The Reddit Revolt, Turpentine, & Shaan's Latest Business Venture

so so that was the other thing that sparked drama now you got leaked phone calls you got the ceo calling a guy crazy he said she said and so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing as the thing on reddit small things could turn into big things that's like part of the beauty of reddit and that's what was happening here dude alright first of all your energy is gonna me sight this is a this is a great story we'll just wait i have a little more for you here are alrighty this is the part that that's the background okay now let me get use foreground right let me give you a little future future play here play no let get a little more play i feel like i could rude word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off alright what's we're here dude have you seen this reddit revolt that's happening are you aware of this i am aware of it and is that gonna matter really so basically what happened is there's this app called apollo right apollo yep here's kind of the i would say the zoomed out version of the story so what's happening today is if you go to reddit right now the whole site is down so they broke all of reddit what they were trying to do was just a bunch of subreddit reddit so these communities on reddit we're trying to protest some new reddit policy so it started with a few of them that said you know what we disagree with this policy change that's going on yeah we're gonna do this forty eight hour blackout we're gonna go private we're gonna go dark and they called it reddit go this suburb it's going dark and more and more started joining to the point where seven thousand subreddit including some of the biggest ones on there like r slash funny and ars slash picks and stuff like that and i believe that's thirty percent of reddit that's what i read yeah it's basically it's a huge amount like you know there's there's there's this couple of cool websites that you can go to in fact we should go to to one of them right now so go to this site so it's red dark so red dark dot un tone dot u uk very strange site but you can see in real time this thing's almost like this this tool is even almost broken to so many are going dark at the same time and ben if you could share your screen so it says seven thousand two hundred forty out of seven thousand eight hundred and six that's like ninety percent or something right seven forty out of seven eight zero six ninety three percent of subreddit have gone dark which is just an insane number and if you do it you can if you click the large thing there's like a live feed it'll be like animals with jobs has just gone private five thousand members music music horror has gone private five thousand members crusty windows has gone private and you just see like in real time and i've been watching this since yesterday it's crazy when i when i open this up yesterday it was at two thousand and now it's basically all of them it's seven thousand out of out of seven thousand two hundred out of seven thousand eight hundred so almost every subreddit has decided to join this protest and so you say well what's the policy what what's so bad and what happened is reddit wants to ipo so reddit wants to go public in the future reddit is not currently profitable they make about i don't know somewhere between four hundred and five hundred million dollars a year roughly and they're still not profitable and these apps that other people have made called third party apps were just used to like you could browse reddit it and they built like special features into them that made them maybe easier to use for certain types of people power users or moderators things like that so that's why people love apollo is because they had some power user features that were great for moderators and the reddit made the mistake of not they were thought they were picking on apollo but in fact they were pissing off moderators and that was a really really big issue i'll tell you why in a second so reddit goes and says hey look we can't keep giving these third party apps full access to reddit this has a couple problems first they're hitting our servers with a bunch of requests that cost us said what the ceo said was tens of millions per year in server request the second thing is those server requests are now serving reddit content onto someone else's app so that person could monetize their app and reddit doesn't get a piece of that so they were like alright we wanna cut costs we wanna increase revenue and they had a third problem which was they didn't want their data going into all these different places because basically open ai and chad gp had the scrapped reddit reddit it was like one of the key sources to make chad gp so good and reddit it kind of was a asleep when they did the first scrape but now they're like no no if any other ai company wants our data you're gonna pay us a huge amount of money for it so to do that they needed to to basically pay all the data they needed the data only to live inside their own their own walls so they upped their api pricing they basically said for every server request you do it's now gonna be whatever ten cents and a fake number but but the result was that a a app like apollo which is made by this basically this one dude who made you know as a passion project out of at of college he would have to pay twenty something million dollars a year just to maintain apollo and so he's like do that's un feasible like he's like i have fifty thousand paying users they pay me ten bucks a year so he's like i make five hundred k on this now i to my costs are gonna in thirty days my costs are gonna go to two million a month and he's like that obviously kills my app and it kills not just my app all of all the third party apps and reddit answer was basically like shrug like you know alright well sucks to be you and and then the way that they kind of responded well so wait hold on guys i wanna ask you a question about how the word got out but first we have to get background here which is even though so i just looked it up reddit is like the ninth most popular website in america and even it's like you know it's like when someone says no one who knows says they use it well it's like you know no one goes to that restaurant anymore crowded it's kinda like that so reddit is is basically a i don't even know how to strip it but basically a hundred thousand plus forums all on one website and the reason why this matters is because each forum which is called the subreddit and there's basically a subreddit on any topic you can ever imagine in most viral news in america or viral memes dart at reddit and it's subreddit are forums that are owned by volunteers so someone comes up with one and they trade it and they run it and then they run it and i didn't realize how much autonomy they are giving given and the reason why this is port is important is now like this has happened before apparently reddit fired one woman named victoria like eight years ago and she was a community moderator and everyone loved her and so all these other subreddit forum leaders like did the same thing but where they shut it down a little bit now we're by the result of that was the ceo got fired they got two back then they got two hundred thousand people to sign a petition saying ellen powell needs to get fired and so she stepped down like i don't know a week later or days later after that happened so they you know they they do wield a lot of power they yield the ton about so but here's what's crazy a reddit doesn't it make that much money for how large it is it's it's if you look at the top thirty websites in america i bet you i i'm not research but i would make a bet that it's on the very very low end of revenue or even value created per user their user and part of it it's because people are anonymous and reddit are typically horrible with clicking ads and things like that and the other part of it is that they're kinda in a weird way this guy steve hu and alexa and they created the company reddit it and it's amazing and their users own the platform a little bit and that's what we're seeing here is these people basically set their channels or set their subreddit to private so you can't access them so that's what's happening my question to you is when this guy will call him apollo when apollo guy announced that he was gonna shut down his app how did he get word out that it happened and how did all these people rally around this well again the people that use his app were power users and so when he said hey guys you know here's what's going on and it actually happened in multiple steps so the reason this got so much heat is because it happened in multiple stages he said they announced the they announced that they were gonna update the pricing he's was like hey we're gonna have to keep an eye out for this but i'm optimistic like i'm sure red it's not gonna they're not gonna like just do something that that doesn't make any sense and but it's like for sure for sure we're obviously gonna take this and take everybody's needs into account but we will have to update the pricing and he's like you know what that's reasonable i can't wait to hear back what you guys have in mind that was like post one and he shared that but where do he shares that he shared it on subreddit on reddit and maybe in the apollo subreddit plus some others and so like the mods subreddit because again a lot of moderators like apollo and because it helps them do their job faster because these guys are subreddit owners make money no they make nothing so reddit has this huge fleet like of the moderators that are in the dark one i think right now there's twenty eight million moderators i think that that was the number one that are that are like participating in the this some some insane number let me see i had a subreddit it was called like apartment hacks and i was like trying to get people at it and it very quickly got like a thousand people but i i quit working on it so i got the number wrong twenty eight thousand moderators on the seven thousand subreddit so that are participating in the in the in the blackout basically so these moderators basically they're constantly fighting spam so when you have a site that's as popular as reddit there's a huge amount of people that are trying to get you to buy their crap they're are trying to get you to subscribe to their only fans that are trying to get you to click this link and install this virus and or just doing clickbait like just making it where they post something super outrageous just to get clicks and engagement up uploads and a big battle in the comments but then and it kinda turns off people who were there for like you know they wanted they wanted the entertainment without getting ruined without the party getting ruined and so the moderators with the people that were keeping this house party working where it's like yeah we want people to come here and have fun but no dude you can't bring seventeen ke in here no you can't just come here fly your own party inside my house like no no you can't do all that crap and they're fighting this constantly and they do it as a giant unpaid thing now what they pointed out during this protest very reasonably was that dude where red has one of the only networks that's all run by unpaid volunteer moderators so for example facebook has a huge moderation program they spent about two hundred or three hundred million dollars a year just on moderate content moderation twitter spends a bunch of money in content moderation and so content moderation can be a very big cost center so the moderators are like hey you're trying to save ten million dollars by shutting off these third party apps have you thought about what happens when we stop doing all this free work and like now you have to pay for content moderation or this whole site goes to shit like what's gonna happen then maybe you should listen to us and so that's the that's where this is escalated to but i'll just to finish at the story so he goes he he says up front okay reddit announced this change it's gonna affect us but hopefully it's all good and some people in the comments were like dude being naive these corporations are they're like just like twitter killed all the third party clients reddit gonna do the same these guys wanna go public they're gonna wanna own all they they're gonna wanna own the user experience for all all all users of reddit they're gonna kill and he's like no no they've they said like you know they said they're gonna be fair k a couple months later it comes out and they're like here's the pricing it kills you and it takes into effect in thirty days hey he's like what like first of all ridiculous pricing saying thirty days like i couldn't possibly try to like change my app to maybe make less request to your server like i couldn't do anything in thirty days like you're just gonna kill my whole business and i took yearly subscription so i'm not only my app gonna dia a refund like two hundred fifty k to people who paid for a year subscription because my app no longer gonna work so he was in a world of trouble so he contacts reddit and he does a call with the team from reddit and he records the call and after the call what state in you can you can you're a allowed to do that in some states but not in every state did he do it the right way dude it in neck beard nation it's all good baby it's all it's all legal you're the little guy fighting the big guy you can do whatever you want yeah and so so he at first he doesn't do anything with it then reddit comes out and says this guy's crazy he's making outlandish claims he tried to ex us for he asked for ten million dollars in order to like keep supporting the app we can't do business with this crazy guy and they basically like kind of like just you know a sla up a little bit and he's like what are you talking about that's not what i said and what do you what did i say that was so outrageous he's like here's the recording people can listen to it themselves and decide oh man did you listen to it i haven't listened the whole thing but there's a part in there where he's like look like reasonable yeah it sounds reasonable it he's basically like look you know obviously i'd love to just keep going independent but you guys are saying it's too expensive if you're wanna raise pricing that makes it un ten for me but people like this app and they're gonna be upset when this app because goes now he's like you know you guys bought alien blue back in the day and you made that the rented app like have you considered just buying this app so that you can like you don't have to pay for all these ex you know it's not something external party of that ones that you guys can yours but at least it lives on and like it's a win win solution potentially for for all of us and so he was like you know he said something like you're saying this cost you this will cost me twenty million a year or you're saying this cost you tens of millions a year like you could buy the whole thing for ten million dollars and that's you know six months of my operating cost and you know like it can work out that way and steve hoffman on the calls like look like you know i don't i don't appreciate the threat type of thing he said something about like that's a threat and he goes wait what's a what's a threat what he mean or because the guy said something like he goes you know if if you if you don't want all the like all all this noise about this like you could just do this and you kind of took it as a threat like oh you're threatening you're gonna make a bunch of noise if we don't pay you ten million dollars and goes no no i'm saying we have like the you're saying i'm making too many api calls so if you don't want all the server noise for the api request you could just own it and just use your internal systems to do it instead and he's like oh sorry like okay my bad i didn't realize your talking about api request like i apologize i didn't mean to like say that you were throwing us and he was like okay no problem like i just wanna like cal clear on that then later he comes out and says he threatened to he's like dude even on the call you apologize saying saying sorry i misunderstood you and then you took that out of context and try to make me sound like a a guy who's trying to profit out of this or like trying to make unreasonable request so anyways that caught so so that was the other thing that sparked drama now you got leaked phone calls you got the ceo calling and a guy crazy he said she said and so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing as the thing on reddit small things could turn a big things that's like part of the beauty of reddit and that's what was happening here dude alright first of all your energy is gonna me sight this is a this is a great story we'll just because i have a little more for you here alright alrighty this is the part that that's the background okay now let me use foreground right let me give you a little future future play here play no look give little four four play so reddit may forgot but this is how reddit started so reddit started because the the popular forum side of the day dig made this big update and everybody hated it and dig said sure you guys this is better and they said see you and they went to this little site called reddit and reddit blew up but that's how reddit became what it is is that the dig fumble the ball released this anti you know this this anti user update and the user sticking to the man yeah i stuck to man well who's to say that doesn't happen again so i have a little proposal somebody should run with this idea i bought this domain and i think somebody should do this if not you know this what i would do if i was if i was a little little younger and hung than i am today so here here's what i think somebody should do i think that was the perfect time did the younger you the equally con connecting just a little bit more ambitious you my tea levels were a little higher back there yeah i'm a mellow out dad now you know if my daughter paints my toe i happy be doing all this kinda of yeah if you if you woke up at ten am this morning and you wear a hoodie all the time you know this is for you neck beer nation this is the call out it's what i do there okay so i want you to just check out this little website here so sam i don't know if you know what does the ceo steve's handle is on on reddit do you know what his his username is i used to yeah if you said i would remember it dark dark something spam wasn't so spanish sp easy and so i don't know i woke up this morning six am and i just looked at godaddy and i just saw that sp dot com was available i thought one cent for sp dot com i bought it and i said what's sp i think it's it's read without sp would you like reddit it without steve well here's what we're gonna do well we're gonna make a reddit as very very very very very similar look to this website but with one difference there's there's no steep and there's no correlation that's gonna dude the tagline needs to be same same but different same same different exactly same same but different exactly so here's then threw this up while while we were talking because i gave him a rant this morning i was dude here's someone you're do i think he just bought he told me right before we went on and i was i'm gonna buy the domain i wanna put it up so he goes it says i love reddit i just don't like don't like sp so i'm gonna create a news new red it's called sp it's read reddit without steve here's the master plan but be very very very similar website to reddit it's gonna be a non nonprofit and any revenue that it makes will get funneled back end of the communities or moderators because this blackout like this this forty eight hour protest that they said it's cool gonna get headlines but reddit really doesn't care they're gonna lose about three million dollars by being down for two days and then they're just gonna move on with life and the the the protesters made a big error then which is they said how long they would protest for they said the pain will stop at forty eight hours so all red has to do is just ignore it for forty eight hours they're gonna keep doing what they want so when your when your voice doesn't work you gotta exit and here here's it here's a little little exit boat for you it's basically right it without the bullshit and there's a little email sign of box so if a million people sign up then who knows maybe we can create something here and so you know why do this as a nonprofit you've always already rich we don't need we don't need to make a profit on this we just create this for fun because it's fun to to see something burned down don't even have a problem with cfo by the way i think he's you know it's like steve smart guy i think he's he's fair in his opinion but also this is the internet and in the internet do you you really gotta know who you're pissed off and i think he's pissed off too many people with this move i can't believe that nobody's making the alternative to this the people that are trying to make alternatives they're all trying to do it so different you don't wanna do different and needs to look almost exactly the same change the shade of red by like two hex you like little text color over to the right and then it needs to be the same site with the same structure everything's is the same except for who decides what happens so how the money flows and if you just change that you could do this as a nonprofit thing and i i think it would be very entertaining a lieu of your morning cup of coffee this morning you had a cup of rage and i and i and i dig it dude first of all a big beautiful things neck beard nation that was right that's our new that's awkward that's our fan base so we hired this woman to help us with some t shirts if she's listening she dude this lady by the hilarious hilarious thing you did so listen is this woman trip this woman sent me this beautiful no no the whole thing what does she do so you get something in the mail i get this thing in the mail and it's like this beautiful like ten or twenty page out it's clever it says what she's gonna do for us to make tv is it beautiful it looks like a giant powerpoint deck that was just printed out because knows like he might not click the link let me just print the powerpoint out on white and black you know paper and just put it in an envelope for him it's beautiful like when you see like a net beard guy doing very neck beard thing where you're like i'm just happy this exists this is a beautiful display in that since it's a beautiful it wasn't physically beautiful it was very it was it was very clever and she said you can reach me at my first thought at gmail mail dot com or something like that or right yeah t h o t thought which stands for that h over there and or she said you could use dm me on my first thought and so i talked to it and i was like this is awesome let's do something roll we'll work together it worked i email her with you on the line and i go i think i said dear thought or come my dear thought and she was like great i mean by the way you should look up what thought means and i was like i know what it means i thought that you you to be because yeah you said it first to me that was your twitter handle i don't i'm not trying to this disrespect you you said it not me i'm just rip repeat i'm just playing the game here yeah i don't know i only the funny thing as you go alright thought let's do this yes and she was like i don't think you know what thought means otherwise you wouldn't have called me that she goes el at big dressed as my first thought your email or dictionary below for your amusement yeah and i immediately earned part i was like i'm sorry i thought i thought i thought this was a stick i you're right i'll call you your real name my apologies so we didn't get off to the doctor to a great start right away right thought let's do this so dear your thought we're gonna this is why we only have four female listener is because this type of behavior i was trying to i i you know i was trying to relate i was trying to like show that i read yeah it didn't work out well yeah it's like here hear someone called their friend they're like oh nikki and you're like something nikki and they're like it's nicholas you're like oh okay just to he like yeah sorry i was just i was in la this weekend and i went to like the la tech week thing and and we went to this event and there was like three hundred people and i'm not exaggerating i had thirty people of like the three hundred people come up to me and like say like hey love m band i'm a total man and so two episodes ago or one episodes ago sean came up with this idea of this total man we got a lot of flack for i don't know if you saw it but people loved it in general and i had literally twenty or thirty people like in a row come up be like dude i'm the total man by the way this you're doing it wrong it's not total man with like a space in between because then it's like you y i'm i'm the total man it's i'm a total man it's like one word it's like it's a it's a thing you're now it's it's a different type of noun you got got you know mammals you got humans and you got total man that it's just like a separate species yeah get rid of the space it's cleaner i got you yeah we're gonna do it and so total man that that a hit i think neck beer nation with you being the mayor i mean that or you be the president that that that's that's our new that's a new thing that's that we did it we got a new thing yeah totally ingredient washing which side are you on i think team red on this one but they screwed up they shouldn't have done it this way in the first place you know they're venture capital company they've got hundreds of employees probably thousands at this point they they fumble the bag here not on the p press or p r front which they did but like letting this get out of hand the way it has in the first place i mean you gotta you you gotta pay the bills why are that what are they doing letting people build build the stuff on on their land right you know what i mean yeah i i get where they're coming from i think they like many tech companies fumble the communication and execution but i'm also h at that so you know i would have done this twice as bad if i was in their position because i'm always like i'm a very much ripped the band off type of person and also like because i'm very far on the spectrum of not easily offended like it takes a lot to make me feel like mad or upset i severely underestimate how easily i can make other people matter upset and so i i get their position i think you know most likely unless unless bezos becomes a thing they're just gonna be like cool nice protest we hear you we'll take you into account in the future continue using reddit you know like life will just go on and nothing bad will happen from this unless literally somebody seize the narrative that's the thing there's a narrative right now and somebody could come in if they could surf that momentum on the narrative that's though we are the thing that's hard uber had the same thing do you remember when in there it was trending to delete uber like i think these things coming and go like this happened in the crypto world crypto world is like the most like ruthless it's like just like night fighting in the streets and so open sea had some policy issue or some change i do you remember what it was was like fee change or something why did you get people get mad at open see when they forgot otherwise they changed something yeah they're royalties yeah they changed like the royalty take rate something worst podcasting etiquette ever to ask the guy in the room who's sitting like ten feet behind you with no mike or headphones to ask opinion have you seen joe rogan cheryl it does it anyone can do it so basically open c which was the big n nfc marketplace by far the dominant and a hundred percent market share type of thing changed something in the policy people didn't like it and literally like in like a forty eight hour period somebody spun up a competitor they did what was called a vampire attack which was they in crypto you could do this thing where you could be like who are all the wallets on that use open see i could find them they're all public then i can air drop them tokens that say if you come over to our platform and claim them create your account here you get free tokens and people are like token might be worth something and so they just like they basically like vampire tech they just sucked the blood out of one network to another and this happened several times in crypto with they've basically tried to do this now it's not only a hundred percent successful but to go from you didn't even exist to like a million to two million users with like a shot at hey if you deliver a dope user experience you know this can work you know that's like better than nothing and so in encrypt crypto this has happened a couple times a couple of the like d defy tools have had this happen oh we don't like your policy we're gonna fork your source code rename it and we're gonna incentivize all the major players on yours to come over here and get like a bonus token if they if they come claim to thing here which builds the momentum in the narrative well i don't i mean like your energy don't know how to like one up you here you know like they say we're you're like supposed to like meet people you're supposed to match their energy to like make them feel comfortable i don't know what the say don't feel i feel like i feel like more coins come a monster truck rally like sunday sunday sunday i don't like grave bigger right now now i'm just in a and trying to keep up with ear plugs you know what i mean sunday sunday sunday that's so awful boy how do you even remember or no know that that's like their radio app heads for yeah monster or jam have you been to a monster truck rally in the last seven hundred days it's the poke catholic of course i have yeah i've grown to monster truck all the time i've gone like five or times do that you back flips now i'm not not gonna go see a big ass truck to a back flip alright let me talk to you about something that you actually are no more than me about i think because your friends with them yeah and then i wanna talk about that's a lot of stuff okay and then we talk about i wanna talk about the second thing about milk road and and and that thing and we'll we'll leave time for that so trip time is that what's called the trip team trip diving time yeah so basically there's got named eric thorn he's been in the game for a while he's just done a bunch of stuff in the internet including founding a company called on deck he launched this new thing called tu time it was very nice he gave us a little shout out but basically what i believe it to be is just a podcast network for business content particularly some type of like start of the related stuff so there's like one on media yeah yeah tech there's one on media i think there's one on on fintech a few other things and he announced it have you seen this what what what am i out i've seen this so eric thorn behind this eric's awesome guy did he talk to you about this before he did it because i feel like you know i was gonna do something like this you're my phone a friend right no you didn't talk to me you're my phone a friend on that i've never talked to him oh you never so you don't know each other that way well gotcha but because he's gonna he's in our like friend group i guess okay so i'm curious what your take is on this because i think you know a lot about this i have a sean opinion but i want you to explain it i mean i think you said well he's trying to create like what i would say the easiest analog is like the ringer so the ringer was started by bill simmons so kind of like famous notable guy in the in the sports journalism landscape basically it was like i'm gonna create a network of sports podcast i'll have my show i'll have this guy do nba i'll have this guy do nfl i'll have this guy do you know pop culture i'll have this guy do whatever and so they created a network of podcast ended up selling it to spotify for a few hundred million dollars two hundred two hundreds on the million dollars and really that was mostly because bill had the number one sports podcast and he's like very influential and spot if i had a strategy there so eric's trying to do that for tech so he's like how do i be the ringer or how do i be bar stool but for the tech industry can i basically create like intellectual inter entertaining but also highly intellectual conversations about things that people care about in tech and then he's looking for show so like basically if we were you know not the bad that we were we could be like hey well let's join tu time we're gonna get their back office we're gonna get them helping us sell ads we're gonna get like you know help with production and we'll get cross promoted amongst you know their their network very similar to like work which we've talked about on here before or groups doing this kind of with like newsletters and tu is trying to do this with with podcast podcasts plus newsletters plus other things that's kind of a the thing it says his tagline is where experts talk so it's a network of podcast covering tech business culture and trends that are driving in the future and he's got i think three or four shows right now oh looks like maybe five three that he's doing and then a couple that other people are doing but they're all like very like fan sm like the cognitive revolution you know media empires moment of zen and so they're they're kind of like i would say high brow compared to what most podcasts are yeah so here's my opinion i don't think anyone that you mentioned or anyone out there is really doing it perfectly but this is beautifully done you go to his website wow it's not you're gonna be anti you're pretty anti most media thing so i'm no oh no it's it's gonna come oh you're doing you're doing that sandwich thing but yeah yeah my bad myself yeah yeah sandwiches always a it it's not it's not your logo but hate everything else like a sandwich did not meat cheese bread it's bread meat cheese bread okay you gotta it's it it begins in it and it ends with that no i i do like it here's the thing about these companies i think if he doesn't raise money i think it's awesome i think so long as he doesn't raise money i think this could be really really cool i think owning this outright is amazing i think that's really cool i think when i go to his website i think he borderline lined like if it was done a little bit the other way it would be really douche gucci but the way that he's done it it's actually quite awesome like for example he quotes pablo picasso and you know that could go either way that could go either way he went the right way i think when you go to the website i think the name is nice it's all like pretty slick it's upscale it actually looks really good i think that if you if you if you did that a little bit differently it would not work but he's like what's the what's the quote for pablo picasso in there do you see it yeah it says when art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning when artist get together they talk about where you can buy cheap tu time and cool i think that's cool i think it's cool and it's got a nice little picture of pablo i think it's awesome yeah do my next company i'm gonna get a quote from benny blanc i'll take say it's trying was just he got public with picasso i'm gonna get benny blind color on the on the side we did your bugs bunny next to i mean i think it's good man i think it's good branding i so my opinion is i think it's cool if you own it i think it's cool if so i don't know if you know this you probably don't because who cares but business insiders writer the writers are on strike do you know that yes well a a lot of like isn't in hollywood also on strike right now i think they're totally unrelated other than maybe they inspired each other i think there was like a contract up and insider formed of union or something like that and they are protesting and they're doing this thing called a digital pick line i guess it's called where a digital picket line where they're like telling all the customers like not to click on business insider or links now which is great i mean someone who follows a business insider journalists is probably not also someone reading business inside etcetera i would imagine so i i i don't know if that's gonna go well but if you have to so if you're gonna start a media company i think you have to be incredibly careful not to hire folks who will union utilize i think that is actually an existential existential crisis to a lot of media companies right now and and think that that's like a real so if you're so here's the takeaways i think a it's awesome so you're gonna do this i think it's cool i think you should own the whole thing b look out for union types c him going b to b that's one hundred percent the way to go and i wanna give you an example but is this b i don't think this is a b2b to b what makes you say this b well i think he just has i think he has probably he's probably going for like high end customers more so than b to b right yeah but you're ad sales people can spend that nicely to salesforce like it's not like true crime you know what i it it's borderline it's kissing cousins with the with a b to b real b b it's it's close but let me just give you an example of a real b to b one b to b b bi yeah it's it's dish you heard it by the way did you see that guy who's getting in trouble his name is george santos he's like clearly i think he's like from south america but he was i'm gonna butcher it but he was some type of elected official out a long island and he's getting in trouble because he did a bunch of fraud stuff pink but one thing that's funny is he told everyone he was jewish and he goes well i didn't say i was jewish i said i was jewish ish like i'm our friends with the jews i was jewish like you know like i i'm buddies with the have you not seen yet but all time all time use he likes stole five hundred thousand dollars so he's actually crook but like the funniest part he goes i'm jewish ish and you look at them at and he's like from brazil or something like what so that's pretty funny but anyway i think that instead of going b b ish gotta go all the way have you heard of aging media no okay so type in aging media it started by this guy named john john a member of hampton but everything i'm actually about to say i just kinda stole from similar web but i have heard some rumors about them but basically if you go to aging media what's what what's the you made on his hampton application we're here to write his revenue profits names of all his children and social screwing over you may you may have some info on this i he's the meet love no i just click similar web on their site no info so i know you ain't get shit from similar web right now oh yeah yeah so here's why here's i'm gonna explain to gotta be a pro but you know listen aging media is their like corporate website so what you say they have like their brands like senior housing news hospice news skilled nursing news that sort of thing those happen so what what what's the what's the meta tag on there is it like nursing home professor or media for the senior care industry yeah so click like one of their websites and you can go to similar web each website only has something like fifty thousand visits right i believe it's like it's like not a lot but they're doing something like twelve or eleven million dollars a year revenue and like three or four million dollars a year in profit and this is a b to b hardcore b2b b site they make their money through lead gen so basically i imagine they'll do like a webinar or something and if you like are in the nursing home industry you give them information they also have ads and i think i don't know if they have podcast podcasts but they do have newsletters on their site this is a hardcore b b this is yeah and i love it i love it i love this you just did this guy such a disservice by sick for four four to forty copycat on them if i talking about get a business on here well a this podcast like if sam sean's say the word i don't mean the word i mean newsletters if they say that is a good newsletter business instant copycat copy cats bro they saw what you do with the hospital so they i wanna do with milk crowd they're instantly looking for a new newsletter to close and i i apologize and bob behalf of whoever this guy is i i the end him on in the hampton and i go hey don't tell me anything but it just can i talk about your company and i i said here's what i see on similar web he didn't know what he was saying yes to no i i got permission i go here's here's what i see on similar web and this is what i'm gonna say are you cool with it and he gave me a thumbs up like literally a thumbs up emoji that's how i roll i get that emoji we're good that's a hardcore b2b to b media company so anyway my point with this tu thing i think it's cool i like it i think it's cool i hope you pulls it off i've about doing this idea actually the past i ruled it out for a bunch of reasons but it's more doesn't i mean somebody else can't do it i think i think it'd be great to do it takes a lot of energy and i'm totally with you that i hope he didn't raise money he in his tweet thing announcing it he didn't he didn't say like so happy to have thought mark investing of this so so i think there is i i think there's probably a good chance he raise money but he didn't raise okay he didn't raise money so so i hope he is taken it that way he probably learned from from his other company on debt like that's another company where i think they raised a hundred plus million i forget but i think the valuation was five hundred million dollars so i don't know how much they raised but i imagine it was the nine figures that's another company where worth like that could be cool if you don't raise money basically you've screwing up your cap table is like one of the only mistakes in business that you can't really make up for speaking of screwing up your money can i tell you what i did post milk road with the with the money that we made well i do know that you sent me a text i i would have to go look at when that came and you said i've sold all my equities i think it's gonna go know i think the market's going down and since then do you've it's double it's it's about double yeah a lot of that so i know you did that with your money so what else did you about my next best decision yeah what else did he you do besides not make money off your money for the record for the record i've actually i would be about even from where it was my equities on that on that because i kept well i kept a portion of it but i also the stuff i sold has not doubled you just look at hubspot stock because you're like i got hubspot so you're like post hubspot is the market amazon is not the market exactly so i'll tell you that so let me let me tell you about what i did so we got this money so sell milk road now just cash a bank count got a couple options so it's like do we just buy treasury bills make four percent on that what bank did do you use what bank did i use what do you mean you use them chase or one of the other ones that got pretty not done there's no upside and answer this did did you use one of the ones you you were using one of the ones that i got it screwed up no no i didn't use used still look bad me no so money's sitting there i was like fed buy treasury bills no that's too boring could do what sam does i could just index into the stock market it's reasonable but like you know i think seems like we're coming off of a of a thirteen year bull market don't really need to to put this on the full amount in right now let me just kind of wait and see what happens there is this something is this there something that can do better than the eight percent that i might be able to get on that i thought well should show should just invest in a in a new company we start i don't know maybe if we have a great idea we'll do that but but let me just let me dodge that and so i started doing this process where i was like can i i i worked backwards basically like can i get thirty percent a year compounding and thirty percent of your sounds like high number but we have a few friends who have done it and the way that they've done it has been through buying private companies so they buy businesses and they own them andrew wilkinson i think is the one that most people who listen to this pod will know because he's been on a bunch of times and talking about this how they built tiny from a few million dollars into you know five hundred million dollars by doing this sort of thirty forty percent compounding over over time did you be tiny annual your report or we'll have to talk about it next time yeah i i rather your letter yeah so so i've and i we have a few other friends that have been doing this as well that are less public about it so i said okay well let me do i but i don't wanna buy these companies and operate them so i thought what if i bought thirty percent stakes so sort of like can i buy a minority position in companies so that they keep running them but i give them capital so basically like the founder oftentimes was like not taking a lot off the table or they were kinda always worried like should i put this in my pocket and spend this well i don't know what if the company needs it even if we're profitable they were kinda worried about that so say here let me give us some some money and then could i help them grow and so i went through this actually i don't don't think i told you about any of these but i talked to about twenty five companies in the last i wanna say six months dude to every company that you talk to dm me and they say something of a variety of i was talking to sean and now we're not talking anymore but they like they like message me to like talk to you and i just ignore it yeah they like the wink band who refuses to wait you you you you don't have a tell me when companies i already know probably half of them my funnel was this i i was just doing a review of this i was gonna mistake so talk to about twenty twenty four companies i think got serious i like did like did diligence i would say talk to means like talk to it means like i was interested you know obviously we we looked at a little bit more than that but talk to was like oh this could be interesting whether you could kinda sq and see a possibility then got into kind of like more serious toxin either negotiated numbers or diligence with about nine got to a stage with three or four and ended up doing one deal in the last i wanna say six months post post sale and so this range from everything from so newsletter businesses only fans businesses journal apps virtual events bookkeeping companies merch companies and then a bunch of random stuff that i know nothing about that we're like oh that sounds interesting like some company that like does something called laser pinning on machines to make the the parts last longer and they their clients are like boeing and stuff like that or autism clinics that seem to make a ton of money but i'm like okay i don't really know how i would add any value to this and in each one i was like alright can i find a good operator where i can acquire minority stake of the business at a good deal and i could help them grow and ideally they're the category winner for for what they do and so that was kind of like my process i wanna pop before i tell you about the deal that we ended up doing i wanna here any any thoughts or questions on my my approach here because there's a bunch of learnings yeah there's no way you're gonna get thirty percent for that long right do you actually think that's possible what you mean for that long that long means what i don't yeah i don't know anything about markets i'm i haven't read like a warm buffett biography but like what's he compounded at every year oh oh yeah he's been at twenty percent for like fifty years or something okay but if he but if you got a purchase ten that he's putting billions and billions of dollars to work and that's very different right okay i think that's smart do you think you're gonna enjoy this i think you'll enjoy right i'm not sure so this was a test basically to see like is this fun to do definitely fun on the learning side now that we made the first acquisition or the first kind of i would say not an acquisition like kind of minority investment and it's different than startups like we've done startup up investing start investing very very different start investing is you look at a business you're trying to figure out is this are these three dudes in this bedroom gonna be able to build like a multi billion dollar company right like is this husband and wife couple gonna be able to pull off this this you an exit and like kinda right now they have usually nothing just an idea product maybe a little bit a garage it's it's way more of a lottery it's a lottery and you put in a hundred thousand dollars and then you do that with forty companies and you know that thirty eight of the companies are gonna be kind of like just write off or cost of doing business and two or three of those those thirty forty companies are going to be your winners but hopefully they're winning at a hundred x extra a thousand or more returns and so it's very lottery like and you you spend very little time with them so you're not like they don't want you advising them you answer questions when they call you can proactively nudge them a little bit but you're more mostly hands off i say is angel investing whereas if you buy fifteen twenty twenty five thirty percent of a business you're a little more involved you know you care a little more active these businesses are not like all or nothing businesses they're like oh it's already a good business it's profitable and it's already growing so the question is can we accelerate the growth right so like the one business we bought is i don't know super profitable it makes millions of dollars a year in profits it's a you know more than fifty percent margins and you we were able to buy a piece of that and i think that that's just so different than every startup investment i had ever done you know it's probably not gonna become a multi billion dollar business i would almost guarantee that but it doesn't need to it's not supposed to it's a cash flow business and isn't it funny how you have mocked me for like the last eight years about my slow and steady approach and now you're you know look you're still at first it was like laughing at eight percent i'm going for ten every year whatever right now you're it's it's it's coming down now thirty percent is really attractive which i agree that is really attractive before you know it you're gonna say now dude that's that's not true even in a startup up fund even when you have your winners that become bill dollar companies the overall fund like a great fund is doing thirty percent irr or twenty percent just service you're getting board it's still the same boring no it's down i don't know that i i reject that i reject that premise i would say to make a live streaming app and now you're looking at a company that sells parts to boeing with cash flow has always interesting it's always been interesting and now it's more interesting than it was in the past i really didn't i really didn't have a lot of exposure to these types of business i lived at san francisco you say cash flow and people think you're talking about like you know like a leaky faucet like nobody knows what the hell the hell that means and so once i started doing this podcast we got a lot more exposure to like most of people listen to this podcast our entrepreneurs all around the world and so when they reach out about their business it's like oh sky minnesota with this you know marketing agency that does this per year or this person sells parts and this person does whatever you know they're rolling up bookkeeping services and so you you learn about different types of businesses more through this and so i've been getting my like nba on on nonsense silicon look valley businesses for the past what's look the cool thing is is that you know we research stuff and like if i really dive deep into a topic i'll research it for eight hours and i that's not enough to make it an investment but it's enough that i say to myself oh wow this space is really intriguing you know i i could see myself doing this you're doing that but instead of eight hours you're doing weeks and so it's oddly in the similar vein a bit of course you have to do more due diligence and actually look at the numbers and get to know the people but yeah it's like getting used to the space so the the most interesting thing is what happened between the four deals that we signed lois on and the one that we closed and i'll try to do this without giving away any info about the companies that we didn't do the deal with i can't talk about the one we did but i can't talk about the one we didn't but the things though the reasons that the mistakes that we were making along with the way here's here's trap number one that we already experienced i can fix him like the classic girlfriend mistake like yeah he you know he sucks but maybe i could fix him but it's basically like maybe i can fix this business and when you do this minority investing you're not the majority you're not gonna be able to fix anything and so that was you know trap number one was getting really far down the road with the business that i thought had a ton of potential before finally realizing i'm not gonna be the one to fix it and fixing it is the wrong approach to do it going into a business like this that was a mistake one mistake two was i can totally i can totally see this working but working at a small scale and so you have to remember basically like as you play the game it's kinda like this is how i felt about like your airbnb b which is like you do one airbnb that's you basically can't do one airbnb you can only do one as a test to see if you wanna do a bunch one airbnb is like a bunch of headache without the size of the prize being big enough and so we had looked at one business i was like yeah this skip which is what i have by the way yeah it was when we all make this this mistake but i think you were at least looking at it the right way where you were like maybe could do a bunch of these you talked to people that had fifty of these in their portfolio and you have to do one to know if you wanna do fifty and so we got really far down the road with this one that like if it all worked it's like dude we could be making two hundred thousand dollars a year off this it's like wait what are we doing what why are we doing this yeah it's a great deal and it's highly likely to work but it's highly likely to be very small and like not worth the minds share of even doing this and so we pulled out on that one the one that we did was basically company people probably know so it was in a so at this one was not quite name yeah you name it now it's it's official so we first looked at the category so i was super bullish on companies that let you hire internationally so specifically like how to hire in the philippines in lat and you know why why were you interested and what and say like kinda scar tissue like dude you came to my office i remember you you came to my office of san francisco when i was doing be and you're like what's your burn rate which again it's like a question nobody asked somebody else out loud it's like you know that's i asking somebody that's asking a woman their weight like to ask a founder their burn rate it's the other feel yeah in my head i was like that's bubbly you had a bubbly burn man and i was like three million a year and that's what we were we were basically a startup up that was burning three million a year pre product market fit because that's what it called we had we basically had a team of engineers so we had like you i don't know ten month ten to twelve engineers it's like two hundred thousand a month two hundred four i think we're doing like two hundred forty thousand a month in burn so yeah like and annette net burns does that mean no does that assume no revenue we had revenue for one of our projects but like no i was just saying like the overall bill so so we basically you hire ten people that are two hundred thousand each you're doing two two million plus pay rent plus you your cloud bills plus you have whatever else and so that was really expensive and those were all silicon valley engineers and they were below markets south so those people if they're working for us for two hundred k they could've have been making four hundred five hundred k at facebook but they wanted to be a part of a startup so i did that and it was very stressful to have a very high burn rate for a company like i just didn't like it but i didn't know any better at the time and then afterwards as i got a little more savvy like with our e comm is we'll do probably somewhere are like a little under twenty million this year in revenue we're profitable because sixty five percent of our team is overseas so we have our like our our data analysis person argentina our designer india our customer service philippines are the person who's running our whole wholesale channel like built it from scratch it did not exist and now it's like a new revenue unit in the philippines and we did the same thing with mill road we were profitable with mill road from day one like i remember coming to your office at the hustle and you had like i don't know fifteen people running around there in san francisco and like that's a bunch of san francisco issues they have to go home and pay six thousand dollar rent so you gotta pay them money and for us we had one person in the us for milk road and we had everybody else sit in the philippines and so it was again lean mean profitable machine and i was like oh not just is this cost savings like if you hire some of the philippines they're basically ten times cheaper than the us so like you know you can hire somebody in philippines for thousand dollars a month so twelve thousand in a year with that same person in the us will cost you eighty to a hundred twenty k and these are skilled people like in lat like the guy we have doing our data stuff he's like you got his nba like there these are highly educated highly you know he's like a wizard with like you know power bi and liquor and all these like data tools that i i couldn't even start he get to know yeah yeah of course day i'm talking to him all the time the one good thing is especially with the philippines this sounds terrible what i'm gonna say it anyways because it's honest i hate managing people and i love hiring people to philippines because they need so little management like i why does that sound horrible what did i miss there because i think what people want is for you to be like i'm a good manager and i talk to my people and i'm like dude it's fucking great i only talk like first i have my assistant i only talked to you on fridays people are like well that's kind of mean or like it's great they don't want one on ones and like career trajectory coaching and they don't want like like the same like in san francisco i had and let's say i was eight direct reports that's eight weekly one on ones i had to do this well i've had that's essentially eight hours out of the hundred sixty hours a week that you know that that that i have that i'm like you know i'm spending doing basically like touchy feely stuff which is fine i understand it but it's really nice when you don't have to do that because it's not the baseline expectation there's a bunch of roles where you don't want someone who's entirely ambitious like hold and assist it's like you don't want someone that's like no i don't want to give you all these other opportunities i want you to be great at this thing and not bail like i i don't this is what i need this is the tool that i need and i want you to be that i don't want to have to promote you tons and tons of tons i've hired a people for like our hold c basically and they're they're cool or they've they live in san francisco they're also they're they're super motivated to work with me i'm like great what do want like i wanna be you and i'm like wait what and then i'm like like you know someday they're like yeah but i'm also spinning up my own news newsletter of my own podcast my own investment arm like i'm like okay well like that's great you could do that but you that makes for kind of a shitty person to hire onto to my team because like part of being on this team is being down for our mission not like your own mission necessarily and i totally you get if you wanna go to your own mission but you gotta go do that on your own don't get you don't get to have both you know at the same exact time you could do one and get mentored for a bit and then go do your own but you can't do it but the exact same time and so it has been very nice to have people that are just like they like literally like our our management style is they log in they say logging in here's what i'm doing today if you have any adjustments here you say something if not you just don't say anything at the end they say logging off here's what i got done today here's everything i did here's the files here's the here's the info logging it off so how much are you spending an now on on these on these folks i mean dude do i have like in my own companies probably almost fifteen to twenty people that are international now and so and with the average salary it ranges so like on the low end eight hundred i think about it months monthly because that's like when i push payroll that's what it says so like you know eight hundred a month would be the the low end and that's like i would say most common so that's a customer support personal assistant things like that can be that low and then higher roles will be like twenty five hundred to three thousand and then there's one guy who's just amazing and i've promoted him up twice now now he gets paid like a us employee because he makes the impact of somebody who's like driving a ton of growth on like oh great like you keep creating rewarded you're at some point you break break through where you're if you're driving growth you get rewarded for driving growth and you also i an email you you have a course on this note too i course on the personal assistant side yeah i just created it it's not even a course actually it's just i like i don't go and teach it it's just a system it's like y but basically the best hire i made this year was i hired my personal assistant and i had thought okay personal assistant is you know personal assistance like for rich people for like mega it's thanks for jeff bezos it's like mega busy mega rich and and i also was like i don't wanna have to tell somebody what to do all the time like that sounds like it's own pain in the ass to come up with shit to do and i heard a few friends talk about there and i was like maybe i'm wrong let me open my mind to the possibility that i'm wrong about this three people tell me three people that i trust tell me that it's like been a huge game changer for them let me and send it to me i wanna use it i yeah i've basically created the whole thing last week and i was here's my system so for example like here's my my email system like i used to be terrible with email and now my email system is like super organized on top of shit here's exactly what i do here's the exact scope work here's how here's how it works i just texted ben i goes i said send it to me yeah and and so and we by the way there's like like a a a funny offer we did with it but i'll i'll explain the company that we ended up investing in so i looked at all the ways you could do this i done all of them so you can hire if you wanna hire somebody you could base have three options you hire direct so you hire somebody on like a job board upwork online job something like that upside it's basically free you just pay the software subscription subscription like in our ninety nine bucks a month so you know you pay thousand dollars for the year to be to be a pro member on there downside you have to do all the hiring vetting training sift through candidates yourself like you put up hey i need a customer support person or a personal assistant you're gonna get two hundred applications and like good luck trying to find somebody good you could also go on the high end and use like a managed service so this is things like growth assistant or athena they're great they do the they do the vetting for you but there's this huge up charge so those guys charge you three grand a month for somebody that actually costs eight hundred dollars a month so you're paying you're paying three x the price or more every single month forever i how big those companies hub big at athena i heard they're huge they're big and they're big because this is like a huge arr thing for them and people don't really know but people don't really realize like you didn't have to pay triple the price every single month and so that's like you know one path and they're but they're good at what they do i tried yeah i've tried to a bunch of these the one i like the best was the one we ended up investing which is she so people have probably heard of she before i think the url support she dot com why i like she was it's kinda best about so they do the like filtering screening background checks all that stuff so basically you just say i want a personal assistant they present you three great candidates so they present you five great candidates for you and they're they're filtered they're checked and they're basically like these are the best of the best so they save you a shit ton of time which is like as any business owner you kind of need that on the other side you don't have to pay the monthly up charge so they'll say great here's you know you can make the hire directly and all you pay is the one time finder fee for us having found the candidate and so it ends up being you know ten to twenty times cheaper than these other ones in the long run because you just paid you know the one time finder fee so i like that model the best i was like i long term i think this is the most sustainable because if i'm making in my business like i did fit fifteen hires internationally i want i don't wanna be paying like this bloated cost every month from there on now or nor do i wanna do that all that work myself so that was the the business we ended up investing in super excited the the branding on their website so it's support shepard dot com yep you you have to be one of the testimonials you you need to test on there but it looks good it it it's cute branding so marshall h is the guy who started it marshall i've known marshall since she in twelve maybe he's a type of guy who whenever he does something it's awesome it looks cool so like if you follow him on instagram on twitter he's got show ship he's got show shit he's got the juice he's got the juice so whenever like for example i think he just bought a new house and i'm like following the bill of that house he also like he likes cars so like i saw him like red decorate his garage he owns like a boutique hotel he did this like e commerce thing that was like super simple and actually it was like a really good like you know a successful business successful eco comm business that was just like yep it was like a phone case and like you know it was just that and like when covid came out they came out with this little like hook thing like your captain hook i was like you can use this to open doors without having to touch the knob like a peasant i was like did this guy's is great he just he's like simple little businesses and he runs all the reason he did this is he ran his businesses using international hiring as is like workforce so then he partnered with his guy in the philippines opened up a office on the ground there with a bunch of recruiters to do all the vetting locally on the ground as he going into the philippines his business partner lives there and is has the the the office open there so that's like how you that you gotta commit if you're gonna do these types of things and so he basically partnered with the guy who's doing that and that's how they create a shepard and it started off just like you know solving their own but turns out like a lot of people have have this itch and so am myself included so so if he i file i i'm not i'm not used it but i will i will use it i i would like to use i'm i'm literally i just texted ben i'm i really actually want your course i wanna figure out how you do this because i want this and maybe i'll use these guys but if his business is going so well why would he sell a portion to you like my head is i'm greedy i'm like get the fuck out of here because i mean obviously we're gonna drive him a little bit or a lot of bit of traffic and the pod will is that the only reason why he would do this yeah basically they don't spend any money on marketing at all and so the way that it spreads is just word mouth people coming back and then the other one is like entrepreneurs who have an audience saying saying the word so they first did this with nick hub and nick nick drove them a ton of business because nick uses it for all of his businesses and he when he talks about it they get a bunch of they get a bunch traffic so i think he saw the success of that and basically you know we have a a large audience now like through twitter through this pod through other things and so there's obviously a benefit of i don't know like the brand association like as well as like you know the the ability to reach you know reach a large audience that i think was appealing to him and but i bought it and i didn't get free shares right like i bought i bought into the to the equity pool but i agree with you you a really good business you're always hesitant it has to be like the right fit and so i think the other benefit was he listens to the pod and so he's seem you know if you listen to this you know how we think and you can agree be like this person's great or this person's an idiot you know if you wanna if you would wanna do business with them if you listened to the pod regularly you you have a very good idea there's no hiding our personalities on this do they have a m m like coupon code or coupon coupon so if you go to my website if you go to shop dot com slash remote assistant basically here's what i got them to do which is better than a coupon thing so i was like alright if you wanna do the personal assistant thing the i did i was sorry alright here's my systems two hundred fifty two bucks you get the whole like all the templates all the thing or whatever but i was like i only wanna make money from people who don't take action and so here's here's how it works basically she just buy the course and you don't actually hire assistant i keep her money but if you actually go to shepherd and you hire your assistant then shepard will give you two x the money back so basically you pay two fifty you'll get five hundred dollars if you actually take the accident and go higher and i was like that's kind of a no brainer offer i like marshall we gotta do this like do this where if people want their own assistant and they actually goes like take their action and go forward with it pay them back not just what they paid for the for the system pay them double because like i bet a bunch of people are just not gonna take action but who cares like i want the people who who will take action to be rewarded for doing so and so that's a pretty pretty sweet deal basically it's like a you essentially you get my system for free plus you make an extra two hundred fifty dollars if you if you actually go go forward with it make your hire so first i want if you're into this shit i have no stake this by the way but go to support shepard i i do want them to sign up because here's what i want i want you to report back and i wanna hear if this whole influencer buys companies thing actually is good i wanna so i want i want the results to be reported back in like a month and so i am curious to see like what the demand is i bet it's gonna be quite good number two what i'm curious to see is if you like this i don't know if you're gonna like it or not can you going i fifty fifty either way so far how do you feel i mean look if this deal works then this the greatest thing no this one is the hard part this is already easy this is already a successful company i'm already religious about hiring internationally anyways my own businesses it's like i didn't have to be convinced that this is a good idea like i already knew this a good idea the question was am i gonna start my own of these or should i invest the one that's already working that i like that i use i was like okay let me just do the second one that keeps like way less work you know to do that so i think this one is kind of a no brainer in that it's kind of a proven business i am a genuine believer in it and whether we actually drive extra traffic to them or not i think it's it's sort of like i don't know like i obviously for them they want that and and i would like that too but i for me it was already say it was already was what percentage are you is that too much to ass or to i was that here because i think you know their business i don't wanna i don't wanna give that away too much but you know it's a it's a good chunk i think do you think they'll ever sell the company or do you make your money just through dividends yeah just dividends like it's a profitable business it just pays out dividends like i got our first dividend check yesterday it's awesome you did you got one already yeah it's fantastic this is gonna be your seize candy maybe i mean if this works out that's exciting i'm curious to see if you're gonna like this because on one hand i can actually see you loving this because you get to spend time seeing how things work and you get to use your skill set which is content to tell people it like this segment that we just didn't i'm actually interested i wanna keep talking about this just because i wanna hear the story about it i think that's interesting and so it's kind of a win win in that regard but i'm curious if you're gonna enjoy all the due diligence like when i talked to andrew wilkinson he actually i don't think does a lot of them do due diligence he's got a team to do right if you are able to pull that off i think you'll be in a win situation so as long as you like like doing that i'm gonna try it with two or three this one i knew was a a slam dunk because i'm just like just a total of lever in it what's gonna be interesting is what happens with ones that aren't like perfectly in my zone of like i get it i used it i believe in it like it's like this one is like bull's eye i don't expect every business to be exactly bull's eye so the question is what happens when it's an non alexandria is it still fun do i still believe joyce am i still willing to talk about it like this i'm willing to talk about it because i'm like i literally wouldn't have my e com business work the way it does or milk grade worked the way it did if i didn't use the strategy so i'm like i could talk about that now what happens when it's like one degree separator from that and am i still gonna wanna to tell a story on it it's not even that interesting story and i'm not gonna do like i'm not gonna come on this podcast and bore everybody with like a story that's not that great so i can't i can't commit to that yet but i don't know if somebody wants me to buy you know minority taking their business hit me let's see let's see what happens i'm try two or three of these and see see how it goes was there anything that you learned looking at the twenty four other than what you said about the like fix me shit like was there anything any other revelations not necessarily about what they had wrong with them or but maybe what they had right with them any coming between the winners yeah yeah definitely i would say that the the businesses that i was most interested in were ones that had a clear a clear sales model i would say so they knew how they were gonna get their customers now and in the future and i i don't wanna say moat because it's like you're just trying to be warren buffett like it's not like not that they had a moat but they had you know either recurring revenue or they had something that was like they're they're actually the category leader they're the go to leader and that there's some reason why they're not just gonna get copied into oblivion by everybody else maybe it's maybe they have operational advantage maybe they what's she i mean i think branding is actually that separates them here i think that that they they look cool is there anything else yeah i think shepherd real advantages is that they're they picked a business model that's actually more customer friendly like i said so like if your two other options are spend a bunch of time have a bunch of uncertainty hire somebody un vetted and you save a little bit of money or pay a three x monthly up charge but you're kinda nuts to do the three x monthly up charge for a long to time especially if you're gonna hire multiple roles that eventually in your company like this just not a sustainable path so to me support shepard choice on the business model separated them from the current competitors now somebody else could try to do it but what are they gonna have do they're gonna have to go set up boots on the ground in the philippines and in lat and really be good at you know recruiting recruiters where they're gonna recruit the talent to actually deliver on these roles and hire high quality people because they they don't really like the money's is not made in your first hire the money's made when you're like you see the light and you come back to them for your next six hires like when i did with the e eco com was like i start with customer support and i was like cool i need somebody can do inventory forecasting people in the us really expensive for that honeywell need a hundred and forty k for that that role here could i find somebody overseas that could do inventory forecasting can find somebody that could do can run our amazon ads can i find somebody could do wholesale as a channel like can i find people that do influencer like you start to be like oh wait this isn't just about what it used to be which was like va equals low cost labor now it's like dude they're pretty talented people that could do these things they got three or four years of experience doing that at another company and so you're able to just pluck from the remote talent pool versus just your local talent pool dude i'm excited to see how this turns out at hampton did do you guys have any overseas people yet or no yeah yeah for sure we have like the guy who made our website is overseas and he's on staff we have our accounting folks the who like the they're called fuel finance they're overseas if you go to like we have this whole backend end thing built where people can log in it was built by a guy in hong kong we have a ton of overseas and marshall is a member and so we're gonna actually thinking about starting to use them for some data analytic stuff so yeah by the way like the funny is all a lot of overseas when i was using for are you coming a lot of become people use agencies i a hire an agency and then they like they're like great let's add could you add these three people to slack and all of the account their names yeah yeah i'm just like so like for example design pickle i think is like a ten million dollar your business to basically like design unlimited designer on demand we tried them out for a little bit every single designers in the philippines then i hired this email marketing guy i was you had do our email email marketing it flows he's based in colorado every employee in the philippines so i was like okay that's another one i hired a a website a web web dev shop got owners in the us entire team is in india you know another one that did the entire thing in ukraine and it's like it's so funny that people are basically this is now a business model is basically like owner in the us does sales fulfillment all done by it and they're they're good i'm not even saying this like a bad thing like they're talented but i'm like wow this is a whole business blueprint a template that they could use to basically like make the margins work what are you better to go there when are you going wins philippines yeah we're when's next beer nation goes to in the philippines we should host the next live pod there do we have a following there i have no idea unfortunately i don't think we do i don't think they give us a shit dude you gotta go there i've been on philippines it's awesome very and i've never been i'll go tonight and tomorrow i'm taking a fifteen hour road trip in my tesla my first time doing it we're gonna see if i love it or hate it so i'm gonna report back on wednesday fifty minutes hour you said it normally takes twelve but you have three hours for charging data i did a charging road horrible where you going from or where are going to how what's the distance austin to s saint louis okay i'm gonna visit my family what do you get the x or the why which one are you gonna x long distance three hundred and fifty miles is it a new one because the thing i screwed up was the one i rented on tu was like five years old and it just needed charging every ninety minutes it was an awful experience wow fast you go i mean it's like highway right so you're going like whatever seventy five miles an hour i mean i speed usually yes i mean i'll go eighty five or ninety so do see what's gonna happen crush the battery absolutely crushed the battery at least that that one that i had it absolutely crushed it we had a tear we did a seven hour fourteen hours because we had to charge many times well and by the way you know the charging thing it's not like you can't just like charge like there's like certain charges that are fast and some that are slow you know like don't you just use the thing on the screen that like tells you what to do it tells you where it tells you where it tells you where the charger are but i'm saying some of the charging stations and some of the spots are fast chargers and some are slow like there's a a like it's like a gas pump where one we'll fill it up in twice the speed as the other so make sure when you do it you know that so you go only to the fast chargers none of the slow the slow ones are like you you had to be like i wanted to go watch a movie so that i could do this slow charge no i i use there's this app called a better route i think it's called i use that right like has built this whole like thing just on routing out people's electric charges and so i'm gonna use that yeah but my wife's my wife's flying and i was like i'm driving it i'm wanna drive but i gonna see what it's like and so i'm driving and i'm gonna report back on wednesday to see how it feels i did so i i'm gonna leave tonight so i'll get a few hours in and then tomorrow that way i can like i claim my life around this pod because i was like it's we record eleven my time was like i can't arrive that morning otherwise i'll be like tired i wanna better a research right i have to plan it so i get there tuesday night and i need a full night's rest so i can like wake up and like research and shit do plan your life on this pod yeah chi extent right like you know this is this is the one un mis appointment on my calendar everything else yeah it's flexible this is the one non flexible thing it's no days off i think i mean we've recorded on we missed this myself so i guess we i can't really say that right now well it wasn't there like an issue we we had a sound issue but we're like no days off people are like you missed last the last that was like a technical error but we've done like what whatever the most recent holiday is we recording whatever i think we've done christmas eve before we always record big thanks to everybody who listens this is a fun thing for us to do thank you for listening yeah this is like one of the one of the the dope parts of our life and i think it's attracted a bunch of like i mean neck neck degradation right it's attracted a bunch of people who's whose brain is weird and the way our brain is weird and and i think that's a lot of fun i wanna end with this so i was at this i'll tell you very very very quick story i at this la tech technique meeting first of all our fans are that sounds weird but our listeners they come in all shapes and sizes man all colors i'll i like i love it like i let me what are you trying to say there dude like i had this guy that looked like he was seven feet tall guy like basketball player and i thought he was like a famous guy he comes up he goes was total man and he gave be like you don't like the black guy and handshake and like for a sense black you are a total man like you didn't even need to say it bro we know yeah you're gaming me like that let a handshake you know what i'm saying and and then i had this like fifty five year old woman who would was with her kid at the airport say what's up and i just wanna say yeah first of all if you're a fan thank you and second of all i can tell like walking by if someone listens or not because if they're wearing like lulu abc b pants or like if they look like they go to like columbia like university and they like make eye contact with you in a particular way could tell and i would love for you to come and say what's up so long as it's like a quick like what's up total man like you can say something and there here's the etiquette you come over you fist pound not handshake or hug so get do ducks that's the way we do it we're not trying to dip a little too too much i'm not trying to be palm to palm with anybody and so give me the ducks you can say you could reference it you get no small boy stuff total man you could use any of the any of the ism that you want that just means i know you and i'm i'll give you the head nod back like yep you're one of us take selfie together and then and then we kind of you know we keep the shell rolling from there but here's the shit that i need to announce to people and they and we we got put this in every episode because oftentimes if they send me with my wife they'll say what's up they see me with like my in laws or opt to eat with friends they won't say what's up every once in a while they will and it makes me feel so cool oh my god oh the more people i'm with the more i need you to be over the top with it yes my way doesn't listen this podcast she never heard a single episode so she doesn't think this is cool she thinks this is me of playing video games up in the bedroom right now so only when she see someone come up in person and then even you know i was with her mom there and they were like wow what my dad was there and he's like he he might literally goes he must have thought you're someone else we are famous enough that like our friends and family actually understand and so if you see us out there police us give if we're with friends you have to do it that will make my day and it's the short thing i was on to eat and like three different guys i'm gonna i thought i was at my coworkers said what's up and i played it up like oh man can't go anywhere you know i mean like and in my head i'm like i hope there's a four i hope there's a born it's not i'm like coworkers workers were like does this happen all the time i'm like you gotta say the us embarrassing version of this so when we were selling the milk road i went to meet up with the the guy who bought it kendall at at coffee shop and we're at the coffee shop for a bit and i see someone kinda like looking like i think they recognize me what i'm not sure and i'm like come over just come over right now because he doesn't listen pie guys and i'm trying to do this deal and i'm like i think it would help if he felt like i'm a big deal i was like i think that'd would be a little nice nuts yes the guy doesn't come over right so we go outside we say i say by he starts walking away and the guy comes over and he's like sean and i'm like yeah he goes hey man like fan come yeah i literally go i was like i'm kendall i want to be my house was i was like hey have you met kendall and guy's like no as a kendall yeah well this guy just he listed to the potty i just wanted you and anyway didn't even make sense and i was like i forced it so bad dude so bad validate me please because i need how do you take a cool moment and make it the most lame was me be like hey wait you didn't hear the he recognize karen have you guys met no worse not oh oh my god i i said that before i'm like hey say what you said again but good in front of my laws not fun so i just this is a public service announcement if you think you noah us so if you like size even if the only think it's kind of us just take a chance and say what's up and feel free to be over the top like yeah you know it's awesome we love it it makes me feel good and it more so makes me look cool which is what i care about more than anything so anyway that's awesome that's the pod good episode i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days on on a goal travel never looking back