The Startup Sins Of Uber, Why Scaling Is Overrated, and More

what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever five or six in the morning and he would go to phil coffee and he would sit down with his laptop he first he tweet out that he was at phil every single day and then he would start just literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting the product on product hunt or hey i posted it for you would love to hear your comment or hey i noticed this product that's a lot like yours i wonder if you know or like that's in your industry you should check this out and all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for product time he was the he was the human invite system the notification system the retention system he was all of it i have a feeling you're coming with fire or something you seen fiery today i got some good stuff also i just watched do you ever watch bars tools interviews with people do you watch are you talking about the caleb presley one don't know who that is maybe that's his name it's the one with air they yeah interviewed aaron rogers i want it today dude his name caleb have you so it's called it's it called sunday what's it called big conversations and basically like ice cream i yeah it's like this like chu guy named glenn balls who's sitting in the background and then it's caleb who's like a bro but he's kind of he's actually really funny he's hilarious he's quite smart and he interviews these people he asked the best questions he's so good i've you seen the past ones i've seen a few of them this one is the first one i've watched like the whole thing and god he's good man he that is amazing so i watch that and sometimes that's all it takes you just see someone being great at their thing and you're like i'm gonna be great today that's it i'm gonna be great today i saw great now i need now i need to be great he makes me self conscious kayla presley is is is very very good at these funny awesome interviews he's great on the spot he's very good yeah he delivers alright so let's do can i tell you something this is kind of amazing alright this is gonna be a little hard to share on here but i put this in to the docs so you can click the links ben if you can let's screen share some of this stuff that's gonna i'm gonna tell you this is i saw this ad on instagram and this is the most amazing marketing funnel i've ever seen maybe ever but definitely for a musician so check this out stop scrolling you have twenty four hours rick carol an independent hip hop group last year we had the honor of being placed on brock han official community playlist and we were also shouted out by kenny beats qui little off as you can do it this year we're trying to grow our fan base so for the first fifteen people who dms on instagram in the next twenty four hours we're gonna send you a special kit so i bought the dms now so the the the beginning of the the audio didn't play that but goes do you recognize these people and it's like biggie puck whoever like just like a bunch of famous rappers it gonna stop scrolling and then he basically does this little thing i was like so so ben levi ben sent this to me and i was like what is this amazing this let me i i must swipe up i not must know what this free gift is so i do it what does that lead you to it opens up facebook messenger with direct message already ready for their like for to their team and it just says send it automatically sends them a message from you saying send me the free gift okay so that happens and then they they respond y what's good immediately right so you're like okay i don't know what's happening here but i'm in intrigued the next thing that happens i have screenshots to this stuff below your blow some your so they go y sean what's good so they use my name in the in the thing they pull it from facebook messenger and then it says give us a little bit we'll get back you asap with your gift in some more details thanks for your patience okay cool one day later i get a message it's an audio note from the guys who are the the the the rap group and it's basically like introducing themselves and and again this is kind of mass produced but it works like y sean and then it's the audio which is like y here's our story where these guys blah here's what we're doing and then they said you know for your gift we wrote your own custom song we personalized the lyrics just for you and and and so you know let me know what you think they it links to us it links to their sound cloud and it says sean king of the first million that's the name of the song so then yeah the homie sean run up no under hand got his dogs with it him yet that's the gang hope you wanna stay i saw the homie on twitter now he messaged us invest your funds with a fiat et he get it done but i can't afford it to keep your real so there's in the song and i'm like okay well i don't know what's happening right now but like this has never happened before where you go from there's an instagram and instagram ad about a band that you never heard of then you swipe up then they send you an audio note and a personal message then they send you a song the following day that's like got your name in it and then they followed it up again and they're like y i don't know if you're in new york i'm a pretend you are we're doing a show here's the here's a link to a show here's the tickets and then they send like of this automated graphic using can of you could see it there it's like me crowds surfing and cycle down i don't know what is going on but this band is kinda genius in the way that they're promoting themselves and they're still small they're called car they're still small but when i saw this i was like i don't know they may not they they or may not be the best musician but they are probably have the highest overlap of market like kinda marketing genius for a young band and they play music right like there's a lot of marketing gina out there but they don't make music there's a lot of musicians but they don't know anything about marketing these guys know enough about both to be very dangerous i just like this amazing is this effective you think i don't understand so they're basically doing all this to get you to buy tickets so they're new york show is that right well it's not just that like it's not just by takes a specific show it's basically the the way i think about it is every business you gotta find a way to get like your first hundred or first thousand customers who love you and that's like a really specific thing it's like i just need a thousand customers who love us whether it was for this podcast like we needed a thousand people to listen who actually really love the show and and every business has this and so the question is like how do you actually do that and at yc they have this thing that they say do things that don't scale they talked about the early airbnb guys how they used to go and they they themselves would go and call all the hosts of their new york airbnb they would go to their houses they would take professional looking photos so that the listings look better and people were always laughing like you know that's not gonna scale and they're like well first of all it doesn't even matter if it scales because right now i don't need scale i don't have scale i just need something that's gonna get a thousand people to really love us and that's what these guys are doing i thought this is just an amazing example of like actually betting on that strategy which is that you need a small group of people to really love you and go to bat for you not a bunch of people who just kinda sorta of like you or oh yeah i got you know we got ten thousand views on this thing i like okay but those those views do they matter what are those views worth versus somebody who's got a story to tell like i'm doing right now or somebody who's really impressed by you or feels interested in you or is invested in your story actually goes and clicks and learns more about you and you know goes deeper down your funnel so i think that this is amazing because they're show they're brute forcing that thousand thousand fans who who really care about them dude i always hated this thing of well it doesn't scale or you gotta build the scale i've always hated that conversation for a few reasons number one most people aren't gonna make it to the point where they ever have to worry about that number two you can brute force it and just manually and by hand do things to a pretty large number i think the largest number that i've seen let's see but i think mister beast is is his a operations is worth hundreds of millions of dollars that's a pretty brute force not i i i don't know what it looks like but just talking to him fairly un sophisticated operation i think when i talk to nerd wall you know nerd wall it's a it was a blog that was at the time making like thirty million in revenue and i i think like fifteen million in profit incredibly i like saw a little bit behind the scenes super un sophisticated what what are some other thing and it was basically just them just blogging what are some other examples of things that you've seen that are look like a tech or internet based company on the outside but behind the scenes are like pretty rudimentary and not even like they've not even thought like we need to automate or scale or whatever so our buddy ryan hoover built product time and he he listens to spot he he he came on the pot as well and told the story but i was there kinda like front row when he was building that meaning like i think i'm used number seventeen in product on history or something like that like very very early first dozen people or so that we're on the platform and so and for some of us he was sending like updates on like literally what he was doing to build it and what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever five or six in the morning and he would go to phil coffee and he would sit down with his laptop but first he tweet out that he was at phil every single day and then he would start just literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting the product on product hunt or hey posted it for you would love to hear your comment or hey i noticed this product that's a lot like yours i wonder if you know or like that's in your industry you should check this out and all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for product time he was he was the human invite system the notification system the retention system he was all of it and at the at the time i was like this guy is literally like sending out like hundreds of personal welcome emails a day maybe a hundred personalized tweets per day and then he would like yeah sure enough i six or seven pm he'd close up his laptop he'd go to the gym he's a very like structured guy and he was like go home he he hits the bed early he's not like you know he's not like going out socializing her doing anything like he'd wake up again the next day he would do the same thing and sure enough that community that we were part of i think that first group he sent it to was like maybe twenty five people and it didn't even have his own website he was using this thing called link dink at the time it's was like some third party tool to go use and every day he would send out the email more email digest in the morning of the cool stuff people posted and then he would tag each person with individualized thing oh sean i know you guys had once looked at building a product like this what do you think about this hey get you to share your thoughts because he was asking in such a nice personalized way that okay i'll go ahead and reply but that generated all of the activity for that early community and why did product at work why did it sell for twenty million dollars well because at the beginning he got the right people from silicon valley to actually participate in the thing and the way he did that was like it's like when you watch somebody build a fire it's like first they're just like you know they're just hitting the the the flint or they're rubbing the two sticks together just to get the spark and then when it's there they're sort of covering it they're just blowing on it gently and then they're adding just the next little few pieces of sticks and they know if could go out at any moment and that's how it feels to build a community i saw you do the same thing with trends basically right like for trends when you wanted to launch that it was by no means gonna be a slam dunk and i think most of us who are in trends would say the research reports you guys sent out which was the product they were cool but the real reason anybody liked trends i think was the facebook group all it was as a facebook group was nothing you know you didn't build that you just literally went down there and type to fight type to you know a title in and hit enter and then but what made the facebook group good was you picked you handpicked picked who could get in and and then every day i felt like you were sharing like some super high quality stuff to get a conversation started in the group chat was that intentional when you do that one hundred percent that was intentional and so when i i i did two or three interesting things so this yeah so trends right now is making many many millions of dollars in subscription revenue and it's pretty simple and there's like i think there's only five people who work on it so it's like a pretty profitable thing and we added these people to this facebook group and i would do a few things the first thing i would do is even people who didn't pay who i thought were impressive like you or some of our other friends i'd be like hey i'm adding you to this group and i would just tell them and i would manually add them and i'd be like oh look who just joy you know it's saw shot is at all these impressive things funny seeing you here how cool if you have any questions for sean just like ask them right here in the comments and i would do that all the time so i would add these people who didn't that worked by the way because i was like oh shit this group has cool people and it's in reality you added things three hundred paid members that i've never heard of and then you added one interesting person but you made that intro post ball you're like you ever seen a plane fly yeah that's because of this guy know it's like it was always the most like ball intro you're like you know did you know that it have hundred dollar bills till this guy gave around like that all the time and and the other thing i would do is i would just write out all these long posts of like interesting things that i was thinking about and then i would tag certain people who a either accomplish something like that and would and would talk about it or b i would write comments for smart people and message him and say hey would you do me a favor post this on there or i would write post for other people and make them comment one time when hubspot was looking to buy us i saw that brian hall the then he's the founder and then ceo of the company he joined and i messaged like eighty people and i said hey yeah replied reply bride here's a message to say to him and so many people commented and that he checked in like eight hours later he's like oh my god i've been overwhelmed with replies and notifications i can't believe how thriving this community is and i remember thinking like got them i got them and that's but that like interaction is how you make all like that's the feeling you want all community members to feel and we used to do that all the time but yeah ryan hoover is a good example of people who have grown without like really caring about scaring scaling we should have like a segment another time where we like actually think about like the most like thrown together duct taped shit that we've seen that has gotten quite large and but i'm gonna give you another angle towards this so there's one which is the brute force do things that don't scale and they almost do them even longer than that they do it even past the point where you shouldn't be able to keep this up like airbnb b still does that photographer by the way they turned that un scalable thing of them going to people's apartments taking photos for them and saying hey we'll we'll improve your listing for you and now they just have a fleet of photographers around the country that'll just come do this for your listing it's like it's a that they are scalable for and that's another thing when people talk about well that's not scalable it's like yeah it is like they'll talk about like an ad agency and they're like that's not scalable it's like what do you mean of course it's scalable you just hire five thousand employees like that that's scalable it may be that's not what you wanna do but like yeah and everything virtually everything is scalable like you just have to add a ton of people probably most things can scale past what most people think like you know this also happens in engineering all the time you work with engineers and they're like well we're gonna need to build it right before we launch or we're gonna need to build it right because this won't work in production and so this won't work with its scales so it's like did you hear these stories it's like yeah facebook was written in ph p why i don't know that's just the language he knew at the time and that's what he did you know it's like and yeah actually it still runs you know years later it was still running in that like way past it was supposed to and dude i i've got friends that are early at uber and friends that are still at uber and a lot of people don't know this but i they might consider him a founder but the first or second employee was this mexican guy and you know he like i think he was lived in america for a little while but at the time he was in mexico and so the early versions of uber were written with a ton of spanish in the code and and so my friends who were earlier there they told me yeah like i forget this guy's name you know what i'm talking about i i i remember reading about it about i don't know his name talking me yeah he was he was mexican and so they and he had you know his friends in mexico ago we're like yeah we'll we'll my i know a good agency we're gonna have him do it and they said it was kinda thrown together and kinda jan and i've got friends now that silver there and they say every once in a while we'll find spanish in the early code base because that is you know what these guys are writing we'll find like spanish notes and things like that and that was the early version of uber and think about how many rules of uber got violated of how many rules of startups that uber violated so for example the uber founders travis and garrett they didn't work on it full time uber was not a project they were willing to do they just literally tweeted it out hey we need a general manager and random guy named ryan graves was like i'm a hustle i'll do it and though alright cool it's like they literally like delegated the ceo job then did they have a super strong technical team technical cofounder founder who could write the code and do this in house nope use the third party dev shop to build the the first version of the app they outsource the coding yep most of the investors who invest in uber would tell you if you're a a product guide you go in and you say yeah i'm gonna just use an agency to write the code for the app they'd be like yeah this is not yeah no go okay then what's the next thing then they literally broke actual laws it was like running and they they got a cease desist from san francisco saying hey for every day your operational you owe us five thousand dollars per day and they just kept going then the next you know they just violated rule another one at the time i remember at the time when uber first came out airbnb was was popular at the time and i talked to our investor i was like should we be doing a product like this is like no bits not adams that was like a common phrase since silicon silicon valley which is you wanna do startups that are software based because they can they're the ones that can scale and have profit margins all these things with real world cars and homes and t shirts and stuff like that like that stuff super hard to scale ends up being super super low margin and okay and know some people will say other they're right you know uber is not that profitable but the reality is that the founders and investors in uber did fantastically well scaling this thing up and it was kinda a narrative violation there was all these narrative violations all these these general rules that were broken that like today if you said yeah i'm the i'm the founder of this thing no i'm not working on it at full time i found a guy on twitter to be the ceo and that we're using this agency in mexico to build the app yeah we're the next big thing that doesn't fly and guess what it worked dude we gotta go in a quick a story tangent and that that's kinda what this whole first half is gonna be i guess but there's this guy named scott be key i'm friends with a thumb or i used to be a little friends with them haven't talked him a while but you you know scott yeah i'm i like him a lot i'd like to think of fred of the reality is as i've talked to twice yeah friend friendly with him he invested in my company and i'm hung up them once twice he doesn't know this but he's kind of like i'm his secret admire like he's like this like good look at the hands of dude who dresses dice nice and seems like really wealthy and rich and like i i like if i see him i'm like dude you are the best and i've talked to them if you have ten million dollars at a jaw and all it sam is all in yeah yeah definitely all so like i love this guy and he's great so basically i gotta tell you a quick scott be story so at right now he's like an executive at adobe but not just like an executive i'm sure he's like in line to the ceo and a lot of people don't realize this adobe is one i'd like t largest companies in the world i think their market cap is like three four hundred billion dollars and scott be is he's pretty young he's in his early forties and he i cold email him to invest in the hustle and that's how he became friends with him and i met with him one time and he goes yeah so like when i was twenty six years old i was starting my company called be so be is basically it's be and dr or like the two companies where you go online and designers can host their portfolio and kinda talk to one another and he was like i was just starting this company and in my head i knew he worked at goldman and i knew that he was from like a wealthy like jewish family i think his his grandfather started like kaplan you know kaplan university in no way yeah and so i was like stereo him oh you guys just you had everything handed you to him and like you told me a few stories where i was like oh you actually like it's not exactly how it seems from the outside and he said i left goldman and i was making ninety grand a year there and when i left i had like fifty or sixty thousand dollars save i started be pants it didn't go very well and we bootstrap it and i noticed that with be we were getting a lot of traffic from two different websites the first was called stumble upon and people and designers would post school designs and we would get traffic from stumble upon and the second was a small company called pinterest and i emailed both these guys and this was i forget what year two thousand eleven thousand ten because i emailed these guys like hey you guys are sending us like hundreds of people a day which for us at the time was a lot of people what are these websites and this guy ben told me about this website called pinterest and then this guy named garrett told me about stumble upon and ben was like hey i'm gonna raise a little bit of money do you wanna invest it's the three million dollar valuation and scott was like dude i only have like fifty grand and but i don't wanna like look like a new to this guy whatever i'll invest fifteen thousand dollars and that's a big deal to me and then garrett was like hey my friend and i are starting this other thing none of us are gotta to work there because i'm too busy running some upon but it's basically like a car service and scott was like i don't wanna invest in a limo company like there's no way a limo company he's gonna take off but like i don't wanna look like an idiot this guy's been sending me some traffic and i i kinda wanna like appear a little bit like a big shot and so he gave him fifteen thousand dollars i think at a three point million dollar valuation and he did both of these in the span i think of about two weeks so he was like i basically had like fifty or sixty grand in my checking count at the time my startup that i was shopping i was only doing okay it wasn't making much profit and i was doing consulting on the side to pay the bills but i my wife was like angry at but i gave him each fifteen thousand dollars fast forward however in many years they both went public around the same ish time and i remember sending him something to his house and he sent me his address and i remember the address being this like really fancy town home and i like that i looked it up and i was like doing the math and i'm pretty sure each of these fifteen thousand dollar checks turned into around fifty to a hundred million dollars each inside a span of like i y'all all had to look up when they went public but they almost went public right around the same time and you gave them money each at the same time and another thing a lot of people don't know is be his company sold i think for a hundred and seventy five million dollars and i think he owned he told me around seventy percent of it he owned the majority of it and so this guy has just knocked it out the park over and over and over again and a lot of it came because of uber and pinterest early on and he was like i don't think these are that good ideas but i just i don't wanna look silly that's that's an amazing story i love that story it reminds me i i just got a dm from this guy by the way this is nowhere near related i am i'm not trying to compare apples to apples here it's very hard to have a story that compares to uber and pinterest but there's a guy who i don't know maybe six months ago or nine months ago or something like that i was like getting kinda interested in the like ai stuff about like you know this is basically artificial intelligence i can create art and things like that and i'd said something hand on the pod so somebody reached out and they were like hey so you know heard your interest in this i'm trying to make apps that will do this we just released our first one and i wanna see what you think about it and you know with we're raising a little bit of money we'd love to see if you wanna wanna invest never replied i go i get another dm or no i i see somebody mention this app and i go i go click on the founder and i click the dm oh this it's sky dm me a while back saying best i should i should see how it's going i go hey how's the biz going i'll share for each hey how's the biz going and he goes good man good yeah that app i really ended up releasing it's been downloaded at a hundred twenty million times and and then i really released another one and it's also been downloaded like a hundred million times and yes it's really it's going really well man how are you i was like i'm i'm currently walking off of a cliff because i never responded to that initial dm everybody's like well i recently switched from trader joe's the whole food it's been tired with that i just my four one k match yeah be fascinating you just not much you that's crazy share one other story that's kinda of related to the do things that don't scale this is something i actually learned from those guys dylan and henry so i'm a big fan of this like idea that you have to find a way to learn from three groups of people people that have done it before so people have done it a bunch of times so that's you know people normally try to go learn from them mentor type people people that are in the game their peers just alongside you that's kinda how we got to know each other we were in a peer group a mastermind group and no we haven't made it but like we're all trying to make it at the same time and so we can learn a lot from each other and then lastly is people who are just starting out in the game fresh they don't know any better and there is a certain tactic to like a spend time with each of those three groups and then b be humble enough and know how to ask the right question so that you know how to actually get advice from all three of those groups because if you ask the same question to all three you're not gonna get valid information you're not gonna get the right answers from all three right like the question you would ask to somebody who's been through it before and the things you should talk to them about are different than the ones that you should talk to your your buddy who's going through it right now and the nineteen year old who just graduated from college you can't ask the same question so i tell you something that the the sort of the nineteen twenty one year old or whatever i don't know how old they worth at the time maybe twenty one twenty two dylan and henry they were fans of the pod then they flew they offered to come help us with our video setups at the time well and previously they were fans of the pod and they would chop up clips for us and shared on social media and a lot of their videos were beautiful awesome and they just brute worse their way to having a relationship with us they exactly and that became a a a a full on agency that does you know pretty well they they did it for us and they did it for the all in podcast they did it for a bunch of people and so people kinda know them now but at the time nobody really knew who they were they were just guys are just graduating from college they had their own podcast which is kinda like ours but no you know you go you can go look at the views nobody nobody watches the thing but that's okay like you know it's most podcast nobody listens to especially ones by guys are just graduated from college but they flew out to our house there and they were installing the like kinda of studio setup in my garage at the time and and i went out there like you guys need some water or you guys are like you guys are alright you guys you guys eating anything like kinda like parenting them i was like you know what are you guys okay what are you doing here and and so i went out then and i started shooting shit with him i was talking to them and i was like so what's your guys is like i was like give me advice like if i was your friend and and i'm like you guys got a podcast that's pretty cool most people were raised on podcast like what do what's y'all strategy what are you trying to do why are you trying to do what are you trying to do and i was like explain to it me like i was your buddy and they're like well you know we kinda we like podcasting it's fun so that's why we do it the second thing is we just think that like making content like we don't have money to go advertise we don't have like we don't have connections that we could just go knock on a door and get into some get distribution somewhere so like content is our only chance so we just wanted to get good to content the best way to get good this just doing it a bunch i was like alright it's another smart thing and i go but nobody's watching your shit right so like is it even working it's kinda like what you're saying about this band thing like this even work like this is cool it's interesting but is this valuable like is this actually gonna work yeah and he goes oh i'm just wait he is nobody watches it today he goes but someday if we start to get people to watch there is now a library he goes we call it our binge bank he's a place where you can go and you could binge dylan and henry he and i was like what and he's like yeah basically we just wanna have a rabbit hole for you to go go down because if anybody ever gets to like today nobody's interested but if people ever get interested i wanna have this bank of content that they can go binge and sure enough after like you know forty five minutes down this rabbit hole you're gonna walk out being like i think i love these guys i feel like i know these guys and i wanna hang out or work with these guys and i heard that i was like that's really fucking smart i was like that's the way to think about content because most content doesn't just like immediately hit and blow up but you wanna have this and i thought about it because i was like there are several people who i've gone down that rabbit hole with and i've come out with that same exact conclusion after a forty five minute dig you do this all the time like you discover somebody you go read everything there's about them you go read the their old blog you watch their old talks and you can come out and be like this guy is awesome this for this girl is amazing and they had to create that like library of themselves that personal library to go and let you binge and i thought about it because you other the band like the the guy mack moore the like the famous rapper guy i remember maybe ten years ago now me and my buddy trevor we started like we like found his one of his songs and we were like oh this guy cool who is this guy and he had a bank he had these vlogs he was doing on youtube of him like trying to make it as a rapper it'd be like we're to doing this show at this small college in wichita oh we like we're wait every day right now we're waking up at this time we're trying to record in the studio goes we suck it create the creative process and we're just trying to train ourselves right they were just like just kinda sharing along the way and we watched this stuff and we were like i remember these videos had less than a thousand views there were like seven hundred views on youtube at the time like i just went back and looked at it now those have each like millions or like close to a million views each of those videos at the time less than a thousand and we became super fans in this guy why because it's fun to be early we liked what they were all about and we felt like the quality of content was like higher than the views and so that made it for like an exciting it's like we found a a treasure dude people say that in our comments on youtube like oh i'm like i'm i'm surprised this is bigger or like i'm happy to be here before they're like they're like i'm happy we're catching yeah and and that that definitely gives me encouragement it makes me happy but yeah people say that and are you literally they know that like our podcast has like ten times more download so they're like oh this little shitty podcast only has ten thousand videos on this thing or ten thousand views on this thing and i'm like yeah we suck share please share please yeah but i'm a big fan of this binge bank concept i'm i'm once i once i they said that that clicked with me i started think about our stuff that way and then also i started remembering yeah there's actually a bunch of people who i've gone down there grab it a hole and like and actually there could be like a product that's like this i i know youtube is kinda structured this but i kinda wish that you could just have a thing which is like your greatest hits it's like y if you if you're kinda interested in me this is the curated rabbit hole so this is my tweet that went viral this is this video this was the first thing i ever made this was you know this blog push i wrote back in the day it's kinda stupid but like you know it captured how i was thinking at the time i have two tools that i use regularly and i'm paying subscribers up the first any do you read a lot of biographies no not so i read ton over the world yeah i read a ton of biographies and so any biography that talks about a person who is a little bit pre internet era i'm a subscriber of newspapers dot com which has aggregated like every newspaper ever so like for example i was reading a biography about dan gilbert or something about dan gilbert the founder of rocket mortgage i think it's called the guy who owns the cleveland cavalier ears or i forget he owns everything yep and so like his company got pop it was called rock financial originally his company got popular in the nineties and so like this google rock financial dan gilbert set newspapers dot com to nineteen eighty five so i knew that's when he was started to nineteen ninety and then went public in ninety two so i like i wanna find everything i read all of these articles about him before he was like you know was like really like he was in the making at that point so that's like my favorite tools newspapers com the second one for anything that's internet related is web archive so like whenever i talk to anyone who's like popular on the internet i go and look back at right when they started i like to look at their old websites and you could like see the trend and you could see the trajectory and that starts that teaches me a little bit about patterns and like alright it's okay and it also makes me feel like alright it's okay to be shitty even at this size it's okay to be only okay or around this size you know what i mean totally totally yeah go look at early start up landing pages i i have blog post about this actually like ten throwback landing pages and it's like go look at the first version of airbnb of uber of snapchat all these things and then you'll be like oh why are we trying to perfect this before launch like it if you could start there and end up where these guys did like i can start wherever the hell i am now and launch and then make it better over time do you do you wanna go to can let me let me bring up one so yeah this this guy dm to me and i found his youtube video and it was really amazing so basically in two this has got me think on this whole topic but in two thousand fourteen this guy graduated from stanford and he got five job offers and he did this video that he goes here's the offers that i got in two thousand fourteen and here's what happened and here's like how like this story played out so he in the video it's really great so actually it looks like someone's highlighting the video what's his name how do people find this his name rahul so if you google with like rahul tech on po e n d y yeah so google that or just like rahul and then like tech tech jobs and i bet it'll will come up so basically i'm gonna summarize it but here the video is great but here's basically the offers that he got so the offers that he got from twitter with with a combination of stock and salary was hundred and ninety thousand with a combination of stock and cash his facebook offer was two hundred thousand dollars a year his microsoft one was around also two hundred thousand dollars a year is square one around a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year and this is both a combination of stock equity and sign up bonus and his google one was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year now fast forward were eight years what would that stock plus cash be worth so basically the stock the cash is mostly stagnant i think he added like an eight percent annual growth the stock he looks at what each what it grew since then so his twitter comp if fast forward it would almost be the same because their stock hasn't grown his facebook stock it actually would have got a lot higher but right now facebook stock is down a ton and so it's facebook's first year comp went from two hundred to two hundred twenty his microsoft comp it started at two hundred if you fast forward today it would be worth around three hundred thousand dollars a year here's where things get interesting his square stuff and and he was only twenty two when he graduated or something like that and he his first year salary bet and comp back then would be a hundred sixty thousand dollars fast the stock is now worth a five hundred and eighty thousand dollars and his google stuff was worth two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year now worth almost seven hundred thousand dollars a year and keep in mind so here's a few takeaways from this the first takeaway he said this funny thing in the video he goes square offered me something that i didn't think was any good because the recruiter said you know if square one day becomes a seven billion dollar company the stock that we're offering you now it's only worth a hundred thousand dollars over four years it could be worth four hundred thousand dollars but he goes i'm really doubtful that square will ever be a seven billion dollar company now it's worth fifty billion and it's down right now i think at its peak of was seventy billion so the thing that is really hard to understand is that everything at the time most things seem expensive and the reason why things seem expensive is because exponential growth is incredibly challenging to understand so if i tell you that something is gonna grow at seven percent a year every single year that's actually kind of hard to understand but that what that means it's gonna double every ten years if it's gonna grow if it's gonna grow at thirty percent a year which a lot of these tech companies are that means it's gonna double i think every two or three years and like exponential growth is really hard to understand the the another thing that is really interesting is leveraging offers and negotiating is very possible even if you're a twenty two twenty three twenty four year old and so you always do better when you have another offer in hand and you play them off for another and finally the most important thing for people listening employees at tech companies one hundred percent can get meaningfully rich and people don't talk about that enough because it's a fairly safe way if you are good enough it's a high bar if you are good enough to get but it's still like a million plus jobs if you add together fang i i or around there and they hire tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a year so it's not like that coveted but if you can get a job and one of these tech companies and i'm talking about a tech company that's growing quickly and has at least a thousand employees relatively safe it is such a good way to build the wealth in a low risk way and the final most important thing on top of that is now's is the time so we're you're talking about square being worth like you know what it might be worth seven billion dollars i i have a very small lens here but i see what the private company valuations are they have reset and even better the public companies have reset so we have square facebook twilio maybe robinhood i think like a company like hubspot or something like that a coin base all these valuations are pretty low if you ask me and i think now it's the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid a hundred two hundred three hundred thousand dollars a year in equity and that could be worth potentially eight figures in ten years that's really interesting and a great ad for hubspot very well done very native i enjoyed that one this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot girl better the when we were selling be we had a bunch of conversations and then you know you sort of compare offers you're like alright we had think at the end we ended up with three offers we had a facebook offer we had the twitch offer and we had a not paper but like only because we turned it down early but he was interested the the a discord offer and and i did it exercise recently when i looked back and i said what was i thinking then because i wrote it all down and how did it actually play out and i'll be damned if i wasn't wrong on every single thing i believed yeah let's do this yeah let's go to each so for example we'll start with the one that's relevant to what you're talking about which is the stock so so basically discord was like look we like you guys we we think this is cool but it we there's no way we would come up with cash like you're talking about so it would need to be just a tiny bit of cash and then mostly stock but like we think our stock is great so what let's say let's say you walked away with a million dollars of discord stock back then and back then it wasn't that long ago that was four years ago yeah less than four years three years ago three four years ago something like that so at the time i went and talk to one of discord investors i was like what do you think about this and they were like well it's real simple like today let's say discord is valued just around two you know one and a half two billion dollars so let's say two billion oh no i think at the time scored valued at a billion and it was one billion then and he goes you're basically just betting that discord can be worth five billion if it's was if it if it gets the five then this is the best offer if it's not gonna get to five then this is the worst offer and so you just have to like you know make an educated decision about that and i was like in my head i was like well i do like i was a big admire of discord i was like this court is kind of amazing the ceo at discord jason he's kind of amazing he of all the meetings that we took i thought he was the he was actually the most impressive in there and he cuts straight to the chase and was like yeah i'll i'll do this no you know the cash is gonna be small maybe one two three million dollars and then the rest will be stock and so you know you guys have to yeah is that interesting to you and at the time i was like no because that sounds really speculative and like ill liquid and like i can't go buy anything cool and i can't like i the no the total number as valued today sounds way lower yeah and in my head i was just like i can't do this fast forward discord i think is worth about fifteen billion now so it would have been by four or the best deal so we had a million dollars deal it if they gave you a million dollars of stock pro and private valuations that would be worth fifteen million dollars now in four years right correct and we were getting more than a million dollars of stock if we had done that deal okay so since to that it was it was the worst deal it would fair out to be now that there was one caveat which is it's it was gonna be vested so you know i'd also have to spend you know three years earning that stock or four years earning that stock which i i didn't yeah you probably would been fired way before that yeah so so you know one of the odds i gonna capture all that i don't know but like it just shows you know how our brain is not real like the idea of discord becoming worth fifteen billion was not really like it didn't seem very likely but in actuality the the odds were probably in its favor but it seemed like a very low probability thing because it just sounded big it sounded like a big jump it's like guess am i betting that fifth this is gonna become fifteen times bigger than it is today and actually yeah i did like the user base grew by two or three x the monetization grew the the overall market grew right and there's like all these different ways that you just multiply these things together and you get arrive at this private amount market valuation evaluation now and and also whatever private markets are corrected maybe it's not worth as much now but like you know it's it's hard to say it's a liquid then the next one is the facebook offer and it's like alright well facebook's offer is higher in cash higher in stock but we don't know about this we don't know exact which with stocks gonna perform better facebook or amazon they both seem like great stocks and so then it came down to intangible factors and we ended up ruling out facebook for some intangible factors we which were in retrospect somewhat silly reasons to decide the first was of like twitch is the leader in game streaming and facebook was like nobody watches game streaming on facebook at the time and i was like man this is just gonna be like another startup up like they they're at they're called facebook but like in this niche they're at zero and they're hoping that we can help them win and like man and we're gonna be pushing a boulder up the hill i was like i just wanna go join the warriors and like go play on the winning team facebook just hadn't decided they're gonna win yet yeah exactly and also like my mentor was like that's such a stupid way to think about this like you're gonna walk into facebook and they're gonna be like cool game streaming over here and you're gonna actually i'm gonna wander around this area over here i'm gonna go play in virtual reality i'm gonna go to ai i'm gonna go to the you know news i'm gonna get he's like you could just walk into any other department you want and just go do that thing he's like they'll forget you even exist after they hire you like you're worried about what your day to day life is gonna be like there and like you have no idea what your day life is gonna be like there and he was absolutely right by the way have you ever been to the facebook campus yeah it's it's basically better college the way that i describe it it's like a mall where everything's free so like they have like a food court and they don't have just one pizza place they've got many pizza places and it's one my wife work there and i would go and i'm like oh this is the best thing ever and they have restaurants like a sushi restaurant everything's free they've got a ice cream place everything's free they've got a woodworking shop everything's free a laundry place a barber a dentist the barber that's that's the biggest one i was like food i expected but when i just saw you guys walk over to this guy to get a haircut i was like damn that was like i was like a big draw for me i was like i could just i don't have to go anywhere it's just free i just walk in and get a get a haircut that's kind of amazing yeah they're like it's free all you have to give us is your life deal yeah i did you say there's two pizza shop so how much would the facebook so a million in facebook back four years ago would be worth what a million in facebook stock would have been it's it's gone i think up thirty percent since then so it's like you know million would have been one point three right so that's the like where the stock landed at its was about double so at its peak it would have been double right so and so in that one we made the mistake of basically optimizing for really intangible things one one that seemed really tangible was like they weren't gonna take our whole team and i was like oh i don't wanna like toast at the celebration party of this acquisition and be like but not you for they didn't hire you guys so like you know it's been awesome the rest of us were gonna go and you guys you won't believe the recommendation letter i'm a write you right like that that would been just some cab money thanks for last night exactly so that that wasn't gonna feel good of course as soon as we rejected them and they were like and i was like well the team thing they're like dude but i just hired them a few months later we just didn't have the head count yet like he's was like oh he's like that's why and i was like yeah the commute was really far down there he's was like dude we have an s f office we could've got you i was like oh the commute they have a bus like a bus that basically has like a restaurant cafe like toilet internet tv on the bus that's not even a real commute anymore yeah people on the bus complained they're like oh my god like the the line for the pedicure on the bus was so long this morning it's like alright you i don't know what you're can worry about anyway so we made a decision we made it was we made a really hard decision edit it whatever ended up fine but i i guess like my point is it's really hard to forecast and predict these things and especially hard to forecast and predict what stock is gonna be worth down the road that's awesome right so so i have another topic that i wanna go to alright quick i two quick ideas one is around what i just talked about predictions so there's this company that brandon sent me that's called pre taste i don't i don't even know what this is an horrible name pre taste you go to pre taste dot p r c i taste dot com and it's some kind of like basically it's a prediction engine i don't even honestly know exactly how this works but basically what it's doing is it's using data like cameras like historical trends whatever and what is trying to do is tell the person in the back like how many burgers to put on the stove like how how many how many fries to take out of the freezer because it's basically like how can we help you predict demand and so this idea aside i actually think that there's like a lot of different ways where this is really valuable so for example we own a e commerce store and we're always trying to predict like how much inventory should we order we're ordering you know six to nine months in advance sometimes and it's so hard to forecast what's the world gonna be like six months from now it's like yeah it turns out there was a pandemic a war a war like in you know stem checks that like caused everything to go up and then like everything that could go down and then shipping would broke and like it wasn't impossible to predict but every bet like every better prediction saves us a lot of money and so i actually think that there's like a whole bunch of business problems that entrepreneurs could go after that basically just help you predict how much demand there will be there's a couple of different ways you could go about this so for example for our e com store it'd be nice to know how other e com stores are trending are we all trending up trending down by how much percent year over year in our category because that would kinda tell us like where the overall market demand is another prediction might be you know if i'm a if i'm a restaurant what is the foot traffic or the sort of drive thru traffic like this time of year right september or in this weather pattern how much traffic should i expect today that might tell me what i need for staffing and for you know food today versus any other day and if you just think about like if you can be smarter and cut waste by ten to fifteen percent in in these types of businesses and these types of industries that's probably gonna add up into like the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars per year of money saved and so i think these business were very interesting because this whole like demand prediction industry is very interesting to me dude i have done a ton of research and the trends predict predicting business obviously like we have this thing called trends and before launching that i was like what what do we do i think i told you about this years ago but everything i'm about to say from years ago of research and i'm doing it mostly off memory so i'm gonna be a little bit off but not totally off but have you heard of this company called w g s n i think i told you about them yeah they're the ones who like they like say like the color of the year is lavender and the smell of the year is like you know yeah literally or whatever but listen to this so they're publicly traded so these numbers are actually facts so the two thousand one just sorry two thousand twenty one revenue was ninety one million pounds it's british company so ninety one million pounds so i i don't know what that would be a hundred thirty dollars yeah something yeah like i don't know the conversion of monopoly money to real money but no ninety one million pounds get listen to their adjusted deep or their eb was forty one million so basically for every dollar they made forty five was like net income profit and what they do is they tell you which colors are gonna be popular and i'm pretty sure the product it they they only have sixty five hundred customers so they're paying like twenty five grand a year or something like that and i think the product basically is a quarterly pdf that tells you what colors they think might be popular and i'm almost positive the way that they get this is they put like tablets at fashion schools and they just ask students like what they're feeling what they're liking things like that so it's like they're asking fashion people i guess the people who are like i guess they like like are you a hips are you a gay guy who lives in four green brooklyn like what like whatever you the qualifications are for like you are whatever you think is cool the norm you know like me are gonna like start wearing you know what i'm saying like what like later ten months yeah yeah oh do you are you at eighteen year old who has a hundred thousand followers on tiktok check oh okay so like whatever they think there's gonna be cool that's what they like what they predict is gonna be cool and it's just a pdf and a you real life use case of this is like starbucks is gonna like make a hundred thousand uniforms millennial pink is the new color so therefore let's make sure our name tags are this color so it's a no brainer to spend twenty five thousand dollars to get this like quarterly pdf as well as the ability to like dm someone who works at w and say like which shade of green is like the thing that we should be using and so that's an interesting business in this trend predicting space i i talked to somebody who does like a fashion company or whatever and they were like a fashion nobody or whatever yeah as you can tell i wear a blue shirt yeah my fashion sense you it's frozen in like the third grade right like i was writing cursive the last time i thought about that the and they were like lemons so in this year and i was like what like like i didn't i didn't understand their what does that mean a lemon like i thought they're fruit and they're i i thought they were talking about like literally like what you eat and they were like no as like a print or a pattern or a color and i was like okay so i was like it sounds like you're just making things up i just pulled up their dashboard and they were like no like what look at the difference between like lemon and pineapple and it's like lemon pineapple we're we're everywhere recently weren't they it was so pat is bad example but it was like you know basically like you you guys pick is apple's hot right now no apples apples are fucking out dude apples are like you of they're so out right now lemons are so in pineapple what does that mean in like thomas are so in it's like like a bloody shirt of a lemon on a shirt yeah like a design with lemon on it or a a pattern or whatever right like alright or or you know same thing with like scent and color palettes and things like that and so and i was like there's no way i was like this is all just like you know isn't this just you know had agency fluff they're just fluff each other with these like you know random mass like things and they're like no like this stuff is like the bible to us we we need to know what people are caring about in order to do i don't if it's this exact w aws n or whatever i don't know if that's the exact one but they're like this could be concept of like knowing which colors which sense which which styles which like dude our in so that's so exhausting yeah sounds like a horrible business to be in like if i'm gonna be in the fashion business i'm gonna be in the men's tuxedo business that shit has not changed for literally a hundred years have you seen jack and titanic like that's the same shit i'm going straight big and tall for men because literally the only criteria is like do you fit right you fit if you fit you're in if yeah don't fit you're out that that's your only i was like that's what i like i like a simple just or no when it comes to fashion it's just do you fit or not because i just can't find stuff that fits dude fashions exhausting i i i that's not a business i wanna be in although i do think like there are some brands you know what brand freaking crush it and i never buy any other stuff though because it's just too expensive but a louis louis vuitton there like two cases louis pecan yeah l lp p dude they've crushed it for like a hundred and fifty two hundred years and it's the same ass logo the same colors and it's just timeless i do love those timeless things they they do well there's there's like a little arbitrage going around i don't know you've seen this but like with euro months ago somebody said this they're are like because the dollar the euro like got to parity and the luxury stores hadn't changed the prices so basically like things were always typically priced higher in dollars than in euros or whatever so if might get that backwards but like you the louis vuitton bag you if you were in paris you could buy it in euros for a certain price that same bag was selling for more that same day if you just sold it in us dollars to a us customer and in paris you would also get the vat refund so you'd get you basically met getting something like thirty to thirty five percent under market and that was like your spread that you could then go sell for in the united states it was like kinda crazy and so there's like a whole businesses that are around these like the version of a drug mule so it's like you can just pay someone who's traveling to like stuff a louis vuitton bag in they're in their suitcase to bring it over for you across the border and just because like you know going flying to europe to do this yourself it's kinda inconvenient but there's already people flying from europe to the us every day and so there's whole businesses that are based around this like travel arbitrage and fragmented i just did research on one of these that i discovered it's called grab so the url is g r a b r dot io o so they went with like the spelling and the dot io o so you know they're really a startup but it's not grab dot io o and their whole sc is shop anywhere travel everywhere i guess that's a really bad tagline but basically what it means is it connects you with people who are with these drug mules these louis vuitton mules it connects you with people who are going to overseas places and you they'll buy shit for you and you'll give them the money and it's like a marketplace for that this is i've got the stupid example of that there's a thing called a wicked laser because i'm like grown up i'm like is the we part just like yourself describing a standard laser or is it actually called i'm much of of your old with money basically there's easily i i found this laser online this laser order online that's so strong that they made it illegal in america and if you shine something like a piece of paper it catches it catches fire and you can't have it because it reaches jets in the air and it's a chinese company and obviously i saw this laser and it's a three hundred dollar laser but you could always ship it to someone in canada and i'm like i want a laser that can light should on i'm fire like why do you not want that that will go perfect in my collection of like taser just one laser i baby gun a blazer yeah a blazer for beds my laser so i had to find someone who would buy this in china for me and get it from canada to america for my three hundred dollar laser wow and so should you should go work at grab dot io o that's what you should go do yeah yeah yeah we're just gonna sponsor every cell like subreddit like do you like lasers tired of not getting your lasers tired of driving to canada for your fear yes he's grab you so crowded for you bring it to you you're twelve year old with money this is i saw this tiktok speaking of a cool lasers i saw this tiktok of a laser pointer that somebody was in their bed and they're pointing it at their light switch they go watch this and they just held it on the light they go it and they applied just enough pressure just and i'm like this not real i'll god all this edited this i was like the comments were like that bro it's not real but like is is weird is it how's it work though i know this one isn't real but could it happen because the imagine just not having to get out of your bed to turn your light off at night just grabbing your laser pointer off the beds stand and turning your light off that's dude so just imagine getting an instagram bad you you guy go watch this and he shines something across room and it lights it on fire that's what i got called with these wicked lasers wait to wait how'd the lights switch to go down don't no man i i never got to the bottom of it i liked and followed to find out report too they got me they said if i didn't forward that that take back to ten people my family would die of lasers so i had to do it oh you're i was stupid wanna tell you about another thing that's kinda interesting so you know like i think you met up with this guy i think his name he's like strip mall guy on twitter yeah i i know it's really same guy i'm one of those same new people yeah no well strip strip ball guy is his fake names it's be trent no there's another guys real strip maybe they're two different alright i think real estate trent and trip in strip mall guy yeah i met up with the strip balm guy and we became friends and so i have to make sure i don't accidentally say his name so one of those guys i forgot which one now sorry tweeted about private security hey it caught my eye because he goes man private security is booming right now i know so many like i've i've seen so many cops who were retired and are just doing this because it's better money and i was like what like okay tell me more and so and so i started looking into this and basically you know very very very briefly but do you know much about this like private security like you know like trend or industry i know that we used to hire them for our events because the insurance made you have one and you and i had a buddy who we knew who's or a friend of a friend who started a security business he started like a uber for bodyguard right like did didn't work he no he that would failed but he tried to make it like sexy it's like he just he used it not sexy so basically okay so there's some big players in this thing so private security so there's companies like security toss or if you just go to a u s dot com it's allied universal security which i think those are multi billion dollar companies yeah so one's eleven billion another one seven billion i think they do everything from like mall cops to airports to events to whatever else but like it goes like smaller and smaller and more niche like down down as you go like corporate security so for example i remember when i was at at working at a company i saw on the ceo's calendar a a meeting that was like with like the private security detail to go over like the latest updates to the private security i was like you got private security it's like well yeah like you know it's worth rich worth a lot like you know like worth the lot of this company so the company literally pays for private security for the executives to be able to to you know to go out do their thing and be be safe and so i found this kinda of interesting and it makes it like it makes sense to me and it makes sense to me that there's like a private world out there for kind of like retired either army know military or police that might be higher paying and potentially you know easier your job than what they're doing today who who would the executives had security i wanna say but are you but which did you say the company i didn't hear you no because that would be easy to figure out at that point yeah i i you know like zuckerberg and bezos they release what their security budget is each year and i think bezos was six million which is to me not a lot of money right for facebook they they said last year twenty six million was spent on zuckerberg and his family which was six percent higher than in twenty twenty so that's kinda crazy right twenty six million just on his personal security you know how many people work work for the secret service no six thousand you know how many people they talked yeah you know how many people they protect twenty five twenty five people spoken like a manual who owns as a taser and a laser to dude it i just not i met a secret service agent at a wedding this weekend and i just asked them everything i go tell me everything and i you know they couldn't tell me anything really i was just like shitty secret service guy he's like they're a fan of the pot happy to share they just read out the wikipedia to me but like it was pretty interesting that's cool no i don't know anything about security but i think it's of speaking of tiktok there was a a tiktok of a guy who saw jeff bezos on the corner in seattle just like waiting to cross the street and he just like hey jeff and he like had his tiktok recording or whatever and he's like you know i was going today whatever he's going fantastic and he's like he's ready to like walk across street and they go and somebody in the comments was like the top comment was like check out the hand of the security guy and you look and he had basically a false i think it was like a false hand and his basically his real hand is like in his pocket like probably holding a gun or a taser of some some kind of weapon and he just had like a kind of a fake hand out and i saw that i was like that's awesome that that's that's awesome dude do you know what's even weirder is there was a i i'm a super fan there was a fight backstage amongst the fighters and security got involved and i kept wondering who the fuck is doing security that keep a fighters from not fighting each other yeah you know what i mean like what what like what type of job are are they getting into you what i mean like they just see like something happening and like what are you going to do well you saw the the woman that dana white hired the best buy lady did you see that she was the football player she like kept the woman or someone was trying to rob the best buy and she like got down low and like an o line like it was like pushing her out of the way yeah the robber was trying to run out the store and the security guard from best buy just starts blocking this person would getting this guy from getting out and he's like he's desperately trying to get out because he can't just be like stealing and just get caught inside the store and she just ends up tackling him into like a bunch of boxes she gets fired from best buy because best buy like hey liability you attacked a you know text somebody in our store and she's like i'm like i'm doing my job i'm a security guard at best buy what did you want me to do and data white was like that's bullshit like he went on instagram and i was like who is this woman i wanna hire her and she's like now he's like personal security guard or something like that like she works with that really yeah dude i always see those guys and i'm like who like you need like an israeli trained like secret service agent i mean who are you gonna have to protect a c fighter from hitting another old fighter jerry spring security guards have years of experience breaking this up this is really good enough a tangent but do you remember how remember steve the security guard from jerry speakers also has damage so i probably like the top or on cameo right now yeah next think kevin from the office or gilbert god oh shoot i think gilbert just died actually rip ip but whatever i guess you got stop did you know that dm x died yeah dude yeah i saw that i you you treated it out don't you tell me you do this information you went albert that reminds me of what dave if you know i don't leave my house dave chappell was talking about like celebrities and how it's weird they talked to them during tragedies and he's like just imagine like nine eleven and and job job rule was like being interviewed actually and then they're like what you know we we need job right now to make sense at this tragedy where's job where's john so when you'll give me job we need john to make sense with this strategy this tragedy that's what you it's like you wondering like the button anyone fill me in that that dm max had passed but yeah is his by the did you see this this blog blockbuster is we'll close on this little last random thing but check out this blog post so this guy listened to the episode that we did with rob deer which is probably i don't know if not the most popular episode we did one of the most popular episodes we've done people love that one and one of the things that rob the one of the reasons people love it is because turns out they're kinda of fun loving skater guy from mtv like turns out he's like an absolute nut when it comes to personal productivity and like personal efficiency you know his quote on there was i am human optimization and one of the things he had said was that he writes his wife a handwritten note every day and so this guy wrote this blog was like the top post on hacker news over the weekend and it's called write a note to your spouse every day and note a note a today keeps the divorce attorney away and he goes you know i was listening to my first million and rob d was on there and he says that he writes a note to his wife every day because sometimes otherwise she would be the last person to hear from him at the end of the day about what he was working on how was feeling he's was usually tired by then and wasn't really giving it you know his a plus say he goes for the last six months i wrote a not a a note to my wife every single day here's goes alright that's a lot lie you know i did it most days but like whatever here's how it went and he goes it's amazing like we're on the same page about like what's going on in our lives our kids our finances how we're spending our time we talk more than ever now you know we have more trust we feel less stressed we're less aggravated with each other and like we're better parents because we're kind of like more in communication with ourselves about parenting and he goes you know here's why writing is thinking so just writing helped me clear my mind it wasn't just me dumping my thoughts under her is me like getting my own mind clear and he gives this outline he goes here's what i write first i write gratitude like something about her you know for her for her how hard she works for her looks whatever then what i'm working on today and like my goals or my deadlines anything i'm excited about anything that's bothering me any ideas i have just like random ideas on my head about parenting or fixing stuff around the house transactional stuff like oh we need to remember to do this we have to do this but don't forget that questions like hey are we going to that thing or hey do we ever book that you know hey do we have an event coming up and lastly again gratitude for the life we have the the things we have the time we have the kids we have etcetera because i don't do all these sections every day but those are the general categories of things i try to write it takes me just about thirty minutes if i'm not distracted and you know turn you know it's been a huge like win for is it like a physical note or a email i think it's a physical note not her so sure i guess i should start doing this that sounds pretty cool right and then he did this youtube video with his wife like where they both like talked about actors because the post blew up on hacker music out like probably you know hundred thousand views or something like that so then they like did an interview together like talking about this little habit it's pretty cool right yeah this is awesome i just dm him while you're talking saying this is amazing and this is a really good headline noted it write a note to your spouse every day a note a day keeps a door divorce attorney away this is a really good title this is a beautiful find i think i guess i'll start doing this right this is pretty sick it sounds similar smart maybe i'll start by talking to her they're don't no it seems like a no brainer i'm like reading this and i'm like all upside pretty much no downside why am i not doing this right good for me how could i we a lot of doing this sorry my brain i'm any valid reason not to do this no like the calculations are like going in my head i'm like yeah because you seem like a good husband do you you probably already do this you probably leave a sticky note on our pillow every morning no not at all i i as i was reading it the same thing i was like why would i not do this it seems really obvious but a apparently no one does it my first rob husband's one episode at at a time my i feeling we had to we had to leave him with something useful because we definitely got off on like you know a tangent tangent during this episode dude it worked for rob i mean rob is like successful have you seen his wife i mean she's very beautiful i'm pretty sure she was like a a play mate like a like a like a i don't know what the word is playboy model or something i mean she's like pretty pretty amazing yeah i'm definitely doing this now yeah i i do this why this guy writes so many words picture but he owns like if you google here's i who here's one of the ways that i knew that rob was like crazy rich if you google rob d home there's like thirteen different articles and it's like all about like a different google like ten million dollar house did you mean homes yeah and he buys all these houses and he seems happy he's got his act together so yeah i'm on board i guess i guess i'll do this so fine alright bro