Best of This Week: Feb 4th

yeah i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on a go travel never looking back hey welcome to another episode of my first million best of the week edition this is ben wilson this is just some of the best clips from our episodes throughout the week if you've already listened to every episode there's nothing new here but it's just bringing out some of the best content in case you didn't get to listen to every second of every episode this week we got a great one for you today we had some really great guests on this week to start off with we're hearing from ryan b ryan is the founder of a payments company called bolt he has been in the news for writing a twitter thread where he called out stripe and y comb and then we had him on the show the day that he resigned as ceo of his company bolt and here's what he had to say about the whole controversy cool and and so let's talk about twitter thing so you came out the other day and you you basically said look you're like bolt you know we we've become successful now but it wasn't without kind of some some challenges and there's like the normal business challenges and then they're sort of the like the challenges of the powers that be and in silicon valley there's two kind of like very powerful and in in most people's minds you i think you picked a fight with people that very few people had bad things to say about like comb and stripe right stripe is probably like the most beloved start up in silicon valley respected beloved whatever and and yc is also you know the most powerful are sort of like a brand you know it's like basically if you're were gonna pick on oncology pick on either stanford or harvard if you were going for the top and and you basically told the story about them being them mafia and so i want you to kind of quickly can you quickly bullet point the the what your argument was for people who aren't nerd out on twitter and aren't seeing it because this all the audience we have here is not gonna have seen it so bullet point that and then i got some questions for you yeah so the point is my motivation here was to open people's eyes so what goes down in silicon valley where it's not all sunshine and rainbows is very fierce and their fierce competition and there's also games that are played with powerful institutions and you know groups of people who you know help each other out and so if you're starting a company especially in payments you've likely failed there's you know the only ones have been successful have been internationally and we probably should have failed five times over with investors pulling out of term sheets when we were about to run out of money and so we i'd say bolt almost didn't exist because of the powers that be and powers that be and you know i think there a lot of other companies that would have existed today if it wasn't for the powers that be and so you know now i don't blame these institutions k but but what i you're you're i i i i don't know if you're doing this on purpose to be kind but you're kinda being vague is it possible that you like what does institution mean and gay are you able to like actually well let let's separate out right there's there's fair fair you know fair business game and games which is like we're competing against somebody that's fair they can compete with us fiercely there's investors just deciding the space is too competitive or stripes gonna win i'm just gotta i'm just gonna back away right so perception thing that's kind of like nobody would say that that's unfair talk about the specifics of what you felt was unfair or where you know some some some there were some heavy handed this to it yeah so when we would be pitching investors they'd get interested they'd say they wanna invest and then they would talk to somebody at stripe someone related to stripe and either be told they can't invest or they shouldn't invest or somehow the conclusion was they were dis from investing but how do you know that that's what they might just come you and say we're not told me the the stripe would always come up somehow in that conversation so many of them pull me directly i investor say directly i got a call by stripe and they told me i can't invest in you guys is that bad though i mean what if they if they're already an investor of stripe i i understand i have a conflict but you know stripe has like all the big names is silicon at valley invested in them or so they intentionally put every single you know tier one firm on their cap table and it even stuffed them with small checks they're like everybody's on their cap table right and so you know from and then they say you're conflicted out right that's a competitor ours you're our shareholder don't right exactly and i didn't even you know consider ourselves a direct competitor at the time but i think they're very guarded about anything in their periphery so i've heard the same story from companies you know doing card issuing i've heard the same stories from companies doing subscription payments and then strep raw off their own product next so it's almost as if they have these feel out anything that's tangent gentle they make sure that doesn't get off the ground and then they go and build it and so is there any is is there any side of you so the way that you're phrasing it and it i would like to figure out what what my opinion is i don't have an opinion yet is is like that's unethical but one maybe could argue and be like well that was just a savvy strategic move to could get everyone on board and you know that's just like that's just like that's a that's fair is do you do you see that side of it at at all or do you think that like the way they went about it their intentions were the intentions matter here yeah yeah i've never pulled a single investor you can't invest in somebody right and so to me like everything is fair competition and if someone wants to invest in a company tangent central to me i tell them go for it we've even invested in tangent i've invested in tangent i think you know innovation is good have a very long term perspective so when you're calling best say you can invest in this company like even if they're not on this stripe cap table as investors too that are not the stripe cap table to me that's just not how i would do business and i also want found the next generation of founders to go into building with an their eyes wide open because i invested eight years of my life into this business and not knowing about the games that go on right and so the most important thing i'm exposing here is if you're coming to silicon valley you have an idea you're quitting your job putting a lot on the line like get ready for war like it's it's it's serious and that there will be people who do not want you to exist and you're gonna need to be ready to battle that and so one of the things you say is that which is they basically hurt our ability to fund raise by telling the first they they they kind of played good good game theory right they they got every every big investor to get a little piece of stripe because every investor wants a piece of stripe and then they said cool now you're conflicted out of investing our our competitors okay some might say that's that shady i personally just i'm an investor in you right i'm a fan of yours i personally would just say okay there's nothing unethical about that you may not like it but that's competing that's like a it's a strategy it's it's a hard strategy okay fair enough in the same way that like i don't think it's cool that mark zuckerberg just copied stories or whatever i don't think that's like you don't get bonus points of respect from me but i also don't think you did anything illegal or crooked completely crooked right that's that's you copied something that was copied okay fair enough the second thing you said is that they that yc which it has a huge stake in stripe control they own hacker news and that on hacker news people would be posting about bolt it would get some play would go up the ranks but that somehow there's some you know editorial shenanigans behind the scenes where all of a sudden the post about bolt would disappear or get der ranked and then a post about stripe would be a higher and so you posted some examples of that now that's i think i think that's the summary of what you said as that was happening did you is that a suspicion or you're like i know that that's what happened pretty sure that's what happened you know does we had a some post one in particular that you know i'd written catered to yc the audience it was unraveling of how we do fraud detection better and guarantee with your payments which was radical and new at the time in had organically got in to number one held there we had a ton of comments on it just like very active people very interested you can go read all my comments and then stripes post i don't know if it was there before it seems like they said it got posted technically before but anyway after got to number one they're started to rise and ours just started to fall and then disappeared and so i don't know if those editorial there's also this down vote functionality right and so you can also just have a bunch of your employees go and down or have a bunch of your friends so you know whatever it is they're able to get us off of there pretty quickly the the guys who started stripe the carlson brothers i don't know them but they seem from the outside like good dudes do you think that is that do you know and is that a is that a character characterization that you challenge yeah i mean what's exactly what i'm doing so you know let's they don't mean my standards for good dudes and so you know good news is not what you say publicly it's what you do privately and yeah i i just think that like right now you're like a loose cannon and i love it and i find it incredibly refreshing because from the outside you've raised money from amazing people at a fourteen billion dollar evaluation you are like the guy right now and i'm just i think it's cool and i've shocked but i think it's cool that you're that you've just said that i think that that's i've never heard that before me and sam both have definitely like a rebellious streak in us and we've told some stories on the pod about situations where where we do kind of like not keep it muzzle alright next up we have a segment from an interview with nathan barry nathan is the founder and ceo of convertkit an email marketing platform he was telling us about billion dollar creators how to become one and how to just do a better job of monetizing your audience so you basically have these four rules of building a billion dollar audience so i guess like first why did you even wanna do this like kind of like what got you interested in this and then let's walk through the four yeah so the article asks a question like the whole premise of it and that is what is the most profitable place to direct attention right so everything we right we're we're recording a podcast now whatever you're doing on on tiktok or if you're movie star or everything else right you have attention and brands want they're willing to sponsor you know all of this stuff and so it's like okay you have the opportunity to point that attention somewhere what's the most profitable way to do that long term because you look at people you know maybe who taking sponsorships right five grand a you know sponsor the newsletter you know five hundred bucks for a sponsored instagram post or anything like that and that's actually not that profitable and then we when you dive in you learn that the most profitable thing to do is to create your own product and to drive that attention to something where you actually build equity long term so it's like a longer article talking about that but like the richest movie stars you know like take jessica alba for example right she has made a lot of money from movies but the bulk of her wealth is from starting a company using you know being the spokesperson for her own company and then my other favorite example would be ryan reynolds who you know right he's doing ads for other people and probably getting paid a million bucks here ten million dollars there you know that kind of thing and at some point he goes like forget that i'm going to buy my own companies with mint mobile and aviation jin and i'm gonna be my own spokesperson so i don't get cash i get equity and so you know you just watch this process of people doing it over and over again and that's actually my hypothesis with convertkit right of i have attention on the internet through running a blog and a newsletter and all of that how do i wanna monetize it sponsorships ebooks membership a bunch of things and like nope i wanna monetize it through convertkit billing a saas company like that's my version of the billion dollar creator so that's the whole premise of the article and so you have you have a couple example so okay so rule you have to build more than a personal brand so what does that mean you give the example of jessica mark from primal kitchen so what what is the nuance here it's like it's not just your face your name you need to actually create a brand around around your lifestyle or your interest is that it by the by the way sean primal kitchen is the sugar free catch up company that i like so this guy and named mark he's like kinda looks like the sixty five year old version of me but like even more jacked and he like has a health and health blog and he starts selling catch and he sells that for like three hundred million dollars yeah so i what marketed with i his blog was called mark's daily apple and it was like the leading you know like paleo yeah kinda health blog in that space and a blog like that you know when he was doing this two thousand six two thousand ten that kind of thing you can make a million bucks a year off that blog and he was right but you play that forward on that's it's all about him all about his name all that ray name is in the name of the site but and you can build substantial wealth that way what he didn't said is he started primal kitchen you know kick started this whole brand by saying like i have the most popular site in the space let me you know make these paleo friendly ketchup up mayonnaise that kind of thing you know how big his few years later he had at the time or it it wasn't huge huge like think like ours yeah a hundred thousand wow subscribers hundred thousand kind of like the audience size to kick kick off this thing yeah you gotta remember i were a lot smaller like even just twenty fifteen twenty twelve like that kind of time frame but yeah then you sold the sells it to craft for two hundred million dollars you can't sell a blog to like a blog doesn't sell for two hundred million you know like all of these things and the crazy things he still owns the audience right the thing that that kick started this whole product he still owns he can sell off the that whole brand talking to him at a at a conference you know he's just onto the next thing figuring out what he wants to do next he didn't have to sell his his name and whole identity with it so and craft is highly cosmetic biggest one that people know about because you have tons of attention through instagram tiktok whatever the tv show whatever yep and instead of just saying hey i'll you can pay me is it people will used to say wow you have to pay twenty five thousand dollars for a tweet from kim kardashian or then that was twenty five thousand and it went up to like two hundred fifty two thousand then two million dollars for instagram post from it it got you got a million was like either hundreds of thousands or low millions to get like a an actual like endorsement post from from one of them and and so then you you know cool you can make a lot of money doing that you're right you can you could stack up quarter million dollars at a time but kylie cosmetics was a billion dollar brand so i was like well who wants to who wants to pay me to promote their products well it's mostly like skincare products makeup products or for kim kardashian it's her shape wear like you know like and khloe kardashian it was like you know fashion or whatever so chloe launches true american jeans kim kardashian launches i think it's called what was shape sci sci is it like the shape our brand sean kylie kylie cosmetics going kanye yee shoes right letters is like they all turned to say whoever is the the most willing advertiser actually you become my competitor i'm gonna launch my own brand my own and have my own equity in this thing and there's a guy in the nba who gets made fun of for this which is this guy la lamar ball i don't know if you guys know this guy but basically he has three sons all three wanted to make it to the nba guy is like loud mouth guy they got like a reality show around them because they're sort of like the like you know basketball version of the kardashians there's three brothers and like a kind of an over bearing parent who is like are architect their business strategy and when they were gonna the guy was gonna get picked second in the draft and nike offered him a contract adidas and instead he created big baller brand you know triple bb b he created his own shoe line and like the shoes kinda sucked and like you know he didn't have the full business plan and people were making fun of them for like oh wow you turned down a guarantee ten million dollars from nike to like launch this thing ten million dollars a year or whatever and it's like actually that was the right move now maybe his execution was slightly poor but that was actually the right move and and a lot of these nba players would have been better served it had they done that themselves well how's it going so the shoes is not going good basically the guy they had running it like was like kinda stealing from them so they fired him that was like a a black mark on it the second brother never made it to the nba so that was like a little bit of an issue the first brother kinda under performed his potential at that time and actually now that it woulda worked because the the youngest brother the one who was like the the the one who's kind of like he kind of like a fuck boy a little bit he was you know was like had a goal you know like a diamond grill had like a lamb at fifteen and was like you know he was kind of off the reservation he actually turned out to be the best one he's actually a star player and if they had kind built it properly around him it probably would have done a lot better so i nathan you'll get a kick out of this so like three or four weeks ago we did this thing where we said we're gonna get five g's to one or two three people who take our clips download it posted on tiktok and get views there's this kid who did it and i don't remember how many views he got but like our hashtag i think got thirty million views in like two weeks and this guy accounted for a lot of them and multiple of his videos got a thousand or sorry a million views one video got so big that we drove thirty five thousand new members to the subreddit fat fire and they like and they complained and i was like reach out to this kid i'm like who are you and he replies back with like michael at u michigan dot org or to something like that or dot you or whatever it is and i'm like wait dude are you in college and like he calls me and i face facetime with him and he's in his dorm room and he's young he's in still in college he's in university think and and he's really cocky not a bad way but he's like he's got hot spot he goes man i knew i was gonna do this i want to prove you guys that i could do i want you to pay me money to do this now and i'm gonna do it for other people and we're gonna change the media game and i'm gonna raise money and i was like okay hold on dude hear me out and he goes i'm gonna i'm gonna go raise money for this thing do you wanna invest i go bro listen you do not wanna raise money for this here's what you should do you are so talented at this that don't raise money for this but get it big and start launching other stuff on top of it and if you wanna raise money raise money for that stuff and own all it he owns this thing called like i forget what it's called future but he's got like eight handles now that have like a million something file followers i'm like no don't raise money for this thing man own that forever and that's your piggy bank and your audience raise money for like this other thing that you wanna do and funnel it through there but don't sell that thing because i raised a little bit of money for my thing which was like that and i i don't regret it because i got the outcome that i wanted but i do regret it because it definitely you're massively handicapped because of it yeah well one that's i i think such a good point because you can have that platform to launch whatever you want in the same way that you know mark this and can use his platform to then go launch the next thing right he probably has contracts that say he can't compete in the exact same space we could do a fitness thing or you could do connor mcgregor is right you have the ability an example conor mcgregor is doing this sports brilliantly in the u so like do you fcc gets knocked a lot because of of they have like low fighter pay right like the the percentage of revenue that they give to their fighters is way lower than other sports nba is fifty percent nfl like fifty percent sees is like kind of fifteen or twenty percent so the fighters are you know they go out there they get their you know face beat and they're they'll they'll make twenty thousand dollars off that fight or forty thousand dollar or eighty thousand dollars and then they only get to do that two or three times a year so it's like a pretty brutal sport for a low pay what conor mcgregor did was instead of selling the attention try to trying to make money as his kind of like service fee he created a brand around literally every part of his lifestyle so he's like alright this thing's gonna get me famous but then okay what am i famous for people like my suits at the press conferences is cool i'm an launching a suit brand okay i'm irish i'm gonna launch an irish whiskey irish whiskey i think just sold for i don't know if you know saying four hundred or five hundred million he he walked to yeah exactly and he's like from the deal cool i'm super fit because i'm a you have c fighter my body is amazing here's my p dx x program it's called mcgregor fast you can you can buy my program and subscribe to that and you can get fit with me oh you're getting fit and guess what else do i do i recover okay here's a recovery spray that i spray on my leg that's like you know like makes my leg recover faster after workouts and the guy is literally just selling like every piece of his lifestyle as a independent brand like you know i think at one point he was thinking about launching a sports betting exchange it's like what is the best business who wants to pay me out draft kings wants to pay me maybe a instead of draft king's is mcgregor kings now and i will i'll launch a competitor he just he just opened these you know has whiskey what else do we do i doubts okay i'm gonna so he bought a bar not that the bar is accurate like i could bar in his hometown bar is not gonna make a ton of money but then he used that bar as the like basically the backdrop to film him creating a stout and now he's gonna sell a stout as a new like alcoholic beverage brand and it's kind of amazing the guy gonna become a billionaire and fighting is gonna be the lowest part of his income stream as my guess which is insane but i bet you i bet you mc connor connor mcgregor i bet he might make a billionaire he might lose a alright lastly we're playing a clip from our interview with ryan a holiday you might know ryan from his social media presence on the daily stoic from his many appearances on the tim ferris show or from one of his many books like the obstacle is the way still is the key or trust me i'm lying here ryan talks about why he works with the traditional book publisher and how he manages to stay a top selling author from the outside you know i think a lot of entrepreneurs feel this it's like oh publishing you know record labels and book publishers it's all just middle and their they take advantage and the authors cease a little to you know blah blah and someone like you you have a a lot of business sense b yeah now have a track record see you have an independent audience you can sell to so there must be some reason that you say no actually people don't get it that you do wanna a publisher for these reasons what is that i look at it on a case by case basis you're just you're really doing the math will the what they're paying for it plus the royalty what are you thinking you earn you know in a short amount of of time or or you know in a certain amount of time so i i just do the math on each project so every time i think about a book just because i have a publisher if obviously if no one's was interested in publishing it there'll be a different story but i i you know i conceive of what the book is and then i take it out my publisher has a first look deal at my books i and i see what you know what they what they think what they're willing to pay and then you know i have an agent and so we obviously try to get that number up as high as possible and then once i have that number then i think okay what would this look like if i did it myself so what would it cost me to do it myself what am i likely to sell myself how much work is that gonna be how much of a distraction is that gonna be and ninety percent of the time you know the math the math tends to go towards traditional publishing in my experience the the kid's book that i did the publisher just wasn't it wife wasn't in their wheelhouse they didn't totally get the project i did it myself it's been great and really fun and artistic fulfilling but also just an incredible amount of work i mean like the coins i sell directly from my store right the manufacturer makes them they drop it off at the warehouse they get shipped fulfilling books through amazon is like in an like and then also the thousand independent retailers in the united states plus every international edition you know is extraordinarily logistically difficult and i remember you you gave this talk one time that was awesome where you showed a chart of the sales of your book versus the normal book so a normal book you get a peak and then it pretty much just kinda goes away but then for some of the classics you get a peek and then it goes down a little bit but then it kinda quickly comes up to the point the word even like it's pretty steady throughout like a catcher in the rye or something like that or even sometimes it'll it'll it'll suck early on and just slowly get better your books if i remember correctly they they popped just like everyone else they went down a little bit just like everyone else but then they like raised and were pretty steady with daily sales and you're like that's because i make shit that can last a long time and this was actually for when you're running perennial seller i think you're like proving this point is is is that still the case and considering all of your other businesses is book is making books still where you make the majority of your income or you're just using that because you love it and it happens to make money and you but you make the bulk of your money from other shit yeah it's it's most non fiction authors make more money from speaking than from books that's because speaking can be more lucrative but it's also because most authors don't sell very many books right so i i'm in an unusual space where my books do sell consistently and i have a lot of them so i i make a good living from that but probably make more money from stuff other than books than books do that's crazy sell in that that you're like the man and yet still it's like the other like well that that's another reason to traditionally publish right so so like your a publisher does not take any percentage of speaking does not take any film or tv adaptations does not take any ancillary products any merchandising anything like that so really this the book is it's not a loss leader because people pay for books and and and books have value to people but like the the the ideas in the book everything else is downstream from whether that that takes hold or not does that make sense so if the book doesn't land all the other stuff you know doesn't really matter but if the book works all the other stuff happens and then the success of the book is slightly less significant i think what my so so in publishing there's the front list and the back list front list is anything within one year that like the year of release that's considered a front list title and then it becomes a back list title after a year so most titles stop selling when they leave the back list and when they leave the front list and become on the back list but almost all of the income in publishing is from the back list wow so so for me it's about like i've i've tried to create that in my own my own catalog of like titles that sell every year as opposed to like a big book that comes out gets a lot of attention then then three four years later i have to write another new book because the other one is like not it's like it's like michael bub or or mariah carey running a christmas song you know you you want that christmas hit you want that annuity yeah yeah i mean so so like my book the daily stoic when when when my agent was like we should do a page you you should do a page a day about doses and i was like i don't know and he was like it will be your best selling book and i was like there's no way that doesn't make any sense every new it will he's like it will and he's right it the book sold more copies this already this january than last january alright that's it for the week if you have any comments you can tweet any one of us tweet sean at sean vp or sam at the sam par or me ben at ben wilson tweets thanks everyone and have a great weekend from at all in and like a days off on a road less travel never looking back