and and just to give you a sense of this right i'm twenty four years old i'm the youngest person in the company i'm the newest hiring in the company and six months later i got named ceo prodigy that's pretty good pretty good right i feel like i could rule the world and i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days all on a let's welcome to a new segment that we're calling it's like a q and a but we're not calling it a q and a we're calling it questionable advice does that mean that someone shouldn't follow the advice or that we're just answering questions and giving advice it it means whatever people needed to me it's people asking questions us giving advice advice is a little bit questionable as well right because we're not telling you what necessarily you should do we're saying what we what we've done that works for us it may or may not work for you it may it may not be the best way it's just the only way we know and so today the question we wanna answer is actually different than usual normally we're always talking about starting companies starting business being a ceo being an owner being an investor but today it's about what happens if you're not there yet what happens if you're inside of a big company so how do you stand out inside of a big go how do you become a superstar employee how do you become an employee that is just god's here and that opens up a whole bunch of doors for you inside of a company how many employees have you had like that every company there's always one or two there's always one or two that are just like so clear and what i did was i basically plucked what are the things that they do like what one of the things i remember that they did that stood out to me as well as a couple things i did after we got acquired or we went to twitch what are some things that i tried that actually i felt worked because you know i had to spend two years inside of a bigger company for the first time in my life and i experimented i tried a whole bunch of things i'm not gonna talk about the ones that failed because those were embarrassing or i'm not useful but i will share the ones that that worked dude what's crazy is let me add two things back stories to our our perspective on this one you had someone who worked at monkey inferno and all the other companies that monkey info started you actually had a few interesting people the first interesting person was steve bartlett who's famous for his agency and his podcast diary of a ceo i think the second person and who's even more interesting is far a guy who started a company that's worth tens of billions of dollars i was shocked that that guy would be would would consider you a coworker that was a that was an amazing get the second point i wanna add to this person and you probably you actually had a few other people that were you know jason hitchcock you had a few other people that are wildly successful the second thing to add to this one of the best compliments that i've received from you in the last probably sixty days is you texted me and you said how on earth did you get step wrong and i forget who else you day how on earth did you brain them into working for you for as long as they did and that so we've had we we've each had a handful of superstars who i don't ever use the word work for me because often time it it doesn't i i hate that it it does it's not that it's we work together on something and i'm only gonna be able to have them for a little a short amount of time that's principle number one you work with you don't work for and it's actually a pretty big mentality shift which is working with somebody is a partnership it's an agreement it's a mutually beneficial thing versus i work for you is a you know you know there's a dominant person and there's a person who just basically takes orders and does whatever you know whatever they have to do you know based on the the task list and you never wanna be the work for the work for is you know you know a servant essentially whereas i was working with is a partnership but it's okay to have to be that for for a little while actually for someone who's interesting like if if like sean prairie doesn't have a a specific need to be it done and some kid is like dude i will i'm confident i would do exactly what you say for a little while it's okay to do that for a little while but i agree and generally don't wanna be that person but but yeah working with is is how i consider it to be done correctly i hired a chief a app just out this kid basically had a job at think like jp jpmorgan and he was like hey he just emailed me emailed me emailed me saying he wants to do stuff he's like i can help you with i can help you this is there a reason you're not doing this and then i'd be like no not really i should do it he's like how about i come do it for you i was like i don't know about you got whatever he's like here's an example here i'm doing it blah blah finally he did it and i was like cool you're gonna quit your job he's like i guess i can go quit right now like if you say i'm in i'll go quit and i said okay bet and if he went and talk to his boss and quit his job banking and now he's my chief of staff and even for him on day one i told him this i said you we work with each other and not you don't work for me because i actually want somebody who's gonna treat themselves that way because they're gonna they're actually gonna get way more done they're going to be more productive they're gonna be a higher caliber person if they think that way to mindset you did you actually say bet through twenty two i gotta speak to language alright alright the the first sub category or the first category i think we should have we both have things that involve communication and writing do you wanna like name a few that you have under that category yeah okay so i'll do i'll i'll do a one simple one so write an internal newsletter people know us as the newsletter guys because you created the hustle read by millions of people i created milk road which became the biggest crypto newsletter the the other thing isn't just for external so you you know you could have a hundred thousand subscribers on a newsletter but i if you're inside of a company which you really want is twenty subscribers but they're the twenty most interesting people in the company and so what i did when i got to twitch was there was a a team like bezos has somebody called the s team i don't know you feel say amazon like his he's like fifteen to twenty top lieutenant and twitch being owned by amazon had its version of this called t team and so i got put on tea team and so you know t team is like whatever fifteen of the top people in the company and i go to the first meeting and you know it's it's a busy meeting they're they're not you know they're like oh hey welcome sean we we just acquired that by sean wanna say hi i'm like i say hi for two seconds but really i don't know any of these people and so what i did was i created a newsletter and i created it for all of the t team and then i would slowly anytime i meet somebody interesting anywhere in the company i'm like oh by way i write this thing every week and only goes out to you know a select number of people it's it's fun you'll like i'm gonna add you i'm gonna add you to the list and so they're like okay cool i'll be added whatever and what i would do is i copied james clear newsletter format james clear does something called one two three guess what i had wrote the three two one newsletter internally which was basically like you know it was three or no he is three two one i did one two three so i did one photo from my camera roll so here's a photo i did two thoughts which is just like two like kind of tweet length things that i'm thinking about inside the company and three links which is just random shit that i've seen what type of photos it would be usually something like you know not work related so for culture building thing like i saw john brought in this funny mug not not not work related at all it would just be something about my life that's like an interesting thing for my life and i'm not a big instagram guy but i kinda get the idea which is a photo can say a lot about you and what you're interested in and i'll it could kinda brag a little bit like okay like and i can't learn how to ride a bike this weekend yeah exactly was such a good dad you know like here's what i'm doing and so you know like for example i did one photo that was this list that my my niece had made she's seven and she she wrote her like routine she's like ellie day and then it was eat play sleep eat play play sleep and i was like somehow the seven year olds got figured out what are the rest of us doing right like that's the life you gotta live and so people loved it they're like oh yeah that's so true blah blah blah and so i would just one photo two thoughts three links i'll i send that on every sunday and i wrote i said hey the way i framed it i go you know when i was a startup founder i used to send this to my our investors and board of advisors every sunday i'd write like an update i kinda where my head's at well you know old the old habits die hard even though i'm a startup founder anymore i'm working at twitch i still have this hour every sunday i'd like to you guys are now my new my new board of advisors you guys are my new you know mentors at this company so i wanted to include you on this if you're on this list because i think you're one of the more interesting people in the company that i hope to to learn from and get to know over time and so that was how i started it and i wrote that thing dude i can't tell you how much juice i got of this right because it took me about forty five minutes to write this every sunday but now i'm getting sort of like you know every single person's attention in and they they know about me they learned about me they have an opinion about me not everybody loved it i'm sure sure some people are were like whenever i i don't care about this but it didn't matter he got like forwarded up there was a guy who's was like the the vp at amazon prime would you email me be like dude i love these sunday things man he's like i wish we got to work together because he what he wasn't even in the company he got forwarded to him he was like these are awesome you wanna like just meet this you sound great you sound awesome and that's the whole goal you wanna build a brand internally and one easy hack to do this is the internal newsletter and there's actually a i think even more implications of this so one of the greatest people i worked with was steph smith she's been on the pod many times she's already doing great things that is gonna wanna do even bigger things she there's this thing with history i read a lot of history where oftentimes the person who writes the most popular history book or writes history books they actually control the they control what we think of history even if it's fake she did that of course in a good way where it was very tactical she actually couldn't she was the best google sheets maker and a really good google slides maker and so she would dictate how the google sheet for the projects that she ran and then eventually other projects how they looked and that actually dictated what we tracked which dictated when we do that we do yeah it's but she would make these i don't know i did ever tell you the sheet that we had for trends ever show you that no i'll i'll just show you sometime but she made this beautiful sheet at autofill filled and like i was like oh thanks for doing this this is amazing you should do this for all these other things but she basically controlled the information flow and so if anyone had a question if they anyone didn't wanna do anything they had to go to her and she wasn't doing this for bad reasons but be was basically a very powerful person because of that reason and so you need to get really good at presenting your work and you need to be really really loud about it but you have to be great at presenting your work making presentations writing stuff controlling the google sheets and making them look present and making them work well that is incredibly important and not not enough people think about that a hundred percent hundred percent the waiter right history right and and and also the other thing is you wanna be a maker not a taker so most people in companies are just takers of plans so somebody else writes the plan somebody else makes the doc somebody else creates the dashboard and you just sit on the receiving end of it what i would do you know when i was at these companies is i would always write my own versions of the plans and this is partly for practice because i wanted to i wanna be the ceo well that i should get reps doing the things that the ceo is doing he's writing an annual plan cool i'm gonna write one too what would i say and you write it and then you compare to what they wrote and you see things that they did better and you see those are some things that maybe they missed out on and so being a plan writer being a proposal writer being a update writer is gonna be the thing that actually sharpen your skills so that you if you wanna be a leader what most people will think is i'll wait till i'm promoted then i'll start doing leader things well that's not really how it works right you start doing leader things and then you get recognized and promoted and so if you want to one day be the leader you gotta be the plan maker not the plan taker and you you wanna write your own version of all the things that all the key key stuff the annual plan the quarterly update the the launch guide whatever whatever it is for a given project the next thing i would say is and this is actually challenging for a lot of people i have a feeling it wasn't challenging for you because you're a very confident person but it's important to be a to to be loud and when i say loud i don't mean that you have to talk a lot but i just mean you have to make sure everyone knows the cool shit that you're doing and there's a fine line between being selfish and stealing other people's stuff and taking too much credit and then also being loud but it's important to be loud to let everyone know these are all the amazing things that are happening and you have to present that in a really wonderful way where it shows progress and it shows even if you screwed stuff up here here's the swings we took i think i always had this problem i i noticed it particularly amongst the women who work for me i would always have to encourage him might be like dude you gotta speak up you gotta be louder about the shit this is really awesome you are not inserting yourself and the conversation nearly enough that you should this is really really talented amazing work so i think being loud is incredibly important to sticking out within a company yeah exactly you wanna work in public so you wanna you know present the things that you're doing like you said it's not all bragging so for example you know people would would would report in a format that's sort of like here's the here's what went well here's what didn't do well here's the screw ups that we had this week and some of the things we learned from that are what we're gonna do to fix it so like it have to just be everything i did was great and i'm the best and i did everything you know it was all me it's not that however you're totally right that you're really only rewarded for what people know about if you're if what you're doing can't be measured or isn't seen it might as well have not in who existed inside of a big company and for a lot of people that's very uncomfortable to do they wish the world work differently where it was just purely purely merit based and everything was equally visible it's just not true like if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one right like you know you you need to be able to to highlight what you're up to and you know carve out ten percent of your time to doing that let me tell you one more thing that's a bit unrelated but a very controversial and it took me a hard it took me a long time and i had to go through a lot of tough challenges to learn this titles matter did you i imagine when you started your early companies and maybe you still do this now you're like dude i don't care about titles you can call yourself anything you want it it means nothing to me this is a flat organization but titles actually matter for an employee and they matter because of the job that you have there but also the job that you can get elsewhere so give me an example because i would disagree with this i don't think they matter that much what's what's the example you're thinking of it mattered okay so if you wanna be called the head of something that's actually really important for the employee it's actually scary for the employer because you wanna set you you if you give someone the head of marketing you can't hire someone above them or if you do there's gonna cost tension however for the employee if they go and work at a new company they're gonna now say look i was already head of marketing at this company i need to be cmo or i need to have something of equal senior additionally within the business if you if it's i'm the head of blank i'm the head of marketing everything that go happens within that i need to have my say or i need to have my finger on the pulse with that titles i actually think are a really important thing they seem not important to an entrepreneur because you say these things like all it doesn't matter all working together but i actually think they're i i they matter for the employee so i would say in my opinion the logos matter so there's a funny thing that happens where it's like you i bet you're guilty of this too let's say you're you're building hampton now it's like a community or membership based product if you see oh this person ran community or memberships ads yeah whatever po ipo so house whatever no known known thing versus unknown brand for some reason we we just sort of attribute all of the success of that company to like this person must be a winner because that company is a winner even if they had very little to do with the winning of that company that the secondary step at the hustle i had a guy who worked at facebook and he wanted to join us and i was like oh you're in and we hired it him and he was it was horrible but i totally fell victim to that i've done that all i do that all the time this happens to be with live streaming people are like oh you worked at twitch we we need somebody we we're doing live streaming so it'd be amazing to have you on board because of your experience at twitch they don't know my experience at twitch i don't know what the hell i was doing there i learned way more about live get my startup that they don't know about that was actually building live streaming that was working in that space but if all i had was that unknown startup name i would have gotten zero credit for being i know live streaming expert guy so i think logos matter a lot and just getting better a winner logo unfortunately that stamp that stamp is is cool so than having harvard or an ivy league in ivy oh if you're good enough to pass that bar you're good enough and and one is enough one is enough that's the key i think one probably people can do is think of a local collecting one is enough if you if you got harvard awesome you don't need to also go get you know another mba from some other place or if you have facebook you don't have to make the next one google you can make the next one a the higher variant variance because the facebook will carry other thing i'd say is managers matter so when we got acquired by twitch we were getting interviewed by people and we got interviewed by several people when we were joining and they were like they were supposed to be d the acquisition but i was also d them because i was like dude i know that managers matter people don't quit jobs that quit managers and also if you're stuck under a manager who doesn't have a lot of respect in the org you're not even gonna get to see a lot of the interesting shit that goes on or even if you do stuff it's gonna be buried under however much clout that manager has and so they first tried to put me under somebody and i was like no no i'm not working for that guy and they're like what what's what's the problem was i was like nice guy i'm not working for him and they're like i was like there anybody else because you know maybe these two people i like them they see because they clearly like you know were buds with the ceo and had more more like they were doing all the interesting projects and this guy's over here working on trusted and safety or maintenance of something or like you know plumbing under the under the bridge like i'm not trying to work on all those boring shit those boring projects or with that guy i guy has no respect in the in the org and i think managers matter pick somebody you're gonna learn a lot from but also somebody who got who has some surface area that you can get shit done and switch if you if you if you don't like where you're at trying to actively switch alright i a different one dude wait hold on dude when i sold to the when i sold the hustle to hubspot it was the the the plan early on was i'm out of the picture and i'm just gonna do the pod but they were like alright how about like vp of marketing and reported this guy and i was like yeah can we give me like a lower title and you can make brad who is my vp make him the vp and i'll report to him it it was just like way better but i was like yeah let's let's break it down notch i'm not gonna be a vp alright now there's something i call the five percent rule i learned this from fe so when we got acquired by twitch we're sitting there and we're supposed to work on x right we were we were at that time a taker we got acquired to do this let's do this and freaking wasn't very motivated and i was like dude come on let's try to do a good job here right like we don't have to totally sand back this i get it it's not like the same as when it was our company and this might become the next big thing but like you seem totally checked out and he was like no i'm i'm not checked out with the company he's like but look at this they pulled up the overall company dashboard he goes best case scenario this thing that we're building best case scenario which of these metrics changes and i'm looking at the key the number one dashboard for the company the the key kpis overall ones i was like so none of these go to page three there's subdivision and then this one and he's like cool so let's say alright let's say we change that one how much do you think that changes the overall picture like he's like don't you think that we should at least like if we do a great job what we should do should make at least a five percent impact in the company and i was what and my ego gets of my yeah of course five percent that sounds low actually he's like yeah he's like i just think we're capable of doing something that's gonna at least move the needle five percent he's like he's like i feel like if i did something and it didn't even whatever we did if we did a good job if we we succeeded but it couldn't even move the needle five percent like i kinda feel like that was like a waste of time and that's when i learned this five percent rule and when we we immediately switched to something that would do that and it was such a good decision i wouldn't have done this but in the same way that naval says you wanna place a absurd hourly rate on your time so that you value your time and you put a price tag on your time this actually is also inside of a company you need to put a price tag on your projects that you simply will not work on projects that can't move the needle for the action for the company because if not why am i here what is the point and if you carry yourself with somebody who can actually move the needle for the company it's sort of self fulfilling you will become that person who actually can do that simply like you just raised your standard and now that's what you do dude you you you were lucky to have fe con of course fe i don't know if you was he the c founder or was he one of the first hires at app eleven so app eleven ad tech company fifteen billion dollar marketing cap at one point thirty billion market cap amazing guy so he joined the company before he was even oven he was not one of the c cofounder he was just like a random engineer that they hired they had like eight people he was like person nine within a couple months they were like alright this guy is a big guy right he stood out like a superstar does this guy the guy let and they went to they're like hey i think we kinda built this team wrong now that we see you when we look at the other people we hired before you that are above like we realized we did this backwards can you like fire all these people and re hire a new team of people like you and he's like okay so he did that he ends up getting like a you know c founder equity stake and the thing you know it becomes it ends up going public and it's like a twenty billion dollar company you know years later same thing happens i hire him at i'm mo inferno as a android engineer only right so there's like you know above him there's director of engineering above him as the cto above him is me within a couple months i was like oh this guy is a superstar like i you know android engineer is simply the wrong title and i told i said look you're gonna end up in a different role just give me a month to figure this out and within a month we had switched it up where he end up becoming cto and we basically rebuilt the whole team around him and so he's a perfect example he sorta of has like a master sensei like a like a that type of wisdom to him where for some reason whenever he says something i believe him and i and i think he is actually right a lot more importantly all the engineers you'll ever hire will believe them alright this is guy's a leader of engineers which is like it's extremely valuable let me give you another another principle alright here's a simple one fix your zoom setup just don't look like dog shit on every call in fact you should look incredible on every call it doesn't cost that much to do it like you could do it with an iphone app there's an iphone app called cam you can download that's what i'm recording on right now by the way and you could be dslr quality from your from your iphone if that's all you have if you wanna get one better just get a light right like a light off amazon that's fifty bucks and the that app will set you in the top one percent of people at work of in terms of how you look when you show up do that and have and will also buy a a a podcasting mic your mic can be you know a yeti a blue yeti microphone if you need it a bedroom would be these like sure microphones you just just look good and sound good because like no matter how good your ideas are if it's wrapped up in a crap sandwich it's gonna just come across poorly and it's the you know is the digital equivalent of dressing good and i i think people will really underestimate this i think you may like a rule at your company right i may i tried to make it a rule and i'll give it i'll get really tactical i'm using a sure and i'm traveling right now and this is my travel kit a assure mb seven usb mic that's two hundred dollars an iphone with a fifty dollar cam subscription and a hundred and fifty dollar el dat key light that's that's my setup when i travel so if you think this looks good enough that's what it is yeah it's gonna be better than most people's like up the nose shot with the crappy audio and like you know sitting in a closet somewhere so so try try on that alright i have another one for you unless you got you unless you got one you wanna do well fe con actually is a great example of this and a few other people really did a good job at this i think that when you get into a group whether it's work or any other type of group oftentimes the most confident person is not usually the smartest person but the most confident person wins and i think confidence is displayed in a way of saying things like this is this is the path we're gonna go down this is what we're going to do i have a sixty percent chance certainty that this is actually going to work my logic is this this and this but this is this is the answer at least is the answer for us to try and i think that at a company when you work with a small company like any company i've run you work with the ceo or the owner at a larger company you know it'll it'll it'll go up to the owner somehow or the ceo but it still matters with managers and vps and shit like that but the confident person that says this is the way and they dictate the way and they explain their reasoning and they're confident about it and you start believing in them you still have to be right more than you're wrong but the most confident people i think typically succeed the most i agree i'll give you two things one the thing you just described is like i think it's called the mckinsey pyramid principle are you aware of this no so basically most people get communication wrong inside of a company because they bury the lead so what they'll normally do is they'll say beginning middle ends like a story and in the end is the conclusion the end is the takeaway what we should do it's what's what what what we decided whatever but busy people inside companies which are most of the leaders it's inside companies they don't like that format they won't the opposite they what they want is to say my recommendation is that we should do this for these three reasons number one number two and number three and i believe those three reasons because we have evidence underneath this this we do not have evidence for but we but it's a reversible decision and this third thing blah blah right you stack the the main conclusion first and then you you i like a pyramid underneath you support it with your supporting arguments and that's just a simple communication thing to flip another communication thing to flip that i learned was there's if you wanna become a more clear communicator use the what why so what framework emmett it from twitch taught me this so basically it's what happened or what's going to happen so you know if it's past looking what happened it's if it's forward looking what we're gonna do why it happened why we're or why we're gonna do it and the last one is so what so you know let's just give an example what happened is the the metrics let's say you know revenue is down ten percent this month why because last month we did this extra promotion so we kinda knew it would artificially inflate last month's revenue this month is actually normal if you look at the overall trend line nothing to worry about here so what so we're going to continue doing this an we're gonna consider doing those extra promotions every other month because they seem to buy to provide a boost or whatever alright like you just you get the idea what lies so what just is a generically useful template or outline but like you could write that on your paper before you figure out what are you gonna say in this email or how are you gonna write this document just write what why so what and you should be able to bullet point that and then that's eighty to ninety percent of the material is already done at that point and i find what helps is that if you put a confidence level in there because a lot of times people think well if you're confident you're saying that there's a ninety nine or a hundred percent chance that whatever is gonna your saying is gonna happen is gonna happen you shouldn't do that you should say i'm actually you should be really conservative and say out like you know sixty five percent seventy percent like i'm i'm fairly certain or sometimes you're like i'm actually i actually think there's a thirty percent chance that this works but if it does work the outside returns are quite huge and if it doesn't work it's reversible in these ways and so i think you need like a little bit of i don't know how you would say it like a an easy landing if you fail super superstars do three things number one they think in probabilities not certain that's what you just described the second thing is that they manage expectations which is the second thing you just said which is you don't need to over promise and under deliver in fact you know under promise and over deliver is a better mindset and i remember one time going into a meeting and this is i something i learned from my dad we were going a big partnership pitch meeting and we thought we thought they have this thing and with our technology they're gonna get this huge yield this huge result and the result is like a hundred times better than their current i was like oh slam dunk put that on the slide maybe hundred times better and we go into the meeting and i my dad puts up the slide and i noticed that he's changed it and it only says three times better and i'm like did you messed up like what happened why why'd did you do that and he's like he's like did you see their faces about three times better they were over the moon that other stuff is now my dry powder like i can beat if i could beat the three times even better if i set a hundred times and we came in at eighty times better it would be seen as we did not deliver on what we promised he's like and so you know what whatever ever you know forget the exact you know numbers here the the principal holds true which is only sell to the amount you'd need to sell that like gets them to agree to green light the thing or take action but don't over promise beyond that even if you think it's capable because you'd always rather beat your numbers beating your numbers is just like you know how you exceed expectations and it makes you trust them more and so here's an example so and i'm looking at the deck now so google whoever's is listening you guys from google uber c deck so in two thousand eight uber was just getting started they're raising only two hundred thousand dollars and on slide twenty they have a deck or a slide that says potential outcomes and they say best case scenario becomes a market leader with over a billion dollars in annual revenue realistic scenario gets five percent of the top cities and we make around twenty or thirty million dollars a year in profit worst case we'd say a ten car hundred client services business and just save some time for san francisco base executives versus when you see a slide deck from a pitch and it like everything is like up to the right you're like right dude i don't trust you now because you are saying something outlandish like this and you're saying it a huge high degree of certainty right so yeah anyway are they the on the confidence thing is people think confidence comes from answers no confidence comes through asking intelligent questions any leader knows that you could tell a person's quality of thinking by the quality of their questions and it always stands up if somebody asks your a question that's on point or breaks the frame of how you're thinking about things that person always stands out in a meeting even though they didn't deliver some like you know very boast full confident conclusion and so you know an example of this would be you're in a meeting and it's kind of a messy just it looks like you know options a and b both suck instead of just saying no we need to do a or no we need to b somebody who asks a different question that's like you know what would an easy solution look like here right hey what's the simple thing we're missing right i'm just gonna ask this out loud let's see if there's see if there's an answer because if there is that might be quite valuable to us right now or you know we've been saying this thing just wanna say this out loud is that true do we have the data to support that like somebody who's questioning assumptions or breaking frames with their questions or that says you know we're trying to solve this problem feels like we're solving it from scratch we're not the only ones who have this problem how do other people solve this or how have we solve this in the past what's worked for us and anyone who's asking questions like that that are gonna cut to the answer faster you stand out that's a that's a different way of showing confidence versus just saying maybe me i have the answer dude i the one question that i love that all my employees hey is they'll give this like twelve month plan or something i'm like yeah how do we do this at like four weeks right that question i know some people question some of the best people they they framed that question nicely they say this is this guy flooring and i used to work with he would always say this he'd be like i'm gonna say something you could beat me up if you think this is a terrible idea you know if you feel free to be up but i just wanna say it and then he'll say the thing and it's such a disarming way of bringing up an idea that might be counter to way the the flow is going or whatever you're always like off florida record you know when i don't worry we're i gonna beat you up about this idea but he would say that right or you know this other guy dan he would he he would do this thing he's now the ceo of twitch he would do this thing in meetings where he'd say you know he'd slow everybody down he'd be like you know it's one thing we could say is a b and c he'd like lay out an argument real he's like there's one thing to say this it's another thing if we were gonna say you know d e f and you would just like frame it so slowly for everybody because usually it's the person who can kinda like s synthesized the argument like what i'm hearing you're saying is a b and c i just wanna make sure that it's is it a b and c and not actually d e and f and the person who would bring that clarity to the meeting was always like the essential person right they're the person who whoever everybody thinks that they on the way out because they actually help you you know figure out the solution where it felt like was just talking in circles what you wanna do one or two or three more yeah okay here's a easy one let's say you're inside of a company today but you wanna go start a company someday you need to start creating your own version of the minus list which is who are the five most interesting people inside this company the people that you would wanna recruit later on what i did was i i just i said at the beginning i said while i'm here at this job here's what i want out of this by the time i leave these doors i wanna have the following i said and i wrote down a list one of them was like i wanna learn one or two things about leading a company that i don't know today because these people have manage bigger teams and do it better than i i'm sure that that i do it so i wanna at least have one or two key things that i can take away as a manager number two i wanna have the respect of this ceo i want him to be able to say dude if you leave here and you tell me you're gonna go start a company i want him to wanna write the first check i think that would just be a a signal that i did well when i was here would emmett do that for you yeah he actually slack me one time he was like hey as out of the blue he's he basically slack me that exact same thing he was like i wish we we're gonna i wish we'd be able to keep you forever i don't think that's gonna happen you know if you ever do decide to do something i'd love to you know you i'd love to back you on that and i was like man what a compliment point thank you that's actually i showed him x actually i was like that was on my list of things i said i want it out of this experience so that's a cool full circle moment the third one is you i i said i wanna walk out of here with five people five more people in my talent ro decks that i could reach out to if i ever needed to hire and and that's what i did i was oh this girl in data science massively underrated like she's the real one who delivers the work she's kinda junior here but man i she would be somebody would put right away or this guy over here on the sales team god that guy was smooth if i ever have a thing for sales i know who to who to contact and actually right now with one of our new companies i'm trying to fill a role and those are the people i went to first to be like hey i don't have no idea if you're available but i made this list before of who are the five people i would love to work with someday and you were on it and hey that day is here you know what do what do you to now and let's let's chat and so that's i think another good thing if you ever wanna start a company like just pay attention to who are the haters here because your talent ro decks is what kind of becomes a limiting factor as you try to build new companies right like i'm sure you have people that you know you'd love to speed dial and and bring on board to a new thing and i think you did this with hampton right like i noticed there's some people there that were at the hustle because that's the experience you had yeah i think that you actually asked what was it you who said something like a really good question ask yourself is if you're starting your like let's say your things only going okay if you were if you were starting it again which you would you'd have to ask yourself what i hired the same people and do it the same way and for many cases you say no i would change this as and this and then your advice to them i was like well we'll just fucking do that right now do that yeah yeah but the but the other answer is okay well when you do it again you know you have your list i think you know in the mafia they use the phrase and then succession kinda stole the phrase where they say like oh he's a serious person and a serious person means you you call them hit but in the mafia and nam mob like i always books on it and they say he's serious he's serious yeah that that guy serious and so they'll say he's not a serious person you don't wanna mess with that person so you wanna find serious people i have two other little ones wrote fast ones one is find a paper cut problem so i've noticed that a lot of people who do well in companies they do this in the first two weeks when they join they find something that's just been an annoy that nobody's ever fixed or nobody's got to because it's not that important it's never the most important thing and they just go clean that up voluntarily i call this the paper cut problem like what's the thing that's just been giving us paper cuts it's kind of annoying but you're not bleeding not you're not dying you don't if to the hospital and if somebody fixed it you'd be like dude thank you for doing that like you know it wouldn't actually stand out a lot i know several people that did this they they go to company and they immediately identify like oh here's some annoy that two people have referenced i bet this noise everybody and actually i think if i just bet one saturday working on this i could fix it and they did that and they just like boost their stock so much when i was in seventh grade i had his job at at a bakery and i would like clean the floors and wash dishes and there was a corner or there's was a shelf where we'd have to like put these dry dishes and the shelf was broken and we hired another jan to work with me and i remember like i'd worked there for like eight months and this fucking shelf was always broken was a pain the ass and like within the first week this guy fixed that shelf and i immediately thought that's the way to do things you did it right you did it right and by the way you get rewarded for doing the things you didn't have to do right like if you just do your job that's called your job you do not get like extra recognition or reward or or any kind of bonus points for doing your job so you by definition you have to find something that is beyond your job or doing your job beyond what was asked if you really wanna get this to stand out it's very simple obvious principle but take that and make it actionable by like go look for right as soon as you start looking for it you'll see it right it's a it's a it's a thing that the guy who's been there for eight months has been ignoring he's become he's just accepted it it's become a blind spot for them well for a new person if you're noticing you'll see it right away and you just go fix that and you get so much better guy's head jan now i mean don't worked out i but honestly if you're gonna be a jan be the head jan like be the best be the best goddamn jan anybody's ever seen i got one practical one and then one fun one the practical one is the other problem you wanna find is the a plus problem in any given time in any company there is the a plus problem it is the thing that the peep that's keeping you know the the exec team up at night they're worried about it what i did was i just found the april problem i would only work on that i would just work on that you know i would do my my main job kinda like you know seventy percent is good or fifty percent is good or sometimes zero percent is good i just put it on pause because honestly it didn't even matter relative to the a plus problem and you know i took a little more risk than most people because i didn't care if i ever got fire like it was yeah thank you please fire me invest my shares that would be a dream but but by the way we had a friend who is at a company and he goes there was layoffs this week at our company and sadly i was not impacted you got exactly so finally the april probably work on it i remember what think i told this sort before i was that a company and basically a competitor was like attacking them and like what was just you stealing their top customer basically and i figured well that's probably the april to the only thing everybody's thinking about and so i just did some analysis did a did wrote up a a two page doc and i sent it to the ceo was like hey you know i have no idea who's working on this but you know i was curious so i would dug in and here's what i found it immediately got like text intro into a group chat i was hey sean's in on this now and i think that that's that's really what you want right as you want to be working on the interesting thing because that's what the highest caliber people are doing it's where the highest impact is you might as well you have this only have so many hours in the day i might as well work on the higher impact stuff with the most interesting high caliber people that's how you get better what's your last fun one the last one one is you gotta create a brand for yourself so like you have a little little story right there's all these moments inside companies where it's like you do introductions or you're at some team off site and you know you you have two choices you're either gonna blend in or you're gonna stand out the best way to say that is to be yourself but the the way to be yourself is to just remove the filter and so it's your brand so i think there's has been a couple like when i was at monkey inferno and just to give you a sense of this right i'm twenty four years old i'm the youngest person in the company i'm the newest hire in the company and six months later i got named ceo prodigy just pretty good pretty good right and the way to do that is you actually you know you bake an impact but you also gotta build some sort of brand for yourself and so mine was i was gonna be sort of like the action like basically just like take massive action on everything so whatever the thing was i would be like alright i'm gonna take action on it a immediately b i'm gonna do this shit that nobody else wants to do like i'm gonna go further you oh we gotta do this or we don't know if people will like this who cool give me the prototype i'm gonna go talk to the people go to the mall i don't would talk to you people but i get feedback and i come back with like written feedback there's just the shit that nobody else really wanted to do and it just built this thing like i'm going to consistently take action i'm a have a higher bias action to anybody else and i would talk about that i'd be like yeah don't like i don't really know you know i remember this one guy did this intro and he said this thing this guy stood up and he goes i don't know anything about art or politics i don't know what he goes i don't know anything about art i don't know anything about politics hell i don't even know where the remote is in my house the remote for the tv is in my house but the one thing i know is how to structure deals and today i'm gonna tell you about how to structure deals and i like wow what an intro what i what a fantastic intro it like always stood out to me and i thought you know what as much as your brand is gonna be that you're good at x y and z you could say how bad you are or how literally you know about you know these other three things and just be honest about it and almost poke fun it yourself so i would tell people but like look i have the least experience of anybody in this room that's obvious i have never worked on any of this stuff before i don't know how to code i don't know how to design but i'm gonna make myself useful the way the way i'm gonna do that is it seems like what you guys need is help actually getting your product into people's hands and getting feedback quickly and i'm actually iterating from there so i'm gonna go crazy on that alright what you guys are gonna get the next six weeks is me going crazy on that sound good and they're like they're like great it's like warren buffett says look for partners who have in a high iq who are ethical and have a lot of energy and i i i did same thing where i was like well i actually don't know if i'm high iq two out of three bad yeah yeah i don't know i definitely am ethical and i and i have a shit ton of energy so my wheels are spinning fast if you guys just wanna put me in in the right direction i'll go ahead and the car will run and it'll run quickly and i'll get you what you need i'd the exact same brad as you and when we got acquired i just i was hey i'm a startup up guy inside this big company i'm a start i'm i'm a startup up guy all they working startups i don't know anything about a big company honestly i'm gonna probably make some mistakes that are things that are obvious you should do it a big company but think i hope hope to bring to the table is i'm just gonna keep working the way i know how as an entrepreneur i'm just gonna just do that here and you guys tell me what parts of that are working for you guys or what or not right that's part of the brand but the other part is like stand out a little bit i remember sitting at an off sign is like oh how about everybody just share you know how things are going and it was like person one said this like boring thing about like you know they just immediately went into like work mode right like you know they were like you here's what i'm doing here's the problem i'm having here's what i'm doing here's the problem i'm having here i have this employee doing this and never was just kinda pitching and moaning and telling a very bland story and i just decided when it's gonna come my i don't know what's gonna come out of my mouth but it's not gonna be that and so i just told a story that was more funny it was poking fun of myself about something that i had done recently and a mistake that i had made so instead of blaming my team or my whatever i just told i was like you know here's where my head's at because all you they weren't saying like give us a team update they're just saying like you know let's all be present to share what's on our mind how you're feeling right now and so i did that and that stood out at the break everybody everybody's was like dude i that story and you know the the lesson there is really like take a bit of a risk and don't take yourself too seriously inside companies because i think there's a tendency to try to button up and blend in and i would say that's not what the best people do i don't think that's what i don't think that's how the best people blacked we have this guy at hampton named doug and doug is a very stereotypical engineer so he's very black and white and because of that he's done a very good job of just being honest constantly and so if someone trying to bullshit me i'll just be like what's doug think doug what do you think and it'll just be like that's stupid or he won't say that way he'll be like i don't think that's the right way i think this is the right way and for these reasons or he'll be like i don't like i don't exactly understand like branding but i think that a lot of people like this this this and this and they like it for these reasons therefore that way is or is not the right way and it's just wanna doug i just always wanna know what doug think about this he's very analytical and he's very honest and he just because he's you know like a normal engineer he doesn't exactly understand that what's hurting my feelings or what isn't hurting my feelings and i love that about them i love that i always want doug in my life people who just don't bullshit me and they'll say something like that's stupid that's not stupid and i appreciate that that's his brand is that the pod that's the pod so the those are our tips how to become i don't know a superstar inside of a company how to stand out how to make a name for yourself inside of a company and if you're if you're if you're listening on on itunes or spotify go to the youtube and a subscribe because we're about to cross four hundred thousand and b comment other questions that you have for the new segment questionable advice if we get any good questions we'll do it i like he said the youtube that's how my dad says it too that's cool go to my youtube when i look at when i hold my phone and take a picture i used two hands as well i'm always gonna i no i've like posting i'm try to post to tiktok a day and i love to doing it what you said again that was great every we posted to tiktok i feel like i a i like reverse my age by one month i'm just getting younger just buy tiktok by tiktok if you wanna be young you do as the young people do you gotta like and you're gonna you're sq your eyes you're gonna hold your phone with two hands and you're gonna like look down on it that's how it feels right now the damn thing off alright that's the pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a road less travel never looking back