Startup Ideas For Developers, Rebranding Elizabeth Holmes & Billy Of The Week

like dudes in prison for like two decades for selling like a little bit of weed and and she's was just walking it out of here with too but she she basically took maternity leave from prison like what's happening i don't understand yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a go alright what happens we're here sam incredible shirt i mean enough said just one man to another i'd like to hit issue a quick compliment and i'd like to move on someone in the comments set oh wow sam's dressed like a grown up all all i was wearing was was a coat and so i i'm wearing down on top of his shirt so i had to bring it backed out i let people don't you know i could play both sides here yeah so austin three sixteen baby i still got that dog in you which i think is gonna be the next shirt we make is the still got that dog in them okay where do you wanna start and for first of all did you do anything crazy this weekend because i feel like your weekends are a lot more interesting in mine this weekend i watch cops on sunday because that's what i do those solid of cops but then so i'm i i did this cut combine thing so like i wanted to i set like a new fitness goal every quarter and this year this quarter i wanted to score average for a wide receiver in the nfl combine if you google like nfl combine averages you could find them in this sunday i had to do my bench press test which is two hundred twenty five times or two hundred and twenty five pounds and i had to do it about fifteen times and i just about hit fifteen and so my results for my combine test i almost scored average i just missed it a little bit but mostly i was there wow yeah so i had but but the big discrepancy is when they do the combine they use an electrical timer for the forty and i did it by hand yeah so my hand time was the same as the electric time typically electric is is is slower meaning you have to add a little bit on in the hand times but i kinda did it i i did that this was one of my favorite business ideas that still i don't i'm not aware of anyone has done it's not my favorite in that i don't i don't think this is gonna be the best business i just it's a product i wish existed which is a traveling combine for your town so basically the way i was thinking about it was for youth sports so you know the market of like thirty three year old guys who really wanna test themselves before they leave their athletic prime that's that's you and that's a small neat market but a big market is parents who really think their kid is a special snowflake and so i was like why don't they have a version of the combine where you get measured height weight you know aren't wings band speed agility strength vertical leap all that and just do it for all kids who are in like competitive sports because like you've seen that for like travel soccer or travel baseball parents spend thousands of dollars and like uproot their whole life just to kinda like pursue the kid's athletic dream which is that maybe actually the parents athletic dream and just be able to say that yeah oh he's really good yeah he's yeah he's he's playing with kids two years older than him right now they love that they love saying that their kids playing with kids you know yeah they're only just fourteen year olds in that league and and so you know i think that that product is great because it's basically the tough mud for little kids so you would be able to charge i don't know a hundred fifty dollars per kid to get tested plus another twenty dollars year to keep it all on file you know another twenty bucks to get the photo or the video montage that you're gonna get to post to social media and then every year you'll come back and get retest to see how did you do are you getting better or are you getting worse what's your what are your gains so i think this could be a viable business and i would love if this existed because i'd love to go i'd love to get my kids tested or my my niece tested and even myself would love to to love enroll so i'm taking this a step further first of all i knew i was gonna marry my wife because when i met her father he had the ideal cab so he had the ball they he had the ball and the calf but well i like i i think i got a ball calf well usually people who are explosive they have like a ball like i like tennis ball in their calf i saw i saw his like skinny ankle with the ball in the calf and i was like alright so we give do something has to go with it right that's a thing oh yeah pretty sure a thing skinny ankle you need a skinny ankle you need a skip i remember i used the data girl and she did not have a skinny ankle and i was like i don't if we could do this i don't know if it's gonna work it's not you it's me judging you that's a tricky way to put it and then i i remember malcolm glad had a book and he says like if you're born if you're the eldest in your class you're more likely like you gotta be born like september so that you missed the august cutoff so you get a full year to go dominate those o's and so i was like and we're thinking about where you know as i'm thinking about family planning i'm like where are we gonna live what's school you're cut off can we can be fitted in right before that and then this weekend i got out a piece of paper and i'm like basically my life plan is i don't wanna i wanna rent until i buy a home that i wanna live in forever because movie sucks movie sucks and like the house that i bought now it was just like oh this is good enough and then now i'm like i don't want good enough i want perfect and so i'm just like plotting till and so i'm thinking about what that right home is gonna be and i realized it has to have a five to ten thousand square foot like warehouse so whichever sport they're in we're gonna build that we're gonna build that thing so if yeah yeah if it's if it's hockey gymnastics they're no matter what it is we're build a at there and that game kid is gonna be awesome at that and so i'm planning all that out now there's not a lot of houses with a five to ten thousand square foot warehouse attached to i'm just gonna let you know he may not have i'm building it like i'm gonna build it i've already i've already looked it up i've already looked it up i'm building this thing also i have a theory that because my wife and i were from different like very very different ethnicity background don't get cancel i think our kit i well i what i'm saying is i think if we you mix all of these genes until one child hopefully they're gonna be a super baby you know they won't get sick they'll have strong cab we'll see i know what's funny but when you say it like that you know it's strange but but acceptable socially if you were just said the opposite you're like you yeah being wife we have the same background we're pure then all of a sudden here you you stepped out of bounds so no i want i want a a diverse kid they're gonna be a super baby because my wife is is mixed race and i'm telling you she doesn't get sick there's like all these things about her that like i like that like whenever she takes medicine she never has the side effects you know what i'm saying right so i'm just saying she's a super baby so we'll see what's gonna happen with that i will keep everyone updated though we're we're we were waiting eagerly i've got a few interesting topics you wanna talk about this elizabeth holmes thing first really really quickly so funny explain explain what what you but you saw i don't have a new york time subscription by the way so i only saw the headline and the photo deep i i assume you pay for the new york times could you tell me what was in the story and and explain this whole time i will so basically on sunday yesterday today is monday she elizabeth holmes from the you know fraud whatever she the story of this is she was convicted of def rotting investors upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars got sentenced to twelve years in prison she pulled a a wild move where she had a baby and then the baby baby one is two or three years old baby two is now like six months old and she's making her plea to the government saying actually i have a newborn you can't put me in prison and they bought it and they did it and so they they delayed her prison sentence i'm not sure how it's gonna end up new york times did a big expose on her expose or like positive feature it seemed like a positive feature does expose mean negative because this was not negative this was yeah totally positive exposed it's like just i with an accent saying exposed they expose as being a wonderful human is what they did because they make her sound like heavenly and i will the headline liz home wants you to forget about elizabeth and the whole story is about how elizabeth was this persona and how her new persona is liz and she's a normal mom she speaks like a normal woman you know elizabeth home was known as she would talk like this and she would wear like a black turtleneck and whatever and and then she admits she's like i did that because i was a woman i'm blonde i wanna be taken seriously so i had a low voice but listen to this and and the pictures of her now she's got long hair she's wearing blue jeans and she looks like a mom she looks like me honestly if i'm a woman and you go look at this picture we look alike but listen to this one as she does i mean she looks just like it's like elizabeth liz says liz holmes want you to forget about elizabeth the black turtleneck are gone so is the deep voice and she wants to meet her new persona a mom and and this is embarrassing honestly for the new york times to do this is is pretty it's very embarrassing people get mad at us for bringing some people on the podcast to do interviews with no no new york times p posting this photo of sam with a wig saying and then doing this re brand from elizabeth holmes to liz holmes liz homes are you kidding me and saying are you persona this is i'm absurd listen to the story so here's an expert i can't i can't shake us so mister evans is her husband i think billy evans so in the waning days of thorough miss holmes got a dog a siberian husky named bo last year when lying carried ba away from the front porch miss holmes spent sixteen hours searching the woods digging through the bra and poison oak hoping to find him alive everyone knew that he was dead but miss holmes kept searching she was relentless the certainty the fan it's the same way miss holmes kept hanging on a threat the miss holmes eventually found her beloved husky bo in the woods but by then the dog had been torn apart by a mountain lion and it's this like whole story about how her seating her dog is just her getting carried up and just the fan and she's really well intention but she just got caught up in it it's like pretty pretty wild and i have to remind people i wrote an article i actually posted it on here i wrote an article in two thousand and sixteen so i wanna call myself i wrote this in two thousand fifteen and the headline of my article is the coverage of the is utter bullshit and the first sentence is elizabeth holmes has been thrust into the spotlight as a escape scape go for all things wrong with silicon valley but i find the media coverage around there nose drama to be utter bullshit and i explained why i think she didn't she's not doing anything wrong and how she's being hated on i left the article up because i'm like you can't can't take down a mistake you gotta leave it up but i i fell for this and when i read this article about your times i just realized i think i'm just a little a little sis i fall for all this stuff i read this and i'm like oh you're right she's just like you and me like let's let's not send her to prison i fall for all this stuff i mean look at this this this is like there's a picture of her and the sky or they're two babies sitting on a bunch of rocks by the beach barefoot do you see this i don't know you see this photo yeah it's like yeah tweeted out first of all it looks yeah you use a mid journey what is this the giovanni this look so fake secondly like this hole like you can't just get a new haircut and drop half your name like if i got a buzz and came out here said i'm shaw p you can't be like oh that's shaw shaw a great shot is a great day if it's some care about money shaw shot is a tweet controversial things he see it's a different kind he's a dad and then i take my kid to a a a place with some rocks it takes a take a photo that doesn't work like you know this is working though it is working these are the greatest rebate do you know who james todd smith the third is no who's that ll cool j baby at least my god at least james todd smith at the decency they're like fully change it up and trying to get get a ahold you persona that this is crazy that she is that they just trying to make this happen i mean i don't understand what's going on it's working though she's not she's not in jail she was supposed to report to prison like three weeks three weeks ago there's like dudes in prison for like two decades for selling like a little bit of weed and and and she's was just walking out of here with two but she she basically took maternity leave from prison like great what's happening i don't understand that's exactly what happened that's exactly what happened you what and you know it's another thing that's kinda crazy is do you ever follow ross on or ul on twitter so ross ul is the guy who killed or or he ran silk road and silk road was like a drug marketplace and at the time it in like three years it did like two billion dollars in sales he also is accused of did a murder for hire for three people or four people none of the people died but the police took pictures of the people pretending to be dead and sent it to ross and then he hired the fake killer which were was the police he hired them again and again and so anyway he got life in prison and he tweets about it i've got one of those guys that thinks that he doesn't he he should go to prison but dude life is a long ass time for for all the time time you what that's all the time and he's tweeting in prison and i feel so sorry for these guys i fall i fall for all this stuff i'm you know i'm just i'm soft i think yeah yeah sounds like it okay so this you think ross is you think ross deserves life i thought like twenty five years is is the isn't actually life sentences isn't the life sentence it's actually only like twenty two years or something no he got life without parole like he's he's in there forever and he has multiple life sentences right and it went all the way up to the supreme court so they be so basically the only way i believe he's gonna get out of prison is if a president says what what's it call were they put you out of prison i forget the words but that's like the only way that he's ever gonna get out and i didn't need to like get him confused by part why nephew few ross yeah yes tell get all there yeah a tele marketer needs to call biden pretend to be oh we have your cousin yeah someone from india act like they work at apple or the ira they're wrong around what's going on got me move trouble could be helpful yeah i have a few more topics when do you got what do you got that's interesting so i wanna tell you about it i i have a i a feature here i got a billy of the week for you million dollars isn't cool you know what it's cool a billion dollars i it's been a little while since i have a good had a good bill of the week i kinda felt one bubbling up a little bit and sure enough i got one okay so here's i'm gonna tell you some things about this person's career and you can you might know who it is you may not okay so this is somebody who's so they've had a very successful business career sold a company to berkshire your hathaway actually so they sold a a a company that had done five billion dollars in a ten year span of of sales okay wow impressive they now yeah i do yeah yeah i got one eyebrow up alright let me if i get that other eyebrow they've won an emmy they were like manager of run dmc and fifty cent was their intern at the at the time some music dominated business dominated how about what's what's an emmy and emmy is the musical tv words think oh emmy it's sexy actually tv yeah i i so this person they wrote jingle for for for for tv and and stuff like that and that's that's one way they they made their their phones but they also manage run dmc which is the hottest wrap group in the world at the time in fifty seven i i know who you're talking about they also you're fit you're you're fit guy i see i see a cut two in in in the in the those arms the this guy's run over fifty marathons has run a hundred miles in twenty four hours and actually had david go live with him for thirty days and ended up writing in a book about it sounds pretty pretty interesting he's a part owner of an nba team does he have a successful wife that's the best part about it in his marriage he's not even the most successful one married who someone who i think is the youngest female billionaire in the world so incredible incredible pull on his part let's see do i have anything else good about it here well i think you missed something very interesting the company that did five billion five or ten billion or whatever you said billions in sales wasn't that a jet company it was a private jet company fractional ownership of private jets the person the oh there there's a few more they also were a key partner in a in a cp g brand i everybody wants to start start a cp brand see it in store shelves one day did that z coconut water you ever heard of that one sold to coca cola yeah got it everywhere this is somebody also wrote i think they also wrote the jingle the official jingle for the new york knit knicks for some dick sure did sure did in in addition to that sells online courses and he's like one of us he's just like us these billionaire i am talking about you would you like to to to guess who i'm talking about here say it say yeah jesse it's so jesse it's is the billy of the week this guy's got a fascinating career right i i am like everybody's got a different thing they admire the thing i admire the most in people is people who play the game their way on their on their terms and their rules and one of the ways you see that is people who have multiple chapters in their career were they're able to turn the page and do something completely different so for somebody who started out in the kinda like jingle writing business to then be like a manager of a of a of a famous you know rap squad to then starting a private jet company to then living in a monastery with monks to them becoming an endurance athlete to then becoming an nba owner to then doing coconut water like i love people who have done multiple chapters of their career and i wanna kinda talk about some of these different things he did i can i run you through his timeline here of what he's done yeah and i i i read the book it's called living with seal it was basically the book i think that got david go to be famous it was awesome it good book oh was that before david go kinda was like super well known yeah in the book i don't even think he mentions david's name and then it came out oh we came out who this person was i think he good jesse was at a marathon and he saw this guy and david go you know everyone know he's like a six foot six black dude and he's like ripped and that's not typically what an ultra marathon runner looks like and he became friends with them and hired him so here's what he did so he started back in ninety ninety five started something called alphabet city sports records and these guys were making basically like music it was sports marketing music production and they do it for three years they sell it for four million dollars to to some like you know small a small acquisition so get there that's how he got his first million and stays there for a little bit then they they sent him in the same guy i think start marquee jets so marquee jets was basically like how do you buy hours on a private jet without buying their private jet so how can you get more people access to private jets and so it'd be like you would buy twenty five hours of flight time on a private jet and it's like a debit card you get to just go use it then you get to buy more hours whatever whatever you want if you get a how bunch people do that you might be able to use these jets a lot more efficiently than they're being used with when just one person owns it that's sitting on a runway ninety percent of the deck was that a big business so they never real they never fully released any numbers the one thing he said is they did five billion in sales in a ten year period which is a lot of us i'm wondering i'm not sure if i'm not sure of the economics of that though because it's like if you sell they didn't sell jets but if you sold jets like that doesn't necessarily like a jet cost twenty million dollars you actually only make five hundred k from it i don't know i'm saying yeah i don't actually here's what he said if it's legit here's what he said in an interview i'll put it this way we were extremely profitable we did cumulative five billion in sales five billion over ten years so he says we were extremely profitable so we'll take that i also think that when you sell to berkshire hathaway they're not in the habit of buying unprofitable businesses so they they sold well they sold berkshire hathaway company net jets which is like you know one of their one of their companies so they they sold a net jets so then z coconut water so these guys have been around for four years he partners with them and goes to them and says look let me invest let me help you guys grow this thing it was kinda like small at the time and in the same year he invest he gets coca cola to invest fifteen million and then eventually they sell the whole thing to coca cola i'm not sure how much i didn't disclose that but basically in a a five year period four or five year period he helps z coconut water go from kind of unknown to pretty well known and and sold in twenty thirteen to to coke they've done the same they've done a similar thing they invested in kind bars as well he's got like basically he's got this brand investor group called a hundred mile group and that's what they do they've also they've invested in something called sheets energy strips with lebron and serena williams and a whole bunch of famous people that one failed it was like caffeine you just put a strip on your tongue and it melts and it gives you like energy but that one didn't didn't work out pip also a angel investor that one so he bought a he was part of the group that bought a piece of the the atlanta hawk which is i think we're i think he lives in atlanta i'm not sure yeah they have a house in atlanta and they're i follow him on instagram he's always in i think he owns a fat townhouse house in new york he's also rv i seen they like rv like in this huge tour bus look at rv thing judy i i'm all i also think he has like six kids too the guy does it all yeah i know quadruple threat dare i say so he so he he also started this thing called twenty nine o two nine ever last everest and so what it is is basically they rent a mountain and they bring together like food music and it's a it's a endurance event where you can walk run climb crawl whatever you wanna do up this mountain and then you take the gon back down until and you keep going up and down up and down until you've done twenty nine thousand and twenty nine feet which is the height amount effort so it's like a way to hike everest without going to everest and without doing the the the extreme risk of of of surviving everest he's got like his all day running club you probably know about this one it's a paid membership club for for runners basically four hundred bucks for the for the year and he's wrote two books he was a rapper back of the day back in nineteen ninety one he was a rapper called jesse james and wrote the jingle the new york knicks theme song go go n ny go and i mean just done it all really really incredible like variety in his career i think this prolific prolific good word pro prolific the guy's prolific was he and then his wife is sarah blake who sold span i think it was banks yeah and span was just acquired for like two or three billion or something like that you know what the final it was just bought by black stone black rock or blacks stone whichever one is the one that buys companies bought it yep and if if i remember correctly the company was entirely bootstrap one point two billion one point two billion i think she owned most of it yeah so like they're killing imagine being jesse and not the most successful one financially in the relationship that's a that's a good catch yeah what's like the best thing i i wanted to make a joke there about like you know in the house he does dishes or something like i mean what's like the well won't have been the joke there for for him being like the subordinate in the house i think he manages the people who do the dishes at this point but he's definitely managing people no that the i i've been following them for a while jesse's been he kinda like became to self help guru and i was turned off by him and then i actually started following him and i was like no you're actually pretty awesome and he's the one he's made so he's been on the forefront of a lot of really popular health trends for so he was really in signing for a long time and now like hot and cold exposure is is quite popular he's been doing that for years he's also been doing fasting i would file him like years ago and he would go like five days without eating and he would try all these weird health things and now a lot of these things are popular he was he's been doing it for a while and in his book it's called living with seal he basically found david dag david got live with them for thirty days it's an awesome book it's a really good book i mean he tells all these crazy stories about this guy and so i'm a big fan of jesse one one thing i to know him i was turned off when i like first heard about and then i realized he's pretty bad ass so you say that i had the same same reaction i saw him just in a bunch of like public speaking slash like ads being like you gotta take my course and do whatever and i was like you usually typically people who are like pretty self promotion with that sort of stuff it's like their their main business is actually the talking like the their main business is the selling you on how to be successful not like having been successful themselves that's just like a general rule of thumb so i was really surprised when i looked into it and i like actually this guy's is like pretty prolific he he's pretty legit surprised i i had that opinion of them though i kinda bucket him mentally as like online business guru guy you know but maybe i don't know maybe maybe maybe that was a a total mis now that i see kind of all the stuff he's done i also think one really interesting thing is have you heard about his pickles thing no what's that so by the way i invited him on the podcast we follow each other on twitter so i have the last night i was like hey you should come on i wanna hear i wanna hear about some of the stories that the experiments that didn't work out because this is all the the wins i'm i'm sure if you're a guy who's tried this many different things you had to have a bunch of a bunch of you know trial and error along the way so he posted this on instagram last month he goes why i excited about pickles all caps and he goes last week i said i wanted to buy or partner with a pickle company and boxes of pickles have been shown on my house all week it's exciting i'm doing a live taste test this week they're also different lots of people asking me why pickles here's why hey goes first of all can you name five pickle companies i'm i hate pickles so i don't know can you know any pickle companies there's probably only two or three that i like to buy i buy a lot of pickles i'm a big pickle guy yeah big in the pickle pickle scene so he says can you five pickle companies exactly it's a crowded market but not many dominant players second pickles are underrated americans eat twenty billion pickles a year and there was no buzz in the category not much fun for creativity all the packaging is the same number three the average american eats nine pounds of pickles per year number four the average american household buys a new jar every fifty three days number five clearly pickles are a big deal entrepreneurs look to make things better often those new ideas come in the in the form of products they use daily they get excited when they see a new lane and i see a new lane here and so he created this thing this pickle company called h yeah yeah pickles and he's like this is an name of our new company we just need the perfect picture that like a skit thing no idea well pickles are like a popular amongst jewish people he's jewish is h what is that like a maybe it's like a gi name i don't know it's a funny name and he said it says if you go to their bio they only have two thousand followers right now i'm gonna follow this i wanna hear the story play out he goes we're crowds sourcing our brand while we create the best pickle cup while we find the best pickle company to partner with dm if you have a clean ingredient pickle company and then he's basically like like it's got a feed and it's like here's a picture of adam sandler casually eating a jar of pickles it's like he's just trying to build this pickle he's trying to do the coconut water thing again for pickles this time and i find to probably pull it off dude pickles are awesome i'm i like jesse we should get him on if jesse for if this makes it to you this will make it to you anytime yeah and remember when you i went to hustle con your conference and there was the guy who created method soap and he created ollie vitamins he'd he created well band aids he created three hit consumer you know cp g goods that were sitting something eric ryan i think it's his name it's him with eric ryan yeah and he's like a he's like a he's like a flamboyant looking guy he's wears like these bright glasses and he's his hair comb exotic i like that guy yeah yeah exactly he looks like he it was born inside of a war parker or something so he he was on stage and you gave a great talk at your conference one of the things he said they were like how do you it was like how do you come up with ideas like which you did band aids you did vitamins you did so what how do you choose where do you see the open space and he said basically the same thing that jesse just said he goes i walk down the aisle of a grocery store and i just wait till i see a c of same so basically a sea of save is an area where there's a shelf we're just see like a ton of products with no differentiation it's just a bunch of like for soap go look at the soap it was just green bottles of the same product in the same shape sitting there everywhere he's like so we came out with a different bottle that was blue and had clean ingredients i was gonna be our thing and that was method so he's like go to the band aid section same thing see of save this whereas we took a different approach and he's like band aids we're trying to all be this like nude color that was like same color as your skin he's like but nobody's skin is actually that color so it's just like this like kind of you know you're just trying to like hide something he goes yeah we believe you know your your every cut is a badge of honor it's a great story to tell and so we wanna put a badge on that on that on that wound as that stands out and that was his approach to that one or whatever and so safely with the vitamins aisle he's like the vitamin out was just a bunch of labels that all said like vitamin d three b twelve you know c blah blah a he came in and with ollie they have like a different look jar and it'll say like better sleep but it'll say better hair nails or whatever like it'll say the benefit of the vitamin not the vitamin itself and so just taking a slightly different approach to these like kind of stale categories was the was the idea i think if you go down on the pickle aisle probably a pretty stale category it's probably is a cf of save and so i think this is gonna work well jesse see if you're listening come on man come on on come on the thing i i got like a we're at i was one time i was doing one of these events and we were looking at speakers and we typically had never paid speakers and for some reason his name popped up and like his agent sent or some agent sent like how much his fee is and it was like a hundred thousand dollars to get them come to come and talk so guys killing it in a variety of places that's right alright i have another interesting person and i may explain why i found this person have you ever heard the phrase the way you do one thing is the way you do everything hate that phrase why do you hate that phrase because i do a bunch of things terribly that i'm like does that mean i'm gonna do everything terribly so i hate it because if it's true i've in trouble so i believe that that phrase to be true and i believe it to be true because i've always i've got on myself because i'm not entirely like you but i'm a little bit like you where i like to like you know free ball i free ball lives you know i'm saying i just i'm trying to figure out as i go but my lack of discipline and my lack of process sometimes really hurts me and so i'm trying to make up for that and so over the past couple years i've been obsessed with the phrase the way you do one thing is way you do everything so for example you're late for this pod you are also late for your kids of people class that's right so the way you do that one thing is the way you do everything and it's like one of that's one of the reasons why the military to make you make your bed in the morning is because they say if you start making your bed in the morning that means you're gonna eat breakfast the correct way that means you're gonna run the right way which and inevitably you're gonna fight the right way and so like i believe in that and so i was looking for examples of that and so have you ever heard of this company called ra so the company called ra it's basically like amazon in japan it started by this guy named his name is he goes by mickey so mickey mickey tan this his name and he's similar to like jeff bezos in japan where he's like this kind of like pretty hardcore guy but he's lovable and he's he's a titan of industry so ra is like amazon japan it has thirty two thousand employees fourteen billion in revenue this huge thing and i love reading about japanese entrepreneurs because if there's something about the culture that fa me and they have this thing where he has like a handbook that he gives every employee in and i got a hold of that handbook a few years ago and i read and one thing that stuck out to me was in chapter zero the very first thing that they have you do the whole what that chapter is about is it's called the the book is called the basic principles but and chapter zero it's called they outline how at their offices they don't have any jan and the reason why they don't have any jan is every tuesday at four o'clock they have an hour of clean time which basically means that so no gander come by by every week at same time in the morning everyone at ra from the ceo to the lowest level staff cleans their workspace they take out rags and spray bottles they clean off their surfaces they pick up trash they get on their hands and knees and they polish the legs of the chairs and it's part of the company of the culture and it's been like that since the beginning since the company was around and it's the purpose of it is to foster a sense of ownership he says we do this activity remind ourselves that everything the company does is relevant to each and every one of us to keep a sense of direct involvement top of mind it's also an opportunity to reaffirm that the entire company is a team by having everyone regardless of position work together on the same task and i read this when i was leading the hustle and i try to make that thing and it didn't work no one no one got into it no i got do so glad you said it last part because i've done this so many times i've just michael scott at it so many times where i will read something or hear something or have some kinda crazy idea but usually it's i here i heard some cool person did some cool thing and then i'll try it in our office and i just got these looks like okay and there within four days the thing is gone and i'm like oh man i really needed a different like force of will or charisma or some like a leather jacket and i needed something i'm missing something to make distinction because the way you do one thing is the way you do everything man you didn't do a good enough job neither did i and once i failed that i realized i need to do this stuff even more and so with hampton what with hampton i'm trying to figure out what is that thing you know that we can all do and i realize right now it's our zoom setups so i actually i linked it down here in our document and i this i have this so if you go to scroll all the way down towards where it says zoom i have this document called how to look good on camera and the reason i do that is because when people apply to hampton we interview everyone and then me or joe or someone else goes and watches the interview just see if that person should be approved and i saw one of our guys his name's alex pate works at hampton in these awesome but i saw that his camera setup up was horrible i was like dude this looks like a ransom video you filmed that a nokia camera like this looks really bad and so we're gonna have to like we're gonna have to like fix this you know first impressions matter and so i created this guide on how to make your zoom camera look good and then we gave everyone a budget to go and buy like the proper lighting and things like that and that's like my one thing that i'm trying to implement now where it's like i won't talk to you and let your zoom camera looks great it has to look good and it doesn't have to look like professional like you and me like a dslr camera but it's gotta look pretty good and you can make it look pretty good with like five hundred dollars and so we're making everyone to have their zoom camera look great so first of all this stock is hilarious and the video of the the picture of the guy who looks like the ransom guy is hilarious i think you're close but i don't think you quite got it i hate to i hate to do that to tell me more as a friend to just pop the bubble like that but i think you got half of it right meaning i think you your solution is great but you picked the wrong area meaning this is too logical it's too quantifiable why they why this is a good idea you said well first impressions matter everybody agrees with that and you'd say well you're doing sales essentially for the company so you need to like show up the right way it's almost like you could calculate the roi the beauty of the polished the chairs of your leg chairs or whatever is that it's unnecessary same thing with the make your bed in the morning first thing or wake up a four thirty in the morning just to harden yourself as a person or take a cold shower is it's gotta have some it's gotta be something you kinda don't wanna do or seems unnecessary to and it's like that's the point so what's an example this is almost like you kinda gotta do it this is almost like yeah makes sense i agree i'm not taking a leap of faith here i'm just doing what you know maybe i was held back my money or the tech setup up and i just get around to it so i think it's good but i think you need something that's a little bit more story worthy which is like yeah at hampton we made everybody blank and i think if you say and we made everybody fix their camera setup up it's not gonna have that same show ship it's not gonna have the same punch this as if it's something that was completely unnecessary to do so i've gotta figure out what that thing is though but i but i desperately want it i want i wanna stick yeah i love a good stick give me have a stick i love a good stick i'm a big fan stick i think they add a lot right now my current stick is your your zoom camera has to look good it's gotta look great you get a a small tattoo other ankle of a date oh five years in the future which is when hampton will be worth a billion dollars right you have to go you had go pledge baby you gotta go get get brandon if you're gonna get out this i grab that stuff and that's another thing we're thinking about hampton is we're like what rituals do like our members need to have in order to get them bought in and so i'm like trying to like research like f alternatives and ser but i love this sup the same way that tony robbins his stick is that what's it called a fire walk yeah walking cool which like isn't even that big of a deal is it have you walked on coal yeah did it i've done it twice at his events yeah like a pretty sanitary thing isn't it yeah it's there's no there's no no risk in doing this so basically he's like yeah you gotta the mindset center right you gotta get in state and when you're state you could do anything it's like i'm pretty sure that like they basically just make you stand on this thing that's wet before so you get like moisture on the bottom of your foot and then you can just walk across these coals and it's not gonna like unless you stood there and stayed there it won't make it pass that layer water or whatever this i'm like it's just actually science that if you're if you walk across this much thing for this much time with this much water on your foot you're not gonna get it you're not gonna have problems and so a great actor dude a great actor needs a good set and good props and i'm like reading this book about jpmorgan jpmorgan was this guy and the is gil age whatever rich guy and he one time was trying to settle an agreement with like five different like union heads of like different steel companies and he goes come out to my boat and we're gonna go for a boat right and we're gonna discuss he gets on the boat and he goes alright everyone and he like the the pilot of the boat like goes off in a row boat he goes we don't have a captain we're stranded out here until we settle a deal we are not leading until the deal is done and it's at pi that show its ship every great every great actor needs a good set he he set up that set wonderfully and i'm constantly looking for what's our ritual what's our second gonna be how can i like yeah the show done this before and i studied a bunch of different like kind of rituals basically anybody that has a really strong community what what is it everything from actual cults european soccer clubs where the fans are just insane like i went to duke and we used to live in a tent for three months which is basically living in a line to try to get a to the big game really and everybody behave everybody behaves a certain way people don't even like basketball or live in intent for three months just to do this just because they get swept up in the in the rituals the movement i remember to the i never been to burning man but i talked to people i was like dude there's something about burning man that gets people to act totally differently than their normal behavior what is it and they told me that when you enter burning man i might butcher you this because again i've never been but when you get to burning man so you first you wait in line in in your car basically for hours hours and hours trying to just get to the entrance and when you get to the entrance apparently you kind of like you get out and they give you a name they give you like your new name your burner name and then you like roll around in the sand or some shit like that if you heard this yeah like firefox lion boy yeah and then you like roll of the sand and then like that's like your like get like entrance thing or whatever yeah i did something of my last company that was kinda like that which was just rolled around the streets of soma no no was joking we had we had a a meeting once i was ever everybody had been at the for like the what's it like the the hepatitis huddle everyone's gonna to go out in the streets of soma roll around it's syringe sunday baby get on the ground yeah go wanna we're cleaning these streets up with our body the but i did this thing where after six months of working i i called a team meeting and i basically gave a presentation to the team about each one of them and i basically said this is this this is sam this is sam story if this is sam superpower and i gave everybody a superpower and i was like this is this is derek derrick was our designer i said designers are notoriously they're just artists they're f they need inspiration they you give a deadline artists are terrible with deadlines and but derek superpower as that derek is the mailman he delivers every day of the week except on sundays and i was like derek if you give him something at nine am he will have it to you by five pm every single day without fail except sundays you messaged derek he's not gonna get back to you and i was like is like it's totally not true but you've just implanted that into him it was like mostly true everybody's saying was like believable unbelievably true but it's amazing then everybody started living up to it start referring to him as the mailman and then he would like sure enough he would always deliver them he never didn't deliver because he had to live up give people a reputation to live up to with fur i was like fur his superpower is that we'll always lend you five dollars whenever you asked for it just you asked for him he's got you he's always got some change on them oh it always good for twenty he i was like he felt bullshit and i was like he is just a bullshit melt you can't bring bullshit around him it's like radioactive it'll just start to belt right away and so he otherwise fe was pretty like direct and i think some people you know were intimidated by him and they felt like he was like you know criticizing them when he would say something but then they reframe it as he's just using the super he's just but he just he's great at identifying in a melting bullshit it's not you it's it's the shit that he's melting and so so i tried to do that for everybody and i i really that was one of the fu like management random like random experiment sticks that actually work that people really like they liked that they had a superpower and then they kind of i named it and then i reinforced it and people people started using that one actually in the office whereas most things was just me trying to make fetch happen and they're like it's not gonna happen well i remember early in my career like i worked the only diaper job i ever had this guy had a s and he would try to he would get everyone to clap like slow clap before it yeah yeah it was like that and i remember thinking like this is so stupid and then adapter weeks i was like alright looks cool slow now i'm a yeah no now i'm a little bit older and i'm like stick is good a good stick is great like it's really good a lot of that like performative i used think i'm i'm too cool for this i don't need this couple and then you realize like no man humans are not logical we need a emotion like this emotional stuff matters like the difference between a a highly motivated person and there who's using their emotions effectively is significantly better than someone i mean that's like if you look at like different wars like you could like look at like who is like fired up the right way versus who's not and it really has a massive difference i think that leadership basically if you wanna be a leader like three things are true the first is that you have a higher standard for yourself than anybody else has for you so it doesn't really matter what your job title is but if you hold yourself to a higher standard then your manager holds you to you are a leader and so that's the first to be first definition of leader second is somebody who understands what the emotional state is and what it needs to be and could transfer it so basically anybody who can understand that morale is low it needs to be high they can shift the mood they can shift the energy or everybody's a little too comfortable we need to get some a sense of urgency they they understand the state of the emotional state and they know how to shift it that's two and then the third is they see things how they actually are not worse than they are not better than they are how they actually are and then they paint a picture how it's gonna be better than it currently is to me those are are you reading this are you reading this off something no that's just wow straight off the down that's a good little i think that's a good little a good little thing the next tweet there you go that's a great one actually i if i wasn't a retired twitter artist i would have tweeted that one i got one other quick one for you i wanna read you justin yeah yeah i've been eager to see what you're gonna say i wanna read you something so this was if you're on that justin mayor's tip so we talked about justin the mayor's at the last pod just it's a a very fantastic entrepreneur you clearly been reading his blog you've been ob i actually somebody sent this to me afterwards so i haven't i i've only read this screenshot that they sent somebody said this to ben they go i feel like you every you've done this last time you read you said you're reading a book and i was asking about the book and you're like i've actually you go i just read this awesome book and turns out you're five pages ed yeah it's awesome see you love it for her sight you know what you know alright so here's what it says here's here's the quote from his blog it says i give the same advice to friends who wanna start a company startups are momentum plays that's the key startups are momentum plays you choose you choose the idea you are most excited about you put a date on the calendar for three to six months at that date you're allowed to reflect on your commitment level until then you do not spend any time questioning it should i be chasing x idea over there should i be doing this over here no you put blind on for a period of time you allow yourself to dig into the problem space and spent your early time actually working on the thing versus intellectual is this the exact perfect right and obviously huge thing i should be working on at least that's what i've struggled with when working on something new i love that all hit home for me startup up serve momentum place and how you have to put blind on for a period of time to just actually do the thing versus intellectually like constantly questioning or considering the thing versus ten other things and paralysis by analysis what what what do you think of that yeah i've told you about this i think i have this thing called worry time right say like alright today of the week i can worry about these things once that hour is up no more worry time it's only due time i can i can go back and reflect and figure out my worries and figure out what's like legit and what's not at a later date sometimes i'll do it six months out so like when i was searching for kinda like where you are now when i was searching for which company you start i go alright for the next six months it's plan mode all i'm gonna do is read consume i'm not gonna decide a thing i'm just gonna consume and read and then at the end of six months then i'll make a decision and so i i love setting like clear dates where you can't do anything i also love momentum so when someone talks me about starting a business i go try and see if you can get sales in the next twenty four hours like what's the least amount of what's the smallest thing you could do to get a sale in twenty four hours because the second you make one dollar if everything it feels like changes it's like as if you had poor eyesight and now you have glasses on like that that little that little bit of eyesight gives you a boosted energy and you feel significantly better to get the second dollar which makes getting to a hundred and then a thousand easier which you're at a thousand you go to a million so and you have this really cool line you say a b z where you go you worry about sup a and how do you get to b and then don't worry about anything else but you can think about z occasionally which is like your big motivating factor but don't think about you know all whatever the other letters are in the yeah if this reminds me of something i've seen a bunch and i have a sensitivity towards it because i did this which is a lot of people wanna do like startup studio idea lab i wanna do multiple things at once basically so they wanna do parallel entrepreneurship i ran an ideal lab for five six years or so and i loved it because it's the most fun thing you could possibly do it's like you get i had a blank check and an awesome team and i could pursue not just any idea many ideas at the same time and i could go from meeting to meeting to meeting and have all this amazing variety of adventures and challenges and ups and downs and they was like i felt like i got twenty years of experience four but notice that i said experience instead of success because it was a lot lessons learned and a lot of skill sharpening it wasn't a lot of winning and if you would have had to have stick to one idea do you think that would have been better or if you would have had a smaller budget sticking to one idea would have been far better or just i'll give you kind of the three options so there's what i was doing which is parallel entrepreneurship so you basically take multiple ideas and you pursue them in parallel this is an easy trap to fall into once you already have a win under your belt this is why you've seen you know mark pick with z created an ideal kevin rose created an ideal lab the guy from uber created an ideal lab the guy from you know who whatever there's like ten of these examples out there that's usually successful founder wants to do startups still but has too many interest too many ideas more ideas than time so they create a lab a studio that's gonna create multiple hits is the idea and almost none of them have any hits whatsoever zero zero is the is the average and the median for for these for these studios that don't it doesn't work it doesn't work for a bunch of reasons i can get into but it's this form of parallel entrepreneurship but very sexy but not great for actually winning so there's parallel then there's serial entrepreneurship serial like the jesse it's which is like i'm gonna do this for this period of time and then i'm gonna do a different thing for the next period of time or i'm gonna take this one thing and if it doesn't work i'll pivot into something else and then i'll try that for a few years but i'm gonna give each one a several year you know chapter basically of of effort and focus and like full intensity on one one thing but then i'm willing to switch what the one thing is i'm not trying to run the same company for a decade or stay in the same industry for for twenty five years of my life i'm gonna switch her i'm gonna hop around so that's cereal and then there's the last one to repeat entrepreneurs the person actually does the same company or stays in the same space it's like i created one d brand i'm gonna create another d brand or i run one company and just gonna run it for fifteen twenty years or you know i did a newsletter business i'm gonna do another newsletter our business and that's repeat entrepreneurship and so i personally have tried parallel i've tried cereal i haven't really tried repeat i've stayed away from that one i think if you wanted order of in in order of most likely to succeed repeat is number one serial number two parallel number three and in terms of fun parallel is number one serial who's number two repeat is number three and so i actually think that the correct decision for me is cereal it's the has enough fun and enough winning that that's the that's the choice versus going for maximum success probability or maximum fun with lowest success problem which idea do you think would have been the one that you should have stuck with at monkey inferno i think for the most part it was ideas that we work what we should have done so what we did do versus what we should have done what we did do was we tried to create hit social apps why because before that the the main the guy who was running it who hired me and the guy who became the main investor or was the main investor they had built a social network called be they had competed with facebook and myspace back in the heyday dave of social networks they sold it for eight fifty million dollars facebook went on to become worth eight hundred fifty billion dollars and there's was always this sort of like shoulda woulda coulda and at the time people were pretty down on facebook it felt like there was gonna be something new but nobody knew what it was and sure enough turned out to be you know instagram than snapchat than tiktok eventually and so new things did come out that part was right but the wrong part was trying to recreate retrace that dream because it was just so low chances of success so we build messaging apps and social networking working apps and all the stuff and it just was really really hard to get it to work what we should have done was we should have built either tools for startups or tools for developers because we knew what the pain points of an early stage startup were and we had a bunch of developers like eighteen developers and so it was like we could have built products that what was the total budget what was your budget for the you know like three million four million i think we burned about three to four million a year in funding and we isn't that much money for for twenty people well we also had it wasn't fully twenty twenty was like where i got to at the peak but also i would say the core team was like let's say fifteen people so fifteen people i think you can do math maybe maybe i haven't little wrong there was i don't know if that was pre taken got the profits from one of our businesses so we also revamped one of his early businesses that was his cash cow birthday alarm and birthday alarm was making millions of dollars of profits before it had been declining year over year for five years straight we kind of like revamped it tried to turn it around and got it back to you know slightly growing basically at that by the time i left and so that covered a portion of the bird so i don't know if the three or four million was pre that or post that i don't remember at this point it's been six or seven years since i was doing that which was there was there a developer tool idea that you thought you should do but you didn't and someone else came and took the opportunity so tell you three ideas that i think would have worked that we had that we literally discussed and had the idea for the first was user testing so i used a very early prototype version of user testing and i was like hey this is a pain point for a startup like like the the the company company user testing which is basically like i could pay a hundred dollars and i could get four people to go try our app talk talk through it they would find bugs they would tell us if they liked it or if they didn't like it they would tell us what's confusing about it and i was like these videos are amazing like this is saving me so much time versus having to go in the wild and find literally find people stand over their shoulder and watch them do this or just guess and i was like this is a super useful service and i told michael that one day i was like hey i think we should build this four startups ups and i think we could out paste them in in terms of marketing because we're here at silicon valley we understand the the startup up game like we're we would be good at getting early stage companies to use this and user testing dot com is like a multi hundred million dollar year business now yeah yeah because it went public at a period of time it went public i think it went back private now but yeah it was it turned out to be a big success you know eight years later like they they took it all the way took it to ipo and he was like yeah could do seems kinda boring right and i was like too young and weak and i i was twenty four years old and he was my hero and he was you know my boss at the time kind of thing and i was like yeah you're dumb sorry sorry sorry even said right like i i backed off it right away same thing happened with crypto twenty thirteen our sis admin the the guy who's running like our whole server setup was like guys a mining bitcoin on this server and we were like mining what it tells us why bitcoin is gonna be the next big thing all of our all of our engineers were like yeah this makes sense we love this and our team loved it and what our cto was like hey no normally this guy never had product ideas he was like tell me what to build i could build anything he's like i got an idea and i was oh shit paul's got an idea fantastic let's hear it he's like bitcoin i think is gonna be a thing and there's like no there's only one exchange there's a startup called coinbase but like they're just getting started and he's like i think we could build either in exchange or one of the other like financial services for this like cryptocurrency industry he's like they don't he's like you it's hard to take a payment you know you can't take credit card you can't do any of these things that you're gonna wanna do to inter enter like for a a human being to use crypto and he's like we should just start building financial services let's start with an exchange and then let's see maybe we could do you know debit cards on ramp off ramp like what what can we do and he he was so motivated and he built like a prototype overnight he got he he he started recording with a designer he like shove the product manager to a corner it was like you know shut up i got this and it was just like a great sign for a startup with the engineers is was like i know what needs to be built here i i intuitively understand and then our lawyer our in house counsel called up our investor was like hey the guys are talking about bitcoin i googled it i think it's for drugs and like you know i don't know if this is the right idea so he came in and he was like you know i don't mind losing the you know three or four million dollars we spend on on on whatever like that's okay that's an acceptable burden and i'm not gonna jail but i'm not trying to go to jail and i'm not trying to do like money not trying to handle like money in serious like ways like this i think like bitcoin isn't this like snake oil i don't know and i like kinda can i convinced him enough that day to buy bitcoin i think like he basically like i don't know sounds a little sketchy he like bought some as a hedge but he was like i don't think we should do i don't think we should be in the bitcoin business because you need a you need license this to do this you're basically talking about building a bank it's a super great yeah i i'm not trying to lose my billion dollars like i can't lose the three billion i can't lose my billion and i was like dude the message i got black michael bert burt she just blacked you guys hard i i don't need to blame me the the the mistakes were all on me i'm just i recall two examples where i think we had good ideas that we did was the third one see through the third was we had built lab into a business that was like a really good video chat product and it was it had got to four million users so it was like kind of a thing so it was basically like if you see club house today or like zoom today i was like basically like a zoom caller google hangouts out four people could be on the screen talking there was like a live audience and anybody could kind of request to join and jump in from the audience to start talking so you could do like college shows and shit like that and it got pretty popular like tony robbins was using it like famous bands were using it the was using it martin sk martin crowley was using it exactly and so we had we get to four million users but it was like so we thought maybe this is that thing and that big social product that we've even been waiting for but i it was pretty clear to me that it was too leaky it was high yeah churn was gonna be too high people weren't gonna use this every day or the people who did use it every day they were there were just to make friends so therefore it wouldn't grow because they didn't bring friends they were there to make friends and so you have this problem where if you're if you're sticky users or people who are there to meet people they're not gonna bring people and so you're you're either not gonna grow you're gonna have stickiness or you're gonna grow and you're not gonna have stickiness was the the problem we read into which is why by the way when i wrote that thread that went viral calling explaining why club house was not gonna work back when club bus was at its peak the reason i knew that was because we had built very similar product and running all those same issues and sure enough it's all playing hey so you didn't get rich but at least you got kind of popular on twitter so there's that what's the it's like i just dropped four hundred dollars at check cheese and i got this like you know a little little sleepy laser pointer yeah i got a laser formula little time yeah that's so that's cute you gotta your you have your a little twitter thing that's nice exactly so so that was the the thing there the move there would have been to shift towards like citrix was the big citrix had a thing called webex which is like they're like video chat like for meetings and presence offices of webinars and the obvious thing was we had built a way better tool for webinars or or like kind of large company chats like all hands meetings and things like that if we had pivoted to to b2b to b basically we genuinely had a a like sort of like you know five x better product than them at the time and i think we could have made it successful we even had the idea we were like should we do this we're like kinda gotta do sales and shit i don't know like do we wanna do that are we are we a b company now and i was like nah we'll just try again to build the next big social app which was you know a giant mistake hey you enough line private and we don't have a vacation at home in tahoe but at least you learned at least you learned you know if you're not waiting you're learning it'll be i rather when learn books it's a memoir called at least i learned dude i hate people will say winning or learning i'd rather win i don't wanna learn i'd rather be a dumb winner that a smart loser yeah all day the week that's easy i'd rather be winning on my plane but barely don't read this is why i love this pod you get stories like that those are good stories yeah i think we should should wrap it up there but tell me what think about what's that sandy your shirt austin three sixteen days but it says on that shirt we gotta start getting back into that stuff i've been out of the game but anyway good pot that's the episode yeah i feel like i could rule to where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal less travel never looking back