How Roger Federer Became A Billionaire, Betting On Yourself, And The Figma Seed-Stage Pitch

saw that roger federer was one of he's he's part of the the billy athlete club so there fed is five athletes who have made a billion dollars tiger woods floyd may weather lebron james ronaldo and i think michael jordan may be messy so that might be six i think it's five and now federer is in that club the whole adam levine things ridiculous it's just like is that in like the santa's fake section of the newspaper as well it's just like the most like people are like acting like it's like a big deal it's like dude what do you expect what look at the guy of course he cheat i don't even know the story why did he cheat i don't know because that's why like what what's the controversy like did he do something really crazy i i only read the headlines i think he just texted like texted or instagram like his yoga trainer and said i roll around naked with you all day and then he texted this other lady that says like you know like he like said hey like i wanna go out with you like i why are you so hot or something like that and then later on weeks later he texts and says hey my wife's is pregnant and we're gonna name the baby your name is that cool with you which is super freaking weird but i don't know if you did anything wrong like legally but he's just you know just doing what like guys with like body tat who live in la do you know you just cheat like you can he's got the face of a cheater right i mean that's obvious that's the bottom of your tattoo sleeve it's just a place to put your number and like that i wouldn't have got this sleeve as a married man if i wasn't trying to you know play the game dude speaking of bros i think i've just invented something i've been doing this for the past few weeks i call it like fitness dip so you know how like you know people dip like tobacco they put like a a stuff in their lip lately yeah you know like chewing tobacco you put it in your lip heard of it but you're the only guy know who does it yeah just like a fat lip lately what i've been doing is just put in have you seen pb fit it's like powdered peanut butter yeah that's that's great love it dude i just get a like a tablespoon of it and i just stick it on the roof of my mouth and i'll just suck on it for like an hour and i just it's it's my fitness dip and it just keeps me like from like pacifier for you yeah it keep it's like chewing gum almost like you know you can't eat anything because you got that in the roof of your mouth and you're just sucking on it real slowly that's my new fit in his dip alright so how do you get an idea like this like i'm not saying it's a i'm not saying it's probably it doesn't taste good or might be therapeutic and what why are you like you what something need to i need something on the top of my mouth what can i be what can i what can i do pb fit powder alright i'm gonna like i've never even wanted to put anything at the top of my mouth nor have i just taken foods and be like what if i stuck this here for an hour would that be better than just eating it because i go to the store and i just like look at all the products i looking at new stuff and it says to add water and i'm like what if i don't what if i just eat this as plain powder and i do without a cause over here i don't know i just tried it i it was interesting to me it it had water don't tell me what to do it works it's works so you should try it i definitely will not alright so what do we got today you do what i use i've got a topics i've got a ton of stuff let me we can start off with something well one thing that's like i don't know if this is actually interesting and not you tell me but basically i'm reading this book called more money than god and it's about the history of hedge funds the know only thing about hedge funds not not a lot tell me yeah well you know i'm only in the first half of the books so i can't tell you much about how they operate now but because you know we're still in like the nineteen eighties but basically the guy who invented it was called a hedge fund and his name was alfred jones alfred wins jones a w jones is what they call them and it's kind of interesting he was a journalist for fortune you know he was just a writer it's crazy that fortune even existed back to then this was like the thirties and forties and for some reason for some reason hedge fund is so funny to me that's what it that's what i was called i know it's i know it's real but for some reason it just seems like something we would just say wrong trying to be smart about yeah i'm looking at investing in some hedge once yeah and we would be like is he putting a d in there like you know go out there half fun and breaking an egg you know just it just video deal so it's called it was called a hedge a fun and he was researching for an article stock picker and he found this like small group of people that were doing like some slightly different stuff with hedge funds or with stock picking and at the time like basically rich people viewed wall street and a lot of like equity investing as just a way to preserve wealth not really grow wealth and this guy a jones he was his forties journalism who goes oh with these you know small group people that i'm researching this like mathematical formula stuff that they're doing it's actually really really interesting and so he raises i think a hundred thousand dollars at the time and what he does is basically the kinda dumb way of explaining it is is which is the only way i understand it is that he just like does a combination of longing going long on things with borrowing leverage meaning if he invest eighty thousand dollars he would borrow another fifty thousand dollars now he's a hundred and thirty thousand dollars into a stock then with the rest of his hundred thousand dollars he would buy shorts in such a combination where his upside was much higher and his downside was a little bit protected and there was like some map behind it and at the time this was revolutionary but here's where things actually really cool that itself wasn't the revolutionary part i mean that was one part of it but was the main thing the really cool thing that he did which wasn't done ever before is he hired these young stock picker instead of just giving them a salary he goes alright you work for me i've raised a million dollars you get fifty thousand you get fifty thousand you get fifty thousand you get fifty thousand you can go and hire two people to work with you you're your own group you're your own group you're your own group and get after it let's see what you can do the person who does least best or the person does worst you guys are out and he created this like cut through culture of these people who were just getting after it and he was the first person that made it so you they were only paid a percentage so twenty percent of future upside and at the time he did it because they that was that just means your your tax more it was more beneficial for you wasn't income taxes it was a capital gains tax and your tax benefits were like way greater but he told his folks he goes yes the reason we're doing this is and c captains used to keep a fifth of the profits of successful voyages and that's like how we like he didn't say hey it's just so we can for this tax but like you like justified this weird reason but anyway this team structure that's what like changed everything prior to that wall street which just like the s sleepy place of like look we're just doing eighty percent stocks twenty percent bonds and we just let it sit there but then once he changed that incentive structure everything changed and that kinda got me interested that that's kinda like been sitting with me because at the hustle we used to do this too we're for our quotas for our salespeople we would say you know go out and get ad sales and you get a percentage of what you close but then they would close like dumb shit they would close like for example they're like who cares if it's a porn company if it's a weed company if it's a shitty service like it doesn't matter and then we're like actually that's a good point we need like inverse incentives like you know do the readers like this is a click do rate high do they renew and i couldn't figure out how to do that successfully i couldn't figure out because both all i thought i thought for sure the story was ending with so then i created a better system and it worked beautifully you're like i i couldn't figure that shit out that's too god it's fucking don't like i thought so i would've bet anything that you were about to say so then we did this and pat on the back i did a great job because i'm so used to people doing that like you know in tech nobody says you know we kinda hit this problem and we didn't solve it just didn't solve it you know that nobody ever tells a story like that i love that you just told the story like that that's amazing well i i so with my new business i am trying to think i'm like how do i solve this you know like can i pay like fifty percent of the but there's like but i started researching different ways to solve this and i don't know have you i'll tell you a few other examples but have you had with like the milk road or with anything that you've done have you had where you're like if i just change the incentives this other thing changed it so it's like the product isn't the revolutionary or interesting thing it's like how you operate that's what's interesting yeah i don't think i have a great story personally off top my head like we just did one where we needed to fill all the ads for like october or something like that or like what whatever some future month and we were a little light and it was like how do we get this up and and ben was just like you know if we just told her our like you know salesperson will give them an extra ten k if they can get this to if they can get us you know to to this fill rate i think they'll do it and and i was like yeah but like that's the same thing as their quota like they if they just filled it they would get that percentage he's like no i think if we just say i'll give you ten thousand dollars on top of your quota if you could do this and i was like okay i guess that makes sense and instantly they're like way over filled it so and i was like okay i don't think you could do that all the time because like you know this got them you know to get off their ass and do something but yeah i thought that i was so what's funny is you're right that does work and you can do it all the time i was researching like incentives and one of the there's a handful of ways to make basically i think charlie mu or some one of the like rich benchmark guys said like you show me the incentives i'm gonna show you future results or something like that and show me your incentives and i'll show you your outcomes and there are a few successful ways like incentivize people and so one of those ways i was reading this mackenzie study what they said you actually should give bonuses based on a hundred and five percent performance not just ninety percent performance and research shows that if you over attained to in order to get a bonus people tend to do that versus the other way around another thing is you do claw backs so you get fifty percent of a bonus upfront and if you don't achieve the goal that you said you're going to get done then i'm gonna do what's called the claw and i'm gonna take that money from you so you could do this with kids where you say hey look your allowance is a hundred dollars a week or a hundred dollars a month i'm actually gonna give you fifty now and the other fifty when you do your chores but if you don't do your chores you're giving me that fifty back and that loss aversion is actually performs better than if i just say i'm gonna give you a hundred dollars at the end of the month if you do y z that's that's a hundred percent right yeah the i think loss version is what they what they call it but basically it feels it feels worse to lose money you have than to not gain the same amount of money yeah it should be the same thing but it's it's definitely not same thing and i had this when we did i did a deal once where we got a million dollar signing bonus but it was contingent that if we look if we left before a year then we wouldn't get the million dollars and i i would personally i wouldn't get the million dollars if if i left before a year and and i think if you had just told me hey do you wanna stay for a year to get this million dollars would be like well you know that sounds good but there's other opportunities maybe i could do it this other way but once they just put the money in my account they're like that's there now go look at that okay cool if you leave early you have to pay all that back i was oh man i pay back a million dollars and it just felt if my brain knew exactly what was going on i was like i just don't wanna pay back a million dollars that sounds like that that would be horrible i'm i'm definitely not doing that i'm not losing a million whereas if they had just said hey if you if you stay a little longer you can get this extra bit i would have been like maybe i can go get that some other way and and that's like kind of a crazy like psycho like you know psychological trick i knew what was going on and it still felt real to me well and another interesting example then we could move on but other interesting example that i was thinking about was for you know what's it's like a really fucked up industries private prisons because you're incentivized by like how many beds you fill you know yep and that's like you know doesn't align with what we want as a society and i'm like well what it should be is you're paid a little bit of money for how many beds you fill but then if the inmate you know has a receipt if if they go back to prison inside the next four years outside of being released you gotta give me that money back and if they stay out i'll give you the second half of your payment and i was just like i was thinking of all these different ways that because was thinking about my business i'm like how can i change my incentives around in order to get a different outcome and that was like a really good example but it seemed the problem with incentives is that a it's like to change them you have to be kinda bold and like kind of be the first to like really try something new and b oftentimes it's not always straightforward like did you achieve this or like tracking the results is actually like a huge task in itself which is what we had at the hustle i'm i could do this but like i gotta build all this stuff to like track all this but anyway i i yeah because it's a they call second holder effects basically usually the first thing you're trying to incentivize device does happen it's the second thing that goes wrong basically it's yeah you got your ads filled but they filled it with certain types of content which led to readers being upset which led to churn or whatever like you have to predict what would be the the second order effect that comes from some of this stuff there's a there's like a far street blog that and then i read about this one but the cobra thing yeah like the cobra thing yeah go ahead talk sort of like incentives gone wrong i don't remember the story at some point and basically it was like in india right now like there's you know the stereotype of like a guy playing like a horn i don't know what it's called and like the cobra coming up and like dancing and it was like well why there's so many cobra in india and apparently i don't remember what year it was but there there was a little bit of a cobra problem and they go hey everyone we're gonna give you fifty dollars for every dead cobra you bring it bring to us thinking great we're gonna have no more cobra but in reality the scheme is are like oh let's breed cobra and kill them and bring them to you so like oh nice this is free money this is awesome and that there was now an over overpopulation problem of cobra i i actually have no idea if that's a true story but that's that's like one of the urban legends yeah that's one of those malcolm glad stories that just like becomes like known by everybody whether it's really not have you heard the one of him talking about david goliath yeah that one's great basically the i'll summarize it in ten seconds which is basically like everyone's talking about david goliath is underdog versus the big shot they're like oh no it turns out goliath was like eight feet tall because he had a pit gland problem which means that he was like had low iq meaning he like was like you know like an idiot and he was like big which means if you have that pit pit clan or that issue you can't see and at the time the david's of the world were like she and they had these sling which is basically like they had a rifle so basically this like led bead that this guy had it was already deadly and he hit like a big guy who was stupid and blind so it's really not that like impressive yeah it was a bully yeah alright so let me give you let me give you an idea okay so i need a name for this don't have a name a working title here but i think that isn't it crazy that basically us so we're we both invest in startups now and and i had this real one of one of the startups that i invested in is just doing absolutely amazing and i'm like wow that thing is gonna make like our little investment we put seventy five k in i was like i think it's currently probably at like four or five million dollars that's gonna value that seventy five k check and we're not like like the it can still run like that thing can still double twice if you're not doing anything i'm not doing anything and i was like it also so that's kind of a just amazing and i'm like i'm excited like the fund is gonna have like like the first really really big winner because we're only two we're we're two years in and so it's hard to know what's your what are gonna be your big winners but i that one's gonna be one of the really big winners now it's it's it's looking like very very promising but the second part is i would have never guessed that that would be the one what can you say what it is no i don't wanna say which one it is yet because i don't know if they want me to say or whatever but basically i looked back at literally that that the batch of that quarter i did ten deals and of those ten i would have said like oh this is probably like you know somewhere in the middle i would not have guessed it's like the one that's the big winner and i thought wow that's crazy and i was like you know it's pretty unfair that employees at tech companies don't have this sort of portfolio approach and it got me thinking when you talked about or the founder sarah's list or the founders you talked about sarah's list and how you know the if you could pick one of these companies that's gonna four or five x over your four year period there you know you can become a you know a self my millionaire without taking huge entrepreneurial risks but you gotta pick right and so they got me thinking like why do you have to pick right and so i got two startup related community ideas for you the first is by the way the way that you're setting this up it's like you know doesn't it suck that would you eat four thousand calories a day you get fat why does it have to be that way it doesn't like what if ice cream it just had a bad wrap yeah and what if i told you you like exhale while eating it has no effect at all yeah it's like duh yeah okay and the alright so my idea is basically this you take a job at a tech company you get your portfolio of stock options or sorry you get your stock options you can then click a button and you can what you can pull it if you could pull it with other companies that are like like equally risk weighted so we basically create like a like a like a credit rating agency where we kinda rate stock options or we're like alright cool like you're getting at it at this price at this valuation good we know that that's that's set and secondly like there's a community like desi ability to these options like maybe everybody in the community really wants stripe options because they're like wow stripe is great but i'm not working at stripe right now i'm working at the smaller startup that i think has high upside but like i consider stripe options to be aaa stock options so you kinda get valuation and then a trust of the valuation but you basically put your you put your stock in and you end up with let's call it forty percent your stock and sixty percent becomes a blend of other stocks that you get to either pick or index into out of the start community and so as a as an engineer or as a designer or whoever you are you're getting to be a part of you get der risked a little bit out of just your one thing because maybe you got a crazy ceo you got adam neumann you thought we work was a good idea now three years later your stock options are worthless they're underwater and like you know that okay cool that's just how the game works but does it have to be that way as my question and so sam i've have two questions for you how good of an idea on this on a scale of one two incredible and secondly we need a name for this idea we already not funny on the spot so the name thing i'm i'm gonna that's i've already got a spike share yeah it's already a swing a miss i mean i called the company the hustle like i everybody even good at nab not on the spot so so i mean this podcast guess is called my first million like we're not we're not exactly good at this i told sarah i wanna name my our kid buck and she she wouldn't feeling it dude that's somebody i had told my wife i been saying this since college i wanted to name my kid jumper and then even i was like as a horrible name but at some point i was committed because i had told like twelve people and i was doing this and those was like my twelve friends and it made no sense but i like how to stick with it what like what are you what are you saying this is not even close to what's gonna happen yeah i've suggested bi and buff and she's not into it i think these are like you know in batman comics where they like punch and then it's like pal it's like a bi fuck i like the sound like a whole cartoon punch i have a nothing like that first name chuck middle name stake is not gonna pass either there but but tb so i'm not good at naming anything but yeah i mean if you could pull this off dude one thing that i learned when i was running my company was i thought like oh it's a privately held business i do whatever i want with the shares like i can just you get a share you get a share i can give this to you i didn't realize that it's like it's not i guess it's i don't know if it would technically be considered regulated but there's like rules right like you can't for example if i give if i sell you a share for a dollar i can't then six months later and and i'm like summarizing this which means i'm probably a little bit off i can't then go and give like another employee that same share for fifty cents you know that's i i i guess i don't know if that'd be considered illegal or just against like certain rules that where you can get trouble but it's like you can't do whatever you want so yeah if you could but if you could figure out how to like operationally pull this off i think it's badass well there are like secondary markets where you actually sell them but i think this would have to be some you'd have to create some some you know financial contracts some some some derivative product that basically says i pledge or assign my shares to this portfolio basically and then in in exchange i received shares of the portfolio and there has to be some sort of like consequence for trying to like you know rene or whatever let's say your startup hits it huge you're like don't wanna do that so i don't know the you know i'm gonna wave my hands in the air right now what i'm doing right now is legal financial magic like alright it's done that's done now and now we just need to like you know start the company and have it take off yeah i mean it's the way that's how i actually run my businesses i'll go talk to the lawyer of the account i'm be like i don't know we don't have the we don't we don't know what the contract says like you know you got it you got this give them good vibes instead of like hey i already agreed to this deal you gotta figure out how that works like they're like what why don't you just talk to me first there's like this leadership principle that you're supposed to like give people autonomy and like let them figure out and empower them and i always just see i'd be like you're empowered dude i'm empowering you to figure this out you're welcome yeah not like autumn you have given you through your ass has gotten empowered by fred congratulations yeah you're welcome take me later studies show this makes you happier here yeah studies shout check yeah i mean if you could figure that out i think just a power i just bauer your ass yeah you shit move on my part you like that like on that harvard so sorry speak speaking of like investing i was reading about the fig thing so fig is like the design thing that just sold for twenty billion so have you heard of o'reilly media yeah they they published like books in the conference right like yeah basically what's the guy's name who started i had dinner with him one time what's his first name tim o'reilly tim o'reilly so he's like they call like he had this title like the oracle silicon valley because he's been in the game since like the seventies and eighties and originally started writing books on programming and his mission statement for his company was actually really cool it was like work on interesting stuff with interesting people he's like we'll try books for a little while and then he's like oh well just let's just stick with books that's fine but like he didn't actually necessarily care about books he just wanted to like fund his ability to work in cool stuff so he anyway their famous are writing these books now they make like two hundred or three hundred million dollars a year with a combination of books conferences and like you can pay like fifty bucks a month and like get access to like a bunch of their like technical content so it's content for engineers and shit like that anyway they started a little fun using the profits of their business and the profits of their business were was big but their fund wasn't necessarily big compared to like a a full time you know proper fund fund and i was looking at some of the stuff that they did and they were in fig seed round and i was doing some math and this doesn't account for dilution and if they sold early so these numbers actually could potentially be off by a by a lot but assuming that isn't the case if they if i don't know what fig fig seed round was but i think they raised three million dollars so if you assume that it was around a fifteen million dollar cap it's sold for twenty billion that means it went up by around thirteen hundred times so a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar check is something like three hundred million dollars and it's crazy that this is one of those examples where the main thing didn't even make the main money you know what i mean like the or sorry the main they the not main thing made more than the main thing our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous me think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better dude there i mean there's so many examples of that that actually leads me to another topic i had but like the remember that when we did camp m m we stayed in a house and i don't know if you saw it but did you see on the stair way up to the guest bedroom those plaques on the wall did you walk to that staircase like the back staircase by the chance yeah i thought there were just like kids trophies like basketball i even look at them no they were adult trophies basically what those were so the guy whose house stake he's a venture capitalist oh and he's a capitalist who lives in north carolina and the on that stair up i was walking up there and i was like wait beyond meat and it's basically what he was framing was a share certificate it's like this guy you know whatever his name was owns you know forty five thousand shares priced at point zero one you know dollar like basically one cent a share and then it's like beyond me going public at eleven dollars a share and i was like wait i was just like literally we took out the calculator app you know it doesn't go up to a billion or whatever i was like unless you tired this is you gotta to turn this phone oh really if you turn the phone yeah that's a fun little fad wow game changer i've been just like same i'm like what do you got i mean yeah exactly that's my that's my goal not to be a billionaire to get an e in my network app the the the the but the guy basically had like twenty of these on his wall and they were just like yep issued shares at twenty two cents a share now go public at twenty two dollars a share i'm like wow that's like you know these are crazy run ups and it's like okay you know ten thousand shares twenty thousand shares one five thousand shares fifty thousand shares and you just do the math matthew like this is staggering amount of money that's being generated by this it is really mind boggling when you get these investments right and it is also really funny how some of the really successful people made their wealth not out of the main thing that they did but in a way out of the main thing that the tim ferris is another example somebody was asking me the other day they go how much do you think tim ferris makes a year and i said i'm you i don't know i don't probably keep maximizes like no what he can do like he doesn't sell out you fully probably five to ten million bucks yeah i said i that's exactly i said five dollars five to eight million dollars a year probably of just like cash flow at this point from you know sponsorships newsletter whatever but book royalty something like that was maybe five million dollars a year i said they're like okay that's that's really good but you know i guess that's not that big i go yeah but like he also because he was tim ferris got to invest in shopify and uber and like probably made hundreds of millions of dollars off of uber in invested over a hundred million dollars my guess i would bet that he's net worth is north of one fifty maybe north of two hundred liquid yeah which is i mean and insane and obviously like what that means is that ninety plus percent of it probably has come from not his what if you describe yourself you might say i'm an author i'm a self experiment i'm a podcast but then all the money came from like you know four angel investments or whatever and and i think that's really really that's like really really impressive but also more common than you do you know other people who had otherwise i have a example that i wanna go into anyway yeah just like a few famous people just like you see like like nas the rapper like on all these cap tables like yeah you you know the guy who started fig in one of the articles it said that he had made ten million dollars because he owned the most expensive crypto of one of those like big ones and he bought it for nothing and he sold it and he had ten million before he even sold fig but what are the other ones well i wanted to do i was thinking about okay who do i do as billy of the week and so my billy of the week that i came up with was roger fred the tennis player million dollars isn't cool you know what's it's cool a billion dollars so the us open was on got me thinking about tennis and and i saw that roger federer was one of he's he's part of the the billy athlete club so there's fed is five athletes who have made a billion dollars tiger woods floyd may weather lebron james ronaldo and i think michael jordan may be messy so that might be six i think it's five and now federer is in that club give him like three hundred million dollar bump though because he married brooklyn decker no that's not even included it that's that's just bonus points so how does this work so he he has the same thing where okay he's had a great career right considered i think the goat in terms of tennis tennis player so he's he's the greatest tennis player of all time but less than basically mo ninety percent of his money came not from winning tennis tournaments so he he's made a hundred thirty ish million dollars from official prize money from tournaments hey he's got twenty grand slam wins but most of the money he makes is off the court so just for example like is he retired yeah so roger federer who just announced literally yesterday that he's retiring you know in his last year he paid i don't know three hundred thousand of prize money but ninety million from sponsorships off off the court off the court which is kind of insane but his story is kind of cool like and when i was studying these different athletes i'm actually gonna do a whole episode that's just a deep dive on each of these athletes the moves that they made that made this happen so one of federer big moves was that early on he was not getting paid shit even when he was the best player they you know they would pay like andy rod more because they're like oh andy rod he's american america is a bigger market federer swiss the swiss market you know that's the tiny population he's kind of this like clean cut sort of boring guy he doesn't have this big personality and even though he's really good he's not as marketable he's not as sell and this what they used to tell him so he was getting like very small like nike was paying erotic more than they're were paying roger federer even though by the way there was no rec number one that's the guy who married brooklyn decker oh yeah ironic that's right damn miss so so anyway so federer goes and he's like he's making so he's making like very little money from nike then he you know he carries on and he goes and he gets to a ten million dollar a year deal with nike and it's sort like well you made it you know you should be happy you got this ten million dollar year deal you know you're set your your family set whatever but he made two decisions with a really one decision led to two things that made him an extra six hundred million dollars and here's what those two were so the first is his contract with nike is coming up and the expectation is that he's going to just renew with nike he goes to nike he says hey this is now or then this back then he's like i'm of the you i'm one of the best tennis players in the world like you know what can he do for me and they're like raj we we we put so much marketing behind you you know the reality is you can't compare yourself to basketball players or to or to soccer players like you know tennis is just a different thing here's the best we can and they get him a deal and the deal was basically like every year that you're playing you get x amount of money and he's and you know something similar to what he was making right then but he started he decides you know what i'm gonna pause here i'm not just gonna take this deal i'm gonna go shop around a little bit more and see what i can do and then unique low comes at them with this crazy offer and so unique who's not even in the like sports apparel game really but they kind of had this like tennis vibe they're trying to come they're trying to come to the west and and so uniquely comes out of and they offer him a ten year deal worth three hundred million dollars that that pays him even when he retire so this twenty eighteen he's retired now think he's retired now let check that but he he is retired now right guys but basically he he signs this deal knowing that he will retire during this deal and he's gonna get paid thirty million dollars a year doing this he goes back to nike he tells nike hey guys i got this offer can you also give me an offer like this it doesn't even have to be as much and they're like no we'll we'll throw in this like you know here's the extra free t shirt but you know yeah no you're not getting a new deal give you a and he's like alright he leaves but there's one key thing that he kind of new here which is that nikola doesn't make shoes and so he signs the unique deal he starts wearing but he's still wearing nike shoes said they ask him at the press conference so like roger i noticed you're still wearing your nike he's like are you allowed to he's like i don't have a deal with them you know i'm shopping around let's see what's out there for me you know it's exciting i wanna see see what's out there and so for three years he keeps wearing nike essentially for free because he's just playing and then he doesn't have a shoe deal and then finally he gets he does a shoe deal with the brand called on running which i'm guessing you know about on the the running brand there's another company yeah they're they they they're kinda taking the world by storm and you know what's funny is they were one of our advertisers somebody first started and they started spending a little bit of money and their spend kept going up each year and i was like you guys are killing it aren't you and they are i think they make like over a billion in revenue an hour maybe they even sold did they sell no they went public so so they went public at peak it was like a eleven billion dollar valuation now with with market crush back closer to six billion but at either know at its peak so roger owned three percent of the brand in exchange for he did an equity deal so he said alright i get it you guys want the same cash these guys can offer how out a piece of the company and so he owns three percent of the company at its peak because if steak is worth three hundred million dollars down so that's sort of like bet on yourself and then do an equity deal don't don't trade dollars for time you know trade your brand for shares traded for equity and that becomes worth three hundred million dollars and then he says alright what else can i do so he then takes matters into his own hands he cuts ties with his current representation company he starts his own player management firm to represent him and other players danny starts creating his own tournament so he's got his own like you know cup that's basically like you know the equivalent of the ryder cup in golf where it's like europe versus america so he wants to do the same thing and so now he's got his own competition thing and so he's built this whole empire made over a billion dollars total most of it ninety percent of it off the court and i think this is kind of amazing and if you look at it there's a couple like like interesting things here so he he goes up market so he goes basically like how do i go premium so his sponsors are mercedes benz rolex lint chocolate he didn't do what jordan did which was coca cola and mcdonald's right because he's like alright where's my niche where's my market how do i get paid let me go to these like you know go to rolex basically the second thing that he did was he he he basically not only did he bet on himself not only take matters into his own hands he played up very patient game and so i think most people would have been the during those three years where they don't have a shoe deal they just be counting the dollars that they're missing out on i make five million or ten million dollars a year if i just sign this contract and this is a common trait this is a great lebron james story where lebron is eighteen years old he graduated from high school that same day you know the day the first day he's legally allowed to nike shows up a nike re i think re box shows up at his at his school or whatever they take him to a meeting he's like i remember to dude this is like the longest table i've ever sat at like the longest boardroom table he's sitting out one end i'm sitting at the other end and he's like he slides a check over to me and i look at it his more money than i've ever seen my life and lebron comes from like single mom right she had him at sixteen you know couldn't pay electricity bills type of thing like came from like he had dirt poor and they basically offered him a ten million dollar a year contract as a eighteen year old kid it hasn't played a single game the nba yet a looks at it into they're like you signed this now and you could become our signature athlete we will put this money behind you the biggest deal we've ever offered to a kick kid out of high school you know congratulations son and he doesn't have a he doesn't have an agent he doesn't have anything at this point and he basically just says you know appreciate the offer i i appreciate it thank you let me get back to you i get back to you this is ten million dollars a year what are you thinking and he's like and he's like he tells the story later like in my head i'm thinking man this is more money i've ever seen but if re rewatch offering me this much i wonder what nike would laugh you guys wonder what these other like he's like i must be worth something to these guys like i don't have to take this deal yet and just by being patient he ended up with a much larger deal out of that just for not like immediately g you know what trait that's called it's called there's this awesome book by this woman named angela duck worth called grit have you ever heard that book grit i've seen like silicon can valley people talk about it well it's like centered around this story it's like a study where they give a whole bunch of kids they sit them down a table and they go hey look you can have one marshmallow now or in a couple hours i'll give you two but i'm gonna set this here i'm gonna go out the room for a little on handle some stuff when i come back i'll see if you decided to eat it or leave it there and that will kinda tell me what decision you made sound good and they leave and you know they to see who does what and they measure these kids for like thirty and fifty years like for years and years and what they found is there's a correlation between traditional financial success you know like our traditional word of success there was a correlation between how successful they were and the children that chose to not eat that one and change for getting to in the future and the ones who put it off you know in eight two they were more successful and what you've explained to me is like the perfect like real world but rare example of grit where it's like no i'm willing to like not do this thing now in exchange for a better alternative in potentially in the future and that that's that's the gratification clarification yes delayed gratification and that's like the best way to describe that i'm a marshmallow reader dude like saying i i i would've have been that first you know i had in my mouth while they're explaining these instructions what there's another one coming well i always got like frustrated it when i talked about like you know i told you that this when they talking about warren buffett and jeff bezos i was talking about patients and having fun i'm like dog your way too old go have fun out like there is no there is no long there is no long term man you're long term jeff bezos now he's like you know he's rushing you know you know sick gap over there he was turning to a f voice he's like he's like he wants to be single do raw you know drink beers on a boat it's like alright that's cool but like not as cool when you're how old a shit base that's school your fifty seven as it was when you were oh no man it looks like it works i see it looks like it it it looks like it's working for them let me tell you about it this thing i read right before we started so basically today i think today they're gonna announce the feds what they're rate raise is gonna be yeah we're gonna we're gonna learn how much money we've lost today yes and i don't know anything about that type of stuff so i'm gonna pretend i do but i i read this interesting article and it was about jp morgan you know jpmorgan is like you know amazing bank that's supposed to know what they're talking about and i was reading about what their predictions were and they had this like day of scenario where they're like here's like the three options or here's the three possible outcomes and you know they raised the rate by this much this much in this much and here's our prediction on what's gonna happen and they weren't like being funny they weren't obviously they weren't being funny they weren't trying to be like silly or anything but i'm gonna tell you the the the range of the three options so option one well i'll just say like so what's gonna happen is if they raise it by point seven five we are potentially gonna have a five percent drop sorry if it's a full percent for full percentage point raise we're gonna have a five percent drop in the market or if it's a point seven five percent raise we're gonna have one of the best days on record for the s and p five hundred so that's basically this like the the most like one of the most prestigious banks on earth with thousands of people studying of this they say it's either gonna be the best day ever or a five percent drop which is not quite the worst day ever but it's a really bad day and it just goes to prove that even the quote experts they don't know shit we're all just floating on this rock trying to figure it out but i saw this i was like are you kidding me is this a serious is this a serious prediction it's gonna be one of the best days ever or one of the worst days ever or something in between that's basically what the predictor predictions reminds me those people where you're like alright so you know what do you think of the chances that happened so like a fifty fifty man it can you see if they're gonna happen or it's not gonna happen like no like just because there's only two options it doesn't make it a fifty fifty like it's either going to be or it's not going to be on mid fifty be tomorrow the same analyst is gonna be like well know i saw that going one of two ways but i did not expect it going that other way and the funny thing is it's like they released like an eighty two page report and it just like i don't know man at the yeah i just trails off yeah what was the hell that just like m and am not much you that just what the whole report should be because that's basically what they just said like what's your opinion not much you i thought that was ridiculous that's that's so i was reading about all these hedge headphones and i'm like these guys are smart but turns out like when i was reading about these hedge funds these guys are smart but they're like kinda lucky like they like just make a bunch of guys are hedge funds yeah did this guy this is i hedge opinion by the way this is the most opinion and i've ever seen in my life the it's like one time i was playing ro and i was so down on my luck at the but by the time get to the ro table that means i have like i got bored of poker then i lost money in five minutes playing blackjack and then i had like absolute roller coaster at the crap table and now ro is my like come down like my gambling addicts out there will know what i'm talking about and then at some point i'm like just betting wrong every time like what are the odds of me being wrong on red or black twelve times in a row and then i'm just betting both red and black just to feel a little bit of a win and it's like you know just hoping a green doesn't show up but basically like there's a a tweet that i saw that goes yeah i never realized my whole net worth was dependent on an interest rate like yeah so you're was like till this year did you know what the fo coming did you did you know that like your entire net worth was dependent on point seven five or one percent interest rate or hikes like proof where the fuck this come up and why did it turn out that they can i remember i could just rag all my my net worth i remember people talking about the fed and i was like i don't know what the fed it's like it's like what when people say jump with the fbi to be honest yeah that's funny it's a lot of like breathing bad and jerk goes don't know idea like you know like people say like well you don't sign to say or know they say this i that's why i thought the fed was it was just they you know there's he him heard now there's day you know i thought it was it's the pro the official pronoun the pronouns or are they and fed yeah dude i saw on twitter and he put for his he put we dash damn dash boys james that's it's the best one it's the best one it's like a jack jack jack r brains ring them boys that that was this fucking good yeah that one's always make me laugh alright i have something interesting so in i found this video on on youtube if you google on youtube like fig seed pitch so i watched that this morning dude awesome let's talk about it because basically the story is i believe it was in this video was filmed i think in two thousand thirteen so the video the video was posted in two thousand twenty but the way looking at it he looks pretty young maybe not thousand in thirteen young but he looks young but regardless he's going through his pitch and basically so fig recap sold this week on monday or friday or something like that for twenty billion dollars one of the biggest exits ever for venture backed startup up and the guy who ran it started the business when he was nineteen and there's this video on youtube of him pitching this guy named daniel gross who was actually on our pod early on who had a fun and i had a few takeaways from this pitch and so it's like a twenty or eighteen minute or ten minute video of him pitching my five takeaways were a he's a kid he even if it even the video was like new he looks like he looks like he's eighteen but and he looks so young and he talks kinda young but he's really wise like you could you you hear him i'm speaking you're like it's very impressive hearing him talk the second is that the pitch was basically videos of the product it was a prototype like a demo of the prototype not as much of a deck and oftentimes throughout the pitch it was pretty fun and he like used the product to photoshop the guy he was pitching daniel he photoshopped his face and maybe it he made him look like another person and daniel the guy being picture was like oh my god this is hilarious this is awesome and dylan the guy pitching was just like having fun and showing him the product and that was so much better than just showing a deck and the last two things were tech skills so the guy is like clearly technical and we often talk about how like it you don't need this stuff and technically you don't need it oh god it helps this guy clearly like they built something that like was actually working and that is such an advantage i do think you need to learn that and the last thing is that it's an mvp it does not look good at all it's pretty ugly and it's and and it's mildly effective but it's effective enough that you can see the future yeah exactly i watched this thing so you can find it if you go to youtube it says it's his name dylan field pitches seed stage fig to daniel gross that's the name of the the youtube video it's got what thirty thousand views yeah i think but i been two probably all of it's in the last two days yeah yeah yeah so he's pitching and my observation observations was very much like yours first of all it doesn't doesn't feel like a pitch because most pitches are like pay here's our company we're going after this really big market did you know we have a tam of you know three trillion dollars a year or spell spent spent on health care and they're like oh wow okay three trillion dollars that's cool what are you doing and they're like you know know wait we like we sell weed yeah like we help your we help you do squats with using your phone camera like with better form it's like i don't think that's the three trillion dollars of health care spend but okay yeah like i'm not sure what what and they always have like a a stupid quadrant thing with them on the top right right everybody else you know the the the the y axis is if you're you know stupid or smart and then this one is if you're hardworking or or lazy like i don't know else is just lazy and dumb and we're hardworking and smart like twenty billion dollar company are you sure you're better than them i think yeah yeah they're like you know poor product it's like i don't know about that yeah you're a poor product makes me mad you're fly you we're irritated and what they should do is put themselves in the bottom left it'd be like what one day this could we we like we're gonna be more years six weeks ago when we met and then now we've moved up and like just imagine the trajectory you like that's actually the reality that that's actually what's happening we've already moved an inch on this screen imagine if few us five years it's not to scale but so so he's doing this pitch it's basically literally the first slide it's a picture of him on a boat like here's me what the boat and i used to work at flip board twice goes i worked at flip board twice and then and he goes yeah this is my c founder he was my friend at school we dropped out okay he goes that he shows this video this talk he goes i was really inspired by this talk by brett victor inventing on principal by the way this same talk i think is the one that the web flow guy said was like his inspiration for building web flow was the same grain ass video of this guy explaining you know like how to build like a like a real product well i think i think the takeaway from the talk is or or or he said something to talk about how it's morally right to help people to create or something like that where he's like your goal as a business builder is just help people create or something like that that and so the web workflow guy like the the demo he's doing and this is like the difference between like imagine you have to you have to choose a bunch of options from a menu or write a bunch of code and then push run and see how it happens versus just you see the thing and you could just edit it live like a drag and drive like it into what you see is what you get editor and how much more creative you can be when you're doing it the what you see is what you get version because you're just shuffling things around in real time i think everybody's kind of experienced this in general so anyways he he's gives us talk he gives a bunch of demos and all the demos are like kind of like oh look i you know i made this like airplane and look at blends with the background and then like did this thing like i i've merged these two people's faces together it's like you don't look at this and you don't think twenty billion dollar company someday like it's not like you'd have to have a lot of foresight really what you see when you see this is like the only two indicators that this would be successful is this guy seems really smart and really like he's a creative builder so like i'd bet on him and to be successful in life for sure and then the second thing was and this is i think the underrated part of what people talking about for fig which is that there was a technology change there was an inflection in technology which was web gl had come out and i remember when web gl first came out i don't bunch these companies i mean i but i'm not taking a lot of taking explain but basically what it made what it did was it let you do cool graphics stuff in the browser got it that you weren't gonna be able to do unless you otherwise normally like normally a browser was weak and if you wanted like play a game with cool graphics you needed like download the game you need to have the application of the game to run on your computer's hardware because doing it in the browser was gonna be too lag too slow to whatever and web gl was just like web framework that let people build things that were like they were like cool graphic stuff three d stuff like you know real time stuff in the browser so that's why when fig mode you would see people if i'm working on the document with you i'd see your mouse moving around in real time and that was like a magic trick you had never seen that before and at the time i remember with like we were building stuff and when web gl came out all all of our developers really intrigued by there was like cool stuff you could do in web gl that you weren't other like wasn't possible before and then the the question was now what's the application and then he where he landed was like i think we can recreate the whole creative adobe creative suite in the browser and here's how we're gonna do it and like that actually made a lot of sense he didn't actually pitch it that well he like mentioned those things during the thing but like you'd have to like ignore eighty percent of what he said and just be like oh that's just fun experimentation this guy smart web gl is a game changing technology and this idea of recreating the adobe suite in a browser making it free for everybody that's a great idea and so like you had to sort of see the the the great pitch through the forest here dude so the remember how i told you about this guy named brett ad hoc who's like this billionaire guy who created a a bunch of different companies including basically a flying car business remember that i yeah so he tweeted out the other day like here's what i've learned about entrepreneurship and one of the five things that he said was pick really really big ideas because then you could attract more investors and it's easier to like get employees and all that and and all that type of thing it's like that make no small plans thing and that thing has always made me self conscious because like every plan i make is like pretty small like like you know the i i won't one marshmallow right now not too later you know what i mean i'm like yeah i only make small plans compared to like that plan and it's kinda cool that like this fig thing it doesn't seem that grand it was but it doesn't seem that way early on and that like makes me feel better about my deficiencies so thank you dylan you you know what i mean when people say like grand ideas and i'm like yeah but like running a new newsletter is kinda fun right you know what i'm saying like i don't i don't know how to make robots yeah but i did dream about that sometimes i'm like okay me too and an alternate life what am i doing right now and i'm like why am i not you know changing whatever you know building the the next big thing yeah the next pixar or making a flying you know car or whatever and it's like i could do it i could i know that i could do it and and i do think about doing it maybe i will end up doing it but but it is for some reason for me i sort of like i don't know there's how hard do i wanna work yeah question right like you know if i made my quadrant i'm putting myself in the lazy quadrant where i'm like i don't need to do the hardest thing to impress myself so i'm trying to figure out the things that i can do that impress myself that are also like not gonna ruin my life in my lifestyle dude paul but i wanna mean by that is just like i like being home with my kids i like that i don't have to like don't i i don't have like a a office of a hundred employees that are like we're hard charging and we're about to die at all time times it's like i kinda like that i don't do that so i just need to find a way to impress myself that fits in my framework and i think that what about to do that like who's doing his shit you know roger federer i was gonna ask you that like who's doing his stuff we we had mark laurie in the podcast and i talked to a bunch of people who worked with them him and they're like yeah he's really good at raising money and then he hires people and then he just kinda like they didn't it's exaggerating to say chills that's not true but like they're they kind of like said like well he wasn't doing the hard work he did a lot of the work early on but he kinda like got all the leverage by getting the money and having the idea and starting it and then like everyone else he did really good job of hiring them and letting do their thing but same way with roger federer he ain't the one running that running out a lot of that stuff i wonder how he partners with people yeah well the other one that i was looking at was floyd may weather and floyd may weather has kind of an amazing bet on himself story like this too like you you probably know it but i don't know if most people know boxer in general fighters make basically nothing and with like you know one or two exceptions and then boxer kinda make more boxer can make you know ten million twenty million in a fight and they could do that once or twice a year that's great that seemed like the top and what floyd may weather did was he was like who the hell making all this money because i see that crowd is full of people and the paper view number is huge but like where does the money go the reality was that the money would go to the promoter and would go to the cable companies it would go to all these other people and so he decided to bet on himself so he buys out his contract he spent he takes seven hundred fifty thousand dollars out of pocket and buys himself out of top rank which was the promoter that promoted oscar del la h and manny packing all these guys and he starts you know may weather promotions and now his business model is like basically it's it's vertical integration right like it's to use the business rule term he's like okay i'm not just gonna be the talent i'm also gonna be the production for the show which means that i also collect the live gate revenue which means that i also have to pay the other fighter like i have to i have to write the check i'm also gonna own a piece of the paper view i'm gonna make he's like i'm gonna make money on every hot dog sold in this venue i'm gonna make money on the merch i'm gonna make money everywhere and so because of that now when he does a fight like his man pac fight his conor mcgregor fights he's pulling in somewhere between two hundred fifty and four hundred million dollars that's crazy himself on those fight per fight so he you know more than ten x more like twenty x what he could make by betting on himself and building that brand and then then he created all the associated brands so then he's basically created he's like why am i these sponsors are paying me to wear their shit you know why don't i just create you know the money team clothing line and i'm gonna like own my own clothing line rather than promoting these other clothing lines lebron did the same thing he's like why am i promoting mcdonald's he bought equity and blaze pizza and he's like cool i'll just own a piece of this chain rather than just be a sponsored athlete and so there's there's basically a bunch of a bunch of people to do this model and then floyd you know he did a he did a couple of things one was he went nuts on the self branding so he changed his brand from pretty boy floyd to floyd money may weather and he knew that table gonna hate that he knew that people are gonna hate it and he started doing hate things like he would just post a photo of himself like at a dinner table but there's no food on the table it's just stacks of cash everywhere he's like this is how i eat or whatever or you know he would you know just go throw like a you know a w of cash at somebody and just like make fun of them because they're poor and like they would pick up the butt dollars this is they're like this is like ten grand and so like he would do things that would get attention he would do things at bill brand but in reality he would look like this party this party guy he owns strip clubs never smoke never drank you know like the guy trains at like three in the morning so you know he kinda built this brand like he's this kind of like badass ass or whatever but in reality he's like a he like extremely we well conditioned to athlete that was like extremely disciplined and never like ran those problems but he hired a hammond who a had run you know he he's like we have to do a whole episode on on this because a hammond is really intriguing a h if you google his face there's like four pictures of him on the internet and he's one of these guys i think he's like famous for like you never meet him in person but he does everything on the phone and he's always in the background of the most powerful boxer and fighters in the world and before that you know what he was doing no he was doing the same thing in the music industry so he represented janet jackson whitney to houston help build their brands and their let their whole business empires then he taught floyd how the music how musicians make their money and he's like oh i need to do that basically my fight is me on tour i need to own the tour and so i need to own the shows i need to make the money from the tickets not just be the fighter who goes on the stage and so a became his business guy on that side and then he has leonard l who does it on the on the may promotion side and like the joke of course of about floyd is that he can't read and it's like he's like i can't read but i i know numbers and like you know and so he's like you know he he know you he know he's found a way to make a ton of money he understood like the core fundamentals of a business and do you how to put put people in place so he generates lot of money now some people think he's going broke because he spends so much i think he might be like i totally believe that that's hard to say dude i i totally believe that this podcast we we are the internet do renaissance we started with adam levine cheating on his wife and then i think we went to like the history of head few option shares yeah and rs huge option shares then we talked about the fed at jp jpmorgan and then back to may weather and a hammond they can't get this anywhere else you you can't they're gonna get all this yeah yeah you know we we are the chinese buffet of five guys yeah they say that like true wealth is created by being like a narrow an inch it it in itch wide but like a mile deep not here we are we are a we are a a rain puddle we are just gonna cover everything just a little bit well you got your whole life off being four inches long so it all work out you idea yeah me how many at the end of the how'd get the comedy average in and lots of different if you're average at and just about everything you're kind of above average so out well alright that's that's the show i'm exhausted i gotta take a not napa after of that