Data-Based Businesses, Executive Briefings, and Spotting Scams with Anand Sanwal

i love how even though i tried to pick a non nerdy data one it actually underneath the hood was a not a nerdy data one you're like the you're a data hammer and the whole world is just little males that you're just trying to hammer or with your you know like but you the best in the data like a vacuum you're the data dyson that's just taking in this data from everywhere you can yeah founders are like a lot of times not good at explain what they do to idiots so can i do it can i it's so alright i would make you look cool i gonna be your wig map alright and again so you run a i don't know if you call it software or a data business but people pay subscriptions and your your company cb sites you're now getting close to a hundred million a year in revenue which is like a huge accomplishment hundreds of employees as well and basically and this is the part that's kind of hard to understand for someone like sean and i because we haven't run like really really huge companies but basically when a company that has a thousand people have to decide what software they have to buy like let's say it's just like some customer support software or payroll or something they need to do tons and tons of research to make sure that the business that they're gonna pick the vendor they're gonna pick like we'll stay in business or we'll be around for ten or twenty years things like that as well as a bunch of other information and you have crawled through what you call dirty data so all this data out there exists but you just put it in a bit bits of software that make it really easy to digest and understand so a person can make a right and smart decision and they pay you like thirty year fifty or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to access all that is that right sounds about right yeah and more importantly fan of the show and prolific idea guy before this episode we did this episode he sent over a google sheet that is seventy seven rows of random started ideas which just tells me you're you you are you're one of us and so this is great you made our job really easy we have a bunch of ideas we can go through there's a few kind of interesting cv insights stories that you've vlog about in the past i wanna talk about but let's do those at the end because i think the ideas are gonna be a lot more fun sam the worse sean yeah one of the reasons why he's fun you said that he's one of us because the idea thing that's true he's also fun because even though he comes off like this like polite guy who's like introverted he's a shit head ana ana is a shit his twitter is hilarious he always he writes us famous newsletter to like five hundred thousand people now and he signs it with like i love you and in his twitter the bio says please buy a cb insights subscription i owe people money and like he always does like he he kinda poke the bear a bunch in and his stuff so he's got the he's got a really cool attitude but hopefully we get that out of you yeah yeah exactly yeah my kids were my kids were excited that he called me a shit head so i appreciate that you're welcome alright here here we go sam you put your favorites on the sheet i put my favorites what's interesting to be is we have almost no overlap you only maybe two out of the ten that you put down there were my favorite i had completely different ones i'll tell you why i say we take turns alright where we say tell us about blah blah like the little the little three set three word tagline and he gets to pitch it and let's react and let's try to get through a bunch of these so we might go on random tangent or drill down but like let's in general try to go you know an inch deep on each to one of these for now you want me to go first yeah you go so the reason why i highlighted basically everything i highlighted so cb insights interest me because basically you're not coming up with any data you're just organizing data that already exists and really easy to understand ways and then you're selling it at high fees and i think that's like the greatest business model on earth and you've listed out a bunch of ideas including like six or seven that were more of these like data that data yeah so you had one in there called sawdust data and you have examples you're like can look at what the government does like the government has all this data you can make that clear and easier to understand for people both the saw that data as well as the government data products what what do you mean by all that yeah so saw data is people create products and sometimes the residue of that product is actually really interesting data right and so that's the sawdust from the data and so it's basically taking that exhaust and so i'll give you a couple of examples right you have i'll just i and i don't know if these are businesses already but you know open table and res have all this reservation data i wonder if you could take that data exhaust and sell it to real estate firms right right and they'd be you know hey like reservations are down this area is not as hot maybe this this retail space is gonna be on the market soon because this restaurant looks like a dog right that might be one area you know i think i met somebody who has dog collars like a like a fitbit for dogs right five yeah five right and so you could take that and probably sell that to pet insurance under writers right so it's like it's not your core business it's this residue that comes off of your business that i think you could do interesting things with it's another example like procurement management system so kind of this like esoteric enterprise thing but if you have all this spend going through this procurement management system at your company could you go and sell that to hedge funds on like hey this company's you know average contract values going down or it's getting a lot more seats sold this year right and so can you take again not your core business and i don't think companies are really good at monetizing this on their own so it's basically building this platform that goes to these companies and build these data products off of their sawdust that makes sense with the the business that sean and i are and we're in newsletter business like people have all these questions but it's kinda of broken down and do just a cute few things which is just like figure out what content you can give people that they wanna read every single day and then figure out how to acquire users for prop profit and that's basically the that's eighty percent of the business what's like the eighty twenty thing for these like data businesses is there is or or rather the eighty twenty four making messy data clean data and make it a product that people like the messy data to clean data thing that's just like you have to have a pain tolerance that's all that is right and so i think this is why this is actually i think why cb is done well it's like we've had a bunch of valley companies come in and they wanna splash machine and learning on it and like you just have to get into an excel spreadsheet and clean the data like that's just it and if you're not willing to do that nasty work you're kinda dead i'd say the businesses that work are think i my framework is variable skew highly opaque high consideration and so i'll break that down so high consideration means like somebody's taking risk or putting a lot of money out there right it's just like it's got there's some skin in the game opaque meaning it's just hard to find you know and i think if you go into slack groups and people are like hey does anybody know x that's usually an asset class that's like opaque right does anybody know who a good vendor is for this or good software providers for this and then the last one is variable sku which is like like a car is a high consideration software purchase but it's not really variable like it's got a set of features you can compare them on a grid and so the internet's really good for that i like businesses where like the variability of the skew is significant because you can't just put it into a table you can't like an iphones an iphone is an iphone but like we are we launch yards stick like you know i i don't know radiology software that uses you know that ai reads radiology images like those are totally different and so right that's like the framework i use and so when it meets on those three i think that's an interesting messy hard business that's gonna be a lot of in but like you could build a moat around that alright so you how to do it i'm sorry you had one of your columns so so so i told you have seventy seven rows so those are the different ideas but then you had some columns one of them was frame frameworks or or inflection and that was your that was one of your your things opaque variable skew high consideration the other one you had was tiny but growing niches like or like inflection like it might be time for that to grow is that is that your other one that you look for in ideas and we can give an example here of like yeah let me grab one like you did this representation media so you said extend the rebel rebel girls book for other communities and then your framework was tiny for growing dishes so talk about that idea and explain it with that framework yeah so rebel girls if you're a parent of a daughter you might be familiar with it so we bought this book and my daughter was you know three four and it's just like one or two page stories of like famous women in history so like amelia ear heart marie k maya angelo and it's great like it's a it's a really kind of inspiring book really cool artwork that book is sold i think five point five million copies at like twenty dollars so it's like a hundred ten million dollars and that's probably dated right but i think there's like this idea of like what i what i call representation media right i bet you could extend that to i don't know like hispanic entrepreneurs or like autistic scientists right like people want to read about and see examples of success in their communities and so i think you could extend rebel girls across a bunch of different things and so that's the i think that niche is growing right like people like you get these micro communities that actually are pretty large that would love to read about themselves and receive good representations of themselves that's a great idea i've had the i've had a similar idea because we get gifted some books that are like i don't know like hindu religion book or but it was like the kid's version or something like that it's like the like and it's like oh yeah i'm gonna read whatever you know clifford the big red dog you know like is there is there something that you know adds a little bit of something from our culture or religion like makes it easy for me as a parent to like give them you know something i wanna give them while still being entertaining and accessible and there's actually just not much that's out there for that so so i definitely think if you added up all those little all those little different niches that's that could be quite big yeah i mean i think if you kind of pc if you found a story where the protagonist was like a little white kid like make it a little brown kid make it a little black you know like modify the story a bit and like that's a winner right because like kids love seeing like oh that kid looks like me that's dope right and so like you're off to the races there i don't think it's that nothing's hard it just takes some work but yeah dude that's why my that's why my wife loves kim kardashian she's like sees he's like oh look they got fat asses too dude that fat a good way by the way good way when i met the comedian hassan son min manhattan we he he was like doing his live shows and i had told him i was he asked me something and like oh what would you do with if with my business if you were me and i was like dude i would stop this like live touring thing that comedian do like this is so painful you're on the road like i don't know forty weeks out of fifty two in a year i wouldn't wanna do that i was like you gotta create a broadway show i was like create like the next hamilton and then that goes on tour right touring is a great business but you just don't wanna be the guy sitting on the stage i was use your creative and comedic genius to do that i might buy kind of big idea for him is that right what's the show and i was like dude i don't know now now my wife my i definitely and then the next like a week later i just sent him a voice note and i go aladdin but but aladdin black then he's like what and that was my whole voice note and then he goes what are you talking about and i go remember the broadway show thing i go it's aladdin but they don't it it's not like jasmine can't marry aladdin because he's like a poor guy no no jasmine can't marry because he's black because like you this her family doesn't approve and he's like okay so it's just he's black instead of poor i was like hey look what do you say that way it doesn't sound that good but like i'm telling you there's nothing to this idea of he overcomes and they fall in love and the love wins and he's like alright yeah yeah i'll add that one to the list i got to the list yeah that's what he's he's like stick to podcasting sean well yeah a media alright can i ask you about one this is actually really fascinating and actually i think it'd be a bigger business than than i don't know if you think but bigger business than a lot of people think a daily executive briefing email yeah i don't i i'm not sure how big this one could be i think i i i don't know if i put it in the sheet i said you have like a dollar column which is kinda like my indication of how big it is i think this is like a great side hustle business right so i when i worked at american express every morning our ceo would get like a briefing from his chief of staff right like you know here's what capital one did here's what citi did yesterday here's what visa did whatever and it was like basically that person's job to like scour the internet and like look at financials and product launches and all this stuff and there was a company that cis ts bought called bulletin intelligence which i i don't think i don't know how much they're doing with it but it was basically that idea it was gonna be like your morning chief of staff email and yeah i think this is an awesome business that like somebody smart and ind industries can can build and you i think if you go niche meaning like go financial services because like if you get am like the ceo of citi group like cares about or citi bank cares about mostly the same company so you can reuse a lot of it and it's not just the ceo it's all like their division presidents and there are like geography like you know heads and all that stuff so yeah i think this is like and you know i'm sure with generative ai and stuff if you could like make this really like efficient but yeah i think this is like a tens of millions of dollars business no i think you're way off so have you heard of you guys know political right yeah it's like a political like a news website for dc all politics but it's not from a like a cnn fax new news perspective it's more so like people who work in politics they read political whatever that's not interesting what's interesting is that they sold recently to axel spring for over a billion dollars and where they got roughly nine figures so a hundred million plus of recurring revenue when they have this they have the service called political pro have you guys heard of not have you heard at political pro no i mean i know that's their premium i don't know what's in it so basically i think it's like a thousand a month i forget the pricing so someone's gonna like get on me but they have this they their pricing but the the basically it's for if you're a lawyer or if you work in dc and you have to know what type of laws are happening at like a real rate like who you know like hey the senate is thinking about changing this like because we heard this senator say this in the news yada yada anyway they have these things called pro briefings and they send at least one a day but sometimes more than one a day and it's really fast short emails and that's your briefing of what's happening that day with with like a very very very niche thing so for example they have a segment just for pharmaceutical companies so if you're a pharmaceutical and you wanna know right away what's happening with the new laws or if you wanna dive deeper and read about researchers or if you just wanna have a conversation with an analyst you spend thousands of dollars a year tens of thousands of tens of thousands a year and that's basically what you're getting is this briefing as well as a few other things they scale this business to north of a hundred million in recurring revenue and it's pretty fascinating and there's a few others doing that and so i think if you could actually pick the right thing whether that's pharma legal i don't know what else there would be all different types of finance i think you could actually build a really interesting daily briefing business and you could even have a user say which companies they wanna spy on a little bit more than normal and i think you could charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for a subscription like that yeah you can charge a lot for this like these folks like as long as you deliver quality in the morning when they need needed it like yeah there's they have sort of massive budgets and i think bulletin had bezos as a customer for a while so like he was reading the bulletin intelligence briefing every morning so what's that company called bulletin bulletin intelligence tissue bottom many years ago dude the reason why i like i like talking to you is like you and i are some of the few people that nerd out on there's like all these data businesses out there so uni and for years have talked about there's like inform which is like a ten billion dollar market cap basically data and trade show business then there's euro money which we've talked about another publicly traded company there's a cis decision which like is just kinda an old a company that know it just these companies are just huge and they're just not sexy so they're not talked about with our circle but they're crazy fascinating to like learn about these companies because their margins could be huge yeah it's a i mean it's a build once so multiple times kinda of business right so like once you build that data asset or that info asset like you can keep selling it so yeah they're great businesses they're un sexy which is always good because like then you don't get all the smart people kinda trying to come in and you know eat year take your lunch money so yeah i like these businesses a lot you'd you had one on here also that was the pricing data so it was like go extract the pricing data from every saas tool and you know go to their go to their website find the prices organize all that information for things where it requires a demo quote like i don't know send a you know five dollar an hour employee through that process collect the pricing data now you have it now you can make that visible where they are hiding it on their website and you basically have a giant what like a search engine or a database of of okay if i wanna use some email you know send software here's the here's how the prices compare across them is that what the idea would be the yeah i think the idea there is i think you start with public saas pages and you figure out a crawl them or just you know m enter or something and then yeah email service provider what's the pricing what are the features i think the real killer there which is you know maybe borderline is like you actually because a lot of enterprise companies don't put their pricing on their page so you hire somebody who goes and pretends that they're a customer and gets the pricing and then that's really valuable right because like now if i'm because pricing like a dark art and b to b you're like yeah sounds good right and like like everybody's got opinions and nobody has data so i think you could actually do something really interesting there like long term if you actually call companies and got that pricing or talk to their customers and you get their pricing but that's actually the tagline line it was the tagline on your website which is without data you're just another idiot with an opinion or something like that i think dude that's great is great right i don't know do guys use that anymore we don't use that anymore i think we we still use like in god we trust all others gotta bring data like so we'll use that so who who comes up this stuff this is you and this is someone on your team who's like the witty copywriter these are just stolen from other people who are it's like a quote the idiot one's a quote i think right i think both of these are like you know somebody like some lu and you know we we footnote them in small print gives them credit do do do you think that you guys being kinda silly is a leg up or do people criticize you yeah i mean we get some criticism but honestly like b to b is so mind numbing boring that like it's it's great as a way to stand out but you know i i tell the team like you know love us or hate us you you should have an opinion on us and so that's the general theme right because most of it's like pretty vanilla and you know just kinda like jargon and so yeah it's been it's been i'd say a net positive for us but we've lost some customers over stuff we've said offended them and what like what you know we did a ranking one of of vcs once and we said a specific firm was losing in the ranking and it was just an objective thing and they were like we're canceling our subscription immediately right and wanna a loser move of them just my point oh you don't you don't want access to data now you got you get your feelings hurt and you canceled your own your own data pipeline you're like you're down another page yeah so we've had you know that and some people don't like you know i think when from hysteria was going we'd like sometimes put a infographic with him in it and like we didn't have an opinion but it was just like you just him in elon musk like if you mentioned them it's just like luna come out right and so like and so it's good for engagement but it is definitely like a little bit it can be odd like you say something and people just like if you know it's it's a cult and people get kinda crazy like i you you all you're a really good writer and or whoever's writing is really good and you guys always use things like your headlines are really good but then there's like just phrases all of like it's built in into your culture like in your annual review we're like hey we did pretty good for a company that isn't lighting money on fire like the rest of the vc world they're like just like little phrases like that it just makes a stand out and i think that that makes you have a voice and you guys are actually pretty good at that yeah and i appreciate that i mean i think it's you know it's partly for the external market it's partly for the team right like you're selling b to b software and so sometimes that can be like you if you're twenty two out of school it's like hey that's not super inspiring and i don't know exactly what that looks like and then once we can show them we can have personality we're in the tech economy which is interesting so yeah it works you know we we screw up a bunch of things but that's been good for us if i was gonna go out there and do what you said of getting all the data and like hiring people to call and and actually get quotes who would i sell that to on the software pricing yeah i think you go to product teams at software companies and say like you know or your cr our chief revenue officers and say like hey like you know do you know how you came up with your pricing like you know and here's what your peers are pricing at and give them like a snippet and give them a taste and be like hey we have all this other detail behind right how much would you charge i mean i don't think you start anything with like cro it big companies and like you start at you know twenty to fifty thousand dollars right like it's easier to go low than to start low and go high we just you just handed someone listening a pretty solid idea right i i think that i i think the thing people do is they under price we did this in the beginning our cb and says when it started was three hundred ninety five a month and what you actually got was a bunch of people who didn't know how to use data who are pain in the ass right and so it was like your worst nightmare was people who churn quickly who paid you little and who were blowing you up on chat all the time for support and then i remember meeting a management consulting firm and they were like hey can you add a couple zeros to the price because like one your price will look like a joke internally and two i don't wanna wait behind the guy paying three ninety five a month for service so like it price a indicator of quality as an indicator of other things beyond just like the core value of the product so that was like eye opening to me like i always always like oh you know price low and you know do all that and like you know now we're orders of magnitude higher than we used when we started that's awesome sean what are you at let's do some non data nerd ideas so i'm gonna pick it the call breaking one yeah yeah let's do the college rankings one i would you call it broke and busted broker busted college rankings okay so what's what's the what's the insight here so us news in world report is sort of like preeminent college rankings there's been plenty of coverage about how that's a basic con right and like universities do all this sort of fin to try to get higher in that you know i i look at how how's does that work how yeah they pay or what what is what's the i think it's that they paid i think it's that like you know you've got these like subjective criteria like you know student to teacher ratio right and so like universities will like massage that data so it looks good right and so like you know the it's like a limited set of factors and it's unclear how causal those factors are to actually getting a good education right and so i think you turned that on its head well i think us news in world report you know i think in like twenty thirteen i was doing like forty million dollars in revenue and now it has like again linkedin five hundred some odd employees so i i gotta believe it's doing a hundred million plus in revenue and i'm assuming college rankings is the number one thing so i think the thing you do here is you actually go to graduate of the school and just ask them for their w twos and you're like how much are you making right you just took on a bunch of debt like does this place actually get you a job that gets you paid or you like you know a server in a restaurant and you got like your two hundred thousand dollars in debt so i think you reach out to alumni go get their w twos and basically put a ranking together of here's how much i paid and here's how much i make when i get out and if i'm a parent i'll care about that i'll be like i don't really want to send my kid to a school where their prospects for employment or garbage and so i think it's like takes all of the it's a very singular characteristic so it doesn't take into consideration social life and all that other stuff but it's like i think it's pretty important right especially you got all these people like leaving school with you know tons of debt so that's the way i would do it and you'd have to probably pay those students or ex students a little bit but i think it's pretty cheap and you probably go like do like new york colleges to start like start niche like don't try to be everywhere right out of the gate like you know and then build out from like concentric circles from there do you wanna like i don't know about you sean but like what is we're talking about some nerdy stuff here but i i i find it like crazy fascinating because it's very clear to see the opportunity here but what's shocking is like when you say i'm gonna go get the data someone like me i would be like well i gotta go like google it and like find a database and you're like no i'll just like hire like i'll use mechanical tu you said earlier or i'll just hire someone or i'll just like make a ton of phone calls and just doing that stuff i can get interesting insights is and is that really how a lot of this works and and the beauty of that business is ninety nine p at ninety nine people out of a hundred won't do that work so like once you built the data asset like most people will think it's cool and they just won't do it like the other one that i like which is i don't know if i put on the page is you know as trying to get a pool bill at my mom's house and like pool pricing is just like it's opaque highly variable and high consideration and like i have no idea what to pay for a pool like some kid should just go door to door at every person's house that as a pool and just be like how much did you pay for your pool and like get the specs and then go find out and then find out what do they pay for per month for cleaning and whatever i don't know what a pool requires and like literally build the database of like that's a great idea pools in north jersey here's what it costs to select yeah because that's what people google too right like you know pool pool cost and then my city right that's a that's a a term that people will look for or even if they're just looking at pool cost but you have their their city in the headline they're gonna click that one over the next one and then you go back to the pool people and you're like hey listen i got this pricing next time you wanna bid you probably need to know what your competitors are bidding so like you can sell the data to both sides right like but right it's definitely like it's a perfect side hustle like you know it'd be like a thing that i you know i hope my kids will like just go do this like door to door and they'll get data i love how even though i tried to pick a non nerdy data one it actually underneath the hood was a a nerdy data one you're like the you're a data hammer and the whole world is just little males that you're just trying to hammer with your you know like but you the best business referring in the data like a vacuum you're the data dyson that's just taking in this data from everywhere you can yeah i i mean i love that business i and i actually think like not to get off on a digress direction but i think this whole at gp thing is actually gonna make private data like that much more valuable because like you know before it was like oh i'll give you my data and you'll just link to me and i'll get google but like like that's all going away i think and so like having access to private data is gonna be really valuable so i'm yeah i'm i'm extra and do you look at like for example the the pool one is a good one because it's probably not the pricing is not probably changing all the time whereas maybe the college one you gotta redo the the data collection every year in order for it to be accurate like for example in the content game or the media game which me and sam think a lot more about is like if anybody could do really well with evergreen content that's so much better than somebody is doing what we were doing daily daily emails where it's disposable and you gotta recreate the product the next morning otherwise there is no product and so do you think about that when it comes to data like either the ease of collection or the longevity of the collection like really makes the idea more valuable versus less yeah i mean i think you probably want data maybe counter intuitively that requires a lot of refresh right because like that's what keeps people subscribing right if i can get the data once and it's good for three years it's like alright i'll get it i'll churn i'll come back to you in three years when it changes when it's actually a little bit more when there's a little more volatility to it it's like i need to know what's going on because like my business might suffer or what have you in the case of the pool one the pool owners is only gonna buy at once right but you know that but that's okay right because like you could sell those leads to pool people you could sell that to pool cleaners like you could do all sorts of interesting things with it right and so like it doesn't have to be you're selling the data you could build advertising and lead gen and other businesses off of it for sure okay i got one that there's no way this can be a data one a mccormick spice competitor yeah i don't this one i don't have a lot this just you know i think i have a column called zone of excellence and this one's out of my zone of excellence cor mixes is like this multi billion dollar spice company oh if you open up your spice whatever cabinet like there's probably like these spices with like a red top right like that's all mc mccormick right twenty four billion dollar company wow in sales incredible sales marketing cat wow public company yeah so it's just like like you know why isn't there like the i don't know the apple of black pepper like i don't really know how to do this shit right but like right like what's the what's like well i think for this one you're you're right you can go either higher end or you know the just the more fun look at but just branding packaging design and influencer most importantly so like who is the you know the whatever the martha stewart of youtube that you can partner with that can be the face of a brand like this right like who who has that kind of brand and g that can get into a target or or or the store shelves at at supermarkets to compete with something like this and i think that's that's the way i would if i was gonna do this yeah a hundred percent i think the thing that's interesting about this and i don't know anything about mc mccormick is like the bundling like you know if you buy salt you need pepper if you need pepper you might be needing oregano and you might need whatever flakes that they sell out there right and so yeah you could just keep stamping this out across like every spice category but yeah this is not one is outside of my zone of excellence so i agree in this one but i like it they own everything i didn't realize this have you guys ever have you ever seen this protein bar at gas stations called tiger's milk no be sears yes they own this bar it's the worst looking in like it's basically a label it looks like it was like drawn by kenny powers or like it looks like if power rangers ate a protein bar this is what they would eat and it's just like it's called tiger milk and it has a it has a face of a tiger and it's like their protein bar they own that they own a bunch of different stuff this is awesome i yeah i i i totally should have yeah they own frank's red hat that's my favorite so yeah what a what a company i didn't i didn't realize that these guys were what they are that's wild and they're creating the eighteen hundreds yeah i mean yeah they're just you know brand recognition and everybody knows i mean if you go to spice aisle it's all of that like they just own the whole thing right so you gotta come up with a distribution hack here but that's you know sent sean that's probably more your world than than mine but yeah for sure can i ask you a quick question different from my ideas but about money so i'm not gonna you can say it if you want i'm gonna assume that you own a a a chunk that you are on paperwork worth mid to high low to low to high hundreds of millions of dollars have you taken any money out of your company or has your only income for the last i think you said ten years you've been running this just been like a a a normal mild salary yeah so i didn't i didn't pay myself for the first four years so when we raised money then i basically took my back salary and then since then i've not not taking any money off the table so yeah i'm foolishly long or brilliantly long cb insights we'll we'll see what we'll see how things play out bam i'm all in were are you wealthy before you started the company like did you have banker wealth so just no no i just you know i got married right before i started the company i told my wife when we were dating that i'm i don't wanna work at a big company anymore and we're gonna like there's gonna there's gonna be some lean times and so she was down and so i just saved religiously like we didn't go on vacations with friends and just like you know and it was always like awkward because like oh you wanna go somewhere and i'm like oh i'm super busy but i because i just was like no i don't have money so yeah i just saved like busy i'm busy being poor right now so i can't go sorry y'all take the calendar when i'm at for i'll start going it just saved a ton of money and then yeah for the first like two years of cb just paid for a small team out of my pocket and then we started generating revenue but wait what why haven't you take it a few million bucks just off the table just to make your life a little bit better it wouldn't it would have no material output yes okay yeah i and by the way just just so me have numbers you basically have only made i imagine middle hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary is that right yeah i mean i'm i now get paid like a fair ceo salary right so i'm not like it's not like one of these big public company guys but like yeah i think i just we've been really focused on the business and like i just think it's a giant opportunity and handedly a part of the reason we didn't raise in the beginning was because i don't think i'm good at pitching and i also worked in venture and i didn't like wanna work for my investor like that was always like a very guiding principle of mine like you know and i look at s ones of companies like go public and like you know the founder owns like five percent i'm like that's just like that's a backwards calculation yeah probably you know should have could've have taken money off over the course of time right now would not be a good time to do that given where the markets are so i figured we'll just keep growing out of this current sort of m that we're in and then you know opportunities sort of tend to present themselves even our fund was like a customer sent us a term sheet over email i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data from every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets are doing databases hubspot grow better tell the story of the of tell the story of the guy who offered you a hundred million dollars via dm how did that go to you know i get some interesting dms on twitter and so somebody offered a hundred million i you know i think this guy was broke as a joke but it was still funny i said you know not interested not looking to sell and i think then the email chain kinda dev evolved from there where he was like you know i'm gonna build a competitor and put you out of business and yeah it was good you same i don't recall i don't recall it was like some you blur out of think it out yeah so so so that's this dm are you posted the dm screenshots it starts like hey here's who i am really interested you know in partnering or or an acquisition let's talk please call me and then you were like thanks yeah not even thanks t h x right just like the the short thanks not for sale nice and he goes and then he goes how about a partnership and then he just keeps going and he's like here's how about this i'll give you a hundred million dollars for the business you are now if your fiduciary responsibilities is you have to present this to your board you know you know that let's go and then you you go okay interesting strategy best of luck and he goes so do you accept the offer and then he then he dev evolves into alright then i'm gonna create a competitor have you seen this competitor launch is he is he eating near lunch yet or what surprise surprise weird yeah we're tracking religiously to see when this launch but yeah not not nothing yeah they should damn them be like hey how's was it going man just curious about the launch and details yeah yeah now that was that was atypical i think most of my my dms are are nice but yeah that one was a little little out there what would you do with the money now if you sold i mean i think the thing i'd do is i wanna build a school of entrepreneur like i think education is broken and so i think like kids should just learn how to build businesses and not go to college and so that's i do and i think there's a bunch of colleges that are struggling that i could go by like a a plot and build like a dope campus for for a bunch of like high achieving kids and we'll just like go figure how how much would that take what i have no idea i've noted idea this is like you'll have it this is my distant dream but yeah i i think like i just read a a great book called the case against education that kind breaks this down and it's really interesting and yeah i think it's like i think there's an interesting thing to be done there and and then yeah i'd love to like do some stuff in india along that lines but yeah this will be my last true startup i've i've looked into a bunch of i i have like alert set for colleges for sale because i had a similar dream idea at one point in time i've i haven't i now don't wanna do this but it's amazing you can buy full college campuses for sometimes single digit million sometimes just like ten to fifteen million dollars it's crazy like which one it has to be less than the the replacement cost of just the buildings and land on the in in these these places so so i am not sure why and these are accredited universities the a lot of them are are they start as just like they do one like thing it's like just c or just one whatever there's like there's like those those are really cheap those are like you know one point five million you can have a a you know university or college that does that all the way up to here's a campus in new york for this like small liberal arts college that's not doing so well and like you know for fifteen million dollars you could take the whole thing and i'm like is a marketplace for that is there a zillow for bankrupt universities there should be but there's this one website called deal stream that happens to have most of them that i see so deal stream will send me emails of one like you know multi campus beauty school here you go you know that just got this email two days ago what made you sour on this idea edition just like the lifestyle component i was like what i like what would i wanna actually if i was gonna do this it was like okay i'm gonna basically go be the dean of the school and i'm gonna like basically this will be my baby and i i will make this great and i was like oh it's a lot easier to just like have a business that i could just do on my phone and my laptop you know four hours a day and not worry about this and just hang out with my kids and and you know have fun and so i was like okay yeah there's an all in version of entrepreneurship that i have no longer like super interested in because that would require you know same thing like i'd rather do this podcast then go speak at events i think in the last three years got invited to speak at maybe a hundred and fifty events and i've said yes to two of them right like you know so it's like you could make good money and grow your audience doing this but seems like a lot of work you know i think i'll try to just win the way i want sean have you ever have you read the blog post that a non made years ago about i think your father or someone in your family got sick and they couldn't run their factory in india anymore and you had to go did you have to run the factory right now his dad yeah my father passed away in april twenty seventeen and so he had a chemical business in india and yeah you know like he built it over many years and and like i was like alright i can't just let it go to zero so i ran it while i was running cb for about eighteen months the the title of the blog post is how to manage and sell a company in an industry and a company in a country you don't know and it's kinda great it's like a full like full length sort of like here's the whole thing do you wanna tell like the short version of the story and then people can go read the blog yeah i mean so he died on april seventeen twenty seventeen and as we're going to cr him we're hindu new and this worker from the factory comes up to me in hindi my hindi is pretty weak but i understand it and the worker was basically like in you know what's gonna happen to us right and i was like you know i'm like a mess but i was like alright i guess like there is this thing and my mom and him basically built this business over twenty years you know kind of like a small chemical company like nothing ga in terms of size no or a chemical what's a chemical it was like a it was it was it's in a sector called fine chemical so it was a raw material that goes into perfume and like flavors and fragrances right and so he built it one of three manufacturers in the world that could make this product is a really finicky product and like i'm like alright i guess i gotta run this and like my dad was like a mad scientist like off the charts smart and i'm like i'm not that right and so so i'm like okay what do i do here like i don't if something goes wrong in the factory i can't help so the only thing i can do is probably try to bring in more business so i just went online and like cold called every large chemical company that's in this space and i was like hey we make this product if you ever need it like come you know come talk to us so we had like our best couple of quarters ever when i was running it and luck because you were doing outbound and he he wasn't doing any or he just wasn't doing it well my dad was just like he was a sign he was like a product guy so he's like the best product will win right and like put this put this picture up on the youtube channel of the blog post where it's it's the side of the building it looks like and it just says on one side good quality and then there's a giant equal sign and then it's just says good business that's like it looks like as is that the side of the building as you approach to walk in it's like hey reminder and i was entering the factory yeah good quality equals good business and like times new roman font oh my gosh this is awesome but yeah i was just like i can try to go sell because i can't help on the technical side the team he had assembled was awesome so they've kept the factory running you know got got good sales people kept reaching out to buy it you know a lot of them like you know when somebody once a prop provider dies like a lot of bottom feeder show up so i was just like trying to make sure that these weren't those people i wanna make sure the team landed on their feet and then yeah just navigated through it met a bank a banker was representing this buyer they were above board people and yeah after eighteen months for a while because i'm like insanely ambitious i was like oh i'll have like cb as the data farm and i'll have like this industrial arm and we'll build that and then like you know be a fucking ty yeah well i mean for you know and then i was like telling my wife i was like yeah we gotta have more kids because like if we wanna build you gotta like you gotta have a lot of kids to like take this take all these these arms of this industrial conglomerate up and she's like you're insane and then and then yeah like ten weeks here or if six weeks here ten days in india like i mean yeah i like that was brutal so then i was just like i gotta sell this and then was fortunate to sell it and the team still all there and you everything worked out so what did you sell for i can't disclose a good i mean good like a good amount yeah it was it was you know i wasn't optimizing for the dollars i was optimizing for a clean deal to a person who would not fire everybody that my dad built the business with so you know so i'm sure i could have gone to somebody else who to like torn it down and know done other things with it but i felt really good about these guys so yeah i think it like it achieved non financial objectives that i think were more important to my mom and to me than maybe the financial objectives this is a really really good blog post that you have and it kinda got lost over the years you guys gotta share this again more yeah yeah i mean it was yeah it was you know the team at cv i gotta give them credit like mean i kind of an absentee ceo for a little bit and they like kept trains running on time so yeah it was it was a was a good yeah a a good thing to accomplish is glad glad to get you you had some like takeaways on the m and a process i'm curious i'll just read the headlines but you could decide which one of these you think you have a a strong point of view on or strong message to to deliver here so you said should i have hired an investment bank and you're were like i didn't have one i represent myself maybe i should you said don't let lawyers run the process so lawyers are often trying to mitigate risk but it's easy to just like have everybody get entrenched in like you know risk management and not actually have the deal go through don't want the small stuff quote the industry standard is a phrase to watch out for so give me your thoughts on one of these the industry standard one i think is like the one that like a heat because like people only use that when they can't justify the term they just say like no but that's just industry standard how we do things we've always do things that way there's no such thing as industry standard right like if it's it's if it's good for you then it's what you should aim for and that you know it's some not somewhat counter to the sweat the small stuff thing so you don't wanna negotiate on every little thing but when i hear it's industry standard like my ears always perk up because it's like somebody's like trying to get one over on me on this right or they're just trying to like make it the sweep this under the rug so i think that's an important one you know sweat the small stuff i think like put some stuff in that you wanna negotiate on that you don't care about that you're just willing to give on right but like you know just don't make the you know don't make the negotiation super painful in all regards on bankers like i think for this deal it didn't make sense to use a banker and i have i mean with cb i have a bunch of data and like what comps are and all that stuff so i had it was good enough and it wasn't a big enough deal that i wanted to like cut in somebody for you know five seven percent you know if cb was doing a deal now like we'd absolutely have a banker because i i've definitely seen like the value of what a great banker offers but yeah i mean i think the the industry standard stuff is probably the thing like anytime you hear that i think an entrepreneur should like just wonder like okay why are they just pushing for industry standard in this particular area because it usually it's always industry standard to the benefit of the person across the table it's never industry standard and good for you and so that's one i i would definitely push it on can we one thing happened over the weekend sean that you and i had talked about and i actually think it's a good time to talk about it now because i have a feeling that ana i know a little bit about it do you remember probably two months ago we talked about this guy named got ada adonis i think his name is you know don't talking about you were like i mean you're not the blame we were just using the news and you were like this guy is amazing look at what he's doing he kinda looks like an indian mario guy and he's like doing all this cool stuff where he's like doesn't really care about looking cool and he gives us money away yada yada yada and now he's like the third or first richest mayer in the world the news was i think he had gotten to second or third in the world and i didn't think most people knew his name i says hey there's this guy donnie here's what he does and i think we even said it i i don't remember really saying this but a lot of people dm being like you guys called it because news came out that there's like some fraud going on or whatever with their company and i guess we had said something that was like you know either this is just amazing or you know you'd never know because of whatever i i we have to go back and listen i i'm not sure what the what the clip was but a of people like you guys called that which yeah i people were saying that dude i'm like i said thanks but i don't actually remember i don't remember calling i do remember when i was reading about it it was a lot of people were like hey this is kind of a shell game like he's basically raising money he's raising money in one company using the like basic borrowing gets another company that he owns and that company borrowed against company that he owns and he had like so many entities that were each sort of like the justification for the next in terms of either the valuation or borrowing money or what whatever it was i don't i mean this is a couple months i don't remember what the details were but i think we just said that as a footnote it's not like we were calling him out on anything i people are giving us a little more credit than we deserved on that one so sorry interrupt sam we're we're that's a back that's a background so i think on friday hi hindenburg research i think they're a short seller so they they short companies but they produce scathing report and they've done this a dozen times i i i can't i'm sure a non new packs you probably know some of their examples but they're just like known for these really good reports while they'll write and say this company we think is total bullshit here's why and then it tanks and obviously they are in financially incentivized to for it to tank but as far as i'm good concerned i i think some of the research is actually kinda spot on sometimes and they have like a good track record but not have you filed this i followed a little bit i mean i like hindenburg i think like there's like we live in like the age of drift and so like you need people and i don't know if donny is but i think like you need people like hindenburg who like you know or coffee villa or like wendover productions or any of these folks are out there even on youtube or trying to hold at least shine a light on some of the g that's out there and so i you know i like what they do in at a high level i don't know if they're case with the donny like a good one or a bad one but yeah yeah well basically they they said like the entire company it like there's a bunch of weird things going on with it of all the like he they list all these companies and each person that runs one of the companies is one of his like relatives or former executives so it's all like kinda like it's kinda like his cro he's are kinda like running everything and yeah he's like loan money from other companies that he owns and he's making the valuations of each of those companies really high and so it turns out it's it's basically like a little f t x ask where of just like similar or entities that he owns loading money to other entities with the collateral being a company that he values himself among other things to and so anyway i thought you guys would have like interesting take on this because i don't know yeah yeah spent a little time in india you're in the finance world that's i wasn't sure if you if you had a an opinion there yeah now i i don't have an opinion on that i i will say like when you see like org structures that are really convoluted like you know f t x sort a donnie or en ron before that like people always like in the moment or just like all these guys are geniuses they figured out how to move stuff and do x y and z and then when you look back it's always like no it was just like a giant shell game you know as sean said like that that that's an interesting lens i think to look at companies through and it's like the innovation isn't the product the innovation is like cap structure or some weird thing it's like okay that's a weird that's a kind of a weird business to build right where like that's what you're innovating on it's like companies that innovate an hr right like i'm always like you know they're doing all these weird things it's like don't need have to build a product like why are you doing like three point five days of work and like you know all this weird shit it's just like don't you just work and like build a product so have you been able to capture or like catch any scams just or like make any right predictions based off their data that you guys have yeah i mean we don't we don't publish that stuff we usually send it to media right because we're not like a media outlet but we'll find stuff where we're like you know this company raised at i'm not gonna name but there's was a company recently that raised like at a four billion dollar valuation and then when you looked at like the founders and you looked at like the number of employees and everything it was like something's things off here right and so you know and so like we would send it to somebody and say like hey like this looks odd like you should go do what journalists do and dig into it so we'll find stuff that's a little audit times and then you know i think the more interesting thing sometimes is like you'll dig into filings of companies after they've been acquired by a public company and you see it's not this isn't like a a scam or anything but you see like you know hot company that says they got acquired and then you actually see how much the public company paid for them and it's like you know one eighth of what they raised right and so like you just sort of get it shines a light on like what was a real success versus what isn't i think that's probably what we tend to see more you know people who are wanna do fraud or like if they're good they're hard to catch period right like it's just not something that spend our time also some of these things like the same exact signal that later you look at and you say man we should have known something was off like you said at the beginning it's a sign of of the genius of the of what's going on like i know with f t x there was a a bunch of things that now people are like wow this is you know those should've have been red flags but at the same time those were the things that in stories they were saying were like kind of the the remarkable things about about them like you know for example the you know like oh the the they you know the they they all sleep in the same house and on bean bags and whatever and now it's like oh the had this weird like inappropriate you know like sort of like group dating thing going on but it's like before that it was like these are just twenty something year olds that you know are all like you know living in this hacker house that are making it happen it's like no if on one hand it's one thing and then then like you know after it's exposed it becomes labeled as another and i've seen this with i've seen this many times where it's like oh you know same thing sand bank freed is this sort of like this this you know this quirky genius and then he turns out to be this sort of like you know this drugged up liar it's like the same thing he was doing before where he's you know taken whatever you know adderall all or whatever the hell he's taken in order to you know stamp and trade it was like yeah these guys are fueled by you know you know red bull and whatever and they're just working you know they're they're geniuses that are outs everybody in the market to like their gambler who were reckless and you know we're not making a decisions because of you know their lifestyle and what they were choosing to do i've seen this this happened before i remember with tesla there was a point in time where i think tesla had had like ten or fifteen different cfo and my friend had told me that because i was like you know i'm reading a lot of stuff online about how like there's might just be like some you know there's a lot of smoke i don't know if there's a fire with a lot of smoke about tesla not being in good financial shape what do you guys you know what do you think about this am i i over reacting to these like conspiracy theorists on reddit and and twitter he's like well he's like i noticed something that interesting goes is i always have this phrase follow the cfo was like the cfo no the health of the business and what you never wanna see was what was happening with tesla which was like a rotating door of cfo that would come in for three to six months and then leave and secondly like the new cfo it's like the shy twenty four year old or twenty six year old that's you know now tesla's cfo wow he's amazing the same thing happened at f i remember when we we did we were they're sponsoring us for something and the guy who was paying us was their head of strategy and we you know i i didn't go in the call but asked ben later was so was he like you know super sharp or what was that guy's the story he goes yeah twenty he's twenty three years old or twenty four years old and he started as whatever and now he's promoted he's like the he's the head of strategy for all of f t x and again it was like wow that's crazy i guess they're just a real merit around there and they just see land of equal opportunity and this guy just proved his worth or it's like no this is his college buddy's he's not gonna ask too many questions and he could just trust him to to do whatever and say whatever right like these things from the outside i remember reading articles about this wonder kid and and then later it's like a bad thing and you are right about the cfo thing with tesla at that time or worth were they on the brink well people don't talk about that much now but it did seem like they were on the brink or you know just you know narrowly survived either either properly or improperly i'm not sure but like later i remember one one interview elon finally admitted it he he was like we were six weeks away from like you know the show being over for tesla with when were having the model three production ramp and and he had said something in a separate interview that alarmed me as well would which was about there was like some what's that famous a green at clean energy thing that obama funded like like the green new deal something no it was like six hundred million dollars to soy vera soy lint soy whatever i don't know some comes soy in i don't know what it was some company that got a bunch of money and it failed and like up until the day they declared bankruptcy it was like we're we're good i don't know what you guys are talking about and ce that's exactly right and they asked elon about that like you know just clean energy get a bad rap because of the you know the problems of and others people say it's hard to make new tech work and i'll the stuff and he said something in a in a separate interview where he was like what are they supposed to say as soon as they if they ever admitted any weakness the stock would tank and it would guarantee their demise like they have to say it's all good you guys are nuts whether they are or aren't because the other one is is it it it will tank their stock and they will die for sure it'll accelerate their death so then i was like well you can't believe anything this guy says about how tesla do it if that's his mentality when they're you know i'm reading these things about how they might be on the brink he's saying they're all fine but he even says that that's the ceo's job in this situation so now you know what to do and that's a long story show about why i sold my tesla stock too early yeah i i do think like there's the signal that i look for it's not in the data is like the narrative when it's like a crazy founder narrative like like they were in southeast asia living in a monastery and they talk about like their clothing choices like that's always a weird right when it's like we're not gonna talk about the business we're gonna talk about celebrity wear some like mole skin t shirt made from like you know yeah but it it worked with z yeah but he wasn't like he built a product to start he wasn't known for his like weird and i think it's the key thing when you can't see the product or the or the financials right like like for a lot of these things where it's like is the product legit and is are the financials like visible right but but even then you can't like you know f t x was a like a real product that that people used and the financials made sense at the time that like they were obviously gonna they're making money on every trade right people doing a lot of crypto trading how can they not make money you know it seemed like it would work in both cases another example on the side they had twenty five engineers and i remember reading stories about how he was just like yeah we create like we're not like the silicon valley companies with all this b coinbase has like you know thousands of employees we have a engineering team of twenty five and we do more volume than them because we hire ten x engineers and we we go for extreme operational leverage and later it was like of course these guys had like terrible security practices and all the stuff like they didn't even have the they they refused to even invest in engineering right it's like the same story the two sides of the same story once you once you know the result yeah hundred percent i i do think there's signals when i i don't think fraud but there's signals right now that companies are not doing well right so like you'll see companies raise at a billion dollar valuation and when we dig in we see like the liquidation preference is three x but that stuff doesn't get reported right or you see the cro or the cmo leaves every six months kinda a sean's point on the cfo like that indicates there's problems it's not fraud it's just like hey this company is not killing it the way outsiders might look at i think fraud is a tough one i think under performance and and companies that are not doing well that's a lot easier for us to figure out what's a company that's impressed you that we most people don't talk about because you guys see a bunch of companies that are that are interesting what's a company that's kinda flies out of the radar but kinda secretly crush it i'm like a data it's gonna it's probably gonna end up in the data world so let me think it's don't know if anybody i will say like the area that i like right now and i don't think these are great businesses but i think like i think are interesting is like the the the folks that are analyzing the g right like i really like love this space because i think there's something to be built here like they're more media companies than they are great big tech companies but there was like there's a couple that like are digging into like pastors and like the whole like evangelical pastor world and like it's phenomenal like the stuff that they they do so like that's probably the area i go down a lot more in and then like looking at the businesses of folks like andrew sc and folks like that like you know because i think there's a lot to learn from how they do marketing and how they build audience so i tend to look at businesses that i think we can learn from versus like just like random sort of businesses that are out there what what what kind of boring company like yours learn from andrew sc so the thing that so i think the thing that he's done really but i i was purposely insulting you in order to make make the average listener be like oh yeah i bet that quick i think the thing that he does really well is he doesn't just interview other comedian right i think he like he interviews other people who are kind of adjacent to him right and so what he does then is he keeps expanding his audience and i think most other folks like you know like i like theo von and theo von like interviewing other comedian right so like he interviewed neil d tyson and i bet you that brought him a whole bunch of new people right and so i think it was very funny yeah it was awesome and so this sort of like schultz strategy of like adjacent folks i think is really smart to bring in like the venn diagram is not as heavily overlap and i think like he keeps building that way which i think is really interesting and so for us like it's always like who has an audience that's not exactly our audience but that has maybe a slight overlap and but would those people kind of like us if they knew about us right and so it's kind of like thinking about partnerships there whether it's newsletter partnerships or whether it's you know research that we do whatever it might be so yeah i think like looking at what's happening in the cons consumer side of media is always interesting because that's where like the innovation tends to happen it doesn't usually tend to happen in b2b b well dude i appreciate you doing this you're fun to talk to sean what anything and we we only got through maybe half of the half of the shortlist list ideas so if people like this we should do a part two and and do more do more of the ideas thanks for coming on man is fun and appreciate you know that you've been you know come i i feel like i've seen you tweet about the show you know for a while now so you know that's i really appreciate that that's one of the cool moments of this doing this for us is that people we respect if they like our stuff too that gives you a little extra juice a little extra wind in your sales to to go out and keep going because it's it's different than just oh the numbers are going up but numbers don't have that same kind of like pull as you know somebody who you think school you know liking your stuff and by the way not it's your fault it's kind of my fault it's most it's part your fault basically i get like lots of messages day but like five of them a day it's usually a young man in his twenties and he'll just message me and he'll say let's fuck that's all i get and the reason big one time i was either on my way home or en route to the airport and i was i hate flying so i take a lot of xanax and so that's the only time i'm ever knee and i was very high and i messaged you and i said i'm in your hood let's fuck and you replied like i'm down like here's a restaurant meet be there or something like that and i told that story and now because of that i've get i get a bunch of men messaging me that living living the dreams sam you're living the dream someone's stream someone's dream not my dream but someone's dream yeah i'm living i'm living on person's dream so you're to play for that but i appreciate you covered on and this is fun we'll talk soon alright thanks guys bye