okay so the news is this if you've been listen to this podcast you know that shepherd is a business that i'm a part owner in i've been talking about it on the podcast and it's a great business and last week news broke that there was a private buyout of majority stake in the company for fifty two million dollars at a fifty two million dollar valuation it was done by nick hub i had the opportunity to sell my shares in that i decided not to not a single share i'm holding every single share so today we're gonna talk about i i guess we'll tell the story of you know how shepherd even grew in four years to be a fifty two million dollar company how i ended up getting involved with the becoming a owner in the business and why one of the owners in the business did this buyout how they they took twenty nine million dollars and bought majority troy stake in the company so that's the news now here's the accident it i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a roll alright sean last week you guys had a big announcement so you and nick bought shepherd and that's amazing and i didn't i didn't do it nick did it not me yeah but you were part of it you were part of it you're you're you're one of the partners and i guess maybe i'm gonna interview you at least for this first segment because i wanna learn all about it sure i think it's amazing what nick has done so let's start with the beginning explain what shepard is and then i guess that we'll start it like two thousand twenty when started explaining like how it grew and what happened last week yeah so there's a kind named marshall h who was entrepreneur were done a bunch of different things i think he owns like a hotel in s saint louis he had a bunch of commerce companies some goofy one like some emoji something something then he had peel which was like a phone phone case type like a thin phone case so he was in e commerce and one of the common things with e commerce is e commerce is like a real business but it's like a lemonade stand business every margins matter and so what a lot of commerce operators do and i did this too with my e ecommerce brand i think sixty percent of our staff is is offshore is because margins matter you have to figure out a certain a specific problem which is how do i get great talent at without paying the full cost without paying the full cost of hiring stanford for grads and harvard grads or or you know even just a normal median worker in the states and so a lot of us we go to talent hotbed beds like latin america where you find great programmers or data analysts or the philippines where you can find a great customer support team that will you know do the job at a fraction of the cost usually about five times less than it costs in the states so five times life is like pretty massive so marshall running peel he starts hiring more and more people overseas and he decides to start a company called support chip which at the time was ridiculous i saw i'm president marshall on facebook i've been friends with marshall since sixteen or or fourteen when he told me he was doing this i was like this is silly but then i saw the branding the website pretty much looked the way it does now from the beginning well he uses your favorite color of green as well and so and so he he creates his brand and you're right like the idea of hiring talent overseas is not new this has been going on for a long time i remember my dad once bought this book called the world is flat and i was a little kid never i read this book and it it's all about globalization of talent it was something that big companies were doing but more and more small companies have been doing the startups and the like especially for specific roles right so anyways he starts his company and it starts doing decently well he's promoted on twitter and starts to grow so now nick comes along nick hub from sweaty start exactly nick's got a storage company he's in the real estate space and at what people don't know is nick has certain companies like he has a cost segregation business cost is basically when you buy a property you do a cost study and it allows you to accelerate your depreciation so instead of d depreciation something over thirty years you might be able to accelerate the schedule to seven years it saves you a bunch of money in your one so it's well worth the it's well worth the trade to go pay for cost study in order to save the money so most people who do cost sag they hire us talent what he does all of his talents like in colombia they do it on an ipad do you like walk around with an ipad explain how it works so the way it works is and and i'm far from an expert the way that i understand it is basically typically real estate has something like a thirty year lifespan but they came in and said look the rules actually say that your windows can depreciate in ten years your roof is actually only fifteen years so what i need you to do is do a video tour with one of our people on the phone and i have a a checklist of things i need you to show me in the home and you gotta walk through and spend about thirty minutes just walking through the house and i did that and the person was i knew he was i mean he he spoke perfect english but i thought he was overseas and i was like i actually don't know where you are after for some reason i thought it was in europe i had no idea where he was and there was a guy in the other line as i'm like looking through the house and he's marking down what type of windows i have and things like that right and so pretty crazy that used to be something you somebody walks on foot through the building and it has a clipboard of the piece paper and now you've got low cost talent in columbia that are getting it done for you right so anyways he builds that business so he's using shit he a so he ends up going to marshall and cuts an affiliate deal i think initially was an affiliate deal which was just hey if i send you traffic if i tell you people hey i'm jeopardy great give me a cut of the fees that you that you generate the revenue that you generate marshall says yes nick starts sending traffic and along the way nick goes back and he says you know what affiliates it's great but my beef is not wet enough i need a little more skin in the game so he cuts a deal with marshall to end becoming a part owner of the business business continues to grow last year almost a year to the day i become a partner in the business high i approach marshall i say hey same same story i'm a power user of the product i have a big audience and i think i can help grow your business what did this all come from the place of it'd be cool to grow company based off of your influence i had a lesson which was invest in your p and l and this was a lesson i learned the hard way which was when i was running my startup studio and for six years i was trying to make a successful i was trying to be successful make money and what i learned in the end was that a lot of the i would have made a hundred times more money had i simply look at our expenses in our p and l and just knocked on their door and said hey can i invest i'm a big fan of your product i'm an early user of this product i really understand this product and whenever you're raising your next round whatever valuation do that maybe i can help you out in some small way and you know we were i was one of the you know first i don't know two hundred companies using slack elastic search pager duty we were using early on fig mo were you're using early on like all of these like tons of but i i don't even know like like twenty apps like this and so i learned this lesson than the hard which is you oh you should always try to invest in your p so you look at your expenses you figure out which expense is meaningful it's a line item that you noticed but you don't regret it so an un expense meaning it was worth more than the than the cost and so i looked at mine and i was basically like this overseas recruiting is one because i'm great talent so i went to marshall and i said hey love the product i said i love this category too so said i'm not for sure gonna invest in your business but you're my first pick and i'm gonna i i use your products so let let's talk and so we we ended up working out a deal and it was a a a great deal for me what actually i thought at the time was a great deal for me it turned out to be an even better deal for marshall so he had a lot of wisdom in making that deal because i thought i was getting a very favorable deal but he understood the power of the audience and he understood the power of what we could bring to the table and he listened to m m he saw what we were done on twitter he had know they could come on him before and mentioned it and it was like the biggest day in a year or something like that so he kind of had a he had enough validation to take the leap faith but it was still to be clear ale leap faith so it turns out better than we expected like we had forecasted how much we thought we could grow the business and i try to over always under promise over deliver type of thing so i was like look i think we can you know maybe fifty percent maybe seventy five percent we basically grew it by three hundred so the business is basically tripled in the last year valuation grew and along the way different acquisition offers came up and i went to nick one day and i was like hey look there's acquisition offer i think this thing still got a lot of runway rate to run and actually the initial idea was nick why don't we what if we bought it but if we raised the money and we bought this thing so most people don't know i was the initial conversation and nick's like i'm i'm thinking the exact same thing let's talk to marshall and see within an hour i'm like too much work never mind nick i don't wanna do this this is too much effort for me it'll be a huge transaction like he to buy this business so what what actually ended up happening is nick announced he said big news yesterday i acquired a controlling interest and support she for twenty nine point seven million we paid twenty nine point seven million dollars to buy enough to become a controlling owner of the business i think he said the valuation i think yeah maybe they didn't different one fifty two million was the valuation they said fifty two million dollars and so which is pretty amazing because from the time one a literally one year ago i it was april of may that we we did the in my deal that means the value of the company had more than tripled in a year so you know just tremendous value growth a win for everybody involved my state grew knicks state grew marshall did obviously phenomenally well and nick goes and he basically raises the money and so he raises the money to to go and buy you know basically for thirty million bucks you buy control stake in the business my little crew we we threw in a little bit welcome to the team finally yeah we're we're very very very small stakeholders amongst this thing was hurting me to get rich without you you gotta be honest it kept me up in night a few days that's alright we we we have a very small taste of it but okay so it here's what i wanted to bring up about two or three years ago you and i did a podcast where we said look there's all these people have created billion dollar companies off of instagram they've done it off of youtube they've done it off of facebook there's not really been any breakout hits off of twitter yet because twitter's audience is small but i was like i think it's good i think we both said it's great because it's tech base you get to know people whatever and there's it's a b b crowd a little bit more so value crowd yeah more so than the other places and it hasn't happened yet but i think it is happening right now i i think i don't know if this is gonna be a billion dollar company but i think the fact that hub like went out and raised this money to do this that is a big swing and it took a lot of courage right to do that and it could our our prediction could be coming true as we speak very balls move i gotta say very balls move to do this and i tweeted the like a balls move i can't wait to see how this plays out and people thought that was a negative but to me i i literally just met like oh my god i can't wait to see how this how this ends like what is the store what is the story gonna be and i think it's gonna end really well it's not balls a way it's balls that he took the ball in his core and he's like trying to do this thing and i by the way when i tell everyone is i don't wanna bet against nick nick is a as a really good entrepreneur and if someone could pull it i have faith that he can pull it off you know when you watch somebody play sports you learn a lot about them and i played basketball with nick humor he is a he's a workhorse he's an physical player he's an incredible he he comes to the pickup games with a mouth with mouthpiece in it's like bro i don't know what contact you're planning for but it's more than i was ready for today and so you see you learn how he operates let me tell you a couple things about this so nick could have been on cruise control the guy owned self storage facilities self storage is literally a closet you lock it's the like the least operational thing you could possibly do is literally put your put your objects in this door and lock it forever like that i think it's a hundred million dollars worth of storage units that he owns so it's a significant amount my point being is he's kind of financially he he could've have been he could've have been in a good spot he he loves haunt he's got little kids he wants to do outdoors he wants to play sports he could have just been chilling then he has a twitter audience so he starts he could've have done affiliate deals he started launching all these agency agencies he's like i got a seo agency he's like i got a hiring agency i gotta you know i don't forgot what else he he's casa he's got like seven different agencies he started and each of those would have brought in i don't know fifty dollars a month enough he could have been totally chill he chose violence he chose to not chill he chose to bet his entire career put his entire network and net worth on the line basically to say this is to take this bold bet and you'll love to see it i love to see it i don't think it's gonna fail i think the even the worst case it's it's a very sur viable thing i think best case is is quite huge it could be a very big outcome for him and i think it's so cool that he's doing this yeah yeah it is and like look i thought we were taking a big bet like when i put my name on something or nick puts their name on something it's gotta be good because we're spending all this time years building up a reputation years building up a loyal trusted audience at the end of day you gotta turn over your cards and if you don't have if you don't have the hand you know you were just bluff the whole time and you can't do that nick took it to it a whole new level which is to basically say forget all my other shit i'm going all in on this and i think that's that's really awesome okay so now let me tell you the big picture take so forget shepherd for a second this is part of a general idea i've had for a while couple of years now which is the idea of an audience cofounder so when i started my first companies i knew i needed like i myself as an entrepreneur could do part of what was needed to to succeed to succeed you need to build a great product you you say identify a gap build a product that fills that gap you have to have a maybe a a technical team in order to build the product you need money you need a bunch of things and as a founder you try to go do all the things you try to identify the gap try to go raise the money you try to go recruit a team but it's hard to do by yourself and so very common in silicon valley to have a a technical cofounder and a technical cofounder founder is you know that's the person who's gonna do the the engineering the building and you rely on them to do that and you're saying i'm gonna do the the the other components of this business well now i think there's a more more common playbook which is the idea of an audience cofounder well an audience cofounder is you partner with somebody who has a has a cheat code in go to market right they have a advantage they have an unfair advantage that is non fungi that is non even not easy to recreate yourself they and what they do is they essentially lower your cost of customer acquisition sometimes the point of being zero sometimes negative but it definitely lowers it which is it new that that this isn't new you know you george foreman and then since the beginning of time we've talked about celebrity partnerships exactly so so they've evolved and so what that's what i wanna bring up like the evolution of these so for example you got the foreman and grill and it used to be you hire a celebrity they hold your product they smile by this product right that was an endorsement then this then the onto the audience people they they got a little bit wiser so they said and instead just taking cash for this i'll take some equity too thank you very much so they start taking equity and you're gonna put my name and face on it then that means i'm gonna have to own a piece of so you get the former grill you get all of these celebrity alcohol brands you get mac mcgregor doing proper whiskey i think gregory owned about fifteen to twenty percent proper whiskey you have logan paul and prime i i don't know but i think it's something on the order magnitude of twenty thirty percent you've got clooney doing his tequila you got the rock doing his tequila you got ryan reynolds doing his gym you got a bunch of people that do the the sort of celebrity alcohol brand the celebrity cosmetics brand right rihanna with fe beauty but but each time it's getting a little more and more tied in with the c cofounder so you go from hold up the product and bing play the jingle to putting in my name and face on it to actually it's named after me actually i'm gonna be the one creating the media that we use to market this thing instead of you paying me twice a year to come to some some commercial shoot i'm gonna be posting every day i'm kylie jenner i'm gonna be posting every day on my instagram stories about this i'm conor programmer i'm gonna be re repo tons of material on i'm gonna take a bottle to the press conference i'm logan paul i'm gonna take a a you know a bottle of prime with me to wrestle man when i'm when i'm and i'm gonna use i'm gonna crush one right before i go in the ring and so the celebrities become more and more involved and now what what's happening is this is transitioning out of major celebrities doing major you know consumer products to more and more happening in the software space which is more new i would say so you have yeah russell brands and do this with click funnels you have h mo do just bought chunk of school and now he's wearing a school hat and a school wide beater everywhere he goes because he's trying to promote that product and so you said what me and nick did was shepherd and you see that basically these brands that are almost private equity brands right so we build a consumer facing brand and then we do private equity and the beautiful thing is that the private equity guys don't know anything about brand and the brand guys don't know anything about private equity and if you happen to be somebody that knows about both you're pretty unique proposition in the market and so i think we're gonna be seeing more and more of these audience cofounder for people realize that i can either just take a bet that my product will get off the ground that i can get out of the kind of the the the mu of similar products at the subs scale and try to break through and they're gonna use their cap table as a tool for to do this and i i i narrowed it down into three things that i think you need in order to make this work because i think there's gonna be a lot of people that try this and they're gonna fail and here's i think the three essential things you need in a audience c cofounder the first a large trusted audience trust being the keyword here there's a lot of people with an audience but they have low trust meaning if they go tell people hey you should go try this you should read this book you should try this lotion you should show up at this event should watch this movie how many people actually go do it and i'm not gonna name names so there's a lot of people that we know that have audiences but they don't have anything for trust or they have audiences but their audiences broke and so the only thing they could sell them is very cheap things for both people basically and so you have to find the right trust somebody with a trusted audience so trust that's quite challenging to measure but large is easier so i could tell you so our podcasts m mfa if you measure youtube including shorts which you could argue and i would agree with it that schwartz is nonsense but we had something like ninety million impressions last year across the podcast and then i had to guess your twitter handle probably had another ten to twenty a month million impressions and then your newsletter i don't know how often you said that you said it once a week i let's say let's keep round number of a hundred thousand so you're talking to tens of millions of people all month would you say that's accurate no to be honest no i think the number of people is a lot less than the number of impressions sorry for sure tens of million depression i don't know how many people maybe a million maybe more million i think i think we reach somewhere between half a million and a million people truthfully right and there's a lot of who that will exaggerate these number truthfully i think that's the absolute ceiling of what we reach but then the trusted audience is a fraction of that but it doesn't matter it's it's the depth of trust that matters and this is the total mis priced asset in the market because the easy thing to measure is number of followers number of reviews number of of of impressions that something gets a little bit better might be likes or replies but then even better is bookmarks even better is how many people you click the link and then the ultimate true source of truth is revenue there's other test that i like to think about so another trust test is and i talked to a guy who who's getting millions of millions of views on shorts and i said hey if you tweeted it out tomorrow that you are hanging out at this coffee shop in austin i said hey i'm hanging out from ten to two tomorrow or ten to noon two hours i'm hanging out stop by how many people would show up there are some people that would have a line out the door and then there's some people that nobody would show up for because they have a very fleeting transactional impression based thing they are not the focus of it maybe they're putting up meme content or they're putting up you know like canned videos that are highly animated but they're not even involved in it there's no trust that's being associated with them another trust test if i email my list tomorrow and i said tomorrow i'm putting out something that i've been working really hard on that it's fucking good trust me and i said it's is that it'll be available at five am tomorrow and it's gonna be available to the first thousand people that that try it that's it how many people would set their alarm right right there are certain companies of products you set your alarm for apple gets people to set their alarm and come camp out to get their new product it's trust at the end of day right that's the that's the measurable value of a brand is trust and so i think that's the the number one variable number two product to audience fit yeah so basically if i came on here and started tell you about colon cologne it's not gonna work it's just the wrong product for the wrong audience it's not what my audience want it's not what they trust me on it's not the right price point given the the size of my audience right i sell products that are worth tens of thousands each logan paul sells products that'll worth four dollars each but he's got a bunch bigger audience you gotta find an equation that works so product audience fit a great example was the episode we did with danny austin on this podcast danny austin was a woman who was she was she had struggled to postpartum i think postpartum hair loss and was really stuck insecure about her hair she wore wig for like a year then she took the wig off and told her her instagram audience and it's like here's is what i've been going through i feel a little bit silly i felt it's insecure about it but i'm trying some things and let's see what works and eventually ends up creating her own line of hair care called d which is a product to cure this pain point that she authentically had that many people in her audience authentically had and trusted her for it so the highest highest version of product audience fit is when you genuinely authentically experience a problem can tell a story about it and that story resonates with your audience because they also have that problem and they believe your story third one content creativity so how good is this person at creating an ongoing stream of content that plugs the product dude that's shockingly hard by the way very hard to do it's very hard at i'm good at it i think you're good at i think nick is exceptionally good at it as well nigga fantastic at it i he posts probably i think a hundred times a week on twitter i looked it up and he's good he makes hits and you see this everywhere so when logan and paul and and mk launched prime they did a photo shoot they did the photos shoot of them drinking and then there's this viral image this image that goes super viral and it's basically it's logan paul drinking prime and k drinking a prep private but k was kind of like bent down on one knee and then somebody photoshopped them together so it kinda looked like ksi was know like going down on on logan paul and then they printed a cardboard cut out of that and they put it in the aisle of i forgot walmart or wherever they were launching so they the the news was we're launching in walmart and many okay what does it creator do normally hey guys just us so excited can't believe it we launched in walmart good for me you know go go check it out please go buy our product from walmart right well logan paul does a smart about as he knows how to go viral around his product he knows that it's not about patti yourself on the back it's not about a generic announcement that doesn't a mean anything to the audience he gave them a reason to share the news which was put put him ksi in a compromising situation made joke out of it and that image goes and gets a hundred million views right and it's the same story but he knew how to package it to go viral he'll also do things like he'll create content that'll be i'm gonna try to make this drink using these three favorites flavors surprise so it's like kinda like those will it blend type of commercials yeah but he's using his product you know for us we will do like me and nick we would do a workshop where we would we did a like a delegation workshops so i was like look is that what most people will call those things i mean haters will call them webinars oh yeah but they're called haters you call a webinar i call you a haters i do it with a w word i could think i it was shop something like that yeah it's on the web i forget it's kinda like a seminar oh we would do these things and they would drive so much business for the for the business and so we would we would come up with what is a value add thing we could do that delivers so much value in forty five minutes out and we just say by the way if you wanna do this shepard it's a great tool but you've delivered so much goodwill and so much value that you can you could do that anyways there's a whole bunch of stuff around content creativity how do you end an ongoing basis jet create native content that is going to continue to bring the brand front and center or do it we created the thrill of the shield for example to give ourselves an excuse to talk about our products and so there are creators that are better at that and they're creators that are worse at that we're you know we're good but there are people who are incredible at who do you think is the best like who do you look to besides some of the maybe some of the non popular ones is there any non popular ones that you look at and you're like that's really great there's a guy on twitch named doctor disrespect that i first noticed is incredible about this and i noticed it because majority of twitch streamers get a ton of blow back if they ever mention a product a service to chat immediately sell out sellout out sellout out oh my god whatever doctor disrespect created a brand that almost allowed for it and he created so much humor and content it's like you don't wanna be in the middle so either you just never sell out or you try to try to sell product but you're trying not to sell out you're sort of hedging and the audience can sniff that out a second and they will pounce on you or you go full you a full sellout up at twitch we even did this when amazon wanted twitch the company to promote prime day i like oh how are we gonna do this our our community is very sensitive to us promoting something especially promoting a corp mega corp like amazon and so they created a campaign called twitch sells out and they made yeah you gotta make a sure twitch sells out and that was the whole campaign was well today twitch sells out and and they basically like they they leaned into it doctor disrespect would do this he he would do a promo promote promo with old spice and then he would create like a full like a full like content series around this thing around old spice and he would do it in such a way that by the end of it the whole chat was looking forward to the next old spice like if he park already he called it like the champions club or something like that he would create all these little things around it because he was a total character and he knew how to do it so he was i could see how much money he was making he was making way more money per viewer than the average twitch chamber because he knew how to monetize that audience do remember we had justin mayors come on and he told us about his new company called is it t med or t medicine t med yeah t med so t med i how do you explain it is it hsa spending so it's like a a a kind of a boring topic but basically like you could spend your insurance money anyway his c founder is this guy named kay means and kay means is i guess he's a i think he's a doctor or former doctor but he's like obsessed with the metabolic health and i followed him on twitter and he is ind me on like a healthy i bookmark his thing yesterday say it was like the four points fourth thing like you know basically he's like america has like you know a twenty percent obesity rate or something like that in young kids and like other countries have four percent here's the four things we should do immediate effective immediately to turn this around and i was like sir yes sir you know yes really depressed i've never met this guy but goddamn he's convincing he is so convincing and so hit his company and he does it in such a good way because his company is a very specific thing hsa spending and you could buy like healthy stuff i think you could buy like an eight sleep mattress or whatever using like your insurance something something like this but anyway he'll he his whole crusade is on like processed foods and over and being overweight and things like that and so he's like a renegade and a champion for like health it just so happens i have this thing that i that you could actually use to like buy some of these things so like he tweeted out their days like america's super obese series four points like you shouldn't be able to use food stamps on soda or i a pharmaceutical company should not be allowed to advertise on tv and he had like two or three more things and i get obsessed with it and he's started to change my opinion and then i'm slowly starting to think about true med we should have him come on by the way because i've seen him now do a couple of these rants and each time i am so convinced i'm so convinced that i actually scheduled time on my calendar to look up opposing evidence because i'm like before i just fully bathe in this crew aid same i need to hedge myself i need to create some firewall where i go see if this guy's full shit because he is very convincing he's very convincing and this is a really good example i asked you for a non popular example i guess i had one kay means is a non popular example of a well i guess he's i mean he's not like mainstream popular but he's somewhat popular in our little circle of of a b to b product and he is selling it wonderfully absolutely yeah i think it's a i think it's amazing there's a bunch of other way liver king nick bear like that a lot of i to do this and i think the the interesting thing now is it used to be celebrities hold up the product and endorse it or it would be the celebrity creates the company themselves what i'm finding now is this interesting new new variant of this the new strain which is company that already exists finds a audience founder to accelerate growth and by the way if you're trying to do this company to me i wanna do this again i wanna do this one more time the shepherd thing went so well i i tweeted this out i go you if you have a cash flow we product that is genuinely a great product like it has to be a great product otherwise i'm not gonna put my name on it and you are bootstrap you are not on the venture path hit me up sean s i wanna do this one more time you have this thing on here about the curse of family riches and i wanna talk about that but before we talk about that i wanna tell you story about someone i spoke with recently so there's says company called simple modern have you heard a simple modern of course so simple modern is a website that sells basically mugs but i think they sell a ton of stuff so like stanley mug competitors tumble like they sell a a ton of stuff i talked to him the other day and he gave me his annual revenue since they started the business along with the profit from some of the recent years and he said i could talk about it and so i listed it here in this document so when people give you their revenue do you just go just like even laugh or what do you do well whenever i talk to people i'm like hey before we they have conversation just so you know i'm not saying any of this and then our twenties we try to get girls numbers in our thirties we try to get guys numbers yeah yeah i wanna those people's people's income but then at the end of the conversation was like dude this is so fascinating can i share this or not and he was yeah dude i don't care you could share and so anyway he started this company two thousand fifteen in two thousand seventeen they had ten million in revenue eighteen they had twenty million they grew it and i'll just i'll ask a few years up in twenty one they got eighty million two thousand twenty two at ninety five million twenty three this most recent year they did one eighty this year they're expected to do two hundred and twenty five million dollars selling these tumble it's mostly tumble and he started the company with like two hundred thousand dollars in his thirty and so he's bootstrap company he owns half the business because he gave away a lot of the the the business to employees and i was asking about it and by the way in july in twenty three they did a hundred and eighty million revenue and forty five million dollars in eb in profits and so he's been able to make like a significant amount of money but the reason why mike was so fascinating to me is he's based in oklahoma so he's just like real soft sweet wonderful nice guy he's i'm sure he's aggressive in business but when you're just hanging out with them he's like a sweet man and he was like i started this company because i wanted to do two things one i wanted to just build a business that i could hire people who admire being around and number two he he was like i just wanted to give away a lot of money like i i feel like it's my mission to like give away money and so this guy since the beginning of the company the company has pledged to give seven or ten percent of their profits away to charities and the people within the company vote where the charity goes to and so he actually doesn't have control he set it up to everyone's a lot of vote but in the meantime he's been giving away all his money and so he's giving away something like a hundred thousand dollars a month of like the beckham family money and he like said what is he's like i i've i've been able to save up like of four million dollars but i'm still giving away something like a million dollars a year right now and i don't know if my five million dollar liquid net worth is gonna go up a significant amount because i intend to give as i go and he's been giving since the beginning so he's like when it started i was giving away five thousand a month when i was making i he said what did he say was like when i was making two hundred grand a year i was giving away five thousand a month and my intention is to continue giving so when i die i don't have a lot less i've given it away as i've gone and he was like basically like i kinda wanted to be generous when i was alive not when i was dead which is what a lot of people do and i don't know if i'm gonna leave any money for my family or not maybe i'll leave them enough that they have a little bit of something but we're gonna give away most of this he's like my net worth right now is probably two hundred million dollars based off the value of the business i'm giving it all the way and i was so fascinated by this and it really actually inspired me not enough to take action because honestly it's still it's still a bit fearful if i be honest like i'm still quite fearful of it but he seemed so freaking happy talking about this do you give away any money at all like this a little bit yeah not like this sounds like he's giving away twenty percent of his liquid net worth per year something like that yeah like a significant sum and and his liquid net worth is growing because he was like this is the first year that the business is he's like we're gonna do forty five million in eb it's the first year where we're like we don't have any new ideas within the business so we're gonna could big that dividend and i'm gonna end up giving most of that away and i'm just gonna give it away as i go two parts of this are impressive one is money where your mouth is there's a lot of people that that talk about oh yeah i wanna be able to give things away and then they live their whole life and they're like it's like the sand bake feeds each of the world where it's did you give any of it what what happened what happened to that he was giving as he goes i think that's really really really great some of the happiest people i've met in life are the people that give the most saying some of the most successful people i i know in life are people that give most and the the more interesting thing is of the people that give the most they've been giving from the beginning i think that's the real takeaway is like the fallacy that when i have enough then i'm gonna give and it just creates this like internal fear of you know giving away right you know this year last year we did when we had scott harrison on i did the thing where i gave away my birthday so i basically said i'm thirty thirty five i'm gonna give thirty five thousand dollars to charity water i'd set it live on the pods so i can i can say that loud here and then i encourage you hey if you wanna give me a gift go to the charity water thing donate the gift there do you know how much that race and i think it raised like about another thirty or thirty five thousand i think it raised thirty thousand so in total this pod gave you know audience people gave thirty thousand i gave thirty five thousand and it was an uncomfortable give like not that like didn't change anything in our life but i when i went downstairs i told my i was yeah on the pod i got kind of inspired and i committed to give away thirty five thousand dollars and she was like she pontoon you the stomach really hard yeah she was like what are you doing i was like i'm helping people and she's was like help me and i was like what and she's like off the trash i was like okay sorry but you know just in general it was an un it was unfamiliar territory to just like that on a whim commit amount of money that's you know meaningful that's a car you know that's it's like something and i really like the feeling and every year i tried to do that i tried to get to giving away in a way that's meaningful to me so the other thing we did was when tony robbins came on we pledged to give away i think it was forty or fifty tickets each tickets you know fifty to a five hundred to a thousand dollars basically you know so that's another you know sort of twenty five to fifty grand that we give but i'm like giving away an experience that was really million meaningful to me that i think could help a lot of people and so by the way i need to be pick the winners for that that reminds me so if you've been waiting you didn't miss out i didn't pick the winners yet there's like a thousand people to go through it and i just left that pile of you two thousand applications i was like i'll get to that when i have some free time but i will do it but the idea is give amount that's slightly uncomfortable for you i think that's a a good practice that i'm just now doing last three years i think i've done that and and probably should have been doing it earlier to be not i need to do it and the reason it kind of interest me and i was like mike is it okay to be selfish about this he's like well yeah so i was like do you get tax advantages he's was like yeah like it we you could like you you can like there is some stuff i can capture trying find the other reason to do it well i he he was like he's like he's like i'm not gonna not take advantage of something like but that's not the reason why i do it but is it is a nice like cherry on top i could takes but i was talking to him i was like you know what's crazy to be so he's religious but not in a way where like we disagree on anything like he's very kind about his shit and i was like dude if you're telling me that you're put here on earth to like please god by giving away money i never wanna bet against you that's like the best amount of h shit on earth you know what mean like who who who wants a bet against that person like i don't wanna go against to you you're gonna like destroy everyone you're you you got the best motivation and so what's the thing on here about curse of of of oh was it it was familiar rich i rather i didn't know when to break it to you that you thought i was saying family riches but it says familiar riches what's here's a transition talked about giving away money this is the greed side it this about making money okay so i have noticed a pattern in myself and in many others and i call it the curse of familiar riches and here's how the curse goes you grow up thinking a certain amount of money means are rich for me that was always a million dollars that's why this podcast is called my first million i used to play games with you know my sister whoever would be would you rather would you cut off your pinky for a million dollars would you and it was just like escalating what if scenarios that's an easy yeah yeah exactly that was a starter yeah i never even asked about ten million dollars i've never thought about a billion dollars i never even heard honestly i never heard the word like i never even heard people talk about billionaires never knew a billionaire when i was growing up it wasn't even on my radar as a thing i thought a million dollars was like all the money so you have this idea of like what a ton of money feels like but even a million dollars wasn't my goal it's not like a million dollars was what the rich people have that wasn't what i thought i would have and so i thought making six figures a hundred thousand dollars was like the goal that was that you've made it line what i met you and you were making six figures i thought you were the wealthiest person i knew it was a great feeling enjoyed being the wealthiest person of you knew yeah it's like a hundred and fifty grand a year oh my god you're driver so anyways i and i get the curse familiar riches is you have you start with this amount of money that you think is a ton of money and it is a ton of money to you at the time it's all relative and then you get you you do it right so i graduated from college i think my first job well my first thing was a startup and we were paying ourselves nothing we were living off of we made twenty five thousand dollars of prize money from visit we lived off that three of us so you know eight grand a year or something but then i got i we got kinda hired i ended up getting a job my job was paying me a hundred and twenty grand a year and i was laughing i couldn't believe that they're paying me that much money and once i was making a hundred twenty five thousand dollar or hundred twenty thousand dollars my brain this is why it's called familiar riches my brain could think of many other ways that i could make a hundred twenty thousand dollars i could get another job doing this i would maybe hear about an opportunity i could realize that i could stitch these two things together and if i did those two things it could be like a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars and so there are once you get to a certain level whatever that level is it's quite easy and familiar to come up with one or two other ways that you could make that same amount of money and by the way that exists at every level at every level this is this is the problem this way this is the curse and so the easy thing to do then is when you get to a hundred grand you realize oh i can go get this other job that would pay me a hundred grand or even a hundred and twenty grand or hundred and fifty grand but it's basically between a one and two x of where you're at so you you could figure out how to make about what you're at fifty percent more or just double but your brain breaks after you say awesome how do you make five times more yeah and i remember hearing at the time like there's a guy who makes five hundred thousand dollars a year in salary and it was stunning to me i was like he's stealing the money from the company there's no way anybody could create that much value that they're making half a million dollars per year he just gets paid that that's insane i and if you ask me sean what's the pathway but you're at one hundred twenty now how do you get to five hundred my brain would short circuit and break and so what i did for many years was i did things that were very familiar and i found a way to one to two x my earnings and then when we got acquired by twitch whatever and i got my package the the here's your upfront cash and i sent it to my dad and my dad i think the most he ever made was three hundred grand in life and a year a salary and so i sent them the offer and he called me and he's like it just keeps going i go what he goes i thought the first line was the total amount and i was so excited and that was the boat signing bonus i said like then then the next thing he's like then they're what is the rs what are these things what are they giving you and he's he couldn't believe it he emailed me again that three days later he goes i just read it again i still can't believe it and he like thought it was like a men menu where you like pick one of the options like does more like a like a it add it all up and so and my brain broke too so what am i getting at here after that i started to ask questions i sure to realize wow there are people forget making five hundred thousand a or these people that make two million dollars year these people make five million dollars a year and so i started to use as a thought exercise how does how would i make ten times more than i'm making today and at first again the brain broke there was no answer i sat down again the next day and i said how do i make ten how how do i make ten times more than i'm currently making well i guess if i was gonna do that i and and then you start to get creative if you're like is there anybody who makes that of course sorry what do they do how do they do it you start to reverse engineer some things and then you add time into the equation i remember we came on this podcast because i had a brain breaking conversation with nike nikita beer we're like nikita what you to i just sitting facebook you're just been four years just rotten away over there what's going on he goes yeah i'm thinking about for the summer how do i make ten million dollars in ninety days and i was like what i had never ever heard somebody ask a question oh no it it wasn't ten million dollars it was how do make what it was like a million dollars three million dollars i forgot it was it it was yeah was it was not ten it was more like how do i make a million dollars and ninety days and i was like i don't even know i don't know what do you that time scale breaks all the existing answers i have but sure enough if there are answers and that that summer he created the gas that app called gas and i think he made seven million dollars in revenue and then they got acquired by discord the son of a bitch did it and i was like what the hell is that and so i started asking myself better questions and i've just noticed this and it's just a prop the world anybody who's out there you don't you don't have to do this it is absolutely wonderful to be completely content where you're at and to focus your energies on other things besides making money probably healthier and if you're doing that more power to you but if you're slightly broken inside like me and you don't go to therapy and you think that money's gonna cure your problems this is a good exercise to actually do it which is to absolutely refuse any option that's gonna make you one to two extra money you have to completely say no to anything that is a one or two x where you're currently at and only think about what would it be a ten x and then let your brain short circuit every day until your brain starts to come up with the answers and it will it just takes like five to six days of doing that every single day to get to start generating some answers so i wanna give two points to that one i actually think there's good news the good news is is that you know how they say money doesn't make you happy i actually think it does make you happier so the good news is is there is a threshold i don't know what that threshold is is different for everyone it could be tens of millions it could be a certain amount of a year per year but that seventy thousand dollar study that's bullshit if you zoom in on that graph it continues going up it just doesn't go up as steve steep and that study is also like twenty years old so it's totally outdated but there is there is some number i think we're it will make you happier the bad news i know a lot of rich people you and i know a lot of the same wealthy people we know people who are billionaires we know people who are hundreds of millions millions millionaires i am just about one hundred percent positive and i can tell you that this is based on my personal experience it's never enough it is never enough you and i have a couple friends who it is enough for a very small group of people but for eight out of ten people it's never enough and that whole two x idea it always exists and so it is a challenge but it's imperative that we it doesn't matter if we making a hundred grand a year it doesn't matter if you're making it five hundred grand or fifty million year that we have to figure out how to be happy and present and enjoy ourselves along the way because once you just automatically get that outcome or whatever you get it it doesn't change a significant amount from like where you were the months or years prior what's the jim carrey quote he goes i wish i wish everybody could be rich and famous so so they would know that that's not but that's not the answer it's absolutely not the answer it i think it can make you happier but it doesn't necessarily make you happy let me tell you one for all the finance personal finance nerds out there what i used to do is so money's is kind of a weird thing because when you like sell your company or something like that it's just like for the first few weeks the only major change is when you log in to chase dot com the number like the digit like the screen looks different like if you think about it that's like the all that's like and that is awesome but that's like it's kind of weird that that's like weird psychological thing where that's the only like meaningful difference is that number that have come on the pod and said they used to just go to the atm and just click print receipt like tend to just like do a random withdraw ten bucks print receipt please just so they i could see the number so i'm gonna explain if we could hack that so they told me that i heard that as well and so about two years before my exit i used to use this thing called personal capital dot com which basically mint dot com whatever whatever using could work i you can create a manual account where you can add in manually where it's not connected to your bank account you just added numbers i put in like fifteen million dollars in the manual account so it said that my net worth on paper was at least fifteen million dollars and so i saw that number and then i sold my company and i got the money and i went and deleted the fifteen million and i and then i saw like the real number and i was like i've already seen this for the last two years like this isn't really like that different you what mean and it did a shocking amount of stuff to my brain to like see that number leading up and so you almost get used to it it's very strange and it kind of ruined that like initial deposit because i was like it's like these numbers are kinda like the same but by the way i gotta be the counter balance to this because i've heard i've listened to any podcast podcasts youtube videos i've heard many people say similar things that you know money doesn't make you happy there's never enough you know that day after it happened and you know nothing really changed you know i just kinda felt a little i i didn't know what to do i kind of actually almost had a little bit of a depressed period effort and i'm not saying that they're lying i'm sure that's true for many people i had a very different experience i had what i had exactly what i would have hoped it the more money i got happier i got the one free time i had the less bullshit i had to do with sure i had some new problems but there were way better than money problems and then with when i saw the number the bank count i said fuck yes and i was so excited and i had a such a great day and i took my parents to dinner that night and i was so excited and they were so excited for me and i bought a bunch of socks and those was like these socks make me happy because they got a bunch of matching socks with the highest quality and the highest highest kind and then i felt amazing i felt better and the money made me feel better and so there are people out there right remove this happen yeah you don't don't misunderstand me i said it makes you happier it made me happier but if we didn't but we still want more right we're still having conversation of how do we two or three or five or ten x because if you are truly content we wouldn't be asking that question and so what i'm saying is we still want more and it does make you happier but it's it in itself is not always it's not like the answer it is potentially part of the equation right and i guess the thing that i'm talking about right now is really just a question of of leverage meaning for the same inputs can i get more outputs okay so so all i'm saying is that if you just change your brain to say you know what i am familiar with many ways to get this amount rich now because i've done it i know other people have done this i've been doing this for a little while now i am comfortable at this level and there's more levels that i would love to be at you know without ten my input can i ten x my output i'm always interested in that if i could get ten times more people listening to this podcast without having to record ten times more or prep ten times awesome you do that'd be awesome i would do that any day and think even you did this when we were talking about growth for the pod was like here's some low hanging fruit and then you were like is there anything we could do that would just get like a million views per video so he's like listen shouldn't we just like ask that question at least in case there's an interesting answer and that's kind what i'm saying which is you wanna ask that question because it it fries your brain for a second and it forces you to think a little differently you may you may decide that you may never come up with a great answer or you may decide i wanna do any of those things or i'm totally comfortable with that where i'm at but i just think that there is a curse of familiar rich which whatever level you're at if you're making ten million a year you probably now know a bunch of ways to make ten million a year but you'll have very few ways to make a hundred million in a year and as a thought exercise i think this very valuable to say let me say no to all things that do the that are at the level i'm familiar with and let me only think about and consider options that would ten x where i'm at and then see and then you could decide afterwards where you wanna take any action on that or not let me ask one question as we wrap up yeah you're talking about earning would you spend ten x what you're spending now in order to get used to that life in order to get used to it yeah in order to like do you know like like you know the act is it so i've got friends who will say like you know this is gonna work therefore i'm gonna just behave as if it works and i'm gonna spend because i like burning the boats and feeling this and i have to make it work i am totally into act as if but not by spending that's not the i don't i think that that that per converts the spirit of act as if of or living from the end so what the way i do it is act as if means to me i'm like in decision making meaning i'm willing to say no to doing certain things that come from a scarcity mindset so maybe i would've have said yes to some speaking gig because it gives me money but if i had a hundred million bucks i wouldn't say yes i wouldn't go travel leave my family go to this speaking gig and duluth you know i would i would i would just say no and so loot so i use it in order to just put myself in a more of an of a of a abundance mindset in order to make decisions that are more aligned with who i really wanna be those aren't like i'll let me go buy a tiger in order to increase my burn rate in order to add the pressure to me like i think that's a completely unhealthy way to go about it or the other version is how would i you know a lot of people walking around with a lot of anxiety a lot of stress or in a in a big rush they rush through their day they're constantly feeling a lack of time and they live again in the scarcity mindset lack of time a lack of ease and so the act as if that i will try to do is put myself in a place where what if i was what if it was all figured out what if i knew what i was doing what if i had already done it what if what if you know what if was already done and it allows me to just walk through my day with a greater sense of presence and ease and joy and less stress less anxiety less of a rush so i'll use it in those areas i will never use it to be like hey how about i just like increase my burn just to see how it feels it's like you know it's like aren't people into like dripping hot wax on themselves before they like you know do do stuff like not me i'm good don't need to do that and if you live in duluth you can kiss my ass like it's delivery at a place i just said that i had yeah there's a duluth in minnesota i don't know but there's probably a duluth in a lot of places out to the listener who just caught an absolute stray and duluth you're lucky yay yeah peter lip duluth just comment in the youtube but let us know but you could still kiss our ass alright that's odd i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back