Asking Billionaire Investor - Andrew Wilkinson - How To Prepare For The Economic Collapse

i'm mostly holding cash and waiting for winter to come and i'm gonna buy businesses personally as well i just yeah i just want i want businesses you don't own any like vanguard index fund shit you are literally sitting on i imagine tens of millions of dollars of treasury bills yeah alright on today's episode we got andrew wilkinson joining if you don't know you gotta know andrew is the creator of tiny tiny owns like i know twenty thirty businesses at this point they own dr they own aero press basically he buys himself biz buys and sells businesses of total value maybe over a billion dollars at this point definitely over a hundred million in revenue and and he's sort of known as the the warren buffett of the internet that's the model that he chose to create so he didn't do the startup up path he creates one genius idea he didn't do the investor path where he's just putting small checks into these companies instead he was finding these little gems of businesses buying them when he's been doing this for like you i don't know ten fifteen years now and andrew andrew's become a good friend he's a friend of the potty listens to the pod so he knows the vibe he's probably the most well liked guest that we have so we're always happy to have back in this episode we talk about preparing for winter so how what moves he's making or has made in order to prepare for like you know what's going on in the economy so what he's doing in his business what he's investing in that sort of thing we talked about a couple of his new ideas or businesses that he started one like negotiating as a service or procurement as i'm told or or this other company called i see i i wanna give it all the but he talks about a couple of the ideas that he's working on and then we go on some tangent about why you should only rent your house not buy houses we talked about you know different ways that he gets together with other entrepreneurs and groups it's a good episode so about an hour and a half i think you'll like it or enjoy this episode dude wait hold on sean i haven't seen you in a minute where are you you you good oh dude i've been literally sitting at tesla charging stations for like the last year of my life it feels like i made a horrific mistake of renting a tesla for a road trip where'd you go just from here to la from the from the beta la and i thought okay that's cool might have to stop once or twice it stop five times basically every ninety minutes i had to stop for thirty minutes it was awful how fast were you going were you going above eighty no nothing not fast two kids in the back at a bunch of you know snacks like was this was not like some this is not me it was you that's how i felt that's how i felt towards the car i was like apparently this isn't what most tesla would be like but the tesla i had rented you know was was not the greatest and which kinda sucked because this was my sell my wife on tesla's tesla the next car trip and i had the opposite effect you know what's interesting is like i bought tesla like maybe eight or nine years ago and it was insane it felt like you know going to the future or whatever and i just bought the new bmw i x which is like their electric suv and you realize that the main feature of the tesla is how quiet and fast it accelerates and instead of being a tesla feature you realize oh that's just an electric car feature and then as soon as i get in my bmw i plug in car so it's like the apple interface and you realize like at the end of the day these electric cars is like there's really not any competitive advantage you know and tesla frankly the interior is so much worse than bmw and all these german and american manufacturers so like i'm really curious to see how it all plays out now yeah they've done such a good job of rebranding fake leather to vegan interior and i that's what they say they say it's vegan friendly interior i'm like oh you're just low quality like the fake leather and whenever i sit in them they feel like plastic i'm not a tesla fan i also think that they're like super not sexy yeah like the model x looks like a weird big toe that or something i mean i think like it's they're great they're great cars like i i really like them but i just think that everyone over overestimate their a competitive advantage and that at the end of the day you've got all these legacy manufacturers and you know ultimately if apple and google are providing the interface that most people use it barely matters right it's just like a platform with an electric motor that takes you from a to b and then you know does it work with your iphone or your android and if you look at the tesla interface it's like really bad it you can't sync your maps up on the screen or anything like that it's not great so sean you're not getting one actually i still probably will get one but yeah i gotta like do research and shit now like i joined the subreddit for tesla fans it's so crazy by the way how many products are just for tesla owners because you basically have i don't know how many million but like like in the subreddit alone there's two million members and that's a and that's reddit reddit it's like the niche part of it right so like i don't know exactly how many cars tesla has sold now but some somebody can grab that i think they're doing they did like a million this quarter delivered to something like that something crazy like a huge huge jump but let's say that there's five million tesla out there those are five million high net worth people who can be targeted with specific products and i've seen some people do this one guy had this thing called tesla i forgot what just called like tesla camper or some shit like that it basically would turn the trunk of your tesla if you fold down the back backseat seat and you open up the trunk of it it it would turn it into like a sleeper van and it was just like a bed that goes in the back of a tesla it's perfectly made to fit the back of a tesla it looks sleek like a tesla thing and it was like they're and they were doing like you know they're doing pretty well these guys would do seven figures on just just as one product with very minimal ad spend because they can go highly targeted with contact instagram and stuff like that to to reach tesla owners and then same thing people selling these adapters that let you charge everywhere or there's an app because i was like trying to plan the road trip and i just typed in the destination and like you know it gives you a suggestion on where to stop to charge but it wasn't great that's why i stopped five times i was like there had to be a better more optimal route than this and there's some old ass app called a better route planner or something like the ab b p and it's like the number one ranked thing the interface looks like it's you know from the nineties and it just does a slightly better job at like giving you some custom control over what what charging stations you should hit on a on a trip and i just realized like wow there's this is like a it's like rolex owners or things like that like these high net worth communities that are super passionate and they're locked into that ecosystem you know apple being the biggest example of this like the big like the apple blogs that's that we're out early on got over time this like there's the same opportunity with tesla and other products like that that's awesome yeah maybe maybe i'll be getting one too but we'll see so we should so so we should reintroduce andrew so andrew will get us back definitely the the the the number one guest of the pod both in our hearts and the fans hearts so and i don't know why we don't schedule more these because like we should but every quarter or so air just text us he's like hey i wanna come on i got stuff and we're like great pick pick a day let's do this and so he's back he's the founder ceo of of tiny and they buy beautiful internet businesses he's got a bunch of pods of this in the past explaining that stuff but he's also he also listen you still listen to the pod regularly i know you used to listen to the son at night yeah all the time i take little breaks because i get too pumped up sometimes when i listen like in the sonic that's the last thing i listen i listen in the shower or the sonic usually alright so down more than four hours always i'm always fully i'm always fully nude when i listen to yeah would it make you feel comfortable now if we turn the cameras off and pick off or clothes about okay that would be ideal so you had a bunch of ideas or topics sam you wanna go to yeah so you got you have a bunch of good shit you what do you want so we're gonna talk about like what you're doing for winter meaning like what you're doing which your personal and business finances given that the economy may not be going well we're gonna talk about like different ideas that you have i wanna talk about the workers so you like you've been hiring some anonymous folks and then you also have like five or six companies that you've started and we're gonna be like a post mortem on them and like say like what went well and what didn't go well so sean you're yeah alright great i was gonna say you you drive sean because andrew already told me a lot of his stuff so i want you to tell me what's most interesting yeah let's start with winter so andrew maybe tee it off which is i think there is a consensus now that like we're either in a recession or going to be in a recession and that this is not gonna end soon give me your take on what you're what you what your view is of the market and then what are you doing to prepare for that situation yeah so i mean there's this great quote by andy grove only the paranoid survive so ultimately like none of us know what's gonna happen right like we could have a rebound i was super terrified like when covid hit i thought the world was gonna fall apart and it didn't but what i do when something like this happens is i stress test my business so if you think about it like if you're about to drive your family in a minivan across a large bridge that's like you know i'm a kilometer in the sky and there's a one in twenty chance that bridge can't take the weight of your car you don't wanna drive across right it doesn't matter if you're probably gonna be fine you just don't wanna go across and so i think you wanna stress test and over engineer your business for all the worst case scenarios and though so effectively you know that's what i've been thinking about a lot and i think what people miss is there's two ways that you know something like this can go bad right the worst way it can go bad is total loss right you go bankrupt your business fails you're embarrassed it's terrible i think that's the worst but the less bad option that no one really talks about is missing opportunity so you get presented with something incredible and you're ill liquid you can't take advantage of it so for example let's say you're an e commerce company and suddenly ad rates drop you know five acts and you could go out and take the market and sell shit loads of your product you can't do that because you're you're liquid or you're just barely holding on you don't have any cash reserves maybe there's an amazing acquisition you can merge or take over a competitor or something but you can't do that so you get instead of errors of o mission you get errors of mission you're not able to actually execute on those opportunities and so you know i've been thinking a lot about this over the last couple months and generally we operate quite conservatively our goal is like you know any debt we have we wanna be able to pay it off pretty much at any time we try and keep as much cash as we can head office but there's a couple specific things that we're doing that i figured i'd share that could be useful but so number one start was what is a stress test so that sounds cool i wanna stress test my business great i sit down today what the heck am i doing to do that okay so you would say k what happens if revenue drops fifty percent in this business right are you able to lay people off is that a possibility are you stuck in a bunch of long term contracts and leases that you can't get out of do you have a lot of debt that you can't pay you know you're really modeling out like what what i'll do is just do a simple spreadsheet and say like okay if revenue goes up by twenty percent here's what it looks like if it goes down by twenty percent if it goes down by fifty percent if it goes down by seventy percent or for example one thing that often happens is you still have customers but in many businesses they have accounts receivable and people stop paying so people they're gonna pay you but they might just pay you late maybe in ninety days or a hundred and twenty days and so what happens if no one pays you for two or three months do you have enough money in the in the bank do you have credit lines etcetera so i think you know it's really wise to kind of do that shadow boxing and imagine a bunch of nightmare scenarios so that you can sleep at night great what yeah actually continue what you're going continue where we're going and then i'm gonna ask you a question yeah okay so i'll talk a little bit about like what we're specifically doing so everyone always says you know the best companies get started by a during a recession which is absolutely true but at the end of the day i am not gonna be putting a lot of money into crazy venture bets and what i mean by that is i'm not gonna be taking like a lot of risk right so i'm not gonna go and invest in the e commerce company with five hundred k of revenue at a twelve million dollar valuation i'll still keep betting on new companies but i'm doing it in a much more conservative way so for example we have an rolling fund we invest about twelve million dollars a year there and i'm pivoting it to totally focus on secondary and minority buyout so for example a founder who gets cold feet or wants to buy their business partner something like that i'll do non binary deals so what i mean by that is like if revenue and earnings get to where they say they're gonna be their valuation is one thing if they don't the valuation is another so kind of our investors win in either scenario and then the other one is strat like structured deals so for example saying to someone look i'll give you a five million dollar valuation but i wanna guaranteed fifteen percent return in the case of liquidation or dividends and that kind of stuff and then also and you guys have talked about this a lot but the idea of default alive i wanna be investing in businesses where if they can't raise the next round they're not going out of business and then the the other thing with venture is like we've realized too we can do venture internally by inc businesses with low downside so for example like turning our p and l expenses into businesses in and of themselves so for example like we want better procurement internally we wanna negotiate rates and get our p and l under control and so we started a business to do that we want to you know get better credit across all of our businesses we started another business to do that so that's the kind of stuff we're doing with venture we just we just talked to all about that the other day and what was your take sam on what on what he just said you're think it's i'm i should do that i am doing that or i'm doing something different pardon me thinks that like that's a little well i personally wouldn't do that because i'm like man when chic gets bad i get afraid and i just wanna focus focus focus and when i think of like you starting something new i'm like whoa aren't she gonna have to like allocate like another five hundred thousand dollars to the salary for buyer dot c and like or you know like however are many of the salaries and how much is gonna cost to do a new website and so i get i get nervous about that so are you're not are you baking those in to like new expenses are you saying like look i could just go and cut costs and save a little bit of money or i could go spend a little bit more money build a company around it well i'm looking at businesses like there's been businesses where okay here's an example so when we started buyer which is our negotiation service for software that we launched two years ago and we ended up selling it to ramp so i think we started that business for fifty k at the end of the day we're looking at it and going this is a very low risk bet where we're basically finding someone who you know they wanna start a company we're giving them all the tools to do it and we're gonna partner with them provide all the capital but at the end of the day we're looking at really really simple capital light businesses that can get revenue within like two or three months i don't want something i mean i've done i can talk about this later but i've done businesses where we go for ten years and are never profitable and we're just pouring good money after bad i you know i don't do that anymore what are you doing with your personal portfolio at the moment what's that like what those percentages look like where where each thing is so basically it's cash so i have treasury bills and then i also have a the only stock i hold right now is per square holdings and the reason i really like that is a it's trading for far less than the value of the underlying assets so it's a holding company that owns a bunch of blue chip stocks and it's trading at about sixty six percent of the net asset value so if there's a hundred dollars of stocks you're paying sixty six cents and then they also are but that's my design i highly help most of these don't most of these kind of like holding company types traded a discount anyways not to this degree right at the end of the day like this why for the type of fund is well i think there's a variety of different reasons i mean it's ill liquid it's traded in europe it's run by bill ac who has had you know a few blow ups and people associate him with blow ups if you actually look at his record he's killed it and i'm the other thing i like about that business by the way is that they own a very large position in interest rate swap ins so as interest rates go up the fund actually does better so over the last if you look at the net asset value over the last four weeks it's barely moved while the larger market has gone down significantly but anyway i'm mostly holding cash and waiting for winter to come and i'm gonna buy businesses personally as well i just yeah i just want i want businesses you don't own any like vanguard index fund shit you just are literally sitting on i imagine tens of millions of dollars of treasury bills yeah and that's what do you do i guess where's is your main focus with your balance sheet like how much of your worth is in your personal accounts versus let's say if you think about okay my my net worth how much of it is associated inside tiny and you need to be smart about what you're doing inside tiny versus under personal because i think for most entrepreneurs most of their net worth is in their in their business and then their personal kind of checking accounts savings accounts stock trading accounts are much smaller in comparison yeah i'm like ninety percent in tiny but what i have done is i've had i've had liquidity and other things outside of tiny you know tiny is a holding company that c own with chris and there's been other assets like legacy assets that have sold or cash flowed and so i've taken that money and compounded it and done stuff with it personally and the way i look at the personal money is if everything goes pair shaped with tiny i still wanna make sure that i you know can retire and be free and have enough money to do stuff so it's a little bit more conventional but you know what's funny is you know you're like oh you don't have etfs and stuff as far as i'm concerned i do have an etf because per square holdings owns ten positions right so it's a diversified stock portfolio and it just happens to be managed by bill what percentage of your net worth or sorry if you have one number in treasury bills how's that compared to the other number in per squares per square i think it's fifty fifty right now and one thing that i've been following basically like two years ago so or a year ago you own or c you're you're a majority or i actually don't know what your percentages is i think it's in the the and or report but you own we commerce which is yeah a collection of shopify plugins ins as well as a few other products that's like a really really good business i forget what it said in the annual indoor report but it's publicly traded it's like fifty million or sixty million dollar a year in in annual revenue and its peak stock was like six hundred million dollars it was crushing it now like the rest tech it's just been decimated to like i what is it today i i think it's like eighty million or something when how does it feel like you're the only person i know who's like this wealthy well no know we talked to our mesh our message was like yeah i'm lost like two three hundred million dollars here other day how's is like once it feel like what's it what where's your perspective and where's your emotions when you're seeing this thing destroy it and be amazing at six hundred million all the way down to eighty like how do you feel about that so i think if i was just like a pure one of the interesting phenomenon i've seen is people who are great entrepreneurs often are just great entrepreneurs they don't become investors they you know they don't like thinking about the stock market and finance and stuff i actually really enjoy that side and so i've spent the last ten years learning about investing and reading about warren buffett and warren buffett mentor benjamin graham has this whole idea of mister market right so the stock market is like this moody person it goes up and down at the end of the day if you know what your business is worth it's irrelevant what the stock market says it's worth so personally i mean yeah like sure there's a little bit of an ego hit seeing your net worth have some zeros pulled off of it but at the end of the day i know that number is made up anyway so for me it really doesn't affect me day to day i just go do i still own a great business well in it you're you're personally you're fine like you've got liquidity and you've valve all these other things going on but like i imagine let me put let me put it this way there's a great buffett story and he says you know sam let's say you own a farm and it makes you a million dollars a year of profit right and some yoke walks up and goes hey sam i'll give you fifty thousand dollars for that farm you just go go away like no i'm not gonna sell and then someone else one day comes along and says hey i'll give you twenty million dollars maybe you consider that but the idea is that at the end of the day these locals will yell numbers at you and you don't have to sell right unless you sell that's when it matters right if you sold for fifty grand because you're panicked because you're going oh the economies in a recession maybe my farm will crumble and you sell for fifty grand yeah that sucks but if you ignore the yoke it's a irrelevant and in the same vein we all own houses and the houses the values fluctuate constantly but we don't feel that right because you don't see a ticker or if you own the hustle there was times where if the hustle had been publicly traded it would have been worth next to nothing and then there are other times where it would be worth crazy numbers right and and you at the end of the day you know your business you know what it's worth yeah da said this thing it goes valuation os around value and i just have this image so you know so i imagine you're creating value in this business the line is going up it's pretty steady it's really it's it's quite hard actually to have like dramatic jumps in the value of your business or dramatic downs and then dramatic highs again it's like that's not really how values created in most businesses and and he's like but then value is this like crazy moody line that's swinging up and down on like higher and lower than the value at any given time and if you you have to be able to differentiate between the value of a business and the valuation of a business and that's i think what you're what you're talking about totally do you wanna talk about some of these what do you wanna get to now sean well i was gonna say i have the opposite strategy as andrew as i often tend to do with most of my friends i have the the opposite strategy not by design i wish that was not true but like for example right now i'm doing more i'm putting more attention and energy and doing more deals in venture than i did in the past year it past two years really because was your personal money well though the fun money but you i'm the steward of that capital right so and it's and the the returns of that my i have personal money in there as well but like the returns of that i think are are gonna be pretty meaningful personally but this amazing thing has happened which is that all the founders have just read bad news for like six months straight and this has done two things one a bunch of like not a bunch of people who would have quit later quit now which is fantastic because picking is really hard in startups and so like you know thanks for making it easy where like you meet a founder who's just sort of like yeah so what like okay okay who you who cares about what's going on in the world i'm still gonna do this thing i was obsessed with it before just because there's a war in ukraine and a pandemic and the stock markets down the crypto is down doesn't change my interest in this like niche thing so you see that person you're like okay great they're they're in it for the long haul you see other people who are pivoting like crazy and you're like okay they're not really in it for the long haul the second thing is that they've cut all their valuations by like forty to sixty percent or more the same deal yeah we're more so the same deal you could get you know for ten million you're now getting for four or five million right twenty million you're now getting for ten million and so but but the reality is that the that same business was gonna exit seven to ten years from now we're like the market like they're reacting they're changing their valuation based on today's data but they're you're gonna get paid out so you get to buy cheaper but you get to sell seven to ten years from now when the market conditions are gonna be dramatically different than today and likely a lot better than whatever this next you know kind of down cycle of the market looks like over this year and next year whatever however long my worry my worry is anchor bias right so i mean if you think about it everyone was saying venture valuations were crazy in twenty nineteen right let's say the average seed in you know or or sorry angel valuation was say five million in twenty nineteen which was much higher than it was in twenty sixteen in twenty sixteen i see deals for one to three million so then it goes to five and then in twenty twenty twenty twenty one let's say it goes to twenty million right and then it comes back down to five and we all go oh wow it's a crazy deal right so my worry is that these businesses should actually be valued at one to three million because if anyone came to me with most of these businesses you know as a as a cash flow real world investor it just looks insane yeah but you suddenly way to get your money back is to have a massive exit right but that's always been true for venture right venture a venture deal will look horrible to any private equity type of buyer and in the same way a private equity deal to a venture capitalists will look also horrible because their their criteria and their lens and their model they're based on fun of it like totally different factors and andrew on this podcast they're both you said i didn't invest in slack when i had the opportunity i didn't invest in this or that or this and you've made i don't on dozens or maybe even hundreds of investments so you you you walked the walk as well but you you said oh i wish i could have done that this i wish i would have done that i made a huge mistake to do that an exercise that i do all the time that i tried to do all the time is i try to ask myself what like you know like we constantly say like oh i wish i would have known that this company was gonna be as big as it was and i wish i would have pounce it on that and i had that opportunity or there is this opportunity that i had and i missed it and i always asked myself what is happening this second this week this month where i'm gonna look back and there's a chance that it's gonna say i really just screwed that up like that was like oh like for example for me it was when i was running the hustle facebook ads i could buy users for a dollar and they were worth ten dollars to me like i knew at the present this is a good deal and i didn't go harder on that and i missed that opportunity and so right now i am wondering you know i about eight months ago sean and i were like dude we're never gonna make money on angel investing because like the valuations are twenty million dollars when the company should be five million dollars and like these whole this whole like idea of like a tim bears investing fifteen thousand dollars into uber and making fifty million dollars that can never happen with us the numbers just don't work now i'm seeing these numbers and i'm like is that happening right now is this opportunity does this exist the the second i would say you guys have a very unique opportunity because of your profile now right i think like tim ferris was able to get into the best deals because people wanted him in them and you guys are gonna have that same opportunity but i guess the question is are you playing are you playing ro or are you playing poker i play poker right i wanna play with very good odds in my favor and i wanna know the odds i don't wanna play ro where it's almost totally random i still think venture is totally random i do it for fun off the side of my desk and don't get me wrong when i see i look back and go i could have predicted maybe not slack but certainly there's some of the businesses where i could see it was quite obvious that they were gonna be winners and i could have pushed harder to invest in them but i still look at that as kind of random because i've had that feeling on businesses where i've lost everything so see for me what i'm saying is you're about to enter an environment where anyone with cash who has a large sum of cash is gonna be able to buy a business at say a twenty or a thirty percent earnings yield meaning you can buy a business and pay yourself back in two or three years maybe five years and you can buy good businesses right because everyone's gonna be panicking and wanting to sell there's gonna be great opportunities to me i'd just rather play that poker game than venture right now and i'm focused on it it's not to say i'm not gonna venture long term and if a friend of mine who's amazing comes to me and says hey i need a hundred thousand dollars for my company i will invest all day still i'm just saying i'm not focusing any energy there right now what's an example of a company that you try to buy recently and they wouldn't sell or an example of a company that you can you can reveal now and it's no big deal because that it's just it won't happen but is there any companies that you that that are good examples of this well there's one really weird one bridge based dot com i started playing bridge like five years ago and it's kind of like chess dot com there's always nerds that play the website isn't particularly good but i was quite impressed by you know all the numbers behind it i think i ended up selling to someone else we looked to chess dot com that ended up obviously blowing up with everything that happened with queen's ga i mean there's all sorts of businesses i i won't kiss and tell because you know we still might look at some of them but we've looked at a lot of kind of off the beaten path interesting businesses like that where you find like a a nerdy cohort of people that have a dedicated place where they all gather how much you think bridge based dot com sold for i'm looking at now it looks like it has like i don't know eight million monthly unique visitors it's a it's pretty huge yeah i think my mom uses this by the way that little kiss and tail line i have this sheet on my phone where i just save little throw away lines that like i call them get at of jail free phrases or it's basically like how do you use a phrase in certain specific situations i'll give you another example so andrew just did one where it's like you get kinda put on the spot and you don't really wanna share so you have a phrase that get you out of it smoothly safely securely and like no damage done versus you know what there were many other things that he could have said in a response that just would have been like sort of awkward and another one my i my uncle told me this once he goes he was like trying to do this deal and it wasn't really working and i kinda we all kinda felt like i feel like this deal is doable but we're just not there yet and like maybe we just need to like you know if you just wanted to dine this guy a little bit like i think it would happen but you can't just tell somebody i'd like to you know one and dine you that doesn't really work and he's he's just like you know my mentor told me you gotta meet someone belly to belly if you're really ever gonna do a deal with them and like whether it happens or not you never regret meeting another man belly to belly they guy laughs he said okay yeah sure and and used that as the to get what he wanted which is i'd like to meet you in person in a kinda informal way and i have no agenda like and i can't come up with a new agenda to do it i'm just telling you that this something i believe fundamentally that the two people need to be belly belly if they wanted to if they ever wanna do you have any entire folder dedicated to these phrases what other folders do you have and what other words are in that folder like you use one all the time like don't don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining you know like it's like how do i how do i get my point across you know with a little bit of humor a little bit of show chip at a little bit of like ambiguity versus just speaking so fucking like because i have this problem i'm really direct so i kinda needed these tools in order to do stuff and i stole this actually from neville neville in his copywriting course but when i was creating my copywriting course i taken other people's to see what do they know that i don't know what are what are some think useful things they've taught and one of the things he teaches in there is he goes what does he call like he's like transition but he has this long list of like transition phrases and it's like or like he calls it like slippery transitions or something like that it basically it's like we all know that you should kinda start with small talk and then get to the meat if you just go straight to the meat it's a little bit like oh aggressive and upfront but also it's hard to be like you know small talk small talk small tuck so maybe who do you wanna do you know like would you like to buy my product and it's like oh damn like you know awkward and so he he has this long list of like his little connector phrases and was oh that's really useful actually like this is a useful thing to get out of a course so when i created michael kors i started creating like these banks of like phrases headline formulas transition words like different things i'm like this is your go to when you need to sign off or something like say hello in a fun way sign off in a fun way give you know transition or like you know give somebody something that's direct you know and i saw i started creating those for myself dude belly to belly is a good one yeah it's a good one right like if face to face doesn't have the same touch belly belly it's a chuckle and you're like okay i understand what you're trying to do andrew are you doing any writing at the moment you're you've always been a great writer but you have it didn't seem like you're really producing a lot are you riding for your companies or anything yeah i'm working on a a book actually what really on what yeah yeah just about the story of building our business and just yeah like the experience that i've had over the last fifteen years what's it gonna be called i don't know yet i'm still figuring it out i just signed like a book agent and i think i i think i sold it but yeah we'll see it's fun i mean it's it goes back to like i think i've spent so many years frantically writing like twitter threads that disappeared of the ether and i love i love the idea of actually building a narrative story and writing something more substantial and i'm really enjoying that process and it's just a it's a new thing right it's a totally new thing to learn i'll i'll share some stuff with you tell you a little book story that will give so somebody when you tweeted it out you're coming on you're like what should we talk about there's a bunch of questions bunch of good ones honestly but one that stood out to me was this guy goes give us can you guys each tell us like an example of a a butterfly effect moment in your life meaning a chance encounter you had with somebody or somebody or something that like just like nudge you in a different trajectory that kinda changed your your thinking at the time it didn't seem like monumental decision or event it just seemed like this kind of harmless chance encounter and and your book thing reminded me of my answers to that which is that once upon it i think i've told the story board once upon a time my dad was supposed to come to this meeting this and he's like hey i was gonna go this meeting in san diego he's was oh should come with me i was a college kid at the i think a junior senior in college and he's like come with me i was like okay well i guess like i'll just tag along i was shadow you for this i'd never done that before so it was kind of a random thing that my dad tried to do and and then my dad's flight gets canceled but dad's coming from indonesia at the time so flight gets canceled and i'm like oh shoot i'm already at my connecting stop like i'm like wherever kansas city and like should i what i he's like just go do the meeting i'm like i don't even know the context like i don't even know what you do for a living am i gonna talk to this guy he's like don't worry this guy is great and i told him you'll be and he he just said come hang out with me so i go to san diego i meet this guy and the guy comes in as like a ball of energy how and he's got neil sent centurion he comes in as this ball of energy charisma he's immediately cracking jokes he's telling me a story he walks in and he's late like twenty five minutes late i'm just sitting in his room and he goes he goes man i'm sorry i just got off the phone with cove whatever comcast he's like let me tell you one thing you got a pen get out your pen write this down and i'm like i just met this guy he even said hello yeah he didn't even know my name and i like go get my pen because like i'm the little bitch that i am and he's like he's like write this down if you have great customer service you can run the world do you hear me run the world and like and so he's like this character and it turns out this guy this crazy career where he he built like skyscraper in san diego because he's like oh real estate where i'm wanna make my money then he's like got into hollywood he wrote to like you know like scripts for films or something like that he was a show runner for for for a bit and so he thought that that's how we would make it then he started tech companies with the internet boom and then he married the woman who started one eight hundred flowers and he's like just had this crazy career he had invested he bumped into a guy in an elevator and invest his company and it ended becoming like c or something like that like this big multi billion dollar thing so he had this crazy like he just wow me with all this like this like afternoon basically he takes me this restaurant to go eat have a special table for him and the table cloth is all made out of paper it's a high end restaurant but his was made out of paper like a kids table and they had crayon that he would just draw diagrams and like cut deals at this table and he didn't he never had to order they would just bring out loads of food and then he'd walk away at the end like uber he never had to pay and i was like i don't know who this guy is but like that's what i wanna be in life like i wanna be this ball of energy who's just cut deals drawn on tables and like you know has had five different arcs of his career in these different spaces and he's still like i don't know this guy guy's like sixty five seventy years old he still seems to have all the energy in the world so and then i just like went back to school and like but if i hadn't had that i don't think i would had this blueprint that like being a entrepreneur could be cool and it could have like more variety and i didn't have to like choose one thing i like i just saw this one example for one day and it was like a dream basically then it was done i never talked this guy now he's still there still in san the diego and he's like guest teaches at some school there and he's got this man mega man mansion on the top of the hill and that's still what he does that's awesome i love crazy that was a good story oh sorry the the book part on the way out he's like so i'm with this guy for two and a half hours and then i'm just like whoa i don't know what the hell i just saw i'm twenty one years old i've never i've never in like in college don't meet people like this i didn't at least so is the first time i ever met somebody like dynamic like this and somebody who had made their own path and didn't just like follow their major into some career and on the way out he just shove a book in my hand and it's his book and it's called i'm there for your baby and if you wanna read this guy's book i it never sold a lot of copies i don't think but he wrote he wrote a note to me in it handed me this book and then on my plane right out of there i sure enough read the book cover to cover and by the i like the guy by the time i was done with a book i love the guy and so i always i i remember that because i was like oh i've always thought of books in one way as this like i don't know mass market you you're trying to become a best seller or something like that and then i realized a book is just a tool that like anybody can use like some people use their book to get public speaking gigs but this guy used it for a different thing which was he could turn a like it into a love just by handing the this book because it's cool i'd met you for two hours or an hour i'm not gonna talk to you anymore but this book will sell you on me and like what i'm all about through entertaining stories and whatever and and i was just remember thinking oh that's a great idea to do so that every person you meet for the rest of your life you can convert them into being a a believer and a buyer of a fan of what you do and that's actually how i wanna use my book when i write a book i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or doing databases hubspot grow better i did this like personal values exercise like six months ago or so and when i thought about what do i actually want what do i actually like why do i do business it's i wanna meet interesting people and one of the great things about being on twitter or coming on this podcast is that i'll randomly bump into people in a coffee shops i'll be sitting there and some guy walk up and say hey i heard you on my first million i wanna tell you about my business and i ended up making all these new friends so i probably made like twenty new friends from this podcast i've had random lunches with people literally like i've been in line for lunch and someone's been like hey wanna have lunch and i have and so the next level of that is yeah like a book you get to exist great in line for lunch like you can't say no we like like i know you wanna rush sure totally but it great the guy with the guy is super interesting he had like a airplane leasing business it was it was crazy but but i think a book you get to exist in someone's brain for like twenty twenty five hours and it's exactly that right you can actually get someone to truly understand who you are and then when you meet them you don't have to do your pre you don't have to your pitch you don't have to do what that guy did with you don't have to sell you can just be yourself and they already know the deal and i think there's something really cool about that so speaking of meeting interesting people let me ask you guys if you would do this so i was talking to nathan barry the other day nathan barry you know he owns convertkit kit or he owns the most all of it he's probably worth two or three hundred million dollars he's worth a lot and he told me how when he travels sometimes he'll organize like he'll stay like i mean once it go somewhere for seven days he'll play in an eighth day that's dedicated to work and what he'll do is he'll do like a six hour meeting where he'll let like twenty or thirty people all come in hand with him but he charges them and it's almost like a very miniature conference and i could i maybe i'm butchering a little bit about what he does but basically he's like i got the inspiration because base camp jason freed and those guys used to do these things where they would charge two hundred to two thousand dollars and you can come and hang out their office and i thought you know i should do this when i travel and it will pay for my trip and also i can meet interesting people and i thought about this and they cons are it could feel like s and weird to like well i'm charging money for my time but i think he actually said andrew he went to one of your things and you gave the money away i think like he yeah and i was like yeah that is the s part but it is kind of a cool way to like meet people that cross a certain threshold and it could if it could like a pay for your trip and even though it's like i don't i don't i have enough money that i could pay for my trip there's something about it that i find so into to do this have you ever thought about sean i would you do this sean and andrew what yeah what we gonna say oh i was just gonna stay really struggle with this so like you guys are i think one of you guys is on intro i'm on intro because i'm listen i'm fred founder on intro listen listen first of all i don't even have any i don't even think i have well i don't have that many dates available but my friend started it and he's was like hey use i was like fine i started using it then he puts my ad everywhere on on facebook and so i only make like an app we're to available a month and it's just crazy my just service that lets you meet sam that's i'm pretty sure that's what intro is based on the ads that i've seen that's gonna interesting oh my god they're killing me with all these ads well it's a terrible way to use your time right like what we did we did a a charity asked me anything so we're were like okay anyone who pays whatever you donate will double it and i think we like suggested the donation or whatever but with nathan and about twenty other on or we did like a zoom spent two or three hours answering all their questions i think we raised like fifty grand for a charity which was pretty cool but i really struggle with this kind of stuff because at the end of the day you're selling your hours and i don't wanna be in that business but it's fun it's a fun way to do it and but i i feel like it compromises the like people expect value right so if you're on day eight of your trip and your exhausted you now have to dial it up like that guy that met you in san diego you have to be like history on it you have to wear a mask you have to like pump yourself up and i find that one of the things i've realized is i'm very capable of doing that like i can i can be miserable and i can pump myself up like tony robbins style like jump on the tram and all that crap but it makes me miserable and so i just don't wanna do that would you do it sean i would not charge for that mostly because if i'm doing that it's because i want to meet interesting people so i'd rather say it's filtered or i have the right to just stop talking to you or boot you out and like though that's fight like i can make these meetings ten minutes right so brad fell did this in brad fell of vc and boulders it's probably like one of the main what most well known venture capitalists in boulder colorado and he used to have this one day on his calendar every month called the random random day or something like that and he would just let you book a fifteen or twenty minute meeting with him and he just in a coffee shop and he sit there for four or five hours and he just tried to meet as many people you could and he had no filter he's like you don't need a warm intro you don't need this you don't need that and first that was great branding for him i'm like i'm a man of the people you know it's like when gary does these tiktok and it's like it's just some you know somebody who comes up to him and they're look like you they're like h and they're they're like gary can i just get a minute of your he's like of course i'm anything for my my fans and he's like carrie you know how do i don't want money up the money for dinner like here's what you're gonna do you're gonna take that guys dinner and sell it now you got two dinners give them back one and you got one for yourself it's like he gives them this like pump up thing and the guy like thank you so much and they hug and they embrace and i'm like wow i don't wanna touch anyone who listens to the podcast you know this like i just here's a rule we're not touching like touching is not happening you know like this is not a thing but he does it gives a a a brand vibe of like there is one of the people he's a man a man of the fans and so similarly brad would do this and i thought there was immense brand value for him doing this and then the second thing is was i'm sure there is some when i met i was like why do you do these because i went to one and he goes he goes you know you have to create a a landing spot for luck and other people called this is surface area for serendipity but like you want to give in your schedule someplace first of all those both both those phrases chant gold landing area for luck and surface area for serendipity sorry go ahead those are both beautiful yeah future book titles so so basically you wanna you wanna create call like intentionally creates space because the more successful you get the busier you typically will get by default and the less space goes on your calendar buffett and others like know andrew you do this too or you just carve out space i'm gonna think i'm gonna read i'm gonna walk i don't need to have meetings after meetings after meetings because guess what if i let that happen that's exactly what's gonna happen in my calendar and what this i did i thought it was interesting was you know cool if i just stay in my bubble and i owed me admit people who on the surface like are you know worthy of my time or whatever then i'm just gonna miss out on a whole bunch of other and so how do i carve out you know what's the one percent of my time or two percent of my time that i'm willing to allocate towards randomness luck serendipity just so i can like have that in my in my mix it's amazing how it goes away like i remember when people would email me early in my career i would be so flattered like they write me like four paragraphs i'd write them a really thoughtful response and get on the phone with them and then you know you just get more and more of those and you waste your time like they're only interesting maybe like one out of five times and the rest of time you wanna off yourself and so i basically stopped and then it was like oh shit how do i get that serendipity and to be honest going on here is a great form of serendipity because of those random meetings and introductions and stuff but most of the time if someone emails me i honestly i delete it unless it's like one line and super clear if it's a pitch or anything i just deleted it i i found my my most naval naval thing that i can't my version naval quote where i realized like the point of this podcast is not to be well known and point point of creating content is not to be well known meaning known by like a lot of people but rather to be known well so like what's happening now is in my inbox or by dms people are sending me stuff that is so interesting to me or they're making intros that are so on point and the reason they can do that is because if they listen to the podcast they know exactly this of shit i'm and that sam into and so we get this like amazing inflow of just dope stuff that we didn't have the eyes and ears out there to to go see and that's when you know it's working like if for anyone out there wants to create content don't make your goal well known make it known well and you'll know it's working because you'll start getting more than your you're you're being asked for in these emails or dms and andrew i'm sure you you get the same which is like people send you either interesting companies or deals or they wanna come you know work for you in this they wanna help you solve specific problems because they know you well they know what you're what you're interested in what you're what you're looking for more of dude i had a guy just recently sent me so he goes hey my website does this much revenue and this much profit and he told me all about it and i didn't reply and he goes what you don't believe me and he sent me a google drive with his tax returns like head is had his had his social and everything and it was one hundred percent his tax return i mean he i guess i could've had photoshop but it and he goes and then here's his reply was like see told you say the small boy stuff that is that absolutely all the boy stuff the tax returns it was like seventeen million dollars of income and any and and he sent me multiple years and it was hilarious it was one of the best thing things and i was like you know instead of like a casey and neistat and dave port used to do these awesome videos where they would unbox all the fan mail that they got and it was actually really fun content i'm like we need to have like an un unboxing our inbox no no we unbox your tax returns people just send us a tax returns and then open it up and we react we create a youtube react channel just to your income and your business to your p and l is that i wanna does does he wanna sell or get you to invest or what was it wants to be friends i he just boing to be friends he just like friends you know joe joe rogan has this like famous youtube clip or he's he's reads some quote from some guy which is like most someone famous but it's like most men lead lives of you know quiet despair or something like that and it's like it's so true you know most people walking around that just have this this this sadness in them and there's a version of that for rich people which is if you're are rich but acknowledged there's something in you that just kills you and i mean we get this a lot for for the podcast guys so much where people are just like hey i just need to vet like it's like you go park at a mall or whatever you're like can you validate my parking that's how i feel it's like can you validate my my wealth can validate my career like yep here let me give you the punch like this is amazing you're you are way wealthier than me they're way more successful to me you're probably smarter than me but they haven't they don't have the platform or the audience where they get that sort of congrats thing like maybe the people in their life they can't brag can't tell their employees how well they're doing you know there's no need to go do a press tour about it so it's like that would be uncomfortable but so then they're just sort of like damn nobody nobody i won the game and nobody knows dude there we've had so many people shawn who we've mentioned and they've reached out to me and i noticed that that just that mention it's they now view themselves as like a public figure and they start creating content and things like that and i wanna tell them like hey just so you know you've already won it's it's like start doing they start everybody's asking me about my skincare routine and it's like yeah like you know they they get that little taste of that that fame that hit those likes and they're like i guess i should abandon this working formula that's generating mounds of wealth in order to write some threads maybe and they start what's that what's that what's that quote it's like would you rather be the world's greatest lover and have nobody know or be the world worst lover but have everyone think you're the world's greatest lover right there's so many these world's greatest lovers walking dude it's speaking of being a lover andrew you you have like a little bit of a five o'clock shadow right now and you've your jaw looking his old you look this is the best i've ever seen you lost what's going on have you been work down what's going on here yeah extensive facial reconstruction and know i've just been power lifting for the last six or eight months it's working awesome they're coming three riverside to sam right now anyone who power lifts is just like automatically turn sample on yeah you had me the i'm not the sam shirtless list photos on instagram level but i'm getting there okay so they that's another example that's if you get there let's say let's say win you get there and you're just you're so proud yourself but now nobody knows everyone still thinks you're just a normal looking to do but now you know the truth are you gonna get your parking validated or are you gonna post something but maybe like you know you gotta like you know do the fake fake like humble thing where it's like you know i gotta be honest i i'm so proud of my was really depressed about my body and nobody talks about this so that's why i'm coming forward with these selfies just i needed to be vulnerable here guys check this out who's the who's the guy he was on silicon valley the indian guy and he got jack what's camille on johnny the comedian yeah like like think about that experience for him right because he had the biggest version of that yeah i don't i've i've done that i've i personally have like progress photos and stuff and i showed my friends but i would never i don't think i would ever post i've seen them online i can't do it i think they look great i've seen them are you more less less ripped than sham who's i think you're he's an investor your thing right did do you guys exchange you know yeah i definitely am less definitely less ripped than cha no no no no i don't think so you you guys were you guys are you guys are are right around the same area he's is dark so you know darker always looks more cut you know what i'm saying yeah my my problem is i've got a a hardcore farmer's hand so my arms get dark and then my entire body is basically translucent you can see my heart beating through my chest so not the best for a a six pack that's amazing yeah you're like what white have you you never received been aren't interested so alright let's do some more i wanted to say one thing real quick you had said something that i thought was i i wanna say this because this one of the most interesting observations i had about my own like investing misses that i like made a firm note to change so you talked about creating businesses off your off your p and l so you look at your expenses and you say oh we spend money you know on saas fees what if we could create a business is it by the way the new one called buyer or is it called something else now no we actually started one kind deal maker and because buyer did software we sold it to ramp they're doing that we have to do something different right so basically the story there was we chris and i were man na about negotiation in the early days right when you're the owner of a business see you saved thirty bucks that's thirty bucks in your pocket directly and what we noticed was as we as we got bigger and bigger and bigger we had managers and ceos running the businesses their comp based on hitting a very large number and so you know thirty grand or thirty bucks doesn't really matter anymore but to us the owners that really matters and so we were like okay how can we make this easy for the ceo because nobody likes the discomfort of negotiate i hate it and so the idea it's it's very uncomfortable i i don't like it either right i know all the tricks have done it now i just don't enjoy doing it but if i can outsource it to subs scrappy person who loves to negotiate a car or a house or a lease or whatever it is i'll do that all day long and so we create this business called deal maker deal maker dot c and instead of doing software we're doing like office leases furniture insurance like all the random stuff in your p and l and basically just cc them and they take a cut of whatever the savings are and i i just this is thing i wanted myself because i was going oh my god like i had the experience of you know when you're when you're rich or or people know you're rich they will rip you off if they can right so a recent example is i got wifi installed in my house and they had to wire the house and do some stuff it was tens of thousands of dollars and i was like holy shit it's too late now i could've have just had like an euro installed in a mesh network or whatever but instead i did like the you know rich fancy thing and got it all custom wired right or another one is in our office we got drape and we got a quote and it was twenty thousand dollars for some white drape i looked at ikea we could buy them for like two thousand dollars right so i'm just realizing that we have a target on our back i think anyone who runs a business does especially when times are good and so i think having someone to negotiate on your behalf is a very good idea how did you how much did you fund this business with it it looks cool the site looks good yeah i think it maybe like fifty k like like i said we don't put large sums of money into this stuff we basically find really scrappy operators where we can basically say look we've got all the back office all the structuring legal it's ready to go we'll build the website you you just need to take it and run with it and we go typically like fifty fifty or seventy thirty depending on the amount of capital we have is it working yeah so far i mean i think it's profitable at this you said it's pretty you said you just need much to be you just cc deal makers say you're like when you're talking to your vendors or whatever and you just cc make deal make her in and it's like basically like hey you know here's my brother it's gonna beat you up it's like think of it as like procurement department right so like if you go to walmart like we used to work with walmart at metal lab and it would be like okay here here's what we want we'd say like this is the number and then they send you to procurement and procurement is a guy who's literally a professional negotiator who crush you and they crush you in so many different ways right it's like your hourly rate is too high your payment terms you know you said fifteen days we want forty five and so it's just about getting the most in my out in my head i'm just imagining like a bunch of like young guys like like shaking in their boots like oh we gotta meet mister brick urine but and he's like this scary guy and you walk at it it's just is like dark with like a horrible like half beer with like mustard on his white shirt that short sleeve had buttoned up like look at like dwight and and it just like the nerd guy ever and he just like it starts rubbing his nipples like thinking about a good deal like like oh yeah do you guys percent off there's a great there's a great book called i will teach you to be rich by ram seth and i read it like fifteen years ago and he makes a really good point he goes look you're not you don't get rich by paying attention to like latte and like building budgets and like not buying lens out you get rich by paying attention to these macro big things in your life so for example when you buy a house there's a massive difference between getting a three percent interest rate and a two percent interest rate but no one thinks like that and so this is the stuff you wanna outsource to someone else and have them do it know you buy your car you buy your house you get an how buy twenty thousand dollars of furniture how do you act actually pulling this off like how how what's the what's the what's the work behind the scenes to to to do this deal it's literally an army of guys who love to negotiate and we train them up we you know we give them all the books that we read and we have a process and you know they get cc seed and they go for it and they basically say look you know your first quote was x we saved you y give us a cut of the savings and and go for it in some instances they'll retain us so like for example let's say there's a company and they're like we wanna do a super thorough review of everything then you know they might pay a retainer or something but usually it's just being cc that my dad should work for you my dad is incredible at this he will like so ladies very know the i can't train this well it takes time here's the thing is like you and i like if we were i i remember i walked into a car dealership and i go to the guy and i say i have two hours and if you can get me the car in two hours i will just sign whatever you want but i need it in two hours right that's the worst possible negotiating thing but i value my time and i don't wanna sign documents i have a friend who will literally go to five of the same dealerships gets quote from all them name drop them to one another walk out five times do like ten test drives show the guy how rich he is in a variety of ways to know so he knows he's serious and then finally he'll he'll save you know ten thousand dollars right i'm just too lazy but there's other people that right where it's totally worth it and the numbers are huge except the phone oh yeah derek i'll be there shortly i'm just finishing up here i don't think i'm getting what i want for here so i might go over there oh you have it ready for well that's great i'm just gonna hang out here for ten more minutes in case something changes like know like might do my dad will be on the phone with some company like but he does it for petty shit like he'll just try to get like you know you know like you know when you like negotiate with the grocery store yeah no no literally he'll he'll call like the airline and just be like you know why is it why did you charge me for my seat they're like that's how planes were and he's like and then he'll be like you know i've been a customer for a long time and they're like and then he'll just pause he'll just most people will just bail because it's too awkward he'll just sit in that shit he'll just be like and then they'll they'll be like oh that's you we've we've loved having a certain he'll be like long time and then he's like very like where are you going with this this says nothing to do with the conversation about this and be like yeah this is just very nasty behavior and he's like what is like whoa nasty behavior what are you talking about nothing is like we just did the the normal thing here we just charged you for the product and he's like yeah this is interesting and okay well sure we gotta go now we need like a i wanna a text folder of all these phrases like just long time lot don't like know trust this trump will be like you know people are saying people are saying it's great they said it's great you know are saying that they're saying that and these just like keeps going statement is my dad dude set well so often so often it's just silence just being silent same right may like you said throwing out one of those open ended statements and then just staying silent and holding the discomfort and then often they will start to you know give on the price or whatever and you just realize like most people will just avoid social awkward dude you need instead of deal maker you need to have like comp maker or salary maker so many people myself include news for salary when i was negotiating my salary for hubspot when we sold the company they i remember my wife was in the room but she was like on the other side of the computer screen so they couldn't see and they like tell me a number and they told me a number and i was like yeah whatever you know whatever whatever is cool my wife was on the other like what the fuck shop don't change things saying it's all good during that's a she that's actually a really good business idea maybe we should have like a coach where it's like a coach so it like you know you don't because it'd be weird if it was like third party i'm doing a comp review this is jerry from my procurement team well here's here's how you but if you had that guy telling you like do this do this do this do here's why it could be cool is because i remember i got a speeding ticket recently during the pandemic in like rural kansas when i was driving cross country and they were doing zoom things so like zoom i and i was like oh i'll fight the ticket because i actually think it's nonsense and so i had a lawyer i don't know if i'm breaking any laws here but i had a friend lawyer and i would be like hey i'm gonna put you on speaker so you could hear what they're saying and then just text me what you think i should say in court so i could fight this ticket and try to get off of it and she was on the phone like listen to you're like alright i asked them this and i asked them this so then asked them this and the lawyer or the the the judge was like wow you really know what you're talking about i was like oh yeah you know like i just i really didn't think i did anything wrong and you really just need that for like when someone's just cc all emails part of the salary negotiation or have them there like listening to the zoom and like alright i'll say this and now say this and then just give me half of with the earnings that you you just got gone up by when i was at twitch they were like yeah the salary is this that i was like oh i just let him sit it that and i was like and they're like you know they're like sorry did you say something and i was like oh no i just lower than i thought and i was just like i know buying time and they're like well you know i was like can you explain how the process works i just so instead of like saying i want more or here's a different number i was can you explain how you guys get to a number like this where does this number come from and like you know where do babies come from they're like and they don't know and then they're like and then they said the magic where they're like there's we have these bands which just like a band is like code for like a range which is code for like we're trying to see how much of a sucker you really are like basically i was like oh so you're telling me for my role there is a specific minimum and a maximum band of of compensation that i could get and you're offering me anything but the absolute top of the band or pay better yet have you ever gone out of band and gone hire what situations would cause that to they're like wow somebody needs to vouch for it like they have to go to bat have to write ma'am i'm like cool alright now i know what i'm gonna go ask for and i basically just like work through the system but once you realized that these are all a negotiable and b like there's actually it's like playing a a a like a a robot you know like that can only make certain moves on the board and you're like oh you can only go forward backwards oh great so i'm just gonna go around you over here because you're bound by these rules of like this is how the process has to work and and so you know at most companies you can get a lot more than you're currently getting what have you guys ever like thought about this when like you know my wife works at a big company she's been offered jobs at other big ten thousand twenty thousand person companies a fit a hundred thousand person companies and i'm like sarah what would happen if you just told the interviewer like hey look like let's let's screw this place a little like just tell me the most amount that you can give me and let's like worth these yeah i'm like no i mean not really screws but like what like what's stopping they're like like i'm gonna fuck us out my money i'll yeah let's just like let's let's let's let's rob this place if we can so let's just like i'm just gonna tell you like lie across the table yeah write down a number here but you would like why giving me why is this like hundred thousand person employee who has the power to allocate certain dollars like they don't care you know it's not the company's money and i've just has always shocked me that the culture is such that like they are actually being honest in many cases to the employer when they could be like look i like you you like me here's the rules i need you to tell me this and i can then give you this you know what i mean like what they don't have a they're they're not your friend they don't care their incentive is to just do the the basement cover their ass like i guess people big companies just so let's do let's do can we do one other topic yeah and your pick one that you had prepped that you're like you'd feel like man we to get to that so pick that one and let's do that k well let me do one that's applicable we were talking about winter coming and i had a story i wanted tell so one of the other things you know obviously we're like you know stress testing all the businesses we're dialing on our p and ls we're pulling excess cash into head office we're you know loading the elephant gun so to say we wanna get ready for a big acquisition and winter and two two like kind of interesting things we're doing one you know this is very obvious if you have debt you know lock in right even at a higher rate i think a lot of people are doing this thing where they're going well it was you know interest rates were at three percent i could've locked and then now they're at you know five percent i don't wanna lock in and they're kind of anchored to that three percent thing to me it's about certainty i wanna know that when i build a model when i stress test the business that i know that my interest is gonna be at five percent or whatever even if you know they go up or down or whatever i just want that certainty the other kind of weird thing we're doing we've done this once before is we're buying we're buying options on the stock market so this is and this is kind of speculative but i look at it as an an insurance policy so here's an example of what we did in twenty twenty so we started freaking out about covid we're a little bit early on it chris and i locked down kind of like late january or early february and if you remember everyone was kind of saying like oh this might be a bit of a nothing burger up until march first or second or third kind of in that zone and so what we ended up doing is we're looking we're doing these stress tests and we're looking across all of our businesses and at the time a lot of our revenue came from our agency businesses and we had these large fortune five hundred customers but we're going okay what's the first thing all the fortune five hundreds do they pay run late and so we're looking at okay we're gonna get some late payments that's gonna cause cash flow issues we might also have some of our startup clients go out of business and they may just not pay us and so we started looking at what is the number there that we wanna ensure and it was like five or ten million bucks where we were like okay these are all companies that may just not pay us we might you know lose that revenue and if that's case we're gonna have a bad year we're not gonna have liquidity and so what we did is we basically said okay in late february we said okay if this if the s and p five hundred the index of the five hundred largest companies in america goes down by twenty percent we will get a big payout and so we bought for five hundred thousand dollars put options that were went out about a year so if any time in the next year the market dropped that much we would get a large payout and the idea is it's kind of like buying an insurance policy on your house right you pay this premium you put the money out and you hope that you just pay that premium and nothing bad happens but if your house burns down they'll give you five million dollars to rebuild it and so what ended up happening is we bought these put options they went from being worth five hundred thousand dollars to seven million dollars all of a sudden and chris and i are like laughing our asses off never had you know never bought put options never been through this or whatever so they go to seven million dollars and we're like holy shit this is amazing let's sell them right and so we sell them we cash in we take seven million dollars onto our balance sheet and then we look at each other and we go well this could be the worst recession of all time you know are we are we the guys who just sold our insurance policy like should we keep holding this you know what if what if this is nineteen twenty nine and the stock markets really gonna go down fifty percent and the whole point of this is to have this insurance policy and sleep all at night now we don't have it and so we take all the money except for five hundred grand we we took five hundred grand out we took all the money and we re bet it and we lost everything because it fed came in and the markets rebounded now there's two ways to look at that story you know one is where we we got hit with gambler fallacy you know let's go in we'll do one last roll at the ro table the way that i think about it is i go i lost my premium right i i paid for insurance and the bad thing didn't happen therefore i didn't deserve to get the seven million dollar payout and the fact that we sold it is just a you know that's yeah it sucks that we had that money in our bank account for five days or whatever but it really is irrelevant and so the way to think about this let's say that you own a saas business and your entire net worth is in the saas business and you currently you know you've raised money at twenty times revenue or something you might wanna find a saas business that's publicly traded that is a comp to you and you might wanna buy out of the money put options or buy a basket of those and basically say if the market gets crushed that's probably an indication that the larger economy got crushed too or my part of the world got crushed and businesses like mine doing badly and so it's kind of an interesting way to buy an insurance policy it is certainly a little bit ga right but it is an interesting way to sleep it where'd you come up with the math of like alright five hundred k well you can model these out there's a website called options profit calculator and you basically say this is the stock and it'll show you in a variety of scenarios and so for example in that one i just said okay in previous recessions you know a recession is defined as what you know more than like four quarters fifteen percent yeah draw down over two quarters or whatever i just said look if that happens over the next year i will get a payout and i could look at the different payouts based on where it went are you buying any real estate right now no i hate real estate are you sean buying real estate no not at the moment i i hate real estate so much that i don't build equity in my own houses so i do interest only mortgages because i want everything in businesses because businesses a business can earn a a million dollars of revenue and then the next year do a hundred million dollars using creativity there's no apartment building you can buy do a million dollars of revenue and do a hundred million dollars next year it's just not how do you qualify for an interest only loan you just gotta make a lot of money you i think i think you can do it via most banks generally it might be the sort of thing where you have to have some sort of collateral or other assets or be at a larger scale are you fixed or effectively yeah i i'm fixed yes so then you you you got locked in at what what what rate like to the two when it was back and two i think i locked in at five right i'm one of those people where i was like you know hey let's lock in at three didn't do it let it go too long ended up locking at five but it goes back to i wanna sleep at night it's possible interest rates go back down to two percent and i feel like an idiot but i wanna sleep at night i just wanna i if if interest rates go to eight percent ten percent which is you know maybe not high probability but it's certainly possible historically i don't wanna deal with that sean are you buying a house now no i just rented this place so it's like a two two year three year rental yeah i like renting i like renting the place i live me too i love is i for multiple reasons but like basically buying your buying the house you own it's not a great investment it doesn't like there's no yield right you're you you are the tenant so so it's not like i think people can play those two things like if you buy property that pays you okay that's an asset if you buy a property you live in and it cost you money that's the liability of my opinion so so i think that's the the first piece second piece is picking the place you like to live is not always the best investment like what are the odds that the best investment of a pretty significant amount of capital is the place my wife really likes the countertops like it's just like there's not gonna be the place like well that's not where the value i'll keep transfer yeah you have people people that put like fifty or even ninety percent of their personal net worth into a single investment which is a house and then they go oh it you know doubled in value over fifteen years and you're going yeah if you just bought an etf you would have had the same result and if you bought an individual stock you probably could have done way way better so to me it's like if someone's completely if they're not an investor at all then sure go buy a house all day whatever to save a reasonably okay investment but if you're even remotely smart and you know how to read and you go and read invest books and stuff i think it's crazy i mean i would i would just rent a house all day and put everything into equities and businesses we're renting too i i own a house in austin because i i've wanted that to be my residence and whatever we did and i actually rent that house out now when i'm not there i would much rather in the future for like the next ten years sarah and even when we have kids we're renting for sure and i wanna go a step further i wanna rent all my furniture too so there's a company called feather have you guys sort of feather you can rent furniture on that website but it's only in certain cities and i intend to rent a place and i'll and i'll get a nice place and it'll cost me ten to fifteen grand a month and then i'll spend another two to three thousand dollars a month and rent all my furniture i wanna own nothing if it's so much love so much better not owning stuff i was i'm on my way back now austin and i was in brooklyn for four months and it i rented a furnished place and it was sick it may be so much happier i i'm realizing like so over the last couple years like i bought like i i've a house at a lake locally i've got a place in vancouver i've got a house here and then the stuff and the management like just i have to have a a staff that now manage all the houses right and i own them you know i do this interest only thing but i do own them and i am responsible for them and it's just constant you know stuff breaking new furniture hiring designers doing reno all this stuff and so you realize pretty quickly like everyone thinks they wanna have you know ten estates all over the world but no like you're running it becomes yet another business to manage yet another p and l yet another group of people who you have to give opportunity to and have hr around and everything it's it's you know don't cry any tears for me but yeah it's it's really annoying yeah i think everybody ends up a prisoner of a prison of their own making and so you know you wanna design that prison to be this what are gonna be a prisoner or two is it your stuff is it your properties right like if i bought a fancy car and i lived in san francisco i just be stressed all the time that it's gonna get scratched or it's gonna get broken into and like you know i'd it would net make me less happy and less free and so it's like where do i wanna like optimize for is like more free and more happy and so you know cool i need to do some things to make that happen like maybe exercise as part of the prison i wanna design right it's like cool i know that if i do this all the time and i make this a part of my routine and it's important to me and i don't miss it and i make time for it all the time it cost me money and it's like heart it's hard effort but it has this payoff of how i get to feel at the end how much more healthy i can be how much mobile i can be etcetera etcetera and so i think it's not people think like you have to choose what you want or you gotta choose what you wanna do i think it's also you gotta choose the like you know choose the constraints you're gonna put on your body and your your time and your your yourself and your psyche because you will have some and like whether you chose them or not that's up to you totally i mean you look at like any of these there's all those sayings around if it floats or flies or other things you know rent it and i think that should be applied to to most things frankly and it's just a matter of can you get the things you want my for the issue for me is being in canada in a small city we don't have furniture rental there's not a lot of great high end rental homes and stuff but i'd be all over that if i could well dude thank you this is awesome i i love seeing you i love senior face again not being belly to belly i'll tell you that one it's not like being belly to belly but dude his face your face has become a better face than the last six months your face is is full thick tight strong thanks guys yeah yeah and what what's going on you you guys talked about them i know you did camp m mfa or whatever are you gonna do more of that you really regret not going into you got the invite you do blew it bro i know i know i hate basketball no one blinked dude it was like like sean was the best player there which like we you know we weren't no no one was vanity right now yeah no ben on the pod was like duncan on people nick cooper was great sean's really really good but besides that ever we're all just like much more scent at something i suck at roughly like you know sam's camp mfa is gonna be like running the two hundred meter sprint it's like oh to be amazing at this oh you know guys are it's always a tracks the street oh look a squat rack andrew what would be the version of that that you would do where it's like it's we with the the two staples are trying to have great interesting people that are you know curated set of people coming but the other is we're not just sitting in a room you know looking at a whiteboard or a presentation it's not a conference so it's like doing something that's a passion that we that we like and then the networking fills in the gaps in between that i the ins and outs the bus ride there the the food or whatever but like the focus is on some activity what would yours be that you're like really interested in doing i don't i honestly i'm not i'm not a big hobby person i mean like like most entrepreneurs i get obsessed with business and stuff and it's been a real challenge for me to find those things i just did like i do these form groups where i've been in some of these groups for like ten years five or six guys we go into a room once a month talk about everything that's going on in our business runs i do i do i used to be an e and then i just started doing it myself and we just did a former treat and we went to whistler so you know beautiful mountain and we all went hiking we'd go hiking all day go do cold plunge exercise during the day so there's activities and there's something about being in a group specifically with other dudes where you're sweating and your heart rate is going and you're talking about what's going on in life that feels really good did do did do do a towel ass whipping that that's actually yes yes someone actually did give ass we went to a we went to a spa and someone got ass whip yeah that they did but but we we did this thing where we we would like do dinners and we'd have this pack of cards and we would just pull random cards and be really fucked up questions like what's a what's a rude word your parents would use to describe you or like how have you let someone down in life and i just love that kind of stuff right so for me it's about how do you create things that facilitate deep interest conversations ideally with people you have something in common with so there's a shared bond but like i i'd be down old car or whatever you're decking and you're like alright guys have a question should we kiss right now oh my god the deck said it immediately the dad said it brendon trucking that's that retreat said that was too easy sorry i'm working on my dad humor alright i gotta go see great our you guys