Long-Lasting Companies, Pandemic Monitoring & Deepfake Businesses

let's go outside of the tech world so two brands that that i am looking at that have i've lasted a long time louis vuitton louis vuitton has lasted said maybe two hundred and fifty years now and when you think of louis vuitton you know what you're getting same at new york times new york times has been around for two and fifty years not everyone likes them but you know what they're pursuing which is their version of the truth but then let's go to raising cane there been to raising cane dude love raising cane i'm met the founder of raising kain once he is awesome i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a roll we're live what's going on what how are you i'm driving alright good so i've been thinking about this conversation you and i had we talked about outsourcing and i'm actually gonna put a lot of words in your mouth i'm implying that you said a lot of stuff which you didn't exactly say so you're kind of more of a representation but rob d said something amazing a few pods ago he said two amazing things one he goes i was looking for these twenty thirty million dollar wins and i do like twelve of on me said and goes instead i'm actually gonna only gonna do one or two things and i'm and i'm gonna hope that they're gonna be big and then he also said he has this thing called forever estates do you remember when he talked about forever estates so afterwards he sent me mock ups of this and i like googled the architect and everything and there was this really cool article that they rob and the architect wrote together so forever estates rob said i wanna build this home basically he said he had twelve million dollars liquid at the time ten million dollars who went and bought this plot of land and then he goes to build the home i want it's gonna cost thirty million dollars at the time i didn't have that and i it sounds like he maybe he he has it now but he was like basically i wanna build this home where the dear family for many generations can meet at this home to discuss family planning and family issues and things like that and so i'm wanna build this home exactly how i want it and we're gonna call it forever estates because hopefully it lives forever i found that very inspiring did you find that inspiring loved it loved it i love when people take an absurd long view and more than anything i love when people have a vision for their life and what they're doing when somebody's gotta get was awesome compelling vision for their life that is like one of the most attractive traits to me it doesn't even matter if i agree with that vision it's that they have that vision and that they agree with that vision is what matters i thought it was awesome and he sent me mock ups of the home and i was like dude this is so inspiring so i got i got all hot and bothered about this it was awesome to me and so i started thinking about companies that can last a long time i've been a little bit obsessed with this because with hampton things are going well we're not a success yet but it's very clear that like i always tell our team physics will allow this to work there's demand i've got a good audience for this we've got a good team physics allows us to exist there's nothing that gets in the way of this we're already somewhat successful the only question is how great will it become and i'm starting to think how do you create something that lasts fifty in a or a hundred years whatever it is and the word brand is something that i've been thinking about a lot and i think you and i as well as our audience we get in these like short term thinking and we use like the a word the arbitrage word or we use like we use these certain words that people actually don't think about branding they don't think about soul and i've been thinking a lot about that lately and there's this book that i'm reading where it's called lessons from the century or lessons from the century companies club so it's like this one woman studied like companies that have lasted a hundred years and she's like what are what are they all have in common and i've been thinking a lot about that and you brought up something you said you invested in this company shepard which i think is awesome i actually am i'm starting to use them i'll give you a plug is it grow shepherd or support shepherd dot com yeah support shepherd dot com you talked about that investment in the company and it's and you're talking about outsourcing it's basically you hire people in the philippines i think also latin america and they do a bunch of odd jobs but you said something like i wanna hire tons of these people and i started thinking about that i started thinking should i do that and then i realized i shouldn't do that i actually should do that for some roles but but the thing that but i had this like off site this like a hampton retreat with like a bunch of our employees and i realized you have to build a real strong company culture and you have to figure out how you keep employees for a long time and that's one of the key keys to building a brand that can last a long time and i wanted to hear how are you and this by the way this topic is not that exciting for anyone who's in survival mode this topic is more exciting for people who are in like thrive mode where it's like got this thing worked includes to be clear the first phase of the company is just build something that people want and figure out if you can get it to them right don't worry about culture don't worry about brand don't worry about the forever plan don't worry about the twenty five year vision none of it's gonna matter if you can't do the first thing sam has done the first thing with hampton he has proven that he can create something that people actually want and he could sell it to them so now he's thinking you know and now you get what i call progressive ambition i wanna do a whole video on progressive ambition i'm gonna show people if you go back and you watch mark zuckerberg early interviews and people are like we're just a skill from here you're on eight campuses now you're where are you gonna are you're gonna open this up to everybody high schoolers or everything it goes he's like fifty schools he's like you know our goal is to get to you know all the major colleges i'm not sure everyone keeps saying why you know expand expand expand some things are cooler when you don't expand and i don't think what do we have to open up to everybody i'm not sure i mean some some things are really we could build something really really useful for college students maybe we should just do that and then now the guys like created higher balloons that give internet to farmers in india so that they can use facebook right it's like the he got progressively more ambitious as he went along and that's which is a crazy story in itself by the way facebook i think sarah helped to work on this or something at facebook facebook basically puts these planes over india so any indian can access internet because the issue with growth of facebook is they literally have everyone on the internet so they have to create more internet for people they gotta create a bit more tam like we're tam it out right now hold on gotta they give more people the internet so they could use our app but that's cool that it started where that that's a great phrase progressive very common for different companies you can go back go i've i'm a forensic i'm a let's say i'm archaeologist i go back into the to go study the early origins of these companies and you find this very very commonly that they start with a sort of humble ambition then as things start to work they snowball their ambition they become more and more ambitious as they go realizing the opportunity is wider and bigger than they had initially you know planned for and that one step of success earns the right to go for the next step of success and that it is okay to ladder up because what most people do is they look at them today and they say well now they're trying to do a b c and d so i when i start need to also plan for a b c and d and it's actually like no you actually just start with a you know you don't actually have to do anything else of course there are exceptions there's elon musk saying we're gonna you know but you know even elon for example let's take one of the most ambitious companies in the world spacex right what's the goal what's the mission statement i make the human species multi planetary so we can survive when we were an earth or earth gets you know hit by a ash or whatever and so it's like wow what's more ambitious than creating a rock literally rocket science to create rockets that will eventually take us to live on mars wow that's like the biggest vision ever when spacex started his initial vision was to do a test demonstration sending a plant in a rocket into a certain like i have certain height i don't remember exactly where it was to you know have the first living thing you know go out of you know past the moon or whatever wherever he's trying to take it and that's all i wanna do is just take a plant out there he's like i'll just fund this you know it take me twenty million dollars but it'll will inspire people towards science and you know hopefully nasa will then fund real mars missions after that and then only you know along the way he's like you know what screw this plant thing i'm gonna let's actually do it ourselves we don't need inspire an ass let's just do the whole thing ourselves he also got progressively more ambitious and also when he first started he started of think called zip two which i'm almost certain it's basically like putting the yellow pages on the internet which i'm sure he had some cute way of spinning it where it was a grand plan but it he made twenty million dollars off it which is a lot of money but he was like in his head he's like gotta get my nut you know what i'm saying he's like you see every every human has a number phone number and you can reach them this is one of the most marvelous things in the world and you need a way to reach them it's information you know he'll he'll make anything sound fancy but actually one of the interesting things is elon is also credited as like he created paypal he didn't actually create paypal you know paypal the product was created by you know first max le and peter t but even then when they merged with elon company he had this a big vision for x dot com he's like x dot com is gonna be everybody's full financial life it's gonna be banking it's gonna be mortgages it's gonna be loans it's gonna be sending money it's gonna be savings accounts it's gonna be all things to all people and that was the vision for x dot com when they merged elon was the ceo of the merged company and the plan was to create x dot com and so he had this big au audacious crazy vision his forever plan about how he's just gonna change the whole financial system and actually the only thing that worked was going back to the basics let's make something that people actually want to see if we can get it to them and it was like oh yeah ebay sellers would love way for people to pay the money when they send them the like beanie babies and so literally was send money via like send money via email small amounts paying a pal was the actual use case that people wanted and needed and it was only when they essentially booted him out and focused on that small use case the smaller vision did paypal actually take off and so you know sometimes you almost have the the reverse you start too audacious and actually you needed you you'd you skip the step of finding that initial foothold and that that's what paypal actually did and here's the rub which is very similar to that that i'm experiencing that i'm trying to think about which is so in order to build a company that last long time you need a you need a few things which i could talk about but it it starts with having a brand it starts with having a very clear defined purpose you have to have employees who you wanna work with for a long time and there's a bunch of things but how do you balance paying the bills and taking customers and also like having this mission that might be polarizing to people and i'm trying to figure out when is that transition do you always have it and that's something that i'm constantly thinking about now which is i don't think it's a switch i think you have to have it embedded in your culture early on but where do you make sacrifices where do you make sacrifices i i'm not sure i'm not sure on going from short term to long term thinking how that happens and that's something that i've been thinking a lot about lately so it's hard to kinda give advice for without any specifics but i'll do it anyways i'll be the advice guy for a second so when when i was doing my fur very first company it was a stupid company we're trying to do the trying make a a restaurant chain the chipotle of sushi and we had all these micro decisions to make like any business does on a day to day basis should we use this packaging or this packaging for our thing well this one costs more looks better but other one you know we would have better margins because it costs less and then this other one that's eco friendly blah blah and so one of our mentors at duke she sat us down and she's like guys you're having the wrong conversation and really like what do you mean and she and she's like it's not about packaging so what what do you mean she's like let me ask you this what decision can you make upstream of this that would make your packaging decision obvious i was like what and we don't really get it she's like you gotta know what do you value right are you about ruthless efficiency and margins because if so then the choice is obvious there's no choice right you choose the one with the the cheap packaging with the best margin are you about are you is your number one value the quality of the customer experience because if it's the quality of the customer experience you definitely not could choose a cheap one but you also won't choose the eco one that's gonna kinda melt you know the distilled paper straws problem it's not actually the best product but it is an eco friendly it's like so if you're all about product quality that's what you're gonna gonna go all in on that's your number one value then the packaging decisions is obvious same thing with the other side if you're all about sustainability if that's your number one value then the decision is obvious she's like you don't know which packaging to pick because you don't know what you stand for you don't know your values and she's like what you wanna do is figure out your values number one so what are the things you value more than more than other things because they're and and you only know what you value when you're choosing amongst good options it's obvious to value something when you have a good option and a bad option there's no you you didn't test your values there your values only get tested when you have multiple good options but they're good in different ways and that's when you need to know which one do we value the second thing that you said was jeff bezos has this great quote where he goes they're like oh you know amazon has been around forever and you guys have just kept growing and growing and growing and you know through every innovation cycle you know the internet mobile phones whatever amazon has been cloud you know amazon done great how do you stay on top of the curve if he goes because we don't look for trends we ask ourselves the opposite question instead of saying what's gonna change we say what's not going to change so basically as i could we're customer obsessed that's the number one value for them and he's like number two we ask what's not gonna change are people ever gonna want less selection no are they ever gonna want higher prices no are they ever gonna want slower delivery no okay cool so now we know that those are never the never changing things so all we gotta do is how to figure out how to give a more selection lower prices and faster delivery that's what they care about they're never gonna not care about those things they're always gonna care and all we gotta do is just continually find a way to do that so i think that gives you a sort of long term orientation like for hampton what would you say are the never gonna change things i've gotta figure that out frankly when i started it was the same thing as zuckerberg which is i just wanna like be around smart people are you know what me are people ever gonna wanna be around lower quality founders no they're always gonna want that bar going up that they look in their peer group and they're in awe how did i get in this room right i think that's gonna be the first feeling you wanna create is holy shit all the other people in my group are awesome i can't wait to talk to these people right that's gonna be i think always the number one the quality of the other members in their group to them and then i i think the the the thing i've been thinking about is they're always gonna want their peers to be committed so you if so we've been thinking about oh if you don't show to a meeting it's like well we should just ban them let's ban them you miss one of the term both of those things we mentioned hurts revenue because if you make the door exactly wanna increase revenue widen didn't the door baby let them all in now let everybody who wants to pay the bill come in okay but now you've ruined the quality of member prop you know the long term people will never want this to go in that direction you're you're screwing that up for short term profit same thing on the people don't show up you banned them or you also you know have to go ahead and remove that subscription revenue from from the from from the old stripe account and so you're not gonna wanna do that either but it will only happen if you take this long term orientation and say no no the thing we value the most is people want a product or it's high quality people that show up and care about this community about this group and if either of those we every decision has to be first and foremost from that point of view does this increase the quality of our members or decrease it does this increase the commitment levels or decrease it and i also think that so you you given the example of facebook and amazon and i looked at those as examples as well but let's go outside of the tech world so two brands that i am looking at that have i've lasted a long time louis vuitton louis vuitton has lasted maybe two hundred and fifty years now and when you think of louis vuitton you know what you're getting same at new york times new york times has been around for two hundred and fifty years not everyone likes them but you know what they're pursuing which is their version of the truth but then let's go to raising cane there been to raising cane of course love raising cane i met the founder of raising kane once he is awesome that you guys gotta a i don't know his name but google raising kane founder and like watch talks with this guy he's like a southern boy i think from louisiana he started a chicken finger place i think at ls you and if you go to raising kings now here's what you're gonna get they all they sell as chicken fingers you can basically get them deep breaded and deep fried or not breaded and deep fried and then i think they only sell fried or fries or obesity fried which one do you want yeah like there's like there's only there's no and you get it on a styrofoam like a styrofoam the school box type of thing and they're not fancy but you know what you're gonna get every time and he's like adamant he's like we are gonna perfect this and we're gonna get this it's gonna be fried the exact same time every single time and it's not sophisticated but you know what you're gonna get another brand that i'm like fucking dollar general you ever go to a dollar general yeah of course dude it's it's not sophisticated it's that high but you know what there's just gonna have a ton of stuff and it's gonna be low quality and it's gonna be affordable you know what you're gonna get every time so i don't think you need the sophisticated like it's day one here at amazon and we're we're like no you don't need that you could you could have like no like we're fashion nova like it's cheap apparel that you know you don't have to make a lot of money you could buy and we're always gonna be on top of shit you don't need a lot of that stuff that high end like sophisticated stuff you can be anything but it's just cool that like to see people who are adamant about what they are and they just deliver value every time or at least they're their folks in the brands so anyway that's my spiel about that and the reason i was thinking about it was because you're were talking about outsourcing stuff and i'm like oh that definitely seems cheaper but is is it cheaper for every role in the long term because you have to build in order to build a brand that last long time and let's let's be straight here this is all about like doing dope shit it's also about making more money i think you can make more money if you drag out your excel sheet you're like oh this grows thirty percent twenty percent every year yeah drag that shelf for fifty years you see what i'm saying a and let's see what's cool out there right it this is it's this is also rooted in like adventure and fun exciting and agreed so i don't wanna get that twisted but anyway you have people who wanna work for you for ten twenty years it gets really interesting and i think you can actually like embed different things in the culture you you know white castle you ever heard of white castle you know white that is right dude to white castle i fucking love white castle i went and looked at their like linkedin i trying to figure out their executive team like all of them have worked there for like thirty years i used to make fun of them like oh man he's fucking suits i'm like no no no they know who their customers they know what they're doing and they're you're get the same shit every time and it works because there are people have worked there for fucking thirty years and they like know what the company is about so anyway that's my rant rant over but it's something i'm thinking about it something i'm thinking about i'm glad we just discussed this publicly i'm actually gonna i was taking notes yeah yeah good i i think that's cool i i take the exact opposite point of view for the for the record i do not think about building things that are gonna last fifteen and a hundred years i think that's really hard and i think it's unnecessary i wanna be the thing that lasts fifty or a hundred years not an individual brand necessarily well you are the brand if that's the way i think about it is this it depends on how you want your career to go some people get really excited about building something and being a part of something and working on something thirty years i get more excited about taking like sort of seven year chapter arcs of my life it'd be like cool i wanna have five you know i only get one life to live i wanna experience all the things i wanna ride all the rides and so i do a you know i did a a a tour of duty and i i lived in australian and indonesia and all these other places that was fun that was wearing in a great venture i moved to silicon valley in the heart of san francisco and i tried to do the billion dollar startup up thing now i'm doing this basically cash flowing business side of things and podcasting and creating content i'm a content creator now that's interesting that's fun in in a way i'll shift at some point seven years from now i'm not gonna be a content creator more or i'm gonna shift the content i'm gonna create tv shows or stand up comedy set or something yeah but you do realize that's all rooted i'm gonna like j to your ass you realize this is all rooted in the same shit which is like it it is a consistent brand and you're changing the monetization i might not even put my name on like my name is not always gonna be front and center on everything when your contact it is but other times it's not for me the more important thing is i'm not gonna a bank on people recognizing my brand in order to do something i do wanna accumulate enough financial freedom and runway so that i can go pursue things that don't have to make money right away and so but you know it's all about what you the vision for you you have for yourself so that's why i was talking about rob dod has this vision for his house you have a vision for hampton what you're trying to create as this long term enduring thing i have a vision for my life or my career that is chapters and episodic and i wanna have that variety and new challenge where i have to like go become uncomfortable and try to get good at something new and learn go learn the dark arts of a whole different industry and go become a beginner that's something i get excited about more so than creating one thing that's gonna last long time or i'm gonna be a part of for a long time is that a phrase we're gonna start using the dark arts i mean that's what feel on that's patented so you we i just have a little things to him for saying that right now where do you wanna go let's move on okay i got two quick ideas for you in general i wanna say this by the way in this pod i think we're gonna make a shift in how we create the content so right now every episode is this mismatch of breaking down a business talking about frameworks an idea of business idea here or there i think what we're gonna start to do is segment them better or chunk them better theme the episodes better so you know what you're gonna get and we just go really hard at one thing so we're gonna do episodes where it's really hard on just ideas business opportunities that we see we're gonna go really hard on certain topics like one man businesses or you know businesses have very few people but just crush it it's gonna be a lot harder for us to do the prep for that but i think it'll make for much better episodes so we've been talking about bit a little bit about think we should put it out there that we wanna start doing that but until then let's smash a little bit i got an idea for you okay if you made a grid of customers that are easy to acquire or hard to acquire on one side and then customers that are not that valuable and super valuable on the on the other axes one box that interests me there is hard to acquire super valuable and the reason why is because those companies can become very very def def very very valuable right your value as a company or even as a person is just based on how easy are you to replace you want to be irr irr replace them that's how you can actually make more money in the long term so what's on that in that quadrant like a fucking plain manufacturer or something like that something that sells to government so you go get government contracts not easy might be boring to do long term expensive government contracts it might take you years to get to the point where you can get one but when you get one very valuable and very def def and so i was thinking about this because i invested in this drones company called vale a long time ago i've invested maybe many years ago i don't i have no idea how they're doing i was a small investor i don't even get the updates but at the time they were doing pretty well i you know i was like okay cool valuations is a little bit rich for where you're at but why is it you know why do you think this is evaluation and it was like well they're about to get this government contract that's a hundred million dollar a year contract one customer will now become worth more than all their customers combined because and what's the term length of about that contract i think it was like a there was a couple that they were up for i think there were like sort of three and five year deals and once you get one government contract you're sort of der risked and you've done all the you know the clearance and all that stuff you basically to get your company to a spot where you could get a government contract and once you have one being able to get the next one becomes more likely because you're sort of in the trusted vendor circle so i was like oh that's pretty valuable i was just thinking about one the other day you know with this whole covid pandemic somebody out there has gotta be selling some kind of pandemic modeling software or detection software to every government in every country of the world and this is also have like a network effect whereas as soon as you providing you're the provider of this product to one government it's actually something that all governments would then choose you for because you know the more governments you get the more compelling your case becomes and so i wonder who's building kind of the talent what pal did for i think like national security type stuff somebody's gotta be doing for bios security so who is creating the pandemic monitoring detection modeling awareness program that you can then go sell to every single government on earth as an indefinite ongoing contract hey these things happen once every hundred years with the spanish flu we got covid alright i'm just gonna go i'll be your provider because hey they're they're devastating when they happen and i can i could be this for you for the next hundred years i think that's a a hundred year company that is probably be quite defensive one quite valuable if you can do it i'll talk to some of my friends who work at pal i'm like hey what you guys do today and they're like oh just like stop a terrorist attack in france how about you wrote a blog post you what i mean like don't five week tuesday today yeah where my five favorite tweets in my newsletter cool it's like those have you ever worked at those there's all these like net worth calculators real like where will i be in fifty years and you're like well if you were to start in like eighteen eighty four this is where you'd be if you were starting like nineteen ninety five this is where you'd be and you can like see like well because that this fifty year or this thirty years actually had slow growth this ten years had fast growth and you like see all the different scenarios you're like so if we take the average it's this but if this happens this you're kinda like talking about like that but with like potential illnesses who have you researched out there i haven't i have research any of this but i'm sure already exist these sort of like you know like because people have been worried about these sort of like viral things but obviously they were insufficient right so like whatever existed obviously sucked because we didn't detect it we we didn't have any plan for it and we had no idea how fast the thing was spreading like literally the best pandemic model i saw was made as a side project by kevin sis from the founder of instagram for fun on the side he's like oh i can break down by state the r naught the viral coefficient basically of this and of this virus based off of this public data i'm getting about hospitals and hospitalizations and i can use that to kinda show which states are flattening the curve versus which states are about to go exponential and you know they should really consider doing something and it's like somebody's gotta be doing this at this gotta be the easiest sales pitch of all time right now is the guy's kind of what i guess what i really means like if you're sitting at mit or one of these places just be like where a sign that says i went to mit and then go walk into the government building open up the fanciest like mat lab you know like model you could find and be like you need to pay for this and just see what happens i think i feel like they can get you can get pretty far right now with this pitch of like hey we'll help you with the we'll help you keep tracking of these viruses do remember about two years ago you and i were both interested in people who are trying to detect fires forest fires do you remember that yeah yeah we did we did this on the pond right there was probably like one or two like kids like college kids fooling around it but then there was like i think two different companies that raise money i think from founders front fund and actually they were ex pal to guys i forget the name of the company it's a four letter word it was like gel or i forget what it was but they were i tried to invest in them and they were like they they weren't having it because they were getting big and they they didn't need any money but do you know what happened to those guys i don't know the name of it that's really hard to remember no i also don't know what what came of it but yeah there was i remember when the california wildfires were happening i felt like every three months it was like a new fire and the entire like state of california was like covered in smoke yeah i remember when that i remember where that was happening to to find early detection of wildfires was like a like a a startup up idea that a bunch of people got funded for yeah it was really interesting what we need to do when i'll do not this week but next week because we have jack on next but i'm gonna actually do research and see how these guys are doing because it was very similar to what you're talking about well and what was your other thing that you're looking at you're gonna go from sound governments to sound to justice simpson yeah exactly yeah not the same iq so basically this next idea is so celebrities are having this like deep fake crisis crisis and opportunity so deep fakes are getting really really good and celebrities now have a crisis plus opportunity so the crisis is you've seen this fake tom cruise it's deep fake tom cruise guys like amazing looks just like tom cruise and and it's like a video are you know it's this is getting really good you're not gonna be able to tell dude did you see do you see the ones where they put our podcasts in spanish yeah those are awesome by way we should do that should release our i guess never like they were amazing they were so good i mean and i've heard of these new scams where they'll take people whose voice and video you get access to and may call your parents i mean i'm like hey dad look i'm trapped i need some money can you please send it like just don't ask questions to send the money it's wild and so i think there's an opportunity here so i think celebrities who get paid for their name and face and you know oh i gotta go fly to you know arizona and shoot this commercial for gatorade right now and it's gonna be three days but i'm gonna get paid all this money blah blah that's gonna change into catered would like to use your your ai clone in their commercial you cool with that yeah you get to set a home and collect the check and it's like maybe it's fifty percent less you know expensive for the brand maybe it's the same cost with brand i don't know but you don't have to do the work anymore that's gonna be a big deal so the more famous you get now you're not gonna have to actually do the appearance thing because you'll just send your your ai stunt double to to go do it so that's an opportunity but there's also a risk there which is what if somebody just doing it without your consent and so i think somebody gonna need to create a sort of celebrity deep fake licensing company so it's a company that goes and says look we're gonna create the legal entity that's going to house your name and likeness that other brands can come in interact with when they want access to this and we're also gonna do the detection to find out is anybody doing the unauthorized use of your name and face somewhere and we will handle all the take downs for you so it's kind of like a reputation dot com but for this new deep faith thing so you basically will go and i think you'll you need to it's almost like angel list you need to create the legal framework for how these work need to go sell this to every agency and say hey you should we've created one for you know you you have one of these for all of your your clients on your roster and when a brand comes to you use this to issue the license that has the right some controls on it that has the digital encrypted watermark on it that has the tracking on it and then we will also fight anybody who is trying to use it without paying you because that's gonna become an issue as well that's what i think is gonna happen i think somebody could build that company right now i used to get all of these emails when i first started the hustle because what we would do is we eventually bought getty license which is like fifty grand a year but before that we would use i would just type in whatever picture i wanted and i go to google and click like allow for commercial use and then i like i would use those pictures on our website and then at once we got popular we would get all these emails from these patent trolls or not patent trolls i mean we were we were using someone else's picture and they would say send us three grand and we'll go away otherwise we're suing you and i started looking into them and basically what they did was they've just built this technology so they could detect if someone's photo was being used and they would automatic like crawl they would use like who is and find out who the web master was and send you this email and i wonder like how those folks turned out like what's going like how some of these people actually built those those things and if they were profitable i imagine so like there was one time i used someone's picture i think it was like the it was like a thumbnail picture it was the smallest picture i didn't even know we used it and i think maybe someone at our company took a screenshot of it and like try to alter it and then put it on our website in the smallest way and they totally caught it and within like a few hours we had to send them like three thousand dollars is like shit they got us i wonder like what that looks like in the world of ai when you are having a bunch of these fake celebrity videos so you know what i'm yeah yeah exactly so i think somebody's gonna need to create a good version of that so one option has become the troll the other option is become the official sort of like broker of of these of the usage of these digital fakes alright that's my second one the company by the way is called felt s e l t dot com felt that's what we had talked about good remembering you wanna talk about how you flew ben out the convince him to move with you yeah i think it's good actually because remote work is you know obviously all the rage and remote work is great in a bunch of different ways but i'm of the opinion which is remote is great when you have things figured out and be people who are just operational to do things anytime there's a lot of needs figuring out or creativity or just your brain trust i think works best in person and so i told ben the other day i like ben i think we're on to something with what we're doing business partner ben this is part ben i was like you know he lives in austin right now and i was like you gotta i was like you gotta move out here and he's like like you know i live here now and wife kid we have family in texas i was yeah i know but like you we both believe the following right every time we get together magic happens this can be pretty big like what we're doing can become pretty big and so even like a ten to twenty percent improvement on what we're doing is actually worth maybe tens of millions of dollars so it's like you know it could be worth it to move and california's is a great place too so it's not like i'm saying you know let's go to you know rural ohio or something and so he was like okay why don't we do this so he moved out here for the month so he got a airbnb in the birds or savers the herbs where i'm at and he's like got an airbnb b brought his wife's kid came out here he's just been living here for the month and and i also i offered him i was like dude i'll pay you dollars if you move but i told him i go but the number drops by twenty percent every quarter that you don't move i like this is not like a standing offer forever is a burning an exploding offer i said used should take your time should think about it we should also know every quarter that you don't move that number goes down and dude he he should tell you you come you get your ass to texas yeah no he knows i'm not going anymore you knows they're not gonna go anywhere that's not the that's something that i actually lived in texas for a long time and you know the other thing is like here you know in san francisco there is kind of like for for example for a rolling fund there's so many companies so many other investors so many people in the start of world like proximity is power you wanna be mere as many other people as you can that are doing the same source of things as you as you are to the extent that your lifestyle will allow it and so yeah we'll see he told me i think you i think i like a ten to twenty percent chance well i'm coming out i was i was with him a week or two weeks before he went out there and i was shocked when he told me that he thought that there was maybe a twenty percent chance that he could be convinced so and by he i mean the the levy entity the the household and i was shocked that it was twenty percent is it still twenty percent i don't know i think so but we also work a lot when he's here so i'm sure his wife's like dude this is terrible like you work more now like man i don't wanna do this and so that might be working against us the other thing though is the way we work is kinda of goofy i don't think most people do this but you know for coding to have pair programming not that popular but some people do it and what pair programming is what's the name of that agency that was in san francisco that was like a really popular dev shop they're like went public at one point you know you know the name yeah yeah i don't remember it but yeah i know you they popular at least i don't if they invented or popularized it but basically it's two programmers working on one computer you know right it's like the you know engineering two girls one cup basically it's like you you sit together there's one keyboard and you would think well okay you have half the efficiency like only one guy's working only one guy's coding but actually you get more than double the efficiency because it keeps you completely focused and you and your partner are basically both talking things through and figuring things out on the fly and literally me and ben do that when he comes out here to work we i'm like alright put your laptop down like just we buddy up side by side at this desk and we'll just work on the same thing at the same time and like i can't just like open twitter and start messing around over there what what what's happening what you doing you can just like open new tabs you know as you're figuring something out one of you guys pointing something out you just sort of really stacking i call like stacking focus it's like whatever my level of focus is plus is a level of focus on the same thing so that's been good the other is the in between time so already when we work remote we call each other all the time you know probably on the phone two hours a day three hours a day maybe on calls either with others or just ourselves but what's happening now is we'll work on something for a bit that's kinda like us being on a call together working on something and then we're like alright let's go get food and we'll just hop on our bikes we'll go to this taco shop and we go get this we've go to the same taco shop every day we get the same me every everyday everybody you play wolf ball afterwards we hold man that we skip home basically but while we're doing it it's sort of like the best ideas are coming out in all the in between time and that's the time where normally if we'd be like okay yep buy close zoom close google hangouts or whatever and then you know i put on a podcast and he does something else and you know it's the in between time where you get the ser ideas so it's just kind of reminding me how valuable it is to work in person so here's the issue that you have or i've always had with you which is whatever i am around you both of us are high ish energy people where you're the type of person that eggs people on and then i'll egg you back on or i could see like and and i'm not even that bad at that but you do i'm sure there's a lot of other people like sue you guys just start egg each other on and it's like wait a minute we're totally off track here we should just do the same thing over and over again does this having him around just distract you further because i see you guys just like you're sitting on two like love seats and your throwing to a football back and forth and you're like why don't we do this yeah well what if we did this is like well fucking let's just do it right now there's definitely a part every single day that's like that i crumble up a piece of paper i throw it to him we throw it back and we playing catch talking about bullshit that like you know things we could do that are not like just the obvious things but the beauty of it is as i've gotten older and i've gotten wiser and i've been doing this podcast two things have happened one i hang around you and you're very good at just doing the thing every day whether it's your workout or it's whatever i'm just gonna do the thing and i i don't wanna get distracted by everything i wanna do the thing and so hang out with you as how helps there was also a guy who came on the podcast a long time ago one of the earliest episodes and he design it's he's from peak design they make these like camera bags so he started his company off sad that that was two years ago yeah this was like one of the first fifteen episodes i think and he so he bake these camera bags who knew and and they do like i don't know at the time like seventy million a year in revenue off of camera bags and i was and like clips for your dslr cameras was what the hell like this that big of a market and he had done it off of kickstarter and he kind of inspiring guy and as i was talking to him i so what's your philosophy around business he goes everybody's got these like plans they got these ideas but blah like he's like life and business is just the six inches in front of your face it's just this and it just held up his hand six is where he goes i just look at this and i just do six inches in front of my face it's all i'm focused on and i just do that every day and that's stuck with me and so we have out you can't see it but on the wall here i wrote six inches in front of our face on a giant like post like a giant sticky pad thing these things are great by the way you should buy these these a giant sticky pad things where you sort tear the paper it's like a huge post it now that goes on your wall dude at monkey a thirty year old office you are like that guy you always had whiteboard and like pads that was your thing i was at the were always setting up like writing yeah that was you you always said that little whiteboard ses real quick so so yeah i have it here and it says the six inches in front of our face and so the first thing we do every day when he comes over is we rep prioritize the six inches in front of our face like what are the small no brainer steps forward that will make this like one percent better today and we the first three hours the day we don't do anything else besides knock those out i think theoretically we could just do that for eight hours a day i would get bored out of my mind also i can kinda get eight hours of work done in three hours of focus when i put my mind to it and so that's what we do first and then for the rest of the day we think okay what what else could leap frog something forward beyond those one percent obvious improvements so we knock out anything anything we could think that's a one percent obvious improvement six inches in front of our face first and so that's how we've been able to stay folks dude you shared something on twitter about what's this football player named russell russell o'connor yeah oh my like god so i'm not i'm not a sports guy at all so i didn't even know who this person was and you'd shared this thing this basically who is he he he was was he was he good he was awesome he was a former line so line are you like the biggest guys on the football field so he's know probably i don't know three hundred pounds or something like that he's like six five he's he's six five three hundred and ten pounds when he played it when he was played it yeah and he was like a star start like he won he like won a super bowl ring he was a pro bowl awesome awesome player i remember it i think he was playing it on the sea h for a while that's that's kind of what i remember him he's now on twitter there's a couple of these athletes like dominic and sue russell that are like the kind of like on tech twitter somehow like and so russell and you can dm them and though and and he's been he's been replying to my dms yeah like matthew del do invited me to an event the other day i was like this is so cool that they've crossed over and they have got their athlete camp they've also got kinda of business tech interest and by the way the best thing about it is they come in so humble which is like they don't come in with this well you know who i am personality like this saturday was so we do i i started this basketball pickup game every saturday for founders and investors out here in the east bay and we rent this gym and then we we all just play pick up for like three hours and za pat truly came and he's a he's a former player on the warriors and he really tweeted like oh yeah i'll i'll play and i didn't invite him to the first week because i thought he i was joking when he replied and then he emailed me after for the first was like bro what happened i didn't get the way i was like oh was shit you actually were gonna show up and so he came this week he was fucking awesome dude like not awesome a basketball obviously he's awesome a basketball compared to us za is it is it like a big russian looking guy or i don't know where he's from yeah where is he from i don't know if serbia or think he's from i think he's from serbia i'm not i'm sure you i just google georgia geo yeah he's like seven foot a he's just he's a beast and so now he works for the warriors and he does like their business aside their operating basketball operations and investing for them and he's just super personable super funny guy like was totally humble and like you play yeah played with us for three hours and it was a lunch it was amazing i was talking so much trash to him and he was just such a good sport about it and was amazing so and i just i gotta say i was so i've been so impressed with the way that kind of like the athletes i've seen that crossover into business and tech they do it it was i don't know so much finesse that is really impressive wait what did you learn about i love seeing pro athletes in real life and just like seeing them joke around or like behind the scenes instagram videos where they're like hey watch i can jump over this thing and they jump over this like huge thing you're like oh my god these people like we're we're not the same type of person was there any athletic attributes that he had or was he just totally chilling well yeah for i mean if you see za play in the nba za was basically like a screen center like his number one skill was he could set a huge pick to get steph curry shot but when he played against us right he's steph curry he's just draining shots all over the court you he didn't even take these shots in the nba you never saw him take these shots and he's just he made all of them that's my pulling up from the three point line and he has i was like when's the last time he played he's like twenty nineteen i was like no way like no i've shot around he's mean i'm the basketball facility i should around but he's like i don't i don't even know last time like played it like a again like a kind of like a a competitive game so he a couple things so his warm up was like a real warm up like he like he's talking but he's doing these like hip flex openers and i'm like oh yeah he's like he's actually an athlete who's had to to like get his body ready many many many times over and so you see like a bunch of the dudes you come in and it's like oh here's this vc or here's this like tech founder and we're like know i guess try to touch my toes is that what i do to warm up like we don't know we don't even know what to we didn't even know what to do to warm up whereas he's like doing these like you know hip openers then the second thing is what he played hit obviously his game is a lot better than you see on tv because you gotta be a star in your role in the nba and he was a start in his role as this like paint protector screens set here he could do a lot of other things that he never got to show there the other thing is like he was like a bear so he was mostly you know just playing point guard passing the ball mostly you know obviously he could post any of us up he's got a foot on all of us you know in terms of height so he wasn't just abusing that but like we beat him the first game and then they won like six straight you beat them you beat the same if we won the first game yeah they were just like you know whatever we we got off to quick start but then the they went on a six o run or something like that just crushing everybody and then when we came back out to try to beat them as a very competitive game and then it's like we poked the bear it's like all of a sudden he started driving into the hoop and he started like playing like aggressive it's like oh yeah don't forget the bear can kill you the bear might be nice right now but the bear will let you know that like i could kill you if i wanted to and he just shows which dial he was gonna yeah he's like let's let's just put it to a six now we wear the three let's just put him the we'll just put it out a six just for a few minutes alright we'll back three listed the this has been a three up till now i'm just gonna show you that then i'll go back down wow that's awesome that i love seeing those types of people like just like in normal settings and so talk about russell so what russell doing i i saw him you shared it he has his website and it's here's why it's interesting one he's doing a forty day water fast that alone is interesting but what's even more interesting is he's doing it in a very like i wouldn't have expected this like six foot five three hundred pound football player to be so intros and if you go to his website do you know what the name of his website actually no we'll have it in front me if you just google his name and then go to his twitter and you can click off to the link he's got this website a it's built on ghost which is like a pretty like in the no nerdy web platform i think it's o fast dot com is at least where the that's where you he hosting it if you just google it you'll see it but it's like a yellow website and like he has email pop ups and like everything is set up really actually like exactly how it should be yeah like the email pop up is like thoughtful and then you go to a confirmation page that's thoughtful and he's blogging every single day and he's posting the same picture every day so as of now i think he started this thing at two sixty i have the notes six we buried the heat so he's he's gone he's going on a forty day water only fast he's lost a hundred pounds so far doing it and obviously it's not just about the weight loss it's about like sort of like the mental challenge and the mental clarity that he's getting as he's doing this like you know sort of this this really intense fast i think he's on day twenty one well he talks about how it's a spiritual thing and he and he basically like he he's just so much more thoughtful than i ever would have paid this guy just because i'm stereo typing like an nfl player and like his writing is very good and very clear and there's a lesson that he's learning each day and he talks about that and everything's well written it's just wonderful it it's a really really cool fourth day was the hardest he goes because this is where the body is transitioning into a new state so he's like i had headaches fatigue my body was transitioning to using fat as the energy source rather than you know the in the input of new you know carbohydrates or whatever and he looks good so you could see even when he started it you look at day one ray he restarted it he still looked pretty lean now you look at him at he's starting to get like skin and skin and skin and his writing is starting to change it's very fascinating and he's been tweeting about it every day as he goes and he's been blogging about i think it's awesome i love seeing this right yeah and he's also like he's on day twenty one he's on day twenty one he's also like a bitcoin max he's he's an interesting guy by the way there's a guy met named byron jones who retired this year he was like one of the best quarterback backs in the in the in the league and he retired i think at thirty so he came into the league probably twenty one twenty two and he retired at thirty which is a early retirement and he got paid very well probably made like i don't know eighty million dollars planned into the nfl but he had said something when he retired which is i can't run or jump anymore and which is shocking because this is like one of the most athletic guys that was in the nfl at time when he was playing and i went to a dinner he had a forty four inch bert wow forty four inch bert and that was just broad jump freak my buddy rom post this event called game time every year in la and it's basically a mix of investors and athletes that get together and so i've i've gone the last couple years and he hosts this dinner and at the dinner there was a few nfl players on the table and they all mentioned like i forgot what they would call a to orbital and and not orbital not the steroid it's like some shot the nfl players get basically it's a pain tyler shot a pain reduction shot pink and there they were just like dude that shot it's like magic and it's a curse because it doesn't make you feel better right it just makes you not feel pain no you feel better but sorry it doesn't cure an injury but it doesn't cure the underlying issues it's like you he's like we would go from you know sunday you play monday you feel bad tuesday you feel like man i was in a car accident and their body feels like i in a car accident you're like there's no way i'm gonna be able to practice on thursday and play next sunday like that's just like where my body at on tuesday versus sunday seems crazy and they said that like they're like man that you know like the culture and nfl was like you gotta play obviously and so these like a lot of guys get get in the habit of taking this one shot t something i forgot what was called and they take this shot and they're like it's like a miracle dude like within an hour you're running again and they're like you went from not you know like limp to like you're just back to you but also every time you do it it's like taking you know it shorten your career because it's just so bad for your body what you're actually doing to your body when you do that he's you're not like it's not like the underlying tissues of healed in the process it's kind of a crazy thing so i think one cool thing about what russell is doing is he's basically like trying to rewind the clock on you know when you're in when you're alignment they tell you to beef up and what he's doing is is doing a a sort of a rapid and drastic change in his physiology in order to get his weight down so that he can live a in a longer healthier life as he goes yeah i said i went to a culinary embolism i i don't know what that is is that a hard thing i had lace lungs no idea how you get lace lungs but that's wild a series yeah a series of surgeries l and ten lin l intended damage and getting up every day was just really hard i thought magically when i finished playing it would get easier but it got harder i had completely depleted my testosterone so he basically just explained he's like i was left in sham and so that's i guess one of the reasons why he's has done this and i think it's really really really cool i don't think i'm gonna do it shout out to i like i like seeing him do it what else you got i like this question i got so a guy tweeted at me i wanna get your take on it so his name's christian von great name the christian says question for you sean because goes what work seems like small boy stuff but actually packs a punch so we have this phrase we say on the pot all the time no small boy stuff and we don't even like spend a ton of time defining it because honestly small boy stuff is kinda obvious but i would say the general buckets of small boy stuff would be you know overly worrying about things small boy stuff would be thinking small rather than thinking big thinking short term rather than thinking long term you know caring too much about what other people think of you there's a whole bunch of things that you classify as small boy stuff like complaining when things get hard or things don't go your way complaining in general waiting in general these are all like small boy moves but i thought his question was great because the magic is in things that other people think are small but actually pack a punch and i had an answer but i'm curious what your answer would i'll give you me to go first you wanna go first i'll give you a very quick example we had our i keep talking about the off site my ceo the company he put all this effort into creating like little individual awards for people and like writing like appreciation notes and like being very thoughtful in the itinerary and i was like dude just like who gives a shit let's just get the room and hang out he put all this work into it spend hours and hours and hours one hundred percent worth it i i i was giving him a hard time and then afterwards i go nope you are right i was wrong that that is an example of things that seem below your pay grade that you you proved it was worth it love it i would actually also give you credit because that would be one of my answers which is admitting when you're wrong openly and quickly i remember hearing a story about one of the guys at sequoia who's awesome like help build sequoia into like most successful vc brand or one of the most in in a long time somebody asked like what makes him great they go all he cares about is getting it right he'll be in a meeting with you he'll say his opinion and somebody else will say their opinion and you know most people either start to debate or it's like we're talking past each other i'm talking about one thing you're talking about another and i'm the boss so i'm gonna get my way and he's like he's the first guy and he has this phrase os says well it would go okay nope i like your way better let's go with that like nope that's better like let's go with that is a awesome small but big thing you could do as a leader and in any company it sets the culture that it's not about who's right it's about getting it right getting to right you know over time here's what i wrote as as some of my answers i said small things that seem like small boy stuff is actually big doing customer service yourself early on so being on the first ends answering customer service emails questions feedback picking up the phone all that stuff manually on onboarding your first ten or a hundred users so literally yourself sitting there with them going to sit side by side with them having them install your product or on onboard onto your product and and answer their questions seems like an un scalable small boy way of you spending your time actually no it's a huge huge thing and it'll teach you a lot about your product and your market sending follow ups follow ups follow up with somebody who didn't answer you always feels like you know like a little low status bitch move but impacts a big punch follow ups are where all the magic is and i think there's also a big piece of follow ups which is a lot of people don't follow up because they don't hear back and they assume they say they're saying no they don't like me they hate they hate this idea i don't wanna let place they get in their head head about it they start assuming the worst instead assume the obvious people are busy and they forget people are busy and didn't get around to it yet and when you follow up with that mindset that's the sort of no small boy mindset centers like i'm offering something of value to this person of course they would want it maybe they haven't yet seen the value in it maybe i didn't con convey properly or they just haven't gotten around to it they're busy and that's okay i'm still here the other one i wrote was finding things that recur daily and making them two percent better because daily things that you do things you do with high frequency compound if if you made them slightly better and so and this is where i think a lot of people are like why are you optimizing for your shoes or your mattress or your pillow or whatever like i'm a stick for how a meeting starts i was like no at start of every meeting we say alright the purpose of this meeting is this and a good outcome of this meeting would be you why if you can't say x and y like we're not doing the meeting i'll stop people and i'll say no do this or when people talk i'll be like hey you know you're talking a really low voice and you're not sitting up straight like could you just do it like say it with some energy it'll make a difference and like but that's every meeting then people know that's how we do meetings and so once you teach how we do meetings we're gonna have a lot of meetings at this company so we're gonna make them better not just gonna have shitty meetings and let them let them slide so finding recurring things and making them slightly better because it'll compound over time so though that was my what was that what was your partner's name at mon fur for fe con fe con i think was like i don't know him well but i could only i could hang out with him for thirty seconds and i could just tell he's the man at seeing red seeing things that you do over and over and over again and be like yeah we're gonna get rid of that and we're gonna fix it by doing this this and this and it seems like you're like dude you're just slowing us down what are doing he's like no gotta go fast to go slow or you gotta go slow to go fast he seems like that time personality he did he do that all the time he was definitely he had fix you know know the hackers laziness this which was like i'm not gonna do something unless i'm unless it's clear that it's gonna that it matters but i'm just gonna do just to do shit that's the first thing second thing i'm not gonna do the same thing every day i if i'm doing it if have to do multiple times i'm automating this and same thing he would look around and be like yeah what's sean do what's jason doing like are the non technical people and he'd be like hey neil you see jason keeps what he's doing is he's going and finding each person manually on twitter you should just scrape this whole list put it in a database and and copy paste this code snippet so that he could put that on his machine so that he could just have his leads ready so he can go faster he would do a lot of stuff like that like he told a story early at app eleven love was a a mobile ad tech company that now worth billions of dollars and he was cofounder of it and what fe con told me a story he's like yeah adam the ceo he's like one thing he really cared about was his dashboard like what does our dashboard look like so that i have visibility and he's like i was like i kinda watched that adam to see like is there really any value out this or he's he just you know sometimes ceo has just had pet projects they just want to look nice and he's like is it that or is their value so he shattered him he's like i'm gonna say my computer said at your computer you show me what are you looking at with this dashboard one what do you do with it and so he showed him and he's like yeah i like this i look at this and that tells me who we need to go after for these deals and i need to figure out how much to offer them so that i can get them faster like you know instead of just saying you should work with us for these features if i just make a monetary offer that's better than their current ad network they'll switch and he's like okay so you need to figure out this list you need this data and then you need to know a projection of how much we can make with them so you can offer less than that but still more than what they're probably making for the current ad network and i just show you which what the current ad network is in this dashboard i'll just figure that out by looking at their sdk blah blah a look he basically put together this like command center for the ceo and he's like he basically built a sales tool rather than working on features of the product he's like i'm gonna build you something and what's what they did was they would go to a developer they said say you should use our ad network and they're like already have an ad network said like cool i'm guessing your ad network pays you nine dollar cpm and they're like yeah something like that he's said cool we'll pay you twenty two dollars he's like how can you do that don't they are ad networks better i could sit here at a convince conventional ad network better but i'll just sign this paper that set says we're already gonna pay you twenty dollars no matter what like i'm just confident it's gonna perform because i know i know works better and they're like okay he's like but here's the year you gotta switch and we have these two engineers standing here at next me they're gonna help you switch today and then they were just and they just rolled through the ad market because they were able to go to people and make them no brainer offers how did they make them no brainer offers they because they had this command center internally that was how big is this app what are they currently using how much are they currently making how much do we think we can make of of them and then how do we have a spread there that we can work with and so i thought that that was a great example of fe figuring out how to make the company successful in a way that most engineers would not do because most engineers just wanna work on product and not even product like the under the hood parts of the product which is like even worse than making the product better dude this is the most wholesome episode we've done in like two months we weren't talking about like ceos fight each other and shit no one's making no one's getting made fun of we're totally aligned lots of take home value here this is this is a this is like the most wholesome we've done in the long time i actually am like i feel like i'm learning this is this episode is good because i've i'm sitting here in a note like taking notes i'm learning that's a get some learning yeah love that well that's it that's the episode good pod i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a less travel never looking back