#99 - Creating the WeWork for Warehouses

alright we're live we're good y you're a utah yeah i am i'm in salt not what's the other place park city i'm in park city nice hasn't it been so far you your great adventure has begun it's okay i definitely wanna of just be in my home but it's okay you're like two days in it's okay yeah it's good like it hasn't hurt productivity but i could see how it could meaning what why why would it hurt predict because you're trying to dunk which talk about that a second no okay so i don't wanna make this too much about me but i'm going too because that was kinda cool the this place say had a basketball court and i posted on twitter dunking shockingly close right very close shock i if you had told me hey can sam almost dunk i don't like what when you talk about no no sam can't almost dunk but you can almost dunk here like very very close which was extremely surprising to me i don't think it's a matter of jumping height that it's preventing me anymore i think it's a matter of but maybe i think i'm little chu i could lose if i lost ten pounds i i'll it but it's a just a strict like i'm not coordinated enough like the way that i'm doing it like right all the limbs have to move in sequence like i like i'm like running and just stopping and using two feet and just like right up no it's cool you should go to sam's twitter and watch them almost dunk i was i was really shocked i've gotten that close to duncan when i was i think nineteen i was super close to dunking and then i like blew up my knee the next like two months later and then i've never been even remotely close since then and it's not because the knee it's just i never like got fit again in that same way to be able to potentially do it if you did it at nineteen work a little hard i i mean work hard and and try to do it like when i was twenty and nineteen i could like i couldn't like put it between my legs but i could like go up and like do all types of weird shit so you could book before yeah and no one believe me like no one who knows me now believe me and so i'm like fuck i'm i'm gonna do it just show you guys amazing okay so so that's going good so yesterday what happened you had a little emergency you had a bail last minute kind of yeah so that was yesterday those was two days ago yeah i got a whole bunch of crazy stuff going on in the in the work world and then like sony with yesterday was having like crazy ass cramp and then i'm like oh shit okay i gotta like learn how to take care of this baby because right now we have like a you know a two party system like i know how to do my role she knows how to do her role and i'm definitely like the steve kerr and she's like michael jordan baby care and so when michael jordan gets the flu you're like oh shit and now i got a score and i don't know how to score i haven't haven't done this all year and so there's some moments like that that just pop up throughout the week and it's always during like you know some other work thing but i'm like okay worked on a board and i gotta learn how to be a dad hold on that's alright well we're happy to have you back i did a little bit of the heavy lifting without you and i didn't like it i missed you for sure we it was good though the editor was like this is an a episode and i was like wait a's a's are possible without me or shit okay well it it didn't feel like an a when i was recording it it was not as fun but i will tell do you wanna do a recap on him well i didn't get to listen to it yet so i haven't queued okay yeah get give it to me okay so check out so i met this guy either in trends or on twitter i met him somehow only two weeks ago and we just would shoot the shit in the phone it was like online dating and like calls you started calling each other yeah oh wow so this guy but i had kinda known of him a little bit but he started this his name's is ryan ryan bi he started biz media which is a newsletter business and i definitely wasn't inspired i knew a lot about him and a lot about their company and so i kinda knew him i didn't know him about knew of him and he called me and we became buddies and i was you know i started my company inspired by you guys and he was whatever and so he also started summit series and summit series he got mad at me a little bit because i kinda describe it in a disrespectful way but it's an event but these guys are wild then they would rent a cruise ship and it's like a lot of young tech folks and then they eventually were like you know what if we like let's not i don't want the party to end let's buy a location to do this right and these guys were like rent it was like four of them were the main guys or maybe five but i think four and they go what if we convinced a whole bunch at this point they probably had five thousand attendees across all their events like over the lifetime over four years and they go what if we convinced like fifty of these people to help us buy a mountain because someone had come to them were a friend of a friend and be like hey there's just mountain in utah and they're like going bankrupt or they it's like a they they went out and they go okay well let's each let's convince its fifty people to give us a million dollars each and well it it was just like a plot of land that was like dirt like there was nothing there and what if we like convince them somehow to like buy into this and they did and they got like mountain yeah successful people like read hastings and like all these like ty folks and they didn't know anything they were twenty eight twenty nine i think twenty six something like that they knew nothing it was very impulsive it sound like and they go let's come convince these people to give us money so people wired the money and they bought this mountain and then they've over the past eight years have been selling plots of land but it's still not complete yet there's it sounds like there's a long ways to go but they built roads they built fire hydrant like things you don't think about they built structures there it it was literally a plot dirt they didn't even know like don't think they fully understood zoning laws i don't think they fully understood like i don't think they frankly understood anything but they but agree yeah what's cool is they took the okay rich people kinda want a vacation home in utah like that that kinda makes sense like okay it's a kind of up up in the mountains i can have a vacation home out there but in this case they merged two things it's like what if there was also this kind of entrepreneurial village and it was your vacation home would you be willing to pay kind of upfront for that dream and like yes they were were willing to do that and i think that they like they had to do so like it it sounds like they had a lot of like they're are these rich guys and i mean i i imagine they're rich now but at the time he was like you know we didn't have a lot like right we didn't have anything really and so it was really cool to hear how he bootstrap this like resort i guess i don't or a town i don't know what you wanna call it and it was great and they would tell stories about i don't like so are you there or is that where you are so he this guy he's married ryan's married but his wife was gone and he had the six thousand square foot home that he was renting and he goes you know if you and sarah i wanna stay here have two levels so we could still like be safe come and stay here so i stayed there for three nights and he and we drove around and did driving tour of the mountain and then i have already had a airbnb booked and so i just went to my airbnb on monday tuesday and so is the the place that they bought all that land is that now like kinda developed is it happens is it happening or is it just still like no we nobody lives here yet some people live there that there's a lot of work to go they have roads they rented out for like races and five k's and they have events there still i don't know if you've ever been to events but there but some of our friends have like they have bill i think they have like forty homes that are completed and you can live in our friend xavier did the boss move he saw what they were doing and he was like okay this is a genius of them at b i don't wanna pay the premium to like buy this plot on powder mountain so he just bought his own little vacation house like a little further down the mountain like right right below where they were because he's like do these guys are gonna put in like fifty million dollars to like making this whole area amazing so he just bought his own little house at like you know half the price or whatever right next to their plot of land it's pretty amazing and sean let let me show you why it's amazing the review the listeners can't see this look at what i'm looking at my window right now hurry up hurry up hurry up i hope i can get it see that there's this is like a there's a straight up a deer just eating plants like four feet away from sam i outside window right now did you just see that yeah that's incredible you see that deer yeah and deer is amazing sounds like utah i really like this story so so i know you did the whole podcast with him so we shouldn't talk too much about it but i just gotta say my two senses is this is one of the like you know on my respect meter what those guys did at summit series is super high up because they had no name no background no nothing and then they created summit series which is great bringing people together and then they elevated the vision like twenty x where most people would have been extremely satisfied and it's kinda stopped at like hey this is cool like whatever you know bill clinton comes to you know summit series events and chills on the hot tub on this you know at at our at our event but then they were like no let's buy the mountain and create a village raised fifty billion dollars that's build roads like that's kind of it's balls in a way that i really respect and i'm sure there's people who are much smarter and much more accomplished but you know you are what you admire and i really admire what they're doing i agree and frankly the verdict still out i think if this is gonna work yeah like totally flop and i would still respect it just as much because i expect the attempt the attempt is so unique that you know i i gotta say that that's kind of amazing most most people would not have done that yeah like but with covid and just the powers that be like i it seems like it's gonna work but just they didn't say this but from my understanding i'm like this definitely could still fail but it's pretty it's pretty baller right so it's amazing and how'd did pom goes so sean was on pom at pop on twitter i don't know what his real name is even anthony pump i think is his name is that good yeah it was a lot of fun so i i prepped so i don't normally don't do any prep for pretty much anything in life and i like okay that's a good way to get good at weighing it but i was like every morning when i wake up i you know asked myself i'm like okay what's the one thing i'm gonna do today that if i just crush that one thing then today was a success and like if even if i fuck up everything else or i have to do everything else is it won't matter this one will carry my whole day to be a success so i look at my calendar usually i'm like okay i have this meeting or i gotta make this pitch or whatever and i usually decide my thing and so when i woke up i was like the podcast i'm gonna crush the podcast and so i was like well what do i i got like two hours here and so i did something kind of unusual i basically sent him a email beforehand i was like this guy doesn't don't really know me like he's heard the podcast a few times seeing each other on twitter but like he doesn't know me he's just booking people her first his podcast that he think will help us you know that his listeners wanna listen to and just like we do many times right and so i sent him the letter that i wish i got from a a guest which i was like hey i'm pumped you know here we go here's some things you that'll help you you know make us a good show and i was like you know first like my name here's how you pronounce it because that's always the thing it's like here's what your listeners need to know about me kind of in a nutshell it's like i'm the guy who blank and i like my blanket blanket and filled it in and i was like here's like five kind controversial things that i believe and i'm happy to talk about any of these here's you know three or four kind of amazing stories that i've crazy things that i've done in my life and if you wanna talk about any of those i can kind of go go into any of those and you know here's my kind of mission on you know why i'm even going on your podcast is because i like to spread the word about x and you know cool let's do this and so the podcast was awesome i think because of that that prep and i would say the reason i share this is because a in general i think you can do that for whatever your version of whatever whatever is your thing you're trying to crush in your life but i was doing it i was like what am i gonna say like if it's like if you think about yourself as like a product and you need to like quickly explain yourself to the customer and they're gonna be like okay i get it i get what this is and i either decide if i like it or don't when i was like how am gonna what's my angle and like you know i i kinda went through this little exercise that's in some ways pretty fucking cheesy which is like kind of like a personal branding exercise or it's like okay well what's the one thing that people should know about me what's the core what do what do i stand for what makes me different than anybody else why why should you listen to me on this podcast and so i went through this exercise and i came up with kind of what i thought mine was and so i'm curious like do you ever think about that or do you feel like you have kind of a personal brand and do you like i don't know do you like work on it like what do you what's your angle you know with somebody should be like alright who's sam sam is the guy who does sam is the guy who is ex no and that's why you should listen i don't think i've work on it but i think i probably should but no i don't i think i don't know i think maybe my reputation is like people kinda consider me like a southern person and i'm like that's not really true but whatever i won't correct you and and maybe they consider me a loose cannon which may or may not be true but besides that i don't know if i think about it at all so like you you did an appearance on jc cal podcast which i think it's a bigger it's a bigger podcast at a ours it's been around for ten years or something like that and i thought you crushed it you came out the gate hot you had a whole bunch of interesting stories information you kind of were a straight talker and i thought that was really good and i would say that's kinda like part of the part of the appeal but when he you know i think for you your thing is like i'm the owner of the hustle the hustle is a you know a media company that you know we tell the news and we do this thing called trends and where we have you know million plus subscribers and we make you know tens of millions of dollars or whatever i think that's kind of like your that's who i am and then the reason people like you is probably the like straight talker has interesting stories to tell and noble bullshit kinda guy so you know that's that's kind of i think that works for you but when i did the other day i sort of was became very obvious me man if i really sharpen this up it could be a lot better like my story could be a lot better and i think i'd why i think be more interesting people i think you're an neville you're you're at a a slight turning point with your who you are right like you're you had a thing you don't have that thing anymore and you're somewhere else right and without i mean i'm not actually it's like i'm breaking news but chances are you're probably gonna move on and do more things one day right which i don't by the way to their listeners i i have no idea if that's true i'm just making this no inside info just just yeah yeah and i also think that you valued yourself as like a the startup or go big guy but now you're obsessed with these like smaller things and that's a transition for you but one thing that's remained constant is there this framework you're like this wisdom this is doesn't this is a good thing you like this wisdom guru and this framework guru that inspires people and that has remained consistent so i would kinda lean into that if i were you right yeah so so i i the two angles that i came up with were i was like i think i was like either i should i should kind of explain myself as kind of like a an idea machine because you know i ran an idea lab for five years built like twenty different products ideas out of that raised fifteen million dollars plus so that's like you know i ran an idea lab i'm and then we have this podcast which is all about shooting the shit and brainstorming ideas and then i invest in like other people's ideas and you know so that's just like who i am what i'm interested in is what i talk about that's one angle and then the other one was i was like okay you know like i'm also super into frameworks more than anybody else i know yeah it's the way i think and i was like you know there's i i said this on the podcast was kinda like you know i would try to like wanna be you know my my goal could be like to be like the framework done but you know frameworks are so nerdy you can't be a done if you if you're into frameworks and so you know it's some it's one of those two i think is is the most like true i done a bunch of shit that that sometimes fits into that sometimes that doesn't but anyways i thought was a fun experience to like go through that process of like cool if i was gonna dis myself down in the way that you gotta like you know be simple and understandable and like interesting to a whole new audience of people how would i do it and that was a fun experience alright today's episode is brought to you by tempo tempo dot fit is the website i actually use this i've used this for a few months now and it's this machine that has a touch screen in this three d sensor and what it does is they give you weights like a hundred and fifteen pounds of weights and it's for strength training so what it is is it measures your body and it's sees how much weight you're lifting it sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in what your part rate is it's pretty amazing and then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift how many to lift what workout to do whether you wanna do a twenty minute ten minute fifty minute workout it's pretty amazing but the best part is the leader board the other stuff all the features that they have that's cool but i'm obsessed with the leader board because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class so it's maybe wanna work harder lift more weight or have more endurance it's just pretty freaking fun and the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer and this product tempo it checks that box for me so they're our sponsored today if you use the code tempo hustle you'll get a hundred dollars off so tempo dot fit is the url and tempo hustle one word you'll get a hundred dollars off so check it out i use it if you look me up on twitter you'll see i'm always filming videos where i'm talking to that company say i'm trying to crush their employees on the leader board because i actually love this thing and i and i use it all the time so check it out let's go through some ideas so so i saw this idea on twitter that i thought it was pretty interesting but it's we work for warehouses so this guy jay tweeted about this and all that i would say his last name but it's like a crazy indian last name that i i actually don't know how to pronounce but he's he's a good good follow on twitter i'll i'll i'll pull this thing up but basically he he was saying like look in e commerce you sort of have this you have two kind options as your main your main options option one is you own your own warehouse you basically lease a space or buy a space you put in all the equipment you have to hire staff to run it you have to figure out you buy the software to run your warehouse all that stuff and what most people do is not that most people will do a three p l which is a third party logistics company you basically you just send them your inventory and then they charge you per order that they pick pack and ship and so that's how much people will do it but like the problem with the three p is that it's not it's their staff not yours they don't actually really care about your customer experience i don't really know your product very well they make mistakes they go slow they charge quite a bit per order that can like really hurt your margins and so jay was basically saying like why isn't there we work for warehouses where it's like you the they have the space they have the building and then they have let's say the like kind of and know we work it would be like the desks and chairs and meeting rooms and conference tables and whiteboard in know a a warehouse that'd be like you know the shelves and the forklift and whatever else but you actually rent your subs section of it and you you run it you operate it with your own staff and so they and so you don't get charged per per order that you're doing stuff and this is not like the newest concept like obviously they're you can go rent parts of warehouses but nobody's built like a brand and a bunch of different real estate where you can go do this and make it made it really turnkey so i i thought that was a dope idea and then i saw some people who are trying to do it this thing called salt box seems like the closest bet but they have like one location and i don't know pittsburgh or florida or something like that and so it just seems like there's more opportunity to to do this i'm i'm doing research as you're speaking so nothing's salt salt box okay so on that thread they say that salt box space fill and dark store right do something similar and i'm trying to look them up and there is such little information about them so it's really hard to understand anything but there is okay so what you were describing earlier is called ship monk do you know what they i mean they're they are a company that they're three p l yeah and i don't know if this is crazy profitable but i do know it's very expensive for a customer and according to there's a quick google search they do something like eighty four million dollars in revenue and i don't know how that revenue if that's like i don't know anything about that's not like gm that's like that's that's like their revenue and then they have their they have their people cost and then they have their leases and so like i wouldn't be surprised if you know and they're doing fifteen million a year eb or something like that wow okay so it seems like a good business forbes which they they quoted the founder in forbes thirty and thirty so i think that would be reputable ship monk made four million in sales in two thousand sixteen expects to do ten million in seventeen so yeah i don't know where they're at i don't don't know how big they are but i know that they like they in i talked to them yesterday actually and they said that they invested ten million dollars into automation for their warehouse warehouses this year so if they're investing ten million dollars they're they're they're not at four million in sales anymore so sure they're definitely way above that so it's an that's an interesting idea one of our friends bought or is renting a warehouse in vegas do some of these warehouses are so cheap that you have to imagine that there is significant margin there like it's something is it is it i think it's as cheap or cheaper than a dollar per square foot yeah so you can get a twenty thousand square foot warehouse in vegas like near the strip or kinda near for twenty grand and so i imagine if you you get like a hundred thousand square feet i bet for like sixty thousand dollars or less and i don't and i've been into one of these twenty thousand square foot warehouses they are so big yeah like i went there i'm like there is so much opportunity here just off that arbitrage that's that's an interesting idea so what would you do i don't know if i would do anything here because i think it's not the it's not the most attractive opportunity but i think if you're at e commerce shop i could definitely see the appeal of why you would wanna have more control and lower cost than a three p but less headache than like building and leasing your own thing and being on the hook for the whole thing the flexibility like a we work like we we work shoved in in between office space you know like renting your own office space and like having no office space they came in somewhere in between so i can definitely see that there should be something like this for from a customer's point of view i don't know how great of a business it would be but i think you could do this and i think you could layer on a three p service on top of it so you could you know you have the space and then you just offer somebody either we can fulfill for you or you can fulfill yourself if you wanna do it this way but i just think there's a lot of opportunity in this this whole the whole e commerce logistics space is just insanely big returns is insanely big warehousing and fulfillment is insanely big and because just a huge portion of retail has moved to e commerce like there's this like hockey stick curve of how much how much retail spending is now happening you know over the internet and it's the whoever if you're if you're an infrastructure company you're gonna get a piece of that pie and it's not gonna be one company dominates because there's like a physical component to the whole thing so it's not like a facebook or something where the software just scales instantly and one company takes all it's gonna be you know market by market building by building what what do you think it would take to make it so every e com site could have amazon prime yeah the that's what they're trying to do right so that's what that's what three p try to do and so if you break it down what does amazon prime really offer it offers free two day shipping and then offers kind of the hassle free sort of return policy right and you know if you talk to ship they're like we ship within twenty four hours now it does doesn't mean it arrives within you know twenty four forty eight hours because you're still depending on usps or ups or or you know d or something to deliver it but amazon does the same they they they deliver some of their own they have some of their own trucks and then they like have hijacked the entire us postal service to be like an amazon fulfillment warehouse so i don't don't think there's that big of a difference between e commerce today and amazon on the on the fulfillment side and on the return side you know that takes capital because you gotta be willing to eat losses and deal with fraud there's this guy and i'm trying to find it he emailed me and he said he goes i'm a vc i listened to you guys podcast and i like trans on whatever and i only invest in trucking like like logistics specifically trucking and i'm find his email and he's like i just invested in this company that is trying to give every small mom and pop place a a two day shipping that he goes that's my goal and it's pretty interesting and i mean obviously that's interesting that makes total sense i have no idea what it would take to pull off but it's pretty cool and i like per i what you're suggesting is almost a just six space in the logistics space and and shipping space i think that like if i was starting from scratch i think i would for sure go into the trucking or logistics space because i do think that that is probably the biggest market in america and i don't think it's gonna go away yeah i know about that part don't know if it's a biggest in america because that's whatever that could be many things but it is definitely big enough it's definitely humongous and yeah there's a lot that can be done there but there's also you know what's the angle right like there's a whole bunch of people trying to do driverless trucks and they're all kinda of failing and it'll take time for that to ever come to fruition and then there's people trying like i just invested in this drone company that just does you know drone deliveries not for consumers it's not not like you know buy something amazon a drone brings it to you this is like somebody in remote africa you know on a oil well they need a replacement part and so then they use these high speed drones that can carry a hundred hundred pound part to that location and those people will pay like you know thousands of dollars for that delivery because it's so remote and they need it for their they need it for their operations they're losing money every day that they're the the machine is down and so and this company's you know phenomenal they're you know doing you know tons of revenue and big opportunity and that's just in like one kind of niche space where they're doing medical supplies and and mechanical supply deliveries in like you know africa right now that's interesting was it a high valuation yeah it's it's a more proven company so i just got in because my friend my friend did the seed round and participant in the a and now they're raising their b and it's like at a two hundred fifty million dollar plus valuation but it's like way more der risked like the drone works they have customers they have big contracts so you know it's just a question of how big will it be so i i wanna talk about this so related i i will preface this by saying i really don't know anything about venture capital i have a lot of friends who are in invest there's i do some small deals i'm pretty much a n when it comes to vc so i might sound like a a moron but you seem like you kinda know what you're talking about whenever we discuss it there was this funny thing floating around where people and i don't know if this is just circle jerk twitter but where people were like the next big thing is gonna be like these young people with big following who have venture capital firms you know don't talking about yeah i think i know what talk about so it's not young people with big follow his the exact there basically time about solo solo capitalist is this the what you're talking about yeah yeah i i i know what time about yes and a guy who i like and maybe i'll tease him because he's funny but i i actually really like him a lot i don't know him well what he stands for his cool is saw hill the okay yeah yeah so he started this company called gum road and gum road i started using it two thousand twelve or like right when it came out it's pretty amazing it it's like the easiest way to sell a pdf and he raised a bunch of money and i don't know what happened but he just said fuck this like you investors suck and he fired all of his employees and he's still running the company like a loan and well he talked about it he he basically they couldn't live up to the growth expectations of it i like okay this company is either gonna die because we have all these people and we're not growing fast enough to raise more money or i get rid of all these people and i don't raise money but i get it to like profitability and i kind of run this like a business instead of like a venture out of a venture backed company and then for the last several years you kind of so he was like humiliated laid people off you know went back to investors kind of told him what the deal was went down to like i think just him working on it and now there's a small team working on it and like kind of rebooted the business while it was still mid flight and so today he announced that he has a five million dollar vc fund yes and this is totally a circle jerk bubble like i love that you're saying this by the way because i'm gonna raise one of these exact same funds next week well we we well i gonna say we are in that circle jerk so i i can hate on it because i am in it and honestly it might work yeah so so okay the idea so what what's actually happening so what they're saying is so you've had you know angel investors or people investing their own money kinda twenty five k checks at a time and then you had vc funds which are like using other people's money they can raise you know somewhere between ten million bucks to billion dollars in their fund and they're like professional investors and the in between those two as being filled out more and more and more every year or so there were small vc funds like kinda seed funds micro funds micro vcs there's all these different terms people use anyways the more like interesting part of this is just that there are now individuals like we had daniel gross on the podcast they're now individuals who have a good reputation founders love them founders talk to us so they see a bunch of deals and now they're like you know what like instead of just making the intro of the vc why don't i just be the vc like instead of investing twenty five k my own money why don't i invest two or fifty k every time and i'll raise my little fund and i'm not gonna operate it like i'm not gonna be a professional investor full time where this is you know i have like an assistant that we have an office and all the stuff like i'm gonna keep doing whatever i do that's getting my name out there right building my company or building my community or running my podcast or whatever it is but now i'm gonna get you know four or five million bucks behind me and i'm gonna deploy that across twenty companies and like let's see what happens and so there's a handful of people doing this and is hit or miss like i know almost all these people doing it i wouldn't invest in half of and then i did invest in two other so i invested in like ryan hoover does this so ryan hoover has the weekend fund which is you know he has a full time gig at product hunt but obviously he sees a shit ton of deals because he's super well known and he built product hunt and he's at angel all that good stuff and so i know this guy i know he's smart i know he sees a bunch of deals earlier than most people and so i became an lp and his fun because for me i wanted to do it just to learn so realized pretty early on that i can learn a lot about investing if i can see the deals and i can see the thought process so the first way i did that was i went on angel list and i joined every smart person syndicate i could find because i realized with a syndicate you don't commit any money you say i'm i could invest fifty k but i might not and you got every single deal memo so for years you know like five years i've just been reading all the deal memos of these guys and i invested in a couple of the companies but most of them i'm just oh this is how they think about things this these are this is the quality of the deals this how much traction these companies have it was just amazing insights as an entrepreneur or a potential investor but for the funds so that's for syndicate but the more you know the the better the investor the less you'll do syndicate so ryan's is not a syndicate to fund so if i wanted to see those deals and i wanted to be a part of kind of his portfolio then i needed to put some money in and so have you seen any returns no because it's like a year old or two years old or something like that so you know it takes six seven years to return so that was the thing i was like should put a lot of money into this a little so i went and ask my friends who are lps in funds like injuries and h or you know you know all a whole bunch of different famous you know like angel founders fund whatever and i asked them i said is this a good way to make money and they go basically the answer i got was you know if it's just purely for returns i wouldn't do either angel investing or being an lp in these funds you know you can you can make money you would expect to make good money but if you take that capital and you deployed into a business you own or into you know the stock market and you keep it liquid or real estate and you have you know different different sort of return profile you can do better but they said you know the reason i i said so the why the hell do you do this and they go oh i do it because a i like innovation b by being an lp i get to see all their stuff so it's a a huge learning advantage which in the end makes a lot more money for me at the end and so yeah i make some money on the returns itself but then i also get to learn throughout the whole process because i'm on the inside of these deals and so that's why i was like okay so i took that strategy so i went lightweight so i became an lp and three or four different funds but i lowered my my dollar amount in each because i wanted to start by saying okay let me see a let me see what this is like do i get a bunch of information by being on the inside did you and are you actually gonna raise your own thing yeah so next week hopefully so i talked to the angel guys because they they the i had thought about this for a while and i never did it because the problem with raising a fund is raising a fund do you have to go and solicit and go and be like hey i need to go raise five million dollars i i always thought like okay cool i can do that if i have a spare you know three to six months but i never had that three to six month gap where i could just focus on going and raising five to ten million dollars and so i didn't do it and along the i've just been investing my own money as an angel investor basically twenty five to fifty k checks at a time and i've been enjoying it but what they what angel came out it was this thing called the rolling fund and the key with the rolling fund is you don't have to raise all the money up upfront so i can open up so that my my idea is next week i'm talking to angela angel guys who run this because it's kinda like invite only at the moment but let's say let's just pretend a week from now they they green light my account and i can open it up so at that point i can basically say hey anybody who wants to c basically invest in deals that i see you can give me a check that check can be as little as five k per quarter or it can be as much as you want you can give me a million bucks doesn't matter and you can either come in today and you'll i'm gonna start investing in companies i see but like i don't have to go raise five ten million bucks up upfront i can raise it over time so so it's more it's more as you go thing and for the investor it's also easier because you don't have to give me you know a hundred thousand or two hundred fifty thousand dollars all up upfront it could be like cool this is great i'll invest you know ten k per quarter i'll commit you know whatever forty k a year and it's a less let's a less less less heavy commitment on their side too so i really like this thing they innovated with so that's why i'm gonna do it now and how do you how will you earn from that well i i earn money when the investments or make money right so you you can take like a management fee or whatever like whatever two percent or something like that but that's not really gonna amount too much but it's basically hey i'm gonna go invest a bunch of great companies i'm gonna be able to buy bigger stakes now so today when i go invest twenty five k into a company like i i invested in this one company that i love it's a background checks company and they're doing awesome like ever since i invested they're they're doing better and better and i i'm really excited about them but i own so little because i invested twenty five k into it i wish i had invested two hundred fifty k into it but for me financially that would have been too risky to be deploying two k per random start of investment i wanna do so so i make money basically when the when these deals exit so like as these companies get acquired or go public then i earn my carry on the deal so first the investors get their money back and then we split the return and the typical carriers is i would get twenty percent of the profits after they get their money back and they get eighty percent of the profits and how do you think and you explained this to me one so let's say that you do have a fifty million dollar fund how does that i don't even know how you make money off that as the investor yeah so you take two percent a year as your management fee so two percent of fifty million is what million bucks you're gonna take a million bucks per year for like eight years you're gonna take off the table if you raise a fifty million dollar fund now that that's going to you it's going to the fund administration legal cost as well as any partners or associates you have to do diligence right so like that ends up being like let's say call it five hundred k in salary for the for the investor i don't know that's for rough math that's so like i just i understand that but i'm like that seems too good to be true yeah it's a rigged game for sure but you know the reason they're able to do that is because you know people are willing to give them their money why are people willing to give them their money because most people today don't have access into technology companies and it's pretty clear that technology companies dominate the landscape like you just gonna look at the most valuable companies in the world they're all technology companies now if you want high growth right if you want invest money you wanna invest into high growth ideally high growth typically is coming now nowadays from technology and so you have people that like they own their own house they have their four zero one k they have some stocks maybe they have a rental property but they have zero exposure to tech and what they the worst thing they could do is be like cool i'm gonna become an angel investor i don't know the first thing about how to structure these deals i'm not seeing the best deals i'm only seeing kinda like whatever comes to me and i have no name brand i have no access i have no personal network and so they're playing you know basically against the house and that would be a bad thing so what ends up happening is you have people who have made money in either their own business or their job as a doctor or a lawyer or whatever it is and they can now invest personally in funds like that so i think that's the the way you know they they're gonna invest some small percentage of their total net worth like five to ten percent of their money or something like that into a fund that they that they believe in and they say okay i i i believe in this person's judgment and their network and i wanna learn about high growth high tech investing and i'm gonna be getting these deal memos i'm gonna be getting smarter due to it that's why i would do it if i was them well maybe maybe one day i'll join not not for bigger funds they are getting the money from like pension fund you know like you know the firefighter pension and in new york or teachers you know the teacher's pension or or whatever this like institutional capital that's how the guys who raised like billion dollar funds or hundreds of billion dollar funds it's not like their uncle who's a doctor who gives them you know treasury k it's these huge institutions that are mostly invested in the public markets and then as a hedge they take a small percentage of the total like kind of value that they have and they put it into risky kind of vc and investing let's talk about female as a differentiator i have thoughts on that so you wanna you i think you wrote that you wanna talk about what it says i just wrote that because i was like dude there's so many products that if you just said it's that but really geared towards women i think you can make a whole new product just off of that and so the it was inspired actually by something i read in trends there was a a a woman in the group who i think had a a facebook group called the solo female traveler network yeah and i was kind of amazed like i forgot the numbers you know off top of my head i don't know if you have it in front of you but like i think she was doing like a million dollars plus a year basically she builds up this big group of females who love to travel but when females travel like they have to think about safety they have to think about you know what are the different activities i'm gonna enjoy and so i think she had this a group and then layered on top of that like kind of a tourist business where it's when you go to the city you can pay and and go do this awesome kind of female oriented trip or tour i was my understanding of it at least and i was like man that's a fucking an awesome business like good for her that's great what else could be done this way and i started thinking i said oh there's just bum which is a dating app geared towards where women get to kind of do the outreach versus men and that was like the core differentiator there's the wing which is a c working space for women there's i think called circle or something of that it's like a mastermind group it's a y p for women and i just thought it up this is an interesting this is interesting thread to pull on what what do you think about this yeah so i'm pulling up circle what's i don't know if it's it's the circle circles something like that they're not out again this is a deal i saw the the pitch deck for i don't even know if they're public oh yeah i think this this one shield was into yeah okay so i think about this all the time and here's what i think it this it's any time you it's best if you're gonna build like a attention or a attention getting business or like a a brand or something that you need people to kinda build a call it's far better to make it in us versus them and the us needs to be like a down forgotten minority so in this case it's women so women are like you know we where we're sick and tired of being pushed around we're sick and tired of this and that and that's like the easiest stick in order to get big you know trump did this with even though technically like everyone says that the silent what do they say are we the silent silent majority or whatever is that what they say we're the silent majority it's like well you're kinda like the louder majority but whatever like like it's or they'll say like yeah you're like we're like we're the forgotten it's like oh i mean you're kinda like kinda make up the mass population yeah or like fox news always does this they go you sick of mainstream media but it's like si yeah it's like aren't you that the biggest news program on on earth yeah it's like you have the biggest it's like you're bragging about that you have the biggest viewership yet right you're like you're calling someone else mainstream and so i never thought about that hilarious they do that that's so funny they go like you know the bay street media what's the tell you it's like dude you you are the main it's like people always say like you know we gotta stick it to the man it's like i don't get the man bro so that's kind of but it turns of like a stick it's like the best it it works all it it always works like in the steps to build a cult it like they're they're like they're there's like a definitive like steps it's like there has to be a clear leader there has to be some type of rituals around the the experience there has to be a bunch of other things right of passage there needs to be a right a passage just like what for return to these and so do and that's what one of the reasons why they bond for life and one of them also has to be in us versus them like either you are with us or you against us and like you guys many times it's well you can join but until you join you're not on our team right and women is a great category for that you know they're they're not represented enough in a variety of places of business and so they say you know we're gonna help each other we're gonna get through this and we're gonna bond it's so that's a great i love that move i think it is a i wouldn't i mean women the women differentiator that is just one of many wonderful examples of what you can do yeah exactly it's a it's a i just wrote female as a differentiator and that's kind of all i had there what's an example of of somewhere that you could do this what's for fun it you could you could do lots of different races i think that like no no i'm saying the the female thing like what's a what's a product category today that is not differentiated in this way that potentially could be where you could geared it towards females in a in a stronger way so well okay well this is not female but do you remember how you could do this for anything do you remember how you told me about your friend who was he muslim or was he hindu where they like generated loans only yeah halal financing halal is that is halal mo i don't even remember so muslim people yeah they you know they halal me and this is halal financing which means sort of a blessed and approved by the you know religious community and elders i guess so i think there's a lot of finance you could do that in you know we and it we there's elvis so elvis they they're a financial company for women yeah what's the what's the female bank is there a female bank if not there should be a female bank you you absolutely could do a female bank elvis is taking us stab at that and they've raised tens of millions of dollars that will likely be what are they like a robinhood hood or what what's what do they do i think they're like so they become a member and get access to investing banking an on demand learning finance initial planning and career coaching and you know what that sounds like what we had her on here yeah yeah that what what was it called a learn vest learn vest yeah was it learn vest and my takeaway away was that business didn't completely work out right but i it but business wasn't yeah it wasn't gang buster but yeah yeah but i think you could still do so what else could you so the skin did it wonder they're at least mildly successful so they done it they did it with news what else could you do i mean i think that like there's if you built like a women's only social club it it'll work it'll be of some type of mild success at least i this guy in our either trends group or podcast group i forget which group created this thing where he's doing was he he's doing audiobooks books for women and and he said that he's already at five thousand a month in revenue in the first six weeks so i think that there's a lot of space for that it's a it basically like porn for women i think there's a lot of space for that what else is interesting banking i don't know yeah a lot of do a lot of people do with content to the founder of bleach tree report his name's brian he founded bleach tree report right and he sold for a whole lot of money and six months or a year after selling that he launched bustle and bustle is a refinery twenty nine competitor he was like i wanna be like the new vanity fair right ryan and he created a women's public network of publication and he did so because i think it's because he had not i i imagine he had a non compete or like don't do don't do fence sports this bustle or something right right b u s t l e apple dot com it's probably makes fifty to a hundred million in sales and i i think what happened is and i don't i'm just guessing i imagine what he saw was that the engagement from women on digital content is significantly better so i've been involved while i could say soap pub the the soap opera website that i was involved in a little bit that my friend owned the engagement on that was mostly all women and it was dwarfed most right like the founder of bleach report not brian but a different looked at the metrics and he goes oh the these this is just the best engagement i've ever seen in my life and so engagement amongst women consumers is typically much higher than men yeah i i feel like yeah somebody should just map out all the big categories and like you know why is there not a credit card that i know of that is like catering itself to women and it's something like you know like for example there's this product that my wife buys is like these little like dolls and i'm like it's like these little handmade things by these women in peru and basically like the dolls are cute but she loves that the story is basically that like there's this whole community in peru that was struggling these women they know how to like like knit is a part of the culture there and they they hand knit these dolls and you know yeah the dolls are a little expensive but you're basically funding this woman's business as you do so and like why is there not like a credit card that's sort of like that where it's like okay cool you're an american woman in the us you use this credit card and like part of your cash back or whatever goes as a micro loan to you know woman in uganda who's trying to you know start our own vegetable standard or whatever it's gonna be right like women empowering women women funding women through financial services like i i i just think that you could go through a bunch of different categories like obviously the cp g brands did this right like or the you know shampoo you know for women and you know each all all the consumer packaged goods sort of got differentiated pretty early but it seems like there's still categories like media like you know financial services that are less touched by this yes but i think that there's here's what i have found and we had a we someone in our trends group a woman was like who you know where all the women in here i wanna speak to where women and a hundreds commented in there and they all connected to became friends and what they were saying it and i i i agree well i'm not in the demographic but from an outsider i agree which which was they were they were saying like i hate how women only brands pan to them and like be like well because you're a woman you like want me to talk like a millennial and you want me to say like cute shit and they're like not really we like we're like we're alpha as well and we don't wanna be like patron patron patronizing and that a lot of brands treat them that way and i totally understand that and that was my for which with a lot of female only brands or female focused brands they treat them like they're like the i saw this in your comments on the hustle about the scam a whole bunch of people whole bunch of women were commenting in the hustle like thread being like oh my god don't get me started on the skim like you don't have to talk to me like i don't understand the first thing about business or like you know like i don't don't patron patronizing me and yeah touch shade that's definitely like let's say the the the the double edged sword of going down this path is you have to find the sweet spot where you're doing this authentically and you're not baby you know any any group that you talk that you and i actually think that's where the market is which is there could be a market like for some reason when women products x oftentimes they like lean into that what i don't know what you call it but there needs to be an opposite where it is women's centric but like alpha and like they don't call themselves like a girl boss right that is that is quite patronizing i think but do you know what i mean i and i don't know how to put my finger on it but i think that they actually could i i it this reminds me of a this one there was a quote from this woman who worked at uber and they were like are you sad travis is leaving and they're like yeah i'm super sad uber was the only place that i could work where i could be me and being me was like being pretty alpha and when i worked at this company in that company if i would if i would interrupt someone or if i would do something a man would do they would call me a bitch but at uber like they didn't tell me to be quiet they told me to be loud and speak up and say my opinion and no one called me like a bitch they just like treated me like i'm an like a woman who was assertive and anyway i think that there is actually there's not enough brands who are leaning into that demographic or psycho demographic and that is quite interesting to me yeah yeah that yeah i i think we're not the right ones to do this but i do think it's interesting like area for somebody to to to explore cool good catching up dude enjoy enjoy utah and then we'll be back with another episode in a few days