alright sam i wanna play a game i wanna start this with a game where i'm gonna read you the and you don't know this by you didn't know i gonna do this we have the i'm gonna read you the most trafficked websites in the united states and as a simple test your a business guy you study the business world i want you to tell me do you know who's the owner or ceo of these businesses okay alright i like this game number one google dot com sergei and larry page sergei something and larry page correct next one youtube chad h and early yep and jared and one other guy steve chen exactly correct reddit hoffman and oh hey correct amazon bezos okay number five now we're getting we're getting into the good stuff okay so first this is i think he'll get this one easy facebook zuckerberg okay number six porn hub bastion something a german guy incorrect sir yeah i feel like i could rude where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel in so this is the number six most trafficked website in the united states three billion visits in in like in a month is it called mind geek or mind freak or something mind geek is a name of a company that owned it however the founding story is pretty crazy and i don't know if you're a sci guy or a fantasy guy but in in many fantasy book series there's this there's like this this concept like in lord of the rings there's the ring or in harry potter there's the elder wand and an the idea that there's there's these assets that are so powerful that people wanna own it but whenever you own it your ownership is gonna be very short lived it's almost that the the the item is too powerful it sort of corrupt you and it puts a target on your back and other people start coming for you it's a real sticky situation one might say this is like it's game of thrones right everybody wants to sit on the iron throne but when you're on the iron throne you're not gonna last very long and so this is a game of thrones style story for tech that i went down a rabbit hole i wanna share with you because i didn't know this story so let me tell let me tell you how it went down okay so we're rewind the clock we go back to two thousand and five up until then you know internet's been out for rough been been semi mainstream for ten years and of course porn was popular right away but the way that all porn sites worked was it was like yahoo it was a directory of links so you would go to whatever i don't know jug world dot com and it would just it would just show you a hundred links to places where you could go watch videos not the videos but to the other websites links to other websites are links to other photos mostly photos at the time it wasn't even that much video so two thousand five a big milestone happens which is that youtube launches and the youtube launches with a pretty simple proposition which is we'll make it really easy to host a video online you don't have to host it on your own servers we'll host it on our servers and then also instead of just sending somebody that file you send them just a link and they can watch it here and we'll just have all the videos here in one place which was mind blowing sounds so obvious now but at the time was different and if you haven't read it go read the sequoia memo of his investment roll up both his investment in youtube if you wanna see how like uncertain and how like small and non obvious this was at the beginning so youtube launches it starts to get popular now there's copycat like about in the porn version of this red tube right just off of youtube red tube you pull or whatever don't bunch it bunch of these come out and they're all flooded with pirate content so they're just like kinda like lime wire back in the day they just take you know stuff that you're supposed to pay for and then we just upload it for free on here and they would have you know banner ads to make money and even though these were kind of sketchy websites they were ten x better in every way so it was more private right you didn't have to go anywhere you could just have it in your bedroom it was instantaneous right the the distance between the craving the fulfillment of the craving were were you know one click away there was infinite variety so you didn't have to pick and choose you could just keep going until you find which you like there was infinite niches and so people discovered that people were in into all kinds of weird stuff because now there was a long tail content and it was free whereas most born at time was paid because at the time there was somebody who was called the king of porn he is the guy who sitting on the gate on the iron throne at the time and this was the ceo of vivid entertainment what is m and what was vivid entertainment they're like a hollywood studio they're baking like you know porn or normal movies no they're making porn but they're making it like in the hollywood way where there's like an actress and there's a set and there's cameraman there's like and people buy dvds yeah by by the dvd and so vivid at the time was the king this guy was known as the king of pawn he was written up at all these articles in fact the year that he was written up at all these articles is the same year these new disruptive websites came out and revenue starts to fall and it falls fifty percent and it falls eighty percent and it just basically goes down the drain how big was it it was doing tens of millions in revenue but there were many studios like this so they were they were the biggest one but there was like you know just like in hollywood where there's many studios alright so i don't if you remember google's google bought youtube because youtube is getting a had a huge lawsuit from via these are like parallel stories youtube was also flooded with pirate content because of that they were getting sued like crazy because they were worried that they would go out of business they sold to google for like a billion and a half dollars at the same time vivid copies that playbook they look at what via is doing to youtube they start suing the crap out of all the the website and so the first owner of the throne vivid goes down then the second owner of the throne which was these like red tube and whatever they they start getting hammered as well because they're getting sued alright so who's the third one to pick up the the the baton where does porn hub come into this okay so at the time there's three college students in canada and they realized that this is a that like there's a lot of traffic to these websites they meet of out of all things at a competitive fu tournament and the guy who's the best who's well player aka chief nerd right like sir do he happens to be the best programmer of the bunch and he creates a live streaming video website to stream their fu wall competitions and there's not much of an audience for the fu football competitions but he realizes as he's building all this video tech he's like hey i think we could do the same thing for porn was the intention porn or was the intention something else and porn users use it use it most these guys made the link sites so that site i talked about jug world that's their site but they made like a hundred of these they made like a hundred directory sites just links to other websites then they see the youtube thing and they pick up this guy matt i think named matthew keys or something ke is the guy who built a video streaming sign he's the best programmer so he's like i think i can make a youtube for for this stuff and we instead of having these directories where we send the traffic away we could just keep the traffic and at the time they had already kinda like you know started to discover things they're like oh people like you know people like this people like this they were just creating other directories and eventually they looked at vivid who was the king at the time and they were like we should make our own vivid and so in the same office they created porn hub the website that was gonna host all this stuff and they created a company called browsers which is a oh yeah producer of content so they created a content producer and they created the platform the network netflix making their own shows exactly or like you know f t had the you know sister company that and by the way nobody knew these companies were linked so everybody thought these were two not only un linked companies that thought they were enemies because at the time all of the studios were hated the platforms that were giving away the content for free people didn't know that one of the biggest studios be you know was actually the owner of one of the biggest websites at the time and so in the same way that there was f t in alameda living in the same house you know kind of sharing funds browsers and porn up we're doing the same thing people just didn't know in fact the guy came out and was like quoted he was like that would be that would make no sense why would we do that that would be a hundred percent against our poor interest as browsers to do that we hate the platforms and meanwhile he was also the owner so these guys start this thing and it takes off like a rocket they they're like dude we have no idea what we fell into we were sleeping in the office we worked every single day every every weekend we couldn't hire enough this was now like two thousand and seven a eight i think so they weren't the first mover but they were they ended up becoming the biggest mover and here's why so they basically scaled this thing better than anyone else could and one of the keys was they had browsers they had their own content that was not not pirate or like it was pirate it but they owned it so they didn't care that they could use on the network so even when other stuff got taken down they still had more content than other people and so they scaled up they they go from basically like just three friends to like eighty people a hundred fifty people two hundred fifty people and they're hiring friends and family and they're like dude are they're like where do we we have an office they're like no just they started buying houses next to each other just created a neighborhood and they're all just working out of that like that one area bootstrap bootstrap no no investors no nothing so just growing because word a mile traffic and obviously it's people love what their their product and they're just coming back over and over again and the key is that this guy ke was an seo sa he came out later and he goes we were the number one rank for porn and sex on google he's like do you know how hard how competitive that is he's like i he's like that's what i did i pulled that off i became the number one search that's how we defeated all of the other things and then we had content that wasn't getting taken down so they grow to two hundred fifty they make one of the guys brothers the ceo you're the ceo you have some business experience you do this so that guy starts doing a roll up like a private equity roll up so he starts buying up all the other ones who are afraid of getting sued and so he's buying them up for cheap and is just consolidating power and just creating one big mega behemoth because then he could fight whoever was gonna sue them because now they owned all the traffic so they had something you know that's something to to to fight with and so he starts building this thing up and by the way there's this whole like industry is so funny because you think of it as a sketchy thing but like one of the sites for example that they bought it was called homegrown and it will start as a a v dhs tape exchange for like swing couples right like the most like fringe of the french thing but this get kid is a stanford nba student buys it his mom helps them raise the money and they do they do like a leverage buyout of this thing like it was actually kinda sophisticated under the hood even though on the surface it look like you know do these are you know really sketchy gray area of things but it's like stanford mba or buying this stuff so anyways fast forward to two thousand and nine they've scaled it to two hundred fifty employees they're making millions and millions of dollars right making more money than they ever knew what to do with but they're getting paranoid because they know you're sitting on the on the throne that people are gonna come for you and so they start seeing some bad stuff right the government seize nine million dollars out of one of their bank accounts just just takes it and they're like shit what do we do they start trying to move money around they hire security twenty four seven they're followed by you know black tinted suvs the keys guy the seo guy he just quit he's like i i can't take this anymore too stressful they're like dude you walking away from so much money he's like i don't care i can't handle this so they finally just decide look too stressful we can't do this anymore let's cash out now there's not a lot of buyers for this thing right because institutional investors can't really buy this type of asset and now it's big how big like it was worth over a hundred million dollars so they sell it to that guy you were referring to this guy fabian and till hundred so a hundred forty million is what they sold it to him for when what was what was his background fabian background was i think he had also he was already in this space so what he did was this guy was like a programming genius so at seventeen he basically started he created a website that was just for internet traffic so it's like alexa right like internet traffic sites just that statistics sorry so he's just a nerd he loves the internet so he creates a site that tracks successful internet companies which which ones are growing the fastest however you know how i started this by reading you like what's the six most popular website in the united states he sees that the most popular websites are all porn websites and so he's like what if i create software for them so he goes to him and he's like what do you need and they're like well you know one of the hard things is we we make money off of affiliates but our affiliate tracking sucks so he builds an affiliate tracking tool that becomes the number one most used piece of code for affiliate tracking on the internet and it's being used by these poor websites and he builds that company up he's super young he's like you know twenty years old or something he sells it he's super rich now he's got hundreds of millions of dollars and so he then goes and he buys thorn hub for hundred forty million dollars and then he just like grows it like crazy so he and i think in i thinking like three to six months he doubled the profits of the business because he's this guy's just a better better operator he knew how to monetize better and he also knew how to like to to solve the problems around the content licensing so he spends a million dollars buying content licensing rights so that they don't get sued anymore he changes the name he launches like a p campaign around safe sex and he starts like you know getting in with politicians and all this stuff right and he's doing hey and he tries to do other stuff too he he buys celebs dot com and tries to create a tmz he tries to create like a bigger media empire but nothing nothing can keep up with the growth of the core asset and so he's thirty you know he he ends up thirty two years old this you know the company has five hundred employees and he's the biggest porn ty on the planet now and this guy has sort of made it however there is one problem and this problem is that like i said this the great power corrupt and people puts a target on his back people start coming after him and he's hard to find too right if you look for photos of this guy google like you actually can't see that many pictures of right well he did a couple interviews at tech conferences later when they started to try like branch out so similar to how only fans has tried to branch out and hire like musicians be like hey show behind the scenes content content of your your music process or whatever they're trying to branch out he tried to do this same kinda hard when your name is porn hub the well he created other websites right so he created separate websites altogether that he wanted to use the same team and cash to to to start but crazy stuff is happening right so like he he's on one hand he's figuring out how to monetize it way better and he's like oh like and the by the way he's hiring like data scientists and the data scientists are like sir we found it the best way to get a free user to pay for content he's a video that is two minutes and fifty nine seconds and that is the point where a man is most committed and is willing like you know to impulsive buy something if we try to put a pay before that or after that it's not gonna work two minutes to fifty nine seconds is what we just found is the optimal time in order to like increase revenue and they do they increase revenue a lot oh there's one other thing i didn't mention which is along the way people start to get curious they're like okay he's building this huge empire he's rolling up all these sites he's buying more and more sites like how much cash does this guy have how did he generate so much cash and what later comes out is that he got a three hundred and sixty two million dollar loan from unknown secret investors and it turns out that basically there was two guys who were he went all the big banks and the big banks were like look we can't do this we can't lend the money so he goes to private it turns out he raised from a hundred twenty five secret lenders they they're their names have not been revealed except for one group their names have been revealed it was a bunch of x i don't know if it was jpmorgan or morgan stanley whatever some some big bank two bankers from their spun out created their own like lending firm specifically to lend just to this one play they're like this is gonna be so lucrative that we have to just leave our jobs quit our jobs raise money and just lend it to this guy and they lend it at a twenty percent interest rate and so even though he was growing and making all money he had huge like monthly commitments because he raises three hundred sixty million at twenty percent interest yeah so his is his his debt payment or his interest payment is eighty or a hundred million dollars a year sixty million a year exactly and and they're and they're also under attack like the ceo he owns a sixteen million dollar house it gets burned down by arc and bill ac comes into the do you wanna know how bill act comes into this into this story so in the game of thrones now bill ac comes in from westeros and he's like he's reading an article one day this is the story i don't know how true this is but the story is he's reading article in the new york times and it's about a girl a a teenage girl who's sent nude photos to her boyfriend the boyfriend then leaked it onto one of these websites and enactment like that's so wrong and she couldn't get it taken down and and she's felt so bullied in whatever he's got daughter he's like this is terrible and so he's like i he's and so you know how right now he's out a crusade to take down harvard take down business insider he goes on a crusade to take down porn up and so he's he tries to find it he's like dude this is like some offshore company by this german you know single owner i can't pressure him he's not a public stock i can't become an activist what can i he's like so he thinks about he's first he's stumped then he's like wait a minute what if i like you know when the us government sanctions russia he's like what if i sanctioned porn up by cutting off their flow of money so he's like hey they need payment processors it's so what bill act does as he goes and he he immediately text the ceo of visa and he sends them the article he's like your company is enabling this these guys are making money off of this you better do something about this and the ceo visa like dude i don't wanna any trouble from bill black agrees that it's the wrong you know it's wrong it's not a huge portion of visa revenue and he text them back i'm on it like within five minutes i'm on it one day later visa cuts off porn so does mastercard so does you know and so they they lose their ability to actually process payments until they later like you know had to change all their policies say like now verify everybody with their license and shit like that order bill has this old tweet because if you've been victim by porn hub or any of their you may be eligible for a large amount of compensation and i encourage you to email this person who console seventy plus victims who can help you pursue your claim so like puts always his weight behind this thing this is this is pre israel pre harvard pre business etcetera yeah billy the porn up is this is is who he's going after hell has no fury like bill act scorn right like yeah he is crazy he goes after so the crazy part is the story doesn't end there so you i thought and you thought that porn was owned by a company called me geek and mind geek is run by this guy fabian and till however a few years ago or sorry three three or four years into owning it he's grown the company like crazy however he gets in trouble trouble for tax tax fraud or tax like evasion or something like that he and he's in germany i don't know all the details are around the tax thing but i know that he gets a trouble on taxes he's forced to sell on a fire sale he sells it for seventy seven million dollars oh wow so the value has gone down somehow i mean the sixth most traffic website in america sells for seventy seven million dollars that's how much morning brew sold for like come on this is the only time where i'm allowed to go to on porn hub on i work in peter so i could look at stats so according to similar web porn hub gets two billion visits a month average visitor duration ten minutes which is a lot and ten pages per visit so they just get a ton of traffic so it's just huge that and by the way now let me tell you so this is a choose at of venture story aren't you curious what happened to those original founders who sold it for the hundred and forty million dollars what are they doing now i'm i'm curious about them and i'm curious about who who bought porn hub to for seventy seven million dollars so which one do you want you wanna know about the shadowy business who bought it or do you wanna know about the original founders choose your own adventure let's i'm wanna go in both but i'm gonna go with the original for for now so if you go look at their linkedin now which i what's your name so but we're the one guy's name i mean the so one is stefan mano another one is us sam yous and then there's the guy k all of them if you go to their linkedin now there is no mention of of any of this they they're like yeah we it's all about their phil it's whatever but here's the interesting thing so they guy yous it he sells and he's like okay i just wanna get away from all this that was too stressful too sketchy it became way bigger than we started like we didn't intend to do that it just sort of one thing led to another i need to reset and in his reset year he's like well why don't how do invest all this money i have and so he starts reading and he reads a hundred and fifty books about investing and he comes away a warren buffett disciple and he's like you know what i'm gonna go into value investing and he creates a a berkshire hathaway for internet companies called val and val is basically like constellation software they're just buying up profitable cash flowing internet companies dude they're killing it they're killing it they're now they're now it's a billion dollar company now they have over a hundred million in eb every year just from the they've acquired like whatever fifty companies or so they have like five hundred million in revenues and then they have like twenty to thirty percent at profit margins and just listen to the guy so they create this thing called the val f group and they're like alright we're going to you know first they start buying up like other content websites because that's what they know and then they start studying constellation software which is the same thing that andrew wilkinson send did and several many other people have done because constellation is like what are the og of this and he's like i read the stuff that warren buffett was doing on stock market but there's private private software companies is even better he goes it's ten times better because there's only there's like thirty thousand of these companies and there's no competition to buy them what year what years this two thousand sixteen and so he he starts topping their playbook and he's like look this market is opaque it's inefficient i think you could deploy a high rate of capital and get economics similar to what you know the mo of the previous times where so he's like murdoch you know he rolled up cable and newspapers back in the fifties and sixties he's like that's what i think i'm gonna be able to do with these you know profitable software companies example of the companies are ne avatar a cloud based car rental software company designed to automate a bunch of the stuff or it's like a construction software business just like things that you don't even know exist but like this one has been around this called m mac practice in thousand and four started lincoln nebraska it's very best in class software for chiropractors exactly so the first company they bought twenty sixteen is something that sells software to small hotels then the next year they buy three the next year they buy eight now they're buying twenty to twenty five a year and they're just buying them that are like they're small and the same thing that constellation so i think constellation bought like thousands of companies during the last few years i think the average size constellation software business is three million dollars in revenue isn't it exactly exactly and so i don't know it's revenue eb but it's it's small they're not like it's not huge pe deals it's the same thing these guys are looking for companies that are five million to ten million in revenue and so they go and they're they're just studying constellation they're like it's great basically you buy them you need them to run on their own individually so that it doesn't add more b to headquarters and they're just buying stuff all over europe and he's like he goes right now my problem is i'm trying to decide between a great opportunity a good opportunity which is just this guy is great did he partner and i think he partnered with some of the other the other founders right yeah yeah it was i think two or three of them that i know it was the two of abusive and the man s one but i don't know what the keys guy does not they don't even mention porn hub on so if you go to val off dot com are history like that that that words that i even mentioned anywhere yeah there's parts of my history i don't mention either right like hey we all redid it these guys are planning to go ip which is pretty pretty crazy so that's where these guys went which is insane now what happened to the site who bought it so the story that came out was that the you know who's the next person on the throne they said that actually the employees bought it out for seventy seven million like the two executives bought it out but that didn't smell quite right where do these where do these employees get seventy seven million dollars to buy this right like how much were these employees making and it turns out that there was actually somebody who was the money behind it that didn't want their name associated with it and it was this guy i don't even know how you say his name it's like the word bernard but it's missing some letters it's just burned berg mayer and he's an austrian businessman which is just already sounds fucking like sick and he's so now he he owns the majority of this he he the majority of this he worked in kind of like finance for a long time goldman sachs he worked at hong kong and london and blah blah he bought red tube in twenty thirteen he sold it to mind originally and then now he bought the whole company back and so he is the principal owner of this thing and nobody saw it and most people kinda thought it's a kind of a debt asset because when you look at the reported financials or makes almost no profit and they're like jeez how do these guys make hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue with no profit one of the reasons why is this guy basically lends money to the company and takes out two million a month in just debt payments himself plus they shift revenue around all these subsidiaries so there's all these shell companies so you don't actually they they've completely obligated how much money this this entity makes it's so that's who currently owns it but even he's going down now he's getting the divorce his wife had came out and is like she wants him to cut ties with the company blah blah blah and i think it's about to exchange hands again because now a private equity group bought it and do you wanna know the name of the private equity group that bought hub yes i do ethical capital partners do what of them how many companies they own one this is deal they formed just buy this they named it like ethical capital var is i mean that's the the subway eat fresh of of a private equity and so these guys are now the owners of the thing and who knows where to go back first of all great story that was a great story i was all the whole time second look up this guy bernard it it's he has a really weird spelling there is only a one photo of him that i could find and he's smoking a sig bad photo yeah he just smoking a sick it looks like like if he told me that he was part of the mob i believe it he looks like either a mob guy or like a soccer cook like you know the manchester united coach after a loss like one of the two yeah he just he just just rip it a sig in this in this photo and he worked at goldman so he's also an acquisitions guy like he's a deal maker that's what he does this isn't insane first of all i i would never trade places with any of these people maybe the original owners that is kinda cool but the last two and the new owner i would not trade places with any of them for any amount of money i would not wanna go through this if you google this guy's name it's pictures of its wife and then fighting over this stuff this sounds miserable can you imagine being married to someone who runs this company what i wanna know is what is it like to work there how do you stay professional like and be try to be objective about certain stuff like you know when you're talking about at shepherd or one of your companies and you're like hey this skew is doing a little bit better maybe we should try in red and blue you know we have black let's just do it in red and blue as well what are the conversations like at at porn hub or or mind key when they're like talking about like oh this category is doing well let's explore that one a little bit further do know what i know what they do right it's it's the chuck cheese tokens thing so like if you ever just had to take cash out of your wallet and keep putting it into chuck cheese machines you'd be like what am i doing this is terrible but what they do is when you walk in and they exchange money for these fake tokens and then they rename everything and it feels like it's all like you know fake you know it's this is it's like abstract away that's what happens because i felt this even when we were at twitch and twitch is a lot more reputable than this obviously but at the end of the day we were in these meetings that felt like life or death high stakes everything is on the line like the world is gonna end and i'm like this is like twenty one year olds playing video games in their bedroom like who cares like none none of this matters and like you we would hire people from harvard and mit like the brightest of the bright and they're optimizing like you know the the mid roll ad pop up of you know a stupid energy drink in the middle of this stupid video game stream but none of it feels stupid once you're in there because it becomes abstract away and you're playing with the data the numbers and the revenue and and and you come up with all these terms for community and content and whatever and nobody is i feel like nobody looks at the fact that we're all just making hotdog dogs anymore well you lose sense of it i my wife worked at facebook out of college she went to ivy league school it's a smart woman she had all these made job job offers whatever and she starts working at facebook and i'm like oh sarah what are you working on and she started explaining to me in a really complex way i'm like oh you're just trying to come up you're just you guys just created like a little sticker emoji that you could put on photos so more people share photos and it was like it was like looking down i was like yeah yeah that's it you know what i mean like you you got that moment where you think of like facebook is this amazing thing of which it is but then you like start talking individual individual people it's like oh you create a thing that when i stick my tongue out like the cartoons tongue goes out that's cool and then reality you're doing it just to get people addicted more to posting and sharing stuff yeah you know that's alright it happens when we were at camp mfa and we're talking to mr beast team and he's giving us a tour of the facilities and our group is like billionaires and philanthropist it and we're walking through and we're like wow this is this is incredible these people are geniuses tell me how do you get people to click the thumbnail and they're like you know we increased brightness and saturation by fourteen percent and look at how many thumbnail tests we do and we're like incredible work and we're so wrapped up it and it all feels so real and then you come home and you click out his video and it'll be like train versus pi and it's like this train is gonna drive it into this hole or is it gonna jump over we don't know it's like oh wait dude i had a friend named ty used to do this shit is backyard like oh you're locking yourself in a room for seven days like i actually know an idiot named jake who did that without youtube like you just did that and we were like you just fucking at jake's till at his room he's like yeah that's what he's doing but like when you're in it you can get in this reality distortion field where you feel like you're doing god's work out there and i that's what happens at all these companies did it is still cool like like i remember he elon us elon musk gave us talk and he he's like you know you're doing someone was like you're doing all these amazing things you're sending people to mars they're building cars or same plan or whatever and he's like yeah but it's also cool just to make a game that like entertain people like that's cool too so i don't wanna discount this stuff but it is fun to put perspective on this and be i think you just can't see you're yourself too seriously right it's cool to do do a do your best it's cool to try to win a game how many people are gonna watch the super bowl next sunday and it's you know bunch of guys eyes chasing around a ball than the arbitrary set of rules right if you if you look like it's cool to be into it it's cool to be great at it but let's also not take ourselves too seriously let's remember like you know what this what says okay anymore or it's something fun or it's something light lighthearted i've met three guys who run porn sites some are popular some aren't popular one of them is very popular dude imagine running a not popular porn site all of the downside with none peanuts you love that joke that you state whoever your friend is running the unpopular porn imagine know bad you have to be an if you can't sell boob as you can't sell anything dude it's what be like this guy launched one and then like within three or four days it was doing like eighty or a hundred thousand views a day but he was like yeah we don't make any money because the ads are horrible like there there's no way to make money on this shit and so they had like so they had traffic and all three of those guys i didn't get it they're all borderline autistic probably on the more autistic part of that line and they were like i remember like thinking and talking to them i'm like yeah but doesn't this make you feel weird this this and this and they're like yeah but the spreadsheet said this number and tomorrow it's gonna say this bigger number and so all i'm just trying to i'm just looking at that spreadsheet i that just in trying to make that number bigger and it just so happens that it's on this website they are all pretty black and white about that you know what i mean yeah yeah exactly yeah once you get in you start operating and by the way i remember reading once so max le who is one of the most you know brilliant people in silicon valley this guy you know one of the c cofounder of paypal and without max you know there's no paypal which could probably say for a couple people but specifically anybody at paypal will tell you that max is technical brilliance in fighting the fraud fraud yeah kept paypal alive when any other money transmitting service just died because the fraud just had too much to gain and they were too sophisticated and as a young company it's really hard to defend against it and max like went to war with them and actually like fend them off enough where they succeeded it it's a brilliant programmer right chess whatever master brilliant programmer or blah blah blah creates paypal this is like monumental thing his next act was a company called slide and slide basically made like virtual pets for myspace i was like what it's like yeah you know like on your myspace profile your facebook profile we're gonna make little apps like you can you know engage with your friends and interact like interact how it's like well we just invented this app called bitch slap where you could bitch slap any one person a day on your on facebook it's like what yeah but only one and so they then it got even lame didn't it it like be him an ad tech company well how do you monetize right like with all these things that monetize ads and so they were creating slideshow shows and music video tools but anyways it was stuff to go on your mice myspace at facebook profiles and they go you know max you built slide they got really popular then the platforms kind of shut shut down some of the capabilities and i think they ended up selling to google for some small amount and and and they were like max what you learn from slide small for it was still a multi hundred million dollar exit but i think they had raised a lot of money so i don't think anybody really made too much so i i'll never forget this i read this quote and i realized oh shit this describes my life and so i read this like fifteen years ago i've still never forgot it they go what did you learn from slide and he said what i he goes i realized you gotta be really careful what you what projects you pick because anything can be optimized to infinity and he it's like what do you mean goes you know we picked that we were gonna do these like widgets on top of profiles and guess what like the smartest people in the world can spend every moment of every day optimizing that to make that more engaging more viral more addictive higher monetization and that's what we did we spent years of our lives doing that and i think that was like his big takeaway was like he didn't say it by the i think the imply things like kinda like what a waste like be careful because everything can every knob can get optimized to infinity he he became like the best po stick player in the world like and i've felt this many times in my life and i i don't really even know how to deal with it to be honest because when you have the realization you're like shit should i just stop or i don't know i don't wanna stop this is like my job this is successful business should it like with my e com store i feel this like you know you changed the color of this and then you run this ab test you it's like dude what are we doing like is this like is this what we should be doing with our time and our life and our creative energy and i do have that like kind of existential crisis you know every few years just thinking about this quote let me be your therapist for a minute as well as anyone else is in the situation which is your product doesn't have to change the world your product actually as a ceo or owner could be i create jobs for wonderful people and i give them a great place to work and like most people just want a nine to five and they wanna play softball all in the weekends and they wanna make sure they've got good health insurance they wanna see their kids raised and be healthy you don't need a life changing thing all the time to have a badass thing and i don't think that it's fair to compare all these products to the tesla or whatever or like these existential crisis things because like just having a piece of clothing item or item of clothing that you can give to someone or that makes you feel good about yourself or a game discipline time i mean we just have a podcast that i you could say oh we inspire people sometimes we we just jerk around and it's just funny like that is also awesome it's not the right thing to say this compared to this other thing it's so stupid when it's like no you could have all of those things and like i get inspired listening to music and then there's a lot of music that's just silly dumb stuff and there's some music that actually changes me there's some movies that changed me and then there's stupid vine skit like it's all in the same category and that's okay we can have all of that and my product could be creating a workplace that people love coming and i inspire them or it could be i just have traded a future for my daughter you know what i mean like so i don't think that your product necessarily has to be the thing you're selling but the thing you're building mean okay i feel better thank you that was good i feel better now i'm creating jobs out here dude no that is the truth or like you know what i mean lauren you're providing creative family office with the number of jobs i've created this is great yeah yeah we have created literally half a dozen jobs this last quarter i might have to become the governor of philippines because did all my jobs in in the philippines but that's alright can i just show you one thing off this list though because i had this list pulled up of the internet sites to look at this list just tell me the first thing that stands out to you and betsy it's the same thing that stands out to me i'm looking at the list of the twenty most popular most visited most used websites in the united states well the first thing but this is not what you're referring to duck dot go is number seven that's what i'm referring to dude that's that what referring to dot duck dot go what is it's more popular than yahoo and wikipedia and twitter so here's the background duck dot goes doctor was started probably twenty years ago think i mean or maybe maybe more but like it's not new started by his guy named gabe i think gabe was a a mildly successful entrepreneur or successful by any means but like amongst silicon valley it was all like a base hit i think he wrote this book called traction with justin mayer our friend and then he had this whole premise of privacy search where he said privacy is gonna be important to people we brought this up on the pod in the very first fifty episodes we're like this is so cool because what they used to do is duck dot go dot com slash like stats you could see all their web traffic and it was small at first it's basically google but you but for some it's it's google but somehow they don't show you targeted ads so i don't actually know how they make money or what the promise is entirely it's it's just ads that are targeted i think it's ads that are either not targeted or it's ads that are targeted only on what you search like the term you just search for but nothing to do with you as a person so they're not it cooking and collecting info on you in hyper personalized it to you it's just here's an ad because you're searching or here's an ad about you searching for a car here's a car ad but we it doesn't have to be sam you know that that we're tracking info on and we talked about these guys a while ago because it's kind of weird which is like this is a significantly less good google or at least that's like what it appeared to be and but we're like their traffic growing like crazy what the hell is going on and now apparently they're huge i didn't realize they it was this big i knew the trajectory was really really good i had no idea that there'd be the fifth so it was starting in two thousand and eight by the way i am blown away by this i i might have to go read that damn book then which book traction yeah this is real traction okay i i mean i mean i believe you this is crazy yeah it it is pretty wild and i've been i've been interested in duck go but i never fully got behind it because i was like this is just an inferior google but this is amazing so they say duck goes an independent privacy company for anyone who's tired of being tracked online and wants an easy solution and actually recently they raised a hundred million dollars in funding or maybe two hundred million but it was over a hundred million and i heard that none of the money actually went to the company it was simply early employees selling some of their stake meaning the company does not need cash they're very profitable which makes sense because google is like if you know i don't know how many employees google has hundred thousand they but like if you fired everyone but fifty or a hundred or two hundred people it probably could work pretty great i mean their main thing is like the most efficient best business model of all time so it makes sense why duck goes so such a good business but this is amazing that they're what is it number seven number seven most popular website ten years they went from point o one percent market share to now point six three there's that insane they're still tiny according to their own you know measurement of of market share which i don't know exactly how they measure that because if you look at the the you know alexa rankings with the sem rankings they're getting ten times less traffic than google or a little bit less than ten but they're saying they're only point six percent of search so i don't know they had a hundred billion searches in q three of two thousand twenty two i'm gonna go on the street i'm gonna ask a hundred people do you use duck dot go i need to know what's going on here this is crazy i think we should i'm not gonna go through my other topics i think that this this the you did a wonderful job you had me ent the whole time what's the title of this one gonna be like sean talk for ninety four minutes straight because that's what i felt like that's every episode this one's gonna be that's one's gonna be the story behind the fifth most popular website in the world alright that's the pod i feel like i could rude to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a less travel have look back