Rapid Fire Business Ideas, How to Buy a Public Company, and Mastering Your LinkedIn Profile

every time i've had a company sale when we sold be to twitch when we just sold the milk road you've been our and we would call the deal du you help us you know go through that labor process and come out the other side with you know the happy ending i guess su welcome to my first million you're sub in for for sam part today and like every substitute teacher it's always the best when they're there we we're gonna do a bunch of things you're gonna talk about some of your the companies you started the companies you've invested in things are you know some ideas you have you were the first ever episode of the podcast if people wanna hear your life story that's the place to go episode number one we've come a long way from there did you think this is what would happen i always knew the podcast was gonna be big and i think from the very beginning you were like let's do bar stool except for business and that's what it's become and it's huge and i actually think it's gonna be way bigger in a year than it is today like three times the size a year for now than it is today yeah i hope so that's the that's the goal but we did the kind of bar thing except without hiring anybody i was like okay we will just be the jackass and then like let it go from there alright so i got you sent me this doc which is great because there's a bunch of topics on here that i kinda wanna jump into you i guess we should set the the the the like groundwork here so i'll give you a very short life story so people understand who you are you you worked done a job for like a couple of years you did like the traditional path you worked at microsoft quit you decide to start your own company this is right when the facebook app platform comes out so you start building like silly facebook apps that go viral so think things like super which was like which of your friends most likely to do x and it would invite those friends to like do it too and it grew like crazy but it was like a silly facebook app so you didn't do with it but you ended up selling it so you got that was your kind of my first million moment so you sell it you're how old at that time like twenty four twenty five ish twenty six maybe yeah twenty six twenty six take that and you go on the next big wave which is mobile apps are gonna be a thing you are creating games i think maybe first on facebook and then on the iphone when when when the iphone and app store comes out you're like oh this is gonna be big you create a company called tiny or ten c and end up somehow you raise money from entries in h you're living in the dream things go south as the economics of that business change and then you go all in in this hail strategy which again episode one for the whole story you go all in on this hail strategy of like we gonna get the rights to family guy you end up somehow as they start up the nobody's ever heard of getting the rights to the license to to make the family guy mobile game you did it for harry potter and a couple other big ip things sell that company and then that i met you after that so i met you kind of when you were selling that thing we met at a a dinner that sam was throwing because you were speaking at hustle and immediately we hit it off we were we made some big plans we were like you know you were talking about tony robbins i was like oh i'm a tony robbins guy you're like really i don't even know about robbins tell me and i started gus about my experience there or whatever and i was like yeah we should do that here in san francisco like let's do it tomorrow morning let's have a yeah horror with people like us we were just you know electric and yeah we were like tony robbins is amazing nobody is doing this in this kind of modern way let's put up some facebook ads today and then tomorrow let's have fifty people in here and try our hand at like ben tony robbins per a day we did the thing we spent twenty minutes being like this is great this is a great idea this is this is a no brainer and we gotta talk about how much of the no brainer how much it's a i am dunk we're gonna do it we're using all these terms never did it ten years later we still never did it but we became good friends along the still think it's a great idea yeah it would be the most fun weekend ever yeah i think i still think we should do it we but then we you we kinda got i guess from there you you did a couple things so your brother started native deodorant can help them with that you started another company which we don't really talk to too much about then i was starting my e commerce brand you have helped me out a lot with that and a or kind of a a a shareholder in that business and when we were every time i've had a company sale when we sold be to twitch when we just sold the milk road you've been our and we would call the deal du you help us you know go through that labor process and come out the other side with you know the the happy ending i guess so that that's kind of like how our interactions have been like on a business side and then become great friends since it so that's my intro that i missed anything i love being the deal dol by the way when we sold tiny we had this banker named dick f and he ran he was our banker ran the transaction for us and i told him that i loved what he did so much that i just wanted to work for him for free for six months after this so i could see all of the deals that he was doing and he did not accept my offer and said no you you can't do this dick is great he helped us for free when because bi was the be deal was gonna be too small he does bigger deals like i like hundred million dollar plus type deals it was too small but he got on the phone would be several times now the process talked to me off alleged multiple times when i was like i'm just gonna say this he's like no well you should probably just wait see what they say and his advice was basically just like don't f this up you know sun and he was totally right he helped me a ton and actually i still feel the guilt i didn't like send him a gift after texted you like a year later i was like what's what sticks address i didn't send them a gift i can't believe i didn't and here i am still four years later have not set done that gift dick i'm so sorry you were so helpful and i i you the deal another deal addicted that i thought was super interesting was he sold app eleven to a chinese company for one billion dollars and the trump administration blocked the deal or the ftc blocked the deal and instead of it being a billion dollar sale the chinese company invested a hundred million dollars into app eleven and then couple years later app eleven so everyone i thought would be devastated like the founders were like we're gonna become so rich overnight was we sell this company for a billion bucks transaction doesn't happen i assume founders are sad and upset then a couple years later the company goes public and at some point it was worth thirty billion dollars as a publicly traded company yeah so such an amazing transaction to not have had closed well they got the best of both because they whatever the company was putting i think it was one point six was the original one point four what six was the original purchase price and they were gonna put in a few hundred million dollars to own seventy or eighty percent of it and then instead it was like the year went by nothing happens and so with that anxiety came this big payoff because the business grew like crazy in that time so they're like hey okay same deal but now you own like twenty or thirty percent and so they got the money they got liquid on that but they only had to give up a tiny fraction and then they sold it then they went public you know later for for way more so that turned out you know pretty much as good as it could go right big scenario it just had to wait a year speaking of kind of like acquisitions i gotta i have a milk road related question for you first which is you saw you saw both the acquisitions that i did from like sort of start to end and i shared you know it's like in high school when it's like the boy texted me this should i replied this i say this like no that it looks too needy say that like change the period to a comma and then just you know cut that last line like it's that level of help that that you were doing with me what's your i've given kinda of my debrief of the acquisition i'm just curious what's your what was your takeaway or what was your what are some nuggets that that you would you would share from from watching that go down i love the deal structure that milk road ended up with which was a bunch of cash up upfront and then a bunch of equity in the new company where those two guys are wanting to grind it out for years and build a giant business and those guys in my head you know some percentage of the work that they do is just creating value for you and ben and that's awesome so i love that deal structure the in my head kinda having been through this a couple of times i feel like a lot of the you know text the nuance of words that you care about when you're trying to sell your business the buyer doesn't care about that much and it's more of a emotional thing than a practical thing where practically the buyer is like i wanna buy this business because of the strategic reason and the revenue and the profit and a lot of the things that you can be sq about or uncomfortable to say or not sure how to say things i think a lot of that stuff doesn't matter one of the things that i learned actually when i was trying to sell tiny was we ran a sales process where i was trying to sell the business and we talked to a bunch of acquire and we got pretty far along with one and then the deal didn't happen and then a year later we went and sold the company successfully and the there's a bunch of stuff that i was trying to keep close to the chest and i was like oh people aren't gonna wanna hear this people aren't gonna wanna hear that and what was great about a banker and some somebody like dick was he was like no actually this isn't a big deal just tell these guys this and they're not gonna care about that so it took this kind un discomfort i had around like things i thought were secrets that i needed to take to the grave with me and he just made me comfortable telling them about right sam sam did something for me in this process so i was were selling the milk military i was like oh any kind of tips or advice you've had and when he sold a hubspot and he goes oh on the same note he goes just do just tell them upfront all the shitty things about your business that they that might scare them away because guess what they're gonna find those anyways when it comes to due diligence and you're just gonna be you know four weeks in or six weeks again emotionally invested and it's gonna get ugly later and they're gonna feel like they just found some like you know big work on the deal at that point in time and he goes just tell them all the skill since your closet now and be like here's all the reasons you shouldn't buy this company if these bother you you now know them and you can decide for yourself you know if that's a a deal breaker for you this was like not the very first thing but shortly after like we went to a dinner and everybody's who's interested we hadn't even fully negotiated the deal but i just said they're like you know any questions you guys have or you know any any concerns i said well you know i wanna make sure like you fully understand this business and you know i've been through this a couple times i just i know like it's better to just be fully transparent i said y here's all i've made a list of the reasons why you know you shouldn't buy this here's all the skeletons in our closet and you can look at these today because you could decide if this is too to concerning for you you know let's talk through these now and we did it in later f after the deal was closed we did a debrief and they they basically this how you know they're smart they're were like what could we have done better in the acquisition process like you know from your point of view and we're we asked the same as they they asked that it's like how was that for you was that good for you it's good for me and it was like we we told them our they told they gave me that feedback they were like you know you said something at this dinner where you were just like here's all the ugly parts of our business and like let me just tell you about and we could talk through them they go that built so much trust because we didn't know you very well and immediately we were like oh okay we feel we felt that ease and we felt like we could trust you guys going forward and so that turned out to be a big win and that's the exact opposite it my you know i think the entrepreneurs instinct is hide that you know as far put it behind your back you if they if they if they ask for you show them but like don't scare them away and and in and in fact what you wanna do is like find out as quickly as possible if there's a real match here or not and use that as a tool to build trust versus to build dis trust by not disclosing it upfront the other thing i've seen entrepreneurs do that i i think is also kind of the wrong common and sense out there is when you ask an entrepreneur if they wanna sell their business entrepreneurs are told to say no i do not wanna sell my business and they expect that the buyer is gonna come over the top and say even if you don't wanna sell your business we're super interested in buying it we'll do anything it takes please come talk to us and in practice that's not at all how it works oftentimes a buyer is looking at a bunch of different businesses to buy at that point in time and so they'll reach out or talk to ten different businesses five of them will say no we're not for sale and they'll say okay great we're knocking these five off we're gonna focus on the five that have said yeah we offer for sale right and so what's the way to say yes without seeming desperate there or seeming too too eager to sell because you don't wanna have do that either i think the way i've done it before is one when when i was ready to sell a business i would find somebody that i knew was interested but wouldn't have a good offer and get them to make an offer and then say cool go that enables you to reach out to other people and say hey we have an offer to sell the business and we're thinking about whether or not to do that and you are somebody that we think there's a great strategic fit with so we thought to talk to you before we did something else yeah yeah so that's like the one when to do it if they come inbound it's sort of like you know we have had interest and nothing you know nothing fell felt right you know we really like our business but you know we respect to you guys and if that's something you you know we we'll obviously be open to listening you know we we the we owe ourselves that right and so so you kind of you just say we like our business we had the interest it hasn't we we didn't real nothing went too far because we weren't very you know weren't too keen on it but you know really like you if you wanna talk we're open to talking there's nothing you know that's fine yeah yeah i think that's a good setup and i think buyers who are experience can kinda of read between the lines pretty quickly because what you just said is like i'm wide open somebody please ask me ask expert date i'll i'm ready you know and i'll be a cheap date send exactly but like it's the signal it's the signal that i'm without like without begging you but it's like to be clear i'm interested yeah yeah it's perfect it's like looking at somebody across the bar for and catching their eyes their eyes for one second and then smiling and looking away there was a another meeting we won't talk we won't name the name but you were a part of a few of the meetings as we talked to different people from milk road and it was the first meeting with one of the buyers and you you immediately called me afterwards and you were like wow you then you said there's this phrase a fool and his money or easily parted and you immediately sniffed out that this person was sort of an idiot and like you a would would would be and sure enough they made the by far the largest offer and you know it turned out to be you know they turned out to be not not exactly who we we didn't go with them because of that but of of the three or four people that we talked to this was one of them but you sniffed that out immediately what what tip that off for you and what can you say without getting us too much trouble you know there's a lot of people who are char nowadays and they'll often lead with a lot of like flattery and not substance like it's very easy for me to tell when somebody is like hey this is who i am i've done x y i started this company i sold it i started this company didn't work out they're just like honest about the resume and there isn't tremendous amounts of puffer that with a couple google searches you can be like actually that's all not true right and that's with that you said a lot of words but you haven't said anything yet okay that is you know either i'm not understanding what you're trying to say or you have nothing to say basically yeah that's right and they don't lead with like numbers and information they lead with like flower language that doesn't go anywhere so i'm curious what are some business ideas that you think somebody could start that would be successful either at the smaller scale like i think this can be you know like a clear business that'll make a few million bucks that i just think you know if somebody out there looking for a way to get financial freedom this is a way to here's a big idea somebody who is willing to grind that out should go do this the big idea that i like the most right now is robinhood hood for real estate so you know robinhood makes it easy to invest in the stock market and the way i thought about this is i've got a ton of friends who are you know in their twenties that work at facebook or google and they make a ton of money but what they do with it is they just stick it in their bank account or in a savings account or a cd sometimes they'll invest in the stock market i think it's so hard to be able to invest in real estate and if there was a turnkey way through a mobile app to be able to invest in real estate i think that would be huge and i think it's really different you you did this investment and and i followed you in a company called jar in india and so they make it super easy to invest in gold in india and so you can invest with a dollar or fifty dollars or five thousand dollars and just by glenda like a one click it's just if you believe that gold is a good thing to invest we'll make it easy for you to do that thing that you already think is a good idea exactly and so it's a one click thing of like how much money do i wanna invest today and then they the best way to do it is to kinda set up a subscription where every month you're like cool i'm buying two hundred dollars of gold every month and ten years from now it's gonna be worth millions a dollar first i think the same should happen with real estate there's a bunch of companies that are like cad and like fund drives or crowds yeah whatever those are like it's but you have to look at the individual deals you have to they're targeted towards people like me who like investing in real estate and who are sophisticated about it and wanna know what a what the cap rate is and the location and the year of construction and all this stuff i think there should be a one click way to be able to go buy equity in rental properties that generate income and it should be marketed to people on their twenties it should be marketed through facebook it should be set up so that ever you basically log in and are like cool you wanna invest in real estate how much do you wanna invest every month two hundred dollars great two hundred dollars is now happening in real estate you're now investing two hundred dollars in real estate every month and boom it does doesn't ach from your account every month on on the customer side and invest in that real estate and the income that's gets generated goes back and reinvest in more real estate and that's it and so it shows this is how much you've invested so far and here's how much it's worth boom okay love it give me more what else you got what else do you got hey hey hey well whoa well what's going on here then this is the you you're you're the guest of otter here i got a i i'm dope ideas every week here i'll give you one that like i think is i i give you one that i get asked a lot which is not actually what's a big idea but what's the easiest way to get to like a million dollars and i always think that like the easiest way to get two million dollars i'm if i need to get to a million dollars right now here's here's what i would do i would i would create an agency that's gonna target a really specific part of a business that makes money already and just figure out how to make more of it so for example email marketing for e commerce brands or con conversion rate optimization cro for for companies so you basically say hey visitors coming to your site we can help you convert more of that traffic into sales and i think there's such an easy play where you basically just create content so you create content that basically just says like here's the before and here's the after look i changed these three things because i called this my you know my hot cold hot method and we boost revenue by thirty two percent by the way if you want somebody to boost your revenue by thirty two percent work with me and i think that this is like a such a bootstrap easy way to get to a hundred k a month of revenue right like you get ten clients paying your ten a month it is not hard to get ten customers to pay you ten k a month when it's a part of their business that's already gonna produce like already producing hundreds of thousands or if if not millions of dollars of revenue and you're gonna provide you know the turnkey service you take it off you take the headache off their plate but you do it better than they're doing it because you're you get seen as a thought leader by putting out like ten of these case studies and this happens all the time with ad agencies email agencies conversion optimization agencies but you could do there's anything could do this with site speed you could do this with like any number of things so i would just go and you could start with start at zero and become a quote unquote thought leader expert just by publishing like very simple before and after like kinda case studies if you start by not even having a client you say hey if i was this brand here's what i would do look when they do this it sucks you know they this is a dead end for them or you know they should steal this good idea from this other company and so you could put the other case studies without even having clients and so to me this is like the easiest like if you are willing to work hard and you feel stuck at a job that maybe pays you a hundred k year and you're looking how do go from a hundred k to nine hundred k do we get from a hundred k to you know seven hundred fifty k a year this is the like all all it takes is hustle approach to to that side of type of business and then those businesses can be sold so like your job you can't be you you can't tell your job right like i in a book i might write that that might be the title you can't sell your job just like my my one line case for why you should start a business instead of have a job and if you get a business like this to nine hundred k and you know sixty percent profit you could sell that agency or that consulting business for maybe two or three times you know eb and so you could sell that you could make six hundred to eight hundred k a year and then sell it for two or three million you know after a couple of years and so that's a very easy pathway to financial freedom easy meaning it's simple not not that it's no effort but easy that like anybody can do it and it doesn't take being the genius with the one idea who beats all the competitors in the space yeah i totally agree with that i think there's a bunch of other examples in my head like just setting up a facebook pixel and doing in a way that's actually optimized and perfect and following all the facebook guidelines i think that's super hard and i think there should be some guy who's like on the expert at this right and i take care of that for you and i gave a brand of e commerce but like you can also do this for just hey every low legal practice every dentist you need websites i i'd make websites for dentists right so it doesn't even need to be like you're the best at doing growth for d brands it could be like hey in minneapolis minnesota i make the best websites for restaurants in minneapolis minnesota or legal practice or whatever and just through cold email or you know some companies for cold linkedin referrals you can like get time customers to pay ten k a month yeah i think you could pick any of these big sectors of the economy like accounting law medicine dental i you're be like whatever yeah yeah yeah and i'm just gonna go and build a online thing that makes their life easier through marketing to them making it easy to make a website it's insane how many of those old world businesses are still like don't have a good website right don't do any google ads so i think there's some stuff opportunity there our friend nick cooper does this thing where he's like he basically has a playbook to make a self storage unit run better and so his thing is like i'll buy it at some multiple but i know i can run it at thirty percent more efficiently or forty percent more efficiently so i'm getting value i know within nine months i have a turnkey process to make this thing generate thirty forty percent more eb and so he does that buying the properties but you can also just take that playbook and say hey self storage owner i will do this for you i'll do it risk cr for you manning you pay me nothing unless i deliver this outcome if i increase your revenue by thirty percent or your your your net profit by thirty percent that would be you know that be great right and here's my playbook i do these three things you would agree that you're not doing those three things today very well right okay fantastic how about i deliver those to your risk free and when i do i get to keep you know half the value for the first year and then it drops down to ten percent after that and you could do this for senior living you could do this for self storage you could do this for any business that's like out there once you find a good like whatever best practices this is what alex her mo did with his gym launch thing who's like hey jim owner you want more customers like he used to own his own gym developed best practices and then realized the the value was not in his gym being run with best practices but taking the best practice in selling it to all gym owners and so that's what he that's what he did and i think you could do that with like pretty much any any niche business what do you think about niche content creators and kinda trying to build the same thing by creating content in a specific niche like you know eco friendly sustainable products that kind of thing so what would somebody do there so i'm a i'm a content creator what am doing there in in this example making youtube videos instagram video instagram reels and tiktok about that put for the business to marketing a two business owners i like hey business owner here's what you should do or two no not to business owners to consumers just being like this is how i live this sustainable lifestyle kinda pick anything that you're passionate about and make a bunch of youtube videos about it or content about it and i think that can be a big business like you know doug d with cars right see i i don't like those as much because i a i think it's a good thing to do because good things come of it i don't think they're very reliable at creating successful businesses most content creators don't make successful businesses right so if you just look empirical at the numbers you're just like okay of the two billion twitch streamers and of the ten million youtubers like who's making over ten k a year and the numbers like astronomical economically small and so you know the problem with those is that everybody wants to do that and there's not a clear way to like get the value out it is good to do because you will learn you'll become good at content you'll meet cool people it'll lead you to the thing most likely but it's not usually directly the thing when it's consumer facing if it's business facing i think it's pretty easy then to say oh yeah i mark it to the owners of self storage units i create the best content for them you know you could go that that's what nick sharma did right nick cha is like hey i'm gonna write the best newsletter for a e commerce store owner and i'm just gonna put together awesome information case studies deals whatever for them and like that's not for the consumer it's for the business owner and he created you know what what should be like a five to ten million dollar of your business one it's fully mature doing just that and i think you could do that for basically the owner of any business construction business you know whatever any you know doctors lawyers whoever any anytime business if you if you focus on that and you you get good at doing that so i think that one i like i don't like the consumer facing one as much because i think the numbers would show that they don't make very much money the way that they currently do them and like you i i have this problem too where it's like what's the most competitive thing is like being like a content creator like you know what what are most people doing from like you know even like a twelve year old can do it and i have this problem myself i'm like i wanna create a bunch of youtube content and then i'm like man this you know i'm competing with every fifteen year old in america and they're better and faster to have more time and have nothing to lose and are willing to do way crazier stuff like wow that this might be the wrong game to compete in and i you i'm still trying to square that for myself like is this the right game or the wrong game to even compete in i could've said that about podcast podcasts in general too right so like you know some of the best things i've done have i've been like in that category and it worked out just fine but it does feel a little strange it's like against my own business advice to like don't compete in the thing that everybody is trying to do because most likely you know you just playing game that came on hard mode yeah the way i've seen it done well is like there's this guy who's a realtor in la and you know small time realtor and he started making these youtube videos that were walking through mansions yeah wanna say yeah he's great yeah and so he just like made ten of them and we're was like this is fun and then he got access to more and more places and just made really high end video walk throughs of la mansions and you know his job was already be a realtor so he was doing this as a way to get new clients in la and then as he did it more and more it became a business of its own and he stopped being a realtor and now will fly around the world because people will be like i'm trying to sell this house make a video of it and i'll go make a video and a million people who watch it in three days because he's got right to youtube subscribers so i think where you're combining it with like a profession that you already have it probably is a good fit like there's some guy who's smb acquisition attorney yeah on twitter and so it's just a great way for him to get lead gen yeah new customers well i also think like i don't know if there's a good thing or but i thing was that is that thirties aides thing where it's like i used to think about a business and only look up like wow the skyscrapers are huge in this field i'm i too i'm gonna build a skyscraper and now i'm like cool before i do that let me just go quickly look at the graveyard of people who have tried to do this and like when i was in my twenties there was no graveyard i didn't think about the graveyard i'm music start love it every loves music right like what you're going wrong yeah and then you're your thirties you're like don't social network start let's see i did social networks for like seven years or six years if my twenties is because it was like the skyscraper was so attractive and like there is some beauty at just doing that not even paying attention to the graveyard like i think the people who win will just do that and it work and their successful formula really was like yeah i didn't worry about the graveyard why would i do that but as i got older i was like man you know what's more fun than trying to build social network like winning is really fun and so like let me just make sure that whatever i'm doing like the odds are not like ninety nine point nine percent chance of failure like that that's and if i'm gonna do it okay i'll go in eyes wide open i'm gonna look at the graveyard and say i'm still gonna do this that's kinda what happened with the podcast it's like a you know what i'm still gonna do this even though i know that most podcast nobody ever listens to whereas before i did not even pay attention to that and i didn't you know but i don't know if that's a net positive it might be a net negative actually in terms of like how the you know the the the the strength of that kind of like the ignorance yeah there's this guy bobby ko who's the ceo of act division and he's like i can be ceo of anything i could be ceo of a toilet company or ceo of campbell soup the thing that matters to him is success and momentum and you know there's so many people who are like you're the ceo of a games company that's what i my entire life would be made if i could just be that and he's just like success is what matters more than anything else and i'm kinda closer to that as i've gotten older where i'm like success is the thing that brings me joy more than the specific category or product that i work on the thing that i think you've done really well sean is you've seen friends who will have a successful business and you're like let me just clone this business in a different category like you know you did that with sam and the hustle with milk road and then you saw an e commerce business with ramon in the way that he was doing it and you're like i can do this too so i think that's a really good way to to do it that's like kinda under underrated and most people don't do where they're like i see this person is successful i'm just gonna do the exact same playbook but in a different product category or different sector yeah i call it having a blueprint like if i don't see that there is a blueprint of success in a category and that it is replica like okay i can look at how the guy started snapchat but if but that doesn't seem very like rep yeah i can't replicate that and so but when i saw in e commerce where i saw oh the newsletter business i thought okay not saying this is easy but i like i understand this this is simple enough for my dumb brain to get how a business like this works what does the cost what does the where the revenue come from where does the growth come from got it did they have some unfair advantage did they did they start at the right time and that there's now is like you know not the right time or whatever i try to just figure that out but if there's a and so now with new things i just look for that like first we're gonna go searching for a blueprint i'm gonna talk to people until i find a blueprint like okay i wanna buy companies cool andrew wilkinson as a good blueprint what does he do how does it work and then do i wanna like do i believe that i could replicate that in my own way in my own sector my own style and if i don't see a blueprint i don't really get that excited at this point because i'm like why would i do it without a blueprint when i can do it with personally i'm like that or the same thing if i'm gonna do it without a blueprint alright that's cool but i'm gonna make the announcement hey i'm choosing to do this without the blueprint and i gotta go in wide open on that so like all of my rules i break all the time but i say them and i do them because i'm like i'm cool violating this rule but i just i'm not gonna do it something else i'm gonna do it blindly i'm gonna do it knowing and i'm gonna make that trade you know knowing exactly what i'm trading off by making this decision versus you know how i you know i used to do it where i didn't really understand i didn't even know what i was looking for you know when when i came to that i wanna finish with some rapid fire can i do some some quick ones and then i just want you to say you're reaction to this okay so i'm gonna this first category things you've told me that i thought were funny and i want you to like reactor elaborate sort like explain this tweet i don't know what the hell mental models are i used to think i was dumb for not knowing what mental models are now i think everybody else is dumb for the on the model some version of that yeah that's right in silicon valley it's so v to be like oh i'm applying the you know this cognitive bias theorem to this situation and you know everyone in silicon valley that smart talks like that and so i was just like why do i when i see something i don't see it in that same way and i just thought i was idiot and i always solve a problem like from scratch like tab ras like it's the first time i've seen it and i just like that way of doing it so i gave up trying to find mental model alright another one you started your first two businesses on what i'll call wav so like the facebook app apple from i think launch the same day you like had quit your job and we're like what can i do next let me just do this you saw the announcement you're like i'll just do that i have nothing to lose same thing with the mobile app store launch i think you were one of the first big iphone games what are the waves today what would twenty two year old solely be doing now probably something in genetics or ai yeah probably one of those two things and something biggest of sectors okay what you seven years ago we were at dinner and i was just asked you a question i was like why haven't you were like i wanna build like company a billion dollar company i was like why haven't you done that already you you're so smart you're so great why like what's what's gone wrong and you said to me i don't think i understood what a billion dollar company was before what did that mean i think you need to have a certain moat and there's a bunch of things you need to get right to build a dollar company you need to have a big market you have a clear way of getting customers that makes economic sense and you need a product that's really good so i even today i feel like i've got a very clear path to be able to build you know hundred two hundred million dollar businesses but i haven't quite figured out how to build a billion dollar business outside of taking five or ten hundred two hundred million dollar business i think there's a different code to build a billion dollar business than hundred million dollar one excellent what would you do if you were mister beast i would start a y comb for creators and maximize the basically find the next kim kardashian and the next mister beast and support them and own a piece of them and be a king maker where i'm making other kings you did a lot of start up investing i think you've pulled back some from start investing give me the the the bullet point version of your take on start up investing i think start up investing i think competing for deal sucks i hate trying i find it very d demeanor trying to convince somebody to let me invest fifty thousand dollars in their round friend of mine was raising money and got a term sheet from injuries in h and bill gu at benchmark and went with the injuries in h term sheet and bill gu was so mad that he called the founder up and like yelled at them for two hours and sent them fifteen angry emails and bill gu is one of the most successful people on the industry and the fact that he still has to do that made me be like this is a industry with no moat i don't wanna like have to go kinda beg or try to twist people's arms to let me invest in their startup the other thing that's happened is trying to turn fifty thousand dollar investments into two million dollars over a ten year period doesn't really do anything for me anymore so my first startup up investment ever was a hundred k investment a company called chart boost in twenty eleven or twenty twelve and then the company sold in twenty twenty one and i made two million dollars so that was a ten year time span so i i think having to wait ten years to get cash out is really annoying and makes me like it a lot less i think the valuations have also gone really crazy and companies are so much more competitive like there's a company called d home that raised at a billion dollar valuation and there's four other d homes out there that are competitors to it so the combination of high valuations and increased competition makes it really hard to make any money as an investor and i've evolved from being interested in kinda making these fifty k checks into trying to buy a majority interest or a thirty forty percent interest in businesses that have revenue and profit or a path to profit i think that's a better way to invest for me because i'll see money back and be able to take that money and reinvest it in other new businesses what's the biggest investment miss you've had and biggest hit you've had biggest miss was coinbase base my at tiny we had this guy who worked for me named adam mu he was roommates with fred the coinbase c cofounder and so brian armstrong and fred we're fundraising for their series a they got a term sheet from har and benchmark and a bunch of other firms and so they called me and said hey should we go with benchmarks should we go with recent h you know we at ty raise money from andre injuries h mark and recent was on the board and i was like go with injuries h here's what's awesome about them and on that call if i was like hey by the way can i put in twenty five k into this round i feel like they would have said yes and that twenty five k at their ipo was worth two hundred million dollars i think it's probably did you you didn't believe or you didn't ask because you didn't think about it i didn't ask because i didn't believe i i that's answer yeah crypto bitcoin these guys are building paypal for crypto and bitcoin that's silly that's just paypal what about biggest hit biggest hit well let me ask you you wrote something on here said it could have invested in facebook doc i thought you i read something that you had bought after you sold your company that was on the facebook app platform you had bought facebook secondary shares did you do that or or am i missing that i did this really stupid thing that i'm still embarrassed of to this day which is i signed a contract to buy some facebook stock like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth and the stock price you know it was private but in the private market the price went down by fifty percent and i called my father and was like oh you know this happened to me and he was like don't worry about it just buy it and you'll be fine it'll go back up and instead i didn't buy it they suit i think they might have sued me and said hey you signed a contract to buy this and then i said okay fine i did and i paid them seventy five thousand dollars to not buy it versus a hundred day of mine yeah yeah i a hundred and fifty get buy it so i paid them seventy k to not buy it and i was gonna go buy some from somebody else who was selling it and they backed out so i didn't end up buying it and then while i was buying it from the other guy somebody else came to me and was like hey i've got facebook stock to sell too and so i hooked up a friend of mine with that facebook stock and he bought fifty k worth of stock and that fifty k ended up being worth like eight million dollars for him which is kind of amazing and i was actually raising a fund to be like we're just gonna buy facebook yeah because the that's what i read i after we had very first met i was like who is this guy at googled you and i saw some article where you had sold your app on the the your facebook app and you were like it was like what are you do now you're like actually i think facebook is the good investment not like my app and you're like i'm gonna just buy like millions of dollars of facebook stock if i can and i was like wow this guy is super aggressive and interesting like i what a great in hindsight well at this was now many years later so i i was like you know wow that must have turned out amazing i didn't and i never asked you about i never knew this full story yeah this was in two thousand and eight during the great financial crisis so everyone was running away from everything and facebook was valued at two billion dollars in the private market at the time and you know had an ipo and was unclear when it would ipo was you know probably at a a hundred or two hundred million maus something along those lines and actually i met this guy who's in new york city and was like hey i'm trying to buy this stock and he's like that's a brilliant idea and i like yeah i'm trying to you know get the best price possible and he's like you idiot don't worry about what price you're getting just buy from everyone who's selling it go buy it because this price is so cheap that it doesn't matter matter don't worry about whether it's two billion or three billion or four billion just go by by it all and i just kinda fucked it up yeah easier said it done for sure when those moments happen happening right now in crypto it's like i know so many people that were like i missed it i wish i got in blah as it was going up crashes back down to you know eats at a thousand bitcoin was at sixteen thousand you know like a month ago and it's like hey you if you did wanna buy like now would be a pretty good time to buy probably and they're like i mean this thing is of who knows now and they're the same people that three years from now are gonna be like i wish i had bought again and they're still there's never gonna buy there's gonna be constantly suicide and wish that they were buying and never buy at the times they should and always wish they could buy at the times they shouldn't that's me right now because i've got like forty million dollars or fifty million dollars in us t bills that like mature every thirty days and i'm keeping them on in like short term t bills because i'm like i'm gonna find some other investment whether that's the s and p five hundred or something else there will be other investments and now is the time to go by them the a couple months ago the s and p five hundred was at like thirty six hundred and that was my trigger to go buy it and i was like oh it's gonna go to thirty five hundred i'm gonna wait till thirty five hundred it never hit thirty five hundred i am still sitting on those tea bills did not buy s and p five hundred yeah very very hard to do this sort of thing but like maybe this is where the mental model works the cognitive bias or the whatever whatever bias this is i got it you know there's someone out there who knows all these biases and they they're right i have all of them actually my father is really good at this and you know i sold my first startup up and made a million bucks in two thousand eight he lived in florida and was like all the real estate prices here are at twenty five cents on the dollar i'm gonna go buy it and so he bought a house i sent him the million dollars he went and bought a house for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars two weeks later that same house was selling for seventy five thousand dollars if it was me i this is literally what i did i would have freaked out and said fuck i don't know what i'm doing i'm gonna stop this is not working instead he bought another house for seventy five thousand dollars and he just kept buying houses like for the next two years all the way on the way down as the stock market as the real estate prices bottomed out kept going down and then even on the way back up as they were increasing he would just keep buying them and so as a result he owns or we a family now on something like a hundred you know single family rentals and ford and what's the line there between degenerate gambler because i've done that too when i'm losing money in played poker or in a blackjack or whatever what's the line between d degenerate gambler and genius maybe there is no line maybe it's while the result turns out yeah i think it's a result but also it's the psychology going in where you're like i know this is gonna go down i don't care because i i know i can wait five years or ten years and this will go back up right and he was like this is below replacement cost so if you're were to build a new home right next door that was the same home cost it cost you four times as much as i'm paying for it right now so yeah amazing our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better you have a very honest linkedin and i saw a guy who i think one up here and i i actually wanna tell you about this business in a second so basic so google this guy justin yoshi mu so justin and then yoshi m r so i wanna read you this guy's linkedin hey he goes i'm currently the founder founder chairman and ceo of cs holdings one of the dime a dozen quote unquote unicorn startups it's already wow wow it's got towards startups dime dozen i've trying i've been trying for fifteen years to making unicorn like these are dime dozen and then he goes after being told that nobody would ever hire me i quit the bureaucracy and the negative negativity of palo verde high school so already just like calling a grudge against his high school to start a marketplace for unlocked cell phones anybody who sells cell phones ring tones or any of that shit they're like the best they're great hustle so already you know bonus points so he's got two points first making fun of the fact that he owns he's a ceo of unicorn second high dropped out of high school and sold unlike cell phones he which was acquired by family office when i was nineteen years old more recently i start five hundred friends of marketing loyalty thing we merge with whoever and eventually acquired by whatever and then he goes i introduced fifty k to one million and interesting companies run by interesting people that he names a bunch when he names the companies he names the round he invested in another closing another key thing that only real investors and honest people do which is that they you know you invested mu in the sea round i mess this one late stage right versus what most of will do is they'll go buy you know airbnb shares in the public market and call themselves an investor and airbnb right it's like we know we know what you're doing here i've seen big venture funds do that too where they're like this is a hot company we wanna invest in the secondary in the series d a couple million bucks just to be able to put on our website small amount at any valuation don't care i'm just buying a logo basically yeah so then he goes besides besides business and things i shouldn't be discussing on linkedin i love animals dogs many cats especially persian lance dolphins whales he names like ten animals mana tease turtles and he goes despite this i'm not a vegetarian base mainly because i lack self discipline however i do wanna clarify i don't need any of the animals above and i would judge you for doing so especially considering that the prevalent belief is that eating wild animals at what markets is caused covid where my where linkedin from going is and ace then he goes i've been included many vanity lists such as forbes thirty to thirty inc five hundred whatever yeah forty under forty but thankfully i stopped advertising these on my linkedin headline when i was nineteen after realized i was being a douche bag for a formal bio go to my wikipedia so first just the digest this guy do you know i've ever heard of this company cs generation it's it's so what he did was he started buying up all these like kind of antiquated furniture companies so it's this it's this kinda hush thing but they own z gallery which like half my house is like from z gallery he owns what are the ones here one king's lane he he owns sur lat tab so he's bought like sur h for eighty nine million he got for twenty million one king's lane and then he started making offers to buy i heard about him because my our buddy i don't know if you know meta tab but meta tab sent me this he goes this guy be great for the pod and meta tab is like hundred percent signal to a noise ratio if he sends to me something book i've instantly buy it so this was like instantly just put her on the list research on this guy so this guy's thirty two years old he's built basically like a sort of like a billionaire ish let's call it a dollar company rolling these up and what he's doing is he's making them more like e commerce and digitally like savvy so he'll close down half of the retail locations that aren't performing he'll get the e commerce side to build up he'll take all the customer data that they have and he's like dude the they have like years of customer purchasing data but it's in a machine that's like twenty years old that they can't even like literally extract and like put into an email database so we're like find it you know put it facebook ads or anything like that so he's like we take this to he's like we built a system to buy these companies and he's trying to build like what constellation software did for small saas companies he's trying to do that for large furniture companies he's like he's like that's my model they built a amazing intake engine to buy like thirty thirty software companies a year and like unlock more value from them i'm trying to do the same with furniture companies and this guy gives like no interviews he's just this one guy and the reason he's on people's radar now is because he started making these wild public offers at these old school furniture companies so he went to them privately he's like i'd like to buy your company and they're like you know they're in nebraska they're sixty five years old they're like you know my father's father built this table in this furniture store like what are you talking about and he's here's his thirty two year old kid who lives in la and they're like no we don't we don't want your kind here basically so they don't like his offer so he's like okay is getting me nowhere so when he just started releasing press releases saying i'd like to buy this company for twenty or thirty percent over the public you know share price right now please respond board you have not been productive you have not responded to my offer in private you have not told me a counter offer you've said either yes nor or no your shareholders deserve this publicly so he's publicly making offers on these two public companies and that's how he's like now on people's radar because he was like pretty much doing this onto the radar before this what do you think of this this guy in this idea that's genius i love it because there's just so much unlocked value in these businesses and he's focused on a specific vertical furniture i have no idea why he's focused on that vertical but just that kind of focus will allow him to be able to take the same product sell across a lot of these different retailers get crazy improvements in margin by combining the scale of all of these and the idea of doing it going after publicly traded companies that are like undervalued so good and so he he said so they're doing they're doing over a little over a billion in revenue now out of their thing and he said he's charging furniture because they're undervalued they lag they're like kinda like there's sort like lagging and they they who could benefit the most from like a digital glow up he's like it's these companies that are like basically not participating in the right way in like the digital world and the economy and commerce and and whatnot and so he goes a lot of his old tool school furniture companies have a ton of customer data it's an old physical server in their warehouse software is thirty forty years old the company that made the software's out of business you can't even like get them to update it he goes i'm just trying to get it to be modern and we've built a platform and a process to unlock the value of this customer data i'm almost a little a little skeptical of that clint type of claim but he goes i have i have no desire to have my own brand he goes constellation software has no brand just a forty billion dollar company that goes thirty three percent a year ten years ago the stock price is a hundred now it's two thousand they created a platform to buy these companies and unlock the value and took them in they have the infrastructure people in process they created a machine to unlock value in this category i don't think anybody's done that in retail that's what we wanna become wow first of all i just love the tone with which he speaks and like the humility and is just kinda like this is what we're doing it's simple there's no magic to it it's obvious in fact why isn't somebody else doing this okay nobody else is we'll do it and that's kind of amazing so i i brings up for your reason one on the tone he reminds me of you your linkedin is the same way where you'll be like i invested in this company kinda got it was kind of like a yelp for this ish i don't know i these guys can explain it better and like no no investor would write that on there or you you'd be like i kinda got acquired aqua ish i don't know good outcome for the guys you know okay for me you're you're very honest with like your portfolio which i thought is good and and unique nobody writes on linkedin like that linkedin is basically like you know it's like those dog shows it's not like owning a dog it's like those dog shows if you watch a dog show you'd be like is this what owning a dog is like if you're like no that's nothing like what owning a dog is like so i i thought you like that you also when i started my e comm is you sent me a one line email i don't know if you remember this you go you go with my last business we realized that we just have to do this one thing differently than everybody then the current status quo and it would work we didn't need magic it didn't need like ten genius things we just needed we just had this one fundamental thing what's the one thing you're gonna do that's gonna make this work and like you know that one question i was like spinning for like a week because i was like i don't know i don't have a good answer to this question does this me my business is gonna fail but this is a great question and i stash it in my great questions list i thought okay i need to find that for this business but also for every business going forward what is the one thing that needs to be true or like you know is true about this do you remember setting do that no not at all but i think that sounds like the sort of thing i would do it for some reason it reminds me of my first company i started i started with a a friend of mine from college and we sold the company and after we sold the company we got into a fight and he sent me this email that was like fifty reasons this company succeeded despite your existence and i was like ouch and so i went read it and you know he got to like twenty five good reasons and then twenty six he was like you get the gist and for a little while i've read that email like every day for like the first year that i got it and then after that i've read it like kind of once a year every year to just be like what is it that he said and what was the truth to it i don't know why it reminds me of that but that was such a great it's great you know we great email there was some truth to it enough where i could kind of be like cool let me just take this feedback and action it in the future and is also ironic in that you know he he didn't he kinda gave up the startup up game kinda shortly after that man you you really broke him as a partner well he actually tried to do a couple other start ups and then i think and i think got into yc and did a yc funded start but i think it's you know start game as a hard game and so he was just like this this game isn't for me after some number of years and the other thing that's crazy actually is so you know i started that company then i started tiny and we were raising our series a from injuries h and he found out and he sent them an email saying you shouldn't let this guy you shouldn't invest in this guy call me and so they called him and you know he was like basically read that list of fifty things and you know it almost killed the killed the deal because they were like yeah we're we're worried about investing in this deal because of this and it's funny because there's so many things that people there there's many things that people will like ad privately but but kinda celebrate publicly like travis the uber ceo when he heard that some company some vc fund was investing a lift he stopped what he was doing he drove down to that vc firm and said here are all the reasons you shouldn't invest in lyft right and that seems crazy but because he was successful brilliant and there were a couple other things with like mark pink and z where he did the same thing so it was just a funny experience going through that with him and kinda drinks h what series a and it's funny now because somehow ten years later were great friends again and you know he got married and i was like the best man at his wedding which is alright happy to this you you also have been talking about this kinda like buy a public company thing so because i'm i'm like y what's next for you right what do you what's the next big swing what are you excited to do and you've talked about this so let's let's go into some of those that idea because i don't think most people in the startup up game think or talk about going and buying a public company or or you know sort of a hostile takeover what it would have you what's the idea here and why might you do it yeah so i've been kinda trying to figure out what to do next i think after tiny i was like wow startups are hard i'm gonna try to take it easy and now gotten to a place for where i'm like cool let's do something big again and starting a new company from scratch is really hard so i've just been like is there a public company that i can acquire where i don't go through that zero to one phase that everybody loves but is really difficult and go to a place where something's already at a five or ten and can i then take that and scale it as an as a way of kinda running a business so to me the perfect business out there to acquire is this company that was that's this number one on my list is a company that was a three billion dollar that's currently a three billion dollar company but in the private market was ten billion dollars so it's worth ten billion dollars before and now as a public company it's worth three billion dollars the company is squarespace squarespace squarespace ad i feel like every the only time i ever hear squarespace squarespace is in their ads now yes squarespace spends so much money on these like podcast ads and you hear about them everywhere on podcasts or places that you weren't really you don't see companies doing like direct response advertising like i never see them on facebook but i always hear about them on podcast podcasts forward and so the stock is down you know fifty percent since the ipo they're at this like kind of nine hundred million revenue run rate now it's a subscription business with more than four million subscribers i'd love to buy because i think it's a great company that's super undervalued it's not being run to maximize profits so it's being run a way that keeps it at breakeven so i think you could run it to maximize profits get rid of those podcast ads focus on direct response facebook ads to get new customers this where's the fan in their in their spending they do a ton of like the non direct response ads that are like tv ads or podcast ads that i think are great to have this like halo effect around the brand but i don't think those are the optimal way to maximize return on ad spend right and so they do i think three hundred or four hundred million of marketing spend so that's one you could make that more efficient or cut that down where what is the the other isn't it like like you know like elon buys twitter fires have the staff type of thing there's like a huge head count or what else is like fat in their system yeah i think they've got a a ton more people than they need their head count costs are like two hundred and twenty five million a year and their headquarters in is in new york city and i think you could just cut that team materially and you know get rid of the new york city headquarters because it's super expensive to be there yeah sam was talking about i remember back in the day like one of the earliest pac i talked about casper hey he's like casper you know how new casper is gonna fail they had like a hundred and fifty employees in new york and it's like why are you why are you hiring all these people in new york you don't need these people should be sitting in like you know south carolina omaha and like you know these other places like why is your customer support you know somebody making you know all this money in in new york he's like that's the first thing you gotta do is just get rid of new york and he was like so adamant about it was like his number one rant and this is at a time when casper was still like seen as like kind of like one of the like rising stars like now i think casper just kinda taken a beating in the in the market and all that stuff i think might have gone private again because it it's yeah casper a private couldn't it couldn't last publicly i guess but the but i remember that was his like number one thing like i say no more i don't need to read the p and l i just saw how many employees work in new york i could tell you this business is mis managed from day one there's this great carl icon story where he buys a business that makes like subway cars and they've got a huge team in new york and team somewhere in in middle america and he goes to the team in new york and is like there's three floors of them in some fancy midtown building and he's like so what do you guys do and you know they show all these presentations for two days and he's like okay i saw the presentation so what do you guys do and they're like we just told you and so there he's like alright let me go visit the guy who runs the middle america thing that actually makes the railroad cars and so he goes to visit them and he hangs out with a guy and the guy is super charming and at the end of the day he's like so you know they're these guys in new york what do they do for you do you need them and he's like no those guys don't do anything in fact i got four guys that are just there to manage those guys and all the questions that they bother us with firewall yeah if you get rid of those guys i think if the business will continue to grow and we'll be fine and so the next day he goes back to new york and fires three floors of people it's like that seen an entourage or ari gold just walks in with the paint gun and just starts blasting everybody that's basically what like the the the new york the new york firing carl icon yeah he tells us story with such a smile and actually he tells it as like this was pretty early in my career so it took me like a couple months to do this if it was now i would buy the company and fire them like the next week and so how answer how how does somebody actually do this how do you go buy a three billion dollar company because you're rich but you're not three billion dollars to spend on a company rich so how does somebody do this yeah i think three billion of the three billion dollar thing is probably too much for my you know a personal balance sheet but the way you you'd go wrap about it is just like the guy at cs generation is doing which is make a public offer it's the same way elon musk did it you first make a private offer then you make a public offer you make sure that all your financing is lined up when you do the public offer and you know the way that us stock market works and shareholder rights laws work is board has to respond to that offer and they have to have a really good reason to not take it if it's if it's at a material premium to the current stock price otherwise they're gonna get sued out the w by shareholders right and so yeah that's kinda how you do it okay so that's that's one way you let's do some of the other things let's do so that's from big idea to fun smaller ideas so you you were telling me something like you helped your buddy your i don't know high school friend or college friend or something like this sell their dental practice what telus teach me about that i i don't know anything about that yeah this was a chance for me to be a deal du so this friend of mine called me and was like hey i got a quick question for you somebody i i started this dental practice you know ten years ago somebody came in into make an offer should i take it and you know i thought it was gonna be one phone call it ended up being like sixty hours of work with a bunch of phone calls with him and and the buyers of the business and it was super cool to see the inside of a dental practice and how the p and l looks and how a company gets acquired like that so he has a dental practice that's massively profitable that he runs in a way where he's optimizing for his lifestyle so he does seven figures and eb has a fifty percent net margin all while working three days a week and i was just like oh my god he's worked three what is he doing the other days he is making up new hobbies that he's getting excited about like he's never gone fishing before and he's like i got all this time to kill because have i fun gear now i have to learn this hobby yeah so he'll go find a new hobby and like buy the gear find somebody in town who is good at that hobby and go with them actually i i hung out with him recently and he's like let's go fishing i was like when did you take up he's like i got so much time so he works three days a week and he's not optimizing the business for eb he has a big waiting list of patients who wanna become patients but he doesn't have the time to see them he has one dentist that works for him and a bunch of dental h but none of that is being done in a way where he's like optimizing for revenue or profit just optimizing for his quality of life so this private equity firm is doing a roll up of all of these dentists in that area and it's super interesting how the private equity so they've got a company that's going around and doing this roll up of of dental practices the company is run has a ceo which is a dentist super nice guy super well known in the area and admired by and admired and liked by all of the other dentists in the area so he's kind of like the figure ahead of the company good cop good cop then they've got a coo who is this hardened guy who's bought tons of businesses and worked for a bunch of private equity firms and his experience acquire and you don't even like talking to him after you know five minutes and he's the bad cop so good cop and bad cop go in and you know good cop does all the charming saying this gonna be a great acquisition look at how it's turned out for me bad cop does all of the numbers in negotiating so they bought this business and they bought it with a really simple premise they bought it for a seven x eb multiple and they're like we're gonna go buy all the dentists in this area that we can and we'll sell it a fifteen x eb multiple because we'll get to a scale of you know twenty thirty million in eb that's just the valuation arbitrage right which is basically that small eb of businesses like let's say you're doing a million or two million they'll sell for seven x but if you had twenty million of eb in a business it'll get acquired by a larger institution it's a easier buy button to buy twenty million a a year of eb for fifteen x that's that's and so all you have to do is kinda like accumulate roll up and and put this together to get to that next stage of buyer yeah exactly right so that's one aspect and then the other aspect is they were like there's all these things that we can do to increase revenue for this guy's business one we're gonna add another dentist eliminate the waiting loss anyone wants to see a dentist they're gonna be able to see a dentist within a week they added another dental h chair so the dental chair costs like ten thousand dollars and my buddy just didn't go by one and kinda of put a dental hi there to increased dental hygiene revenue they even told him that there's all these things they can do to maximize to increase the amount of money they get from insurance companies so they were like there's this one instrument whenever you're doing a cleaning just pick this instrument up you don't even have to put it inside the mouth of the patient just pick it up for a second and then put it back down and then you can claim that this higher insurance code and we're gonna generate more revenue so you called me and was like you know is this moral or is this immoral like can i go back to these guys and say hey i don't wanna do this this doesn't seem right he said as he's holding the two up for forty five minutes just to see what happens that's right and then because they bought all these other dental practices in the area they're able to take one dental practice and say oh you need braces or you need a root canal or you need whatever oral surgery procedure we're gonna refer you out to somebody and so they used to he used to refer to people who are just kinda third parties and now you get to refer to people that are in the network already owned by the private equity firm nice yeah okay that's great so you see that machine and you're like wow this is amazing what's your kind of like big takeaway from that experience because i think most people wouldn't take the time to go do that you did and i think you probably got something out of it would what would what was your big takeaways well i thought it was amazing there was a win for the private equity firm and just being able to see the roll up strategy and how good it was for them upfront was awesome i also got to see it from his perspective and from his perspective it was also a huge win it was an easy transaction he didn't shop it around it was a way for him to retire and become the richest person that he knows he owned the real estate of the dental practice so he got to keep the real estate and now the acquire pays him rent every month for the real estate that he owns and now he gets to go because he was working three days a week which is a lot he now gets to take month long vacations to europe or africa or wherever he wants to go for fun with his whole family yeah that's amazing i also like the i'm the richest guy now that i think that's it a funny thing that actually does happen in a bunch of like especially in smaller towns and like niche things it's like if you can make eight million dollars or stuff like that you are you you know you're done now you don't need anymore and you you feel like there's a beauty and that like if you're in silicon valley you could build a billion dollar business and like you might not get invited to the big boy table still right because it's just like everybody knows fifty people that are more successful younger smarter and you know more ambitious than them and so there's just there's never ending you know like race that you're on if you're silicon valley new york la and that's just not true in these other places and i i think there's some there's something great about that yeah it's amazing the only way to win the rat race is to opt out of the rat race and he has opted out and has buy won the rat race and it's so funny to compare my life to his because i spent so much more time working and you know have made a bunch of money so that maybe i don't need to work as hard or at all and yet i continue to work and he's like i'm chilling and you've thought about that or no it's like just not your nature i have one of my goals for twenty twenty three is to like take it a lot easier work wise and spend a lot more time doing as many fun things as possible like i'm in la right now they have this thing called the porsche driving experience so you go and go with a bunch of friends they've got porsche in a race racetrack and you get a porsche and just drive it around the race racetrack as fast as you can without killing yourself we you know when we got back from the weekend getaway that we did i gave a debrief and i talked about this one observation had which was that at that thing there was peep we've we met people or we were hanging out with people that were of like four or five different life phases so there was like you know you know victor and judy basically like you know twelve year olds and their mindset was like y wake up time to play like they literally woke us up with a boom box by the window just playing like you know ts or something like that and they're like come on the pool already warm then we can go to the song and we could play golf we could play with wall could play this and play that like they were just and like from the moment they woke up to the moment they went just sleep they were like let's play so that was like the you know twelve year olds and then it was like the twenty year olds we bet that came over that night that were basically like building the n t projects or doing the like tiktok in the tiktok d brand that was just taken off and they were like i don't know how to describe it but they were kinda like in that hustle of like they kinda thought they had it all figured out but they don't but they don't realize that yet but that lets them do some cool shit because they don't know what they don't know yet so they were just like young stallion ins like just you know full of ex exuberance and didn't understand where the limitations were what the drawbacks were but that's okay they'll run head first of that wall when it comes but they're having a good time doing it and then there was like me band like we're like in our thirties and it's like you know the thirty year olds were sort of like okay i'm i'm you know i still have enough energy to do things but i'm not dumb enough to just do them blindly i don't have that the that great ignorance yet i i really like kind of over analyze things almost and so the whole time we were like trying to think through our next project trying to like sit down and map it out and pros and cons and all this stuff and and then there's you guys who were in your forties and you were like yeah you're like ramon yeah yeah you're like oh ramon like throwing out his back playing pickle ball and like you know you guys were basically some combination of like let's have fun like let's go to surfing let's play sports like y know seize the day i don't know how much longer i'm gonna be able to do all this stuff constantly like i'm doing it and you know like i guess like there was like an element of like you know yeah business stuff is cool but like life is a lot cooler than business where the thirty year olds and the twenty olds were like no winning and business is a lot cooler than twice yeah and like i remember just continue trying to be like hey guys alright you guys wanna just sit out and just whiteboard for a minute and it was like you know just sort of like i was feeling this urge to do that and i feel you guys were this urge like the sun is out let's go outdoors and like but let's wear our sunscreen because like we don't wanna die it's was like this element like i wanna live and i don't wanna die and that's where you guys were at and then we hung up with like a seven year old guy and he was just sort of like you know i want some action i'm bored i want some action and like you know i wanna contribute on a give back and like that was like a big focus and like you know it's just fun to have like this energy around me so that was kinda one observation i had you know hey is that is that accurate as far as you read or my my making stuff up here yeah it's super accurate ramon and i were like it's saturday night and we have a bunch of entrepreneurs who are just like trying to sell us their business and just like get themselves excited and meet people on network and me and ramon we're like it's nine o'clock i think it's time to go to bed and these guys are like no let's see up till two am let's talk about business ideas let's start new business tomorrow oh my god this guy selling mini katana on the internet through youtube and tiktok wow so it's a real funny thing and then you know you and ben were like let's talk about new business ideas here's a new business idea what do you think what do you think do you think oh what about this what about this and ramon and i are like how about we jump in the pool like just take a ice pad yeah soon it's funny to see these different seasons of life and yeah i'm trying to kinda adjust this new season and for example now on saturdays and sundays i try not to touch my laptop at all and be outdoors and with friends as much as possible well that it's hard to make that shift and that's he's me even at the beginning of this podcast like i'm buy a public company and take it to the moon and then it's like actually i'm gonna like enjoy life and like you know whatever you know do family things and think things like that it's it's it's hard to even be congruent in a one hour podcast with like you know a a a kind of like direction so you know i i think that's that's i've observed that amongst many many people it's like very hard it's very hard to stay congruent i i noticed this about myself like i'll be like oh i love this content podcast thing this is great i think i could be the best of this and then and then i get all this positive feedback where it's happening and it's like growing and people like it and then i'm like yeah but should i start this business doing this b2b thing and then it's like wait what happened to the whole like i wanna do this content it's like i don't know like i just it's hard to be congruent and it's very easy to get distracted and get off kinda like mission when you're used to doing one thing and you know you can always go back to that well and do it and this this new thing that you think might be the right thing for you but is different and maybe a little unfamiliar a little less familiar i met the guy who started a company called solo stove and sold it and it then later went public named spencer and he was like i started this company i worked really hard i sold it now i made mega bucks and i'm good i'm financially independent i he doesn't invest in any startups ups he doesn't invest in any private equity funds or vc funds he's like when people are like do you wanna invest in this that the other thing he's like no i'm good he takes all his money and puts it in the stock market in the vanguard v o the vanguard s and p five hundred index doesn't think about it all and he says that everyone else who is like this as an entrepreneur starts a company makes it and then goes back and starts another company they're only starting another company because that's the only thing they know yeah and he's like they just keep building a new prison for themselves that's bigger and brighter but it's still a prison and why would you do that and so i had this call with him and then for a week after that i was just like walking in circles like mu to myself what am i doing with my life what what am i doing why am i starting new businesses what is all of this so it's really interesting to see people on the other end of the spectrum i think i told you that once when we i remember we're at some park san francisco you're were tell me about your new thing and it was working great and i was like i was like i that's i was like that's great and i'm like i admire that you do this with such ease it's like watching steph curry shoot three pointers like wow you just can start to business and it just works like this that that that what happened to all the hard gritty stuff that i feel all the time like you're just doing it that's amazing but then i also told you was like i feel like you're playing the same level of the video game again and like you know you kinda beat this level like shouldn't you just like go to the next level i don't know what that level leaving is i even know what that means maybe it's not even business but like you know i said that and i felt like a real dick afterwards i was like that was a stupid thing to say i remember like feel like you know that i was like i first felt really bad i was like that was just kinda like a a i don't know like that probably didn't feel good to to say that or to hear that and then i was like also like i was like well do i believe it and like you know what i want a friend to tell me that if they felt that about something i was doing and i was yeah i think i would and i was like i think he doesn't take that stuff seriously so you know that's no problem but you know like i felt that and and i i felt seen that now in many people the same like build a prison of your own making and like you said the only people who win are the ones who sort of opt out of the rat race and it's really jarring when you see that and you're like wait what you're leaving but you you could do we're still here and they're like yeah we're still here and they're like yeah it's great i'm gonna go wander over here and i'm like oh my god you can leave this room like i didn't know that was possible it's like it is honestly very jarring when you meet the like one out of a hundred people and silicon look at valley could do that yeah it is stunning that people do that and it's so interesting when you meet people who do that and like what they choose to do with their time like you're were telling me about that brain tree guy who's like i'm trying to maximize my life i'm trying to reverse my biological age yeah yeah and so i change my diet i've got like a team of doctors nutrition physical therapist trainers and i'm reversing my age and that's what he's doing with this time and energy and money it's super interesting hear when people get the the thing i've seen i now have this thought which is that my life is actually limited by my imagination and growing up i always assumed it was limited by you know money or resources and now i realize my life is just limited by my imagination and one of the things that made me do is i'm trying to hire a chief fund officer my definition of fun is often like let's work and let's grind it out and i'm trying to hire somebody who's the exact opposite of me to be like no that's lame here's like five more fun things you could be doing right now go do those instead and i will literally close my laptop and just go do one of those five things in response to that that's amazing did you that thing you just said that my life is limited by my imagination i think that's probably i don't how many minutes into pi we but that's a that's like a golden nugget there like that's something i'm gonna think about a lot what say more about that like either how you thought of that or what's an example of that yeah you know it's funny because i'm living with my brother right now and the two us wake up and we're like it's monday morning let's go let's grind it out let's go let's win the ballgame and yesterday we like played paddle tennis for four hours until our limbs fell off and that was way more fun than whatever work we're gonna do today and so i just want somebody to like i don't spend it i spent all this time being like actually what what's happened for me is as i've seen more businesses and gotten older and more experience i feel like this a little bit of a hyper but i feel like neo in the matrix where you show me a business and i can like see through it and actually see the fundamentals of the business and have an opinion about whether it's a good business or not or i see opportunities where i'm like there's a hundred million dollar business here and it's just a matter of like doing the work and executing it and it could be a real business so i spend my so much of my brain thinking about that stuff and very little of my brain thinking about how to have fun and like other cool things that people do in life i spent a ton of time reading the wall street journal and talking entrepreneurs but very little time talking to instagram influencers or just people who are like balling out and having a great life and so i just wanna spend more of my time and energy imagining fun things to do like i love magic i would love to have a magician show up randomly in my week like while i'm at a restaurant a magician shows up and as like hey everybody i got a magic trick for you and then does magic trick at the table i friend of mine told me that him and a bunch of guy friends would go to vegas every year and one year this guy was in charge of planning it and he hired like five little people in tuxedo to follow them around and then a bunch of like the brazilian carnival dancers to follow them around the whole weekend and so everywhere they went everyone was like who are these guys they got in every club they got free drinks they got to all these people coming up to them and they had a dope weekend as a result and you know lots of people will just go to vegas and like go to the hotel and gamble and these guys just through their imagination had a better way of doing it yeah amazing alright this is this been good where do people find you you're you started tweeting so so shout out your your handle and then we can wrap it up yeah my goal is to get to one hundred thousand twitter followers by the end of the year so i'm gonna be tweeting a bunch more my twitter handle is my full name s u l e m a n a l i yeah silva ali alright great thanks for coming on man you bet thanks sean