Frame Breaking Businesses: From Pomegranate Juice to VPNs

so in like two thousand twelve two thousand thirteen thousand fourteen he started a vitamin brand and it only did okay and then he started also tinkering with a skincare brand which it actually did much better got to like ten million or so written revenue he hired a ceo the ceo kinda like drove it into the ground and didn't really do that well so he started focusing again to his vitamin brand and he's like look it's doing okay but who's the best customer of a vitamin company dogs because you and this isn't i'm not dis discouraging him but like do they work yeah why not like fu you know like forget yeah forgot woke to f inc yeah takes supplements of it's for dogs they'll never tell you if it works or doesn't work what what up alright we supposed to like start with like a catch phrase now hey boys girls welcome to the business show where you learn how to make so much money that you'll get taxed out the ass that's what rich richard don't care about taxes if you don't care about taxes yet you ain't rich do you care about taxes yeah i like i don't i don't i'm gonna live my life according to like where the low taxes are but like it's like the number two or number three thing that i'm thinking about so i'm thinking about this whole in new york texas thing and i like do the math and i'm damn like i imagine i gotta rent a place for let's just say like twenty grand a month like that's how much taxes i'm paying by moving here versus staying or you know whatever it is like a lot of money a month well you have a good thing you could do the like texas is your main residence and spend four or five months out of the year in new york so that's not so bad that's not so bad but yeah i i i need to do it with new york and florida because texas winter is not like winter winter that's desirable enough that you wanna winter there you know what i mean yeah yeah dude have you heard about this like the teddy bear law the teddy bear what's that so i was asking my tax guy i was like where you keep your like possessions yeah but basically i was like so the rule is it six months out of the year what does it take to have residency in some place and he was like well it's there's a bunch of little factors he's like but one he's like there was a famous case with derek jet the the new york yankee shorts stop they're like jet wanted gina play for the yankee he's in new york but he didn't wanna pay new york taxes he wanted to pay florida taxes because he's like look this is my home this is where i live avalon blah blah but you also have a apartment in new york and you play in new york so you work there your home is there and your kids go to school there i think and they're and so they ended up it got ruled in the in court and they call it i think the the the name they call it as the i haven't looked this up was like the teddy bear law and it's basically like where would you keep your teddy bear so the place you would call home so like factors like where your kids go to school where are the possessions that you love it all goes into this like umbrella to be like where do we actually think your home is and and actually when i first heard this i was like wow that's really like subjective for like a ruling or a law and actually it's one of the laws i kind of agree with i actually think that that is more like how it should be done which is like dude what's the spirit of this you i live here or do you just like stay here for exactly six months and one day every year and i have to you know i don't actually know where you are at any given time but if you know if you're working at a place your kids go to school there all your possessions are there all your friends are there your families is there like that's where you live as an avid listener of date line one of the easiest ways to catch the husband who kills the wife is like three weeks before he either bought like you know a trash bag and like a shovel or he googled like how to dispose of a body and last night i found myself googling and i was still embarrassed to do this so i went to incognito me a window i was like i can't google this like they're gonna know that i shoulder yeah and and and it was like how does the state that you're visiting know like like if i'm renting and i didn't even know what google by way i was to figure out how to phrase this but if i live in texas how does new york even know that i'm there if i'm just renting a place do so funny you said that i did the same thing and like my queries sound exactly like just the irish really know just like it's somehow about somehow that's how it's like formatted in my search like so yeah like i went google with like deal dude google needs understand it real yeah like the asterisk and everything it's like there's one browser that's just like just because only ever incognito and he's either looking at porn or taxes like what what's this guy's lifelike like right it's like basically it's like you know i'm trying to google like when you get you know if the irs does this you is that like jail or just apply yeah are we bring in a rule or law right is or taxes a recommendation or a requirement well when i learned googling this googling this was the irs and i like it makes sense but i didn't even understand irs is for federal so like but i pay my federal taxes no matter what but i'm like okay so then how does the state of new york actually know that i was ever here and i'm trying to like take a i wanna i'm googling that to follow the rule but i am curious and i was to be clear in case they also listen to podcast podcasts i'm googling this a for a friend and b to enforce the law on my friend because i know not here for anything else and i was just curious i'm just curious i'm like literally how does the state of new york even know that i exist i'm i'm the same way i i have the same way we're all i'll go down this rabbit hold then i'm like thirty minutes i'm like why i even looking for this is not applicable at all to me but i'm like i just wanna know how it works like i'll be like when you keep the receipt does anybody ever go read the receipts like you know what but i actually have like you know there's this twitter account i love called house stuff works or something like that i love it and today they posted a thing i was like it was like how luggage gets loaded into an airplane so there's a guy in the back of the airplane and then there's like a conveyor belt shooting suitcase is that how gonna stacking it like a perfect tetris grid and i'm just like i do i love this account because it's always these these things are i'm like dude how does the world actually work like i you know i know i give them my suitcase but what happens after that and it's like sort of the same thing with like either taxes or like like google just like you know rich people don't pay taxes dot but how like you know like these loopholes that i hear about are there are there really these loopholes like are like you know universities have this endowment what how are they doing with that and i'm just like always trying to get at the bottom of like i wanna have like an actual understanding of what's going on and dude so like i have so little understanding about so many things on earth but it's so funny that you you brought that book i actually i'm like doing the thing with m again the idea aviation boot camp course and to i started talking about the book that i had as a kid called how stuff works and there's another one where they just like split like a power tool into two and just see like a picture of like how school bus like operates or whatever and i'm like the reason why researching which is what you and i do for this podcast is cool is because whether you like it or not america and the rest of the what most of the world is you know guided by capitalism and commerce and so like if you understand how like a business works just like these books show you how like the luggage guy works then you kind of understand like what's possible and what's not possible why laws are the way they are why art is the way it is like you can you it's not just money making but it's just like the earth like there's how the world in society and so i actually was just writing that yesterday and i totally agree and i think that's why like studying businesses is cool and by the way like i think most people do this for science they're like you know why is the sky blue and like there is an element of that i'm talking about just like here's a perfect example we use the luggage one for example it's like question what happens if you just never pick up your suitcase or like what happens if you just simply like i see those bags over there they say that they're waiting for someone to come get them what happens if they don't like is this just a pile up forever you wanna know name of doctor mario and then yeah i do i is yeah i'll it up for you then there is an answer and it's actually kinda of fascinating for somebody who goes and digs in and says like okay but then what right or like they you like a kid like why do they do that and why do they do that and why do they do that and then that you get to what's it called un unplanned baggage or whatever it's called like that what's that was that the name of our company so basically the hustle wrote it about it if you google like the hustle un unplanned baggage there's a company and like rural alabama i think it's alabama or arkansas called un unplanned baggage and they sell three hundred million dollars a year worth of un unplanned bags and they it it's like a huge thrift store you know right agenda and and the same thing with like the like you know the the shampoo at a hotel like you know i use this thing once what do they do with it do they just refill it and give it to the next person i'm curious what do they like oh actually there's the whole company that recycles things they take the half used shampoo from hotels and they sit they tell the hotel hey we'll pay you nothing for it but we'll come collect it for you we'll take it off your hands because you can't give that to the next guest and then they take that and then they have like a basically a a way to rep package and resell those and their brand is around lessen waste on earth and they that company does extremely well and so you actually find companies at the end of all these because again this is like a giant little business ecosystem just in the same way that like you there's plankton that eats stuff off the whale head or whatever it's like you know basically there's a little business that's going to solve every one of these edge cases all around the world right there's a person whose job it is to do that thing and if you keep going far enough if you'll like find those those little nooks and cra well which is a perfect segment for what i wanna talk about today because here's here's why i i wanna i'm gonna give you a bunch of example of things that i've i'm calling frame breaking businesses so like things that i've discovered that have changed how i thought about stuff and there's a story and and by the way today i was i was thinking i was like days is my leg day because i'm putting you on my back and i'm carrying us for this episode i i i'm i i've got a i've got like outside up by the way by mom yesterday well i i work out with my mom sometimes and she was like sam paul's legs she goes to sam par full name i love it i don't know if she knows that's like to you first and last but sam paul's legs men he's got strong legs and i was like yeah he's great and she's like i was just looking at his legs in the last video the mister video because you're were wearing like shorts on the couch or whatever i was just looking at his thanks i didn't hear anything i like mom hi mom hey sean's mom tech me i'll send you some more pics and and i'll set these the pictures of my legs i got you it's it's genetics so people people comment on my legs i it's just it was they i was born that way so thank you i appreciate the love though alright so basically the reason i thought about this was because dig so there's this website called dig it's actually not that popular anymore but if you're above thirty you probably know it dig in reddit or competitors and for a long time dig was kind of beating reddit but they're both like the whole like front page of the internet type of businesses that had like tens of millions of monthly unique and kevin rose the founder of dig was on the cover of time as like meat silicon valley new wonder kin the guy who is twenty years old and worth a billion dollars or whatever he was like the mark zuckerberg like the next zuckerberg and dig ended up not actually winning this battle and they're currently for sale and i linked to their financials someone just sent this to me on twitter it's not like i got this through like i didn't like sign up for a service where i had to agree to competent confidentiality but someone just sent this to me right you signed the fda a full disclosure agreement where you're like i will put this on plastic if you send this man shit to be she and i not twitter account that's exactly what happens just said it to me i didn't ask questions and i just looked at it but i'll give you like the overview the overview is that over the last year they had twenty seven million users so what's that two million a month so two which is not a lot the hustle gets more than two million a month just on our website and we don't even try to get traffic on our website so two million a month their revenue slam slam on dig nice it can go they're okay so their revenue for the year was something like a million or like one point three or like it it was like one point two one point three nothing shit big which was supposed to be like you know a great website only like eighty seventy ninety one thousand forty four thousand a month in revenue horrible crazy small boy bullshit yeah yeah and but here's the thing is that this rep this this discrepancy we're gonna call it the gap the gap between how much we've talked about them and their prestige and like you know the accolades that they get as but from but the the gap between where they actually are in reality that gap is huge so instead i'm gonna swap it and we're gonna have some frame breaking companies and we're gonna talk about the actual good type of gap and i wanna show you a few businesses that people don't talk about that are actually phenomenal and really interesting so i'm gonna give you the first one the first one i we maybe talked about before but i was looking at michael biz michael bi is a you a youtuber for mma and a vpn company sponsored him and i thought that's kind of strange so i just googled like what's a good vpn and and maybe i'll start buying a vpn basically a vpn if you're in america and you wanna like tell the internet that you're in europe you use a vpn or if you're in like north korea or one of the korea whichever everyone would this would apply to and you wanna act like you're in america you use a vpn that's a that's a that's like oh or if you just wanna like just search the web anonymously and you want google stuff about taxes and that's what the vpn just wore and so i googled best vpn and i came across this website called compare tech that was kind of intriguing so i linked to it you see compare tech dot com slash vpn so i started reading it and i was like this is kind of an interesting site and i looked him up on similar web and they get millions of views and i scroll all the way to the bottom and i noticed that they're based in england and the thing about england and the uk is that if you are a uk company that name all the things you love about about england maybe the tea maybe you like the queen and you like the fact that all companies numbers are publicly available yes a lot of people don't know this but if you are a company in the uk i don't know what the threshold is it could be as low as five it could be as high as ten million and you do over ten million in revenue you have to there's a thing called companies house which is a very british name it's like they're i don't know if it's like is it like they're irs or something like that where you can go and log in and see all these financials from privately held companies and i was curious about this little website called compare tech so i went and looked it up on their on company's house can you see what their financials are do you have it up i don't have it open no okay so i'm gonna pull it up and i i linked to it down there said financials basically a fuck it the link broke on me but basically their revenue for the trailing twelve months was twelve million and their profit was ten million and this little website that just reviews vpn it's i'm sure it's more sophisticated than what it looks like but it's not good looking it's not like it doesn't have like the best design and i believe this website ended up selling for like two hundred million dollars and i think it only gets like a million visits a month it's sold last year or six six or ten six or twelve months ago interesting site right that's crazy it was also only started in twenty fifteen so sometimes i see these sites that i'm like wow this thing gets so much traffic and they just send clicks out to whatever you know basically their business model is they write about which vpn to use and then they link you to vpn and they get a kickback from any whichever link you click of the ten they'll get a kickback from all ten for you know some some dollar value right if the vpn says cool every customer worth three hundred dollars to us we'll pay a hundred dollars to anybody that refers as a customer and so these guys will do you know some some numbers like that normally when i see that there's like really high traffic sites that sort of just look very basic it's like you know this was start in two thousand four i'm like well okay props to you you had the foresight to know that like very early on and like the you know the the internet days or google's days somebody was like i'm gonna start reviewing credit cards i'm gonna start reviewing vpn providers i'm gonna start reviewing what email software is best and they made what email software is best dot com and like you know that they rake in six million dollars a year you know ninety percent profit margin something silly like that and like you know the person is spent the last fifteen years trying to figure out you know the meaning of life because they they won the business game already and so that's normally what you see but twenty fifteen is like pretty new for a site like this it's pretty new and here here's their financials i went and found them on companies house in two thousand twenty one they did fifteen million in revenue and thirteen point two million in profit the year before that ten million dollars in revenue nine point five million in profit that's crazy this is crazy right right yeah i i i'm a big fan of these now by the way do you ever do you play with seo a lot because growth tactics are like martial arts it's like you could be a black belt and ji and know nothing about karate right are you know karate and you nothing about ty one or j you don't know how to do any grappling and any throws and that's how i feel about growth channels it's like i've spent a lot of my career figuring out viral vitality so a lot of my career figuring out paid marketing now with e commerce things like that the thing i've never touched is seo dude i know how much a absolute novice on it absolutely i know seo like an ivy league architect knows about construction like maybe i can have a conversation with the construction worker who's gonna build my project and like kind of know but like i'm not gonna be able to reference like which r to use and you could kind of lie to me sometimes that i wouldn't exactly know if you were right right you put me on the job site and i'm gonna ask for some gloves because i don't got one hurt my hands yeah yeah i'm just gonna everything's gonna be called the monkey wrench so like i don't entirely understand seo but i do believe it's the maybe the best one like it's like like if you nail it i think it's the best thing to nail or one like that that seated in the office when dwight like you know trying to ignore jim and then jim like dwight are you they're doing i can change yeah which pair is best like that's stupid question there's hey he's like you basically school yeah all they're basically school two schools of thoughts here wrong yeah that's that's how i feel about like you is seo best i don't know is brown bear best or is a black bear best right like every every one of these growth channels is like has something awesome and then something terrible and the one you're in you know it too well usually and you're like this thing is awful i wish i could just go on facebook and spend money and get but one spend a dollar get two dollars back and the facebook guys is like oh my god you can get free traffic on google and the google guys is like holy shit this thing grows viral wow and what is that you know and so i think there's there's no best i yeah i would agree and but and by the way this site compare tech it was sold for yeah it was sold for over a hundred million dollars i believe this year in two thousand twenty two for like one first give me give me another frame breaker that's a great first one alright another one a company can i give a ps here just in case some the good happens ps is with the milk road today we run or like our business model is is newsletter ads and i had asked ben i was like ben if we were going to sell a product our own product instead of advertise other people's products what what would be what product would work best what bear is best ben and he was like vpn dude hey he's exactly he's like we should just launch our own vpn fits the audience you gotta promote with the amazing business model just have to buy an existing vpn and plug in our distribution and so if anyone is a vpn they wanna sell me i i'm happy to either buy one or bill our own yeah you gotta come up with like some cute branding like vp nope you know what i mean like can't track me you know like you gotta come up with something just like you do it with milk and stuff we gotta just get get rid of vp vpn and that's just too whatever it needs to be like you know of whatever material or like you know i'm like you know you know secret juice and it's like oh i use secret juice i'm on onboard with this don't tell don't tell you know yeah just call it don't tell mom alright the next one qui street have you heard a qui street no alright google qui street and go to their website for me alright going and tell me like what my hess is i thought this was a fashion brand if you told me nothing else but okay yeah i'm guessing it's not alright qui street i just see a guy and it says where performance drives digital and then there's like another stock photo and this guy accessing high intent prospects this guy a horrible stock not like these guys aren't here aren't ugly enough to be like a stock model they're not good looking enough to be like they look like they're like out of like a like spanish or like geometry yeah like they they just look like just normal you know it's like they it's they're so normal that they don't even looking what does your skin have like you know normal people wrinkles and blemishes so that's not right stock photo you need to be perfectly airbrush right is this the founder it looks like the founder i don't know i don't know who the founder is but it's like a simple ass website that's not good looking right but this bit dude i've going to the slideshow show this is slideshow hilarious dude this looks like you meredith from the office this is like that's what i'm saying they're like so that they're not that that that it looks silly so this this company i'm gonna explain what they do i'm gonna tell you how big they are so what this company does is they used to own and i don't know if they still own these sites but i'll tell you what they what they still own now but they used to own websites like directory of schools dot com or campus corner dot com or learning and life dot com or find the right school dot com just like these like boring websites they don't look that cool and when you google ohio insurance ohio auto insurance they come up number one you enter an information and they sell that information to the highest bidder for insurance people this website it's like ugly looking it's simple looking and you like a lot people respect it they made about six hundred million in revenue last year it's publicly traded it's publicly traded is that's crazy right this is this is another frame breaking company like they am too i see if you click their about page on qui street they're about or one of their forms like it doesn't work like it's like it goes to like a four zero one like it they don't have it set up dude okay you know when you meet someone and you're like i can't tell if this person is absolutely a genius or if they're completely idiotic or if you're in san francisco you see somebody walk into a fancy restaurant with a like a hoodie and like you know they're like wearing one a and one cro and you're like alright this person is either homeless or a billionaire right like that's a pretty common situation in san francisco that's how i feel when i go to websites like this i'm like these are either the biggest dummies on earth and don't because i can't i can't understand what they do right their website is full of pages and just like performance are our product or something it's going into a video game and like you talk you bump it into one of the the stock characters that just like is like oh it didn't see you there hello and just says i keeps repeating on loops some random shit that doesn't make any sense that's their website so these websites they're either like absolute money printers or it's like you know someone's aunt who's got some dream of like you know being successful and they're never gonna make it because this makes no sense i can't tell and now when i get to finally then i see the the key money tab investor relations if you got an investor relations tab on your on your website like it's working right like you know put in the bill clinton clip where he's like i did not have relations with that woman that's how that's how feel what i see the investor relations tab i know some shit's going down hilarious our software is the worst have you heard a pub hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous i think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better it's kinda the this whole web in this whole brand it reminds me of like a fourth grade classroom with like the like you know like teamwork and like each letter like it spells a certain word do you what i mean or like that's like teamwork t is for teamwork easier is for everybody that that's what their this whole website looks like but it makes five hundred six hundred ish million in revenue market cap isn't very great because it's a lead gen company those typically don't have good mark gaps but it's just crazy they just ignored all the unimportant stuff like how good does their website they're like public facing brand website look and they only focus on just the results i guess and they own all these other websites that don't look so bad and they clearly get results but it it's like a really interesting company and and it's another frame breaking business where they just don't give a shit about the things that most people care about and it works it's effective so i recently met two guys who run a business like this and they've run three other businesses like this and exited them i'm gonna share i can't share the story now but i'm hoping one month from today i could share a kinda of crazy story about so i'm just gonna put that there cray a teaser for a future of one month from today you know there will be a a crazy story about these two guys i might even have them on the podcast i don't know yet but but this is this isn't insane this is a sam park special how did you find qui street where where were you what was it in the what vpn and private browser did you have open when you were searching for this two ways one a guy named jackie chu who i like just like tweeted at at this tweeted me this a while ago and i just saved it and then number two joe spies my partner and a bunch of stuff he told me he used to work with them he owned an ad network and he was like in the early two thousands like worked with them they basically right now they do car insurance and things like that but they used to do university of phoenix so university of phoenix you they would you know they owned all these school websites you would google like what's a good online degree they figured out the and this what what the the the these these guys look un sophisticated they are not they're very sophisticated they like know how to get traffic to websites they know how to do seo like they look like a fat guy who like it trains j ji just like just like you talked about like oh this guy he's good but they need like you know can like put you in a head locked putting in three seconds that's what these guys yeah and so anyway i found it just by goof around and talking to people this is crazy so they own insurance dot com insure dot com car insurance dot com card ratings dot com money rates bank tracker m am one and modernize home services and then they partner with way more as well by the way that's a really great source for info is talk to people at ad networks yeah they know everything people who like work at google cloud or aws they know everything they see everything they they're i they they know who's making money and who's not they know who's getting traffic and who's not and like if you ever wanted to go figure out your next gig go be like yeah i'll be jan at this like mobile ad network i'm gonna go be jan at aws by payment all i need is like login credentials into the dashboard i like to i'll be a account rep for high value clients and therefore i need that list of the high value accounts that we have and you basically just mine that and you're like alright which one of the you know who am i gonna copy right right here dude there's a website like going into or go into a barber shop and you see like the yeah is like i'll take the number twelve the fuck boy fade please yeah the line on the side exactly like that please did you guys do eyebrow lightning bolts no yeah okay fine i'll take the number twelve foot funny dude alright the next one is in your world not just because he's an indian guy but because he's he's e kind some reason come with some reason that it's not just that i don't know man any entrepreneurs for you guys are taken over the world i'd love show you you guys all are part of the same tribe you know one another kinda there's only a billion of you so this guy alright so i was looking at the ink five thousand list of all the list that's the only one that like kinda matters it's still you could still really tuned i see this all the time p i see the random mass some digital agency that i've worked with that does not like nothing special they're like we're a three time inc five thousand winner i'm like well you can based myself of you could still it's it's supposed to be based on revenue and they're both so i don't trust ink anymore but i used to and when did you're okay listen i clicked the lake for twenty twenty two block five is number one block five basically just went out of business like months ago so it tells me everything i need to know do and your goddamn list you they already at the story though you know greatest active athletes bill russell like he just walked away two weeks ago like they're like on they like created the list and someone didn't endorse like hey we gotta remove block five from number one and they're like seems like a lot of work they're like look i don't make up the rules here i just think them up and write that down according to us is two hundred and forty five thousand percent this year it's like yeah you forgot the negative side dude they're like but it's like so far away the computer i don't know where my charger is five thousand is you go to the office no one those the charger is that is we can order one but we would meet our computer to food that i guess i could speak my bond by way home yeah but they're like oh it's happy hour zachary have her bid at a have you ever been at like a company happy hour and like you'll hear news that something really really bad has happened and had you heard about that during the day you'd be like livid and i'm on this yeah i'm fucking ti avoid like this is livid and then you hear about it like when you're laughing at happy or you're like yeah and like that's what happened you're not talking about it your a bit like a company happy do you like hear bad news and you're like hundred percent we used to do ours on friday it was called the friday wind down and it was like wine and cheese and like whatever you know that office you guys gosh so it seems like much a wine and cheese type of guy though like i know but the the office before i joined the office was pretty you know adult and mature and like sophisticated people and then i joined i started hiring people that would sleep at the office and so like it became this crazy culture clash we ended up ending it but it was so funny because it would be like friday you look at the numbers like well still don't have product fit i guess alright let's just head over to them to the office at lord just drink for a bit and like oh servers downs like how much traffic you think we get on the weekends anyways yeah when one guy would go back to his desk to like fix the thing or like you check they check their email like oh we gotta go fix this and then everybody else would be like sort watch them walk away be like alright if he looks like he's having trouble all go to yeah you're like no don't no that's target it's the voice of like well let me know if you need anything sorry dude i was looking at five thousand which apparently just bullshit black i didn't realize i saw black was ever one i i didn't realize that that was the company that like went out of business with so yeah the list is kinda normal this point it doesn't really matter but i saw someone who's number six or number seven it's called high key it's like a keto cookie business type of thing and the the guy's last name i don't know if it says it on this list but this other list i was looking at it was patel and they used his real name but i was i think that sounds like a aj patel so who i recognize recognized and high key was like six or five do you see what it is on the list yeah it's number five or six yeah and they grew by forty one thousand percent i think that just means forty one x right so like if it was a million there do forty two million now or forty one million yeah okay these numbers at my funny paperwork word you heard this word yeah it just means like fake right yeah but i'm i'm all about the word for gazing i feel like i can own this corner i don't know anyone who says it and absolute pleasure absolutely treat say the same that word gays it's like well it's like the most popular line in wolf of wall street bug fu yeah it was this all day you just carry the twelve you know like i just can't do this stuff of bath so this guy a aj patel he started this thing called high key which i would imagine is in the thirty or forty million range but listen into this guy so he's probably in his later thirties probably thirty five or thirty six so in like two thousand twelve two thousand thirteen thousand fourteen he started a vitamin brand and it only did okay and then he started also with a skincare brand which it actually did much better i got to like ten million or so written revenue he hired a ceo the ceo kinda like drove it into the ground and didn't really do that well so he started focusing again to his vitamin brand and he's like look it's doing okay tinkering but who's the best customer of a vitamin company dogs because you and this is a about dis him but like do they work yeah why not like b oz you know like forget yeah forgot welcome to fa inc yeah some of it's for dogs they'll never tell you if it works or doesn't work yeah you know what wanna be it's like it's like what's that memory loss game where it's like brain teaser you know brain audacity or brain acid yeah it's going it's like it's like no out yeah it's like having like like a like a like an ad campaign towards those with amnesia like does or or or with like alzheimer's like does it work at yeah and maybe so that's like what what like these vitamins for dogs are like he knows if it actually works and he starts growing this company he pivot from like you know normal vitamins to dog vitamins and he starts growing this thing and it takes off after a while and he in a in he and he kills it he gets a twenty five million in revenue and then he sells part of it to a pe company and he took sixty million dollars off the table then he grew up for another three years and sold it for like six hundred and fifty million dollars and he's still owned like half of it so collectively he made three hundred four hundred million dollars at the age of thirty two and this guy isn't in silicon valley he's not in new york he's not in brooklyn he's in orlando florida capital of jo jo city usa you don't jo city white new balance tower twenty two twenty two listeners in orlando they all just collectively looked out at their lap and came back and not it like facts a fact maybe yeah yeah yeah like like you know england or illinois is the land of lincoln florida's like land of dog the bounty hunter you know like it and that's where this this he he's born in india indian immigrant came over decided for some reason the florida the place and knocked it out the park and not really well known and i was just like researching him and high key is now number six on this list they grew forty one percent forty one thousand percent so forty one x so if they were doing a million in revenue or five hundred thousand in revenue they're doing twenty to forty million in revenue now so it's another nine figure and value brand and this guy is just quietly crushing it and i love it and i watched to talk with him there's this thing there's this website called capitalism dot com dude i'm reading the transcript of that talk right now as you speak it's pretty crazy so so let let me just recap this guy's known mostly for he sold zest pause that that company for six hundred million i think right so the the past was over in the in the in the transcript he he says yeah the public number is six six hundred but it actually got raised a little bit higher wow and he he also has hockey snacks but in this thing it says his first business i like his first kinda side hustle was he was selling he's like i played single poker and i got to a million by the way i did this exact same thing that's why i stood out to me i told you you guys are brothers man you guys yeah now i know the connection so he got to a million shift he sold it for thirty seven bucks i i did this on poker stars i grind my way i got i i accumulated a million that was my actual first million it was a million fake poker chips on poker stars and i sold it for thirteen dollars and i tell you what i've never felt like more of a prostitute in my life i was like wow i just worked so hard for like three months to get the you know like just grinding the free money game and i got to a million chips and i sold it for thirteen dollars via paypal and then i proceeded to lose the thirteen dollars immediately on the real money tables and i was like i had never like you know you should see it could take a shower i feel yeah googled like can i declare bankruptcy just out of embarrassed man like you know is there is there some like version of that is i was so embarrassed i like the the terrible trade i had done he said he did that same thing and he started doing that as a like as a market based on ebay i think he made like a hundred or two hundred grand just doing the the fake poker chips like buying and selling basically which is it's kinda like you know it's kinda like a a kid being good at chess when they're six like if you're doing that on ebay it's like yeah you're gonna yeah well just here's all my money just hopefully you'll figure it out one day just get me back when you can like that's what you do when you when you be people doing things like that that's like i can just we need this guy on and i'll give you i'm talking to him i've been talking to him on facebook i got him he's he clearly has you know he comes from our he's cut from the same the same cloth i know what we'll what kinda thought that is but but it's definitely our cloth whatever yeah we'll assume it's silk but the dude this guy he i started becoming friends with them my facebook never talked talk to him my life there's a software that i needed to i don't wanna add them but there's a software i needed to use and it's like ten grand a year and i mentioned it to him that i use it goes oh here i have an annual subscription here's my password and he's been letting me use this free like ten thousand dollar a year subscription so this guy this guy is my guy man yeah yeah and so wait what's the second reason why why we need him on here because i just googled his name a j patel now here's a guy sold a company for over six hundred million sold another company got he snacks he's sitting on store shelves everywhere the in the across the country guess what google puts up and the the they're like google thinks i'm talking about patel a aj m d the doctor in san francisco dude no matter what an indian guy does in business the doctor is still number one he's still at the top of the ranks and so he needs to come on this pod so we can we can get this guy's seo but it's like one what's the jessica alba company honest the guy started that his name is brian lee he started like that shoe dazzle and like legal zoom if google brian lee like he ain't coming up oh dude it's a a wrestler it's a it's a guy who looks like undertake her we're like big shower or something yeah like brian like it doesn't matter if you're billionaire or not you you you know you you you cannot you which by the way fame is always way better than than money so right wrestle wrestling beats being a billionaire but this guy in his talk he said something amazing so he like he hired the ceo to run his skincare brand and he says yeah like it's stun this guy like i gave him the reins and i told him to do it and he totally talks slick to me and i thought he knew what he was doing and he and it didn't work and the guy goes the interviewer goes well was it a sad day when you fired him like he must have been hard right and aj aj goes no it was awesome firing him was so easy because he was so bad and i felt so great like getting rid of all the dead weight and i look at business as a living organ organism and like i have zero emotional attachment if someone doesn't serve the business and i'm willing to fire myself or anyone else and i have zero sadness about it and i saw that and i was like hell yeah i call that you know what call that i call that korean convenience store owner energy you remember you remember here's why you remember during remember like the rodney king riots it's like in the nineties remember like these pictures of like the koreans store business owners but like shotgun standing on top of their like they're like no be like yeah like let's go i was talking to it like some people i invested in the other day and they were telling me about their business and like how they're like things aren't going that well i'm like well can you do me a favor like do a screen share let me see your calendar and like it was totally open and like it hadn't booked a lot like i'm like what i'm like every meditation afternoon walk yeah like dude from eight am to eight pm it's gotta you have to have sales call set up with prospective customers and like don't give me this nonsense of like oh well you know it went out of business but we learned a lot or like you know like we just couldn't or the things that you're suggesting sam they don't scale i'm like no dude right now you need to have that korean store owner energy where it's just like if you don't make this work you don't feed your family and maybe you're gonna get deported like you need to have that like like that that energy of like motivation with a side of deportation is how his dishes served dude you have to have that energy sometimes like of course like once things going well yeah you gotta get like beyond like scale all that stuff but like early on it doesn't call yourself a start call yourself it doesn't matter what you call yourself you're just convenience store owner and like some convenience stores you go there and they have every type of kind bar you could ever imagine that's where i'm going other type of convenience stores like you know they don't have what what i want i ain't ever go in there again you gotta be that convenience store that has every kind bar every cliff bar has a stick and just grinding and knows your name they are willing to call me like you know like what do you want the usual that type of that's what like a lot of startup up founders need and so this guy aj aj patel he's got that korean store business owner energy you know that like immigrant and hustle i love it yeah he's great and that's great and i feel like we know so many people that it's like i meet with them and i hear them talking and it's like oh let's just fast forward at the part where you write a medium article called my next chapter or our next our next adventure and then you're gonna sign off saying onwards yeah like you're a fucking captain of a ship in the seventeen hundreds like a h maybe your business is failing wake up do something don't just sit there and lose and then go work at facebook and write my next chapter i'm so excited to lead you know you know digital digital ad products at facebook now for the next two years of my life before i go out and do this same stupid thing again it's like wake up go figure this out right figure out something that's gonna work i don't care what you do i don't even care if it's bad but like i need to see some like some serious action being taken i you know and like realize your shit is not working and like i invest in startups and i know that the name of the game is you're gonna lose most of your money and only a few are gonna like return all the money but when i hear like their updates i'm like alright i i'm okay with swinging and missing i'm not actually okay with it but i know that's a part of the game and it's just a numbers game but for those not swinging it doesn't matter if i only invested five thousand dollars i reply and i'm like oh you're losing and you suck for these reasons and you need to improve because i gave you my harder earned money so you can have a good shot at trying something and you are not trying or taking a good shot and that's pissing me off and i told some of my other angelo angel investor friends and like i kinda feel that way but i never say that i'm like what do you like what what why not why wouldn't you say this it doesn't matter how little or how much you invested you gave us your hard money to someone to like take a swing step to the plate dog like swing but don't like give me this nonsense we we have this phrase i use in and all my companies which is that alright people are gonna make mistakes but there's two types of mistakes and you have to you have to decide when you when you make a mistake which one is it did you make an error of action or an error of inaction an error of action is you tried something and you did it wrong or it didn't work or had a bad result you know you were trying really hard to do something and you just messed it up that's okay that's a fumble no problem then there's an era of inaction which is your mistake was that you didn't do something you didn't think about something you didn't anticipate it you didn't plan you know you you just forgot to do something you dropped the ball and that's the run right so it's like i'm always like number one to be like broke no problem this was a error of action that's great i love errors of action that's how you get better and like never feel bad or sorry for an era of action for an era of action i now have a problem and so i feel the same way with founders that i invest in it's like some of them i'm like oh man they're just banging their head against this wall i will only ever say something to somebody if i feel like if it's a if they're making errors of action when they're making errors of inaction my experience i did it twice now and i was just like hey guys like you're like your update makes it sounds like everything's okay but like read what you said everything is not okay and like you gotta do something what can we do here and i like rolled up my sleeves and i was like helping them with their strategy and their pivot and then their investor deck to raise money because they're running out of money and i same with thing with the other one i was like hey guys like this is just not working like you don't have product market fit you have like two customers after two years like what's going on and they're like no we're really excited about the pipeline and we think that's that doesn't that's not fair and i was just like oh my god not only were you like not aware of it you're actually in denial of it wow this is like you know complete waste of my time and you know sure enough in both cases they you know my like several days worth of like full time effort to try to help them resulted in nothing and so you know i now i'm picky i'm a little bit picky where i'll test the waters and i'll see does this person if given a dose of reality do they take it and say more please or do they like i don't want this and it's like oh if you don't want reality then i don't wanna you know i was just there's a mistake on my i i judge wrong you know my my my my check was written to the wrong person here as the great doctor phil once said don't piss on my back and tell me it's rain alright i got one last one i've an interesting one so it's like a bill of the week but someone who like people never talk about or at least they don't talk about a lot and he's he's got that gap and it when i say he it's actually him and his wife and his wife is actually the more interesting person but this guy a little bit is more front facing his name stuart res have you ever heard of stuart res you know how we talked about him i don't know the name but i just googled it and now i know they do the the wonderful company or whatever so so give me his story alright so listen to this guy named stuart ru came and his wife his wife's name is linda they're they're based out of california and so in the nineteen seventies he started a jan business and he just basically like was a jan at one point i think and then he eventually hired a few more and he got contracts with buildings and once he was in those buildings and had the contracts he expanded to security guards and at one point he had a thousand armed security guards on staff so he like through this jan business into a security guard business and it was amazing he got some lucrative contracts to lax and it turned out to be a a great business and he ended up selling it and he made a little bit of money and with that money he eventually bought the franklin mint which at the time was one of the world's largest sellers of coins collectible coins and oddly enough you know who owns the franklin mint right now no no idea former m ty lopez does he really get yeah i was my was a joke yeah basically the the good job so basically like in the sixties seventies eighties and even up to the nineties like all the marilyn monroe coins and elvis presley coins the franklin mint they they're the ones who started it or who produce a lot of them and so from there he part that to a couple things and now at this point his company it's called wonderful brands they own a a bunch of really interesting brands so they own landmark wines that's not that interesting tele you what tele flores is it's a pretty big three hundred fifty million dollar year business where you call it's like one hundred flowers a competitor but but here's the big ones that they own the first is wonderful pistachio you've seen those at the store right mh the second is palm wonderful you know what palm wonderful yeah palm juice yeah pomegranate yeah palm juice and so basically the wife linda she she's like you know i love pomegranate grant but there's no this was like in the in the eighties she's like there's not really a good palm grant juice let's let's do this juice and she goes you know what pomegranate it's good for your heart it's what else is it and she like learns about what it's good for and she was like you know it makes women have like an hour glass figure like it like it's like good for you and like it's you know it makes you feel good i guess and so they made she made the bottle like you know it's like if you ever seen it it's like like a signature bottle yeah yeah it's like a signature bottle well they own another company that has a wonderful signature bottle called fiji water so they are they also own fiji which has a square bottle and at this point they're privately owned they're one of the largest producers of one of the largest farm owners in america so they own all men and pistachio farms and they do four billion dollars a year in revenue and this says in twenty eighteen they were the wealthiest farmers in the country yeah and this guy they're you know the the i believe the the wife linda she's jewish but she's got this like southern bell charm to her like she's from like alabama or something she reminds me like an old like we know faulkner novel like she reminds me have like a character in force gum movie and and but the base out of california and then he's got like a little new york vibe where he like kinda comes off as like cool and hip but they're farmers they own they're they're huge farmers and they're like have the best brands out there fiji is a great brand and they created these they're not just acquiring these right no they made them yeah they they make these brands and they own way more wonderful is a really good brand i love wonderful pistachio and so these guys just kill it they're just quietly crushing it and i think at this point i think they're like eighty one or eighty two years old and i still watch talks with them and they talk about how they go well how do you stay close to their customers and they're like well i just read twitter all day and i like read about and like i sometimes i like like us yeah they're just like us and so sometimes they they just like look at like what customer they're like we use facebook and we just like skim like our page and we just see like which complaints are actually good and which our our our nonsense and we reply and then we make changes and we just run our business that way and they're really interesting people so that's the billy of the week stuart res and his wife linda linda wow yeah she looks like the type person that i would give you a kiss on the cheek and then wipe off the lipstick yeah just gonna i that yeah yeah i love those women but it they always smells so good yeah yeah yeah like going to the bathroom at one of the that at that a woman like that house this is just a absolute pleasure there's so many things you can so somebody sense sense you didn't even know existed like you'll spend fifteen minutes just trying to wash your hands to get out of there because it's like oh wow this is it this is like a hand shift instead of like a you know a towel this is amazing at the end of this you're gonna be an expert on butters scotch candy like you're gonna go all i'd like those little like red green and yellow candies that like what the fuck what are these things is like fruit punch candies so i love this brand this is amazing by the way does tele one eight hundred flowers thing why doesn't somebody create like one eight hundred flowers a tele flowers as just a ghost kitchen on door dash and on uber eats like why is this does that exist like what why can't i just order flowers i've seen a flower thing when i go on there but i think it's like door own i think you could create like either edible and rains flower thing and just partner with local flo to fulfill the demand and it's like it's like way better than food but i know whenever there's like a birthday or something like that that's my go to thing now it's just like i i'm gonna a door dash them something right because like i never played the door some what's like a good enough like i'll do like like the last one i did was like you know like a a a bunch of bob tea like this person like really likes bob tees so i sent them a bunch of bob or i'll send them like you know pizza and wings i'll send them a ci and whatever or i'll send them you know a bunch of ice cream or chocolate or whatever because it's like i can procrastinate until thirty minutes before like their birthday you know is over and i could push this button and still be a great friend so let me do that you know that's a great friend machine noah k for my birthday gifted me like two hundred bucks worth of sixteen ounce bottles of top chico from costco and i like that was it was like a it was easy it was like a month and a half supply of top chico and it's like all i drink for two and a half months or something think it was awesome yeah on your birthday i tried to see like is there such a thing as gas station gift cards but they was i was really tough to find anything that would worked yeah so funny i was like can i open a tab in my friend's name at you're got your destination he want deliver time to time you guys so dip and like yeah because some nacho cheese what are just the nacho cheese foods yeah it brings his own cup can he just get walk out with the hot cheese that's awesome that's is disgusting that's that's the episode that's was dude you you really did carry that episode that was amazing this is this is this entire episode is gonna be called the sam special and it's just sam bringing hit after hit after hit you wanna know those quad to work you wanna know what i'm most proud about guess how i'm long that took me to prepare i think you would be proud if you spent a long time like forty five minutes it's all that with the other way it's one pm now we started recording at noon i block off on my schedule from eleven to noon is my research time i did all of this in that one hour time and i even took a bathroom break and i definitely did some pull ups so yeah did you like take the limitless pill how did you do all that forty five minutes i just got a good brain i don't know i just yeah i just my brain's is good i just was on fire of today i drink a bunch of coffee nice but that's right we're out of here