Bootstrapping a +$1B Business + Selling To The Ultra Rich | Jesse Pujji

said a couple interesting things so let's let's break this down we have no money we're bootstrapping let's get ourselves on gl as experts i'm like okay my my charge is five hundred dollars an hour she goes no problem but we talked to like someone after a few weeks and he goes do you guys have research and we we look at each other we're like yeah yeah we have a report it's five thousand dollars so i was joke that was handled angels around we raised a hundred and fifty thousand dollars selling research reports to edge one people forty sick that's an amazing story and by the way there's eight of them that all have like high eight or low nine figures in eb the whole category has just crushed the two takeaways from this by the way are sell to the rich and then your way of figuring out what they need was i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road jesse what up dude how are you doing man what's up guys i'm pumped to be on here good to see you where should we start you sent us a doc had a bunch of cool ideas on it we're we're twenty you wanna start with i mean maybe maybe some of the stuff we've learned at gateway x as we've been building new ideas i think the idea i'm most excited about which i think sean and i've talked about is ox insights sam do you know about this business no what is ox insights oh dude this is sick okay so tell us about this new business you're gonna love it so you know one of the things that i i as we've learned starting new businesses and some of them you guys probably know like honey sean you custom of failed it didn't or we stopped doing it and one thing i've learned sitting in the seat is it's really important to like understand demand and that there's a customer who has a problem that you need and then goes like the stand up the thing with growth assistant that's what i did i already knew people needed it and i just stood it up and and immediately started to work and so you know i started my career in finance and consulting i would depend i got a million friends were in private equity and after we sold amp push i would get a call from one friend once a month without fail who worked at blacks stone or worked at t g or worked at one of these fancy private equity firms and they'd go hey i i have this deal in front of my investment committee it's a billion dollar company and i'm getting asked all these questions about their google and facebook ads jesse like what if they don't perform well or how do we know they're good at them and they're asking me to like look at the web traffic and make some analysis and jesse i no idea and my my investment community is not happy because i can't convince them to buy this business what should i ask them so the first few calls i'm like well the same thing you any of us would do well go look at google analytics well how many how many creators are they testing my fourth guy i was like can you just do this for me and i'm like you know me i'm like well yeah a couple hundred thousand dollars i'll do it for you and he's like oh that's it yeah done let's go do this and so ox insights is essentially a private equity consulting business it works for private equity firms specifically in office of the cmo marketing related diligence and what what's called value creation value creation after they buy the business they want you to spend time helping them put together a strategy for how they grow the business and there's businesses like accordion a cool example three hundred million revenue a hundred million eb it's only a twelve year old company they do the same exact business for office of the cfo what so anything finance related yeah accordion i mean you could look at l k eight hundred million and two hundred and fifty in eb mckinsey has an over billion dollar business just for private equity firms it's got fifty five percent eb margins and when you say they're off the cfo so let's let's break this down so you said a couple interesting things the first was it's a lot easier to succeed in business if you first find the starving crowd so find the really hungry market versus how you and i sam like starter at least i should just speak for myself i don't know if you did the same thing but like i would always be like what's a cool idea yeah or what's something i could make or what's something that seems easy to do and it was easy at the start because it's so familiar or it's like just nearby but i i've no idea the demand or the demand is all and other broke people like me it's gonna be really hard to sell and make money or i need so many customers to make money whereas is you're like well let me work backwards who are the richest people and the richest companies it's like private equity hedge funds that type of customer they're not price sensitive at all they're urgent and they're super rational they're like cool if i can buy something for a hundred thousand dollars but it's gonna help you make a ten million dollar decision great you know the the the math mats i'm in so they're they're they're wealthy they're not as price sensitive they're rational and in your case you figured out what the need was because you had one fortune circumstance which was like they were calling you to ask you about this thing and you basically so so what you built was like a marketing due diligence so they're looking at a company they need to know is there are their digital ads performing very well not so good is there any red flags in hear any concerns in the same way that if i wanna go by a company and i get a bunch of financial statements i might ask a super financial account to go look it yeah yeah like hey my accountant like can you look at this can we do a quality of earnings can we can we get some understanding of like are these numbers solid or not they are really financially literate it but they're not as facebook ads and google ads and pinterest ads literate as you are so you're providing that diligence and then after they buy then you're like cool and then we'll help you like lever we'll show you some levers that might be able to grow this this thing after you buy to create the value right you should get background so you started and sold ambush for some tens of millions i think dollar visual marketing agency and then with that money you went and started a gateway x which is almost an incubator yeah we call it a studio you told c where you have started three or four or five business is we started six we've shut down two one is kinda going sideways two have crushed it aux being one of them and one is new got it okay and and let me jump in and say two things that we what we call it at gateway in the studio sean is we have to have a unique insight and an unfair advantage i wanna build like in ten years i want this like hold coast studio thing where we've got five to fifteen i don't care what the number as operating companies they're all profitable they're compounding on top of each other and we've got this super cool culture of builders basically inside of it you don't raise money at the start for them right we don't raise my money we tried it with ka honey as you know and and it didn't work like it wasn't it just wasn't for me shouldn't say it was fine just wasn't for me what what what's ka honey well there's a great example of sean's point of like a cool idea so that you're gonna think the idea is cool the second tell you and like a shitty idea of business i was like look commerce sites look like they're ten years old and meanwhile instagram and tiktok i've got these like full vertical videos so let's make a plug to let e commerce companies change themselves to look more like tiktok and instagram so the first product was the little stories nav bar at the top of of every e commerce site and we had it on sean's site and i was like oh it's gonna people are gonna engage with it the content is gonna look bigger it's gonna and we launched it and everybody people thought it was a really cool idea right but nobody's actually like sean by the way i i thought it was awesome idea in fact i kinda still think it's an awesome idea is good idea but it doesn't solve anybody's problems and nobody's nobody's lining up for it and then we're like oh it's improving your conversion but then it's like it's not sean sure it's improving our conversion it kinda seems like people engage with it and then people like it's kinda slowing my site down or it takes me too much content and they just ripped it off the site was it basically just a plug in it's a it's a plug in just a plug so i mean had a big vision for it right you'd have landing pages and you could influencers and we i still think someone's gonna figure it out but i sat there and i was like i got this other business growth assistant and here's was a funny story you guys will like this we go to shop talk and you know shop talk matches you and i have one sales guy from ka han and one sales guy from growth assistant and they both do the matching thing the ka honey guy gets three meetings the growth assistant guy gets twenty five meetings one selling like marketing talent in the philippines and i go man if there's ever a signal for like solving a problem versus you know just cool thing this is it and that was like one of the key decisions where i was like i don't wanna do this anymore and with ox so he so with connie like y you wanna invest would love to have you a bored here's a tech and i'm like looking at i'm like i kinda like they idea but i'm not fully sold i ended up not investing with ox he half tells me the idea to text message and i'm like i gotta invest in this somehow right like even i was like instantly i was like this shit's gonna work this is a great idea much easier to solve and one really cool thing i i had heard jesse can you talk about this which is earlier when you were doing and push you signed up for gl g which is a like expert network well where basically rich dudes on wall street will call you and be like hey nerd you know a lot about this biotech thing or you know a lot about newsletters it's like if a banker is about to take a company public like a email software company public they wanna talk to all types of users of email software and ask them questions so they could have more conviction in their decision yeah and by the way there's eight of them that all have like high eight or low nine figures in eb to be clear there's guide point global there's alpha sites it's the whole category has just crushed and the it's basically like if brad pitt called you i was like hey you ever been to this italian restaurant new york he's gonna take a supermodel there but you've been there and he's like how's is the palm and you're like that's it's pretty good actually and then they're like cool they hang up you don't know why they asked you and they pay you a thousand dollars for the for the for the feedback well here's a this the story of g gl is hilarious so i don't usually tell this part of the story but it starts earlier young jesse's an associate at goldman sachs he decides my my best friend who's is my c cofounder hedge fund blew up during the financial crisis so he doesn't have a job so he kinda sits around like i wanna get a job i wanna start something he gets me excited enough and i'm like i wanna start something too let's go start something in a few months i give my notice at goldman they're like take ninety days wind down and i was like me i'm like hey do you mind if i use the firm's resources to research my future business idea and goldman by the way probably has a multi million dollar subscription with gl so we have an unlimited calls they don't charge us per call because the goldman they're paying them so much money so me and my c founder line up three phone calls a week with like digital ad experts and lead gen people and we research e commerce like you name the category we were talking to an expert in it for like the ninety days before we left before i left goldman we also had all the sell side analysts come and tell us like what are the internet trends that we should be paying a ten can do so this was the research before amp started i'm twenty four twenty five years old then i start amp qui street would you guys may or when not i know is was publicly traded lead gen business goes public and the same thing happens a couple of my hedge fund friends call me go dude isn't this what you're doing like and i go well here's what you need to look at and here's how their margins work and then i get the idea i'm like we have no money where boots bootstrapping let's get ourselves on gl as expert so i call my old rep and i go hey can i be an expert on on your gl are they asking them like yeah we need someone i'm like okay my my charge is five hundred dollars an hour she goes no problem so now me and my c founder are doing on the other side of the marketplace we're doing five calls a week we're making twenty five you know it's it's good money but we talked to like someone after a few weeks and he goes do you guys have research that you can put together because you can the way you're explaining is so helpful and we're we look at each other we're like yeah yeah we have a report it's five thousand dollars i'll send you guys a report you can link to it it's super outdated at this point a fifty page reports it's gonna explain the lead gen industry you tell you who the competitors are blah blah blah blah blah he's like gal i'll take it so we we basically spend four days all weekend putting this report together and then gl is like hey we're getting a lot of other questions about this report can you sell more of it by the time was all said and done we sold thirty of the so i was joke that was is angels around we we raised a hundred and fifty thousand dollars selling research reports to edge one people that's insane i don't know if you heard on the pod but ana nod from cp insights did the same thing i did did you hear did you hear his story he basically no sold he's barber he turned into a huge business well he started with the with the pdf and he's like you know he's trying to charge like five hundred dollars and then he's like the best thing that ever happened to us is my buddy was like no you need to charge like twelve twelve thousand dollars minimum twenty five thousand is your medium and then a have a hundred thousand dollar option he's dude it's a pdf like what you sure they made like three hundred grand back it's a gift and good yeah right it gets more value when people think it's a it's been more expensive i mean that's of for pricing for ox we charge fifty thousand dollars a week for for a team of consultants and mckinsey ban and bc g charged two hundred thousand dollars a week so our argument is we're seventy five percent cheaper than them but way better in our world of online mark you know the world that we know extremely well how come you don't charge seventy nine percent more and say we're better that was so one of things i didn't tell you when when i my friends were calling me and i was like isn't there someone who does this why you keep calling me about this and what they told us this is part of the market research was they said look mckinsey bain and bc g are two hundred thousand dollars a week and they don't they're not practitioners of marketing jesse so they don't actually know the answers and then every time we ask an agency agencies come back with recommendations like change your match types or do more lookalike audience or whatever and they're like we don't know the fuck they're talking about like we don't understand what they're saying what they want is you do this and this much revenue in eb will come so a big part of our work is literally just translating marketing levers into revenue eb dot terms so that they can actually understand what they're what they're gonna spend money on or what the risk levers are in the business do you run like fake ads like like you know a lot of people when they have a company they'll be like you we wanna make product but we're not actually sure if anyone's gonna to buy it and so they make an ad for the product that doesn't exist and sometimes the landing page will be like oh you caught us a little bit too soon but let us know if you want this whatever we've done it in value creation we haven't done it in diligence diligence is like you've got four weeks they're trying to determine whether they wanna buy the business and you're just like your head you have so much data you have to figure out what's going on and be able to give them a smart answer value creation you have twelve or twenty weeks sometimes depending on the engagement there we will definitely run experiments will make ad changes we'll do all these things and come back to them and say hey this is a good idea is not a good idea so to make this actionable like even for me or sean or listener what do you look for like what can i look for in my business and i assume obviously this is only if you are running digital ads facebook and google basically adds what can you look for to be like there's opportunity here or this is stupid shut it down yeah the i mean we we approach in a few different ways right one is top down like we use ver and a couple other third party data sources and our own data to figure out benchmarks of the company so if you're an e commerce business with a you're selling water bottles what should your click through rate what's your conversion rate by channel what's that's our top down way of kind of assessing where they stand and so that's just whatever you can get that data anywhere online and then the bottom up part of it is for example for facebook right we'll say like is the account structured correctly oftentimes there's too many ads trying to like breaking the signal in too many different places it needs to be consolidated the other question we'll ask is is there event match quality good oftentimes these old old school companies owned by private equity they don't even they have like a three out of ten match quality which means facebook signal is super crappy for them and i bet sean's company and most startups have nine out of ten because they've like major day facebook's getting all the right data then there's all the creative stuff are they you know the easiest thing almost says my performance is bad i'm gonna go how many creative do you test a week a week what you talking about oh we do two a month well yeah of course your performance is gonna be horrible right so creative testing is one of the easiest levers to pull in terms of improving face and if a business that you're looking to buy has all of these things that they're doing wrong and they're still succeeding and you for you you're like there's opportunity here if they get this right you're gonna be even better at buying this exactly and size right so the key deliverable the first five slides of every deck here's the grade for every channel and then here's the waterfall that says what's your current eb and then if you improve the things that we think in a pretty moderate way here's what your eb of the business could be and that's the money chart for a private equity guy pretty sick yeah it's it's a super cool business and and honestly like the validation that we've gotten like that's the other cool thing is that my one of my other tests for a business is if in my discovery phase people start asking me to buy it i know i'm on to like that's what happened with growth this assistant that i that's what i with ox and early as that happened i like hey this is an idea we have we wanna get you offshore marketing people and like can i get one of those people and i'm like oh okay we're good same thing with the private equity thing i call on my buddies to go here's this idea we have we wanna do he's like oh i actually have a deal right now can you guys start looking at it that's awesome how big is this business now is that year old could you say like a year year one it's like five million to do five million dollars this year that's save yeah it'll be five million and we by the way we invested one tenth of what we put into into it and by the way sam like i think the the key because you were like what are the marketing levers and like he gave you like a as good as an answer you give not having like the thing you need is like doctor what can i do to be better but here's none of my data and none of my scans and on my name it's like well you should i guess you know check on your health so the key here with this business though is it's he won't say this is not part of a sales pitch but like it's not that he has to be like this marketing sa that's gonna like find the genius levers these companies are really buying certainty and it's it's cy y right why a lot of consultants get hired in the world is is is there's c but you're doing a deal you need to understand that the thing you're buying doesn't have any like you know horrible war that's the first piece and then cool what is a like best case base case worst case kinda scenario of what we can do to grow this thing and it's not even like a specific tactic like oh change the audience segmentation but it's like we need a plan made by people who know a lot about this and that's enough to like kinda move the ball forward and then of course like when you could go in and you actually do the shit you'll figure it out case by case it's not like like you go to a hundred e commerce companies and you could take the ten smartest people in facebook ads and google ads they're gonna give you ten different answers for every single company because one guy likes costco caps and another guy likes as another guy says right simplify the structure another guy says use all the new shit another guy says do this attribution method and another guy says this there's no real uniform answer for like how do you do how does this work better versus worse yeah i will i'll i'll disagree like i'll show you can i share my screen yeah yeah i mean this is an example of the internal tool or the internal like analysis to give you the detailed answer sam of like everything we look at when we're trying to assess and grade inside of a private equity right so there is top down it's bottom up how much spend does getting spend plays what's campaign structure what's how you made this i mean my my team made this yeah that's so cool so this is what we go through and do and we're gonna turn this into software at some point by the way any color coded excel sheet we're like this is yeah great i'm a step smith came on and showed me like a just like beautifully formatted excels shoot i don't think i even read anything that was in it but i was like you're great this is fantastic like i'm i'm such a sucker for formatting on an excel sheets well but and and sean's right which is like the other thing i would think about too that i think a lot of entrepreneurs miss because we we're so caught up on ourselves is the human ness on the other side of the table so shit you you say private equity firm and you're like oh yeah private equity firm but what's really happening is there's a there's a mid level partner if they buy a business and facebook blows up in a year on them it's career limiting for them right so the human of being on the other side wants to go in and sell this deal to their committee be able to put a good case together and the reason mckinsey and bain built billion dollar business to doing this is because those people wanted to go look mckinsey says the market is big now the group the dream is they go look ox says there's x amount of eb available in marketing and look at the analysis they put together that's convincing like that what percentage of the deals do you say shit you're like no dude like there's no opportunity here we've had i mean it's it's a young business we only done twenty projects but let's say on twenty five percent we've said we we should you should say the hell away from one i mean one there was just straight up fraud in the seo tackling linking that they would have never spotted without us that was a huge win and i mean they paid us obviously they didn't do the deal and then we've had a couple where we were not convinced that there was as much leverage like the management team puts together projections right so they they share projections and these things and we look at those projections and we basically go dude this person would have to be the best facebook ad marker on the planet to hit these projections like we we think they can grow but we don't think the projections they put together are reasonable and we need to double click and as they double clicked on that they lost excitement about the deal wow what a cool business good job thank you much better than honey so so your thing was like kind of office for the cmo you talked about how accordion and the there's there's the equivalent for the cfo side can you talk about other businesses that are like this to sell to the like ultra rich customers so let's call it hedging yeah investment banks whatever i heard you talk about a business that i never heard of called i think it was first ring or first what is that well that sounded very interesting well the first thing i was tell people like who's the richest man in new york sam who's a richest man in new york i don't wanna ruin your story okay fine i'll say ari who's who's a richest man in new do you think it's so long here's the homie guess i here hear the only guys i hedge fund guys i'm real estate guy yeah daniel oc or steve schwartz or whatever nope nope nope it's michael bloomberg it's the guy who's selling information and so sitting at goldman i like had this terminal we were paying twelve hundred dollars a month and you know they never negotiate price every single terminal they never do volume discounts and you're like damn this guy is just i mean they're printing money in that business it also helps that he owns the entire thing owns the entire thing but dude whether he did it and it the thing makes like five ten billion a year in eb it's huge it's a ridiculous business right and so i'm sitting there i'm an entrepreneur entrepreneurial person and and my boss comes up me and she goes you gotta set up first range jesse and i'm like oh cool what's for strain and i'm like looking through it and it's like pull this stock ticker and get an alert to your inbox when there's news about this company and i'm like this is just google alerts she's like what's google alerts and and i'm like what do we pay a month for this she's like oh we pay like two thousand dollars per license and i'm like well our group is like forty people like we're paying eighty thousand no we got a it's fifty thousand dollars a month we're paying for for this google analytics thing i'm like what the fuck and so you know one of the one of the categories for us now and again remember unfair advantage is very important i i happen to have lots of friends in this world because of where i went to college just whatever unfair advantage where did you go to college i went to penn fancy and the wall street you know training school so a bunch of my friends work at hedge fund the private equity and you know these guys want information like that they're willing to pay tons and tons of money for me they're not price sensitive at all they if they can they can the roi of everything they every decision they make because that was what we got told about first rain they go oh it's fifty thousand dollars a month but if it gets us one trade ahead of somebody else it's paid for itself for the full year so because of the numbers they're dealing in they can just pay anything right just like the two hundred thousand dollars diligence the project for a half a billion dollar deal it's nothing for them right so this category is a great one to sell into and actually have another funny story you guys are like so i'm g g gl g has been like my life my savior in business you what happened for me i became like a regular take that term anyway you want four hedge fund dudes for facebook every quarter ten same people would call me and they would go how's the quarter going jesse do you think ben's is gonna be up or down because they own huge positions in facebook right so one of the guys eventually is like jesse i want access to your data like i just want the aggregate and i'm allowed to share it as my data at ambush push i'm spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year and he goes i want i want just full real time access to your data like i can give it you an aggregate i can't give you any client data and he's like what can i get to you and i was like well bootstrap company right i'm like you know we've been dealing with this like working capital situation with with our bank like well you just give me a five million dollar interest free loan he's like done he's like done so this guy peter he's a good friend of mine now he gave us a five million dollar loan so we didn't have to pay any interest to our bank to do working capital and all i had to do was basically give him a real time feed from our tableau or whatever of our aggregate cpm ct whatever all of our data for for facebook so anyway first reign is this is a basic software tool you sell the hedge headphones because they're willing to pay anything for it and so one of my ideas by the way and if anyone's listening wants to build this with me i need someone very good at analytics and and decent at sales is i be just with my network i could probably get five billion in in meta facebook spend of and give people a survey every quarter did you spend more or less how excited are you get like a detailed survey i'd have to be a really robust survey then i'd go to all these hedge fund people and i'd say you can have the access to this data every quarter it's a it's fifty thousand dollars a quarter and you have to guarantee me two years of a subscription and i think i'd have people align out the door people willing to pay for that data and then i would do it for google then i would do it amazon then i would do it for all of these different platforms dude see it even easier we like why not just go to triple well who already has all the data yeah that's etsy and be like hey triple well let's you know do this line of business basically hundred percent yeah let me license your data for the exclusive use in the financial service because they not gonna be important for them and then you can basically create a thing that hedge funds are paid and the best thing you i what i would do to hedge funds i'd say i'm only gonna sell it to twenty of you but let's do a reverse auction so now make them bid against each other for this date and as long as you limit they'll do that because they don't want everyone having the data right that's a really important thing to them but anyway though the the lesson here is that category alternative assets are a great thing to bootstrap into because the like one deal basically can make you as a business and then you can go from there yeah my my old business partner used to call college just adding a zero he's like basically what what market or product can we go into where we do the same exact work but we just added a zero to the end of the the dollar amount that we're able to charge like sam you you told me this with your events too you used to charge i think like three hundred dollars a ticket but then other people charge three thousand and then i friend who was like rec code or whoever it was charged thirty thousand dollars a ticket and it was like the same work same product it was ridiculous and i did the exact same thing sean that you said you did where you're like i have an idea but i'm broke so i'm just gonna assume that everyone else is broke and that's what i go hang out with other broke people yes it was really the easy thing which like the two takeaways from this by the way are sell to the rich you know you're gonna be able to add a zero to to what you're what you're doing and then your way of figuring out what they need was you had friends in that circle you could go make friends or you were using gl you were like i have one area of expertise that could be my calling card to get in the door and then that will be how i you know understand that what these people need and then maybe i can pair what i know with what they need and to a you know either a data product or a consulting yeah and to tie it to get tie them together actually anyone listening i would say what is it that you know extremely well or a couple things that are cross sections of each other and so first figure that out and then figure out who's willing to pay you the most money for what you know that's essentially what i did with with aux business i was like i know this thing who's gonna go pay me the most for it and that group is gonna pay me the most by far can i you didn't put on this sheet but i wanna talk i wanna ask you a couple of questions about this particularly because i don't know if sean knows much about this company and i know a little bit about it but i know that when i know they're like crazy impressive so i think you sold your company to red ventures is that right so we saw it's a longer story we sold a minority they wanted buy the whole thing we couldn't get to terms they sold a minority we gave them an option to buy the rest of the business they started buying content assets and decided not to buy the rest of our business so we ended up eventually selling it to someone else but we did for know them for two years we operated as one company because the plan was originally for them to buy it so i know them and rick incredibly well do you know about this company sean red ventures i know about the surface level and actually we've we've hit up jesse being like dude this is fast should we get rick on like and i i wanna know more well but there's one part of the story that i just wanna mention which was amazing is like he started this thing and then he was actually on the plane that salt landed in the in the hudson and he like gave this like amazing talk when he he was like i was like one or two years into my business and for some reason that life the that life or death situation kind of changed his outlook on life and now red adventures is known as like one of the best places to work and it sounds like they're it's a great company so yeah to what's the background yeah so the story of the way that they tell it they started the business in two thousand so rick and dan are the founders and they're both friends in both multi billionaires errors and they they actually met ascend in the late nineties you guys know what send in is they had like the the coupon book they launched orbits they were like the original internet hold c they met there very direct marketing heavy so in two thousand the two of them broke off on their own literally months before the internet uploaded they started red f is what it was first called five years later in their their story they're telling of it not mine rick says dan give me a dollar dan gives them a dollar goes you can have my half of the business i hate this business i don't wanna do it so they do a hard reset five years in i think they barely were doing a million eb and like these guys are the best learners you've ever met so then at the time go back to two thousand five there was this new thing called google adwords and there was agency starting and there were lead gen businesses and they for whatever reason had a relationship with directv they said hey directv if you remember back then was looking for satellite people to sell in them mall like they're these reseller so rick or one of them had this idea let's go to go go to directv and become a dealer so they go hey director we wanna be dealer like sure we love dealers what's your territory they go this new thing called the internet will be our territory like okay sure we don't know anything so they became direct star tv authorized dealer of direct tv but as the part of their thing they owned all the web rights they own all the adwords rights they owned all the seo and in four years they built a seventy five million dollar eb business just selling directv subscriptions because they would run the media take the phone calls and all these things that are commonplace today where like what you do on your website gets cookie and then you know on the phone call they were they were pioneers and all of that stuff and basically if if someone became a reseller of the tv tech dish network wherever whatever it was directv they gave red ventures like a five hundred dollar bounty for every single customer they get and red ventures just had to do it for less than that right and so between their media and of course after a few years directv like but we can't get rid of you because you're driving all of our customers but we don't like the deal we made so then they renegotiate a million different times and you know they still probably work with them but then they went and took that out and then general atlantic the big private equity firm invested and has crushed it on that deal and they they went and did that for any high lt tv purchase you can imagine so every credit card company worked with them american express verizon wireless people who sell pest control like anything that was like a long term purchase basically red ventures was either running their marketing and and when they invested in us we wanna do the same deal for direct to consumer companies which did not work nearly as well as it work for them which is a different story for a different day but that's what they got you then they got to twenty fifteen they're doing two two three hundred in eb and there's no more growth left which is why they invested in us and they bought they did they did a bunch of other things their rick's really smart and he goes okay i'm invest in jesse he did five other deals at the same time same year and a year later ambush is going okay the other one went down to zero one you know but they bought an seo business that they use their same playbook and within nine months they took it from three in eb to nine in eb and they go oh shit so that worked okay let's go do a bigger deal so then they bought like a ten million dollar eb seo content business and then they took it to like twenty five when you say seo content business you're talking about like the point scott yeah the first one was reviews dot com the second one i'm forgetting the name it but yeah like the points then they finally rick like give a couple of those and rick's like alright i'm ready for the big time he went and bought bank rate which is a billion dollar publicly traded company for a hundred in eb it owns the points guy it owns credit cards dot com and owns and in less than two years they tripled the eb of the business and then they bought health line they bought cn net i mean so they basically took their and now the services part of their business is a tiny part of their business and the seo content part is a massive part of their business but the same culture the same playbook and it's it's an incredible business and incredible well can you explain what they're doing so they buy these seo businesses which is let's just take bank rate as an example people google best yep mortgage rate more current mortgage rates whatever and they bank rate has done the content work and the seo work to be the top thing that shows up on google so then you click it you go in and they have like these affiliate offers and that's all great and what what red did was they basically am i right that they bought a business that was like primarily seo driven and then they layered on paid to that is that the main thing that they did or what what did they do to the assets there's four major levers they pull and the first thing i have to tell whenever i tell this story is rick and it's the most unique culture like at some point you guys i just take you there and you got a tour the campus and check it out because you've never seen anything like it and there's a great new york time article where they describe it as like part wall street trading desk part like southern politeness and part like hard nose direct response marketing and that's exact like is a very apt description but anyway and that's why i wanted to ask you about it because rick seems like an anomaly like he seems like a like a like this is normally like kind of a not this could be a shady industry it often is a shady industry he doesn't it seem like a shady guy and they seem like a like people love working there which is rare he's one of the most special people i've ever met my he's one of most special people in the world i think what would we notice if we toured the campus what would we see the funny you asked so one of my request to him when they invest i i wanna shadow your leadership team for a week me and my my ten leader gonna shadow your leaders and i wanna see what you guys do and what you'd find is you know these things that are like startup up outages they've done at a scale of five thousand people every meeting is short every meeting starts with a bottom line and numbers are the only thing that has ever talked about in levers and every person is basically trying to optimize more eb in in any discussion they're having and they don't talk about the work that gets done as a independent of that right and it's like another example is like they shape teams so yeah you know for digital marketers they don't say like we have a client team and we have a marketing team we have a they go we have like team click through rate and we have team conversion rate and we have team traffic volume like they literally organize people by the kpi that they're trying to drive so that there's a deep deep focus into it have these really cool things called business reviews where basically rick and the leadership team sits and you have twenty minutes to come in give update on your business real decisions are made about the business and he does like forty of the or like forty over two days basically it's a high energy very smart it's like it's a very unique culture but anyway so the culture is a starting point by far because without it i don't think any of this works they have four main levers the first is improvement of traffic acquisition both paid and organic so to your point sean they'll they'll layer on paid in a really smart way they think a lot about cost per visitor and revenue per visitor and get that equation working extremely well but they'll do a lot of seo as well and they'll get volume up right so i think i remember high level when they bought the points guy making these numbers up but it was doing seventy cents in revenue per visit and maybe forty cents in cost per visit and two years later was doing like a dollar a dollar seventy in revenue per visit and like ninety cents in cost per visit but the visits were up by like factor of two or something like that right so so first lever is travel acquisition second lever is they're extremely good at on side optimization if you guys pull up the points guy i of these things now you'll say wow platinum american express is plugged here but it's plugged in a smart way but i wanna click on it but it doesn't feel too sales even they're very good at getting basically the on site optimization to be significantly higher the third lever is their incredible geniuses when it comes to pricing to the efficient frontier of a customer's curve you guys know what i mean when i say that you used it a lot of words my friend independently but when you put them together that way which was is a combination i wasn't familiar so when you're a credit card so you're american express right and american express is probably worth willing to pay seven hundred dollars per credit card application but their person on their side will pay two hundred if they can right so but the only way if you can figure out the exact willingness to pay for an incremental customer by your customer in their business your profits skyrocket so they basically basically you could call it the simple way to say it is they're good at pricing they they can really charge more for what they get and this i'll tell you a funny story the guy who's who's retired now but he's a good friend of mine he's a southern dude he's very like disarming but then he's smart as shit and he's like jesse we were sixty days from clothes we were gonna close this bank rate deal and their team told me there was a bit auction for how you bought credit card applications and no technology could be beat it and he said i looked at it and i said discover is only paying five hundred for an application and they said they're willing to pay nine hundred why are we not charging them nine hundred he's like well that's how the algorithm works he's like buying this deal he goes the day we closed the deal jesse i threw away that algorithm i pulled up a spreadsheet i called all the customer and i say what are you willing to pay what are you willing to pay i got them i charged them exactly what they're were willing to pay and i got twenty percent more in eb overnight within within the first month i own the business and so that's the third lever they're good at and then the fourth lever is they're they're not crash and burn people but they're very thoughtful about and when when they invested in ambush i cut the head count under their sort of tu by more than half and our revenue grew during that time so they're very good at like truly challenging the the b in an organization and being like how many people do we actually need like one store you guys will love is one of their executives that they bought some like government owned thing a really weird business that mails you all the mailer when you move for forgetting the humid with it right now but i just hate that so it's it's actually it was owned by the usps and then it got that now adventures owns it i go so how'd do you decide how to reduce the head count he goes we took the top three in the company we held a draft so we basically put everyone's name on the board and and we said you there's only forty people of eighty staying now go draft your best people and again they you know there they're they're compassionate with obviously the people say like oh it's not that's not it's not meant to be a negative them but like these organizations they're very good at lean staffing these organizations right so those are the four big levers and that's how they get the kind of results they get that's dope i appreciate the the red ventures master class that's great they're they're like a juggernaut and i didn't know much about in terms of how they actually operate your boyfriend the guy from i'm silver late the guy you love who's the guy what's the name that you have a crush on i should probably know his name if he's my boyfriend e e what his name e i think he's on their board yeah he's on their board ga on their board and i mean look they they they're all minority holders they've never raised a dollar of primary capital so they're in my opinion they're a bootstrap giant right they've taken secondary but they've never raised primary if their headquarters is like north carolina or something right yeah they're in charlotte but again dude rick is a hustle of all hustle it's right across the border in south carolina because the state of south carolina has paid for the whole thing with tax incentives you you have on here every profitable founder should understand pe and roll ups would that mean yeah i think the one of the biggest value creation levers if you're running a two to five million dollar eb business is a roll up and i'll tell the story of the company that ended up buying push because it's kinda like still hurts me a little bit when i tell it so there was a business called elite sem as an sem agency four million eb same year that i think ambush had like six or something in twenty fifteen we ended this deal with red ventures whatever earned a ton but these guys sold to a business called mountain gay capital and let's assume i don't know what they paid but let's assume it was on eight times eb which is fair multiple so they paid thirty two million for the business right the founders rolled thirty percent i don't know for fact but i'm just let's making that up in this scenario founders roll thirty percent of the value they take twenty million off the table and they they roll the rest in mountain gay goes and buys another six different businesses in the one to two million eb range now for those businesses they pay like five four to five times eb then they grow the whole thing organically right so then they go for easily like was a math four let's say they buy another five or six companies they buy ten in eb right total invested capitals call it sixty ballpark but now the business is worth fifteen times correct and it was bought by new mountain who bought who bought ambush it was bought by new mountain for fifteen times fifteen which is two hundred and twenty five million eb so the founders got twenty million plus and got another bite of called forty or something like that plus the pe firm obviously crushed it on it my push to founders would be like if you understand that multiples are a function of growth stability and like and margin or def however you wanna think about that and all those things improve with scale and so there's just what they call the finance nerds call it multiple arbitrage which means i can buy it a low multiple and then i can sell in a few years for a higher multiple and i think a lot from if i'm a profitable bootstrap founder including myself like even for growth just and other things i'm like this seems like such an obvious path to create a tremendous amount of value that's that's like better than the venture path for so many different reasons more apt on and more just you know but yeah i think i think everyone should look at it in their space and by the way i think well i've been approached multiple times and pitched on this and it's on my list of like creative ai meets roll up so jesse go let's go buy a creative agency redo their processes with ai right then once you figure that out let's go by ten more of them and not only will you be able to roll they can get the all this multiple arbitrage but you will create a much more profitable business so i think there's a lot of strategies out there and i would say like i think a lot you can do with private equity without private equity but but the founders of running these businesses should be the ones leading them and the more the founder has the strategies better they're gonna do with the pe firm they ever need the capital to go do it right you mentioned ai i wanna ask you about that because you were early to the social networking wave i think you were doing like a social networking type of thing in the first year of facebook i think there's some story where z called you and i called him on a cell phone pretend to be somebody else that was a good one oh you called z tell that story by the way who did your better tend to be so summer of o five were like facebook's oh my mark mark zuckerberg is a year he's already age right we're like he's already age he's like gonna crush it but he's never gonna go into high school somebody should start a high school facebook and we're like why not us so he started the high list i have like i have like the docs we had these little eye icon and all this stuff we basically rebuilt a clone of facebook and at the beginning of the summer we went to go by s facebook dot com and some kid at columbia i don't even remember his name maybe he's listening and he can he can phone himself he owns it and he goes well i'll sell to you for like twenty thousand dollars and where college kids were like no thanks we'll call it the high list and we say peace we build the whole product we launch it literally on the eve of the launch he calls us and he goes mark zuckerberg wants to buy as facebook so i'm giving you a last chance buddy like you get it and i was like oh my god we need was oh my first question was he gonna launch high like yeah he says he is and i'm like no are you sure like i the guy's bullshit me how i prove it so he forwards me the email from zach and this is not this is just a guy named mark zuckerberg it's not z z today right and the guy includes a nine one seven area code number sorry zach that your area code is nine one seven on your cell phone and i don't know if the rest of it don't remember but basically it has a cell phone number so i'm like okay how do we call and how do we verify this is true so i call z by the way i call him from my summer internship office at bain capital so i'm like sitting inside some finance company calling him and i go my name is tom goldberg i'm partners with this guy bob and we own hs facebook together so i wanna make sure that you're not like i'm not getting cut out this deal that you apparently have with him and he goes yeah i'm gonna buy it from him and you need to sort that out with him and then i i what are you gonna do with it and i kid you not he spends thirty minutes and to his credit he outlines the entire strategy of facebook has executed he goes first we're gonna go to high schools then we're gonna go to places then we're gonna go into pods then we're gonna like he had the whole strategy this is in o five dude this is a year into facebook and he's like it's what he was wearing wearing chains and cool shirts we didn't that right around he's like it's twenty years like twenty two or what i'm twenty one and then of he's like wait by the way what was your name again and i'm like click and needless needless just say our a high school facebook plan did not work out they they launched a nate crushed us and we went and got jobs at in finance that's an amazing story i said the story and by the way isn't the funny thing that like the actual answer was go join facebook like just whatever every point in my life that has been the right answer to maximize my album and when i started ambush dude for ten years like i was before all their ads and i did the math because a buddy of mine got a job with same resume got like a corp dev and he didn't take i was like he's an idiot but he didn't take we have his offer we have his physical offer still like oh that would have been worth seventy five million dollars dude i i talked to a guy the other day who was like the two or three hundredth employee of facebook and he was like i had one hundred million dollars in facebook stock yes you know he worked there for seven years or something like that what what i should've have done is said hey look i started this the sizable competitor do you wanna hire me dude because i'd probably be like a billionaire right now because when a year into the the business existing and by the way like to start facebook unbelievable amount of work and and and genius to be the founding kind of like first five ten fifteen twenty people there tremendous amount of work you're scaling something that's that's massive and you gotta be like really sharp or you're gonna get washed out to be the hundredth or two hundred person at facebook don't need anything special to be honest all your two thousand like you're around get over here can you lift boxes for a bit alright he lifted boxes for a but hey can you we got a bunch of spam can you look at all these and figure out like what we're gonna do tell the team like we need people to filter this by employee two hundred you no longer need to be at the top of the genius curve more work you know and incredible amount and you still get rich i if four years into ambush i was looking for head of sales and our best place to hire salespeople was from facebook itself because they knew how to navigate the beast and get us more kind of leads from that get this guy we love each other on the first dinner you know he meets two other people in and then where he's four four interviews in and i do the classic talk alright let's talk comp for a second right we're startup up we'll give a couple points of equity and he like gets this very scared look on his face he goes jesse i'm investing eight hundred thousand dollars a month in facebook stock how are you gonna match that and i'm like i'm like dude what what yeah why hate you buddy see later that is absolutely insane sean have you heard the story about noah ka and how noah was hired to work at facebook noah was a thirty second or t employee employee and basically what happened is he was out at a party and he was drunk or something like that and he tells a reporter a tech reporter we're gonna launch this thing and that thing and it's gonna be the best thing ever and it becomes a news article the next day and z goes to his desk and he goes you're fucking with my company you're out and he fires him on month nine so noah was three months away from his first to vest and noah told me he goes had i just made it that three months those that those shares today would be worth about one hundred million dollars those three months all because he had a had a big mouth and he was twenty one and drunk at a party he was he was his first facebook ads client believe it or not app was that's awesome i bought his first i first customers for him yeah and now it's like you know a business that does a hundred million year in revenue it's so kinda worked out but it would worked out a lot easier if they kinda kept his mouth shut yeah i you know but my thought don't know how you guys feel about that i i i've done that math and i'm like but i don't think i could could've have worked like i don't wanna work for someone of course you can't look back and be like but i even if i could even now make that decision i'm like i don't think i would have wanted to work for facebook or anywhere for that that long or dude i would or that would been awesome are we're gonna say sean i think you're both right so dude for the the the math on this just to put it in perspective let's say you joined when facebook is valued at a billion dollars which i think it was like a fee like a few years and i don't i don't think it was like right away at the time it was unclear social networking would be that big and so let's say you joined at a billion dollar valuation and your employee you know four hundred and you're so junior you're junior and they give you ten thousand dollars of stock a year and you're gonna make a you get a hundred thousand dollar salary and you're gonna be a ten thousand of stock over four years you've you've accumulated forty thousand dollars of stock at a even at a billion today facebook is a one point three five trillion dollar company so that's you get a thousand bag or multiply by a a thousand third a thirteen hundred dollar thirteen hundred times your forty thousand it's a fifty four million dollar stock option you got for being the jan at facebook at the right time which tells me a couple of things number one picking the right company and project will be like by far picking the right market to be in the and then the the winner of that market if you're in the tech industry is by far the most impactful thing you could do in your bit in your like career it'll it'll beat your hard work it'll beat your own like you know intelligence it'll beat being right many times in a row like you just had to be right once in that right time and i should point this out which is that at the time or like every kind of like four years it's pretty obvious what like winning companies look like so my version of this was i only did two job interviews in my life the first one was at monkey fern which is the the studio i ended up joining i wanted to be in the studio and the other one i did was stripe and i could've have told you right then like stripe is the winner like it's the winner of the search the reason that was the only other interview i did was because i was like sc is the winner it was super obvious and then i've done the similar like heartbreaking math of like wow even if i had joined i would've have just been like a sales guy biz biz dev guy like i had no like i would know no senior would have made an absolute fortune now on the other hand you have the jesse thing which is like do you wanna do it would you would you actually have stuck it out and even beyond that is would you have held because there's no chance that i would have held i bought bitcoin in twenty fourteen i did not hold all the bitcoin i gamble right or bitcoin away on a poker night one night because i was just like playing on my poker i did all kinds of things that's now a four times sixty thousand dollar you know thing at the time bitcoin just like three hundred i was like yeah i thought a thousand dollar investment it was actually a quarter million dollar investment and so you know there the idea that i would have held is ridiculous and i don't think i don't think the math is actually real because nobody holds for that long i agree that's insane i've got the same story by the way with airbnb i think i was gonna be employee one hundred and twenty or something and i don't know i also it was a twenty dollar an hour job i don't even know if the equity would have been a lot but you do the math and it does it does sting a little bit but dude i i mean the one way like i was i worked at goldman i was twenty five my twenty nine year old boss made two million dollars a year my thirty five year old boss was making fifteen million dollars a year and i got off that path because i was like i don't wanna like sit here and look at spreadsheets all day like it's a very not dynamic job i didn't like i looked at my boss said do i wanna be them monday and i said no and i literally wrote this down to keep myself honest i said i would i'm okay with like half my personal expected value to be able to like do my own thing in the future i don't know i've never rerun the math but but i have to like make that you know decision for myself what's what's a fifteen million dollar a year employee at goldman do there's a bunch of jobs that make that kind of money but in my world i was in the like the buy side hedge fund they were investing we had a seven billion dollar fund two and twenty right if the thing delivers ten percent a year they make the fees on seven billion are like what one forty plus on ten percent is seven hundred millions like three hundred fifty million in carry and there's four senior people now golden white to even get half of it or whatever but like the the they're paying fifty percent out of whatever the people make in that crazy so but then bankers make that much i mean all these financial services at a senior level they all they all make tons of money there was a guy went down a scholarship i got when i a pen was a partner at goldman man at the head of the infrastructure fund i was making fifty five a year is what he told me and then what he told you did he just like sm the biggest spark you've ever seen your like goddamn life and it it just it was permanent he had a facial i saw it i was like five but you've been there thirty years and like you ever been in those atmospheres none of the three of us would last more than a two or three years in those atmospheres they're not they're political swam is it's not i don't know there's more than money right i i totally agree i think our our actions have showed that but i also think it is entertaining to see like just the the the sort of mind bending amounts that people make doing certain things and in the in the case of joining companies early like wow that that's kind of it that's all you really had to do in terms of like financial success there's a funny tweet that mock put out the other day where he was like bill gates you know if he had just basically held his microsoft stuff would be i think the richest man in the world or or you know number one or number two something like that and and instead you know he did the gates foundation and he did a whole bunch of other things he like sold and then has his family office and yep the top reply which was like a huge was like now do you with meta right because they he used facebook he's like great i got a billion bucks and then i'm gonna do social special capital i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this that and for you know to do specs i'm gonna do all these things for like you know the next twelve years fifteen years and if he had just simply like held the meta stock and and chilled he would would've have financially out far outperformed his own you know is brilliance it's doing all this different investing action yeah i you know but that's the thing that's why you gotta do things that you actually care about or that light you up or that you're motivate you in a way that's different from cash because i mean dude the other thing how many i mean you guys probably have friends like this i have friends who are worth more than i am who have much more money and but they got it through like a meta type situation they're like the most insecure like they're like oh i just got lucky they're afraid to talk about it like it seems like a like a horrible existence like it and there's a lot of people i know like that i met one of the founders of youtube once and the guy was like my lot ticket success you know i don't i like he was he was very unhappy with them amount of money he had made so you think that it's like i'm on easy street i get it like but the psychological thing that people feel like fraud all i mean it's a whole mother there's a whole mother vector of challenges that come with it versus i think all the three of us are founders you start a business whatever it is you made you made it you know you did it like there's a different element to it in my opinion i like talking about it the same way i like looking at mega mansions on the internet it's fascinating to one part of my brain but then the main part of my brain is like i even want that out like yeah exactly like not even in the excuse just like dude that's way too big that wouldn't be fun to live in that be uncomfortable and man the maintenance of that would be like pain the ass that's not what i want in the same way that when we got acquired by twitch i had thought in the last seven years i had worked towards like i wanna big build a you know like i a a successful tech company right i was in the venture capital world success in that world as you build a billion dollar plus company we were doing like a social type of product and media product and twitch is like one of the ten winners that that like actually existed and then i saw emmett day to day and i was like oh man i would be miserable if i doing this and not even in a like like it was just that wasn't fun like his job fundamentally was like putting out fires and you know all problems roll up basically and like it's the worst problem roll up up pat yeah yeah shit rolls up exactly and all it's the worst problems that rolled up past your executive team because they would solve a bunch of them but the ones that they can't really solve cleanly roll up to you so you get the worst of the worst that they'll roll up to you and he would sit in the conference him and basically on a you know his calendar was managed by somebody else's who's a thirty minute block and another thirty minute block and another thirty minute block and he's reading memos and he's doing decisions all day and i'm like man this is not like like the fun factors not there and that's when i started asking a question that's why i started this podcast is i was like who's having the most fun rather than who is the most successful who is the most rich it's just fundamentally who's having the most fun i remember looking at joe and i was like i think joe rogan have a blast it seems like he basically a podcast which is like a une edited un scripted thing he's hanging out with comedian friends or super interesting scientists and paleo pathologist and just fascinating people like that and then then on the side he does comedy which is like you know a craft that he really cares about that he does he does the u which is like a his hobby and he gets to comment for that sit ring side but he also doesn't overdo any of the things meaning he doesn't do his podcast in a way that's like optimized for views he's not like he's like right i wanna do a three hour conversation because that's what i want not because that's optimal for the algorithm for u he doesn't travel he's like i'll do the ones that are nearby me but i'm not gonna fly around the world every weekend accommodating this like i hope that works for you guys same thing with this comedy stuff he's like i'm gonna do it the way that i wanna do it and when i saw that i like okay that is a different model of success that i you know i want more than than kinda what i wanted in my twenties you use joe rogan but i honestly understand that you can apply that to anyone like my hedge fund friends who love hedge funding they're happy they love it it's it's finding your thing it's finding the thing that you really enjoy and then just going all in on it those are the people i think who are winning you really gotta enjoy like doing it a lot because it's it it all really sucks to get there like to do you guys remember z in o six to i mean maybe it was like oh wait to like fit fifteen like i would not have trade places with them i wouldn't i would never in a million years trade places with elon musk but the idea of like having all these things me neither no trade i also reject that trade sam yeah very very very fair of him to say that but it does seem cool like i guess what i mean is like i could acknowledge that that seems awesome that would be cool to have and also i'm not willing to do it but it's that's like fantastic i think one of the most powerful things is figuring out what's cool there's the difference between cool for you and cool for me right like it's right there's so many things where i see people's life set and i'm like that is super cool for you and like i don't mean that in a negative way it's like i do think it is super cool and i think it's even cooler that it's what you wanted but i have to figure out what is cool for me look like you know what's funny is our last episode you talked about the seven spiritual roles and i you you talked about that book that you're reading or how you're were thinking about reading or something like that and i i went and bought it because i personally i'm a little bit of a a a place now where it's like i think some people call it the second mountain you know you already like achieve a little something to where you're like you you're secure but you're like alright but what's a problem that i wanna work on or a way to spend life that may be a little bit higher up on mas hierarchy of needs and so i'm personally still like asking myself it's not defined yet for me jesse do you have one i'm curious yeah you know in i've done i think sean you know this i've spent probably a better part of six or seven years on this personal growth journey which has turned into like a spiritual journey and the the defining moment came for me maybe three years in when my coach was like what's the one thing you can't not do it's like a really weird question and the exercise for you know you could do it sam right now is what's the one thing you can't not do write down a few sentences and then every week look at those sentences and see if they seem to grow with you that's a good idea and and in one funny way he's like what's the thing that comes in the room when you show up like what's the stand because his his point was we try to make purpose this far out thing we have to go get it's actually the thing already inside of us that we just need like tap to and live more fully and for me it was i love helping other people like be the best versions of themselves like raise their game to the next level of what they're capable of and even in this podcast like i think i taught you guys two two new things like it just it comes out it's not purposeful and that's i've made it more purpose full now but like at the time it was wasn't but it was a thing when my friends would tell you about me any of my employees would tell you about like jesse walks in and like the bar goes up and it's like an exciting go up and and so i really like one one of the interesting examples of this goes how do you keep your to do list jesse i was like oh initiatives or clients and like what if you kept your your to do list based on your people you worked with like executives and how you're helping them be the best versions of themselves he's like you'd probably still like get the work done that you need to get done but you do it in this very inspired way and get way mean gateway is a whole function of me going the thing i wanna do is help other people learn and grow i'm not the ceo of any of these companies like now i do actually keep my to do list that way i don't write growth assistant or ox i write adrian and casey and i'm like how am i helping those those people and i find it's a weird thing when i frame my success or my life through the p l's of those businesses i get very like like i'm not i'm not as powerful i'm like a you know more scarce minded person and when i frame it as the like how do i help those individuals is the same shit because they're running the businesses i'm like creative and i'm happy and i'm i'm more flowing so for me it's like that's the thing and it feels overly en energized for me like i think i do it for a really long time but obviously the setup up the way i've got it set up matters a lot too like i'm you know not running any of the individual businesses i don't think i want i wanna run staff meetings i don't wanna run comp plans hiring like all these things i did you guys have done it like it's not what i wanna do but i do wanna help grow each of these businesses dude you're awesome i appreciate you doing this thanks man what do you think and it's great to see you by the way how'd did you get nelly at your birthday party what was that about tell that's hard where we go do you a quick one so i turned forty in may as you guys know and i have a cool video montage of the party and my wife awesome party but i've been telling all my friends about saint louis since i was eighteen so i went to college i'm like was the best city whatever and everyone's was like i was i moved back there one day they're like no you're not and then i moved back and they're like oh shit you move back and so i had two hundred people in town who i've been raving to about saint louis for like ten plus years so i'm like what's the most ridiculous thing you could do if you're me having your fort be like nellie i mean you guys are similar similar age from my high school early college nellie was like the biggest rapper in the planet and he's from my hometown nellie was our guy he was the first famous saint louis guy and it doesn't matter what race you are where how old you are using now he was like our son he'd made us so proud if you're in your thirties or forties just close your eyes i'm just gonna say a few words that'll just take you back country grammar air force ones e her oh my god like just the memories that come with those words so so so i'm like alright i'm yeah you know what's a ridiculous thing i could have at my party i'm have nelly perform there so my wife closed to the normal channels they're like you know he basically doesn't do this right so he's like look it's three hundred thousand just as a starting price by the time you do it all it's a million dollars and i'm like i i i wanna die with zero but like that's a little little rich for my blood so i live with zero yeah so i'm like alright we're not gonna do that and then i kind of am sad for a few months and then and then the entrepreneur entrepreneurial goes wait come there's gotta be another way to approach this right saint louis not a big place i asked a couple people ago you know nellie people right and i'm like can you introduce me and so i get to know they're great but the there there's this guy mike chief and there's one wonderful guys i get to know them and you know they introduced me as this guy who's like an expert digital marker e commerce guy so i'm like hey what's going on what's going on in your world oh hey you know nellie is actually working on two big e commerce businesses like his team is and i go oh tell me more and had to the hell me all about it and i'm like okay well here's the thing you should think about and make sure you tag this problem and and they're like oh wow you know a lot about this i'm like okay how can i be helpful right and and then i just basically have been working with them and right here here's a shopify app do this here's a good contractor for this are they helping their team get it going and at some point it came out the aux business came out and i'm like yeah i charge private equity firms like two three hundred thousand dollars to do nice right and they're like oh but you just been doing for free like can we be help i'm like it's funny you ask a young man's dream would be to have nelly at his birthday party and you know they're they're his people so they're like well let's go talk to him and they go well he's gotta meet you because he doesn't know who you are and if he doesn't know you so i take my wife you know get my i get my sort of urban like going i'm there and we become he's super nice guy really friendly dude have you ever been more nervous walking up to that meeting i was nervous my wife was super nervous like why the hell am i here right now we meet him in like this this soho wannabe be in saint louis so a club wanna be you go for the handshake gap up what do you do yeah you know not the handshake but the you know gotta pull in yeah yeah yeah of course and and so he that goes really well yeah my guy he's sorry he's said that phrase my guy yeah and he asked me was what he wanna do and i think like i was like oh man you gotta come out to e we gotta have the intro because gonna be like and and he like looks me he's like okay you're real fan i'm like yeah man this like you were you were the guy so they're they're like okay nelly loved you we're in then they're like wait what was the date again is may twenty fifth like well he's in napa on the twenty fourth night at some festival and he needs to be in vegas on the twenty sixth day for a day party and they're like there's just he he would do it he as a friend hour because you've helped him but he just can't make the day work jesse and so again i'm like depressed for forty eight hours and i'm like no fuck this i'm like what if i fly in private both ways and they go look we'll talk to him come back next day okay he'll do it but it's gotta be a g four or better he's like now he does not flying anything below a g four so i go and do a bunch of like you know i've i've been flying private a little bit since the amp sale and i like talked a bunch of these brokers and i basically get them to beat each other up and it was round trip so it got a little cheaper per hour than it normally would but for sixty grand i got him a round trip on a g four napa to s t s snl vegas and he rolls into the you know he role and he by the way he was amazing at the party like i'll i'll i'll text you guys videos and stuff like he but it was scary because he wasn't under any contract with me so he could have come out and said hey happy birthday jesse yeah yeah and he could have left he ends up doing a forty five minute set and he he told like his manager manager told me he's like dude he was like so hyped it was like all these indian people who like knew his music like he was so pumped that you guys are all just like wrapping up my brother and i are on stage wrapping e with him like it was due it was a top three life moment like it was unbelievable that's so awesome yeah story it was the bet like it was honestly one of the best hours of my life it's gonna super cool a little dick if you're out there listening i would i'm turning forty in a few years i would love to start you know yeah you gotta save that money dude you gotta save that money you yeah you have to hope that as like career just goes down why don't my wife like for your fiftieth i'll get beyonce because hopefully by then i'll have a little more money and you will her stock will be down yeah we gotta just catch them right before they cameo so they can't be peaking we gotta be on some sort of decline but like not all the way rock bottomed yet so that's that's what we're going for jesse appreciate you you're the man thanks for doing you guys good to see you yeah alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back