it's not that putting money in some place and getting a return is stupid what you are starting to get annoyed of or or tired of is the amount of your mental energy that goes towards thinking about how to rep returns out of out of cash to deployed so it's actually about where do you devote mental energy and not where does money go it's it's that kinda like i get that money you gotta do something with the money you might as well put into place that's gonna grow might as well fund a company that's gonna do something but it's about mentally spending cycles thinking about how do i get seven percent versus eight percent versus tax nine percent versus just mentally spending those same cycles thinking about something else if i could reading a book taco to a person building something cool writing a song whatever it's gonna be is that is that more accurate yeah just like get out of this financial arbitrage circle jerk and actually make a difference and have a an exciting wonderful life yeah i'm myself and others i'm with you on that i'm with you that i catch myself doing that all the time where i'm like how many hours is my brain spending on you know in this financial game and there's some some amount that's correct but it's very easy to slip into more than more than what you need more than what's adding value i love that tv show billions and i'm like oh man like bobby a rod this powerful billionaire guy he's going to war versus other people that's fucking awesome i love that yeah he's an alpha and then i'm like but he's also just a jerk off who's just trying to like squeeze penny out of this thing of that thing and it's complete nonsense right you know what i mean yeah i think you know i think what's what also happens is is important which is in your twenties you're trying to figure out what like twenties in many ways about feeding ego it's like whether you're partying trying to make friends trying to date people trying to you know get your get your name on the map in you know your career or your industry i feel like a lot of people including myself their twenties are spent feeding the ego and then your thirties are spent figuring out that okay my ego is either full or it will never be full and i actually wanna feed the soul in some kind way manual i actually wanna be more conscious of how i spend my time and my energy and and then there's this constant push and pull of like well maybe i just wanna make a bunch of money well like maybe i'm not ambitious enough i think you can do play uber money focused and there's like these debates that i have my head it sounds like you do too i think you could do both and i think that i guess the point is i'm beginning to realize i love the builders more than the all like yeah yeah yeah exit that fucking day builders over all all day okay yeah i could that's a good that's a good way to end the podcast i if you if you listen to us me and or through that last five minutes hopefully there was some value in the end for you