alright this is part two of the episode with jeremy gif he is the first employee at tiny he was there from the beginning when they turned five million dollars of equity into roughly five hundred million dollars of business value and took the company public just by buying businesses so last time we asked him you know about those early days about the first business they bought the mistakes they made the lessons they learned this episode is different now we're asking if i was doing tiny today how would i do it how can i do the same thing that they did what what businesses is would i buy what trends what opportunities does he see and he tells us the single best investment opportunity he sees today and why he's putting his money behind that so this is a fascinating episode part two which whichever joy then i feel like got rude world to know i could be what i want to alright i put my all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back i wanna ask you about opportunities so what business opportunities trends or ideas do you have that people who are listening can kind of expand their their scope right i remember when i was trying to be an entrepreneur one of the big big problems i had was i only thought the world was this big tiny little circle and i was only looking for opportunities in that inside by tiny circle and it was only when i listen to podcast and i kinda wish m mfa was a podcast i wish existed at the time but it's like only when i would listen to certain people talk or hang out at a dinner would hear some idea that was not something i'd ever consider my circle got bigger and bigger and bigger and then the more of that circle got bigger the more opportunities i saw so if suffice i told you what are the j opportunities that you see right now that somebody could do or that you you know you think a smart person could go go for the like second most interesting opportunity i what i'd be doing if i wasn't raising a fund to to do these these buyout it would be finding people with audiences and either buying businesses for them or building businesses for them so i think that i think it's like a anomaly like a the business in its toddler stage that the way most people with audiences monetize through ad reads or sponsorships i think it's kind of like hollywood when you you know your a big star you'd get paid to to hold up a a glass of coca cola or something and i think every person with an audience will eventually the money that they make from equity in a business that they own will massively dwarf the money that they make from ad rates or or sponsorship reads but the big problem here is like generally if you're a great podcast or content creator the last thing you wanna do is buy a business for one like that's risking capital that's hard or even start and run a business and so i think there's a big opportunity to basically build a business around someone with an audience and come to them and say look like i will be the ceo of this thing i think like you know this is the perfect product for you guys to like really organically use and like and talk about for a long time and i will run it and you know we'll split the equity or something like that you know joe rogan did this on it and sold that company for for for a lot of money and there's other examples doug d with his cars and bids and the people are starting to do this but it's still very early and i think that like if i was just gonna start a business d novo i would say okay what's who are content creators that really they like and what is the perfect product for them and then just like make it easy you know it's a pretty low risk proposition for you guys for example but if you do it right like even if an like with an audience of your size you can have nine figure exit you know over four or five years and that'll obviously do dwarf the money you make from advertising if anyone wants to do this sean at sc dot com feel free to hit me up by the way this is how tiny doing this you martina tina which is the the the drink they're doing with hub they bought a your bam mate company and then they he's he loves mat and he'd been drinking for a long time it's a perfect type of product so they did that for him where if lieberman was like and now i'm gonna take a break from my science stuff to go become a search and go find a business a pe deal to do like that'd be crazy for him but but tiny doing it makes sense they also did it with james clear they built the have app right so so you know another app versus ad type of thing so i think they're executing on it well this is also the how congo brands built prime so they they did a lot new and then they were like okay cool we're gonna do prime they went and pitched logan paul and k and they were like hey you guys are gonna be the promotion engine of this you get equity you know significant equity in this and we're gonna be the operational back end for this and we know we know how to do this we can build a in their case what's probably gonna be a ten billion dollar plus company of that that brand yeah it's it's definitely starting but i think like the trenton group has been very good at it with you know they did doug mu and steven real ron manila with the the hunting stuff and it's definitely starting to happen but i i think like a more you know this is a little bit exaggerated but i think most people in a yc batch could find a podcast and just say okay you're gonna be the audience c cofounder for this thing and we're gonna give you thirty percent or something and we're gonna work with you and it's gonna be a product that you can sell very organically and because the the broad thesis is that these audiences are still super under priced basically that the equity you're giving up is you'll be more than compensated for and i think that'll last for for for quite a long time and the long tail is really good too right like you could do it with a very niche youtuber and and still sell a more expensive product or or or do it multiple times or whatever and i i i basically just think everyone with an audience will eventually have some really tightly integrated organic product to sell love it alright so that's a great opportunity which is go find a content creator who's got us like a a a great audience high trust and basically buy or build the perfect business for them and have them be your audience cofounder i think that's a it's basically an really unfair distribution advantage you could generate for yourself by doing that alright love that what's what's another one one other trend that i'm just really bullish on is basically the idea that everything in the modern world is like poison and toxic i live new york like the air is making me dumb the water is like ruining my hormones all the food that i eat at any restaurant is like full of seed oils and you know everything that i eat is like some combination of soy corn and wheat and the wheat is all sprayed and gl like she's everything is really bad for you but it's like this huge and i'm kind of a freak about it like i have water filters and air filters and buy all this specific food and stuff but it's a it's a really mentally taxing and i really wish i think it could even just take the form of like the wire cutter but for you know these are products that are not gonna kill you and and the thing is it's such an nefarious problem that like it runs the gamut it's like clothes that isn't made out of polyester bedding that isn't bad for you cleaning products like you could do every single thing in the house i would love to have a wire cutter kind of thing which is a great business for just like this is the version of this thing that is not gonna kill you dude check this out so go to live dash oasis dot com i found this website the other day like coworker send it to me and it's a they say do you know what's in your water ninety percent of the water sources contain toxins micro plastics and other contaminants and then they rank which water as in the cities but also which water bottles have wanna the water a brand i see one that i used to have it's very bad it says out of one hundred it's in very bad anywhere well that's the thing right even you try you think you've done it and then it turned out the thing you bought doesn't even work like it's very complicated well i and i go to this i said like i'm scared because i also see the thing that i have and it says bad and then you click it and it make you pay five dollars and this is definitely a thing that i purchased recently i'm like fuck like i gotta see which water bottles like you click on when it's like sad you horrible i just want like okay like i need a shampoo what is the one that like hub and and run patrick i'll agree on and i'll just buy that one you know yeah and i can i think that can exist for almost every single thing in your house ask sean why he's drinking that water i know why yeah we we hosted this event this camp m event and it's we do it at mister beast house we're in like remote north carolina somewhere and we all show up at this billionaire shows up he's got like you know his security guard with them or whatever and i'll just fast it like oh how does this guy travel it's flew and private he's got a security guard but then the thing that really stood out was he had security guard carries in this case of waters so we had fiji bottles of water which is like it's in a plastic and you probably got that because you thought you're being fancy you you wanted to make a good impression you're so impressed with my choice here at fiji like i went i went for it and instead he's got his own like aqua and glass bottles and he was just he knows always be drinking he didn't say anything but i was like hey what are you doing that except except by he made the noise whenever you but he's when he telling you chicken it out of what are you i switched to aqua for my drinking water for my family i bought an athena shower head filter so because the other things like oh you're drinking one thing but then you'll go shower it bathe your naked body in and like the dirtiest tap water with like a thirty year old you know shower head in my house and so if a f i n a dot com i bought a shower head from there there's like filters that water and so i'm just like one by one replacing different parts of my my house to try to try to get rid of some of the the bad stuff yeah the traveling with the crate of mineral water that's a that's a good that's a good way to spend money i like that alright so two good ones i like i like the wire cutter for products that'll kill you by the way it's like it's just wire cutters is kinda like value based yeah and in this case it's health and i think that's just like a such a simple model that somebody could do it's probably like ten years of awesome execution and real like love and care like only the right person should start this business it's not like yeah anybody could can do it but i do wish somebody did it i mean examined did it really well for supplements like it it certainly can be done it's just i would know i would use it every day let's do a couple more transit opportunities you had talked i asked you a question when we were hanging out yesterday which was what are what's a business type that you really love maybe you guys didn't even make an acquisition in the space but like what are categories that you really love and you mentioned i don't know like a regulation compliance type of category can you explain that one yeah for sure so like anytime a government anywhere introduces some kind of arc rule you have to you if you don't follow you go to jail it's like the ultimate kind of motivation to buy right and sometimes it's gonna be really difficult so you know we looked at a bunch of examples one one was it was just great company itself company in italy that just did banking regulation for all make sure all the banks are compliant with all these things and that's like an amazing business because first of all that you're going long italian regulation which is probably a great trade in and of itself but like in the future italy is gonna have more rules than it does today and then aside from that it's like a bank is not gonna rip that out ever and it's you know it hits that golden criteria which is it's relatively cheap but mission critical that's like a really great one and there's a bunch of these there there's all these you know for buying a house for for vetting tenants for ky and am if you if you start looking for it day to day you see a lot like i just rented a car and there's like a process there where they i check my license against some database and i'm sure that piece of software like those are great because i love it because it's like a low lift and the downside is super high and you don't really wanna mess with it once you've got it working and the other inch interesting thing about them is that exists for every country or at least every western country and so you can go find the software that does that for you know europe or or one specific country or whatever and there's gonna be multiple versions of those even canada like canada has different rules in america and so that's either it's you know cheaper software products or two different companies so i love i love those those businesses as well and they're also like fairly ai resilient i think because it's really again it's like medical stuff it's really high downside so you don't wanna like trusted with ai and then it turns out you weren't in compliance and you're gonna get a huge find or go to prison or something yeah i yeah i made a bet recently in the regular a regulatory compliance type of space and i was like you know we have this thing on the pod that we talked about one chart businesses which is like a business that you don't need a a full business plan for you could just put one chart up on the screen and you say that's why i'm doing this and the one in this case was basically that regulation only goes in one direction it only goes up into the right nobody ever rolls back any of these needs it's only gonna increase and so if you can become you know maybe the go to provider or like a key piece of software in a space like that is it is just such a bet such a bet you wanna make because you know that regulation only goes up you know that like this compliance compliance requirements they don't just say yeah you know what forget them you don't need all that compliance stuff anymore like this is never gonna happen it's only gonna go in one direction and like you said you do it or you don't get customers or you get go to jail it's like well that's a pretty strong motivator so like you know i think people are gonna wanna either get customers or avoid jail and it's just like the right type of space to be and it's the type of space that twenty four old me would not have known or appreciated that that's a better business to go into than what i was doing at that time which was like dating apps social network like cool new sexy you know thing and now i'm like it's kinda like what's sexy now is like a knee length skirt it's like you know show me a compliance business and i'll i'll show you my interest the other big opportunity for someone who who's wanting to start a business is like you can front run these things right you can see what's gonna pass you can see what's just passed and you can be the first provider for that and have a huge leg up especially if it's a fairly niche thing but you could very well be the only option for a couple of years which is a huge advantage right why don't you start these things instead of just investing in them i don't i don't like operating businesses i'm not i don't think i'm very good at it and it's not what i enjoy doing and so i think everyone should try and to like really stay in their zone of genius as much as they can i think that it's like personally very good and also good for the world if that happens and so i'd rather like be allocate capital to the because i think i'm good at allocating and capital to the person who maybe needs capital and is really excited about building something alright two more things on here the first i i actually don't have context on this but i'm very interested just because title the boy versus the guy yeah so the boy is the guy so goes you could go a bunch of ways they could go yeah yeah there and and there are a lot of different readings especially depending on what c coast you're on yeah basically it's it's like it's the idea of being a lieutenant or being like a pro j effectively would be the the the class year way to say it i guess and so you know and generally there's like there's the trusted lieutenant who is you know just the solid number two really important but their whole identity is being like a lieutenant to the number one person and then there's this other genre which is like on the west coast it takes shape as a chief of staff a lot where it's just you're kind of this like you're either this young rising superstar there's the sense of like you're really gun for number one and and the idea like the the what maybe noticed originally it was especially in the valley every like billionaire has one or two really young smart boy generally who just kind of like flow it around them and there's this kind of task agreement of like you come work for me for two or three years you shadow me you you you're my apprentice and then i will back you and like open doors for you and it was kinda funny like at some point know i was in like social situations where it's like oh like it's kind of like flying under the the flag of a lord or something like everyone is you know the everyone is like you know going on the private jets of these principles or whatever and they themselves are probably broke but like they very much live this lifestyle because they're like under the protection of a lord and so i think it's like there there's another a new kind of piece of information that i've figured out about this is it's also an age gap thing so if you're within twenty years of the founder or the number one person in the organization you're almost always gonna be a guy and if you think of like all the great firms or even you know companies where someone has become the new number one there's almost always at least a twenty year gap between the person just because otherwise you're too close and so i think that dictates it a lot as well but is these two different things of the other way to put it would be that like the principal really sees something in this young person and wants to you know can tell there they're like on a rocket ship they're not gonna be an employee forever or whatever but it's like you give me two or three years and i can really accelerate things for you and i think like that pairs very nicely with the cold email thing which is you know i generally think like if you wanna start a company you should just start a company don't go like work to get experience or whatever but i think this might be the sole exception which it can really open doors of either investment or vouch or connections or whatever and you know there's lots of examples of this like i know like ben casa like very wrote very publicly about being reid hoffman chief of staff you know blake masters with peter t you know sam alt was this to paul graham like there's there's kind of all these examples of it that i think are are really instructive i just recorded an episode with joe lo who was this for peter till like yeah because basically peter till pro and now has started i don't know more billion dollar companies than anyone else in the country and and i think you know he's fascinating guy because when he was eighteen nineteen twenty he was an intern at paypal yeah he then he was at peter's family office then he started pal here with him and then you know then eventually you know went on to do his own and joe's done this for a bunch of people one of my close friends was was his his chief at one of his chief staffs and it's an amazing launching pad and if anyone out there i'm looking for a boy never thought i'd say that but under this context i'm am sure i sure enough looking for a young boy so we need to start it we need to start a community called a weed at weed and boys you're better know this but i've had four people who are kind of in this bucket i i hired them when they're let's say between the ages of sixteen to twenty and that have gone on to either become you know gone become millionaires and in some cases millionaires and like successful contact creator podcast type of folks as well and and it's happened four times already so i'm looking for my fifth yeah i think a print thing is really underrated you know you think about it in the context of being like a blacks or a carpenter or but i think for a lot of these things it's the single best way to learn hey i had a question i noticed that you studied do you study philosophy at columbia yeah that so i remembered as a kid i i saw this crazy stat that i think it was the majority of people who scored really high on not the bar but the test to get into law school they actually most of them they all sat most of them were they studied philosophy that was their their undergraduate degree and then i saw you studied philosophy and that's kind of an interesting way to because now you're raising this massive hundred million plus fund did that what what did you learn in philosophy that you think is gonna help you make a good business person yeah i don't know it's it's there's a big it's a big club you know leave it to a philosophy major to know every philosophy major but there's tons of names you know reid hoffman peter t peter fe stuart butter field it's like this weirdly over represented thing my favorite that a philosophy majors is that it's something like in the top ten percent of earners they're the highest earning of all people so if you take the top ten percent of every major they're the highest earning in general they're not the highest earning but like there's that kind of like group at at the far end i don't know exactly what it is i mean i i can speak to my own experience i think it's just like if you're gonna spend four years thinking about a set of questions thinking about the most fundamental questions is just really appealing that's certainly what it was to me i don't think i really learned anything that's super it it's it's funny like you know i'm canadian i had to get a visa to be in america and a big thing thing with visas is like is what you studied relevant to what you're working on and you know the answer for philosophy as far as the us government con is concerned is no it's not relevant to anything but i'm always like well and no it relevant to everything it's like how should i live what should i you know what should i hope for what can i know these are relevant to every field and i i think maybe the other way maybe the other cut at it is it's just like being interested in the most fundamental and the most abstract versus like learning you know something more applied it's something about that just kind of draws these very kind of curious i i i guess like intellectual and i don't really mean that in a complimentary way just like people who think like to think a lot but there's also a big difference between people who study philosophy and undergrad and then move on and people who study philosophy for their whole lives like those people are really people who just like they they thought they they think like you know what i actually wanna think about like what is a good way to live for the rest of my life and i think that's a little crazy right like at some point you wanna go okay i've like explored this now at time to go go and move on i wanted to ask you about hold coast which seems to be the new trend or people buying businesses i think a lot of them take inspiration from tiny what you guys did what's your take on know the hold code trend or influencers out there who are like i own five hundred businesses you know like what what's your take on all that bragging about how many businesses did you own is really weird and probably like a contra signal how good you are and by the way like anyone who owns a lot of businesses was will and should tell you that like i know andrew would certainly if you know if you could have tiny one business that would be much better and so it's always a weird thing to say oh i've acquired a hundred businesses or whatever i guess unless you're like constellation or shore capital or something where the whole point of it is that you like buy a million businesses because yeah it's always better if you could have the results from one company that would be way better than than having to own a bunch of them and that leads to the point about holding companies which is the thing that people don't understand about holding companies there's two like there's two real reasons why you had start a holding company versus a fund or some other structure one is because you wanna hold everything forever and i think that's a fairly faulty premise so usually when people think because so people look at generally they're looking at two places when they think about the merits of holding everything forever they look at buffet or they look at venture capitalists you know you you don't wanna be the person who sold google at the ipo or whatever and and and buffett famously owns everything although that's like not actually true buffett sells stuff all the time to your point sam about him being a little bit different than his public persona but like okay so both of those groups buffett is talking about railroads and insurance companies and energy companies these are companies that ostensibly will exist for fifty or a hundred years and venture capitalists even more than that they are looking specifically to find the one in a thousand company that will be a fifty year company but most companies are not fifty year companies especially not five million dollar software companies you know like it's it's kind of crazy to buy a chrome plugin in and say like yeah i need to own this thing for forty years it's like no is first of all like software is really difficult my kids will inherit this chrome plugin yeah you're not buying one of two railroads in canada you know like you're you're buying the chrome plug and so first of all just thinking like oh i need to hold this forever i think is a bit flawed and then second of all if you get the chance to sell it for a great price like that is probably the way that you maximize returns if you're actually interested in just making the most money and so that's one thing withholding companies the other is that i think when the more investor type start them they really don't appreciate a holding company is part of it is what you're holding the other half is a company like you just run a big operating business you know it's tiny has i can't remember it's like north of twelve hundred employees across portfolio like that's a big business that you're running and for most investors that is a completely conscious skill like if you're a good investor the last thing you should be doing you when you meet a great investor you're you're not thinking oh you'd be a great as the ceo of a twelve hundred person company you know like generally those are very far apart and so what it can end up happening is you spend a ton of your time actually just operating a business and you're not able to invest which is the thing that you're probably the best at and so yeah in general i think they're quite they're quite overrated and you also actually said you're like most harvard guys who are trying to buy a plumbing business they shouldn't buy a plumbing business they just go and start a plumbing business yeah this one always cracks me up it's like your resume is you know harvard goldman sachs harvard business school bridge water and then it's like ohio plumbing company and you're owing i always think like i get it i i i you know the math works it can be lucrative whatever but i always think like imagine if you would you know you're this brilliant young person and if you just move to ohio and you were eighteen and started a plumbing company you probably control all the plumbing in the state you know what i mean like you just wipe the floor with them and it's always weird that people wanna go through all these loops i think a lot of it is just to make themselves feel very fancy like oh you know i set up this steel and acquisition these investors and stuff but a lot of these businesses i think if you just started them you could really wipe the floor with with the existing competition you have one more thing that you're known for which is something like the the pre and post fall i don't know what this is can you explain this somebody texted me this they oh you gotta ask about pre and post fall so i define fall it's like a pseudo biblical idea but i really define it as like appearing in your life where you've really been brought to your knees by whatever could be a death or a breakup or you know health scare or or or bankruptcy or all these kinds of things that like really just kind of humble you truly not like how most people say humble which is like oh i just got on the cover of forbes i'm so humble it's like yeah it's actually be exact opposite offset but like truly truly humbled and i really think that that changes someone for the rest of their life and i think it happens to everyone i think it happens totally at random times it could be early in life it could be late in life but you can just kind of see it of you know the the the extreme example of this would be like a veteran who's been in a lot of combat like nothing is really gonna shake someone who's been in a bunch of firefight you know and and i think that applies too is if you've been through really hard really dark experiences i think a lot of entrepreneurs they have their fall while they're building their business you know it can get really difficult and hard and lonely and yeah the best way to describe it is like after when someone's post fall you can just kind of see it in their eyes that they've been through worse and so they're not gonna it's just not gonna shake them that much versus somebody's pre fall and by the way you can become very successful you can be late in life but nothing bad as it really happened to you and i view that as kind of a liability in some sense of if you're gonna partner a work with them of like boy like when something goes off the rails here this might be a really big blow up because of course like you know if you're a broke kid it's one thing but if you like a high flying person the the way in which you can blow up is far more spectacular and and yeah it's really just like have you really been humbled by life in like a true way and and i think when you look at it that way it's quite evident that you know people either have or haven't it and i think it makes a big difference do you wanna talk about the special situations distressed venture stuff or or do you wanna to say that yeah we can we can talk about that okay tell us what what is the what is what is the opportunity here yeah so the opportunity is this is like really combines a lot of the factors that i love which is effectively there's this whole class of venture backed companies where they raised too much money in especially in twenty and twenty one and so you get this like strange phenomenon where you can have a business that's doing ten million dollars a year of revenue and growing thirty percent a year but maybe it raised forty or fifty million dollars and such that like the founder is probably not gonna make any money because the pre stack is so high and then the the other part is the investor is really not gonna make any money not in the sense that they want to so venture investor they like they want a good investment to return the fund generally and so it's like this weird thing where you have this great asset you know if if if you guys owned a business that was doing ten million dollars of revenue growing thirty percent a year you'd be very happy with that but if it's owned by a venture investor and run by a founder who's got this pre stack the founder is not gonna make money the venture investor doesn't really care about it so it's kind of this like in some sense it's actually a worth this asset and so you know i we've done these deals a tiny before and and what i'm really interested in is doing a lot more of them personally and so i've been talking to a lot of founders and talking to a lot of gps about this and there's just this huge opportunity and the opportunity is really to take a business that's because of its cap table it's just broken it's not working for anyone and turn into a business that works so like say the founder owns ten percent and you know the pre stack is fifty million turn into a business where they own thirty percent and they can run it profit and it can be like a great business like a question that i always asked founders is what would you do if you just bootstrap the singer if you own the whole thing and generally that's a different answer than if they were in their current situation and it's a service for the venture investors as well because they you know they have to be responsible for these things they gotta go on the board they gotta audit them they gotta think about them to a lot of these companies take couple of their time and they're not the ones are gonna drive returns and so it's just as weird kind of vest of the fact that venture returns have been so high that there's all this waste like there's these ten twenty thirty million dollar year companies that are not really making money for anyone and this this weird situation right because there's nothing wrong with the business but you can get them for cheaper than you would otherwise because there's this like weird second and third order incentive set right normally a distressed business the business is broken yeah exactly here it's that the cap table is broken that the the goals of the investors don't line up with the realities of the business is that right exactly exactly is that what you're gonna do yeah that's i love special situations i like all different types you know i think when tiny when tiny started bootstrap businesses were kind of a special situation and now it's way more popular and i view this special situation is a really nice way to i i love a good special situation i mean that's a it's a better way it's totally totally special situation has a lot of nicer to asset yeah yeah yeah yeah for for sure but it's it's like it's like this idea of oh there's all these people that want different things and if you can just like arrange the bricks so to speak that everyone gets what they want you can like unlock this puzzle and like with what i'm doing everyone is better off the vcs are happy the founder is happy like everyone's better off and i love those i love those situations when you can do them and then it also to go back to our like initial thing it's a very specific thing so you're gonna come to me because you know that's what do and i'm gonna get stuff that other people don't get because i'm doing this very specific thing and i i from my particular form of laziness i love it when people just know what i offer and then they just come to me it makes things so much so much easier than having to go to them and convince them to do something you know which i love because i like you to love me like it's also it's also rare you remind me of myself i i think that's why i love you yeah you're great because i see part of me and you by them it's the opposite of most people come on the podcast and say and most people come on the podcast and say you gotta work super hard hard work is everything and both me and you were like we asked a different question was like how can i be lazy and win the most and we're like yeah i i take pride in a certain form of laziness i'm gonna be super active in one area but i i absolutely reject a certain type of sweat that's how i think about it do you think about it the same way yeah totally i i i another like archetype i have of this is like you can divide the world into the into the you know the arnold sc kinda type and then maybe the the sam alt type and it's not to say that sam alt doesn't work hard and arnold sports and smart they are both examples of doing both of course but like you know sc aggregates it's all literally like in the biography it's about like laying more bricks like lifting more days more hours it's just grinding and when he becomes an actor it's like more audition more movies more practice versus maybe someone who like alt who like found this big opportunity and like was really early on it was really clever about how he set it up and everything and it's more about making these like moves and probably like you sean like i i find there's a certain elegance in in doing things with like the least amount of moves and other people aren't don't like that like sam i i bet you're probably more like people who work really hard grind it out like put in the hours i know you you have shack i think shack in a lot like this like just like out work around out you're act like you don't lie you looked around like know but you are like that you're like hard equals good because hard means i'm hard whereas i'm like easy equals good because it means that i'm clever right looks like you admire a different attribute no yeah i mean there's value i think it just sweating sometimes like you know i think that sometimes because a thing is hard therefore it is good for you i definitely believe that but i mean i only work like forty hours a week i work a normal work week but yeah i mean i i fall a little bit in the middle i do think that like just doing a hard thing for the sake of it being hard there is like some type of like divine goodness within that yeah and you gotta do both like there there there's you know for the lazy person there's periods of really hard work and and vice versa but but i think when people say they don't work hard and they still like achieve greatness i think they're full shit like sean you say that you are lazy dude yeah you'll you're you'll he'll till text me a paragraph like a book at like ten pm like you're still doing shit you're just you're laying on the couch while your wife is watching tv and you're on your phone you know you're not at a desk i've view laziness as not that you don't do anything it's that you don't do things you don't wanna do i just do all the things i wanna do at full force because that's how i because i like them i want to do them i just don't do a lot of things that i don't wanna do i i i'm very selective or cheap about how much effort i'm willing to put into things that i don't actually wanna do and i'm willing to be lazy on those right it's kinda like the definition of work versus play work is you know work is how do you define work one way of finding work is it's the stuff that you don't wanna do voluntarily and play as the stuff that you do wanna do voluntarily and i just opt into a lot more of play than i think most people do and i'm i'm i have a lower tolerance for work that i don't wanna do than i would say the the average successful person and the reason i like jeremy coming on is because it's cool to see examples of a different play style because we've seen a bunch of the other play style because it gets a lot of it sounds amazing the david go the work harder grind more show up early leave late you know like that i get that that's a cool play aisle it's just not what everybody wants to do so i like hearing other play styles yeah i mean sam you're you're definitely right like i'm i'm sure i i do a bunch of stuff that i'm not even conscious that i'm working a lot harder than other people because it it just feels an innate but i think like another way to look at it is there's certainly type of person who the way you soothe yourself so like some people will just soothe themselves by putting in way more hours like you know working on that like diminishing marginal return piece of like off i just put in a few more hours on this and other people i think it's like just gotta figure out the exact right thing to do here like what is the exact right move and you spend all your time thinking about that you guys wanna do a fifty mile race at me in august dude i've been training to for this thing and i had to run ten miles on sunday and i haven't ran that far forever and i'm just like depleted so you wanna come work hard come come join this race with me yeah that's probably a good one everyone who loves like the super endurance stuff it's probably a grind at heart because it's just like about if i do so much of this i it'll just be better than everyone else it's sucks i just dude what's when we're in austin last week we were hanging out with do you know isaiah photo you know what that it is sam no no i don't he is a youtuber who lives in austin and he's got probably like ten million youtube subscribers and if you go look at like what are his popular videos are like what kind of was his break he would do stuff like these challenge videos these are kinda like grind videos counting to a hundred thousand like that he's like how i will like this jaw breaker as many times it takes till the job breaker disappears how many lick did he take he'll hold a lighter on and he'll be like how long till this slider just goes out like how many lighter food is in how long does that last it's like a hundred million views or whatever right people love this shit and it's you know to his credit he found what people wanted and it he gives it to him at the same time i'm like oh man i'd shoot myself if i had to do that because that's not that's not a path that's very appealing to me but that same personality i'm like oh what you do for fun outside of view tubing and he was like i love running same thing i'm like yeah god what's the deal with you runners he's like yeah really wanna run i wanna start a run club but love running and i'm like if somebody me y you gotta run today they just said sean you got a bad day today and i'm not trying to be a runner but there's so many successful people that love running and that that there's like really high correlation there on the other hand i win did a podcast with mon i jeremy i assume you know yes yeah andrew told me he's like he he was my first value investing man crush and steps is great mona ish that's the first time you done that when's the last time you did that pepper front years ago when i'm at my wife yeah it sounds like you got breath this yeah exactly and he was like yeah i take a nap every day he's like a good year is i make one or two investments which is like literally clicking a button yeah he's not even like he runs a company he's like buying a public stock and he's not even buying he's not day trading he's not analyzing everything he's like one or two good investments in he year would be a fantastic year and he reads and he chills and i was like man the both guys i would say are winning they're winning at their craft like to have ten million youtube subscribers is phenomenal he's built a wonderful life for himself and the other guy you know as a phenomenal of value investor but the lifestyle and the the things that they value are so different you know one guy maybe has stomach losing seventy five million dollars of net worth in a day and he's gotta be cool with that and the other guy got a stomach waking up tomorrow and being like how do i come up with the next crazy video and it was really remarkable to see that so you know i think jeremy you were talking about like you know you sort of pick your prison in a way yeah i'm assuming you've sort seen these different games that people play and and decided which ones is appealing to you it's funny i guys like mon are like i call them the nap room guys like there's a whole set of value investors that have a like a room he's like this is my napa for opened it up i was this is amazing it's that a thing nap room guys yeah they're i i've met at least like through or four different value investors like that who like they have a place to nap i wanna ask you about that same idea but in a different way so i'm gonna give you my observation and i want you to i i i wanted know if you have any specific stories that that line up with this so my observation we we talked about does andrew grind right he comes on here acts super zen super calm super philosophical he wants to be like warren buffett he's playing bridge half the day reading and then once it twice the year he just bless us with a beautiful investment right but you know one thing i have seen andrew do is he may not work super super hard but he works very fast he is incredible at sniffing out opportunities he incredible at fast follow ups he moves really quickly when he's excited about something that's the first thing i noticed the second thing i noticed about andrew is not only does he move really fast when he's excited about an opportunity just keep texting you about it her or he'll keep prodding until he finds out more information he'll he'll fly to meet you right away but he also will will be persistent so like i think with some of the businesses it's like yeah used to you i love that business so i emailed him every month for like five years and then finally one month they were like yeah i am willing to sell the business and i think that was the case for maybe litter box or dr where he was just emailing the founder continuously aero press same thing he was just emailing the guy like hey yep have you thought about selling this month hey if he's thought about selling this month some version of that question hanging around the hoop in fact when we sold the milk road same thing happened we tried to sell the business we walked away from these guys at the last minute and if i'm them i'm like oh hate the you know hate those guys screw them well let's let's kill those guys and instead they were super professional about it they were like okay no problem like sounds like you have you wanna go different direction and they hung around the hoop a month later he says hey i didn't see any announcement like no deal went through and we were like no you know we decided not to do it for this in this reason he's like well we're still interested and he i was like wow that was so different than how i i would i would have done that so we made it a practice for us whenever we're buying businesses it's like a don't get personally offended when it happens and we schedule the automated reminder a month or three months later let's just follow back up and just make sure that we check in and say hey is there still an opportunity here we still like the business we like to then we like it more now you know like if there's if there's still an opportunity to let us know that idea of hanging around the hoop are there any other stories either on andrew's moving fast and or being persistent and just following up over and over again that you remember yeah i mean on the fast thing it it's annoying but it's true the the most successful people in the world respond instantly i cannot believe it's kind of infuriating how true it is but when you email the billionaire ceo it's like a thirty second response and when you email his vice president it's you know it can be a week or something that is just so true and i i really try to and force myself to respond fast i i wrote this little script for for gmail that it archives my email every twenty four hours so i like have to respond it just disappears and i feel like it's a really good nudge of like just send send the simpler text messages like response and andrew is like super super high paced really energetic the the thing that comes to mind is when you're at you know lunch or whatever with him if he thinks of someone you should meet he will pull out his phone and like send the intro email before you've even like finish the sentence and it's good and bad like sometimes you you're like wait like i don't wanna meet that person or whatever but but it's also just this like if you think about it in terms of iterations it's so many more iterations of just making that happen and also like movement especially when you're in an operator movement creates information like you learn more by doing more things and so it's a really powerful combo and then yeah and in terms of following up i think just being a little andrew to call like being dennis the menace like just after just being a little bit more willing to just kind of like poke your head in even when it might be a little like you know go or or whatever can be really can be really powerful it's kind of that just like hey like you still interested in selling you still interested in selling you still interested in selling that dennis a cement bit that's a good one that's a good yeah and he's willing to be the menace more than most people like he's he is willing to he does meta like people do say you're meta me stop it but it also like really pays off because just like oh you know it's and if you think about it it's like okay fine like who's that guy who emails me every three months like maybe you had a bad day or you're done with the business or whatever and like alright i guess i see that i has to say you know and yeah it's it's incredibly it's incredibly powerful and and more people should do it and just generally be less afraid of like i learned this doing a lot of cold email for sales you if you send out a thousand cold emails you're gonna get one or two responses that are just someone's going ballistic like if you email me again i'll sue you or whatever arena but the other nine hundred ninety eight it's like either positive or no response or neutral and it's just like all upside basically alright so i wanna shift gears to what i call the spicy hot take section the semi controversial opinion section if this was if we in a club right now this is that part where the dj starts like the beats about to drop and we all know things are about to get a little little crazy little fun that's what's about to happen in this podcast okay so here's the first prompt i'm just gonna prompt you and then i want you to kinda give us your rant on it first prompt is about mister beast which is that mister beast shouldn't be selling chocolate bars what should mister beast be doing instead of selling chocolate bars yeah i mean i think it's a testament to how valuable audiences are that all the most valuable businesses that have been created are like the worst businesses chocolate bars supplements merch that kind of stuff like these are really bad businesses and so i i always think okay what happens if feast is the most successful like creator brand what happens when that is you know a really good business a a bank or like a great software tool or something like that no let me explain why is chocolate bars or prime from logan paul why are those bad businesses because somebody might say oh they're doing hundreds of millions of revenue or they're they're gonna sell for a billion dollars like but but you're saying bad business as a characteristic like the underlying fundamentals of that category so explain that yeah there the reason like you can still be to be clear you can still be very successful in selling tel bars like hugh kitchen is one of my favorite companies and jason ka is like chocolate and i know very successful with that but it's it's it's kind of that thing of like you know is it a restaurant or is it a you know a saas company like there's levels of difficulty basically and so you know there just businesses like if you could contrast stream so a choco bar low margin not a repeat customer not like super necessary product or anything like that versus say you know something really low in the stack like home insurance or property insurance or something or or or visa or mastercard like something that you need every day like there's just better qualities of businesses and then the other way you could think about it is what would be the like enduring enterprise value of the business without the person so feasible is gonna have a way harder time without mister beast then you know if he built a bank right if the bank had hundreds of thousands of customers or whatever ostensibly he could go away from that it might make the business grow slow or whatever but it's still like a really great great business and so i actually view it as very like very it's very bullish for the creators it's very bullish for the space it's kind of like you're making it work on hard mode and and i wonder what it looks like when it's kind of on easy mode alright next one net worth is a silly metric so why is net worth silly and what's a better metric instead you've told me something about like kind of personal cash flow or something like that is is a better metric yeah yeah i mean so my like my other line on this is billionaires a state of mind because the amount of billionaires first of all it's like it's so bullshit because it's it's always unless it's either like you have this in cash or it's your shares in a public company it's always a complete matter of taste you know it's like well my company would be worth a billion if it were to sell and and even in public companies it's not even real because most the time if you own a ton of the public company if you were to dump it all i would massively you know drop the price and so i really think like it's kind of this thing once it's more like this meme label once you get labeled a billionaire it kinda just sticks and people just refer it like i this a lot also people people use it as a way to describe someone who just kind of is in a certain class i actually think it's more of a class market than anything like you know he lives a certain lifestyle he hangs out with a certain people he's like a billionaire it really has nothing to do with with whether or not you actually have a billion dollars or you own something worth a billion dollars and the other the other is yeah like cash like liquidity is so crazy the amount of people billionaires i've that when you're like okay could you wire me a hundred grand tomorrow the answer is no like it's like i've been shocked by this over and over and another explain that more what do you mean so people who you have read them me saying no because they i don't wanna wire you a hundred thousand yeah it's it's my it's it's definitely it's definitely is that it's definitely can you wire me a hundred no not no but no people people don't keep a lot of cash and and it it really is like one way to look at this is in like a party seed round or whatever i'm always shocked by like who doesn't wire the money or you have to chase them down or whatever and or or they have to wire it in tran or anything like that like and i think it's just that cash flow is so far from net worth and then and and so like and you had like you had oh sorry go sean what sam we we have a funny experience with this we were at a launch with somebody and you were asking them you're like what level of money made a difference like we're what's the next level of unlock and yeah like he said twenty five this much like you know you said a number that was like a net worth number and he's like yeah that was a good number you know when i was doing that every year then blah you were like wait annual link you were like cash flow was that because i mean we're kinda saying the whole net worth and he and he was like yeah that's what i doing an annual cash flow and it was very clear that if you had that much an annual cash flow you essentially had infinite money yeah well it was like we were like i think twenty five is like a good number and he goes yeah i agree having that come in every year awesome and i was like oh yeah i literally like in the booth of the restaurant just straight now to the bottom yeah i was under the table and i was just like oh what's down here i mean you and and did i read that you tried to create some kind of like equivalent like like a chart of cash flow to net worth yeah yeah i thought a lot about this so so part of that is as talking about one like weird thing about tiny is i probably talked to three or four thousand bootstrap entrepreneurs and the vibes they give off like i don't know i've met a handful of billion dollar net worth founders and the vibes between them and someone who makes you know ten million dollars a year from their chrome plugin or whatever very different and and there's something about like just how free they feel when they have that cash flow coming in because there's two things and one is like maybe the network never actually translates into cash a very funny thing is like all the all the silicon valley guys are really when like behind closer are really n mb of the new york hedge fund guys because they're so liquid like they might not actually be as rich per s but they're so they make so much cash that it's like it may as well be a whole different thing how much does the hedge fund guys make in new york yeah this is another hot take which is i is when i started getting interested in making money it was like the most common thing you hear is you cannot talk get rich on a salary like you got own equity you gotta own a business in new york there are lots of guys lots of guys are making five ten million there's people making a hundred million i've met one guy at a big what as like a like a portfolio manager like a bonus yeah there's there's there's at least one guy out there who like makes a billion dollars in in annual compensation but what's normal like let's say you're you're you're hanging out with your new york finance friends it varies it varies a lot but in a good year like an analyst at a big hedge fund will make three to five million dollars and in a really good year it can be a lot more than that because usually it's a it's a percentage and you know like being being a senior person at a big fund or whatever you make a lot of money and you kinda take no risk in some very real sense and so i think like that was certainly certainly surprising to me and yeah just to like come back to the cash flow thing i certainly like andrew was always such a cash flow person and and really like in in canada at the time like there was just no funding so you just had to live or die off cash flow and it's it's i think it's more instructive to think about money in terms of in terms of cash flow because the other thing is when you have a net worth like say you sell your business and you just have a bunch of cash even if like psychologically sam i know you're big on the like money psychology stuff the idea that you're living off a fixed or finite amount just really changes how you view things even if it's ton of money versus this idea of like i make you know whatever a hundred thousand dollars a month or whatever just the idea that it just comes in it like dude me and sean have this good friend who sold the business and he walked away with sixty million dollars and i go that feels awesome because goes it feels horrible man like why he goes i'm a brown immigrant i need cash flow if i don't have cash flow i feel broke i need money coming in every month i can't spend this and i was like shocked by that i think we should wrap it up jeremy where should people find you if they wanna get more of you follow you become big fans of you wish they go twitter jeremy gif and my dms are open yeah that's the best place awesome thanks for doing it man really quick hanging thank thank you guys it's that's the pod and i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to i'll put my all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back