The insane story of Blake Scholl: the high school dropout who’s building supersonic jets

okay i have an amazing story if you're if you're entrepreneurial sam if you have a pulse in your body if there is a single blood vessel in your body you are gonna be fired the fuck up after this i don't know what you got what do you have scheduled after this cancel it i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel let's hear what is it alright so you've probably heard of this company boom supersonic yes yeah i had the opportunity opportunity to invest in this couple of years ago and i didn't have any money then but also i even if i did i would've have passed on this because it's it's a it's a ridiculous proposition didn't have courage than either that was the real problem well like a guy said that guy silicon valley said he's gonna build a commercial airline he's gonna build a jet that can be supersonic commercial airplane right that sounds ridiculous exactly so the the thing that's going viral right now is former like group on product manager because he worked at group on is linkedin literally goes group on product manager then created the first supersonic jet in like you know whatever fifty six years so it's this insane jump on linkedin and that's kinda going viral right now got me curious because i remember back of the day this was twenty sixteen did you see the deal i i i wasn't it didn't it's like somebody sent it to reach to invest i could if i chased it down and then actually several times since then i could have invested but i didn't maybe not too late maybe now's the time but i remember watching demo day do you remember this story do you remember his demo day pitch at l demo i didn't know he went through yc i didn't pay that close attention to so he went to y comb exactly went through y comb now i at the time it stood up now yc does a lot more like moonshot type of companies back then it was all apps it was all software you're making an iphone app you're making like a b saas tool and this is sixteen time sixteen and there was this one guy there who was like we're creating supersonic air travel like you're gonna be able to fly from new york to london in three and a half hours that's what we're doing remember the concorde we're gonna do that again and he gets on stage and i remember thinking while he's pitching i'm like how is he gonna have traction because every yc pitch ends the same where they show their user growth we're growing thirty percent week over week but it's like going from like a three to six to nine right like think they're they have some crazy growth rate but it's on a very small customer base but that's always the pitch so remember wondering let's this guy you a do and at the very end of his pitch he whips out a piece of paper and he goes and as of last night we have five billion in pre orders thanks to virgin thanks to richard branson and virgin and we were like what five billion and it was like l he had an lo it wasn't actually a purchase order just says one day if you can actually build a safe supersonic jet we will definitely buy it we will maybe buying it it guys what it means right like when somebody my me feel like you need i don't wanna go to i'm gonna start sending lois because at lo lois just means i'm generally interested but i'm probably not gonna do it right yeah so yeah but still it was impressive five billion still through this day nobody's walked into yc demo day with five billion dollar worth of letters letter of intent so okay i remember seeing that then he disappeared for a while then he actually had to go do the work so let me tell you this guy's story because right now in silicon valley there is a buzz word actually i would say it's kinda like an early buzz word like i would be buying stock in this buzz word because it's about to go mainstream and that word is high agency you seen high agency floating around no but that is is sky agency that duke contra oh it is abby it shit's on contra dude like we means we're contra walked we had to sell democrat the democrat is done that was your grandfather we have the short contra we're going all in on high agency weight long high the man in the arena is that just plummeted had a moment had a moment butt him off just butcher that one so that was done so alright so check this out so high agency is this word and there's our buddy george mack by the way is like all in on high agency like he i think he's writing a book high agency right now mh i he by lawyer he bought the domain high agency dot com and i was like how'd you get that he goes the guy let it expire after ten years and i snip get right away i was very low agency move by him low by the other right it's like in the football the low man wins no no in business the high agency man wins and so the classic meme which we should put on the screen on youtube is guy is the cartoon guy is trapped on an island and he has these like pieces of bark or wood or whatever and he he spells out help he's waiting for someone to come save him that's the low agency guy and the high agency guy takes the wood and makes a boat and rose away right so that that's like the the the gist of this okay but this guy this dude from boom supersonic wasn't named bleak he is just absolutely dripping with agency alright so let's take this out his guy is soaked this guy is a yeah he's a buffalo wing and he is tossed hand tossed hi jesse alright so here you go story starts he drops out of high school his parents sent him to a good high school like a nice private school and he doesn't feel like he fits in and he doesn't really look like get that interested in class he drops out and so now he's high school dropout like parents are kinda concerned he ends up finding something that he's really into like science and math like he in this like after school program or there's some shit like that but forget that first hyatt agency move once he started getting interested in science math engineering he's like actually i think i do like school i just didn't know what i i i just didn't like my high school of the way i was doing it but now i found i actually do like to learn i wanna go to college well how do go to college you don't have a high school degree your a high school dropout he finds that at carnegie mel they have a special program for high school dropout who wanna go to carnegie mel so he applies he applies as a junior and he writes an essay about why you've have to write an essay say why you didn't finish high school and he writes high school had nothing left to teach me he gets in not only he get in and he gets the merit scholarship and he graduates with a you know bachelor's and computer science okay so what does he do next his next move is that he's like i wanna be an entrepreneur but i don't know what idea i wanna start yet so why don't i go and work for who i think is the greatest entrepreneur right now and that was jeff bezos in two thousand and one so amazon is out the dot com crash just happened amazon stock is in the tank i that's what i'm betting you're looking that up right now two thousand one it mean it was shit it was a dollar now it's two hundred and seventy three dollars great so he joins amazon in two thousand and one and his goal is to learn as much as he can from bezos so he's like i gotta build something that's of interest to bezos and at the time bezos had an idea which was like hey we need to we need amazon products to show up number one in google search results so blake builds this automated system where he is buying google ads for every single product on amazon like the entire catalog he builds an auto bidder so that amazon will bid not too much but bid enough to be the top result on amazon which is one of the reasons by the way that like the you know there's like stories of like there's a story that a company wants you to know and then there's a story that actually happened right and i have read a lot about amazon and one of the one of the make break moments was the fact that they were one of google's biggest spend and they crushed it and knocked out the par because google was under price and they were able to get big fast because people think all these companies are competitors they're also cons conspirators right google pays apple built tens of billions of dollars to be the default search engine apple in microsoft invested in apple when they were big competitors bill gates basically kinda saved apple at at a time when steve jobs needed investment and in this case amazon is the biggest vendor on google like you know that what i thought these ezra were competitors and bezos is was one of the angel investors of google or anything like that exactly so he builds the system by twenty four now he's twenty four years old three years in and he was basically working under direct view of bezos so he goes every three months i had to give bezos a report on how we were doing and by the age of twenty four he's running a three hundred million dollar p and l inside of amazon he's the he's the gm of that business but even though he's learned a bunch and he kind of you know cut his hook cut his teeth here he wanted be an entrepreneur so he quits even though he's like a rising star at amazon and he knows amazon is like a amazon's a winner right amazon's is a winner if he had done nothing else but just stay at amazon get promoted as an exec keep getting stock options every year he would have made hundreds of millions of dollars essentially risk free at that point yeah but he quits and him and some guy decide to create a a start the greatest startup up it kinda fails to create another startup up eventually they sell that startup up to group on and this is where the linkedin part of group on comes in is like this hilarious quote on on his group on his group on linkedin description so he says what he does like you know senior whatever manager of this thing and then his description goes nothing like working on internet coupons to make you urine for doing something that you truly love so he after two years a group on he quits and he decides you know what i wanna do a company i don't know what i wanna do it in and his whole life he had been interested flight he talked about like when he was a kid he was always interested model airplanes his parents took up to a museum he was always obsessed with flight one of his things on his bucket list was that you know in his twenties he wanted to go mach two like he he got his pilot's license he always just was an interested in flight but was a hobby and he's trying to think of what started ideas has to do and his method for figuring this out is i'm going to write a list of all the ideas starting with what would be the most awesome if i did it down from there and then i'll just probably cross out the first five because they're unrealistic or un impractical and i'll probably do number five on the list was his plan but number one was create a supersonic jet because like elon the way elon started spacex you've heard the story where he went into it like thinking this is not gonna work well but even before that he's still you know he's sell paypal sells elon now has hundred and eighty million dollars he leaves and he's just curious like what okay what else and he's curious what's the latest with nasa's mars mission like i haven't heard about our mars mission like are we is it in progress and i just missed it is launching soon i can't wait because to go see it maybe i'll fly there and go see it i wanna see the launch i love rockets and he goes on the nasa website and there's no mention of mars and he's like what we went to the moon like in whatever seventy three like how are we not where's the next mission and he wasn't even on the website and he's like what and he got so upset by that that the start of spacex was actually that he was going to privately fund a mission to sound like a plant to mars and then it became like a turtle or jelly or something it was like you know some i'm living some technically living thing and it was like i'm gonna spend twenty five million dollars doing this this it was just like a stunt and just to kind of like rein the interest in this same way this guy blake puts on a google alert for supersonic jet he's like i can't wait till there's a supersonic flight i'll be the first guy to buy it and he's waiting he's waiting he's like he's nobody's working on this and he's like oh it must be that it just doesn't the numbers don't the map ain't map it like that's gotta be the problem so he creates a spreadsheet and image he writes down the assumptions he's like basically like the engineering assumptions and he gives himself like a few months to work on this where he's like let me just dig into this so i think it was two weeks where he does like it goes and buys a book because he's like i i don't know anything about how airplanes fly but he goes he buys a book and he creates an excel spreadsheet on one tab was the cost model he's like is it an economic problem because the the brief history is we had this thing called the concorde back of the day have you ever seen the concorde like have you ever looked at photos of it it looks great photos yeah slick and it was like inspiring and everybody loved it and it was the same idea you could get from you know here to london in new york to london and three and a half hours ish yeah it was like three and a half hours or three hours and forty five minutes was the fastest time ever which they double the speed so it's eight hours normal flights so it was twice you could fly twice as fast and the idea was the concorde was like this luxury item in a way it was priced really expensive so this is you know almost fifty years ago that it was invented but yeah it was priced at like fifteen thousand dollars ticket and if you look at the inside of it the photos i think it was only like three seats by three so it was like a it was like two something passengers i think yeah so there it wasn't a lot of people at all so it when you think about it it's hard to make a lot of money high priced low volume not a lot of routes only limited number of routes but it had all these problems like if you go look up like the problems with the concorde right like it was like yes it was expensive it also like got really hot like this is this famous thing where when they first launched it to do like a p blades are like to sponsor it they had pepsi sponsored with the concord and so they painted it light blue and the concord before that was this white reflective material to reflect heat to not store heat but the light blue thing made it where it got so hot inside the cabin that you know the hour flight they could only do for twenty minutes because it was like i cooking everything inside so like heat was a problem noise was a problem price was the problem you know duration was a problem i also think there was a really famous crash too where was like that was maybe and i don't remember if i don't you know this was years i was a kid or i didn't even think that was alive actually but i remember reading about it and the what i read was the reality is that it couldn't worked or it could have been great but the perception was that this thing is dangerous and it's too radical and a crash i'm never getting on that is that right exactly so the the last the thing that kinda killed the concorde was they had this flight where during takeoff the tire hit something on the runway and it rupture the tire and then the plane basically explode and to kill everybody on board and that was like alright we're done with this thing too dangerous so it had safety problems price problems heat problems you know like noise problems because it was like you know shatter windows when it would do with sonic boom so it was like oh whatever so i think like two thousand and three was the last flight so in about twenty years have been no no no flight since nobody was even working on it so he he has a spreadsheet and he's like look am i just nuts because the way i'm pencil this out you know we only need like a thirty percent improvement in like fuel efficiency a thirty percent improvement and this one other thing and he's like dude it's spend fifty years like our tvs got better our phones got better our computers got like dramatically better not thirty percent better they got like three thousand percent better he's like i'm pretty sure we could make the plane thirty percent more efficient and then this would work so he goes to this like you can buy a t you can i can get a tc seventy five inch tv for literally six hundred dollars and it's delivered to my door the next day right like if i can do that we can make a we can make a chat so he goes to this stanford professor and he's like he's like hey like you know this we need a thirty percent i my calculation show when you a thirty percent fuel efficiency and by the way that concord was designed at a time where like they use slide rulers and like you know wind tunnels to test things like i think we could do this and the professor was like yeah i think you can't the math is correct he's like so you know you might have engineering problems but like the physics are fine and so he gets encouraged he's like i just thought i must not know something and that's why this hasn't been done but it's one of these classic things where like the beginner mind goes in and they don't see the problems and therefore they do it whereas all the experts just assume that's we tried that it doesn't work and so he goes and he he decides to create an airplane company okay so what's the next move how is he gonna fund this thing now is he gonna build it because again this dude just bought a textbook about flight he doesn't know anything about this stuff so he's like alright i need to recruiter a rate team and we gotta we need some money so he decides he takes half of all of his life savings and he decides to fund the company bank account with it and he hires up something like six to ten people one of which he punches the former chief engineer of gulf stream and he's like i thought it would be hard to get talent because here i am i'm this fucking group on kid saying i'm gonna build a you know in a supersonic jet it's never been hasn't been done in you know fifty years like the last american new american airlines company that worked was like you know eighty years ago or something so the business plan is a little crazy it's probably gonna you know it i think it cost to conquer like a billion dollars to make the conquered it was like a billion dollar project they thought it was twenty million and ended up spending a billion he's like i think well i think we'll need two hundred million but i don't know where i'm gonna get all that so let me just start by trying to get myself did he did he say how much like he hasn't said the the amount buddy he at one point he's like i realized like i'm playing chicken with my own bank account here he's like i wanna go raise money he ends up raising like a million bucks still almost nothing but he gets like a few early believers in i have one of my really close friends chris was in that round oh wow did he say what he saw or why he's been telling me about it for years and that's originally how i heard about this and he was like this guy just magical and i i i just couldn't i'm like a silicon valley software person starting a jet company that just that's really dumb which is evidenced by dumb ideas being potentially amazing and how that's actually quite common and by the way the airline mark airplane market is super fragmented oh wait no not there's two companies one owns fifty one percent owns forty nine percent it's just airbus and boeing that's the whole market right so you know he's trying to go to basically break up this duo in in theory okay so let's go back to the to the so he hires this guy so he get hires steam and he's like actually one of the surprising things was it was way easier to hire great talent because the bigger the mission the better the pitch so he's like i had a super exciting mission i didn't have a lot of other i didn't have a lot of traction i didn't have lot of funding but i had a great mission i had an exciting project that was basically like nerd porn so he's like any nerdy you know engineer who worked on airplanes you could either go work at boeing or airbus and your job is to like you know make sure that the cabin temperature goes down by two degrees so that we could sell more you know vodka like that was they were trying to innovate at all so if he were somebody who wanted to innovate this was like the only option so he creature team then he goes into yc and he was skeptical and goes into y comb he's like guess isn't it just for software companies but sam alt is like no no we like heart heart stuff sam's like i don't know if you're you're gonna get in but you should go talk to these four other guys who had hardware companies that kind of failed in yc but but they'll tell you that like they would have failed much worse had they not had yc so you guys talk to them there they're like yeah it was great let's do it so he joins and he's like i realized something pretty quickly he goes why he is architect in this three month program on demo three months you're gonna stand on stage in front of all the investors you're gonna make your pitch picture you gotta raise money that's the whole point and so he's like what the hell am i gonna do in three months so he goes i realized that during yc if i went to them and i was like hey we reduced the drag but thirty percent and this engine design is really awesome and like that's our progress update we're cooked and so he's like i gotta figure out something that i'm gonna do so he comes up with two plants he's like number one i gotta sell the dream so he spends a good chunk of his time and money just building like a model airplane that looks sick he's like alright this is not gonna actually help us make the plane but it's gonna help people see that we're making a plane and it's gonna lift awesome how much does yc he give you like hundred and twenty eight five grand yeah somebody at the time i probably just spent all like one hundred thousand dollars hiring some firm making like a really great model so he had like a model like yeah like a model but then he also had like a an gnarly looking engine and he's like we just wanna stand there with a big ass engine and then people will walk by like whoa is that a jet engine he's like yeah that's the jet engine we're gonna use on our supersonic jet would you like to hear more so he's like i need that eye candy you needed a booth babe but for him the booth babe was the model in the engine so smart right because like one of the common out is elon and these other guys is if you can't just be an engineer in your in your little engineering hole you gotta know just enough about the rest about the marketing the capital raising all the other things to to survive so he did the second thing was he was like i need these like purchase orders so he makes a list and he's like alright how can i go get lois and he's like he makes this list and so he's like here's his good he is i realized i couldn't show up to demo with no sales otherwise my goose was pretty cooked so i looked at my sales pipeline and it was united delta lu fans air china and we only had eight or nine weeks before demo day and i thought myself there's no way i'm closing lu fan lu fans airlines by demo is not gonna happen i'll be lucky if i closed them in nine years let alone nine weeks so i realized i actually only had two options a startup up airline or virgin he goes so we i went all in and focused all of my my sales efforts on startups and virgin he goes i went to the startups who were currently operating and i got one of them to do an lo but it was a company you've never heard of but it was the best i could do and the hero was twenty four hours before demo and the lucky break we got was that demo was split into two days if it was demo day one he would stoked by age just said that we have a small lo from this company you've never heard of luckily we got randomly assigned to demo day two so he had bought an extra twenty four hours in that extra twenty four hours he ends up getting an email from virgin the night before demo day that says you're allowed to announce we'll take the first ten planes we've got options on them and through virgin galactic will even help you building it it goes i fell off my chair i almost screamed i had to read the things three times i couldn't believe it we went from have we went from being the biggest laughing stock on demo a so the company that showed up with five billion dollars worth of an lo worth of lo lois a record that won't be broken soon dude that's so sick wait wait year is this wait year is this twenty sixteen so yeah i was reading i i was looking at my email to try to figure out did i ever talk to this person how do i know and the earliest thing i could only find was i think in two thousand twenty it says the hustle actually wrote about them said united airline once to buy fifteen supersonic airline from boom sonic so it's took additional two years to get the you know airline free the next roi so okay so then how did he get branson high agency baby i told you he's dripping an agency alright so what does he do so he's like alright i wanna get to richard branson i gotta go through somebody i trust he goes i'm also not just gonna try one path to branson we gotta try multiple pastor branson so he's like if i get blocked over here i got this other long shot going so he's like i had this scott on our board who was an astronaut this guy mark kelly probably heard of him so that guy was on his advisory board he's like he knows branson he's like so i'm thinking alright we got we gotta find a way to to get to richard and so he goes we asked we asked mark what's the best way to get to richard branson how do we make that happen he and he told me he goes hey you you can't get him interested in you but go where he's interested in his own thing so here's what do you mean goes virgin galactic has this big rollout for their spaceship richard's gotta be there so you just gotta get there go where he is and they're like okay and so they get he's like could you make could you email them and say hey these guys i'm advising from boom supersonic are gonna be in mojave when you're doing your rollout you should meet with them when you're there and then he's like and he reaches out to the virgin guys he's like hey we're gonna be in town to see richard can we come to the rollout and like you know so basically they get invited to the rollout they get there he's super busy they end up getting fifteen minutes with him when he's at brunch with his mom and they go up to him and they he goes richard to show him what they're doing to like we're building the first supersonic jets since the concorde we fix these problems we're making that happen and he goes look we're not asking you for your money all we wanna know is this when this thing flies do you want a virgin logo on it and i think that was the key you gotta ask for the right thing when you do a deal you it's probably gonna be hard to close you gotta ask for what's really gonna help you so we told richard look if you're our a customer we will get money elsewhere we don't need money from you and that was crucial basically like the first few babies of these that are in the air do you want them with a virgin logo or not and so that was the thing that got richard branson across the line was making the intelligent ask and hustling their way did movie this is a movie it works if it ends well it's a movie well they just did their flight so they just did their first demo flight where but it wasn't a i think what the test was if i remember correctly was it the engine that they were testing they got the engine because the plane is like a it's a small plane right this was a smaller plane than the real plane that they're gonna have and i don't think it was the full speed that they're gonna have but they did achieve i believe they achieved supersonic flight you could check me on that but yeah yeah i they they achieved the right that the they crossed the threshold they did it safely they landed it and is they're like whatever x xp wan or whatever they're calling that thing okay he's got some great start advice so here's here's the way he described it his start right i like the way he phrase this so he goes here's my advice for startups pick something that's gonna be worth it to you personally that is what's that is how you stack the deck in your favor stack to the deck so that you will be motivated and when you look at what you're creating versus if you went to google or facebook or amazon it should be a no contest if you haven't found that just don't even start a startup up i did that my first time i just started startup up just for just because it was a horrible idea you you just start to start up when you're like i must make this happen and something i've come to believe is that the bigger the idea the easier it becomes because it motivates you and to people around you and you're attract better people to come work on it when we were brainstorming this most of the ideas we came up with were like no one's gonna really appreciate this blah blah blah but for us it was like the most exciting thing we could ever do and so that's all that matter was like you know stacking the deck in your favor doing it as a must rather than a we could do this and so that that's i thought one really great takeaway i was reading this quote by the guy i don't know his last name but the guy who wrote crime in punishment you know like this famous novel and he said your worse sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing and i was really good i i just read that like an hour ago and it's sat with me and what you've described is exactly that yeah i love this guy so i don't know them but i'm rooting for them i wanna invest now because you know why not let's let's get on the team you know and there's been a lot of well i think there's been well there definitely has been but there's been i think he's wrote publicly about a lot of the downsides of all this which is that it's this has not been clear i think he had to take a huge down and he tweeted out about it i believe and i think his most recent valuation was two billion dollars which was down from the other map but didn't he tweet about the down and how like they basically almost ran out of money and how it's almost failed at a bunch of different times i don't know i didn't see that i also i'm different than you i feel like you love to know the downsides of things like even when a guest comes on that's one of the questions you tend to ask which is interesting to me be because i never really think about it but you're always like what are the honest like it's not all peaches and cream like what what are the downsides of your approach which is obviously an intelligent question but i think there's something good about being delusional about it too and just being like i have a convenient hole in my memory and in my brain to not even really pay attention or remember those things the reason i asked that is because i have been a victim of this many times where i go and say well this guy did it why can't i do it and then i start doing it and i think to myself this is way harder than it than it than it looked why is this so hard and and so i always look for those i ask those questions not to say that someone shouldn't do something but just to say that it is much more challenging than it appears and that is okay and normal because i remember thinking on my journey this sucks you know this person he never felt that way why do i feel that way like i'm i'm full of shit what the hell i'm not i'm not good enough and then i wanna like be reminded that like this is a normal feeling this is a normal problem i'm having you gotta keep going that's why i asked those questions yeah i think it's totally helpful to have that yeah the one that helps me is tony robbins does this thing we talked about dabble versus stress achieve versus masters and i've talked about this i won't do the whole thing but like one of the things he says at the end is that anybody who's pursuing anything no matter what if you are in it you're gonna hit plateau so f it even downs but like just plateau where it feels like it's not working the progress it's not happening it's not as fast as you want it's not growing it's not working everyone's saying no we don't have that investor or whatever it is right and the one thing that tony said that just always stuck in my mind almost like as a it's like a it's like a a jingle in a song or like a commercial where he goes when that plateau comes the dabble quits the stress stresses and the master says i thought i'd be seeing you soon hello my old friend you're here i i was expecting you which is like we have this one company we started just little over a year ago that's just been like up into the right like this company is i haven't announced it yet but it's like almost a ten million dollar run rate already profitable bootstrap in one here is i can insanely insanely successful but we just hit like are you know our first plateau and i feel like when we called it out it was almost like this kind of like a embarrassing down feeling of like oh man like we didn't have ridiculous growth this month and we're out whereas i was like dude i've been expecting you where is the plateau i i know it's coming i almost don't even trust that it's happening until you that this is real until we start to face some of these and so yeah that's why i asked those questions is i don't want us as a media or whatever we are to be the ones who who i i wanna be realistic business business influencers on itunes well yeah as spotify thirteenth biggest business influencer i just want to say that it is a fucking pain in the ass and it's still worth it do you what i mean yeah yeah yeah you're right speaking of insane agency speaking of insane downs on a way to a huge up have you listened to this episode i did with nick mow it came out this morning and i hadn't listened to it yet but i went and like saw i saw it pop up this morning and i went and googled his company and i own a ton of the toys that he makes like and like not by kid me so like he owns he owns mini brands you gave with the robo fish well i've we have a robo fish actually but for my daughter but you know i told you about many toys right and how like i oh that is mini brands you he owns many brands it's so like my wife is fucking weird at which she was pregnant and like not feeling well i would go and surprise her by buying these mini toys which is the stupidest thing ever it's just like a miniature it's a ball full of miniature things like a miniature kinda of coke a miniature kit kat a miniature notebook the weirdest shit if people love it and then the other thing loves those dude i don't know why my wife would loves thirty three year old loves those dude you you know what i did was i i went and bought like literally three hundred dollars worth and i hid them in my drawer and whenever like she had a bad pregnancy day which she was like sick or something i'll go and get one and be like i something for you it was like i was like you know i was like a secret stash and then also he makes these electric water guns forth that i went and bought last summer that i would shoot at my daughter like messing around have you seen the electric water guns don't i think it's hilarious is how into the toys you are right now could i tell you the biggest oh holy shit moment from the whole thing you gotta tell the background it's from what i know it's two brothers in new zealand that have a toy company that does like three or four or five more than that more than that so let's just let me start with this we have interviewed i don't know how many two hundred guests on this podcast two fifty maybe hundreds billionaires billionaires young old man woman whatever criminals not criminals criminals non criminals guys you don't have wanna hang out with guys that you don't wanna hang out with right there's a lot of people we've we've had on this podcast he is yet the top of the mountain number one number one most impressive entrepreneur of all of them i was blown what he is these hey he has the scrap hustle story and like the like his bottom was like the bob live literally living on a dollar a day for years literally this is all funny this guy is so he is okay so now z i'll give you the context that you wanted it but like i just needed to say that out of ever yes i've ever had on this podcast ever he is the number one most impressive founder that i'd ever had on the podcast okay and we've had some cool people no offense yes alright so but sorta story yeah but know your place with i'll do becky you fucking suck yeah okay robbins i thought batman man this guy i was say he's the wealthiest man in new zealand he's got a company that him and his brother started family owned bootstrap self made billionaire there they do a few billion dollars a year in revenue they do a billion dollars a year of just profit i that they and they've been doing that but nice never had outside investors he has dominated the toy industry so he built the most profitable toy company in the world he then built the fastest growing diaper company in the world you ever heard of ras diapers or million moon at target yeah so you got the fastest growing diaper company in the world doing hundreds of millions and by way he made that while he was on sick leave he got his intestine removed because he got crohn's disease and while he was on his sick bed laying there he's like oh i guess i'll just dominate diapers now like you didn't say need a diaper that's what happened so he he creates the fast growing diaper company creates the fastest growing hair care company on tiktok now wait what he's monday hair hair cara whenever he owns monday not only all that he now is building the largest factory in the world bigger than the tesla factory bigger than all that where robots are gonna build houses autonomously and that's what he's doing he's building houses with robots now self funding the whole thing by the way problems i i asked i was like that's just gotta be hundreds of millions of dollars of self funding and he just laughed so so take that for what it's worth let me now tell you okay so that's that's what the guy does can i tell you some of the just holy shit stories from this thing yeah alright so the dude's eighteen years old and he like after selling door to door in new zealand where they live trying to sell his brother like invented this hot air balloon toy at science fair and his brother's his older brother and put him to work and was like y you need to go sell the door to door the dude that they were there like you know what we need a factory and they're like oh all the manufacturing is in china so they moved to china but the hilarious thing is at nineteen at eighteen i think eighteen nineteen something like that they go to china that's the story where they sleep in the bush outside the airport because the airport lights were too bright so they leave the airport sleep it a bush get babe by mosquitoes they have no money so they're like they're just on their own and so he i was like oh so you found a manufacturer in china that you scaled up because when he you found a manufacturer we went to china and then built a factory on the side of a river we just went with like wood and like a hammer and we built a factory i was like what was the point of going to china you know you go to china to their factories are already there he's said yeah we didn't understand that like we we just went there and we just built our own factory on the side of a river and we found this like mom to make a food for two rm b a day thirty cents a day and then she had some people that could come work in the factory and then we just have we had her own production line and it it sounds like a it sounds like a shed yeah they literally built a shed and then they just kept scaling up the shed and he's like my brother didn't come back home for like eight or nine years he just slept on the floor of the factory and i've i slept on the floor too then except for when i did a cell alright so how do they win wim he's like and a product sucked by the way with is one of my favorite things so like everybody who makes it they're like the key is just to have a great product and then if you're a founder you're like dude what like okay i've made a great product now what nothing's happening and and you know they don't like people tend to leave out the like the manual work it took the lucky brakes it took to like get get the thing to start working what was it was on it it was a hot it was like a plastic hot air balloon toy or what even worse so starts with a hot air balloon quickly rear he's i did again we didn't know anything about anything so we go we build a shed by the river in china or making our hot air balloons then we've learned you can't even export hot air balloons he's like literally it's a fire in a tiny can like we can't sell that so he's like we realized that was a waste we gotta come up with a new toy and again everybody everybody tries to say we're so innovative so we innovated innovation is great and then we made a great product he is the opposite he's like so we found that this other toy was selling so we copied it we ruthless routinely copied that toy and we made a shitty version it because we didn't know anything by manufacture dude so this like white guy moved to china and out chinese the chinese yeah exactly exactly it was like dude we lived on a dollar a day i was like so you i was like to store you ate mcdonald's every day and he's like every day that i wish mcdonald's was our christmas treat we would go to mcdonald's and he's like for years i just remember saying like merry christmas broke and he's like merry christmas bro we would cheers our fries he's like i used to eat half the fries and take it back and be like hey there's only half the fries in here you guys ji me and get like the second serving of fries and he's like that was the treat do dude i used to do that all the time at bars i would order an iced tea and be like you made the long island iced tea wrong you forgot the liquor and by the way he was not saying work pride he was like i i was almost like a therapist because this guy's never done a podcast by the way this was the first podcast i think he's ever done and there's no stories you could find it this guy like i went to do the research there's no like oh him you know normally we do research you've you go watch the three most watch podcast that they've done and you pick up a bunch up he had zero he had to download google chrome to do the interview he's like it's not letting me do this i were like what and we're like just open chrome he's was like what's chrome and i was like you're a billionaire you don't know google what are you use he's like oh i think i have chrome hold on he's like oh i got chrome okay got it got it let me switch to my laptop this is gonna work okay like just talking with you now we who's that serious and so i was like dude why don't you do any podcast to tell your stories like i don't know i just never did what motivates this guy he's just a man actor he he's like he was he was he calm very calm i felt like i was almost like a therapy session because i'm asking about these times back in the day and he's almost like yeah i don't know what we were doing and why we were thinking like he just doesn't think about it he and he was like not su he's like yeah you know we we were super scrappy but he's like we're also a little mentally ill like we just were he was we were so na that naive is not even the right word so he's like for example we got sued for millions of dollars because again we like copied someone's toy and so it's like a two million dollar lawsuit it's either gonna bankrupt the company because we don't have two billion dollars or we have to fight it but the lawyers that we talked to about like it's gonna cost you a million dollars to fight this he's like do we had like a few thousand dollars he's like so i go to colorado and i find this lawyer he's like this guy eventually got dis bard but i find this guy chad and i tell them hey i'm gonna do all the legal work you put your name on this and we're gonna fight this this way and i paid them fifty dollars to put his name on it and i did the all the lawsuit stuff myself just like googling and we fought the lawsuit that way and then chad got this bar like later for other reasons what you told this story of he's like dude we got this expect we got this he goes i used to i was like how don't you sell the thing like how did you sell these toys you're saying the product up and you were copying somebody else why would anybody buy this he goes i emailed because i made a list of every retail buyer of every store in every region of the world and i emailed her called them every single day he remembered the name of every buyer this is from a fifteen years ago because he would call or email them every day he goes the walmart buyer he's like i would call her or email her every day like i never forget her and he's like one day she emailed me being like nick i do not need your daily email about your product and he goes well listen jen i'm sorry it's just a great product and i just had to tell you about it because we've really got some exciting things to the pie product it's like i just didn't let up finally he goes she just sent me to the two most beautiful words in the in english language send sample he's like we're in and he gets this like walmart order and by the way actually before that somebody's like hey do you have your showroom in hong kong i'll send one of my buyers he goes of course of course showroom hong kong yeah yeah we got one of those it's like what's a showroom in hong kong so he goes he rents this little cubicle where they put like escort in you know it's like the red light district and like it's enough for one human body and he just sleeps in there because he doesn't have run up money for hotel sleeps in there and then when a buyer shows up eats just pops out he's like hey it's me whatever you would like to see our showroom and they're like yeah we're what is what is this there's a dressing room for like one person to change clothes and he's like yeah toys are inside here you go and he ends up getting this order from walmart for two million units and he's like oh my god that's thirty million dollars he's like this is amazing at at that time the revenue was like a hundred fifty k a year ed street tells this story about how he's like first he's like i go and he goes i learned two words of chinese too slow and go faster because our factory a little old factory by the river had never produced two million units of anything and he's like said we had to produce two million units of this thing i come home i take over the factory because i'm just like my brother's is like not working at fast enough and then he's like and then walmart basically cancels the order after he's like super deep in it and he like took a loan from the like from a contract manufacturer to like help him build the two million units and then he like goes and harass the walmart buyer to like hold up to the end of the bargain and he's like by the way product doesn't sell not a single one he's like it's retails at thirty dollars just discount to twenty five just discount to twenty just discount to fifteen because it ends up selling for fifty cents he's like he's like it was like concrete on the shell how'd do you find this guy i don't know i don't i've read something i i i must have heard something or read something because about a few years ago we talked about him on the podcast and then i remember that like three years ago ben has emailed him no joke he showed me seventeen times over the next eighteen months to get him to come on the podcast to the fight sounds awesome i need to go and watch listen to stuff it's not like you know he's not like mister like super storyteller teller mister schwab or he's i mean it's a great guy but like he just tells it like it is but if you listen to this thing i don't know how long it's like ninety minutes or something like that i mean it is one of the most incredible entrepreneurial stories i've ever heard by the way alright so i let me tell you a story though because we this is chinese related but we're just telling stories about interesting people i gotta tell you about someone i just read about have you ever have you ever even been in new york have ever been in york like manhattan yes i have yeah okay when you were here did you see these crazy guys on electric they're like they're called electric bikes but they're basically motorcycles they're like the uber eats and door dash drivers no i don't think that happening then dude so in new york like four years ago it just popped up that all of these uber there's seventy thousand uber eats and door people in new york city and like manhattan and brooklyn area it's like and they're all riding these electric bikes that fly they look like they're normal bicycles but these things literally go sixty miles an hour and i ride my bike everywhere when i'm in new york city and like i've these fucker have almost killed me tons of times and they're and they're dangerous they're really dangerous and what you'll notice is that they all have like these gloves on their bikes have you ever seen these like door dash drivers in the winter and they have seen that but well they keep them there in the wind in the summertime too and the the reason they do that is because underneath those gloves they have like a motorcycle style acceleration like a twisty thing on the grip which is illegal you can't have that because that like you know at what point are you do go from being a bicycle to being a motorcycle where there has to be rules and so there's there was this weird thing where i'd be walking around and i'm like i even would ask these guys what is this bike and they don't speak english like like getting it couldn't tell me but i was like i wanna know what this bike is that goes sixty miles hour and has like a twisty throttle thing because this is sick i want one and so i start doing research around it and i think i talked about it in the podcast i couldn't find out what it was well two or three days ago an article came out and it told the story about what this thing was and it's pretty ridiculous and so basically there's a guy who comes from china he's got a too hard of a name to pronounce but his american name is andy he comes in two thousand and eleven and when he comes he basically admits that he goes i paid a guy forty five grand and he smuggled me in from mexico i came illegally and then in this article they even linked to a rat video that he did when he was broke and poor and he was like i decided to come to america to make it rich that was like the chinese lyrics of this video well it turns out the first thing that he did was he noticed that there was all these uber eats like bike writers and they get punished if they don't bring or they don't show up in time like if you don't deliver quickly you get like doc like you don't get the full rate and so he starts importing he he i think he borrowed a twelve grand from someone and he starts importing these electric bikes from china and he opens up a a shop and one of these shops was right by my house where i used to stay in brooklyn years ago and i'd always see these guys like like they would kind of hang out outside the shop well what i didn't realize was that he scaled this thing so fast to where he started having like literally thirty different stores all around manhattan to where he's selling these things it's called fly eb bikes he's still selling these eb bikes that go like forty fifty miles an hour and they're only a thousand dollars it's incredible and they're incredibly illegal like like they they literally just don't file any of the laws but if you look at the under there's like when you order these bikes there's like says something in the plate it says like there's literally like a metal plate and it says like you know this meets this usa standard this and that and like in the article someone was like nobody checks that is just basically an honor system and that we hope that you do it but there's no one actually checking thing these things but the guy ends up andy selling seventy thousand bikes in forty years and a few months ago i think it was in september system he had the audacity to take the company public and so it it goes public on the nasdaq and it's i think the ticker is f l e y and you could see the ticker i think that the and you can see i put all their financials in this document but the year before they went public they were doing like thirty million in revenue and like two or three million dollars in profit but they're getting sued like crazy because one of their bikes catch on fire because they follow no rules the he basically admits that he's like yeah we're cowboys we build first and we ask questions later and so like homes have built down people have actually died from the batteries being catching on fire in someone's apartment and burning the fucking apartment down and they're getting sued and one of the lawyers suing them he's got this quote where he's like dude six years ago these guys were bus boys serving dishes or cleaning dishes and restaurants now they're running a publicly traded company they know nothing about building bikes they're just like getting the cheapest shit they can over here and it's all true by the way they're insane but i cannot believe they went public and in like the the one of the i went and watch listen to this i i listened to one of their their reports or like when they were inter like investors were interviewing the ceo andy before he took it public and they're like why you go decide to take it public and he says he was inspired by the movie wolf of wall street and that's why he decided to take the company public he says that in a youtube video in a youtube video he says i decided to take it public because i saw wolf wall street and so now because of all these lawsuits and because the company is just like shit like it's just like they're breaking somebody laws they just do whatever the hell they want the the stock is crashed we need to spin off pod of just absolutely renegade chinese founders just doing doing things that that we would never dream of i wouldn't subscribe to that insta instantaneously well he's like the real life jin yang from silicon valley where like he just sit or smoke at sig sit sig and like someone's like you know you really need safety stuff and he's like who says like you know what mean like you yeah like founder right right i know the deep league founders is gonna get a out of pub for this same reason it's just this guy's hilarious it but it is actually inspiring that like all these do are like we gotta do this we gotta we gotta like have this process we gotta do this and meanwhile we got this guy nick moving to china and not known shit and then we got those chinese guys moving to new york and not knowing shit and like it's and it still works and his company by the way he started electric bike company does thirty million in revenue and three million in income so like it's not nothing yeah so and he started with twelve thousand dollars it's pretty bad ass so it besides the fact that it's you know like incredibly illegal and dangerous and people are dying but besides that it it's like kind of an interesting story because i've always wondered where these freaking bikes have come from i gotta give a shout up to curb they have an article and it's called the mop king how an x delivery worker up appended the streets of new york city for better and for worse and it's called fly eb eb ebay yeah yeah yeah i'd i'd i just need to spin off somebody needs to make the not not the right way to do it but still impressive a version of much yeah we went from like we went from like inspiring who cares about money we're gonna like make travel better to hardcore shark does whatever it takes but still ethical the but like i'm gonna get rich and just conquer the world to fuck everyone get paid the full journey exactly yeah alright that's it that's the part that it that's it that's a pod alright i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back