Best of This Week: Feb 14th

yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on on a road travel never looking back hello welcome to another episode of my first million best of the week edition this is ben wilson also known as producer ben and this episode is some of the best clips from our episodes throughout this last week nothing new just a short rapid recap of everything that went on to start off with we've got a clip about the billion dollar bitcoin thieves so sean had written about this on milk road his newsletter which should go subtract to it's really good and he had the full backstory about the these people who had stolen billions of dollars worth of bitcoin and then strangely sam had actually met one of them it was a husband wife team and sam had run into one of them at a party back in the day and many of you pointed out that it seems like a strange coincidence that sam also met ross another billion dollar criminal and so is sam actually a criminal mastermind is he a real life danny ocean i don't know but enjoy this clip where sam sean break down the story of the billion dollar bitcoin thieves our i don't even entirely understand what happened but i have a backstory about people today's addition of the milk road you won't get the full backstory and ten bullet points so here's what happened two thousand sixteen this crypto exchange called bit got hacked and at the time i think like a hundred twenty thousand bitcoin got stolen that was like seventy million dollars got stolen and it was like it was bad that was like a big hack the price of bitcoin that week dropped by forty percent so it was like a it calls like this huge you know like a fear shock in the market but the thing about bitcoin is bitcoin is on a public ledger right like it's a it's a public blockchain so everybody could see the coins so everybody saw all the the coins are in this wallet and like and so all the other exchanges were like look this is bad for the industry we will try to prevent like if that wallet tries to cash this out we won't let them cash out the money so for many years that money kinda just sat in those wallets or was moving in like really small small transactions back and forth between like a web of wallets clearly somebody was trying to like lau the money essentially they were trying but but how how did he did they even get a numbers but so i don't i don't know what the exploit was that let them hack the accounts and they didn't hack all the accounts bit next they actually just hacked like some of the whale accounts so they were able to take a hundred twenty thousand bitcoin from not all the accounts and the funny thing is vi didn't have the money to like make those users whole so what they did was they they reduced everybody on bit is balance by thirty three percent or something to like balance it out some like core like imagine if your bank did that that would be like insane i feel like oh they robbed that guy's vault you're taking mind money way to like even it out for everybody like no thank you so anyways it was bad and this reason why vi is not like you know the biggest exchange now so anyways that the money kinda sat there now fast forward five and a half years go by last week people start to notice bigger transactions coming from the the bit for hack wallets and so there like there's these alerts on twitter like whale alert whale alerts like the coins are moving the coins are moving hundred thousand a million dollars of the coins are moving ten million not whatever and so and so the fed go are not the fed sir department of justice goes kicks down a door in new york in into this this this husband and wife couple's house and they look like you know your complete like average joe clean cut like would this is not like you know doesn't look like a grimy criminal mastermind operation and i'll explain a little bit more about that in a second the funny bit about that but basically they seize like their computers they they find a bunch of burner cell phones they find like a bag of like fifty thousand dollars of cash they find a bunch of like the hardware wallets that had the bitcoins in them and then they found like folders on their computer that were like fake passport ideas and like like places to go places to run away like they found like folders that said that shit on their computers and and they seized three and a half billion dollars worth of bitcoin because the price of bitcoin has gone up so much so that seventy million has become three and a half billion dollars worth and so these guys were trying to launch they they don't think these are the hackers but they were trying to lau that money they may have been the hackers i don't know that's not proven but they were trying to lau the money and the the the doj had been like if you've seen that meme of charlie from it's always almost sunny where they had like the cork board and he's like trying to like find find the the crime or solve the crime that's what they had been doing because they had they this web of all these wallets and finally they found that oh it's trying to cash out in this wallet owned by this guy il dutch l stein or whatever but how how did what what type of idiot would use you need to get the money just the problem is like they were trying to get the money out through like the walmart gift cards they were buying like five hundred dollar walmart gift cards with bitcoin they were doing like playstation games they were like they were trying all these small things so they can never move the bulk of the money so if you wanna move like in mass you gotta do something that had that lets you move size and usually those could you buy an n and sell it no like eventually you need to get the money out of the wallet that's the problem so so so the problem so in order to do that there's like an off ramp right how do you get it into you know us dollars for example if that's what you wanted to do you you know he left it there for five and a half years and they were probably living off and spending in some ways but like you wanted to actually like get a lot of it out and get get it and removed the paper trail of the blockchain you need to get it as an off ramp but to get as an offering you have like a you know your i idea like these exchanges they they're required you to upload your license and like they have laws they have to comply with called ky y know your customer and so eventually they found that somehow the doj they didn't explain exactly but they they identify that the money was moving towards the wall that was owned by a known person that's how they ended up finding these guys now the funny part is this off go ahead so that well so the i when i read about this i was like wait that name sounds familiar both their name sound familiar so the guy it his name is il i l y a i think it was like very like weird name his last name is l so he spoke at the first hustle con i never talked to him but so he had a company called mix frank which was just a normal startup went through yc and he spoke at hustle khan and then his girlfriend or wife she was a copywriter and i remember talking a little bit with her because she her name's is heather morgan i think and she had a a website all about writing sales emails totally is that right remember before the hack did right she had like a linkedin post on like five hacks for your your cover letter for your job interview like you know like that sort of thing and so yeah she was doing that she and so they and and the funny thing is like the reason the internet kinda went crazy with it was because here you had two very unlikely characters so we had a bunch of france text us or text me because i was writing this this edition of the no road and i was like anybody know this guy and you you knew them but some other people knew to they're like dude you would never get vibes of like this guy might just go longer billions of dollars i was like smart like kinda like his guy like engineer type he like he like showed very little emotion no i did not think that this guy like yeah and and and her she's like this like super strange kanye west level weird you know like person she basically she had like a ultra ego that was called ras khan and ras khan was her rap name and then she has like these super fucking cringey rap songs on youtube like dude okay i have you know i have you know i think it'd be cool to be a rapper but if i hear myself there's no way i'm publishing that because it sounds so bad and so it's horrible it it's so bad that the top comment was paris hilton i'm gonna prove everyone that you could have that having money means you can rap good and then it said heather morgan hold my beer i didn't even know pair has has a good rap on so yeah yeah there's just like she's like one of the strangest characters like i watched i i went deep dude for this i was writing this thing and i was like oh let me get some examples and then i couldn't look away because like the the train wreck dude like the videos are comfortable and like she she like forced everybody to like they built like this golden mini taj mahal that she sat in and that her bride made lifted it up on her shoulder and brought her in but even the the audience at her wedding is like un comfortably clapping like off beat because they're like this is this normal they're like and there's like clearly only fourteen people in the room and then she does a wrap performance at the wedding that was like equally cringey she's just like hump the air just weird to the guy billy il goes by so dude this freaking guy i'm looking at these pictures that's hilarious this woman's really hard to look at she this cringe that that should've have been harassment and cringe city that would have been like okay i get it you're gonna be the cri cool that's like hey henry a day the the king of cringe yeah that's what she should got like it is super strange but but yeah basically they recovered it and so now let's go and anyway there's just a bunch of interesting little bits to it so the doj is gonna give the money back to bit for it looks like bit had when they they launched their own token at one point time called the leo token that's like used in their if you trade in their exchange it'll give you a discount using the leo token so they had to put it a thing when they launched a leo tokens was like hey if we ever recover anything from that hack we'll use eighty up to eighty percent of it to buy back and burn our leo token which will cause like the price you know leo holders to benefit from if we ever a recover from this and so now they're gonna get like three and a half billion dollars to buy back so the price of leo token like shot up like it our sixty percent in a twenty four hours because people are like oh wow that's gonna be a lot but they said we're not gonna just cause a bunch of sale pressure in the market we're gonna do a controlled sale over like a multi year period so that it's like scheduled and doesn't like affect the bitcoin market or whatever god this is such a good story this would make this exact that's what everyone's saying is like here comes you know incoming incoming netflix stock alright next up we've got a story from sean about a pitch meeting he was in and a very small and simple problem that he saw got solved and this led him down this idea of what he calls paper cut companies these are companies that solved pretty small in simple but very annoying and persistent problems and they can be extremely valuable check it out because this founder was pitching me his company and he was just like screen sharing because he's showing me a product demo and it was like a it's like a data analytics tool and he was like yeah so like check this out if i go to excel and then he like he just opens up the browser i don't see this before he go he's opened to the browser and he goes sheets dot new he enter and then he opened up a google sheet like a blank spreadsheet and i go i go whoa what's just what was that and he goes i'll tell i'll show you later because he was because i was he was so annoyed with me just going on tangent about every random thing he was doing like you wanted be shelby me his product not the fact that you could type sheets dot new and save myself like i fucking google i google google drive then i get to drive then i click new then i go down the menu then i find spreadsheet then i click new spreadsheet then i get to a sheet it's like this like i the only thing i do six times a day and and so just seeing this was like well that's awesome and it reminded me that there's a whole company out there called gold have you ever heard of go links no what is that so so i saw this in a or when i was working at twitch the kinda like whoever the i don't even know what's dropped out like vp of everything the the kind of that number two guy at twitch my boss this guy dan he was like he's like god we have so many documents in this company and now i just have bookmarks and tabs just with like all these docs open at all times in this company he's like and if i ever wanna look up like oh the annual plan it takes me like five minutes every time i wanna find because i know why we don't just use gold someone i'm a gold to us is it lets you set up a thing that's like go dot annual plan or like you know you could can just basically type in like a human readable link and you could anchor it to any doc and so let's say you know you that's anchored to the twenty twenty one doc oh now it's twenty twenty two cool we just swap the link out we sorry we we like we could still always type go slash you know annual plan or go slash plan and ghost slash pan will now take us to the twenty twenty two doc and i saw this i was like wow this is actually so useful to just be able to quickly find and like revoke access properly to to different documents and so so i really like this most people haven't heard of this and i think it's a very expensive tool i think it's like a pretty like enterprise tool i see at the top here they raise a twenty seven million twenty seven million dollar series a okay so doing pretty well obviously so i think somebody could build this is like a very simple product i think somebody could build a go links for like the startup up level world more you bro andy hack i just invested in one oh really what is it yes so i know you about too i swear i i told you about it it's called n and i'm in this too i'm in the too oh i i so that's the same thing right so so this is this is slightly different i don't think they do the the shortcuts and the links maybe this is a feature they should add what they are doing what mir is doing is we all companies have all these docs and then people get fired or they move teams or whatever but people still have access it's like oh yeah i still got this link it just opens up the like the numbers for the for the company or like yeah this contractor we hired still has access to all of our files but like who the heck can go audit and keep up and scrub the access for this thing that's like it's like a very big problem like your company's most sensitive data is all in the cloud and then the cloud like access has shared it amongst like so many people and there's no central place to see who sees what and so n building that they're building the who has access to what yeah but i think the link thing is a feature maybe yeah maybe it is a feature i'm saying i think it's a feature that can be standalone alone because adopting something like mir is like something that's gonna go through my like you know chief security officer type of thing like this is gonna go through our cio or cs whereas this go links thing is something that like you know me and my one person who i work with like we're both just irritated with these super long ugly goo google doc docs links that like you know like we can't find anything it takes forever to find stuff they they have a free plan near does no go links oh go says yeah yes i think yeah i don't know what at what point they they do this but i don't know why this is not more popular this is like a like a real problem and then this also just got me thinking like what else is like this what what are the other problems that are like these like i call them paper cut companies so you know death by a thousand paper cut so like what's a thing that's irritating but you do it so often that is just a constant paper cut that's just annoys you screenshots is another one that like sharing screenshots was one that was a big paper cut invest in company called bubbles that tries to make that better loom is it working better i remember bubbles is it working i don't know haven't caught put them in a little while i know it was working initially they raised much money from that but i feel like it hasn't taken over like you know the loom market yet but maybe it's going into a different market i'm not do the screen the the screenshot one's a good idea also the copy and paste the copy and paste i've been thinking for years how can i optimize a copy clipboard yes a better clipboard i've been thinking about that for a long time it's been that's always an interesting thing to me is is is the clipboard the that's really intriguing but the the the problem with these types of products is you have to truly be invent i don't particularly have that muscle to like be that creative so people who invent things like this or like even like what's that guy named howie who's got the huge company air table air table creating something like air table which is basically kind of like a excel but different and better or even creating like a notion i don't like these people kind of our geniuses who can like come up with like these weird product features and like they just know that like if you hover your mouse over this it needs like that they're so complicated they're so complicated it's pretty amazing yeah they they're big on details and i'll tell you the the best thing i heard about details like this i'm i'm not detail oriented like if if this camera showed my desk you would see like yeah i'm i'm obviously not organized or detail oriented like everything is sloppy even my camera right now is actually slightly crooked but i just don't care i just don't care about details and pretty much anything i do so that's why you're talking with like your neck a little bit that's why i often to do this i end every everybody guys with the cri but you know like i'm not a sweat the details person but i remember the first time i used slack i used slack really early on it was like i in beta i should have invested in it i just wasn't an investor back then i didn't think about it that way but i used it and i remember the first thing one thing i did was i i was telling our designer hey yeah here's the color for like our logo or whatever or they sent it to me and they just sent the hex code to like you know heck you know like pound cf f f are you know three seven three and it just create it turned it into a small tiny color swatch and i remember thinking why the fuck did they do that like what level of care went into carrying that the hex code would just auto format with a little swatch neck to it that's what i mean nobody would do that unless you were like a real product designer who sweat the details who use this product all the time and just dedicated yourself to like anytime you could just scratch your own niche and irritated like remove one paper cut from your own user experience you're gonna do it and so this is why also working on your own products working on products that you wanna be the user of helps because you'll get so at annoyed at the paper cuts you'll just get rid of them yourself alright next up we've got a clip from max lit the founder of gram you might have grammar install a chrome extension if not you really should install it it's great very helpful i use it all the time but what you might not know is that grammar this chrome extension is actually a thirteen billion dollar company and on this clip sam talks to max about how he knew this kind of random market could actually be a really big opportunity what were your girl goals early on like where when you started the business for like man i think this can make ten million dollars a year and provide a good lifestyle or who like i think this could or was it like i think this could be like a multi billion dollar thing like what were your girl goals early on i think we decided that it could be a multi billion dollar business during our conversations was brad partially so kind of alex and i we we we hoped that it could be but then once we started talking with bread about evaluation plans and all that when he was thinking about joining then it become pretty clear that yes there is a multi billion dollar market out there are we gonna capture it or not to be just to be determined but at that point but there is definitely an opportunity so the size of opportunity became clear fairly early but past there that that took care what was the vision that may or what what did you see that made you feel that it could be a multi billion dollar opportunity and what was the vision and were there any was there any numbers that you saw early on that which said like oh my gosh there's something here yeah so i think the breakthrough moment was when we saw that it is possible to help not just professional writers people who write for living every day but also help casual writers or people who write as part of their job but or part of their life but not like a key part so writing is not their like main product they're no no like novel over or researchers who are published and so on so when we saw that it's possible to make a product that's useful for everybody else then it clicked and a very simple formula if you look at amount of time we spent communicating creating knowledge as a as all people in the world it is a huge percentage for our time and it's increasing because we spend less time doing things with our hands manufacturing is being automated it's not like we were doing it manually anymore as much so if you take this time that we spend communicating and creating knowledge and make it even one percent more effective the impact is in trillions not billion billions so can we do something that makes communication one percent more effective on average for everybody that doesn't sound impossible that sounds like something's doable that's doable so we i had that aim same insight except i did it in such a horrible worse way so basically i learned how to be a copywriter so like i read books on copy and like on persuasive writing and my theory was like oh my gosh like with texting or like online dating i i was single at the time and in twenty one and so it was all about like dating i'm like oh man if i were learn how to write better in my messages to girls who i match with like my life is gonna be better and then i was like wait a minute if i learned how to write better i could sell more stuff if i learned how to write better i can make people feel emotions about like this cause that i want the i'm like just writing better like it it changes it makes it life more practical but also it it makes you think better so like if you can if you have an idea for something and you're forced to write it out you'll see all the holes in idea and you'll and you'll force yourself to like laid out and so i was like oh i'll teach people how to write better and so i created a course on how to write better of course like obviously creating a software product it was out of my league but like that was clearly the the better move to do but the same insight was like everything that we do is via a text whether it's a text message or an email or a website and even if it's via like the spoken word i have to write that anyway so like writing is like the the most important thing that you can master i just wish i would have approached it in a software way as opposed to just selling a three hundred dollar course yeah software is more scalable than that's true and and actually we we just tell we're writing it also applies to speech we when we do user a research we noticed that people who use grammar repeatedly adopt patterns of communication more effective patterns of communication and translated to non written communication as well for example if grammar keeps suggesting that you don't use kind of a worthy or wave or weak sentence structures you talk or reduce use of them in each as well so i so kind of good habits is rub off and and translate to other modes of communication alright finally we've got a clip from sam shawn they were talking about whether the olympics were a waste of time sean thinks that the olympics are a waste of time for many people and that's not what i'm gonna post here but what this is is the discussion they had afterwards where sean talks about this idea of not accidentally over indexing on something that doesn't actually matter to you and i think it's a really valuable point and something important to consider let's give it a listen i think that there's like you know like for example if my kid was like had the if you told me right now hey your kid has the potential to be the greatest you know like at whatever the greatest third person in the bobs led in in the country but here's what you have to do every day every weekend for the you know the the the next twenty years of their life is gonna go into optimizing their body and mind to be able to do this which essentially is what goes into like becoming an right you're trying to become the best in the world at an arbitrary game that was made up and you have to sacrifice a huge amount of your life and focus and attention and energy and talents you decide to invest into this and the thing you get out is character building life lessons and the other thing get down the boys scouts you know potentially a moment of fame when if you want if you actually did achieve the thing and you have the you know sort of the the knowing inside your heart that that this was this was good so like you know would i'd rather be you know steve pre font this you know this good looking mustache runner guy or would rather been phil knight i'd rather be phil knight i think actually he's the perfect example what would for free font day get out of you know nike nothing and so he actually we're he out right he he he died three years into pho the company from a drinking driving accident so yeah you're you're right okay that's funny down it didn't work out so he was actually a c founder of nike or he just inspired them he he he was he was in their crew and he was their first sponsored athlete and like they're at fifth or tenth employee or something like that and if you ask phil knight who wait you know what what's who's nike met mentor or sorry who's nike mascot they'll say it's pre fun yeah say anyways my point is i think that there's a lot of things that are fun and they're best done as hobbies versus trying to become the best in the world at it right i can play you know call of duty and have a bunch of fun with my friends i can even play you know the competitive side of things just because i like to scratch that itch and i play a couple hours a week but once i try to become the best in the world at it the level of sort of sacrifice and over indexing on that thing and hey you could do it you could over index on anything you can try to become the fastest diaper in the world you could try to become the best photographer of brown leafs in the world and you know like you could do all those things so choose carefully choose who which one you want what what you wanna go into it's like people who dedicate their lives to be an average d three basketball player it's like it could work you could you could you could go to the nba but like odds are the papers or the writings on the on the wall like it it probably not gonna happen so maybe you should should actually like study a real major instead of basket weaving or communications right and if you enjoy it fantastic if you're enjoying every step of the way fantastic but a lot of things in my experience are most enjoyable when done as hobbies versus when done with the competitive pursuit of becoming the absolute best in the world at it our the guy used to work out of his his dojo he used to tell me that was like oh yeah i really like this so i might start a business around it he goes oh yeah the the this dave gross he goes easiest way to fuck up a hobby turned it into a job and i remember just hearing that be like that's interesting actually i never really thought about that yeah actually there are some things that are really fun as hobbies that become really un fun as jobs right it's like working at a ci right it's like yeah i love eating and ci on working at a ci smelling a ci eating fries in anytime you want now it's not so fun alright that does it thanks for listening have a great weekend yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back