BREAKING: Shaan Sells the Milk Road - A Conversation With the Buyers

we were getting to know you guys to decide like do we wanna do this do wanna actually partner with you guys and and do a deal together we would ask you a bunch of questions like at dinners or at the bar or whatever and your guys stories and answers were so entertaining that i was like see these guys need to come on the podcast if the i was like if i had just recorded this dinner this would have been like one of the best podcast episodes we've ever on i'm probably be best what's up y'all all sean here this is a special episode my company the milk road just got acquired so the news is out and i can finally talk about it i've been kinda hinting at it on the podcast for those who are listening and yeah if the news is out this episode is me and the dudes you bought it so you're gonna meet these guys and you're gonna see who i what why would i sell right like we started this thing it grew like crazy it was profitable like the thing was working so why so and i talked a little bit about that but the biggest reason honestly was these guys these are people that i wanted to be able to work with and get to know better and they're people that i thought if i give them you know this company and i own i still own a minority stake in it that minority stake in five years is gonna be worth a lot because i believe in these guys and what they've done they've done it before they've built and sold companies worth you know over hundreds million hundreds of millions of dollars and i think they're gonna do it again here this the the episode is says a little funny it starts off a little slow but then around fifteen minutes in we're done talking about the acquisition and i'm frankly i'm done talking a little bit and i let these guys shine and they tell stories about you know how they're early projects like how that you know all the different projects they worked on some that failed spectacularly and some that succeeded you know their philosophy around business and negotiations and stuff like that it gets really good after that so definitely stick through if you like this podcast like if you like my first million you will like these guys i'm gonna just i'll build the characters you got mike who is this like workhorse so anybody who likes you know a grinder somebody who scrappy somebody who can bounce back from defeat he tells a ton of stories about like basically getting his ass kicked almost failing and then somehow pulling it off so mike is this workhorse of a guy i've gotten to see him in action with the milk road this guy is like lives in the details and in the weeds it's amazing and then kendall is the opposite he's like how can i work smarter not harder he's the mister shortcut he's the guy who finds a way to make something happen right like you know he you know he's the guy who hacked the tesla referral program and ended up getting multiple tesla roadster and he's the guy who did the same thing with uber and lyft and has like you know uber credits for life and lift for credits for he's just a guy who's was gonna solve the puzzle and and get the shortcut solution he'll he will find a clever the clever way to get it done so these two guys are awesome and i think you guys you guys were like them so enjoy this episode alright so we should we should do this so welcome to show i've been telling you guys you gotta come on for a couple months now and i'm glad we're doing this so we will i think we you should frame this in a couple ways we got together because you guys just bought my company you bought the silk road and so we're gonna talk about that we're gonna talk about how that happened how that went down why you guys decided to do it good stuff like that then we're gonna talk a little bit about you know what's the plan but really the thing i thought would be the best out of this conversation mike so sort of secret plan was when we were getting to know you guys to decide like do we wanna do this we wanna actually partner with you guys and and do a deal together we would ask you a bunch of questions like at dinners or at the bar or whatever and your guys stories and answers were so entertaining that i was like see these guys need to come on the podcast if i was like if i had just recorded this dinner this would have been like one of the best podcast episodes we it i'm probably the best and so then i was like alright my job here is to somehow recreate that dinner because actually there's a lot of pressure i know good this episode could be if i do my job and usually with a guest you know hey gotta show up they do whatever they're gonna do but in this case i've heard the stories myself so i gotta find a way to recreate that that that's my challenge are you guys it's should easy it's you know just you're you're gonna tell your stories and i think at the end of this people will know a little bit about what happened with milk road but also a lot about you guys because i became a fan of you during the process of doing the deal i think a lot of other people are gonna become fancy of you guys too during this because you guys are pretty loki and why is that why are you guys like so under the radar and i asked this as a guy who's like i'm constantly on the stage being like look at me hey you i'm great and then i meet people who are really really great and they're not trying to do that so what's the is it don't have time is it shy what's the reason that you don't do that let's start you i think it's probably shy and it's just something that i never thought i needed to do and then when i met you i'm like i'm doing everything all wrong but we had a hilarious day where i don't know how this happened but somehow when we were rang out in san francisco where i i usually don't the joke on the pod i don't leave my house but when i do leave a house i'll once in a while get bumped into be like oh hey love the pod for some reason that day something was going my way and like i don't know like six or seven people stopped us in a row and you guys must have been like that going what was your reaction to that i was like did you plan this i could not believe how many people were coming up to you and you know i'm a big fan of the pod i'm doing this project i did a fe search engine like it was insane yeah that was pretty crazy yeah like the guy from the hospital like i just came from the hospital like for sean that's little i know what that means i was like do you have security cameras he said he goes that just came from the hospital and then we're like oh okay yeah and then later somebody was like why did he come from like hospital like anybody catch that yeah we had no explanation explanation because he had like a you know like the patient has escaped you know sticker on it on a shirt basically yeah but i'm glad you guys are doing it so let's start with the milk road people wanna know you know the news just came out today this pod come out right after that we sold it and people wanna know how that went down i could tell from my perspective but maybe i don't know let's do from your perspective how did how did this all happen yeah for sure so carter who is our finance was a big fan and he shared it with us mike and i and we subscribe to it and every time we'd open it we're like they're doing it so well there's a while back or this is six months ago okay and you know every time we read it we we talked about it we talked about the memes how funny it was but also how informative it was and that's kinda what we're trying to do with bi is just like make the best content and actually have people read it i feel like you know you could have the ten thousand words but that doesn't mean much to people it's like how do we get that seven hundred and fifty words that really punches yeah and i feel like that's what you guys have done and you know it came to a point where i'm like we should talk to these guys but at that point we hadn't yeah and i think we reached out to you guys i remember having a conversation with bad about growth and it was like ben you know those was like sites that are just like i don't know what's the price of big bitcoin i what's a price of a theory of i was like what if we just go on there and like i don't know go i know was i was like i ever told i was like it's was probably just like some year old kid like it's offer from like a dollar for every email subscriber let's just see if they'll put it put our that up and i think that's how we reached out right got in touch with one of you guys about that ben reached out to so i don't even know who somebody yep got back to us and you know it wasn't something we were gonna do we weren't it was like offering a dollar per sub or whatever how you warner a kid yeah you're actually thirty we weren't seventeen but we just wanted to meet you guys so let's take the meeting and yeah about ten minutes into that we were messaging on the side it's like we gotta buy this thing like we've gotta figure out a what the funny thing is i don't know i told you this but that same day like we just been full force working on milk road this is the best gonna be awesome yep dude we're just every day and like i'm a big like pat pat on the back self pat on the back kinda guy every day i'd basically tell ben this is amazing we've launched this thing and only in this many months already grown this fast it's gonna be so good this many years in you know it's gonna be great and then one day i just hit ben or the curve ball in slack and this is the same day i go i go how much would you sell this for right now and he's like what like i don't do you wanna sell it i was like i that's what i said i said how much would you sell it i he's was maybe this number and i was like yeah i my number is like you know that plus one and he was like i he was like okay whatever you do with that i was let's see if we could sell it and i'm very impulsive like that like i wake up one day that's how i got my dog i was woke one i hey give in the car we're gonna go let's go find a dog and we were like craigslist in the car to find dogs and got dog about that day and that's kinda of what happened with this and so literally he helped calls later that afternoon and he's like dude so weird i just talked to these guys and they mentioned on the call if you'd ever be interested blah blah i was like well who are they i you know i never heard of these guys and he's like no they're legit and i was what he's like yeah googled them and whatever and like he's like one of them built like the largest i don't know how you describe it like the largest gold website commerce precious metals e commerce precious metal e commerce site so basically j boy is the name but if you wanna go buy sell gold silver whatever you can go and do it there and i knew that name because my brother buys from jay boy site so he's he had been telling me you know he's like stash away a little like coins in his safe i'm like i for you man he screw up his orders whatever yeah he he gets every time and he's like you know whatever he's hoarding gold so you guys had you'd had built that that was a couple hundred million dollar company and then you had done the same thing in the sports betting side same thing like roughly a hundred million dollars worth of exits and i was like oh these guys were actually super legit okay scratch the whole nineteen year old kid offer him a dollar let's see what we can get these guys to offer us and then that's sort of how the deal evolved from there and so so that's like how we met then actually making a deal somebody said this the day they go the rule of they're call it the rule of five they go and any deal it's gonna follow follow apart five times if it's gonna get if it's gonna get done it's gonna follow apart five times and i think we kinda did that though we did every three or four times at at least along with the way i do have a question about it which is not just how it all happened but it's wish i've been wanted ask and i to put you guys on the spot here how could we have negotiated better so i asked ben i go i what are you ask these guys on the party guys because yeah ask him about the deal negotiation and i go yeah i should ask him could we have gotten more just that was the the my first acquisition that was the question i asked the ceo and he was like you couldn't have got a dollar more and i was like feels good but it feels like a lie it's never actually the case so from your guy's perspective how did we negotiate give us a grade and tell us how we did i would say it was a minus i was gonna say a b okay b yeah i mean i mean i would give everyone almost a b around you know the table i feel like each one of us at one point kinda where like this isn't gonna work mh and it wasn't as kinda straightforward as you'd like a deal but as you said both my deals every time i was like it's not gonna work you know for one reason or another you get to the point of they're over here i'm over here and we're not in anywhere close right and then you know you figure it out or you walk away and you know we had those walkways with you i think twice yeah yeah i think you guys did at one time and we did it another time yeah yeah sunday minus because at the end like when we made that final you know the last little chunk yeah we were that was it for us we had said we're walking if this doesn't work we talked about this last night i think one thing that would have helped a lot so he has a non compete on gambling as we talked about and you know one of the times they fell apart was we got into the diligence after we'd already agreed on a number and there was i was degenerate there's a little more gambling but but a gambling sponsored revenue there than we thought and i think that if that had come out a lot earlier you guys probably could have guided us better to like hey well for next month we're gonna target this stuff yeah yeah we didn't want a problem we were like because it's not front we we don't have a non compete like this is great yeah alright that's that's good we did talk about it at dinner you did yeah that what that's you yeah yeah oh yeah yeah at at that did yes alright so let's talk about you know how this deal kind of evolves why do you buy a business like this what's the what's the thinking what's the rationale and you guys have been on the seller side you've sold your businesses what's the difference in in the mentality there mh mike you wanna take this one yeah so you know reason we bought you guys we felt like everything we were doing was just gonna work a lot better on their brand and so like the seo play which is our thing you know we're building these content driven sites that we wanna rank in google for you know money terms in crypto like by bitcoin glenn bitcoin all those sorts of things have we we should explain your guys magic your super superpower but your super superpower is somebody goes to google and they say buy gold online best place to buy gold best place to you know bet you know on whatever and your guys's whole career basically is rank number one for that and you did it with the sports betting and the gold but before that you did it with poker before that you did it with other stuff and like we'll go into some of those funny funny stores in a second but that's your guys's secret sauce to which i was like why do they need a newsletter that the newsletter doesn't do that that's that's not the answer but there is some i don't synergy there for you yeah so it's you know just this brand component of like google has really moved towards rewarding brands that users are actually going to google and searching for like mil is being searched hundreds of times a day and that's such an indicator to google of like humans are interested in this brand same with j getting thousands of searches a day for j and boy and so like when we were building our sites like d defy rate dot com was the one that we merged into mo road no one's out there really looking for this site you know we're just trying to figure out how to get it then google so eventually it will become a brand so for us it was like hey we're we get to jump forward you know a year in this journey if we buy this right newsletter by the website roll it in and then you know reap these benefits forever more you're gonna continue to get really amazing backlinks because we do all these awesome interviews it was you know that was my my piece and i think too it was really complimentary you know like the newsletter content could go on the website you know we'd be able to be in the inbox of our users along with hey you know there's a different segment of our users that are gonna go to our website and so you know those type of ways to you know reach people are like really exciting for us and so that was kinda like why they have the brand they have a voice and you know they have you know really complimentary you know and it was working during the bear market yeah our that's the biggest our business was still growing and generating revenue and and profit during the crypto winter which just hard for because if you're not like you know what big bitcoin spice goes down there's a lot less people subs searching how do i buy bitcoin right now you know and so or like you know defy imp or whatever well then people aren't looking to borrow or or land at the same rates so i that that also helps because there's like oh this is a business that will work even in the winters yeah and you had diversified advertisers so they're not all crypto so yeah right yeah this can work even if crypto those that for a while and so the question on ours i was do we wanna sell right why cell do we wanna sell and i think you know there's probably a three pronged answer to that the answers is first a lot of decisions just get made through like who your your nature your personality and i've gotten know my nature a little bit over the last few years and it is very much a i'm good at starting things i'm good at finding the the the something from nothing but taking the something and just fine tuning it day after day making it better in which is where most of the values created in business is not something that i just get super excited about and so that was always hard for me because i could create something get it off the ground get it to work and then as it worked my interest would fade and you know so that sounds was like a personal thing i was i i sort of knew that so i said if if i'm getting a good deal now but i know it'd i'd be better if i held it for four years great but am i i really gonna have this same energy i have today four years from now i can't know that that's true for me as a operator whereas as i you guys and i'll i'll go into why i thought you guys would be much better owners of the business was you're like that mike is a absolute animal work workforce i actually like we've been working together a little bit now and i see your level of attention to detail is crazy like you are looking at this email you know like in the morning in the afternoon in the evening then the feedback and then do it in the next day i love it i was like wow this guy this guy's is an animal and i thought okay maybe he's just doing that at the beginning no that's just kinda who you are yeah i mean that was you know with j same thing like myself and the the other partner who i ran that with we were probably like the biggest readers of the golden silver psych like on the planet because we just wanted to ingest all this what are the people thinking know and that's really we got so many wins just observing that implementing those things i asked you guys some questions before of the pod to get to like a i'm in a google doc and i was like what do you do like i don't know for fun or something like that like are you like and you're one of your things was put it uphill skiing or something yeah i've i've got i've got a buddy that's gotten into back country skiing so that's like instead of you know going to the resort riding the lift up you're just sorta of in nature and your fun nice thing everybody see you you know manually get yourself up this hill so a few years ago he convinced me to go do one of these things and it was in at cor yellowstone park we didn't see another human the entire day you're truly in the middle of basically up amount basically for this this was fairly tame so basically it's it's a it's called a split board what i use so it's a looks like a snow board but it breaks down the middle and the binding rotate so it basically turns into skis and then you put these things on the bottom called skins which originally i think used to be seals skin is is where it came from now it's just like some fancy fabric and it'll only slide one way so you can kinda like slide up the hill with gorgeous you're like cross country skiing up the hill and then it won't slide backwards right so yeah you like fight your way up the hill it takes several hours to do this it's like a five minute ride down so there's not a huge payoff there just like all the children coming down as you're like brutally climbing fight truck hill and then the cool thing you can do it at it resorts too so our i trip this year we were at white fish montana and i was doing this in the resort and you do get a lot of respect from people coming down the hill when you're like a t up the hill so it's a good feeling you know yeah no respect for me i your shocked you life partying yeah you are doing the long sean's riding the lift up and down yeah yeah i don't even get off this is but that was like to me when i heard you say that i was like checked out completely the way you exercise or don't like the way you vacation basically is the way you work yeah which is just like man grind and i love that because that's i mean if you do that in any business you're gonna increase the outcomes and so that was because we still own like a a a good sized chunk of the business and so you know i wanted to know that that was gonna be worth something someday and so that would be the only way that i could make this deal worth it was okay there's the upfront cash and all that good stuff that's great but your boys gonna spend that i'm gonna blow through that through you know some some way so i need to know that like the what if what could have been will actually get played out and like that way all i'll just my curiosity i'll know what would have happened if we had kept at and focused on it well let me just hand these guys were super focused and let's now we get to know and then also there's you know you get the reward of it too if it had some work now so that was one on your side it's was like that's my super problem like this guy is literally willing to climb up the hill like with this like you like he doesn't understand how skiing works and enjoy it works which is great yeah and then he's like alright so supposed to sketch candles he's the same way you also just like that this absolutely super grinder no kendall mister shortcut and i love this so we were talking and i was like alright what you guys do before this before this i kept digging tell the story of i don't know let's pick one them let's do the the tesla the tesla hack because once she told me this story i was like a guy's super clever he's gonna find a way like he's just gonna find the shortcuts that we would need to like you know make this thing super successful so tell tell that story yeah so i had a tesla and at the time they had the test referral program so basically they gave every owner a unique code and to get you know five thousand supercharger miles you actually had to use it so people were searching for it and i was like perfect i you know that's what i do for a living i rank in google so when you search tesla referral code my side was number one i said it was a call like trust referral code it was called it was actually fair estimate dot com okay i basically made like for just a fun side project a lift first uber comparison so you just put like i'm going here you know what's the difference between the two right and so i just made a slash tesla on that but by the way that itself rack that was another one of your little shortcuts you didn't wanna ever pay for uber again right like or lyft you would just get referral credits from that too right exactly so basically on that site the way i monetize it was here's my referral code when you sign up for one or the other and literally had unlimited uber and lyft for years literal years and i shared it with some friends they'd be like hey you know i want some can you put my code for a little bit yeah so i you know do it for a month for them and they'd be like i don't need to load or yeah i am done and then it would just be like the next friend the next friend that's a hilarious but then you know what happens is like these programs are like okay this is kind of weird you know super yeah exactly so they kinda cut you off after a while but until then you kinda can reap the benefits so you had the uber lyft shortcut which is getting your free uber and lyft then you were like oh tesla so you made a slash roadster or slash tesla yep like extension basically and you you were ranking for when people were looking for tesla referral exactly so i sent like hundreds of people to buy cars and you needed to send like i think fifty six to get a tesla roadster sir was that like the peak prize that is the free programs exactly but you know so realtor like what like a hundred grams it was two hundred two yeah or yeah two hundred or two fifty depending on the month they never gave they never gave it to you well they haven't released that what oh the new roads do the newest yeah so they were like hey when we do it you know in twenty nineteen you know we're gonna give every how many in i mean how much you earned so i earned like one point seven five i had sent more referrals but i think tesla was like alright you know we're gonna give you one point seven five and then what do you do with the point seven five i understand i think you have to pay the you know know the difference between up when they do so let me know send it to me without the join that i'll take the three fourth call and i'll take the convertible thank you and then you know i did that and i was like alright well hey dad you have a tesla do you want roadster sir sure son i want that and so i put his code and then did it with my brother lo so you know we have a lot of roadster that might be coming we'll it's like the oprah thing you get arrested you get a arrested yeah but yeah that's amazing so you did speed it back you also did other ones too let's do some of the other ones you did i was asking you how did you even learn that there's like this a like seo affiliate game right so seo is just people are searching for stuff on google if you can get to the top you're gonna get a lot of free customer traffic and then affiliate is what do you do with that free customer traffic they want something you can pass that kinda qualified lead that that high intent customer to the website and they have affiliate program so you'll get the kickback that's how you got the roadster that's how you got the uber credits and all that so how should you even figure out this was a thing i wanna hear that for both you guys this is this is y'all game and it's a game i didn't know about till much later in life but you guys discovered it kinda early i wanna hear the origin story how did you guys even get into that yeah so this was like during like the money maker you know world series a poker was a big thing and you know all of my friends and i were playing poker just around the house and then online you know there was a bunch of poker sites and i saw one of the poker sites had like a poker chipset and they would give it to you for free i was like well how does that work nothing in life is free and i figured oh they're giving it for free because they're getting like two hundred and fifty dollars per person they end up sending so at that point i was like perfect i've got a lot of friends and i'm just gonna kinda make the difference but i'll give them fifty bucks to deposit don't make you know the two hundred dollars that i get paid from the you know casinos and sports books and poker at that point and so you do that with like six friends and ran out of them as happened right you know it was like it was it was great and then it was like okay well now i need to actually figure out how to do this and that's kinda how i got into like oh i need to figure out how to create websites i i can do this was just like random people and you're you're a teenager at this time i'm in college yeah or your college again yeah so i was in college mike was actually a teenager at that time and you know just how to figure it out and i mean like my first big break was actually spelling paradise poker what what do you mean so how did that go out yeah so at the time when you searched in google they didn't have auto correct so basically you misspelled paradise poker and you'd get misspelled website with that and so i was like perfect i'm not a very good spell so i can come up with a lot of variations i couldn't tell you spell paradise i spoke right now and so i came up with a lot of variations and you know got them to rank in google for like every miss spelling right and it was crazy because like all of a sudden i just started seeing traffic i started sending them obviously to the real paradise i spoke i made a cut of them and literally my last year of college it was like paid for i've was basically like parents like i've got this you know i've got room bored you know education because i'm making free money basically online were they like well what do you mean son like do they know about this the whole time or not really i had to kinda like tell them they were like i was a little worried because i was like poker gambling you know they're gonna be like oh what's my son into is he doing this right but my dad was actually like he looked at me and he was like pretty proud because he was like oh you're kinda like you know the and shovel right okay right you're not actually doing it you're enabling people to do it and the people that choose to do it yeah and you you said you said something real quick like we got to the top of google did you have to do anything interesting to get your misspelled paradise poker to be the number one or was it just like that was your domain name so it automatically was gonna be number one at that time well the beauty of it there was just no competition no one else was actually trying to misspelled paradise spoke first maybe they would miss at once but i would have it like eight times so i was the best spell okay paradise poker and literally was number one for most of the i i sent you the thing that's going on right now with the kia car where kia re rebranded their logo it looks like k n instead of kia and google search for k n car is like suddenly spiking because people see it on the road they're like oh that's cool what is like what is the k n car and i was like feels like a kendall thing and i was like kendall what would you do with this so what was your answer so i you know i had a buddy in fleet sales and like that's where they you know sell a ton of cars via online and i would make a deal with someone like that at the dealership i would say look i can get you a lot of traffic and so i would create websites that would literally you know go for all the newest cars right you know the twenty twenty three you know kia whatever it was but obviously spell it with the k right and then know make a deal with them like i'm gonna send you this you know i want twenty percent of all those leads and what is your what would your website look like at that time would it be like hey this is the k caller no i how to go buyer or would you be like you know would you just make it look like the kia website what would should do i think i would just you know explain it like hey you know it look it's it says k but it's actually kia and you know here's the reasons why this car is really cool and here's a form to actually buy this car and i can get you a great deal on it right and then you know obviously send that lead over and you know everyone's happy at that point they actually find the car that they wanted you know it wasn't kia but you know it was the can card that they had found how much you think somebody can make if they they did this what's your range what's your estimate of how how that would play out if you if you did a good job of x getting that i think if you did a good job i mean the problem now is google auto correct so google now i even did the searches myself right it it goes to the actual kia like hey i know what you're trying to do right so you'd have to kind of find that like where doesn't it do that is it the app store or is it some like other you know place to do that right and i think you could i mean when you get like a really good miss spelling of really high priced items with a decent margin you know you could make hundreds of thousands of dollars mh that awesome you kinda had a similar origin story playing poker and then discovered the poker affiliate game yeah yeah so i was basically a degenerate gamble where we was at fifteen or sixteen my friends and i would play you know poker and home games just five ten bucks whatever this is when poker was on tv all the time in right like two thousand five and i just kept losing all my money so i would have to go to you know the local grocery store to the western union or whatever give them the hundred bucks cash they would send it to you know cambodia wherever it's going and then i would just lose that so i was like i need to find some other way to reload my correct hooker account was i'm bus not i need to stop i pay exactly where am i getting real status next exit yeah so then i saw it that they had like the refer friend thing on the website and they would pay you like seventy five bucks or whatever to get your buddies to sign up so i had all my friends sign up same as you and when i ran out of friends i was like same as him like i gotta figure out a way to get strangers to do this for me and ended up coming across this forum called it was called poker affiliate world back then it was basically a lot of people who were doing this that would share you know what was working what wasn't it was a very friendly community that i i was kinda surprised like i don't know what people are telling me this but they're kinda competing right yeah we were all like we were competitors yep and just ended up becoming friends as well so just learned through doing that start website my i convinced my parents to lend me like a couple hundred bucks to buy a domain and set up you know web hosting and everything and i i told you this i put in that document that like when i sold my first site which was probably nine or twelve months after that it was for thirty two hundred dollars nice which was like a billion dollars to me jack that and i got it was like a check i cashed it i took all the cash home and you know spread it out on the desktop stuff and trying to get out of money that's the big new boo for sure and then took the you know repaid my parents and that was like a a very sentimental moment for me that's amazing yeah did you have something what your neighbor did something for you your neighbor like lent some money or something like that was it like a lemonade stand story on something like that well i like the first thing i did for work one of my neighbors needed some like landscaping work done and i will give you you know twenty bucks or whatever to come over and do it and it was on a saturday and the night before i was you know out with the boys that i had a few sodas and i was a little hungover over that morning and i made it to like ten am before i had to tap out like i just can't do this right now that was the that was the first and probably only job had yeah i just had you know random stuff like that did that i had a i one day on a another neighbor had a a bread company so they would have to deliver the bread every morning to restaurants right and my dad was friends with him so he's like you know i'm sure trying to get me to do something yeah you need to go work with mister trans for the day and it was like a four am wake up call to do that so lasted one day at that as well it's like just no way shovel snow for one day so i don't auto one neither of you really had any real jobs it sounded like you never had a real job so you never had like a corporate go and like you know here's your first day at the the new company you didn't have that i did not i basically had like a summer job it was like a temp job agency that kinda of places you different places and one of them was like dell warranties and then i i realized that then i was like i can't work for someone else like this is just not me you know i wanna work for myself i wanna set my own hours and i wanna make a lot of money like my mom always was said like when you were younger all you said is like i wanna be a millionaire yeah i wanna make a bunch of money and she was like alright sure you know let let's see what happens but you know that was just kind of my general sense of it and i was like i need to figure out a way to make it like to make says something like i don't like the idea of working working really hard and someone else making money off that exactly i make the money off that like i mean that's what you know like being an employee right like you're making the owner's money and i just like i couldn't get like around that i was like i need to be the owner of the business dude i find it hard sometimes to recruit people because i'm like i fundamentally don't want to do this trade of like i get some security certainty and experience but you get the upside you know like you know i get my salary but you get the the the upside of my my work i i almost find it sometimes hard to even recruit people to work at this point because i'm just like i don't know man i just i philosophically don't love this path but then i also need to hire employees all the time so i'm like y it's not because it's not productive if you ever have that totally and i feel like actually it's been actually one of the most rewarding things of my company is like watching the people grow you know we would hire them and i'd say like oh i just need you to kinda you know write a couple pages of content and then they do a really good job it's like oh you wanna be the editor of this website right and then oh do you wanna manage other people and so like you know the business i sold i made sure the people that i was working with got really great jobs because i feel like you know sure i made a lot of money but i wanna make sure that like your career is set and you are in the best position possible to really you know crush it where we're you know with what you're doing and what you do after your first sale you did a a retirement party yeah so i had this idea i was like okay you know what i did it i'm done and you were like thirty something thirty i was like thirty three i believe and you know i was telling all my friends like i'm in gonna rent out a restaurant and you know we're just gonna like celebrate my retirement and you know it'll be great because you know i'm not gonna be sixty five i'll be like thirty three and it'll be great so we rented out lazy bear in san francisco and i had all my friends and my family and it was awesome we then had a party bus if they didn't even really know about your business no i mean that was another thing for me i've always been you know not one dick brag about it i feel like what i do is kind of just what i do and there's no reason to kind of be you know boast about it yeah so for actually the first year after i sold the business i didn't tell anyone and and then after a year because i just wanted to live with it and i just wanted to kind of be comfortable with it my health before i then told other people and so i had a three year earn out so after the three years as when i did my retirement party and so you sat on that news for a long time i did yeah well yeah i sat on it for a year told people but then i had two years left with them once i was done with that i was like it's retirement time like i'm done let's do it so rented lazy bear rented a bar had a party bus and it was awesome but then literally like three nights lady at or you this party you were supposed to come oh why did i not you had some some excuse i think i was hungover over again yeah spot i this guy's almost hung over i don't know what sign about that i can't remember why didn't come but i do remember that when he did sell that one i had left the gambling space so i i knew he was doing well yeah i didn't know like what was really going on and he was in dallas for something i can't remember what and i went over to their hotel room and and his wife test had a ball champagne like we're gonna open this celebrate the sale whatever i was like oh you know congrats that's awesome man and then i went home looked it up and i was like oh and i texted him i was like alright i really mean it because that's about like well we could it's in the news right like that one sold for i think forty five million for it was actually fifty million total but i kind of sold it twice to the company yeah which was kind of a weird explained that how does that work so first time you sold it for what so first time i sold it for like fifteen million plus you know a bunch of equity and what happened was like at that time new jersey was big and that was like the first legal state that had you know casino and poker so we focused on that we did really well let makes explain because i think people won't know that the context here so you go from online poker that online poker collapses and now that whole affiliate game is kinda dead because you us just shut down online poker yep what most people did was they went offshore or international because it was still legal in certain places or in certain ways that's where most people went and you did something different like that was the obvious market you went for kind of a non obvious pivot which was in the whole united states one state was gonna legalize out of all gambling or sports betting or which one they basically at that point didn't have sports betting but it was poker it was casino and casinos are like the big player so that's kind of the one that was really exciting so so gambling was was legal in new jersey and only new jersey and i remember at that time it was like well do you build a business around one state that's i it just like you didn't sound big and i don't think it sounded to most people so most people didn't do that right you kind of like found the the hack that nobody else was really competing for this like what was the what would be the search term people were looking for that you wanted to rank new jersey online casino was that was like the big one and you're right like all of my competitors were like perfect you know like we still forty nine other states and the regulators at that time set if you choose to promote in new jersey you cannot not do anything else so they i didn't want you know the the offshore plus the legal regulated market and i was like that's perfect i wanna be you know a big fish and a small pond so i started that business it was going well but there was one competitor chris grove and he was really good content and he had like you know his game figured out i was much more into the kind of revenue side of the business and so i talked and we you know we both talked for a while and we're were like you know this is what i'm doing this is what what i'm doing and like we were like we're the only people in this market if we combine we basically own this market right and so it was an easy decision of any pricing power exactly because otherwise if you're an affiliate and the company says oh instead of giving you two hundred dollars i'll give you twenty dollars you're just like well you're my revenue stream and you just changed the price on me that's not great i think that's one of the problems most people in the affiliate game fall into is your you're at the whim of your your affiliate partners but if you become kinda like almost more important you're like i'm the only acquisition source for customers so this price is the one i'm comfortable at exactly and it it was crazy because you know we we're able to get a thousand dollars per player that we sent through new jersey online casinos wow and so yeah it worked out really well for us literally the first month we partnered together we both made way more money than we did a part and you know within two years contained media the company that purchased us you know came knocking and we're like we have to buy you because we've heard at conferences we've heard from you know people in the industry that you guys are the biggest and we wanna own the biggest right so they buy it once so they buy it once and at that point it was just new jersey and what i told them i was like we're not gonna sell like why would we sell we've we have forty nine of states that eventually will legalize and so i came up with the idea that alright we'll sell you new jersey and any future state we'll get fifty percent up so we'll be kind of fifty fifty partners for every state right and they said sure they didn't really care at that point i think they were just more focused on new jersey and being the biggest affiliate in the us market right so it was great we started running it you know either a three year as i mentioned the first year was good and that's when sports betting actually got legalize legalized and then the business you know started booming in terms of you know new jersey had it but then a lot of other states were really excited about offering it to their you know to the people in their states so they started legal and all of a sudden basically we had like ten states coming online and the company was like whoa we cannot give you fifty percent of this this is just too much liability and so we're like okay yeah no problem we you know here we just need a big chat right and and they did and they were like we have to we have to come up with the situation that you know works for us and works for you and so you know it was part stock and part cash so in total it was around fifty million yeah that's amazing and that company is public listed right yep mean they're publicly listed in the swedish of stock exchange swedish stock exchange nice you go ring like the bell in sweden like i i wish that would would've been cool and so so that's kind of like you're kind of like the big win story let's do mike's big win story so how does one go from i'm am gambling and losing one of your poker i give my friends to sign up for a referral program to i own this company that does i got know multiple billions of gold sales every year right so it's like how does that happen where where does that come from yeah so basically i was in the gambling industry like he was and when the shit hit the fan i sold so i made like the wrong call where that was like the thirty two hundred no so this was this was later on i sold i was further into it i sold her five hundred and sixty five thousand and i was i think nineteen them so that so to celebrate business five or sixty six five thousand what was it doing at the time like it must have been doing a lot but the the future was to uncertain was doing like thirty to forty k a month but it just i didn't know what was gonna happen from that so i sold that and then you know i'm on top of the world yeah my god how old you're like i'm nineteen at this point drop out of college yeah i'm gonna i'm going for it guys i figured it out figured out life yeah so i'm like god i do this affiliate thing in any space so i tried a bunch of different plays i did it in the dating space i tried to do it like selling business cards online that was a complete failure and just really like was this where of the spear off ice thing happened that was around that time yeah that story so when i you know around that age was out that was at penn day i was having some fun and there was this trend that that was like icing people so like smear off ice right would if you presented yeah sure all you presented it to someone they had to get on a knee in chuck it so like guys i knew at college in high school they were ended into this by the way most genius marketing campaign have it was someone needs to just redo that enough time is passed just free replay that's same thing yeah do a milk milk jug you'll laying the bag and chuck it like a gallon a milk so i there was a website called bros icing bros dot com where people would send in like their best pictures of this happening so they're all these creative ones like there was one i remember where i was super hungover in the morning went and opened his toilet and they had put plastic over the toilet and there's was a smart off ice i sitting there yeah like it at seven am so we me and my buddies would send these pictures back and forth like we thought it was funny and then i just somehow ended up reaching out to the guy that ran it and i was like i think it was cool you know an interest in selling it or you know do anything with it and ended up working on a deal to buy it and i gave him twenty five thousand dollars for it there was no monetization at all it was just like i this is cool it has a lot of traffic i can figure something out here and i'm really excited i tell my buddies so like you i just bought that site right i the man guys congrats yeah they're we wanna get our pictures up whatever and the neck literally the next day got an email from sprint offices services assist that we were infringing there you know trademarks or whatever and like you know take all the pictures off the site and the the point of the site was the pictures work about the picture so basically just shut that down twenty four hours and just yeah wrote it off did you try to blur it weren't chasing saying you're gonna it the the i talked to the prior owner because i told him i was i was just like you know any ideas and he's like well you could try burn him out or whatever i mean just seem a little coincidental and next time i do this make a phone call know yeah i wonder but it's a nice loss for me nice learning okay so you're the world's trying to humble you are you getting humbled or not really you're just just very on very successfully humbling okay yeah it was it was kinda like a two year period where just went from everything worked really well so like nothing was working at all and especially i haven't have you know had left school and my parents very much were against that decision so it was it was a dark time for me like you know is this gonna work is it not gonna get egg on my face i have to go back to college whatever so one of the guys i knew from the the poker affiliate world he was doing some affiliate websites in the the gold silver space and there was this company that had just spun up in affiliate program and a jeremy yankee a guy we know was managing him so he's like you guys should look at this whatever so i decided to invest in this guy's business this his same with jonathan and i was just gonna help him like build these sites let's see if we can turn it into something and over like maybe six or nine months we build up some traffic it was making like five grand a month you know was it was a side thing for me i was trying to do other stuff and kinda out of nowhere the company we were sending everybody to just killed their whole affiliate program so we went from making you know five k months to just zero you know this looked like another just completely blown got ice again yeah i guess get nice just get nice yeah and then my partner of like credit to him i was i was again was doing at just like well there's nothing to really do here there's no other affiliate programs we had actually gone to that company that cut us off and and offered to sell them the website like you know the this thing was sending you i don't know two hundred buyers a month or whatever it was you know just kinda backing into what you're paying us on an affiliate basis just give us forty grand for it and we'll you know you can have lead gen for a long time and they just never replied to us so we you know we had no path to to monetizing it so i was i was writing it off and then my partner is like we should just sell this stuff ourselves and that sounded like you can imagine how much of a nightmare that sound insane if you're an affiliate because you never talk to customers you don't like there's no own employees really like it's a very simple job product here it's it's it's you're kind of a middleman man yeah you're like in between people and the product yeah so i i was like this crazy i don't wanna do any of this he's like i'll do all those like gaps in the affiliate what real basis exactly like products there so he's like i'll i'll do all the inventory shipping customer phone calls all that stuff i'll do it all like you just help with get traffic and put some more money in yeah so was like alright let's give this a try and so yeah i mean credits to him it wouldn't happen if he hadn't pushed so hard this is this is andreas this be this is jonathan so that was the j it was jonathan and mike okay and kind of a funny story on that was very regal and official like great story jonathan and mike's gold shop versus j boy like that's a so step up we knew so little about this space when we started that we named it j boy and using our initials and we had no idea that like one of the largest refine of gold silver in the world is johnson matthew and so we actually got a big boost early august because people thought we were there retail are like it was a nice little accidental win and we didn't get any season desist that nice yeah we spin this thing up it went live i think october of twenty eleven and with the the idea was we're just gonna point our old traffic at the new e commerce site j m boy dot com and it was it was crickets it's the first few weeks like zero i don't think we got an order for three weeks and i honestly think that was like my mom's friend she like told him to go do it or something but you don't give up at that point when didn't give up and you know just kept trying to figure stuff out how we make this work what's that conversation like here three or four weeks in three you go to the office like does i say anything like hey guys yeah well there was no office so that was easy it was my partner had all success yeah no office my partner had all the gold in this little desk drawer in his base could all fit and like the the tiny little hey so you're in the basement you're like yeah no goal was leaving the drawer right now staying in the drawer it was so early that it i wasn't really worried at that point you know you like what we're doing right now it's early you know your you know it takes years to build these things but we that kinda funny story this eventually out of nowhere start getting like big orders and we didn't change anything so we're very confused as to what's going on here big credit card orders repeat customers over and over and over like alright we've we've hit it like this is gonna work and so for like two months this goes on we're getting like a hundred two hundred k revenue a month oh no i'm sorry it wasn't that much it was probably thirty or fifty grand and literally on christmas morning my partner text me is like kinda weird have you seen the the checking account i was like now and i go and pull it up on my phone like christmas wine with my family around both the checking account were like negative forty thousand dollars all of it was fraud every single order was like credit card charge back fraud we're we just didn't know anything about any of this stuff so we had so many of those moments along the way where it was really just two kids you know figuring out how to run a gold business and there rollout out of pitfalls that we fell into and fortunately didn't kill us it's so alright so you recover from that yeah so i had to put more money in and i was pretty much on the ropes at this point right was it was like everything it was going in now this was this was it this was gonna work stress i'm stressing at this point yeah and this is where you start uphill skiing in j yeah so the really the turning point for that company was i just took a really honest look in the mirror and i said here's j here's like the five biggest companies like if i look at these various you know metrics or whatever how goods their website how's their pricing product selection how fast they ship customer service whatever and i just basically like did a little scorecard for everybody and i was like there's no reason anyone ever buy from we're just worse at everything we have less selection we didn't even we were so small we couldn't get a wholesale account right so we were just buying from the cheapest retailer and marking it up you know me and jonathan and we're answering the cell phone that was our cell phones were the eight hundred number right if we were available we'd answer it was just again like why would someone buy from us so what i landed on i was like the only lever we can really pull here is we're just gonna undercut everyone because this is a commodity and it's like buying gasoline if there's a if there's a store here in a store there and that one's a penny cheaper you're gonna pull in there so mike let's just cut it and see what happens because because if we can get volume and you know make that work and and see the top line grow i know we're gonna be able to figure out margin as we as we go you know you're gonna get economies of scale so we did that and that did work and then we start to see the revenue really grow so through twenty twelve we were starting to do like you know a million plus a month in sales which back then we were really pumped about and the problem with this company was it was super capital intensive because you had to stay ahead of the inventory so like if you were gonna be able to ship fast it had to be you know in the drawer when they order so i i did another round i put i think my last hundred k and basically and then we out grew that and i was like we need someone no banks can give us any money we put a deck together and sent it to like sixty different you know angels or vcs and just a zero responses absolutely not even like a no thank you so i was thinking like who could i get to invest in this thing and i called him and so he was our first angel investor your knew in person at the time yeah so because we were competitors in the in the space and we went to all the conferences together and we were both around the same age and you know just like to you know go out have dinners and stuff at conferences so we were friends and he had told me after i sold my gambling business he's like you know whatever you do next let me know i would like to invest so i was like so you get the call i was like hey i didn't catch that in now what happens you get the call what's your did you even know he was doing this in the meantime i did you know i got it i was excited about being able to be a part of it but i was like i don't wanna be operational yeah like you know for me i was just like i'm trying to do this the gambling business you know and but i'm excited about mike you know mike made really good websites and i was like if anyone's gonna to figure it out it's gonna be mike and so based i invested in him and you know it was i i feel like we had a quick negotiation it was like twenty four hours yeah yeah you did a great deal you and had all the leverage it was like we're were either gonna go under or he's gonna like this check so it's always like we got a day plus for that the plus and it was like just speed it was affiliate you know we always call like affiliate speed where it was just like we had kinda had a hand handshake agreement and then i just wired in the money like we only did anything yeah yeah it was like i trust you you you put in one like a cup hundred k or i think a hundred was it was a hundred and then you this was another plus move he negotiated like another rider like i get to do another fifty at the same valuation at my option which he then did a few months later as we were growing okay so you put it a hundred fifty k yep that ended up being a good return for you like what what's the multiple on that i think it was that what twenty million you got like twenty three million you that's what you've netted it out twenty and twenty to determine about the valuation no because like silicon we can valley it's like oh you you invested the seed thing oh was up a twenty million valuation no no you're saying he was in like it was maybe a million bucks million or two million dollars we said it was worth a million no i don't maybe seven hundred k something was valuation and soul it for one seventy five so you got amazing return there he turned up a hundred k ish into twenty million points thanks mike yeah yeah did do you he's bunch fast nice happy yeah was you know don't let to you know we could do another business together over right i'll actually help this stuff but yeah there you got that that was good our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous me think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better so you okay so you do that that's amazing you get the phone call you do that you get just more money it seems like you're just gonna have the problem again and we did like three months later so we get his last you know fifty or whatever it was and then we were really this it we're starting to grow pretty quick at that point we're up to probably four million a month in revenue and it was starting to hockey sick so i was like you know what do you do wanna to get so much traffic it's seo basically yeah so that's when the seo really started to kick in so initially it was like we're gonna we're gonna price cheaper we're gonna make this appealing to people and then people start you we get the return customers get the backlinks going cycle what do you call this exercise you did where you're like took an honest look in the mirror and i said it's kinda like why would it yeah i wanna date ten why would a attend date that's exactly that right that's basically what you were saying it's like they have all these websites they can choose from why would they be choosing us yep shouldn't more companies do that i feel like most companies don't actually do that exercise because it it can be painful because the the answer often isn't what you want it to be okay the mirror doesn't look like that it's not that the world is wrong dumb it's there so let's you know something i've tried to use over my career and it's been helpful that's amazing yeah i think more people should do that exercise and and also when you do that i think it it forces clarity where are we gonna be great yep you know we're we're what are we gonna be great on it and you decided we're gonna be great on price first and then we're gonna be great on these other things later okay so you do that gross grows grows you do this for eight years you sell hallelujah so that's kinda like your your your big wins i wanna know give me some stories along the way and either of the big wins baby a story of you know something you look fondly at in the early days of like you know one of those like wins along the way that felt really good and then maybe a moment that felt bad i don't know if you have any stories on on either one of those i'd love to hear them yeah this was kind of a mix of good and bad but so that first year i think it was before you were in we gotten in an order for my guy for like twenty thousand dollars which is a a big order for us back then and he pays us we ship it you know it looked it's delivered everything's fine we go on our way and then we hear from him like a week later that you know i was out of town there's no gold here you know i don't know what happened here and again we're so naive we didn't even have like shipping insurance back then so this there was just nothing there so we dug in pretty farmer like you know gps has the gps coordinates on your doorstep you know the driver has signed an affidavit that he delivered it there you know all this stuff but this guy just kept digging in harder and he he did this like there's a site called rip off report dot com okay anyone can go on there and file like hey this per copy of person screwed me and he did that and we were so early that like there were no jam in reviews anywhere when people search that that was the number one thing that came up and it it immediately hit us like probably thirty percent of our sales just fell off because every in the gold space everyone checks right like they're always worried about getting you know rug cold yeah so it was really hurting us and this guy then went into like this kind solve story of you know that was my kid's college fund my kids not gonna be able to go to college you're you're gonna ruin his life unless you make this right whatever and i was really starting to stressed about this you know that's not a good feeling and i don't know this person but you wouldn't want anyone to to feel like that so as this draws on we're not finding a conclusion ups basically he's like we delivered it you know we're wash our hands at this thing i had caved in and i was like i'm gonna personally write this guy check for twenty and that that would've have been like the end of my checking account right there and because i i couldn't even sleep at night i was feeling so much guilt about this and so i had i drafted the email that i was gonna send to him and i was like i'm gonna sleep on this one more night just to be sure in that morning i woke up and ups had gone with the police to his house and as soon as the police were there he found it in his closet so that one had a you know a happy ending thankfully but that was another learning moment for us if like okay well obviously we need to figure out the the delivery in the insurance business yeah yeah i think for painful painful lessons learned but you gotta do so i think one would be base boom and facebook the or facebook com dot com wait well okay so what are these so at the time you know originally it was the facebook dot com that was you know facebook's domain name and you know i was in college so i was part of it and eventually they dropped the the and i like right away i was like i'm gonna domain squat on things that they're gonna type wrong you know paradise poker you know same thing but i'm gonna do it for facebook so i got the k by the m so that's why i registered face like on the keyboard keyboard well you're a man of science science i realized the precision that you took to this and then you know people forget dog dot so they you know they you know end up putting the calm and then dot com again and the crazy thing about it was i got to see basically facebook's like growth crazy hockey stick right i just went to facebook boom dot com or it goes i have no idea facebook right it goes to facebook now they they also figured this out yeah so they they might have figured out one way but at the time i actually ended up selling facebook boom dot com for like twenty k you know someone came i was like hey there's a lot of traffic coming here you know at that time you'd have just like you know ppc type ads just like really basic text link ads and you'd make like you know a ten cents per click but there was enough traffic where it made it worthwhile so i stole it to them and i was like sweet i still have you know facebook com dot com i'm excited to sell this one but little did i know like a big old packet of papers comes from facebook and they're like hey that's our trademark right do you wanna fight this or do you wanna hand it over and it was a very easy choice to give them the domain so at least i got to sell one of them that's it that's pretty good did you you gotta tell the i switch story what was that one well i almost went blind or at least i thought i was i thought was gonna be a my spelling like not twitch dot com i twitch so like on my first company you know the regulator said as i mentioned you can't do offshore if you're gonna do regulated you have to do regulated and one of my competitors i think told on me and said i think kendall doing both and so i was like so i didn't know any of this and i was at an industry conference and one of the regulators was like hey i'd like to meet you for coffee i was like alright is this something i should be worried about right you're like no no no just just come it's like when chris hanson like pizzas inside come on in you don't get for the pizza here so i just you know i i walk up there we sit down and i think this is gonna be a really friendly conversation and he's like so we can do this the hard way or the easy way and and like at that time i'm like stunned i'm just kinda like oh no do i run and so then he's like you know what you know we we've had reports that we think you're doing the offshore and you know what are you gonna say about this and at that time i was like i'm not gonna say anything you know i'm not gonna inc myself but i but it it was wrong you know all like these pages were basically algorithm updated with these offshore ads that i had no control over right but he didn't know that because he wasn't really familiar with domain parking pages etcetera but at that time i was like i need to talk to my lawyer yeah and then we can talk to you and you have a lawyer figure did not have idea and then people tell me that i need to say these words exactly so then i mean that was a you know terrible feeling but i was like okay you know what i wanna talk to a lawyer we'll be able to kind of outline you know why you know what he thinks is not actually happening but then i get a email from them and they're like we need you to come to new jersey and i was like oh no they wanna arrest be they wanna get me in their jurisdiction and they are going to arrest me and at that time i was like i was just like talking to my wife test like there's something wrong with my eye and she's said oh you know it'll be fine and i like yeah i think it'll be fine but i'm like kinda seeing a little specs and it like got worse and worse and at one point i was like i can't read a menu and i went to then so i went to a specialist an eye specialist and he thought i had a detached retina and he was like oh my gosh gotta get you into surgery and all these other things and then so then he kinda looked a little harder and was like no no actually have you been stressed lately very stressed very very stressed he's like yeah you know we've seen this you know it's just a common thing you're just stressed you'll be fine so to end the story i had to go to new jersey talk to the regulators and i wanted to bring a lawyer and they're like nope don't bring a sued them for the twitch they exactly almost you blinded me with your hardware easy way bullshit there's at the coffee shop and they're like do not bring a lawyer because we'll make it hard on you and i was like oh my god they told you that yes they told me that so man i wouldn't know what to do yeah i wouldn't know okay am i are they just is this a play is this a good cop backup type of are they pushing me around or is this real yeah i had no idea but i was just like alright no lawyer like i mean i'm gonna listen to them this time but which is funny because the first time they you know hey everything's alright and just come see us and i sit there i'm at the office i'm looking around and i'm like okay i'm didn't arrested yet which is good they sit down and they're like okay well talk to us about you know being an affiliate and then it was like the super cordial conversation and i am up saying like okay yeah the these few things weren't what they seemed and here's why and then they're like okay you know that's fine but you know we just wanna learn more about affiliates because they were like you know the first regulators in the united states and they had never really talked to a large affiliate and because you know we were the only one at that point right so then they just kinda wanted to you do a fact finding mission and it all worked out i didn't go blind and you know i'm here today so i feel like another either lined and in jail i did ended it up and not lining out in jail did you like pack a jail bag we'll just that prep that i didn't up and my wife was in a hotel and i was just like okay well you know we have enough clothes if we need that is amazing you guys are also kinda like life hack life experiment i feel like you get just like the you like finding the the clever angles in business i feel like you do that with with life of i'm like you don't just do things exactly the way others and you're like well why don't i just do this you know instead and you've done the i feel like you do the same thing with certain you know like i don't lifestyle experiment so tell us about some of those what are some things that you guys do with your day to day life that is maybe just not standard not not exactly what anybody else doing because i think for the people listening they and myself included i love hearing when people don't just like follow a you know a very standard playbook because it makes me wonder oh what's the thought process behind that why didn't they do that and nine times out of ten i don't do it myself but i like hearing those do you guys have any kinda like interesting lifestyle choices or experiments that you do i think the first one for me was you know i was having twins and i was telling my wife like look we're having twins this is insane she's like yeah i know yeah and she's like they're in i have to do the brunch i'm having twins and i was like we need to get some help like we need experts and so what i did was you know i talked to an agency and i just kind of you know cast my net wide and far and i was like i wanna find someone that can help us raise these kids so you took the seriously like on your to do list like i am going to do a search i told you expert you're doing the hard part i'll do the easy part and just try to find someone that has done this before that can really help us along the way and really like kind of make our lives easier and i found this twin expert she actually lived in new jersey and we ended up hiring her for four months for the baby's first four months and she basically worked with them like night and day eighteen hours a day with them and you know part of it was training us you know it's like a dog you know they're were like oh you know you don't train the dog you train the person and it was kind of the same with us and really she put them on like an insane schedule where if one was sleeping and the other ones one was sleeping if one was eating the other one was eating and now they're like super trained so after four months they slept through the night and you know they were just like very schedule oriented we'd like look at the time it's like two o'clock okay they need to eat right now and they were like ready for they were both just eat totally wrestling sleep at the same time at the exact same time like always so they really kind of synced up and that lit made life so much easier because i couldn't imagine right then it's a point that yeah yeah exactly we basically have one kid that that ends up being till that's amazing what about you yeah i mean i followed him on some of this stuff so he after he sold he one of the sp was he hired a chef so i cook for him and when i heard that i like that sounds really like boo i don't know i don't know yeah that sounds cool i don't know and then he was telling me about it and i was like yeah this makes a lot of sense like why would can eat healthier you know i don't know if to think about it i don't know have to think about what i'm money etcetera so i ended up finding somebody as well and then i've come out to see him a few times the last few months and when we'll be eating i can like see him looking at me because i he's so competitive i know he wants to know like is this better than what i'm meeting at home sadly the answer is yes but you'll never give them that satisfaction messed up i i messed up yeah that's amazing yeah yeah you you're a foodie and you so for you it's like all you're your foodie that makes sense but actually you're more of like a efficiency guy it's so you know people are realize how much mental and physical energy goes into feeding yourself three times a day or feeding in my case kids also and so we have a chef as well and it's the same same thing it's like alright i just don't have to make decisions and i eat healthier and it tastes better because i'm not gonna cooking this person's is great at cooking i was like any money i could spend on a car a nice nice whatever i would way rather do this i would rather have one less employee at work and do more myself then then like sacrifice on this for sure yeah and it's like i think we've both gotten a lot better at you know if you have a problem you can think about how can i fix this problem like how can i solve the problem tactically or whatever or you can just think about who can fix this for me and and that path is you know we so much more efficiency for you you can focus on your power and you know it's obviously been what we've done and you guys you guys are different and from most people who come on the show and also most people i hang out with because i'm you know we're here at san francisco it's mostly tech silicon valley and tech is not like like here's like we build websites but anybody who works in tech here would be like what do you mean like you're you're making a wordpress site with a a referral link what do you that's not like software you know it's on a software startup up in the same same vein that most people consider and you guys also don't right go raise money from venture capitalists you don't like you don't do a lot of the shit that like silicon valley companies do what do you guys see is like what do you like about that like oh maybe i should start doing some of that and what parts are you like no my way is different but i think it's better for these reasons do you guys have any opinions on that yeah for sure so i like i grew up in buffalo new york and i just was never exposed to any of that stuff so i i didn't know what i didn't know so i was just trying to figure out how can i do what i'm trying to do actually meeting you and spending more time out here is open my eyes a lot to that side of the world i think you know for us the benefits of finding it ourselves are you know obvious we control it there's there's no one else that's asking us you know do this or do that or where's this revenue target etcetera so we can think really long term about the business and i love that you know we're the decision makers and we move fast so it's like once decision needs to be made it's like hey what do you think here's what i think alright let's go i think one thing you probably lose though is it's in my opinion it's harder to have like the really big outcome if like the things we're doing or historically have done it it's hard to be i'd be like a ten billion dollar company from that i think going the other path you know it's still very very rare but it does happen right you don't hear a lot about they just self funded this the whole way and then ip it for a hundred billion dollars right that doesn't really happen so and i think too you lose time like for us it was always like we always wanted to operate the business efficiently and profit so things would take time and you'd you'd watch another competitor you know raise a bunch of money and do some really exciting things and you're like that's really cool that's not me at this point but i can see the merits of it but i think for me i've always been like i'm just again a control freak and i was like i don't wanna work for someone else and i think with vc it's kind of the same thing right like that is part of it and you know with this acquisition i feel like you're on our team like you know you're it's i don't feel like it's kind of you know you're gonna be on the board and we're gonna be able to make really big decisions together rather than i invested in you i just you know are we ten times yet yeah know like that type of thing yeah yeah totally and what about you know i guess like business philosophy so i've heard as we've been talking some like some of your guys is like ism it's like these are tend ken these are mike of a sort of like but i've i've only worked you for a very short amount of time so i don't know a lot of them yet but i'm sure you have right nobody goes through years and years of building businesses without coming up with some operating philosophy of like you know here's how to work here's how to negotiate here's how to build here's how to like stay the course or whatever do you guys have any that stand out to you as like you know these are my like this is these are kind of my pillar ones this this is like i just really believe this and i can kinda tell a story that maybe goes along with that one and it's it's bit of a hard question but it's i find these if you do have an answer i find this to be really valuable one yeah i mean for me i feel like you're gonna be right a couple times in your life and if you think you're gonna be right swing big you know for example with or with bitcoin i you know i saw it i was super interested in i was like this could be really cool or well you could time frame where we talking this is two thousand thirteen okay you know it this could be really cool or it could go to zero but i have this like inclination that it could be you know way bigger and i think it has a chance too and it kind of brings me back to my dad and this is in the nineties he was a computer programmer and he was like telling our family like domain names are gonna be big and i was like oh that's cool dave yeah you know and he was like no they're gonna be big every person or company are likely gonna want one and he bought our last name seville dot com but didn't really buy anything else at that point right he could've have bought i looked it up like poker dot com home he was right but didn't swing hard exactly and so when i was looking at bitcoin i was like this is my you know domain names so i just started buying bitcoin and i was like i am just gonna like you know hold it and just see what happens what you know no matter what i don't want that you know i wish i didn't sell right so i'm still holding it today and you you you bet big at at that time alright i shouldn't say you bet bay because you don't often have to put hundred percent your ships on on it to because it's like this is one that it can go big so i don't even need to put you know my entire stack in it i need to put enough where if this works it means something yeah exactly no i i mean i really didn't i probably put a couple hundred thousand dollars in at that point yeah but i was like you know i'll just wait it out at that point i think it was around eighty to ninety dollars per bitcoin and then now you've seen ups and downs and ups and downs along the way did you feel tempted to sell or to you know like get out exit either either because i got a bunch of profit or oh man bad news bad news bad bad news big bitcoin crashing maybe i just get out not really i feel like you know it was always like oh this is gonna be a huge tax set and you know so so when it was really high you know that's what i feel like and then as it's low i'm like it could still you know i still think it's got a long ways to go right so for me i'm just like this is a long hold and you know we'll see when that changes but i mean that's why we started this company you know we're really excited about crypto and we think there's a big future here so at this point i'm just gonna you know i might die with it i remember when so i discovered about the same time twenty thirteen twenty fourteen and i won't tell you the whole story but like let's just fast forward a little bit so i buy a little bit of bitcoin i'm like alright great i in the game maybe and there was a run where bitcoin went to i was buying at like four hundred four hundred was like my average by price and then bitcoin runs up to three thousand at the time and i go to a wedding and i go to my cousins wedding and my aunt so imagine is like an indian like you know she's just like not who not somebody who i would think would say the word like bitcoin or theory she's said the word a theory actually so i i was like what the hell and she was like oh yeah bitcoin it's very good and i was like oh why do you why do you say that and i was like immediately my face dropped because i was like there's no way that she is like the one who's on the trend and she's like yes very good and i was like what yet it goes up and i was like that's the whole thinking like i just like yeah last month it was this now it's this and before that it was even lower it's like oh my god this is like a bubble and i was like i read about this bubble shit like it's i graduated twenty ten so i missed the whole dot com bubble by a long shot i missed two thousand and eight crisis i was a software college i didn't care what's was going on in the world and so i was like i think this is one of those bubble things and i was like you know what maybe i should take some profits so i go and i try to sell everything on coinbase but coinbase said limits like god how much you can sell at a time and so i like maxed down the limit for one week and i think i did it for another week and i was like oh getting kidding exhausted like by the end of like the fear had like dissipate disappointed whatever and bitcoin runs up to twenty k and i'm like you know i'm like oh my god on the biggest thing i'm gonna crash it back down i was like wow i have to really have a bit more of a of a plan as to what i'm gonna do this i i gonna hold this forever am i going to hold it to a certain point what is driving my belief in this so that i'm not just at the whim of like oh i hear something and it scares me and the taxi driver told me something that made me bullish or bearish or whatever on it we're at a point right now where probably sentiment about crypto was like i don't know what the lowest it's been and maybe ever but definitely lowe's has been in a a while and for a lot of people they don't they weren't around for the fourteen crash or whatever that's eighteen crash it was like this is their crash where they're like oh crypto turned out to a scam i guess t x is i i didn't what what was wrong with all this so that's kind of where people are at what gives you what is your belief based on for crypto like why do you think this is gonna be a thing i feel like digital money needs to be a thing like we were literally trying to wire money into this company and it wouldn't work and it was just like what you like what he mean it wouldn't work what was happening well it was mike had the real issue but it took you a week so we we both used the same exact bank we're with citi oh no i'm gonna call it out i yeah shout out on this dude and same exact wire instructions there's is just a pdf we both sent him to our you know people there said i wanna wire whatever it was into the company the next day i get the notice for mercury his hits and i sent mine like four hours before hits and i the whole day i never saw a mine come in so i'm like that's weird they had called me you know i different yeah did answered all the questions i to do the doc sign like text you know too off all this stuff wire never goes so i finally have to reach out to them again and i'm like what's going on with this and they come back to me and say the wire instructions are wrong and i'm like well same a bank with the same pdf and sent the money so that was an example where like on crypto that would have been a ten second you know transaction so i i agree with him you know i'm probably even more into the you know don't love the government control over all of the fiat currency stuff i think we're seeing you know we're we've starting to see and we're probably gonna see more of the ramifications of that with you know debt inflation those sort of things and you know having another option i think it's nice right yeah so in in the same way like government makes all the rules of of where you live great but if you don't like the way that the government makes those rules you have you have choice you can move to a different jurisdiction you can operate by different rules if you don't like the way that the government manages the money system by printing more money or whatever maybe be then you could opt into a different monetary system that's not controlled by the government that's controlled by you know a set of source code and the code you know lives and runs on its own and anybody from anywhere in the world can say you know what i don't like my country's monetary system as my base system i'm gonna opt into this one that makes a lot of sense to me why do you think people have like such a like what do think or maybe let's put it this put this way do you think are the fair criticism so i you're sure the the phrase steel manning but like you know it's like when you argue the other side in good faith you say here's the here's the best argument i could see against it what would that be for for crypto i think like a big one is there are a lot of scammers in the industry and you know they're able to do that because they don't have a lot of the checks and balances of the current system and i think there's a lot of good reasons why that's the case in crypto but also allows these people to do these kind nefarious things you know i was telling people recently i was like you know what like crypto does look really bad like there's no you know you can't really argue that fast right but crypto look really bad know a lot of times but it at other times it looks really good you know there are by the way it wasn't bitcoin that did something bad right exactly that you have to sort of separate the two right like if somebody runs a real estate scheme and scams their investors and you're you think you're investing in some property they're just pocket the money and running away with it or they you know they do something bad to the property or whatever it's not real estate that was the scam waste the scammer that was the scam and i think that's the hard part is that crypto has it's such a playing field right a money business so so many people that can scam so it all almost associates bitcoin or the underlying thing itself which is you know it's like a rock it's right it's not doing anything it associates that with the scam even though it was the human being who decided to trick people in order to make that happen right like that that's the i think that's the the hard thing to dis yep do you what was your reaction to like all the shit that was going right we're in the slack channel talking about you know the daily edition and it it feels like you know bad news bears for like you know thirty days in a row what you were living the each of those yeah were you what did you get were you surprised with the fda thing what what was your reaction it was done by that i mean that you know i like a lot of people viewed them as you know almost like a coinbase base blue rock solid you know feel good putting your money on there i would have recommended them to anyone so i i was really shocked same genesis yep we have i have money on genesis that i don't know it's gonna happen to it but that one was pretty stunning too what's it's been interesting for the milk road in our businesses you know this has actually been for growth a good thing right we cover the news and there's certainly been a lot of news so we're seeing you know record subs coming in that the reader scores have been really good people seem to be very interested in following this despite the fact that it's been very you know negative so now that's another piece of why we liked your business it's less correlated in our minds directly to crypto prices yeah yeah that's true sure amazing do we leave anything that we should've have should have talked about we miss any good stories or or fax you guys wanted to cover i don't think i have anything nothing comes well where should people find you guys because i think a lot of people gonna listen to this yeah these guys are cool obviously mil road but like where do they find you guys personally i know mike you congratulations did you tweet the first time today i had my first tweets in first tweet yeah first tweet about acquiring the okra at yeah my twitter handle is mike w meyer which kendall helped me acquire earlier so last night it's like the the news going out to this morning and mike's like hey anybody help me be around to help me figure out a tweet i'm never really tweeted let alone a thread so he's like is there a button for the thread yeah and that it was all i do is just laugh i provided zero like yeah is this hilarious and i know the i'm not doing anything no this is hilarious ben help me out but it was like a shit show for both of us he sends his out this morning he misspelled milk road in the first discreet he's trying to get that auto correcting trying to you know figure out away but yeah i totally misspelled it and then i deleted the first tweet kellogg tweet running it's still there and i did i didn't realize it for like twenty minutes and everyone was like why is wrong with your twitter profile i'm like i don't know i think twitter's messed up oh you at least use twitter i do use twitter more than mike but i wouldn't still not prolific i'm like i think you should actually make your twitter bio because you have no or you you had no picture pictures it so i added a picture you know you should keep the no picture no tweets just the thread and your bias should be i don't tweet i do actual work and that should be your whole persona and everybody should follow that and that's actually asked us earlier about why we don't do that stuff and somebody that came to mind for me was do you remember back in the day in the hooker affiliate world where all the like mid tier to small affiliates had their like blogs yes like the personal blogs sorry everybody would like i had like mike wit meyer dot com right you add something i think yep and we would all you know muse about what we were doing in our businesses is this and that doing these posts feeling good and then we were at one of these conferences and who was the the big jam investor and he was like the biggest poker affiliate probably in the world back then and this other guy they was similar neither of those guys did any of that stuff they're like every night we're out in the clubs at these guys tables you know hoping they'll give us like their drinks and it was kinda eye opening for like there's probably a correlation here maybe you i do it with those guys exactly yeah maybe i should do the work and blog can you tell any stories because this guy sounds like a legend who who is this person he's definitely a legend what are some of the the crazy yeah he's yeah he's a pretty private guy but he he's he's got a great story can also by the way we could bleep his name okay so then they could just be like can tell the story without the we all the story there so crazy story he's from he grew up there very not well off very poor had to leave school in eighth grade so i go start making money for his family whatever what did you do in the eighth crane he like working at a hotel or something like that bar bar and the boy i think family worked there yeah something like that gotcha and so i think the first thing he did was he was like the biggest ebay power seller and he was selling like cds and stuff on there he became pretty big made a bunch of money and then you know was he just early or is he really good or no at the same time as he was smart like he was basically kind of roll up all the smaller affiliates because he had better deals with all the operators so he'd buy someone and you know it'd be a small affiliate and like oh i'm making like five times and he for him it was like this is two two years earnings or one year he bought my site is how i knew him my we we have one super smart buddy who is has this like dominant position in his game i can't say who are it give it a away but he has the same strategy where he says like he's like yeah now it's unfair he goes i just go to them and they quote me some multiple but i have a better deal with the payment providers or the affiliate partner so i they think they're selling at four times earnings but it's actually too the moment i sign the deal they'll go into it'll go to my payment terms and my payment terms are just superior and so he's like i could just buy these all day and i don't have to like come up with a genius idea to even grow them because like it's baked to just the fact that i have more scale and therefore i have better terms and therefore like what they think cost x or drives y revenue is actually a different nut variable for me yeah i'm for sure yeah yeah so that's why exactly why he bought my business but okay i poke your affiliate business back there yeah and so he was smart that he was rolling these up no was that where were other people not rolling them up back then he sort of started that yeah i feel like he was kind a lot of our small industry he's he's just like a if you give him a business in like an excel sheet and a few weeks to like look at it he's gonna come back with like here are the three things that this could be doing that would like ten exit and that's really what he did for us at j too was i learned so much for him i i'm a completely different business person you know after ten years of working with him than i am now like what's an example that he did jam maybe that was a one thing he helped you yeah one thing you helped me a lot with was i especially early on i would really ride the wave of like you know all the credit card and charge backs hit i'm in despair on my deathbed you know we were first hundred thousand dollar day like i'm rate ip it was just this very he he used to joke with me like if we were publicly traded and you set the stock price it would swing like a thousand percent a day and one thing you really helped me with was zooming out and thinking like into five to ten year increments and and you if you frame stuff like that nothing really ever seems like that big of a deal there's like very few things that happened to you or your business that are gonna materially change your trajectory over five to ten years i an example to his credit but he put a million into jay i'm shortly after kendall did his first of investment like a week before it was gonna close we we had done all the documents it his ready to go our credit card processor throws us out and that was like half of our revenue we just gone and and it was like a visa thing it wasn't just them they're like this is underlying work yeah they're growing too fast like we need a big cash reserve we're gonna work with these guys they asked us they're like can you send us your financials so we need p and on a balance sheet didn't even know what a balance she was i like we there's nothing we could send to that so unsurprisingly me they threw us out and i had to go back to them sorta of had in hand to be like so yeah this happened you know are we still gonna do do this or not and he was just like totally understand if you are yeah just like we really need to pull not if you would though and he's just like you know we're gonna figure this out and he still cut the check and we did figure it out and there were probably ten more of those times along the way that he just help me think about things and yeah the longer increments yeah because with crypto right now like i mean people would have said oh impossible to sell milk road or this time with a good deal you could sell with anything with a bad deal but it's possible to get a good deal right now and i think as a general rule thumb that would have been true but i've always i i hate anything that's like you know this like sort of conventional wisdom because it's like dude i'm in the outlier business like creating a successful startup is an outlier yeah yeah i'm trying to be like you know super happy and super rich and super fit that's an outlier like so i don't really need any advice that is about what the general outcomes are instead i need advice on how to create outlier outcomes and so with this i was like okay well what would have created an outlier outcome okay crypto is going you know if industry gets shook all the big companies they gotta freeze they can't make some flashy acquisition right now that would be impossible okay so i need basically independently wealthy individuals right that's that's the first criteria second a lot of people are gonna say oh bad news in crypto oh i i maybe i shouldn't do this maybe i should see how this is gonna play out and no i need somebody who's got long term conviction thinks in this five to ten year increments and believes in you know the fundamentals and understands that there's gonna be the ups upstairs and actually during the bounds is the time to like make acquisitions and do things like this like this is the time to play offense right i feel like everyone on twitter there's a lot of twitter threads about this is the time to build and it's yeah i agree i'm not on twitter i'm good bad yeah exactly the builders aren't reading your thread yeah so so and then that's how we ended up finding you know basically the perfect partner at that time to to do this and so i feel like the the outlier you know if you're gonna play an outlier game and you're gonna you know you have to if you want an outlier outcome you gotta like play only by real we only have to think in terms of what creates that not what's the average outcome right because the average outcome not the thing you want anyways so for sure yeah cool guys this was amazing kendall you didn't throw up i i did it i did it kendall was really nervous before we started i was i was like do we have any boo around or yeah but you you didn't great so that was awesome what's your twitter handle which group at kendall seville seville s a v i l l e yep and then mike mike give him a follow how many followers you got two hundred now over two hundred yeah that's a big i think that yeah mike with meyer w i t t m e y e r you guys might get recognized now when you walk on the street you might get out hit of that hey yeah actually it it was funny right when we had met the last time before we did the deal we're walking out of that coffee shop and was see you later and you went to go get your uber right then there was a guy who who's sitting right there the whole time he's waiting i just see kept looking at us he's like hey sean he's like you know love the podcast man i'm i'm traveling for pittsburgh i'm just here for the day can't believe bumped into d evolve i was like they just should've have said that when the guy might buy the company was it no might've helps a little just you know that little she's a little juice we were joking about that after i've like strong probably just paid all these it was a genius out yeah i was like it it worked like great job when when we were selling our first company i did stuff like that where i was like i knew the it was like was to larger company it was like the the big fan company so it was like corp dev was like the who's who's paying attention to you at that time and so they would follow me on twitter or an instagram or stuff like that so i would just post like a ticket to like seattle you know one day trip anybody around in the evening and it's like why would he go seattle who's in seattle why would he go for a that's gotta be a busy they're they're talking to them alright come back and be like you know when it rains at poland or is so like and i would just post these cryptic things because in my mind i was like i'm just planting the seed baby i have no idea if this did anything but in my head i was like i'm really playing everybody off feature i thought i was like you know lean yeah catch me if you can type a guy guys that was awesome yeah we're good thank you thank you so much and one thing is milk crow hiring yeah oh yeah yeah we're looking for like you know those a players that have done it before because you know we wanna scale this and do it as quickly as we can and i should you say i like when we were looking at this deal we we actually had a a higher offer that we turned down one of the reasons why i told ben i was like i went to your twitter feed and i saw your tweets from back in the day that were like crypto punk cool i think your up a bunch of cool actually and i looked at the date i looked at what the price was then like what would the what were people thinking then and you were like ahead of the curve then you had another one this exchanged that you had invest in rain and i was like oh dude i've been trying to get into you know to rain at that i tried to invest a point in time i was like he was in there early and i was like i feel like if i just hang out with these guys more i'm gonna get more value out of something completely unrelated to milk road just there's gonna be some random you're gonna be like sir yeah yeah hear exactly kind just throw me a roadster i was like there's gonna be something like that i'm gonna get just out of hanging with it like a big believer in that like if you find exceptional people you don't have to have a plan like yeah just hang with them find some routine or value exchange where you're gonna be in each other's orbit all the time because something goods gonna come out of that and so similarly if somebody wants to work at the milk road i would say like cool it's gonna have good pay it's a cool pro project people really love the product that's that's all true but also like the same reason i wanted to to sell and work with you guys is the same reason really anybody should wanna do that like if you heard the stories in this podcast you're probably like these guys are awesome like they they went through a bunch of shit and they figure stuff out and they play their own game those are the type of people who you wanna like work with even if you're like someday i wanna be more more entrepreneur entrepreneurial than i am today you wanna get a job where you're kind of in direct proximity with people who are very much like that because it'll change the way your own brain works for sure you wanna get in shape hang out with fit people yes like for sure yeah yeah when we what was the body fat challenge you win what last time we hung out he was at like day so we're gonna finish the pause yeah i gotta know so what was the challenge you you were the end of a challenge of my yeah i'm gonna a group called entrepreneurs organization i'm gonna form him with seven other dallas entrepreneurs we'd meet monthly we do a retreat once a year in in advance of the retreat everybody sets themselves a fitness goal and everybody puts in like five hundred bucks that if you hit your goal you get your money back if you don't and it goes towards funding my retreat so no win just a it's not loose yeah just not and avoid the shame so maybe three months out everybody sets their goals and i thought i was like fifteen percent body fat at that time so i was i'm gonna get to ten never done that before i'm gonna go for it let's do it so i you know slam it down the table well i'm like boys i'm doing it and then i i start working really hard the next two months and a month out i'm like i'm gonna go get a deck see i think i'm probably eleven somewhere in there i i gotta be really i'm almost there i'm almost there and i had like wind out in the mirror materially and i go and get the dex i was fifteen seven so i was nowhere near where i thought i was and then i really like killed myself that next month and i up getting down to like twelve one twelve months okay but lucky for me some of the guys in scheduled indexes so the body fat guys were like we're gonna considered it acceptable to use those scale things and on the scale i was like ate something so i got my five hundred back okay wow yeah the good guy the reality is i did not my goal yeah yeah you were like really hardcore about it trying you were like not eating any of the carbs it was just like really sad you were just of in the corner was yeah it was definitely sad oh man like the chef just made this really cool thing and like can't eat of it alright does mike really do this five hundred dollars look it's like you know mike just to not lose mike does not like to lose at anything yep and he said himself a stupid goal yep have you asked it now next year that i'm gonna get it yeah what i would have done is i would have been like what am i now and just like do done like one percent under that and just like make sure i went yeah right mike wants to make is i've hard go up though no last year i i was probably weighed like a hundred seventy five pounds or once eighty or something like that and everyone at the table did like a weight loss thing so i just thought that's what these were it was like one that i think it the first year we did it and so i was like well i wanna get down to know one seventy five and they're like what are you now i'm like one seventy eight what you wanna do is forty pounds yeah not my fault you guys have been slack you need a run a book called going upheld go update what i feel like that's gonna be your your book yeah it'll be the buy you know when you're done working then you can start tweeting your your uphill about your uphill book i actually have one last uphill story what yeah white fish this year i mentioned we were doing i was doing this in the resort and they would open it like an hour before the wi ranch so only the people going out uphill i guess just because it's safer there's not a ton of people coming down so there was one morning it was like negative ten wind chill they actually never even opened the the resort that day it was too windy it was just miserable out so i was like alright not perfect optimal conditions all those conditions so i suit up you rang just suit up and get out there and i had just gotten like i'd never done this in a resort and i really had only done this maybe five times with my buddy who always was like the she button he was like you know help me figure stuff out whatever so there's this route you have to take up the hill and i was the first one going it was like six am and i'm just i'm going straight up that path i'm like marching doing well feeling good and then there's this one section because i've done it a few times so i knew there was this one section that was pretty steep and there were a few times going up that the skins would like start to slip a little bit and i was getting really scared because i don't ski so like if this thing turns around and i'm like i i can't do anything i'm gonna help you and so i'm going straight up this thing like marching the winds blasted me the ice is blasted me and i i'm one step away from the top and i take the step and it slips in the whole thing just falls apart and i'm falling backwards downhill doing the summer stall thing like this skis go flying off that whole thing so i'm at the bottom and i've been very humbled now because there's like twenty i realized there's like twenty people behind me who just watched that and i'm gathering all my stuff like they're helping me out and i look up the hill because they're starting to go and all of them are zig zigzag back and forth so it's not as steep and i was going straight blind directly up the hill i'm like oh that's why they're not falling wouldn't have any other way yeah there you go metaphor affordable awesome well thanks guys for doing this i i know i love out of your comfort i'm glad you guys did it yeah thanks you for having a day appreciate it cool alright