Ideation Bootcamp, Bitcoin Thieves Steal Billions, Stonks.com, and More

they they find a bunch of burner cell phones they find like a bag of like fifty thousand dollars of cash they find a bunch of like the hardware wallets that had the bitcoins in them and then they found like folders on their computer that were like thick passport ideas and like like places to go places to run away like they found like folders that said that shit on their computers i don't even entirely understand what happened but i have a backstory about three people today's addition to the milk you won't get the full backstory in ten bullet points yeah you need to go earlier so but we but we did bullet point and what so here's what happened two thousand sixteen this crypto exchange called bit got hacked and at the time i think like a hundred twenty thousand bitcoin got stolen that was like seventy million dollars got stolen and it was like it was bad that was like a big hack the price of bitcoin that week dropped by forty percent so it was like a it calls like this huge you know like a a fear shock in the market but the thing about bitcoin is bitcoin is on a public ledger right like it's a it's a public blockchain so everybody could see the coins so everybody saw all the the coins are in this wallet and like and so all the other exchanges were like look this is bad for the industry we will try to prevent like if that wallet tries to cash this out we won't let them cash out the money so for many years that money kinda just sat in those wallets or was moving in like really small small transactions back and forth between a like a a web of wallets clearly somebody was trying to like lau the money essentially they were trying but but how did he how did they even get a numbers so there i don't i don't know what the exploit was that let them hack the accounts and they didn't hack all the accounts bit next they actually just hacked like some of the whale accounts so they were able to take a hundred twenty thousand bitcoin from not all the accounts and the funny thing is vi didn't have the money like make those users whole so what they did was they they reduced everybody on bit fedex balance by thirty three percent or something to like balance it out some like court like imagine if you're bank did that that would be like insane i be like oh they robbed that guy's vault you're taking my mind way to like even it out for everybody like no thank you oh so anyways it was bad and this reason why vi is not like you know the biggest exchange now so anyways that the money kinda sat there now fast forward five and a half years go by last week people start to notice bigger transactions coming from the the bit for hack wallets and so they're like there's these alerts on twitter like whale alert whale alerts like the coins are moving the coins are moving hundred thousand a million dollars of the coins are moving ten million not whatever and so and so the fed go are not the fed our department of justice goes kicks down a door in new york in into this this this husband and wife couple's house and they look like you know your complete like average joe clean cut like it would this is not like you know doesn't look like a grimy criminal mastermind operation and i'll explain a little bit more about that in a second the funny bit about that but basically they seize like their computers they they find a bunch of burner cell phones they find like a bag of like fifty thousand dollars of cash they find a bunch of like the hardware wallets that had the bitcoins in them and then they found like folders on their computer that were like fake passport ideas and like like put places to go places to run away like they found like folders that said that shit on their computers and and they seized three and a half billion dollars worth of bitcoin because the price of bitcoin has gone up so much so that seventy million has become three and a half billion dollars worth and so these guys were trying to launch they they don't think these are the hackers but they were trying to lau that money they may have been the hackers i don't know that's not proven but they were trying to launch the money and the the the doj had been like if you've seen that meme of charlie from it's always almost sunny where they had like the cork board and he's like trying to like find it find the the crime or solve the crime that's what they had been doing because they had they this web of all these wallets and finally they found that oh it's trying to cash out in this wallet owned by this guy il dutch l stein or whatever but how how did what what type of idiot would use it you need to get the money just a so the problem is like they were trying to get the money out through like walmart walmart gift cards they were buying like five hundred dollar walmart gift cards with bitcoin they were doing like playstation games they were like they were trying these small things because they could never move the bulk of the money so if you wanna move like in mass you gotta do something that had that lets you move size and usually those could you buy an n and then sell it no like you need to get the money out of the wallet that's the problem so so so the problem so in order to do that there's like an off ramp right how do you get it into you know us dollars for example if that's what you wanted to do you know he left it there for five and a half years and they were probably living off and spending in some ways but like you wanted to actually like get a lot of it out and get get it and removed the paper trail of the blockchain you need to get it as an off ramp but to get as an off ramp you have like a you know your idea like these exchanges they they require you to upload your license and like they have laws they have to comply with cold ky c know your customer and so eventually they found that somehow the doj they didn't explain exactly but they they identify that the money was moving towards a wall that was owned by a known person that's how they ended up finding these guys now the funny part is this off go ahead so that well so the i when i read about this i was like wait that name sounds so familiar both their name sound familiar so the guy it was his name is il i l y a i think it was like a very like weird name his last name is l sign so he spoke at the first hustle con i never talked to him read but he had a company called mix rank which was just a normal start went to yc and he spoke at hustle khan and then his girlfriend or wife she was a copywriter and i remember talking a little bit with her because she her name's is heather morgan i think and she had a a website all about writing sales emails totally is that right remember before the hack did it you like a linkedin that post on like five hacks for your your cover letter for your job interview like you know like that sort of thing and so yeah she was doing that she and so the and and the funny thing is like the reason the internet kinda went crazy with it was because here you had two very unlikely characters so we had a bunch of france text us or text me because i was writing this this edition of the no road and i was like anybody know this guy and you you knew them but some other people knew to they're like dude you would never get vibes of like this guy might just go longer billions of dollars i was like smart like like his guy like engineer type he like he like showed very little emotion no i did not think that this guy like yeah and and and her she's like this like super strange kanye west level weird you know like person she basically she had like a ultra ego that was called ras khan and ras khan was her rap name and then she has like these super fucking cringey rap songs on youtube like dude okay i have you know i have you know and i think it'd be cool to be a rapper but if i hear myself there's no way on publishing that because it sounds so bad wrestle khan they're such a better win come real far but don't know where i'm heading motherfucking crocodile wall street silver on my fingers and boots on my feet always be and so it's horrible it it's so bad that the top comment was paris hilton i'm gonna prove everyone that you could have that having money means you can rap good and then it said heather morgan hold my beer i didn't even know pierce someone has has like a rap on so yeah yeah there's just like she's like one of the strangest characters like i watched i i went deep dude for this i was writing this thing and i was like let me get some examples and then i couldn't look away because like the the train wreck dude like the videos comfortable and like she she like forced everybody to like they built like this golden mini taj mahal that she sat in and then her bride made lifted it up on her shoulder and brought her in but even the the audience at her wedding is like un comfortably clapping like off beat because they're like this is this normal this like and there's like clearly only fourteen people in the room and then she does a rap performance at the wedding that was like equally cringey she's just like hump the air weird to the guy il il goes by touching so dude this freaking guy i'm looking at these pictures that's hilarious this woman's really hard to look at she this cringe that should have been wrapping and prince city that would been like okay i get it you're gonna be the cri cool that's like ham henry cream the the the king of cringe yeah that's what she's shipping on like it is super strange but but yeah basically they recovered it and so now what's gonna and anyway there's a bunch of interesting little bits to it so the doj is gonna give the money back to bit looks like bit head when they they launched their own token at one point in time called the leo token that's like used in their if you trade in their exchange it'll give you discount using the leo token so they had to put it a thing when they lost leo was like hey if we ever recover anything from that hack we'll use eighty up to eighty percent of it to buy back and burn our leo which will cause like the pry you know leo holders to benefit from if we ever recover from this and so now they're gonna get like three and a half billion dollars to buy back so the price of leo like shot up like it our sixty percent in a twenty four hours because people are like oh wow that's gonna be a lot but they said we're not gonna just cause a bunch of sale pressure in the market we're gonna do a controlled sale over like a multi year period so that it's like scheduled and doesn't like affect the bitcoin market or whatever god this is such a good story this would make this is that's what everyone's was saying is like here comes you know incoming incoming netflix stock have you seen the this i saw i just watched this clip like every day for the past three days and it just absolutely cracks me up i was hoping ben can play it in the thing but i don't think it'll work i don't think the sound will come through so have you seen this clip of of this interview of bill gates back in the day jumping over a chair yeah have you seen this yeah wait like just a normal one of him jumping just so he's doing some interview with someone woman about microsoft and she goes she goes is it true that you can leap over a chair is that that impressive he goes it's not well first of all it is impressive for bill gates to be able to do that second of all just i don't know why this is being talked about and if he goes so she goes is it true that you could jump over her a charity goes it depends on the size of the chair so you know just like and then it cuts it's like a hard cut to a chair no things clearing it is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position it depends on the size of the chair i'll treat a little bit yeah that's a old clip but you've you've just now seen that i no i came back in my that because i was thinking somebody at something like oh yeah you know of the day or you know in the good old day so somebody said some phrase like that and in my head i go what are they even thinking about when they when they say that and i go i'm gonna have i was like what's the funniest back of the day thing and i that clip came to mind and so i decided anytime somebody says back in the day or or you know in the good old days i'm gonna think only of that moment where bill gates says it depends on the depends on how had the chair i always don't think a hong kong weekend the uncle rico clip in pulling dynamite my rig i to be able to throw pigs get over the mountains alright so listen i did something that i did not think i was ever going to do so last year in two thousand twenty one or no two thousand twenty whenever covid happened i launched just course that i i don't even know if i ever talked about it called the idea boot camp i did it with go i invested in this company just like you did in m you have already done two of them i think and you have a third coming up i decided to launch one i launch one the other day i only talked about it on twitter i've not talked about it on here yet but so if people wanna do it it's called the idea and boot camp and basically my research my research framework and how i research stuff it's but it's you go to m dot com so m how do you say may how do you like do you say m it aligns with like raven yeah there you go with with an m what but with a m at the m no no no that's right that's yeah and you could see my name is on the front page but what they don't have yet and this is what i told ga they so me and sean both invest in this company and as part of the investing in it he made us promise to do courses yeah which was actually a good kick in the ass because now i actually have to do it and it it has been fun but he needs like custom urls he doesn't have that yet oh yeah yeah it's like m even dot com slash blank slash whatever in order to to get to your but i just have that they made it for me they made a power writing power writing course dot com they're gonna make it for me but that goes there but they have to make it for you yeah but i'm i'm doing this thing it i think it's gonna be pretty bad ass i think continue doing it maybe once a year but maybe i won't ever it i don't know give an example so give a teaser of like okay so so this is about coming up with a great idea figuring out so coming up with ideas and then picking the ones that seem like better ideas and then worse ideas in a short amount of time is that the hook yeah i'll give one old example so basically when trends launched i wrote this article about plants and i'm like man i think someone could build like an online nursery or an online plant business and the reason why i came out with that ideas is i read the annual report for one eight hundred flowers and they said the of and one eight hundred followers is the big company does a billion or something in revenue so they've got a large perspective and they said that our fastest growing segment is millennials buying succulent online this is growing like crazy and then i looked on at their financials and it looked like the the majority of the profit came from people buying accessories so chocolate or fancy pots and i'm like well there's a fucking idea you make succulent and you make it like really cool pots that are artists and you like figure out what the contribution margin is and then what alex said about what did alex say yesterday and the podcast like opportunity of value or value of opportunity like like phrase it actually better than i phrase it historically but basically you could do a bunch of math it's really like simple arithmetic and you're like in order to get your repeat purchase rate the total adjustable market times your contribution margin and like that's how you can come up with a good idea in that space just off that one insight and so that's an example so just list that all like my frameworks and how i research and it started with reading the reading the annual report for one a hundred flowers which that sounds like the most you know got a unique starting point for finding not even just finding specific opportunities but just like training your brain to think about the world wider than the the way you currently think about it that's how i would phrase it because like i don't think you necessarily find the best ideas by being like okay i'm gonna go read you know the heart the h b business school in the harvard business schools annual report and in there i'm gonna find a business idea i think that's a little too hard no what what the way it works is you have this general thing so this general thing is basically what's this combination of things that i'm interested in things that i'm good at and things that can make money alright i know what that general i think is i'm gonna go to very particular places to find information that's gonna help guide this and what it's gonna do is gonna help me find a handful of problems that i've interested in solving and these problems for sure have demand for them i'll give you an example of this how this played out in my life so i i invest in this company the guy a guy actually came to our podcast our live podcast show in san francisco which was time your office very you know it was a very small crew maybe fifty people seventy five people something like that i don't know what it was but this very first live thing we ever did and this guy comes up afterwards and he's like hey that was great and i'm like what do you cool what's your store do you do and he's like oh i'm i currently run the perception team on the self driving cars division of uber he went i'm very charming very good luck i was sold to handsome some guy very very confident so he wasn't like hey can i just pitch you my idea really just want to tell like that that's always like sherman man i'm you talk while i think of a way to escape it's usually how that conversation goes and so this was different for this guy was you know he i was genuinely interested then he started saying things and then i was like oh so he's like yeah but i'm leave it a work on my own startup okay what what is it what is it uber artificial intelligence guy you know like guy works on the ai team at uber and so he was starting his own self driving car company and he's like you know here's what we're gonna do we're focusing on he's like you know it's funny i i i was you know i was looking at what we were doing at uber and he was like what stood that would jumped out to me and this is kinda like one of your idea asian things is like sometimes some a stat will come out and at twitch my the ceo emmett he used to call the that he used to say sometimes you look at data not for a specific answer but just to find something that makes you go or like that's weird it can't be right can it and and so he used to the ceo emmett he used to mention like you don't always go looking do a write a sql query just to get a specific answer sometimes you just browse until something jumps out at you as being like not what you not on trend and so anyways this guy had said seventy five percent of all uber rides are like you know one passenger going less there oh it was like sixty sixty something percent we're we're one passenger and sixty percent we're going less than three miles so it's like short trips of just one person inside of a dense city and he's like you know so it's kinda crazy right we have this like four person maybe six person six seater car that weighs thousands of tons with a with one driver driving one person one mile like that seems inefficient and so he was trying to create a a a new vehicle that was like a one person vehicle one or two person vehicle that was electric and self driving and optimized for very short trips and i was oh that's really cool anyways i invest fifty thousand bucks he fast forward like a year and you know he's like grinding away in this garage in san mateo trying to get a car to drive itself and i would go down to the that he was working it literally out of a storage unit so i would go to the storage container like kind of a what's it called like like what public storage public storage yeah and then he'd roll up the garage on like unit three three or whatever and then he'd put me in it he'd be like alright let's see if it works and every driving a circle around the storage facility storage like a parking lot and i was like whoa that was bizarre to stay there and just like it work driving me yeah so it was working but it you know like that's a closed environment it's pretty easy to get that to work but he was working on okay now let's take it out a mile okay now let's go get a sandwich from the shop and like that's what he was doing for like a year so anyways he at the time the idea the initial idea was like to be kinda like an uber competitor right like somebody will just push a button this ride will show up a roll up to them with no driver inside they hop in they actually drive themselves to the location then they they just walk out and the thing will drive to the next passenger by itself i was like oh that's really cool idea and we were trying to figure it out and i felt like we were hitting a wall and this is where something like your course will help because if you're oh if you're if all your ideas are boxed into your own life experiences and you're like a you know twenty seven year old engineer has worked at you know tech companies like your life experiences are pretty narrow and only once we got out of that and sort of like figuring out these little like you know like these these these these unique spots like when you when you read an annual you go so i was reading an annual report are we talked to just took a random meeting we took a random meeting with some transportation lawyer and he mentioned that he does work for this company and i looked up that company and it's basically like this i don't know like thirty billion dollar company that i've never heard of and what did it do they partner with like fifteen cities and they go to the city and they say hey you need buses and scooters and fairies and trains and all that stuff yeah you just commission us we'll we'll bid for your for the right to run transportation in your city they would get and so this the whole thirty billion dollar company or whatever was like off of like fifteen city contracts and then i thought about i was like oh of course like san francisco doesn't run their own buses like you know or whatever whatever not every city is gonna wanna be in the transportation business they just contracted out to some vendor i was like man that's an amazing business because that vendor now has lock in like the city's is not gonna change so they're just gonna like they just get to eat up they have a monopoly on citi transport and then that got me thinking about those citi bike chair programs if you've seen those citi bikes awesome and then their annual report to online and i went and i read about it and citi bike did the same model they went to new york and they built like a hundred million dollar revenue business doing city bikes in new york and they were the only ones who had the licensed to it and then they did it in san francisco and then they sold to lyft or i don't know some hundred millions of dollars and i thought that's a really cool model and so then we started brainstorming something to dude could you go to a city that needs this type of transport like a different type of transport than what they already have with their buses and whatever and just i will be the vendor for you that's exactly what but they did they went to las vegas did work yeah is well i haven't talked to him recently but yeah they got a contract basically with las vegas where the city was like yeah we have this thing called a transportation desert it's like a place where our routes don't really go but a lot of people need to go in this area and they're complaining to us about it so you know yeah we'll pay you guys we'll we'll pre buy you know like quarter million dollars of rides from you and so it's like instead of trying to get half a quarter million people to download your app like uber yeah you got one city official to say i'll buy two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of rides and that'll last us a few months and let's see how that goes and that's what you and i do to people so because we just study and break breakdown stuff i think you you and i go through the same discovery and aha moment i hope that our audience does which is basically you see once you know what's possible or once you know like what other people is possible your standard of what's possible kind of changes and you're like well of course i do that they did that and they did by doing this i already know exactly how they did it it's like it it it would kinda be like me telling you well just go get big muscles it's like i don't i i can't get big muscles like i don't know what that means versus like we'll just lift this weight do it four times a week and and here i'll remind you every single time and you could do it and like when you know like a specific routine or you know what's possible it definitely changes your perspective on what you should be doing and hopefully that's what the podcast does but that's what the course will be doing but i don't know i wanted to that down there go m dot com m dot com you'll see your face they'll see my face and it's called the cool and then you have one two on the it's called the idea idea boot you have one too the the power running course this is your third time doing it a third time doing it yeah and you did it because you're like people like i think guy had said that you have the second highest rated course yeah yeah i forget number one but you good and you know second place is the best place would you still had a number to reach is it set are still at the top i don't remember which one he said it was like either one or two i think we don't i don't really care about highest rated because i was like you know honestly people's rating will be more based on themselves like it's just like i see to use your gym example most people aren't like if if you're out of shape it's not because you have the wrong workout program and trainer it's because you know most likely you're not even going to the gym then if you are going to the gym they're not working going consistently if you're not going consistently if even if you are going consistently you're not working out with intensity and then comes the program for back eyes and shoulders that's gonna help you get the most gains and so similarly like i had it's like yeah we had a high rated course but then i looked i like man fifteen or twenty percent of people just never showed up to a single well they paid and never showed up like damn that's that's all that like i don't think you could solve that yeah i well you know and i and i'm luckily i was wise enough to not have heartache over that because i was like that's actually just like a completely common pattern with all online education as people don't finish or they don't start for something that they'll even pay a bunch of money for which is really wild so it's like of the people that come what what kind of experience do they have and then you know six months nine months later are you still getting emails being like y know i used your thing it was you know i got this outcome out of it that's like that's the only real true measure of success and i don't think of a hundred people go into the course it's not gonna be a hundred people who have that twenty people aren't even gonna show up you know sixty percent sixty of them are gonna forget everything within a year or never never implement it and really it's the like the fifteen to twenty out of a hundred that go like use the thing and better than better themselves yeah it sucks do do you wanna talk about this bitcoin bitcoin couple what do wanna talk about i have okay i have a couple ideas and then i have a couple random topics but let's do ideas first so i wanna i wanna shout out a couple ideas that i saw other people saying that i thought we're kind of thing so here's the first one so you invested in this thing stocks dot com right i did and explain for people who don't know what stocks is explain what it is because it's actually kind of what dope i i had the opportunity to invest i know the guy super well who started it he was our biggest competitor when we were doing my startup so i was like watching them i like kinda saw how they operate so i knew these these guys are really good but i didn't get the idea of right away and the valuation was really high because they have a good track record so i was like oh okay i'll just pass i'll be a user not an investor you invested so explain what it is yeah so it's like shark tank meats angel list and so angel is a platform where you can if anyone starts a company they can go on and they can get investors and they make it easy so anyone could invest like a thousand dollars into your company and you know what chart tank is and so basically stocks you could spell the like the reason i was like is this gonna work because it's spelled like a joke company meme yeah yeah it looks like it's like it's spelled like a meme and like their logo like a silly it's like the wall street bets guy but it's so once a how often what's the cadence now is it every day or once a week no i don't think it's every day i think it's once a week so so once a week but then they have like big ones that are once a month and they do some pre vetting and they find interesting startups and all types of entrepreneurs investors are on the phone or on the call listening and they could ping in with a question and the a whole audience can watch in real time and so i've been a guest i've been an investor or they call it investors where you're like you're able to ask questions and i've seen people write checks for fifty and a hundred thousand dollars live so experiences is like a live like a twitch channel based like an auction so a start up goes up they pitch their thing the invest some investors can ask questions in the chat some are asking questions live and then you just see in the chat it's like so and so is investing ten thousand dollars so and so is was putting in forty thousand dollars so i putting two thousand dollars and have you seen what we're paid they'll raise like i think somebody raised over ten million dollars in ten minutes is that right i think well the company raised ten million stocks right raised money from guys like me but and then andres h just like angel investors and then they let their users invest and they raised like ten or fifteen million dollars in a few hours and so so what it's what's cool is you're a founder normally your fundraising is like this multi month process that you're almost dread getting started with you're like okay i gotta first get all my ducks in a row and then i gotta start reaching out and figure making a list of pipeline to reach out to then asking people to go out to coffees or asking for intros and following up and then pitching and then following meetings this shrinks that three month process into like seven minutes on stage that's what's doable about this for the for the founder for the investor it's the also a time saver right because and my job is to look at interesting companies so these guys if they're doing the hard work of carrying them and putting them on stage and letting me make a snap decision they're creating a demo day basically where they they pack in a bunch of good startups ups in in theory right and the whole it's either gonna work because they curate great startups ups or it's gonna not work because the great starts don't wanna do this well how did that the best this when when i talked to him i like oh this is a no brainer i i only invested at ten thousand dollars but it was it because i would be would would've have done more but this was great early on he was like you know it's twitch for twitch for angel investing and i've just seen every other live streaming pro i too much battle scars like i've seen so many live streaming products fail and i was like bro why are you going into this you know that as well as i do you know like that's so hard to do i didn't really understand what he was saying is the idea and then he i was like so i asked him a couple questions he sent me the memo and i saw the valuation and i was like so i think it's a dope idea okay so now here's the the r on it right so that's cool in and of itself so elaine z who's been on the pod a couple times before and she she's she's an idea person just like us so she had this idea that i thought was pretty cool she goes stocks dot com for other things like and i i agree can i tell you what one of our friends mo ali tweeted up and and it needs to be for homes stocks for homes like it's because the the cool thing about stocks is you could see what other what questions other smart people are asking and with cars so bring a bring a bring a trailer my favorite car website it has a comment section and i could see what smart people are asking like is this a sixty seven or a a a nineteen sixty seven or a nineteen sixty eight because the nineteen sixty sevens offered this thing and the real collectors items sixty eights you know what i i'm just picking that up but with and with houses it's the same thing like i i remember our home like our realtor was saying like is this me out of stu or this other thing and i'm like i don't know what any of that is and then they're like did you guys like spray the installation or is it like i'm like i i don't know what that means i i i wish i could see like what questions i knew smart people were asking and i wish you could do that live okay that i wish i could i wish and then you could have an up vote an up vote and i think i would like it to be for houses so i think okay that's interesting the one that she had said that i thought was pretty cool was hiring so stocks dot com for people okay so how does that work so okay there's general hiring which is like you know our hiring is like this like large spectrum from like temp staffing where i just need like a hourly employee to show up today and then like tomorrow they may not come back to like craigslist to then you get to like linkedin and indeed which is kinda like mass market if i'm a if i'm a you know junior you know or i'm a mid level marketing manager i might get job opportunities on linkedin or indeed that might be a go regular go look then you have like angel list like play vertical places where it's like if i want a job in startups i won't go to indeed i'll go to angel list because that's where the startups hire or the that's a job board for startups and so then you have this one like really interesting thing and then you have like head hunters which do executive placements and kinda like you know how do you find a cmo you hire a head under you pay a ton of money and then they get like a a huge cut so somewhere in there i think there's an opportunity to let people hire like top talent live like this so if you were able to essentially it's like a reverse job interview so instead of me going in into you know what this kinda reminds me of it it's kind of i'll say though this kinda sounds like a like a like a slave on i hear you're gonna say here you're gonna go there and actually makes me it makes me a little this makes me very uncomfortable actually like that i mean like a talent auction is that where we're gonna call it now dude it's just yes at will it's like you get paid or i don't know have to do right like that's like saying employment slavery right it's not it's a so but there was a a website i don't know you saw it call come out that c it was called developer auction and it was controversial for this exact reason so this came out maybe sixty years ago or so it ended up it got really hot so what they were doing was they're saying look how do developers hired this company it was like part of yc or they were they piggyback on yc in some way i don't remember if they were a yc company or what they did was they were like we're only gonna take developers or we're only gonna let yc companies higher from this place so it's like if you're a dev who wants to work for a yc company come on to developer auction you get the highest dollar bid because these guys have money and they want great devs which which was just a little bit of icing on the douche cake like you're doing you're you're doing a shoes yeah you're doing an auction now you're doing it only for yc that's that's the late that's the cherry on top of the douche bag k the do du should let jk yeah so so basically they they kinda did that and so what was happening was developers were getting way more money on this and they also didn't have to do like a multi week job interviewing process it was like they say hey yeah i was at reddit early ish first forty employees i worked on the fraud fraud system and this and this i'm interested in you know companies doing machine learning and then boom job offer and job offer at a twenty percent premium and developer auction all they had to do was just say they just had to be like harvard they just had to be selective it's like no not any company can just apply here we're gonna pick and then no not any developer can apply here we're gonna pick now ultimately i don't think the model work because they're not like the biggest thing ever now i think they ended up like kind of pivoting or softening it well all talent marketplaces is are really hard businesses i think to scale yeah yeah to scale i think there you could have a lot of you can have like you can be a just a recruiter and make millions of dollars a year you can be just a job board to make millions of dollars a year if you wanna be hired dot com then it i i don't know if it can it's really hard to work so i think the trick here is to do it with something that's visual so okay stocks is cool because it's a live video stream so one question is what in what what category does having a visual screen that's showing you something work way better than a resume that was attached to an email or a job board and so i think like potentially designers or even something like more niche than that like three designers video editors graphics something like that like this could be maybe how like the video game industry hires or something like that i don't know there's there's something there to doing this study what she said elaine she said i don't know i didn't i didn't see which exact example she had the example of hiring and i didn't even read it i was like yeah great idea let me just like rip off that that's what he so i thought that was cool and then i think there's probably some other areas where you could do that and i think the trick is normally the reason live streaming products fail is because the viewers you're compete like you don't wanna compete for viewers with people who are just doing this for leisure because they have a ton of options they can just open tiktok they can you know go for a walk they can do anything you need people you need the viewers or the the buy side for this to be their job so that's why i actually real estate or real estate investors instead of maybe even maybe it's not just for buying my home that i'm gonna live but maybe it's like multi family properties get auction off in this way and as multi family investors that are showing up to to buy pieces of that action or something like that i think i think that'd would be cool i i think i told you this a hypothesis i had in two thousand and twelve i remember when i was in the apartment business we we had think a an apartment finder thing and i was like i'm pretty sure that people is not that far away that people are gonna start renting homes and buying homes so without ever seeing them in person like like like this is before matter port was around and i think we're there like i i would buy a house would you buy a house without seeing it no i wouldn't maybe not mind rent i for sure would rent a place without seeing it yeah maybe would buy but i think i there's a world i think where we're gonna buy them soon without ever seeing a house right the other one that's kind of all out of left field here is did you ever watch the zoom bachelor that some of our friends did shield was the zoom bachelor do you ever watch it no i don't watch that shit though was awesome real sports well i just don't watch reality tv you know i i don't know much good it was like it was like just people to it wasn't in real tv even but it was basically like a an object here's shield he's a he's an investor he's single he's a good guy i think he's great and so as a as a joke has a kind of a la they created a a a live stream and they curated a bunch of single women and they were like alright and they basically in the course of an hour it was like here's six women they introduced themselves he cuts too it's like alright of the four women now he's gonna ask you a question like alright what's your ideal friday night date what would we do and then one girl's like oh i think we live whatever you're like just how many watch movie whatever there was like i don't know like five hundred people live watching it which is a pretty big like livestream channel good and this was like again it was all kind of done as a joke and it was just friends i i don't think that any of them really wanted to date each other but it was just like to do the show but maybe there's something like that right the bachelors was one of the highest rated shows ever and then you see something like good idea idea there's like a match maker show on netflix that's like indian match maker or something like that as people pay thousands of dollars to like to match makers to find like kind of like eligible candidates like that's a that's a that is a niche thing that exists in every city you and i have a you have an eye and i have a single friend and i for a gift i nearly bought him a four thousand dollar match maker and i didn't end up going through with it because it's like i don't know if they're gonna like file through with this and that's too much money to spend if they don't do it i don't know if they're gonna find it insulting but i was like i'd interviewed this lady three different times i'm like trying to figure out this would be the right for fit for our friend i think that i think they're interesting i think more people should use that so i think there if there was a private version of this that was you know you're there was more expensive well so now we're talking about auction off sex yeah so well we're talking about auction after things people want right and so yeah just a happens to be talent sex things like that that's because this agreement evan williams has said this quote evelyn william started twitter and blogger before that and medium now he he goes here's the recipe for a billion dollar internet company have you heard this quote before he goes here's here's the recipe for a billion dollar internet company take a human desire preferably one that's been around for hundreds of years he used technology to remove steps and and that was his whole thing he's like you know and so he's like that's how i built blogger twitter everything else i twitter took out a bunch of steps for a human desire that people had and and i i think that's just like you know sounds stupidly simple but is actually true let me tell you about something that i saw i did not research this at all for this talk but i wanted to just bring it up because we were talking something about something similar i'm trying to find i'm trying to figure out how i'm gonna manage so i bought this farm i need like get a manager to help run it and there's these property management companies but they don't really have like the touch it's a little sterile and like you to make this work the way i it to work i want someone that's a little bit more close to it so in your brain in your head what when i think of an outsourced person like what's like the image that you're that i that you get can you get cancel that to me no no just just tell me like what outsourced vr of a virtual assistant yeah like i don't know somebody in the philippines or india who's you know sitting at a desk you know stepping away for for like in a call center style and style exactly okay now when i'd say military spouse military spouse what comes to your mind patriot what a woman in america white blonde hair speaks great english sitting you know in the comfort of her you know her home office talking to you know customers what attributes are there ernie loyal organized trustworthy things like that exactly so there's this company called squared away so google squared away we talked about here before by the way yes we have but i didn't get it we talked about one we did one we did one episode where we talked about like a cool way to come up with the a type of company that you want is who would you wanna hire mh like what demographic going wanna hire so who do you wanna say right that's another one right yeah who you ultimately gonna be serving a customer and so it helps a lot if you care about them and and understand them and want want more of them to be around you every day so mille it us go what they called go squared away i don't know what why it's called go squared away or maybe it's just called it the business squared away the domain they just couldn't get squared away that com probably and it's the most expensive the cheapest tier is two hundred dollars five five hours great the copy on this website look at this so what great it's great for this so what's another what's another outsourcing company like can we just find like upwork like go to let me just google like outsourcing or let's say virtual assistant for a yeah virtual assistant if they show up on the top google they might have good copy running but while you're looking for that so the copywriting on this page so you go to squared away it says the best company perk is personal assistance for your entire team our our team of military spouses gives you your time back and it's a picture of a lady holding up her sign waiting for her husband to get off the plane from like coming home this screen so ben open up flex jobs dot com this this this is just a perfect example flex is not terrible right like it's it showed up at the top of google it's not i never use a service i'm not saying that i'm saying just the website it's not horrible but it's not special and it doesn't make you feel anything right so i can't really it so just compare the feelings okay so and if you're on you should be watching on youtube to be able to see this so if i go to flex jobs i see this kind of like blue and orange tacky site with stock photos of literally men and women in corporate running away like doing a ballet leap away from you and then it says the number one jobs site to find vetted remote work from home and flexible job opportunities two thousand and seven does that okay great and then it and then it's like good morning america cnn wall street journal whatever okay so this is it's okay and the headline is find a better way to work generic vague doesn't make me feel anything and you know just the this is this doesn't do it now go back to go squared away go squared away what do they say the best company perk personal assistance for your entire team so already they're selling the benefit right you who's coming here is probably looking to hire our personal assistant and they and they focus on or they they frame it as this is the best perk you can offer your employees instead of just find a personal assistant which assumes you already know you want a personal assistant they sell you the benefit of having a personal assistant that you're providing the best perk for your team then they have this like black and white photo of like a military mom holding a child's hand with a sign you know you know like i'm thinking of thinking of you daddy as you know the as he leaves for the plane she's like at a airport hanger right like an emotional scene and she seems like somebody who you would want to support you would love to like help this woman out and that she seems like somebody who you would want not like you know this this stock photo photo of a corporate person running away from you how crazy is that this is beautiful branding because i don't know how many people are in the military but like a military spouse is not like i mean that's a the it's not that ex it's not that rare so like i i may hire these people for doing all types of jobs and they are a military spouse but as soon as they that brand it as i i'm like oh well you definitely are are a good person fact like even though i've i they it doesn't necessarily mean they're a great person but for some reason i think that even though you're a good person bringing this company up yeah you're alright bonus points bet yeah you're you're you know you you get free free virtue for for having brought this company up as something cool is this beautiful branding or what like why why did we even did we talk about this before we talked about it four same thing i we were talking about the stay at home mom workforce and like how do you tap into like labor markets that are under under underutilized so excess talent that doesn't that's that's looking for a job we talked about you know what could you stay at home moms and then we brought this up and they actually shared the clip because they were like hey this is cool we got like featured on this thing and so that's how i remember that we've talked about it before but i don't what how did we get where were you talking about so you were talking about it oh i don't i don't remember we are talking we i think we were talking about like talent right like talent marketplaces and i was and i just i i i didn't even i'm i signed up for what what's it called get squared squared away i entered i'm waiting for them to call me back but i signed up because i but what i went to it i was like oh my god i've in love i want i wanna hire this woman in the pics i need her i hire if i use the service it like washes away the fact that i like don't do compost but i forgot to recycle that it and i feel like the the woman just gonna have my back so hard like she's just gonna like just so much loyalty not yours about dude nope which she's my partner that's like i feel and i just thought they don't they this website i've never seen i've never felt this way about oh oh jonathan brought wife we were talking about managing your branch so you were saying you you might use this instead or just kinda it reminded you that nobody's doing that in the assignment space of making you feel the way that this makes you feel about assistance is that right i don't even remember the angle that i had but yes i think i'm gonna use this to manage my ranch but i thought i i thought that'd would be company and good example of a of a landing page so alright so let's let's go to another one so can i tell you or i'll do a quick one i just wanna get your take on this so i followed this guy and i don't know if this is his name because it sounds like a fake name i've been talking to i just sort of realized i don't know if this is real name but his his twitter handle is peer rich and and i don't know if he's his name is peer rich his name is a c okay his name is peter his name is peter rich peter richardson so that's the thing so anyways he he's he's another guy who tried a talent marketplace and now he's pivoted to something sweet so he had initially he had a yc company and like didn't work out and then he like as a like they just needed money and they were like yeah we just shut down our company you could you can hire us we're a yc duo you can just hire us we'll do a project for you for like as a contractor for like two weeks cost money but like you're getting a yc founder duo where can you hire that oh i'm like and i was like do this fucking amazing i was like i would love to hire yc founder duo and i was like if you think about it like some number maybe twenty thirty forty percent of yc companies are gonna shut down and like you know those people might just go get jobs but actually it might be cool for them to like continue to brand themselves as a yc company as a yc founders and be able to be higher be able for hire so they did that for a little bit and i thought that was cool that's how i got touch with them now he's doing something called cal dot com have you seen this it's a competitor to cal wheaton cal dot great great domain just see alright alright so scheduling infrastructure for absolutely everyone so basically what they are is we've talked about cal call before call basically gives you a little a link that's a calendar where somebody can book you and so that's great for like a salesperson who's like hey i would love to chat about you know how we might be able to help you out here's a link to my calendar grab a time that works for you and it like lets you go pick a time and emails both of you a calendar invite like takes care of the whole like booking process so cal had become like a i think a billion dollar plus company recently two billion dollar company and there there's are they like weren't they bootstrap for like a really long time or something crazy they had yeah the guy was an african immigrant who bootstrap it for like twenty million in revenue raised around at like a billion and then recently raised another round at like two or three years so that business is working so cal dot com i think is a great competitor i'm gonna invest in this because i believe in this model that they're doing which is commercial open source software so cal call is not open source cal dot com is is open source what does that mean that means you can hey you can read the source code b you could basically like self host it so a lot of companies don't want their kind of like data for information in the hands of another company they like to be able to self host the software that they're using and also be able to fork it or remix it in some way that like is customizable to them and so these guys are growing fast i switched over from cal now i use cal it's at all yeah it's a sick product and you could you embed these on your website so it's like if you have a website you're like i don't know you give people your your a lawyer and you need people like instead of saying here's a contact us form and then one of our humans will reach out to you and then we'll try to schedule a time and by that time you already forgot how interested you are so what this does is that to do just embed your your booking calendar right here and it reads your existing calendar so it won't let anybody book a time that's already taken and you could set up rules like don't do meeting like i need a minimum ten minute gap in between meetings or whatever right you set some rules do you just embed that right here so in the heat of the moment when somebody's interested you can grab that lead right away to get them booked for a meeting and so do but how do you use it you're not a company you're use it either for if i'm gonna invest in a if i if i'm doing talking to founder and it's like hey yeah we'd love to chat sometime next week alright you know here's my calendar feel free to grab anytime that works for you and some people find that like offensive or whatever i don't know people are too sensitive about shit like you know just trying to be if we're trying to trying to make it flexible for the other person pick whatever time works for them without requiring four email back and forth or pawn you off to my assistant who's gonna like take it from here and you'll have to email them four times to find a time that works and so so i use it for that i'll also use it for like random meetings so i'll have a accountant that's just know like i'll i'll have like you know just sean and i'll put like a one hour of random meetings once per month that anybody on the internet can go book and so those are ways that that i just add a little like randomness and serendipity into my life that's like in a controlled fashion of when it when it can happen k this is cool you they did a really funny flex so if you go to the website you see a thing that says claim your username and when you refresh consistently you see different names in the auto filled example and it's all people who are well known and i bet are investors of the company and you see that and you're like oh which james per shares is naval this person those guys are they are invested yeah in that funny how they did that yeah that's cool and i did there's a give you if you look by the way this is a common model there's a closed source winner and there's an open source winner for a bunch of different categories and software so this is just like a a very simple way to find good deals is if you if you've missed out or you you see a great company that's like completely closed source just google for the commercial open source company and then if they have a great team behind them there's usually like a separate segment of the market that's quite large that they can go attack just by going from this like open source self hosted model these guys have exploded they went from like nothing to a lot of traffic they're growing fast yeah you should invest to all i can introduce you yeah do it i would love i love this stuff can we talk about the big bitcoin thing please yeah was oh didn't even say his idea alright that that whole thing wasn't even the thing oh what's the i think tweeted that he goes i wish somebody built this called the anywhere school i think this is just kind of interesting so he goes the anywhere school is for people who wanna travel the world but they don't want their kids to education to suffer so here's how it goes the and he put out just like a one page pdf memo of just like here's what it would if anyone's building this like you know take this and run with it and let me know and so what it was is like you join a classroom but it's a traveling classroom around the world so the classroom is gonna be like we're gonna spend three months this year in paris you know three months in bali and three months in wherever you know like thailand and three months in in south africa and the family and the kids go with it so the kids get a consistent structure the teacher stays the same their friends stay the same but they get to experience a a year of of world travel and and so it's like for for people who wanna have travel but don't wanna wait or don't wanna trade off their kid stability and education and i actually think that's a kind of a cool idea i don't think there's like a huge huge business maybe it's bigger than i think but i just think that's awesome and that should be neat so the anywhere pretty think that's a dope on board and that and and and i also think that's a i while i was googling anywhere school and the there's nothing interesting great great right i it's a great name great okay let's let's do the big board school wait really quick before we get to that what were you gonna say about strauss z dude you're gonna love this so you you know i know i know so you explain who we yeah so there's this guy named so there's this guy named strauss how do you pronounce z i think is right z i'm i'm just doing this off memory so correct me i think he's the ceo of a take two interactive which is basically the owner or creator of and grand i thought okay and like in like eight other games that are of that caliber so like maybe like a five or ten billion dollar a year company that owns like the biggest video games in the world and he's probably in his mid to late fifties and he looks like a gi joe so he's this like jacked dude who gets up at like five am in new york and works out really hard and a lot of people are invited to go work out with them but it's all like high caliber get after that's exactly exactly right so he created a kinda like i call it with the breakfast club but it's basically like a morning a morning workout club and ben you can google this so there's a a youtube video that's called strauss next invitation only fitness club it's a two minute video so it's just like really easy to watch and you could see basically when you go to it it's like he goes he goes i made a decision that i was gonna treat fitness as a like important part of my schedule so like okay i'm a ceo if i had a board meeting i i'm not gonna skip it or move it because i'm feeling tired right so he's like i'm gonna treat fitness the same way that i would treat like like a like a meeting or family time or whatever like i'm gonna put it like first order importance and then he's like but you know how do i like juice this up and i'm a big fan of this this is a a big life hack which is multiply activities so you know like i've done this before too which is you wanna hang out with cool people or have friends but you don't you don't you know you you only have maybe like one hour of recreation today so are you gonna choose fitness or friends well even better let me just find friends who like fitness and let's work out together right you do this all the time i do this too and so what he did was he was like alright we're gonna wake up at five or six in the morning in new york and they go somewhere do a different fitness related activity it doesn't matter how fit you are although the pictures that they share like everything's everybody's got like a six pack everyone's jacked and then it's called like the program and it's basically like kinda of networking kind of friends hanging out and kind of fitness all at once but instead of being kind of each of them actually that's the wrong way to say it's it's like the hundred percent of each of those because when you work out with somebody it's like the new york bankers exactly doing and so they get up they do something different every day and and he like would pay for it so he's like alright if we're doing this activity like money is not gonna be the object that stops somebody from doing this so i'll i'll just cover it for our whole group and we'll just go do whatever the heck activity we wanna do and so the guy's is in great shape he's like oh i it because i to hang out with like a bunch of like really interesting motivated like kind of twenty or thirty year olds that are like pushing me to a be more fit and don't be the old man but also like these are really talented ambitious people who are who see the world differently than me right and so i thought this is just a fantastic idea and bev tell me a friend of a friend of a friend of his was was doing it and i was invited when i was in new york but for some reason the scheduling didn't work out it couldn't go they came early well that's the beauty of how do you prevent this from being just the show up who just want you know just the the networking and all that you make it at six am and you make the fitness thing kinda hard that's the filter that will self select for the type of person you wanna be around for this kind of thing i just hate working out it at six am i hate working i i thought you you'd be all about it because like you know the heart of the better for you i like yeah like i would go but like the problem with my my issue with working out at six am means i've gotta wake up at like five twenty which means i've gotta go go to bed at like nine and if i have to go to bed at nine i'm in bed at nine and i'm so anxious thing saying to myself if i go to sleep now like i'm not gonna be able to wake up like it's so anxious about waking up early that it makes it not fun tell you know what i mean this i i hate i i don't work out early i work out as a midday break every day so i i work out like that to two pm every day and and actually i i pretty much stop working at that point and then i come back and i start working again at like eleven pm or midnight and so i don't have to wake up early and i have a bunch of energy when i do that but the the the the takeaway for this for me the voice in my head when i heard this i go oh yeah i forgot sean build your cult and i think that's just like the takeaway i think you gotta build your cult it's like do the things you wanna do open them up so that others can do them with you do them in a way that's like slightly hard and everybody's making a bit of a a everyone's stretching themselves in some way because that's the sacrifice and the buy in the blood oath that you want in your cult and like just fucking build your cult be around the type person you wanna be around dude this is this is why it exactly you're building your call that's a great example i was doing like a general guy what did he do daybreak breaker yeah daybreak breaker it was like a five am party with no album people you're cult right like what do i wanna start my day and please start a bunch of energy dance blah but i don't want alcohol and music i don't like nightclubs clubs so i'm a bring i'm gonna build my own cult that's awesome alright did you have else you wanted to do or should we wrap it