Brainstorming $10M+ business ideas with Jess Mah

you're not afraid to share ideas no i'm super afraid to share ideas but that's i mean one of my ideas i'm actively exploring and here i am sharing it with everyone here i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking we should address the elephant in the room why are we on why we on a plane so we're just flexing on everybody that this is my ty lopez hey guys i'm just on my jet so so it's not that yeah so this plane it's a citation c three plus and i've fly plans for funds so that's been my passion in my hobby i think since even elementary school i was obsessed with airplanes and it was always my goal to be able to afford a fly on and and then i learned i i earned interviewed a bunch of very wealthy people i said how do you afford an airplane like how successful you to and the secret was you don't have to be that successful you just have to have a big tax bill and good cash flow and success to get to that point but it takes some success what you think a lot less than you think actually because it's like a house you could finance it get you know put twenty percent down and then you know the the rest is we'll walk that in a sec so the the funny thing was we did an episode but a normal episode where we're on zoom and it was great you can go see it it's called like just like high school dropout you know bubble we we yeah youtube it take you to make the time look good i like you know i know three hundred four hundred thousand people have have listened to that interview across all the platforms and i wanted you to do a second one and you were like hey i'm in town if you can kinda meet me here i was like alright let's go i'll meet you there and the second thing is you're actually great with tax tax tax and you're better than my accountant who i pay i'd pay this guy to be like hey come up with ideas that i can lower my tax bill legally but how can i do what are the ideas u and he's a idea poor your very idea rich so thought benefiting because one of the things we'll talk about at the end is your you've talked to a lot of rich people and trying to to learn what are the options what are the possibilities as far as taxes goes and that's yeah i wanna learn that from you yeah i mean we'll talk about that as it relates to business ideas but as relates to tax ideas it's actually pretty similar process like i'll just talk to us as many people as possible and i think the mistake people make with taxes is they have their one tax person and that person worked with their parents and they've been loyal but actually this is a very bad place to have loyalty it's really good to talk to like i've talked a dozens of you wanna be very prom us here i've talked a dozens of tax attorneys and tax accountants about their ideas and i just keep track of all their ideas and then i talked to all my friends asked them for their tax ideas and consolidate it that's so true there's like this weird loyalty it's like yeah he's been doing by taxes for four years it's like man but nothing has changed and yeah you want a get ideas for everybody so get let's let's do this point real quick so a plane like this what does it cost roughly what do you have to put down and what is the tax savings or something there's just a mini tax lesson for this plan yeah many tax lesson and then we go into more detail on this on the last episode i did with you guys but this is a twelve million dollar plus airplane and you could put twenty percent down on the airplane i got this pre owned so saved a few million bucks and it's just good as new so you put down roughly two million bucks yeah you put down of that a few million bucks and then you just pay monthly financing on it but then you get you get to write off up to the whole thing last year it was sixty percent upfront but now with the the new administration it looks like accelerated depreciation is back so if you bought a twelve million dollar airplane financed it you can write off the whole twelve million dollars off your tax bill even though you only put in three million bucks so you're gonna pay the government or you could buy airplane right so you it literally ridiculous million dollars is going out of your bank account either way the money leaving your banking account so like it looks lavish it looks ridiculous phil but this is why rich people do these things right and i just wanted to bump that like like a a lot of people are scared to admit that they don't wanna share that because they wanna flex more they wanna show off but it's just a practical matter right and do you use it to like fuck literally be more efficient and go meet people where otherwise you might not have taken that day trip to go do it like you came up like i wanna have lunch with you and so you flew up we had lunch if you flew out first i felt honored but secondly man there's probably a lot of people that i i would have kind of amazing opportunities or build a relationship with but i don't do it because the logistics are actually like in the way of course this is not accessible to most people but like if you're in that successful entrepreneur bucket it kinda makes sense logistically as well it does yeah and you know we've got star on board so flying flying out here as they wanna make five phone calls and be beyond zoom and you know do facetime video where i'm like you know what's up right and like it's it's a practical matter of saving money but it looks really bad if you're an operating ceo of a company you're going to get chat on buyer employees your customers your investors and i realized that that would be a problem for me a few years ago so that's why i stopped being an operating ceo actually it it was really i had this conflict of like can i do everything i wanna do and i know it's the right thing to do i know i would i know i will well i know i'll create more abundance right you know i'll create more value for my companies but at the same time i know wanna get more flack i'm gonna have more people who wanna rip on me unfortunately and i'm sure this video will not help with that at all but like i defend it it's like a practical matter right i love that una so yeah enough about the private jet it's cool it's gonna make for a great great shot job first time for the podcast what i wanna talk you about is what you're great at which is ideas and coming up with new ideas for businesses so the track record here is you've been an operating ceo you started this company called in era when you're really young right how how old are you when you started that i was nineteen when started i knew absolutely nothing yeah and then i built that company up and then started a bunch of other companies several of them are nine figure valuation businesses i have no unicorns under my belt so that's a big security of mine right now i'm gonna be super honest about it like interesting i don't have a single unicorn but if you add them all off i've got you know multiple unicorns right so that became my strategy i decided i'm really not good at building unicorns but i'm really good at coming up with smaller businesses in full of horses yeah a barn of horses where i create i think we just coin something there by the way that was all you good work but yeah if if i could just raise reuse less vc money for these companies and just create more of them and not be directly operating them then that could add up to being just as valuable if not more valuable than if i created one unicorn not to mention all my friends who are ceos of unicorns miserable so miserable i'm so stressed out and also they don't have the ability to live an amazing lifestyle because of all the stuff you talked about they're scared of the optics some and they own a much smaller percentage of these businesses like a lot of my unicorn ceo friends they own like five percent of a billion dollar company which is remarkable amount of money that's a lot but you know yeah totally i'm in it for the lifestyle not the you just have to decide what you're in it for it's just be honest that we're in it for the impact that's dope yeah they they should do that they should save the world i'm on the world i'm glad that they're saving it yeah i personally don't wanna do that with my time i wanna mh indulge my curiosity have fun conversations and just enjoy my life with my kids like that's that's you i like to do that's my that's my gold standard yeah so your story is basically nineteen years old you start in an narrow you run that company you grow that company and then you used like you said you transition from starting and running companies yourself to now you have this like your own hold c where you're you're inc innovating or creating companies and you said that in the last four years you started four companies each worth over a hundred million dollars i've c founded companies and when i say c cofounder sometimes i didn't do a whole lot maybe i helped with idea i got the early team on board i got some early funding and then on some of them i'm still really active and on some of them i'm not active and i'm just like a significant shareholder right alright hey real quick if you're like this episode jess then we got something cool for you so when the episode ended we asked her to be were like hey you were talking about how you have this this playbook this recruiting guide you have this like content guide you have these things would you mind sharing one of those with us and she actually just sent us like all of them so she wanted the listeners to be able to have them for free so they're in the show notes below it's her talent playbook it's a recruiting guide i think it's a operations guide for how she runs her companies these are straight from her they're available in the show notes below check them out i mean somebody's giving you free gold all you gotta do is take out your hands and just accept the gold alright back to the steps i wanna ask you about your idea process because that's amazing to be able to do that i wanna be able to do that so let's talk about that let's talk about ideas how do you get ideas to start these companies and then what are some ideas right now that you're excited about yeah so i got process first so i love y comb ideas the request for startups and when i was coming up with my first ideas for businesses like in narrow that was inspired by that list and it's a list of a hundred business ideas where they say if you build this we are more likely to fund you right and i really wanted get into my comb and and then i put together this spreadsheet so i had this matrix of criteria and one of my top criteria was complicated enough that other people won't copy me too fast mh i think that's really important if i'm a first time founder i need to have more leg room and then another criteria was i can pseudo do bootstrap this like i can raise some angel money but i don't need to raise like a hundred million dollars so like i'm not gonna build tesla spacex i wanted build something that two million dollars could get me very far my other criteria was i wanted recurring revenue i wanted something that was sticky like a must have and so i literally went through every single one of those ideas on the y comb leader list and i rank ordered them based on these three criteria and business accounting and tax management seem to be the better one before my criteria and so my processes i you know go online and i scraped these ideas i've even gone a reddit to look for ideas i have one on one lunches and dinners with people like you and i just say hey like what are ideas you're exploring and then we'll just have a brainstorm but none of the ideas i've actually worked on came from me sitting in a room with the whiteboard and just like coming up with stuff myself yeah that's never worked i've tried it by the way with no success okay so you you had this thing on your phone you had like this idea database yeah yeah three hundred ideas u and you promised you said i'll show some of them today yeah even though these are things you might still go do i think i might still do some of these so do you wanna give us a couple of them absolutely it's called the idea hopper so actually let me pull it up on my phone or okay great should we start with a once we talked about before yeah she gave me a teaser of like two or three of them that like i was like don't tell me more but yes like should she start with a dog she's a service okay yeah yeah i look like this one yeah explain trading right now do as a service for companies explain yeah i mean most companies have so much waste you have people who barely show up or they're pho it in and i have friends who say oh yeah like like i've you know my husband quiet quit his job he's like working two hours a day and no one's tracking it so he's available to hang out those are the people you wanna get rid of so what if you could create a software platform that goes through and tracks who is actually on who is actually emailing who is like using their computer and if not then they're fired so deutsche is a service for companies it's it would be team of consultants it'd be a consultants plus ai how would you do it i think ai i could do a lot of it i also thought that if you're an enterprise then it's you could sell this to consulting firms like mckinsey or vc or whoever and say hey you guys can offer this to the cfo oh they're already doing they're already in there they're already in there and that makes you seem more valuable as a consultant because you could say hey we could demonstrate that we'll save you hundreds of millions of dollars you'll pay us only twenty million dollars and to say i did all the work yeah that's actually pretty interesting i i don't think enough tech teams build tools for the consultants who have already done the sale because what mckinsey is amazing at is it got this relationship with a fortune one hundred company they're on retainer they're gonna paid millions of dollars a year and if you can sell them a tool that either helps them land and expand that contract or just save overhead in actually like executing that contract that's gonna be pretty valuable like if i was like building ai right now i would not be trying to make something that like i'm gonna not only build the tool but also figure out all of the go to market maybe you could actually just sell this to consultants who already have to go to market done exactly that that's i mean one of my ideas i'm actively exploring and here i am sharing it with everyone here i figured you're not afraid to share ideas or what's your philosophy around that no i'm super afraid to share ideas but put you on spot just gotta be really comfortable so here i am this is an idea i've playing around with for a few months and i really like it a lot okay i like it i didn't wanna be one of those people who said okay here my shit ideas now you go do like i think that be just really lame go alright what else you i was just the service that's one i again this is the trendy category okay okay another idea is you know everyone says saas is dead agents are the new thing well what if you could build vertical agent as a service for an industry so for example build a library of agents for dental offices or for auto mechanics right or for you know clothing designers or manufacturers or whatever or distributors so they're all these industries but where they need their own very unique library of agents to automate their tasks and you can go really deep there so this is more of a dramatic business area what which will be i think we're gonna see thousands of businesses doing this right okay so somebody's building a tool and so you're saying you don't even have to build the agent you're like there's gonna be somebody who builds an agent that's about picking up a call and booking an appointment let's say appointment booking agent so what you used to have to have pay a receptionist to do now ai is pretty damn good it's gonna be able to do that fully great so you have horizontal companies right now that sell the voice agent for any industry the problem is you start to do a lot of fine tuning and work for if you're dentist a dentist right so what if you you're a company and you look for all these off the shelf tools and like your own agents and plug them all and then tune it just for dentists right and so it's plug and play i'm a dental office i can use your company and it has like hundred different pieces of ai already baked into my workflow gotcha in a nutshell okay like you should do this for an industry you know about like if you're passionate about you know dental offices under do it in dental offices so that's shout to anyone who's passionate about dental you are this was your day you gotta i know you the more boring the better yeah that's the constellation software model right which so we invest in this company that's vertical saas which was a called shop genie they just so we invested it and i think within a year or two they sold for mid eight figures and what they did was they went to auto repair shops and they were like hey guess what auto repair shops need crm so there was always crm like hubspot and others that they work for any type of business and he's like well but auto repair shops have specific things that are you know very specific for them so they built a tool that was just for them and then they went and they got like three thousand four thousand auto repair shops in like a year to use them and by the way sexy business yeah i was like dude how did you get somebody shops to use you and he's like there's this guy who's like the auto repair influencers he's like the kardashian of auto repair shops and he vouch for us and then all these people you know falling board he's like that guy makes like twenty million a year as their like biggest influencer or two other auto repair shop owners like really insane oh wow there's there's business idea yeah so so what they did was they give them this tool and it was like for booking your appointment and the text message follow ups or whatever and what you're saying is like and vertical saas has been a thing constellation software did it it's what you're saying is instead of vertical saas is gonna be like purple ass each as a service or vertical ass i love it alright mh so but seriously and then the more like random the better like if you could apply this to like you know marine shipping or to like resource mining you know then constellation will be acquiring and ruling up these vertical ass companies in the next few years like that's that's the future what was the marine shipping cargo ship idea you were telling me about yeah that was another idea i had on my idea hopper the idea was in a nutshell could we oh yeah it was coding for these cargo ships quoting like the paint coating u but to make it more efficient so that these ships could go even a few knots faster and that saves you a ton of money on fuel and then you don't need like take these ships out of the water as often to rec coat them so this could be like millions if not tens of millions of dollars over a decade for your entire fleet of cargo ships totally ran idea i got this from having dinner with someone who was playing around with this idea or looking at funding something like this like many years ago and other person just didn't have the money to proceed with it right so my i like i learned about that just from having dinner with someone yeah that's crazy and so you when let's say you have an idea like that u so first is like where who the heck even thinks about cargo ship coding not me so most ideas that the common theme is i didn't come up with any of these ideas right so you're a good spotter would you say or what what are you good at i'm good at initiating conversations with people who are likely to have ideas or have access to ideas like you have good access ideas so like actually i've sent you an idea before and now that i think about it like my buddy james career has a great phrase he goes you wanna turn yourself into an api and what he means by about that he can you know like a website has an api which basically says here's what i can offer you i i can give you location data so you you ping me i give you location data that's what i'm good and by the way here's here's what i wanna get from your api right here's the things i'm interested in i'm interested in acquiring geo special data so you kinda have major api like hey i'm i always interested in hearing interesting kinda weird off the beaten and path ideas so when i hear one i think oh just would like this yeah right so you've put yourself in my mind and associated yourself with she likes to hear weird cool off the beaten path you know ideas that that you know she she's good at making them happen and then in return i you know you're like what are you what are you good at like what do you offer as your apis it's like i have a business and i'm trying to recruit a ceo you and i know you've done that a bunch of times i'm like oh if i go to just she's gonna you know reduce my error rate and make me go faster at this because she's really gonna be helpful and do that or if i have no new idea she's really good at flushing it out over a lunch like ripping on it and then being like super motivated to be like alright what are we gonna do to make this happen like let's push the ball forward so i think you've kinda done that in the idea space which is really well articulated yeah like i get people calling me all the time saying hey jess you have like five minutes to chat i have this random idea i want to get your thoughts on and would you build this with me or if i did it when you fund it i get those calls right all the time multiple times a week and it's like alright like yeah i'll find time to call you back but it's like what warren buffett did he just got the word out there hey i'm buying businesses call me if you're ready sell and it's a fast easy process i'm doing the same thing with ideas yeah that's great my my business part ben i just thinking about i while you're were talking like his api so funny is two things one ben knows was knows a guy so you're like do you know anybody he's like i know a guy who knows a guy that's always ben's thing like he always knows a guy who knows a guy and the second thing is a lot of people will go to ben they'll just text someone when something good happens in their life and i owe like why did they did you ask he's like no they just told me and like we just closed this big deal or we just did this thing and they haven't announced it and he's not that close to them but what i realized is i do the same thing with him because he's somebody that makes you feel good when you win you don't feel like there's any envy or he's not gonna try to take anything from you he's like genuinely pumped for you that's awesome and because of that he just gets this wealth of inbound of people who are winning mh which is also great us for investing because we're like oh wow these guys are doing really well do they need more capital do they need something like maybe we could help them and that's a super superpower so i think people there's like these underrated super superpower like the thing you're describing about i'm good at you know maybe talk having interesting conversations getting good ideas and making people feel like they should come to me with interesting ideas that's not even the skill you could learn in school or nobody would even tell you that that's a thing yeah but you're gonna build generational wealth off that yeah that's well said i think it's equally as important to know what we're bad at you know like for me i realized that i'm not the best operating ceo like that's just not my forte and after i realized that and came to peace with that then i was able to say okay well i'm gonna come up with ideas and recruit great teams and then empower them and that's what i'm gonna figure out how to great to worry on and be great at exactly so let's do see i want more idea idea so you gotta be going i have this other idea the code name is holy hell and i came up with this idea because i heard of another business that was like tens of millions of dollars in eb within thirty six months and all they did was help one niche of a like medical provider get access to insurance and then i did some research i plug this in gp and i realized there's so many of these other types of people like chiropractors or physical therapists where they can get insurance reimbursement but they're so small they don't have the the scale to negotiate with an insurance company on getting reimbursed so they just charge they could technically they could but is it that they don't have the time or the scale or like you need to ban them together both so if you band them together then they can get some reimbursement and then could create you know agents as a service to support them to the cream or lock in and then could help them with their customer acquisition so it's gotta be the full stack and this other company did that for one of these different verticals and i heard about that through a friend who heard about the company and i'm like oh man that's a great idea could i do something adjacent to that that's not copying them but similar in some a similar blueprint but in a different space that needs it exactly so you would go what would you do for that so you would let's just walk through this so i wanna hear so you have that i idea you with the clue i got a clue because i was having lunch with a friend and he's like these guys are making like thirty million in eb i'm like alright and what question are you asking that friend because we were just talking before and i was like how to hell do you get this i go what is your info diet that you are getting these ideas that i don't get to hear about you're doing something different you know you're not just consuming the same stuff i am because you're getting different ideas so can we talk about that real quick the the info diet yeah i mean none of these come from reading a blog post or watching a podcast podcasts all these are from in person conversations i think a lot people are lazy they just wanna come up with stuff by at their computer nothing good comes out of doing that if i mean kennedy you have to get out of the building you have to like just talk to people and when you're talking to what you what are you asking like hey what's interesting what have you seen that that's cool say yeah what's the coolest what's the most interesting exotic business idea that's mint cash that you've seen recently so and so i'm not asking them for a business idea i'm asking them for what's an existing thing you've seen as like why what's the key to their success and why does no one know about this right and like why hasn't anyone copy them yet and you know why is now the rate time frame so you're filtering as they're as they give you the exotic business that's mint cash you're like was there some best secret sauce that's not replica they know maybe they're super influential in a community okay that would take forever to build could this be done in another space is does this take a hundred million dollars of venture capital how much are they start and then they're like yeah like these guys just drafted it right i'm like oh my god now my i'm not math this really watering right like okay and what are the other risks here like can ai just replace this in thirty six months that's like the new risk fact in my like criteria that y'all have to ask so you get the clue you get the clue from the conversation conversation key question yeah and then you get the clue then you run it through your filter mentally just there let's say now you're excited about the idea because you're like holy health and and you give health you give a code name is there everything has to have a code name is why is that it makes it real it makes it feel more psychologically real and like okay then i have something to remind me of the rest of the substance of the idea cool and so i'll just like throw the idea into chat e before you even tell your coworkers you're like i think with ai first oh yeah exactly i tell everyone before you tell me anything think with ai as well yeah and so everyone does that and i say give me like twenty ideas of potential names for this idea and then i just pick one and this is the code name and then we put it an idea offer and then did you see the ceo of microsoft win on a podcast i think is podcast lane he had this great line he goes my new workflow is think with ai and then work with my coworkers yeah so he goes i think people are thinking about like ai is gonna replace your coworkers your your employees just gonna ai gonna do a task he's like but right now the best use case is me thinking and spa with ai to get clarity and then i go work with my coworkers after that it sounds like you're kinda doing a similar thing yeah we definitely do that and what we're trying to do is have all of our meetings be recorded so even if it's in person we're just like turning on granola and having i have a big one of those conference speaker phone things and it's just recording everything and we're gonna feed it in to create digital twins of all of us then have like basically thousands of versions of ourselves just brainstorming and inspiring with each other to yeah that's fine ideas even further it's like this little like chess arenas or whatever where they train the ai still just compete with each other until like until there's like a winner winning strategy yeah and i i hear the digital twin thing we're actually doing we're actually training one off of you as well so i'm we're gonna have a just watch every single video you've been part of so it knows how to think like you you'd be hey bring sean into these conversations bring satya bring suck bring elon bring like never and i want all of them to like help battle test this you know conversation that's amazing so that don't need to pay for you know that's useful when if you just ask your question like oh what would you elon doing this situation or you know take your most high agency badass ass friend who's not afraid and seems to have like clarity in the moment of a fog of war if you just have that friend and you've hung out with them enough and you literally just ask the question it's like they're in the room and i know if that works than an ai that's actually trained on them is gonna be insane how do you know how you'll do that how will you create like what are you gonna use to make them be for you so much pull of content for my team members that's why i'm making sure that they record every single interaction in the company with each other and like is there a tool to do that or you're gonna make your own tools or just lot to to get the transcripts because once you have the transcripts and you could just speed that into any of these so any any of we'll be able to like gonna do a pretty good job yeah you we could go into more advanced conversation on this but that's like people sent do to just so annoying people are using my voice in ads all the time now and i'm like this is is this is wild i'm like how do sue you i don't know who you are right second thing is that but i'm going to anybody who's doing i'm suing you i'm i'm actively working on i'm sorry i to figure out i just i will see through yeah but then on that also what's the other one oh writing style so people just put in write this in the style or whatever because i've written a lot of content publicly and it's not it's not me but it's like it's definitely kinda close to me it's like oh that's eighteen months away for being better than me so that's definitely happening it might as well embrace it we're almost gonna need like a safe word that's like is it human sean that i'm talking to or is this ai sean that i'm talking to like really word i know but that it's like really exciting and and so yeah satya he's on point he's on point here where it was it so you were telling me about okay so we're going through your process so you get excited about the idea yeah you you have the clip the code name and you that have a meeting with your team u what what are you doing in that meeting what what are you trying to do to advance that ad idea forward yeah every week we have a r and d team meeting is what we just call it and we talk about the ideas that we're playing with and the problem here with holy health because this is a live idea and it still is live idea everything i've shared today is still alive by the way and the problem is we just had too many of these ideas i mean you have hundreds of these ideas and we try to work on too many at the same time and the problem is then you don't really advance any idea for enough between each week meeting and then we lose excitement right so now the new rule is we're gonna we're only gonna have two and we're gonna take them all the way until they're busted before you replace and bring in another run and so like what do you do so you have the meeting you pitch you pitch the idea do have a way of kinda pitching it to your team or what how do you what what what's happening in that meeting in that meeting anyone can pitch so it's not just me everyone usually has different ideas and and so yeah it's like hey here's a ai def defensive idea x y c here's why it's a huawei idea so we kinda have a common on standing on what a mo idea is which is roughly what it's roughly an idea that can cash flow that doesn't require a lot of outside funding we could fund it ourselves and where it's like boring and complicated enough where random people are not gonna copy us that usually or reverse engineer that usually that those are mah ideas and that's why i encourage anyone else to do as well okay so if you're an auto mechanic expert then that might be your theme of idea and we have that for like financial services in particular right and so you what hap what do you where do you leave that meaning you say are what are we gonna do next we say okay what are we you gonna get done to advance this between this week and next week and we just get very specific and like alright like person a you're doing these five things person b you're doing these five things and the next step might be like okay let's just go call like for holy health the next step was let's just call some chiropractors and ask them if they you know figure out who accepts insurance and who doesn't and why and then ask them why don't they plug into these existing companies that should be that doing something similar so a lot of is just like what are the questions we're curious about and psychologically are you trying to disqualify an idea or are you trying to qualify an idea like what's the mindset is it i'm trying to figure out is this good or bad or is it like i'm listing the risk assumption i'm doing it what what are you trying to do during that those next few weeks it's it's it's not we're trying to figure it out or or just disqualify per s i think either attitude might be too extreme it's more like there might be a acc angle here that no one else's thought through and so we're not married to this idea we're holding it very loosely we just have to figure out like okay you might hear an interesting insight from a chiropractor that says hey your idea is okay but what would make it really good is if you also added in all these ai agents to automate away my receptionist and and then you know my customer acquisition is terrible because x y like those are the insights we're looking for to then manufacture upgraded version of the idea so we assume the first idea is terrible and it's gonna go through like ten pivot right like which is very useful because that's almost always the case and if you don't have that attitude you basically you hear something really juicy but you're so locked in it's like somebody was handing you gold but you were out there just you know searching for for bronze and it's like what are you sure you're sure you want that i was gonna ask you you know you you're talking a lot about ideas in silicon valley there's this idea there's this phrase which is you know ideas are are are worthless execution is everything do you buy that i think it's bs i think it's i think it's some of the worst advice i've ever heard in silicon on valley so what's your take my cheek is that ideas are really freaking important and if you have the wrong idea you'd be a great team and you're screwed and actually i modified my thinking on this because i was scout for sequoia capital for many years and they would show us a bunch of these like great ideas with amazing traction especially in consumer internet and then they would ask us would you invest on this memo yes or no and so we would vote and then they'd say well here's what happened to that company it ended up being you know a zero even though i had the best team the idea was still garbage so it ended up being a zero and that was like a common theme i noticed so they would train to almost train you on historical yeah ma'am was basically yeah oh wow incredible but you but if the traction was great but the is the is it usually the traction bit or just the team and the the the thesis was great i mean the the early fashion might have been good and the team looks good but then if you really think through the long term like is this idea sticky after a year or two will there be copycat cats like is it like is there anything that really holds the consumer in you know that's where these ideas would then lose steam right and die and so that kinda helped you think about this a bit differently and so you're saying i idea is super important i used are really important and the team is really important they're both really important but to say yeah like i use our diamond dozen like really it's not just idea it's like the whole thinking of the business like doing the calls to like understand or meeting with the chiropractors in person or the auto mechanic and really figuring out these juicy tidbits that you're not gonna find out by sending out a stupid survey or by using chat to tell me hey what are the problems that chiropractors have like that helps you build an interview script for what you're gonna then talk with them about but then you know you have to show up so like when i was building in a narrow i would go to yelp and i would call these cpa and i would say hey i'm like a nine year old college kid i know nothing about business i wanna do something to help accountants could i come to you buy you launch and just like ask you some questions just for fifteen minutes and then you show up they're not gonna kick keep you out after fifteen minutes the fifteen minutes is gonna turn into two hours right and you have your notepad your sc like they love that they wanna be helpful right and i did a lot of that personally like i just showed up and asked them my questions and then got all these insights and we we still do that i'm still on these calls okay like even if it's not in person if you could at least do like hour long plus you know expert calls like we use gl g for this there's also like alpha sites and they charge you a lot you know you might be paying eight hundred bucks for a thousand dollars to talk to an expert in a very difficult to find area versus like accountants and chiropractors like you could just call someone on the internet but if you wanna find like an expert in titanium mining how are you gonna find that person you go to tl and you pay them a thousand bucks they'll find the person for you to set up the phone call for you right and we do that all the time the way you're talking about ideas and markets it reminds me of there's a story of this marketer and the marketer goes to i think a a seminar or something like that is other other marketers there and he goes okay we are gonna let's pretend we're opening up a hotdog doug stand and he's like so i can he's like i'm a genie i will give you anything you want to make your hotdog ducks stand the most successful you can make it so he goes what do you want and so for what do you want the guys like want the best ingredient and best buns he's like got it best buns you what do want he's like no bun that's foolish in the food business location is everything so locations go oh i got you this corner spot in a high traffic area cool location you got it what do you want and each person had like your best branding best whatever and he goes i have one thing that i think will be at all of you if we all if we all did the same thing and that we all got our wish granted he goes all i want is a starving crowd and if you're a marketer like you're gonna spend a lot of time in energy trying to sell something the absolute best issue you can make up upfront is finding a starving raven crowd and it sounds like you know when you say ideas really the idea you know what's underneath an idea is a customer or a set of customers who have like a real pain and like a desire to solve that pain and like they are they are hungry and they're hungry for something and if you just show up with even decent bonds and hot dogs like they'll buy it you you know instantaneously it's okay if it's a little cold it doesn't matter yeah that's a great story it's it's about like how cute is this problem and ideally one hallmark of a mah idea is the customer doesn't have to pay anything so in holy health you don't pay to be on our platform by being part of our platform you make more money get more customers and we'll take a cut of that in exchange for helping you grow your business so you like that model because that model it's like why would you say no for that it's like you're just saying no to more business yeah that's like those companies that they'll negotiate with all vendors on your behalf and like whatever we save will take twenty percent you're saving nothing today if i save you any money i'll take twenty percent and it's like okay go have at it you you were talking about you had a couple other ideas you had like a divorce one was yeah that is like i had so many friends shitting divorced can still do and people say they need an advance on their alimony or like there's gonna be or their money gets tied up and locked up because they're in divorce proceedings and they're really rich they're really six successful but they can't tap any of their own capital while it's all tied up so what if you could just give them some of their money back and and so that was just like a funny creative financing around yeah the window of a divorce or the alimony we called it divorce stop fund didn't go forward that one no i mean people talk about it and we still joke about it but there are other ideas that we got more excited about so so let's talk about failures because one of things you said to be so many failures you were like i like your podcast but you know sometimes you listen to people and it just sounds like it's i had this idea it worked i'm so great you know like that's that's a podcast problem and you're were like i wanna be super honest about things we were trying that are not working or failures i have had where do you wanna start yeah i mean i would start by saying when i use youtube and i have all these entrepreneurs business podcasts i spend a lot of time flipping through and i think man like i'm not doing enough like i'm not good enough even when like i watched your podcast i think that and i think that a lot of people you know probably share that view and and and the people interviewed i know a lot of these people these are my friends i know what they're secretly struggling with yeah and they're not necessarily sharing all of that and i think that's just important to know so in my case looks like i am good at coming up with these things and having success but most of the time and their total does and one example is we had this idea and called it cr boost terrible idea in hindsight i'm so embarrassed to share this i wanna share it anyway and idea was we're going to help you like improve your credit and repair it and you know we had a customer acquisition funnel going and it was high churn low price point very high regulation by the ftc you know it it it got compared to credit repair businesses too much and you know my idea is we're gonna boost your credit not repair just repair your credit and it could've made some money but we just got bored with that and so i burned a few hundred thousand bucks experimenting with that and then i put in the wrong team so i made so many mistakes on that that was an early incubation that went nowhere and this other idea was we're we're going to help veterans of the us military find new jobs and we're going to get paid by vet tech and the gi bill to do that and we could do this all online so it's virtual it's scalable and we're helping veterans so felt like really good yeah yeah the veteran all they have to do is say yes so we launched all these ads all these veterans signed up they're like hell yeah i could double my salary make more money and do this all online from the comfort of my home and and our payment mechanism was this thing called that tech v e t t and it had bipartisan you know acceptance everyone loved it but it's got stuck it got approved by the house and never went up to the the senate and the money dried up and we are like alright get renewed imminent in eighteen months after that still not renewed today still not renewed and we're like okay well the hat business stuff just because of that yeah and then i trying to pivot it i'm like can i get the gi build a fee for it but then the gi bill requires in person and then after after that we lost interest like i was the only one excited about this i'm like guys gotta help the veterans right my team's like we have all ideas that will make more money just we wanna make money yeah like alright i'll come back to this one the time straight so swings and missed this for sure i wanna show you this i i want you to read this this is from a talk you gave oh so this is not just twenty eleven this is when it hurts but not just because an idea is wrong u sometimes it's even when the idea is right yeah and you're running a company you can you read this i wouldn't read that i wrote this to my mom and my dad on saturday june fourth twenty eleven at five fifty six am so i was up all night i couldn't go to sleep i was so upset subject line kind of sad i feel like i'm bernie me off reach on the outside but completely broken on the inside there's just a lot of pressure right now because the company is running dry on money on the next nine month nine or so months and we really need to produce the summer or else we're really screwed this was about a year after y comb na for me anyway i wanna start seeing a therapist or something because this is just no way to live i have no idea how you handle this entrepreneur job jess wow and my mom she's entrepreneur she came here doesn't never i do i actually absolutely remember that i remember the night i remember how i was just like very upset because i had all these hoops and expectations on myself and you know paul graham even he was my mentor and he's like you're gonna be one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time you patrick carlson and sam alt and i'm still the least successful today and i still think about that often and that that weight was on his shoulders that way weight was four on my shoulders it still is on my shoulders and and my mom called me and she said hey like love you no matter what even if you're total business failure still love you and then i just cut all my expenses cut my burn moved into a tiny apartment with my business partner and and then just slowly crawled out out of the hole and then yeah we grew in and out to you know it's few hundred employees profitable good business not a unicorn but it gave me all the training and spiritual training right to for entrepreneurship and be comfortable with mistakes and failure mh were you at that time i guess like what was the conversation with yourself to like because you're like i did these things i lowered my burn i did this i did this so those are the actions but before the action comes some to some inter monologue there's some conversation you gotta have with yourself and i i love the inner inter monologue because your whole life gets dictated by this tiny little voice in your head that nobody hears it's the one telling you how to feel what to do where to stand what to say and i think training that and learning how to like kinda improve that inter monologue is so important and you it gets better in moments like this right that's when it gets that's the muscle building for that that inter monologue do you do you remember kinda what you were telling yourself at that phase you you wrote this your my mom tells you something what'd you tell yourself i distinctly remember what the monologue was that whole evening which is i am destined for greatness and i am not producing my best work right now i am not showing up at my best i'm not playing a win and i'm i'm falling behind and i need to diagnose what went wrong and i need to keep launching fine and i will not accept or tolerate failure that was was went through my head you listen to to a song at that time where did that come that was fire no how'd you get yourself into that state from kind of sad to like kinda kick ass no that was sad though so that was not it was not an empowered attitude i was i was thinking that and but because i knew that that was my situation then it went from like alright like i need to do all this or i'm screwed and then like alright i'm really sad and i gotta process my emotions right just get it out of me and you know be honest with myself that i'm struggling i need to ask for help and i didn't have a great community because back at that time you you know as an entrepreneur you wanna show off you wanna posture you wanna seem like you're better than everyone else and then after that i realized i could just be honest and also have friends and i told all my girlfriends and ends up more people were struggling than i realized more of my y comb batch mates were also running out of money and if you we look back today most of the companies from that batch did not make it most of them went bk and then people took normal jobs for started new companies and then eventually found success and so yeah i still think about that i still have thoughts like that today it's not it's a work in progress right you know i've i've done whatever six hundred of these episodes and at certain point you don't know you'd have to be sort stupid to not realize like there's a mindset amongst the con common mindset that i think great entrepreneurs have and i i've dis distilled it down into this i think a great entrepreneurs mindset is they're ignorant of the past because it's already done if they live there they'll die there and if you just case stay stuck on well it i've been failing for five years you know then you you will feel like a failure and you won't be able to to win so you're ignorant of the past realistic about the present which is kinda what you said like i'm not showing up at my best i'm not putting in all the effort i'm not doing the obvious things i should be doing right now but i'm also not it's not over and so they don't make it worse than it is they don't make it better than it is to see it as it actually is so ignorant the past realistic about the present and delusional about the future and you have to have that delusion because if you're just realistic and practical about the future you don't do anything great yeah that's really well articulated i think also going through moments like that i remember then talking to my business partner and we did a full post mortem we listed out every single strategic and tactical mistake and thing we did wrong and what we would do different if we went back in time and i wish i wrote this somewhere because it was a long list i mean it was like i would do everything different if i could go back from time was the attitude and even today i was talking to or or yesterday i was talking to one of my colleagues and the number of bad ideas we funded and experimented with and our process flaws you know we we would also do everything different going three years that's great good but we're talking about this constantly and that goes back to what we talked about at first quota so every week what if we bake this into entire workflow no matter how good things are let's still reflect on all the mistakes we made so that we can improve and not repeat that again it doesn't have to be one time sort tough and when you're batch run out of money that you're reflecting on like everything yeah yeah no old mistakes it's kinda like the it's the no new friends it's the no old mistakes of which you want you don't i keep making the same mistakes again you said something when you were talking about like i'm not you said i'm not showing up the to you said i'm not playing to win yeah that's something while i was talking to your boyfriend before this and he goes i asked them i said what's a what's a jai ism meaning like if you talk to people enough you sort to see their the things they repeat the things that are like their philosophy that they're like actually operating on and he go he said something like played a win don't play not to lose to explain that i think that i came from this story that i just shared where i one of my prompts was i was playing not to lose so was in a scarcity mindset and when i'm running out of money and i'm in scarcity mindset i mean there's research that talks about how your iq drops by a lot during those periods and so i'm not gonna think outside of the box and playing a win means i'm optimistic i'm delusional about the future of it right so i i see a lot of my friends who are just like playing it too safe they're not they're not trying new things and so you can't do the same thing you've been doing and expect a completely different outcome right what's an example maybe non in business related where in your life you're playing to you you had the moment we're like i need to play to win here instead of playing to him personal life like for example with the airplane you know this is the physical manifestation of that attitude and why it's really fun to share that with everyone today it's easy to say i'm gonna be frugal i'm gonna save the money i'm gonna let it compound i'm gonna invest it in my other businesses or you know screw it i'm playing a win here this is gonna manifest me more abundance for me than if i don't or you would told me something that when we were at lunch inspired me you met somebody i think who threw a great event and you hired this person you were like hey here's a budget and i pay you whatever you're making your job i'll pay you that or more or whatever you're like i wanna have four events a year in these four cities with the most like inspiring fun people in my like that i wanna create i'm gonna engineer some serendipity some luck some fun some cross poll nation of people and ideas four times a year in these in these places and i remember i've told probably five people this because you need some resources to do yeah of course of course like don't if you're in the youtube comments they'll be that guy was like oh it must be nice to have money great there's a version of this in your life too you can take people out to dinner right it doesn't have to be a grand event but i was like that is an investment that i don't even have a line item for yeah right i kinda know if i did it probably really i a have a lot of fun and b like yes i do think good things would happen but you took a almost like intentional business capital allocation approach to the like luck and fun part of your life which i think most people leave on touch look and fun is just something that either happens or doesn't happen is that i don't use my business brain for that i use this other part of my brain this seemed like you almost used your that same brain for both yeah because i wanted to kill two birds with one stone or three birds with on stone because wanna have fun i wanna do more business meet equal people but i also had this friend who heated her private equity job and really wanted an excuse to leave and so i was able to present that to her the vision was for events a year with you know the most successful entrepreneurs and investors i know and we're launching the first one literally today that's exactly what i'm flying off to after we're done and then the vision is we'll do a summer thing a fall thing etcetera but it was really expensive and so what she and i decided to do was we would help her find other worth other events so i'd set her up with my other friends throwing events right she would charge per event and she would get paid based on the revenue coming in to the event so it's all variable versus her being on my payroll right and so for this event what i did is i called a bunch of my friends to say hey you gotta pay something because i have hard costs here and they peed in and then she only peed herself after there was a profit so you could get creative about this for the ideas we were talking about earlier in my whole team bunch of these people are on contract i found them on up upwork yeah okay like you could do this one person like what skill set do they have that you found out you just said like five or upwork yeah like one product management ui ux thinker one is a financial services guy one was a intern of mine he was at ucla and he asked me to speak to his entrepreneur club and then he said hey could i like take you to lunch i wanna get some my advice from you which i do after college i'm like just intern for me and i'll teach you the ropes and then he was so good that now he's full time with us but he's probably one of my best ideas spa partners and then here this event planning person i met her from the burning man community these people are everywhere around you they don't necessarily have a fancy specific resume and they're fun i love them we work well together that's more important the resume of right i met a friend recently who told me this he said something in passing he goes i was at this event and then there was this guy who's he was dressed differently blah blah and me and my friend we collect eccentric people so we've been over him had a chat i kinda paused and i was like that's kind of a cool thing you just said like i collect eccentric people i don't do that and i was like but what do what do i collect like if i just put myself in the if i said what am a collector of so like for me i'm a collector where i call golden nuggets it's like i can have this conversation with you i'm just looking for two three four things like i don't need two hours or ninety minutes of the conversation to be perfect i need three ideas that spark something three golden and nuggets guess that will change my way of thinking or acting so i'm a great collector of those i'm also collector of like young talent like i see somebody who's young who's hustling or is talented in some way i will like kinda of really help them out because i want to a stay young myself and be helpful but b i kinda wanna be able to connect dots between young people and good opportunities or young people in funding or whatever it is and so i think this interesting idea of like figuring out what is it that you collect like some do is collect stamps so i'm gonna do is collect bugs what is it that you collect so like for you what do you what would you say you collect i would say i collect interesting people with that side of the box ideas who also like to have fun that is the key intersection looking for venn diagram exactly because i think you could find interesting people where they're not fun it's very transactional they're just in it to make money themselves but then the problem with that is then i can't do any business with them so that's so then my idea was okay how do i bring more these people together so that we can have more serendipity oh i'll just my own event and then bring them there and then have a bunch of my people also you know talking them getting their ideas and seeing where we could partner on stuff right right engineering the serendipity our buddy nick great as a like no cost low cost version of this so he used to do renegade museum tour so he like he loved museums so his venn diagram was like fun people who are interested in like you know going to a museum on a friday night and he would host his he wasn't a part the museum he would just take people on a tour because he knew the museum better than the tour guides and he would take him on a fun of the before they'd like have a drink outside after beforehand they would go in and they would like do little fun things at the deportation so like that was one thing he did another way he engineer serendipity he would throw these like singles events where he himself was looking to date somebody but he's like well i could just kinda do that i can swipe left or right or like is there something i could do more creative that will not only help me find someone amazing but maybe even like a bunch of our friends find somebody amazing and he started hosting these singles events and again the it's a pizza budget it's not like it's super fancy have to be doesn't fancy right like i feel like i need to say that we're sitting on this like jet but like yeah i mean most of the stuff we do is like very cheap and peaceful for itself and sometimes makes a profit right know so like just but just taking that intensity to engineering some serendipity i kinda love that before we leave what do you just leave me with what are you currently nerd out about i've been spending a lot of time thinking about like cancer and oncology i've been thinking a lot about longevity and you know we're still funding a lot of the research with mike levin who's my favorite scientist of all time he's the bio electricity ninja and i've been earning on out on this a bit more because i was mentioning to you before we got here i've been in a bit of a sad mood this week i had a friend die cancer a few days ago never smoked a cigarette in her life and pad stage for lung cancer and and it's just more examples of this in my life every year too i lose a friend like that and and so it's not necessarily gonna make money it's not gonna improve my lifestyle but i'm just like i got nerd out on it right is there exciting progress in the cancer oncology stuff right now like is there something is there a new paradigm or a new pathway that's interesting yeah like with mike we he talks about how he's been able to use bi electricity to normalize cancer cells so everyone right now in the field is talking about how do you kill a cancer right you think about chemo radiation it's really painful on the patient but if you could just normalize cancer and not have to kill it that's gonna be a lot more color makes it a like a normal non cancer cell but it's still gonna be cancer but it's more benign essentially so that's really cool research yeah he's got a lot of great stuff on longevity making lab animals live longer i don't think he wants me to talk about it publicly yet but how insane is the ai ai for medicine and biology for how is that how is insane is that gonna be i think it's gonna be amazing i think it's also gonna be a lot harder than people think because you have ai that's coming up with all these ideas but the bottleneck is still regulatory still fda it's still getting a clinical trial put together that's one area where we're gonna see slower progress than everyone is bragging about whereas you know with everything else we discuss with digital twins if you could have right two of us springs from ideas there's no bottleneck there right right right like the only bottleneck is like spitting up the computer and then us pulling the trigger to fund ads or fund whatever but in health and bio it's people's lives are at stake it's gonna go slow still i think unfortunately okay well where should people find you and what should they send you yeah if you have any exotic outside of the box business ideas you wanna run by me and i'd love to discuss that with you shoot me a note and i am on linkedin linkedin just search jess and i've post on my blog there almost every week partially used cha to come up with my blog post but i still review it i'm like hey a blog post that's twenty nine fifty characters long because the linkedin limits three thousand in my voice about x y c x y c and insert these anecdotal stories and and then like within two minutes i a blog post that's amazing yeah so i post there and these are real life stories in my life and just send me a message on linkedin we'd love to hear from people and also the last pod we did i made a bunch of friends like people just whole emailed me and i'm like yeah i'll grab lunch with you i'll grab dinner with you and two people i met from the potter coming to my retreat that's a that's amazing to hear that's a a point of pride for us is like we wanted today if somebody comes on the podcast they you should get more kind of inbound messages from this than any other podcast you go on and the second would be that the people who messaged you are people you would actually wanna talk to her that would be the goal right if we're doing that we've kinda built the right tribe here so yeah glad to hear the job with that real community so thanks for having me help cheers yeah alright here we go i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back