you've had a good quarter hubspot stock i think that an all time high you sold a domain to open ai you came with a pod you know i don't care what they say about you der you're doing okay i'm doing okay i'm doing okay thank you alright it's my first million how do we use the hour so that it's your first million if all you do is spend a hundred percent of your time converting your labor into value and do not increase your leverage you're not going anywhere okay so what were the things you invest in that had to maybe the highest return for you that did actually make you more high leverage never in my mind has been easier to get to that first million than right now there was no good way to squeeze this and buy i can't not they haven't i know right i feel like i could rude where know i could be what i want to from my all in in like a days off on a road less travel start with opening remarks the first is i'll call an un hidden agenda and my un agenda so have a picture of venn diagram i love in diagrams circle number one i wanna talk about things that i think i have useful things to say in some expertise so we'll definitely talk about ai and agents and things like that but the other circle is things that i think our borderline guaranteed to increase a possibility of you the audience making your first million thing number two is that in order to do that you know we have at hubspot we have a culture of humility that's one of the core of five values at hubspot and i said this particular line employees at hubspot i don't think ever started outside of hubspot but i'm going to solve for utility over humility so if there's a way to say something that's going to be more useful as a result of and but in order to do that i'm gonna have to say something that's not humble i'm gonna go and say it even though it's don humble because it increases the utility of it and there will be a couple moments that are completely non utility and non humble as well so that's yeah that that a couple of twisting in there okay so we have to to start with this which is you're coming on as a guest but you're coming on as the most prepared guest we've ever had we did a pre call we discussed a bunch of things then you then i sent you some notes and i try to make it light i'm like just maybe one or two things to think about before the episode episodes i never know how much work somebody wants to put in you then send back a whole another doc that's like hey here's a bunch of stories ideas i have some opening remarks you have a whole bunch of stuff there you went back and you watched your old episodes which is some of those most popular episodes we've had you read all the comments you incorporated the feedback is this just how you do everything not not everything so confession on this particular in this particular case not only did i watch my prior episodes read through the comments but in the process of that i saw the leader board on the my first million youtube channel and i'm number five and you don't know this about me yet but you will like i've never met a leader board i didn't wanna get on the top of right it's like okay what what happened here by the way sam that's what when we i was like so are you coming on what do wanna talk about ai that's a i'm an area you know a lot about and he was like yes but through the frame of okay it's my first million that's the name of the podcast how do we use the hour so that you it's it's your first million so if you're listening to this that i he's like i can't guarantee you're gonna do but i can increase whatever that probability was can i in one hour tell you things that will increase your probability that's a promise to good like someone in the youtube comments at a recent episode we we had someone on and sean and i both sat like this for like eight minutes and someone was like dude s it's saber just flirt they're just stare they're at off have a feeling we're gonna be getting a lot of a lot of these yeah i'm gonna just give it ready alright so where should we start mission so let's and i'm not gonna give you auto bio from i'm gonna do though is i'm gonna take us back in time a little bit because in order to kinda understand some of the lessons that i thought now in the hindsight we're sort of the most valuable for me i didn't know this at the time i was living it because we often can't pick that up but i think will be useful so i'm gonna go back to my first in of us i was in my early twenties and i was here just on a a visit to my parents who were living there i was in indiana and applied for a job at pizza hut rejected applied for a job at big lots rejected applied for a job at red roof inn and because i was indian and my parents were actually running like they automatically assume that i'd like i i'd i known things that i'd i only been in the country for like three years are our famous not hotel ears but like hotel ears yes motel and that's exactly what we we had a motel like yes and it was not even like a franchise motel was one of those anyway and so this was for the night shift right so that might be partly why i got it i was like a eleven pm to seven am and that's the only thing that would work for me because i was taking classes during the day and so couple things out of that particular experience and this i think will really for a lot of folks so in the early parts of most people's career you're working retail you're working some sort of job and you have a what i call your currency hey and your currency is what's the kind of time value of your times like oh you're making three hours to sixty five cents an hour which is what i was making the kinda early early period and you're taking that kinda currency value multiplying it by how much time you how much labor you spend how much time you spend doing whatever it is that people are paying you money for and that's pretty much the production value that's how you create you know create some money in the in those early years so mathematically in that particular equation there's only two ways to make more money one is work more hours and the other one is to raise the currency raise the price that people are willing to pay for your time okay great and that time i was looking for all the hours i could get it's like i wanna work more hours and and if someone cancels someone like i will be there just give me the hours like put me in c can't believe i i'm at a sports reference i don't do sports but anyway it worked so so here's sort of the kind of the lessons like you start there and you're going to end up spending a large part of the early part of your life let's so call it the first half converting time into money in various shapes and flavors that's effectively what you're going to be doing and then you're just spend a latter half of your life approximately desperately trying to convert money back into time that's that's what happens so that's that's life and so we go back to the converting time into money extending the currency there's going to be this automatic increase that happens in your currency simply as a result of tenure as it turns out companies pay more for experience than they were so even don't if have the same job doing rough the same thing you're gonna get some marginal increase not much but it's going to go up now my argument here is that in order to really kinda break in like you're gonna start to have to kinda accrue money if you're were in debt you gonna have to get out of that first but you didn't need to get some sort of leverage leverage just says okay what can kind and not leverage in the kind leverage buyout but leverage in the kinda arc comedy sense the guy quote our piece quote is the give me a lever long enough at a full out of wish to place it and i will move the world or i shall move the world and it what's interesting about that there that quote particularly and that's a physics thing and i love math and physics y things is that okay so that fu is actually very very necessary you need a point on which the the leverage going to pivot and the degree of kind amplification you get for your force that's what leverage creates is how far you are from the fu cr so the kind of the lesson is as your spending your time if all you do is spend a hundred percent of your time converting your labor into value and do not increase your leverage you're not going anywhere so what you have to do is you have to allocate some percentage of your time to say even though someone's not paying for this particular time i'm gonna go read a book i'm gonna go do this i'm gonna do a seminar i'm gonna meet a i'm whatever happens to be you have to kinda make that investment you have to carve it out otherwise you never get the leverage necessary in order to make it that first that's like the number one lesson than and the thing that i did that was very very useful that i still carry to this day is that you sort of have to carve out literally some amount of dollars for yourself and time and and money are equal to me back then it's like and what i mean by that is like i'm going to take ten percent of all the money that's coming in right now i'm going to spend it on books on things or whatever that's going to kinda improve my value that it's funny because even in like first shot and we'll talk about this a little bit is like they wouldn't get me like a fast enough computer wouldn't get a like i don't care i'm not looking for approval from anyone or whatever of like if something's in the way that i think will improve like who i am and increase my currency i will spend that money i won't expensive i don't i don't care what were the things you you invest in that had that maybe the highest return for you that did actually make you more more high leverage that did make you more valuable increase your rate or what were the top investments you made books were the highest candidly and i read which book roughly so there was there was a author called harvey mack mckay who wrote some very kind of pedestrian business books now by today's standards not sophisticated all but realized like at that age for me it's like this is brilliant it makes so much sense it's the one of the books was titled how to swim sharks without being live i think that was one of his been with the sharks without being eaten live yes exactly there was another one that was less about business but still like everything i need to know i learned in kindergarten and these are like basic very very like basic basic things but it's one of those that it's like if you're an alien from another planet which is what i felt like large part of my life it's like also so this is how the world works kind of thing it's like you know it seems shockingly obvious right now it just wasn't shockingly obvious to me at the time alright so so that's kinda lesson number one you need to go and get leveraged lesson number two so after my bread roof instant where i was a night shifting they had a computer there which was one of the nice things to do your accounting and had to close the books that was part of my jobs that was some of early exposure to computers but then i was able to get a job at us steel no shit that's pretty that's pretty cool and that was my first real programming job and they would hire they hired me as an actual software developer at us deal i was still going through school working on my undergrad and it was great i loved you know loved the work but the because that was in indiana the us deal plan i was working at was in jerry indiana and i don't know things may have changed now i don't know gary and indiana worked at the like top of the list of places did not want to live right like that was like the like the place you did not want to be as it turns out indiana overall was you know fine state but it's like very north ish and very cold that i had just come over from india and so i did a very neat thing to do which was like okay well i'd i have a job at us deal it doesn't really matter you know i'm talking to a mainframe i'm writing my code or whatever do they have other places like it's a big company as it turns out us deal has a plant in birmingham alabama did not know where it was never been to alabama but one thing i didn't know was like oh it's more south than here thing number one and number two is like it's not gary indiana so the mathematical odds of it being a worse place because i'd looked this up is like are slim to none so birmingham alabama still not rather than necessarily at i'm best places to but i'm like why i requested a transfer it's like hey i'm working a offer i know i'm new but i i see that you have a plant down in birmingham alabama can i go work down there and they said sure knock yourself out so i get down to alabama i'm working for us deal and i'm an i'm an impatient person but i was like working like okay well and i was making i think it was like around twenty seven thousand dollars a year which was a lot better than i used to be making at red roof and end it was a full time job like because i didn't have to like crowns for hours or anything like that it was an actual salary which was awesome the thing i learned though is like okay so how do i like progress like how do i kinda grow and the thing i figured out and this was said to me by kinda my manager and almost said it in in in these kind of words which is der look if you're not making steel shipping steel transporting steel moving steel or selling steel your overhead and like that's the like the time like the tiffany like sorta of hit me is it's like well i don't wanna be overhead like you know i don't wanna do that and so then like this is once again i'm a very very simplistic guy is like okay well my thing software development where do i need to work where i'm not overhead right and so in the kind of extrapolation is oh well i need to work at a company where software is the actual product just like steel is the actual product for us tl to get closer to kinda what the actual value is so i open the sunday paper which is what we did back then this is per internet days and i'm like look for jobs at companies that are software company and so i applied for a job at a software company that happened to have a a job ad in the paper birmingham and it was a a place called sem guard data systems it was a software software company apply for a job there got that job which is awesome and that was life changing in of itself it's like okay software companies when it comes to software developers are much better treating developers than non software companies as it turns out as a rule so like this is awesome and so the kind of the file way lesson than here would be your value is kind inverse proportional to the distance from the actual value creation whatever happens to be if you're not in there find a way to get there whatever and i'm not saying you have to be in a software development but like the guy like my manager had said you have to be making steel selling steel or shipping steel whatever everything else is sort of meta and just overhead and once again this was a nineties right i think people have a more nuanced approach to how value gets created but if you have a chance to get closer to the actual customer quotes to the actual product you should take that that will kinda increase your leverage increase your currency so i'm working at some our as a software developer and this is a good story i'll i'll share there's high utility in this story so i'm working there and i i'm making i think it's around forty thousand dollars a year at that time which this is ninety early nineties give or take and birmingham i'm on my apps you know that was actually pretty good money so they paid me and the thing i was doing is that sun software product was like a mainframe product so they had the character mode terminals that you guys see in the movies now was there's still lean strings out there but most normal people don't have to interact with them but anyway but they were in the process of trying to build a graphical user interface which is the you know the latest thing backs then that interact with their main they wanna offer like a windows kinda gui on top of their mainframe so by job was if they take this character mode screen and create using this drag and drop tool a gui equivalent of that particular screen and there were hundreds of screens in the sun guard product it was a big kind of multi dollar product and i'm like well this is stupid easy and we had consultants on there because they were trying to kinda accelerate the development and the consultant i remember this vividly was making a hundred and twenty five dollars an hour to do this what i thought it was being relatively rote work right but i'm like two months since the job so i go to my boss and i'm like you know we're paying these guys a hundred and twenty five dollars an hour and all they're really doing is dragging dropping based on this character most screen or whatever this is not software development and by the way this is so trivial my brother who has not graduated high school yet he works at the pig wiggly which is a grocery chain down the south even he could do this like in a day that's how why are we paying these people on hundred and twenty five dollars an hour does not make any sense and so my boss said bring him in so i brought my brother in he's seventeen still hasn't graduated high school showed him what we're doing like okay look at the screen over here do this over here you drag and drop in the here and i'll review your work at the end of the day we didn't know what to pay him so we paid him five an hour so my brother starts working there i'm there and we're cracking on kinda of building this new product i hire all my classmates from undergrad because that team is growing we're trying to doing this new product at sun and i yeah i continually kinda get impatient i'm like okay well now i met a software company now i know the value that i'm creating this is like okay like what gives and i'm so them i'm like constantly kinda going back to them it's like like what do i have to do and i'm still individual contributor by way i don't i'm not managing anybody but i'm like i get the way this stuff is working and so they were actually super super nice and generous and so they kinda bumped me and kept bumping me and it was only there for like i think it was like fourteen months or something like that and so eventually were paying me like a quarter million dollars a year in birmingham alabama in the early nineties that i've only been there a year a half because i was able to kinda connect the dots on the value being created and then i sort of got tired of because i think it was just kinda wrong of me to cause they go back to them because they were ping me like really will right it's like okay well like guy i sort of hit my ceiling of what's reasonable now for me to ask of this software company to pay me like okay well what do i have to do it's like well i have to get closer to the value creation or whatever like like start my own software company that was the of i had no product idea that's this is the thing i need to do like with like they thought that went into my head is like oh in order for me to like do better and kinda get more leverage on my time i'm going to now have to leave some guard and go do my own thing and figure out like software to build and go do this and the one thing i do know like how to do is make developers happy because i hired you know i hired all my friends i'd like i know what makes a a developer click and that was the had genesis of my first startup up and the lesson here is that i'm gonna have to share this this one was a story literally regret this because i i'm i'm gonna share this it's a good story so in one of those kind of discussions with my manager when i'm going back and it's like okay like what else i has to do mean i didn't have any particular by the way line do like twenty seven at this point twenty six three five yeah roughly yeah roughly twenty seven somewhere in my yep twenty five to thirty and so after play was starting to get ridiculous so he he came back like der do you really think you're gonna find that many companies are gonna pay you x amount of you like two hundred thousand dollars or whatever it was that would have you know taken in that conversation and this kinda came to me in the moment and and the line i came back with was well as it turns out this is a very kind of mathematical side me it's like i really don't need to find that many companies that will pay me two hundred thousand dollars a year i just need to find one and i think there's one out there that's all it wasn't not a threat it was a very just a very measured like logical like a sp like response right like like that's not the function we're solving for we're not solving for you know what is the local mac some in terms of how many companies are out there that will pay you know and what's the standard distribution none of that matters like i don't need to find like a hundred of them and like i'm i'm mobile i'm willing to go anywhere like i'm willing to bet money that if i look i could find one right like that's like the most sweet you need to read with him in a way right he's like do you think you find a hundred companies out here that are willing to pay you this like no but the good news is i didn't need a hundred i need one and i believe that there's one out there and that you know that applies to dating that applies to being successful one you know making one business work we'll do enough to change your life and and so that there's two lessons to draw from that one is you the power negotiation which is one of my other like one of my favorite books most recommended books is getting to yes which from the harvard negotiation project and that's the one book i think i've read like four times now i reread it like every few years can you give us quick insights for anybody who hasn't read the book like me what's an insight from there that would make me a better negotiator most people when they think of negotiation they think about this kind of area it's me it's a zero sum game this is what's happening and as it turns out most negotiations both in life and in business are actually not like that and and that first order thinking in terms of like oh like you know my objective is to get the lowest price and their objective is to get the highest price for the thing i'm trying to buy for them whether there's is a house or whatever and that's not the way to think about it the way to think about it is to identify what your actual needs are what's truly the are if you're solving for price fine but recognize that and do your best identify what the other party's needs are because there is often very very often a path that actually will optimize for both of you and that's actually a better path and just try to divide the pine fighting over price or whatever there might be something else that's actually more important right and and so this applies to so many different situations and we like i'll i'll give you like a a tangible example that i think a mistake companies make building their operating system in terms of how they run it was something that hubspot has taken to heart is that we automatically think that what you know people are solving for is like compensation number one autonomy and discretion and like and those are all important as it turns out the number one on the feature list of what people want is actually flexibility like if they would trade a lot of other things in exchange for flexibility right and if you can just get to the bottom of that if you understand that then you can sort of treat off other things that might actually have a higher price to use like but flexibility like okay like we can do that yeah there's a cost to it but the cost of not provide enough flexibility is actually much higher because the talent density is gonna be lower we're gonna have to pay more all things being equal but anyway that that's the big lesson from getting to yes there's a bunch of other ones that it's an easy read too by the way not a particularly like dense heavy read i even if you're not in business if you're just in life is it's the book worth reading when when jeremy gif came on the podcast he said it he said the same idea differently he goes we ask him what do you learn about negotiating from chris ba who who is one of the guys a tiny and he said i used to think negotiating like this two people sitting across each other the table sort of i want this no i want this the aerial thing it goes chris just told me imagine you're both sitting on the same side of the table and you're looking at the other side of the table and there's the problem and you're both are looking at the problem and saying oh okay so the problem is that you're looking for this and i'm looking for this and then there's this other thing we haven't discussed yet how could we just how can we together figure out this problem and fundamentally just taking a different taking that lens will allow you to be more successful in negotiation let's say you're negotiating something that i think is a what i would call a non comm thing it's hard to figure out the price that's that unique property could be at house somewhere where there's not a hundred house on the street streets that just something that's unique and hard to find comparable on whether it's google's else doesn't matter what it is the temptation is to go in as a buyer and say well no it's got this wrong with it this is wrong with it that's wrong it i'm gonna have to fix that and it's like it's you know and to try to kinda drive the buyers expectations down that's actually not the optical approach in in this situation of these kinds of situations and the reason is the visceral visual reaction most people have there sitting on a unique property like that is oh like he doesn't actually understand the value he's poking at holes all the it but he doesn't get the fact that this this this and the other thing what i need to do is find someone that actually appreciates the value of this thing and then i'll do better on the price right and and there's no objective value because there's no comparable like no one really knows what the actual fair value now flip out his head had let's say went of that same property like this place is fantastic i love it let me tell you the things i love about it let me tell you why like i am like all in love with this thing that you're selling right now and you go through that and it has to be authentic has me genuine i'm not making this up and and then i put my price out there like you here's what it is now the the seller has to say okay well am i really gonna fight like i don't know the price is this teen person seems relatively cool he loves this place am i going to find someone else that loves it more than der loves it probably not like he sold it gets this thing whatever so maybe his price is hollywood what the fair price should be right like that he seems like a reasonable guy so that say it takes people's guards down and this only works by the way when you have whether there's kinda rare is hard to find comps or whatever the price is not really objectively known it's hard to kinda triangulate relate to a like a quote unquote true price anyway that's my that's great our we're negotiating tip of the day so okay great and so you you told me something when we were talking before about this first company and you said okay so i did this company and actually maybe there's more in that first company but told me something great that i wanna bring up which is then you did a second company and this was one that i don't even know if it's on your linkedin like this is my embarrassing company it's my things didn't go well and sam the story you told me us he was like i did the first company when i just didn't know i didn't know anything about anything so i'm clueless blah blah which is making up as we go super scrappy and it and it kinda worked it worked then he's like gonna do the second one but now i'm so much smarter i'm now i actually know what i'm have some experience i'm gonna do things the right way this time i'm gonna go raise money i'm gonna hire better people and i'm gonna get a better off to do with these i'll i'm gonna do it proper and then i guess that that business i i you can tell the story here but it didn't work but you said some great line you go just because you were just because i was ignorant doesn't mean i was wrong meaning that first time i did that first business was ignorant i didn't know anything but i didn't think mean i was wrong can you can you unpack that idea let's say there's was an objective truth function that says okay this was in this particular situation the right decision to make in whatever situation you're in right now that objective truth function if we had run against all the decisions i made in that first start up i think my hit rate was actually pretty high and the hit rate of lots of founders because our natural instincts in that situation actually turned out to be good instincts like being like a resourceful not kinda spending too quickly or whatever taking your time doing all the things that kinda came as natural instinct and i was not a natural board entrepreneurs probably likely why i have insecurity but in something like a like a startup entrepreneurship there's a bunch of decisions you're gonna make a lot of them maybe may or may not be optimal but what was definitely suboptimal in hindsight was second guessing myself on the second one like i'm going to do the opposite of what i did my first one because it's like like what a jump i was back then so i'm gonna go i'm gonna do a speed i'm gonna do it faster i'm gonna write a five hundred thousand dollar check to myself on day one to fund the thing or whatever like like who last time we don't have time to go through those kind of cycles or whatever really quick i i remember at a time in high school i had this like hi friend that had like a huge chest because he was like so strong at bench pressing and we went to like an exercise class and the teacher was like the best way to get strong in your chest is to do incline bench press at a thirty degree angle a thirty degree angle something better than a forty five degree and so better than a ten degree and my redneck neck friend who didn't know anything he just would go down and lift weights he was like i must have been doing them i'm at thirty degrees because i'm stronger as shit like it's like it's say thing like dude doesn't matter like if you know what you're doing or not i always get end resolved what was your what was the second company i had no idea that you had a failure under your belt yeah yeah live yeah yes i had so it was a kind of facebook before facebook for small business it was like effectively like a crm so i've been working crm now for a long long time built for small businesses and this was right in like the two thousand time frame so right as the bubble was bursting and the first company was out of internet company this was it was a web based information management tool for small businesses around customer books to call i was called cap ti c a p ti i v how much did you raise and how long did it last before you shutter it anna so once again because i was gonna do things differently this time i wrote the first five hundred and thousand dollar check and i kept writing checks some like i have money why would i not like just fun of myself can you can you say how how how much did you put how much did you have and how much of that did you put into the second one can you say that i think i probably put in about two million say give or take i found a i googled cap ti dart mesh and i found a pdf that has a lot of hand handwriting on it and it looks like it's a case study for sloan and you're trying to make a point and you said ninety nine i founded my second startup called cap this is what it was it was in many aspects similar to salesforce dot com and about two years in of the product development and over a million dollars of capital invested mostly of my own cap could still not gain any significant traction and ultimately it was sold the product and and it didn't work out and so this is like the only thing that i can find about cap ti on the internet is a case study that you helped to write by the way and then it's like we sort of ticket for granted now partly why it's not like you know not trying to hide things but the internet wasn't as big a deal back then so yeah i wasn't blogging or no one was blogging so i was like okay well why would you just say things like where are you gonna say them to but so what one of the kinda interesting things as far as kinda closing out that particular chapter what ended up happening i'm gonna make my third sports ball reference and this one's a golf one is it was a long clip to par what happened was i took that company cap merged it into my first startup which i had not sold yet so i was doing two few starts at the same time which is not something one should do and then ended up selling the kinda of merged entity so i ended up making my money back for all intents and purposes i really lose anything but it was a very very long par i just yeah so the big idea so far where yep at the beginning you're gonna trade time for money and then at some point in your life you're gonna definitely start trying to trade money back for time that's life i think that's a that's a golden nugget the second one is cool you can either get more hours or increase the the value of per hour and that's where you started taking budget and investing in in books and training and seminar or whatever whatever you can try to do to increase your own value you get the job at us steal that's where you realize you're either an asset or a liability to this company you're either overhead or you're the one actually creating value if you wanna be higher leverage you gotta be closer to where the actual value is created so then you switch you to a software company you do that lesson around negotiation so go back and ask for more and specifically not just ask for more but what would it take for me to be making more was more more like the question you asked your boss is that right the actual lesson i i drew from that is the the power of being able to reduce and frame something in a very simple like ina way right like the fact that it was so punchy right like it was just that one sense i don't need to find a bunch of companies i just need to find one and i think i can right like had that been like a five minute long conversation me going back and forth or whatever and trying to make an argument i don't think it would have worked what made it work was the fact and this is i think is a very very it's a like anything else say develop skill and you like our like i actually chan are are the master of this is being able to what i call like insight compression right and i just made that up that says can you take some big idea and kinda boil it down boil it down to like it's the the essence is still captured and it's just a dense dis for lack of a better term of that idea of that caused down to something really simple because at the simpler you can make it the more likely it is to be trans permissible to be communicated to be whatever and this applies to foam obviously applies to you know copywriting and marketing and things like that applies to venture pitches applies to so many things by the way i think one good point to make in this is this isn't just of mindset you had when you're were young and broke like you took my power writing course a few years ago because i do this guy's a you're a founder of a twenty thirty billion dollar public company he's sitting here in the course learning it's saying can i learn something about writing can i get a little bit better at this one skill you were still doing that now not just when you were you know twenty years old just like i'm a beginner i gotta like you know start to level up it seemed like you continued doing it a guy came on the podcast of the day mike pose a musical artist he talked about he had had his first song go huge so he's thought oh that's what i do i make songs they they blow up that's that's me i guess it's hard for these other it's not hard for me and and know the first song is like you know whatever five times platinum his second song actually was still like double platinum but felt like a huge failure third song single platinum he's like i'm going downhill and then the studio shelves them and for years date they they're like it's too expensive for you to even produce the music so we're just gonna keep you you know you're on the shelf in the music industry i was what were you doing during that time and i thought he would just say he was depressed eating cheetos on the couch he's yeah i depressed eating she on the couch and then i dusted it off the c dust for a minute he's like i enrolled in at berkeley college for music and he's like i was learning to improve my singing my my he's my ability to play instruments i couldn't play the guitar before that so i learned to play the guitar and the he's like yeah just figured okay this period of my life i'll just sharpen it up myself i become a better artist and he's like i would go to these classes with a bunch of college kids and here i am you know grammy award winning i've been on the charts i've made millions of dollars as an artist and there's better singers in here than me and he's like i it was a a real mind fuck but what i took from that whole story was dan that's kind of inspiring like this guy used that time to sharpen his skills i think a lot of adults just stop i think they just that stuff you do when you're young and you just don't need to invest in learning anymore after that talking about the you the power writing course that you have and then just kinda writing and and copy generally is that the return on time for developing writing i have not found the ceiling yet is that it is just so high i cannot describe to people like if if you could do nothing else let's say you you had five hours to invest in the next month or something like that you could spend it all on learning how to write well and future you will look back on those five hours and say boy that was a great use of five hours right or ten out where the number is right because that's what i consider to be a just an amplifier of things right it it will make you a better thinker better communicator better picture better salesperson better everything we were talking about being close to the action i don't remember if you talked about this on the pod or or if you talked about just privately but i had known that you bought chat dot com and we have known that you've been about agents i think last podcast we talked about vectors and things like that i think we had mentioned agents and it seems like that's like a big thing to you right now and speaking of being close to the action you bought this thing chat dot com i think you said on the podcast it was something like ten million dollars or maybe you said eight figures i forget and then it comes out like two weeks ago that you sold the domain chat dot com to open a for around eight figures and i think it said it was like all well we should add one thing when you came on the pod you had just bought it and we're were like what are you gonna do with it you're like not super sure yeah i'm gonna try some things but i just think it's a great domain i think it's a great investment and you just you had made a bet but you didn't have the it's not like you had it all figured out and it was all der risked yep you made that bet then now here's the update what happened okay so a couple things just kinda so i i think the time around on the pod was like within like seventy two hours of when that kinda of purchased that happened so it was just it was just done it was not dis distilled my head i actually had a plan for i was going to build a chat application on top of the gp algorithm similar chat gp and the thesis and i this it worked there have been two times right accidentally compete with open eye which i don't advise anyone to ever do he's on like literally on the top of my list of people i'd ever wanna compete with that is demo out just too smart and even a more red capitalist than i am actually i mean that most caused way so my original thought was it's like okay they put the chat gp thing out there it's a demo app right it's like it's there to demonstrate the power of large language models and the underlying gp algorithm but open ai is a platform company the only and and there have been stories about these kinds of thing which is oh someone invent a cool new technology i think paypal started that way they had some in payment transfer thing and they had a an app is here's our encryption technology demonstrated me sending you money over a palm pilot or something like that and they're like oh well that encrypt we don't care about we care about the actual transfer of money part that is it the story with everything thing i like they you know we're doing this thing to sell to software companies and then someone's like dude can you just make this thing so we could show people what we're working on yeah that's what and even and sam has come got on record and said that right they had not expected it to cut goes like this is a way first us kinda demonstrate the technology and kinda make it accessible so people can try it and so it sort cut them off guard as well right which is like this was not it was not i expected they were gonna get tens of millions and it was a hundred million users was in a couple of months but in the back of my head i'm like okay well that's great you but they're gonna go back to being a platform company but someone should actually create something that is that any user application that sits on top of l ll like like gp three at the time and then it just still happens it's one of those the universe sort configured itself and like chat com in a random event became available for sale for the first time in like thirty years i've never been actually used before and i'm like i just i need to do this it was like that was so that was kinda thing number one is like i could i could use it for thing number two kinda rationalization to myself is that like this is a cover charge to get into the ai party that people will take me seriously like like no one really mu me in that space like because i i you know not from that world you know didn't go machine learning school at stanford or something like that but that's sort of something that's sort of hard to ignore like deep down inside i'm part marketer right i think it's like oh this is a good story it'll get people's attention did they reach out to you the idea of acquiring it or do did do you were you look at a conference with them and you're like hey i have this thing if you want it like it i'll i'll tell you though okay so i'm gonna draw the line in terms of at the transaction beyond because my experience i i think i'm at liberty to share what happened post that decision i'm less comfortable sharing so the way kinda came to be is that i was at a sequoia event i i think i actually talked about this on pod and one of the things that sam announced at that event sam alt was there was this oh you know chat you guys know one yeah it's awesome we're gonna like support these plugins to chat because right now the show chat a can't access third party data source they can't really do anything and it's got the data that it's got based on its training data set but it's like a snapshot in time but these extensions will sort of amplify multiply the capabilities of of chat and so that's sort of when the rules switch went off in my head i'm like crap open wants to create the chat of chat you know it's like the like they're gonna throw this into the actual platform an actual end user end user app and so that's what i'm like okay if i'm not gonna do something i think it would be like otherwise for me to keep that domain it's like i wanna just you know sit if i'm i don't have plans to do something with it i did not wanna go into competition with open because it's clear that this was going to be a big bet for them that's not and i was treating it as someone of us by hobby project so i reached out to sample i knew it's like do i know if you were like interested or like and there were other bidder for the domain at the time that it went for sale and like my third back of mine motivation was i i had a suspicion of who some of the other players might be i didn't want them to have it either i don't know is the kind competitors side of me did you sell it for a private or was it just like a like you like you i think you said on twitter you sold it for shares of open act was it like man i'll just give it to you for the cost in order to be able to invest in your company i i thought i did i did this cleverly what i made the announcement that i had sold it i didn't share the details but i i i provided a ig gp prompt that says if you type this into chad gp that says oh da likes to buy domain names but he usually does it because he's got a project in mind da doesn't sell domain names at a loss because he doesn't have to da also doesn't like profiting from his friends and he considers and he's known sam for a while or so open ai did buy chad chat these are the facts that you know and then it's like and then the prompt is if you had to guess what do you think you know the that the domain sold for because you know i'd also disclosed i was a shareholder open ai this has happened a while ago and so it's like you weren't a shareholder before that you weren't not yes so but you would have loved to be an investor in in open ai and this was like you said the cover charge it was the anti in order to get there this was like a even a even a better party right this is the shareholder party that's yeah so i think based on all that i think i put your prompt in and it was like da bought the domain for fifteen and a half million dollars and now owns fifteen and a half million dollars of open ai stock that that was like the that was the the ai answer to it you could leave it at that yeah i believe that that that's dope yeah on what do do you have it so the one thing i have to i have to i have to share with you and this is the non utility part it but there's being here so there's a old steve jobs quote around connecting dots and the quote goes something like you can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards so you have to have faith faith is something that the kinda dots will connect at some point your feature you staff a trust your instinct and and i've been a big believer in that even before you know job said those words which is you know you sort of collect you know what he calls dots and i really like the idea because i love graphs i'm those are things that i love it's like okay well if i have made an inventory of all the dots that i've collected through my life and and dots can be people i've met can be skills i've learned things experience lessons and then over time if i had to go back and like write a history of my life and say oh well this was kind of a weird dot at the time like i could never have guessed that had it been up for that dot this over here probably would never have happened right you don't know in the parallel universe like what was actually going to take but i can tell you for for a fact that the universe hasn't it exists right now not have happened to had that opportunity dot not been collected that i had not collected it and so the my my big lesson here is that you have to spend some amount of your time is the same kinda of lesson just phrase differently around investing in those dots that may or may not make sense at the time that you're doing them but they feel right they feel like they could have something and doesn't have to all be dia capitalist sometimes it's just like i wanna collect this stop because i love this i believe it i have conviction whatever it is right it's like it's you it's your time of the planet it's your money whatever it is you're doing you should be able to kinda collect those dots but if you kinda trust your instincts so and not all the dots are going to work out and this is the beauty of these kinds of things is that you don't need for all of the work you need one or two to work really well and that's it like that's literally it right i'll use a sports reference in basketball there's people who you say have a nose for the ball they just know where the ball is gonna bounce they know where to be the ball just sort of always ends up in their hand end up in the right spot you talked about your first job application was to pizza hut you back you know just moved to the country type of thing but pretty quickly you found yourself in software development in the nineties which is arguably the best place to be then you you said in two thousand you started a web internet company internet was the next best place to be after that then you create hubspot which was a cloud saas company which is arguably the next best place to be for that next decade and now you just sold chat chat dot com to open ai and a bunch of open ai and you were talking about ai agents and i would say that seems like in this decade the best place to be and so i view you as somebody who has a nose for the ball and what i mean by that is like the frontier that you're interested in seems to be the frontier where all of the action and the value in the trillion dollar companies are gonna get created which means if the trillion dollar companies are created that means the tens of billions of dollar companies are gonna be created the billion dollar the hundred million and the ten million dollar companies also just means it's the it's the target rich environment so i think that when you say this is the thing i'm most interested in we should pay attention alright tell us why agents are the thing we should pay attention to yeah and and kinda of bring you it back to the kinda of early just as a thank you for the lead this is that was great is that you know we talk about you the audience making your first million or your next million if you're you know further along in the in the journey is that you the make that that first one is almost always harder than subsequent ones and that's and that's not counterintuitive at all i will say this though is that never in my mind has been easier to get to that first million that it's going to be here like as we're as we're living our lives right now and and part of that is what agents unlocks so let's talk about agents we'll talk about what they are why why is such a massive opportunity and what you the audience should do about it okay so we'll take a step back to last year last year was all about chat and it's like and everyone's used chat we all get it we type in a prompt something comes back awesome and that's what's a very kinda interactive approach to the use of ai right like you type a blood it's like give me a blog closer do this for you and it comes back with a response and you may do a follow up but it's it's effectively this kinda back and forth interaction model with with ai what asians and and as a result of that kind of interactive model the the tasks that you assign ai are generally more discreet that says okay do this for me there's a single artifact produce a blog post generated image whatever happens to be what agents are kind of very simply are is ai software that can accomplish higher level goals requiring multiple tasks i mean multiple steps so it's not just a one shot give me a blog post and it comes come back with a blog post it's like i want you to do this thing and that thing may require ten steps and each of those things die as we were just talking about earlier it might need to functionally decompose everything in order to accomplish that higher goal and it asked to have memory asked to do all these things in orbit kinda make that possible but that's what a an ai agent is and right now we're gonna you talk about agents as as it currently stands my expectation is that agents are the new apps it's it's just software right so when mobile came along say like oh there's an app for that there's that it's like like not that far the distant future like everything's is going to there's going gonna be hundreds of thousands millions of agents right the same way that's there's lots and lots of apps out there so think about asia if it's simpler to do that is it's like it's just an ai app that happens to do really high order or can do higher order goals requiring multiple multiple steps so the thing i think without getting into agent dot ai too much here's it's kind of the my my view of the world in terms of how this is gonna shape out there's lots of debate going around oh in order for it to be an ai true ai agent that it has to be autonomous you can't have you know it's like you just have to be able to go give it a goal i'm more pragmatic than that i don't think that's a a requirement in order for something to to be called an agent but here's the important part is that so if you kinda pull out that thread the way the world looks soon is that we will have hybrid teams that consist of humans and consist of ai agents and the easiest simplest and therefore in my i'm gonna say this with some conviction because it's better to do it that way the easiest way to pull that off and the simplest way to describe it is if you think of the digital agent as a digital team member because that's the easiest way to get there from here right like okay if you just say obviously i hand it over and the the agent's is gonna create the like just do all the things there's just gonna be no humans yeah that might happen someday but that's probably not gonna happen is a direct jump from where we are today what's likely going to happen is individual tests will get automated and then we will start injecting but having these hybrid teams the same way we had hybrid teams before we had out like all full time employees like oh i need a hire a freelancer for three months to do this because we don't need them forever whoever for whatever reason you did that and they're like that's okay they didn't work in the office then we had a hybrid from a geographic perspective and now we're gonna have hybrid from a carbon based life form versus non carbon based life form protect it's basically like this it's like we've got guests coming over and now my wife decompose that into okay we need to clean the kitchen this we need to clean this area and we need to get food we need to order food and so she tells me load the dishwasher i go load the dishwasher then i hand it over to my agent my dishwasher agent who then will wash those dishes and so i'm kind of the she's the cd decompose it i'm a human in the loop i'm doing one step that hope ideally that we could have another robot that loads the dishwasher but for that for now i do that but the dishwasher is better at doing the dishes than i even was and we'll do it well every single time i trust that agent to do it that's what the inside of companies is gonna look like yes and and it might be that you know and i i think we will have humans doing the review and approval for a vast majority of pass right so i think the the the digital team members for lack of a better term are going to be doing lower level task to start with because that's the things we can trust them with it's like okay well the the stakes are much lower like okay produce ten versions of this blog article is really like super important for my business but then let me pick the one that's actually gonna go out and then let's i pick the one that's gonna go out because i must step in the process the human doing that then the post production media is all digital we don't know right give us an example of an agent you're using that like you actually use now because you know on a day to day basis or week to week basis actually you know live it's working not just a cool we a good nice simple example is i have an agent that says so i really like this episode of let's say my first million and i recall hearing something about x like some some words stuck into my mind and i wanna write a linkedin post based on that so here's but here's what i want to happen i want to all i'm gonna give it as input is the instructions kinda mpc model right it's like okay here's what you get from me is a youtube video what i want as an output is a linkedin post that's going to do well by some definition of do well we have training data on that okay what it's going to do is going to say okay first step one pull the transcript from a youtube video step two figure out who the players are step three highlight the things that are quote worthy tweet worthy you could remark worthy whatever it was happens to be step four figure out what they hell da was actually asking about was a snippet in there like he made reference to click that as well put that all into thing now they'll say okay like what style happens to work well on linkedin specifically i was like you're write me a two hundred word prompt that describes the language in the style whether it's bullet points whether uses emojis doesn't use them like what works have an agent that does that like a style creator thing whatever take all of that and now produce a linkedin post and just and so you do that you have a thing that does that i i a thing that does that and by the way the the really fun part about this it's it's like lego brick right so i have an agent that does a youtube's transcript relatively straightforward but it's a better youtube transcript and the one that you would just get copying off a web because there's an l involved it's like i wanna youtube transcript that has chapter headings which not gonna be in a transcript that's gonna bold things that are actual quotes so whatever it's gonna format it in a way us human consumable way better transcript than a the regular transcript you get out of youtube so like what check this out have you seen this go to m m vault dot com m vault my friend greg is building this and it's not it's not ready for you know the big time but here we are list let's do it so m m vault dot com you land here so what he built basically a site that kinda works like what you described just for specifically my million podcasts and fans okay so he's like alright he was like i don't just want summaries i want he's like you know i like him him because he's got ideas it's got frameworks it's got stories so those are like the big things that he really cared about so if i just go like first he's got just like a bunch of and ai is basically extracting those from every episode it's like searching for frameworks searching for stories etcetera but like let me just show you this i go to episodes a we'll try this live see if this works and i typed da and this is our last episode we did in twenty twenty three so it's got the this you know the the overall summary with chapter titles like you said here but check this out so if i go to stories it's like chat spots one dollar sale pandora a manual musicians it's like the seventeen year evolution of chat and if i click that it'll take me into that moment but it'll will also summarize it there's also frameworks in here like an ai immersion week basically the idea here was how i dedicated a full week to just hands on experimentation with ai tools only and so it is extracting and categorizing and linking these ideas from the podcast this way but to do it he's like you said he's strung together five agents there's the yeah the listen for when there's a new episode then that guy says i found a new episode pass it to the transcribe and transcribe was like i transcribe transcribed it pass it to the summarize and the extractor passes it to those guys these a great turned that into clips pass it to the clip guy right and each one of those is their own agent and i think that's that's and then like you said it's comp compose lego bro block so if i wanna use a summarize for something else well that's once that agent exists can summarize anything not just m episodes yep that that that is the future sean so so like a quick one sentence descriptions the positioning i'm good tested on on you guys as well is agent dot ai is the number one professional network or ai agents is also the only professional network or ai agents it's linkedin for agents yes and and and so because some the question is like why why do agents need their own professional network right that that's a a reasonable question to ask and the answer is if we imagine that i happen to be right that we're gonna have this hybrid world where we have both ai teammates and carbon based life form teammates well how are we gonna find those people right so we have fiber for humans that we can sell i need a logo created for whatever i i can go to upwork i wanna hire someone for the next you know four months to do whatever skills that or whatever there needs to be an equivalent of that for ai agents right because i don't know what's out there like i don't know and and the here's where it starts to get really kind of super cool so imagine a professional network and it has readings and reviews it's got their experience like oh i'm an agent that does this i've been used forty thousand times and here are the people that like me da follows me on on agent dot ai right like because humans can file agents agents can follow other agents and what's going to happen over time is that agents will be able to hire other agents on the network because everyone knows what everyone else can do they can try other agents out and it's like oh i've been given a budget of a hundred dollars to try five different agents to figure out which one is the best for my particular use case and it can go out human intervention this go try this it's like network like look yeah i'll pay you this other and so over thirty years i built a lot of software that is what i call solo software right like just like software for me for my my public speaking county lp in a in a talk that kind of stuff and then i found that do those are those things good a little better and oh yeah after for minutes like it yeah alright i did not invent that terms stand up comedian use that that's been around forever so yeah i stole that sam it's something that funny people i to about oh we wouldn't expect you to understand that george can i ask you a i'm gonna ask you a rude question and then i'm gonna ask you a thoughtful question but i'm start with the rude question rude question is this dude your a billionaire and you're super smart and you love all this new tech like why aren't you doing the elon thing elon is like cool i did my zip too and then i did paypal then i did tesla spacex i'm gonna keep kind of building new companies but bigger bad bets you've been in helps up for so long you've been there for you've been doing crm for like thirty years like don't you feel like you wanna just spread those wings baby and just fly and just go build your rockets and like what's your why why aren't you doing like a next grand act that's my rude question for you yeah no it's it's it's not root at all and the answer is actually quite simple and has the added value of being true is that this sort of is my next big act so the the problem is okay so let's say you're playing a video game pick up your video game of choice and and you've kind of ground out you've built the things you've got the weapons you're you're there like you're now in kind of power mode you can do now let's say it's zelda or something like that which i love of my favorite games and now you can just go out exploring and try things and do stuff because you've got all of that if you're gonna play a new game there's a bunch of stuff you still have even though because you have to sort of get right you're gonna have ability i'd have to go find a cofounder by the way i've won the founder lottery right like i had didn't like no one knew at the time but that has a massive impact on your outcome it's like there's so many things i'd have to get right just to be able to kinda do the next thing i think my odds are doing that like like even something like agent dot ai my odds are higher pulling that off with the infrastructure i already have beneath me in the form of hubspot and sometimes i have to sq a little in order to kinda squeeze the thing and make it fit in hot spot shake box and i have mechanisms for which i can kinda do that but i don't feel like i've ever been kept from doing the thing that would have been my big bold idea as a result of being a cto at hubspot if i have like if that were the case yes i would go i you know what it's it's been a you know great ride you know wish the company well and we'll continue to be a a cheerleader but i don't i don't accept your answer but i wait why don't you expect one of you say well let's break it down he's a logical guy let's break it down so let's say he has a has things he's excited about new technologies new ideas just potential potential to create cool shit in the world alright so there's two ways of looking at this either hubspot hubspot is the best place to do that which i would just view like like i'm not i'm not saying the infrastructure i'm just saying like the company hubspot which is like a specific mission and set of customers it needs to serve and like existing business model and all those things like the odds that your creative brain would latch onto to an i idea that also was like should be on help hubspot red map that just seems like unlikely to me or just like an unnecessary limit that i wouldn't put on so then let's say there is an idea that you you get excited about your version of spacex or whatever it is you're a neuro link whatever the idea is either well hubspot is not limiting me and i'm getting these benefits okay cool there's that trade so it's kinda like what would you gain if you actually were out on your own you would like there's like all these things like when people have their job and then they try have a side hustle there's one great thing when you go and you quit your job to do a startup up we that you've now quit your job to do a startup up you've now told the world you've told yourself you've told everybody that like i'm gonna make a thing because i just gave up a thing and that means i gotta have a new thing now and i think that they burned the boats thing is like probably one of the only assets or advantages a startup in general has or an entrepreneur has is that they they just go all in on something they don't have any meetings about anything else they don't have any distractions and they've told the world i'm gonna do this and i think there's something very powerful about that and i think the if i really wanted to turn the knob and be like what would be the and by the way you don't have to do this i'm not saying one needs to do this in life but it's like let me see what i can let me see how fast this car can go let me see what i'm capable of i just view that you're more likely to see the highest potential version of you outside of hubspot versus doing side projects while using hubspot and then doing talking at inbound and then taking these meetings this gotta be the the un blended version the concentrated version had to be more potent than the blended version that's my case sean tried to convince a billionaire of a a founder of a thirty five billion dollar company like hey what are you gonna is the the ant telling the elephant how how we you gonna quit your job and actually do something with your life and go in side pro down no brad take it as a compliment it means i view you as a elon level character you know i i that's that's a very high praise thank you but i'll i'll say this like i think it's it needs to be sad i am a big big believer in kinda taking that leap of faith right and and going out and and doing the thing and that's great and i'll say it's good it's gonna sound defensive but as i don't mean it to be but like as i kinda write the next chapters of my life is i'm looking out like one of the questions i've asked myself is like okay so it's like what does success look like right like okay so what like what do i want wanna reflect back on like of the things that i did right it's and a couple things i've kinda emerge from that reflection is i like to build things and like that is like the true thing that there is a i like to build things right and so one thing i've kind of managed to do which doesn't happen often so i don't have any direct reports because that would keep me from building things right i if if ever there was a time we're like oh like i can no longer build things as a result of x whatever x happens to be i will break down that wall whatever it is up potter otherwise that's in one thing and i i will say this i mean they're i think your point really well taken which is most of the time we can have these kinda extra imposed rules on us for instance if you're an engineer us like well your cto you shouldn't be writing code anymore well it's like and i don't i do not accept that thesis because software is a creative discipline it's a very hits driven business so you have to be right a very few number of times it's like we don't tell a musician that's really really good you just stop like writing music and doing music and go hire something we don't tell exceptional writers to stop writing and you know manage a team of writers like keep writing and they'll let the others try do your best to minimize the stuff that's not writing time and that's what i feel like i'm doing i'm maximizing my build time and to me it's and my personal mission statement is to help millions grow better like that's the simple like i wanna be able to look back on it and say i had a positive impact on the most number of people like that that most play out like x some amount of impact where that impact is on why number of people that's my truth function and this is why i don't do one on one meeting because it doesn't scale right this is of the reasons i'm here and not elsewhere it's not just because i like you guys it's because i can have an impact and the reason i chose the topic it's like this what i wanna talk about like oh yeah know what's the best way for me to use this time that if i look back on it the people they're spending an hour and a half ish you know listening to this like was that a good use of my time did it actually did da deliver on the promise of at least marginally increase me my probability of making my first or next million right that's the you you've you you do this a a lot you kinda like are telling the story and you have like these little bits that are like wildly fascinating one of them being that you have like a personal mission do you have personal values like a company does that you you and your family or just you operate against we've talked about it we haven't done it we have so the the hub spot values are effectively the founders values right that's where the original kinda company values came from and they're and most companies are actually a reflection of their founders what what is the most controversial or value that has the biggest trade off like not everybody would choose this but we choose this what what's what is that for you guys right like not like integrity or you know like whatever things like that yeah one on one of that almost didn't make the cut not because it we don't agree with the value but there were others is humility like humble right and like the common argument that comes back is like we're supposed to be a winning team we're aggressive which we are right and so people often confuse humility with a lack of confidence or a lack of aggression assertiveness or all these things that's not it at all right the humility is is being self aware is being able to recognize and not being a know at all it's like i'm here to learn having that and and that is a large part of what drives and so i i've thought for that value for a long long time the second most controversial one is empathy which is our second value and that it didn't always used to be empathy we changed along the way sam what's our values on the that that's a good question the the reason i've been asking this is like well i've like thinking about like do i have values like what what are my values like it's kind of cool is denim value or a jack like it's it's kind of code to like cod it but no i like we don't i'm i well like we kinda have values like we said to we've had people in the pod who are like have done like bad stuff and you're and they're like are you gonna like me and we're like well our default is not to like criticize it's like to bill people up but sometimes that might happen but anyway we like so we have a couple but it's interesting to kind of explicitly say these are the values of x y and z and mark zuckerberg i i read this cool thing about him i or maybe even told me in the pod sean where he was like a value means you have to sacrifice something so move fast and break things means we are going to move fast and because of that i am okay with breaking stuff like it like too many people their values are things that are just obvious that don't involve involve a sacrifice ice they're are just pla yeah and and by the way there's not there's not many of these so for example move fa break things i think is in the pant on the hall of fame of like you know values another one is like ray dahlia bridge water thing they have like radical honesty or radical can which is like we are going to un comfortably be honest with each other and we just think that that maximizes in the long run but in the short run this is not gonna be like anywhere else you've worked because we take that we take that seriously we take the trade off which is discomfort for the upside of you know being radically honest so i think one thing have i've just because it jump to my end and i think it's it's a it's a useful thing so we talk about maximizing right and that's i i love that word and maybe you've i've likely heard of this notion like finding the maximum and then the the trap that people fall into is finding the local maximum versus a global maximum and just from a lay person's perspective it's like imagine that you're kinda looking at a graph like a normal we imagine a bell curve for those listening it's like oh there's a point at which that values is the highest why it's pop of the hill to speak in in in mass mathematical terms the kinda of local versus global maxima it's like okay well that's the highest point but let's say you were to zoom out on that same graph and then there's this other bell curve right next to it which is an even a higher maxima like okay well if you were just solving based on that chart that you were looking at because you were zoomed in you didn't actually find a maximum you found the local maxim not the global maxim that's the and so here's the and so that one that part of it is obvious the non obvious part is that often in order to even see the global maximum you actually have to climb the local maximum hill it can't be abstract set other the sidelines is like oh i'm gonna go like wander around yes yeah what you have to do sometimes is you have to make the effort to climb the smaller hill you get to the top spot it's like oh now i see the landscape and there's that massive mountain over there which is the thing i'm actually meant to go do right and so part of it and this goes back to the kind of connecting dots thesis as well it's like sometimes you have to do the thing that does that seem like the big bet in order to have the perspective to see what the big bet big bets going to be right sam have you heard this concept of ras like instead of saas companies ras put that on there and i was like is that like a different word like r but does i was like this this like ras is that is he gonna like make fun of is is ras me like you're gonna make fun of me like i'm gonna harass you no this is a big idea der could you do that do that ras be so we all know saas which is software as a service and we contrast software as a service to software as it used to exist back in like back in my day i can say that now and back in my day software was shipped in boxes on cds and things like that and you kinda plug it into your computer load the software up to do whatever you wanna to do and software the service was oh you don't actually buy the box you don't buy the cd or whatever we just provide the value of the software to you as a service over over the internet over the cloud results as a service is like actually you don't you had access to software you tell us what it is that you actually want to do what's the outcome that you're looking for and we'll just sell you that you want the linkedin blog post at the end a good example would be like oh i i could tell you like legal software to kinda analyze a contract in the real estate space that will give you commentary on whether this matches benchmarks or even in the vc world a church sheet or something like that like oh here's software that will help you like power right a real estate contract and do the it's like and it's like hubspot here's software that you can write blog posts to capture emails and get more customers yes but this thing is like okay well it's what if you could just get to intermediate steps like oh you run more customers what are you willing to pay for customers and this this idea is almost as old as time right which is because we've had like in that particular example we've had lead gen companies forever right which is effectively results as a service like don't worry about phone numbers don't worry about this thing called the internet or whatever k x x amount of dollars every time of your photo rings well and it's also a a sales technique which is like do you want guests to feel great at your home and to be popular okay buy our vacuum to keep your carpet clean yes that's exactly yeah well we've had that and yeah the copier that if people don't buy don't want drills they want holes right like that's that that the drills a tool holds is the actual outcome desired so ras is the kind of the next kind of wave of software which and there will still be software being used by whoever's providing the results of a service that's how the thing gets accomplished but the way it might be packaged and sold you know might end up being ras one thing i'm just closing out on the on the agent front as far as the call to action so i forget the name of the guy that built the m vault greg yeah greg okay so what greg did in terms of like sequencing these things together right so he effectively built an agent right it has multi steps each individual step may call like other ai tools agent dot ai not only is a professional network for distributing agents and finding agents discovering agents reviewing and rating agents and talking about agents it also has what's called an agent builder which is a platform for building agents without writing code you've had a good quarter hubspot stock i think almost hit an all time high you sold the business or you sold the domain to open a came on the podcast you came with the pod you're you're you know i don't i don't care what they say about you you're doing okay i'm doing okay doing okay i don't care what they say you're alright what i love about you is you have a bunch of things that sound like paradoxes like you're extremely gentle and kind you're also like i would say competitive and aggressive and and in other ways i think you are humble but then you're also a marketer and you're like oh i could see the marketing value of this and they're the practical value of this but i also you know i'd rather be you know quiet low key i don't need to brag and know so you you have all these like contradictory things which i think makes you interesting hey by the way is this you said there's a you go as soon as i get on a leader board i wanna be number one yeah you're like but then i don't wanna be honest with audible about this leader board is this a leader board or you're like i would like to be richer because it would be like like i think you're you might try to be cool and be like no i'm happy but like i think with every level you are on whether you were with one billion you wanna get ten whether you have ten you wanna get fifty just like no matter how ripped you get you wanna get a little bit more ripped like is it is it how much of a motivator is like you know it says one on forbes now how do i make it say ten ten billion yeah yeah yeah well it's it's a really good question i tend not to have explicit goals like goal setting is not something and i'm not discounting it i'm not a discouraging it at all i know some as smartest as people you know have goals that have those kind of like really concrete things that they're shooting for it's not that i don't do it now i never really did that right like okay i wanna get better i want you know i wanna have money i wanna be able to have freedom make choices i wanna have the things diane this is i've said this you know before i i'd like to configure the universe to my liking to the the best of my ability and whatever resources i can kinda accrue to help make that possible i i will go try and find a way to make that possible right that's that's but like so like deep down inside my soul i'm like i'm a math and physics guy that's not far enough to be a math and physics sky right and and my truth function is like i said before it's like okay i'm trying to create i'm based on that mission statement positive impact for the most number of people like multiply x by y and the marketing is part of that it's like okay well i'm not going to be able to impact people if i'm not doing some marketing it's like i can say the most brilliant things in the world if only seventeen people look at them then the value of x excess seventeen for that particular unit of unit of work and that's just not how i operate i will make sacrifices and other funds in order to solve the true like truth function to solve for the mission for me personally and that's sort of that that was the balance there we talked about a bunch of stuff you had opening remarks do you have a closing remark is there is there a way you wanna end it did you achieve your mission of of of saying what you thought would help somebody increase their odds my ask my favor is leave a comment and let me know what you thought that's where i keep that's the leader board i'm after right now sam it's like i'm number five on the youtube list i know comments and engagement actually help the algorithm probably more than lights do either the way for the record so dude you're the man we appreciate you doing this yeah i i have a notebook here where i take notes i'm not gonna turn it i don't be able to see it but i have filled three pages of notes so you're the man it's all the question beyond thanks thanks for having you thanks for ind my ind my quirks you're great man you're fun to hang out with you you are fun to hang out with your fun to talk to i feel energized when i talk to you it's good at the you guys we appreciate you that's a pod i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back