i mean how many times as if someone proposed something and everyone's was like yeah i don't get it remember but someone what else is like look what this is really about is blah blah everyone's was like oh that sounds great that i want well you just said you know it's not bad information it's bad i made my whole career doing that i feel like i could rude word i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a roll alright jason we're live this is how we start we we just jump right into it can i give the it can i give my like brag about you intro of what i know about you and then you can kinda correct anything that i get wrong of course we have jason cohen so jason cohen originally started you had a bunch of smaller businesses but in the early two thousands you started was it called it's just called smart bear or smarter bear just smart bear that was twenty two years ago believe it or not smart twenty two years ago you started smart bear you grew it for like seven years bootstrap it making millions of dollars in profit sold it that company now has thousand plus employees has sold recently or traded recently for like two billion is that right yeah it actually doesn't have that many employees it's more like hundreds which is part of why it's impressive because it's yeah it was sold in twenty twenty for two billion and it doesn't have a thousand employees it's super profitable like it was publicly said then what the profits were it's fifty percent bottom line profit god so just just a a printing a cash pretty machine then you start wp engine of which i'm a customer of wp engine is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world that company you bootstrap for two or three years then you now you've raised i think two or three hundred million dollars it makes many hundreds of millions of dollars is worth billions of dollars and all along the way you've been blogging at a smart bear dot com i've been reading that for years you are not the loudest person and that's the reason why i wanted to have you on is because you're not the loudest person but anyone who's like in the thick of it and trying to build great companies everyone reads your blog like the the the the one percent the one percent read your blog you've got a really good audience that people actually building it and the reason i like you is you and da are a little bit of the same personality to me there's like this venn diagram and it's like it's like people who are wildly successful like we're talking billionaire successful but then also our just do shit just because it's fun and at the same time have this weird like logical way of thinking but then can like disregard that logical way of thinking and just do what's cool and what's exciting which is really rare to have someone who's both an engineer but also understands like oh fuck i'm just gonna do it because this is cool and you do that so like sean he just dm me on twitter i like dude i just got this automated dm from you he's like yeah i built this script that automatically dms everyone who follows me on twitter so he's that type of guy we're like he's got like a thousand projects that who would never even talk about but it's like a little thing that he had to get on the weekend but you also have wp engine which is this massive unicorn and so that's why we want to have you on the podcast yeah i mean wp engines at like one of the top ten web platforms in the world and then you're also tinkering with like these dm auto dm scripts because you're like yeah this is useful i like this and so that's the that combo we've we've come to find as a really good fit with us on the pod somebody who has ambition at scale but also as a tinker at heart i wanna talk to you about some different ideas so check this out sean on your computer and jason if you have a computer is to go to z dot app so it's the word deck but with the z so z e c k dot app okay so says z reimagine how ceos collaborate with your board you just scroll down whose faces is that yeah it it it it norton ed norton the actor is the founder of this company that's funny he's i believe he's like if you google like this company zack and you see like them doing presentations on cnbc and shit like that he's talking he's the founder of this company dude i just booked a demo call in forty five minutes just in case it's ed norton who's gonna i just might get a free call with ed norton and this might be great if it's not ignored i'm immediately hanging up the zoom i saw an interview with them and he said he's super active but these guys are they're like i guess ed norton father i think was like business person and he was a raised around business and he he was i saw him give this interview and he was like the thing about when i work with all these companies that i invest in is they're horrible at telling me back the story they're horrible at giving a presentation and so i i wanted to create software that would just help them be better at that at telling the story explaining how the company is going and to make our meetings productive and to teach them how to do presentation and i think this company i don't know if it's software yet i think it's still a service i'm not i'm not entirely sure but i i saw this site and i was like the fuck is ed nor can do it on this like the software site but ed norton is this is his company doing it and you know it's not just the experience of the viewer and and just wanting people's time to not be wasted which it also was that because it's also more compelling like if you're trying to propose something if you do a better job more likely that'll happen like i how many times has if someone proposed something and everyone's like yeah i don't get it remember but then someone else is like look what this is really about is blah blah blah and everyone's like oh that sounds great that i want well you just said you know like what mean that's just bad it's not bad information it's bad presentation i made my whole career doing that well yeah we have like we have these college we have these college kids come on one once a year twice a year and they like pitch their company and sean's very good at hearing what they said he goes that's actually a great idea you're you've explained it horribly here's how i would tell that and people tell this beautiful story and then everyone's jaw is dropping and we're like yeah we're in and he does that all the time he's very good at that you know we didn't pitch competitions it's at capital factory for fifteen or sixteen years and it always goes like that so can magically fix it at all i don't know about that but like could it could it get go from like negative ten to at least like a two at a ten you know maybe well i think you said three i i thought of three interesting things while you were talking i think you you prompted three really interesting ideas the first is you're right that most decks are terrible and they're not and everybody attacks this from a how do we make the slides fancier here pre is like hey what if you were hang gl while you were looking at the slide deck because like no pre just chill and it's not that's the way we need and other people pitch is like you know what what if a designer just designed everything it's like cool but the actual message is the the part that's out of order jumbled up and unclear it's foggy and that's why this deck is no good not because the background color needs to be soft pastel pink and so you you start to look at this and one thing that i've done is whenever somebody on my team makes a presentation i inevitably we'll try to like try to make it better and the easiest way to make it better is just to ask a couple of questions right like a couple of simple questions one is like if people are gonna remember one thing from the presentation what should it be what's what is the number one takeaway away it's this thing on slide thirty seven cool let's make that slide one and then that thing you want them to take away let's make that the title right like that that'll be the title of that slide and you just sort of go on you know you ask like five questions and you can make a presentation much better with five questions i've also started using ai in this way so instead of going to ai and basically go to chat gp instead of asking a question and getting an answer which you think is how most people use it i'll go to chad gb and i basically say i'm trying to do x but i'm not sure where to start what are some questions like ask me some questions so that i could start thinking about this the right way it be like well it seemed like you know we did this when we we did an episode where we were picking us we did a a fake like stock a palo loser we're picking a stock it's like pick one stock and then you know just like for fun like we're all horrible stock makers but let's do it just for fun and i went and i i wrote this how should i be thinking about this like well if you're picking a stock what you wanna do is this right and you you might wanna to ask yourself the following questions what's an area i really know about what's something that i really believe in what am i looking for something short term or long term right it asked me a bunch of questions that made me get more clear and i think if ai i was gonna do anything it what what i wouldn't do is just take my input and make it better it would actually start stop me before i even vomit and it would just say cool let's just establish a couple of g you know how long is this supposed to be absolutely get getting interviewed and getting interviewed by it makes a lot of sense if it has some context of what you're saying and so the the questions can be even more pointed another thing i've heard once which i really like i haven't used this a lot but it's it's neat which is one thing that ai is good at right now is just giving you the bland neutral summary of the topic right it definitely can do that so if you ask it for the bland neutral summary of the topic it will tell you the most obvious boring stuff so that's what you don't say that's like a negative space so like well this isn't interesting anything that's not this might be interesting now maybe that's on you to think of what that is but maybe there's some like multi step process where the ai could be like okay i heard all their crap now i'm gonna go ask myself what the the then i'm gonna go try to find the stuff that they said that's not in there then i'm gonna try to enhance that then i'm gonna try to build like maybe a multi step i can do that maybe not again that there's is a lot of maybe and could've i know but if it were obvious and easy it wouldn't be a good startup up idea this has to be something a good startup idea ideas to be at least somewhat difficult to pull off yes so you have a little earnings start anyway that's interesting and then the the second thing is you said about titles that's a huge pet peeve of mind i i agree completely people say they'll they'll use the title to label what is on the page which isn't usually not useful because i can see what's the page it should be the message you want them to take from that one slide that should be the title so it shouldn't say our team i can see it's our team because there's three heads and their stuff let's just say something like you know our team has had three successful exits or our team is a collect you know collective thirty years experience is the most boring thing you could say but at least it's something you know like what is it that you want me to know about the team that's so special that's what's in the title again ai could prompt or even force that and it also then helps your the it goes the other way too now it helps your narrative oh yeah so i should put on the screen where we all went to college and stuff i shouldn't read that i should talk about the title which says we've had two exit so i should say yeah we exited this thing in this space this thing in that space and we work together there we've been to the trenches that's why this this team is totally der risked in terms of people which you don't see every day so we have plenty of risk but the team's not one of them whoa that's a good that's a good thing to say on a team's slide to an investor investors like okay tick like i don't quite believe you that there's no risk with like i'm with you i'm with you this isn't when i'm gonna lose sleep over it i love that you know that should be the title so like ai could help and echoes both ways in and do it and if you don't have good titles you can say what should do you really wanna say here oh let's make a title this long okay now let's go back to the text this is something you could be prompted for and any presentation is improved if you do that here's what's funny is that you know i have no idea if you are but you you might be a billionaire or you're in that realm and you've started multi billion dollar companies we asked you about ideas the idea that you spent most on is on how you manage twitter i find that to be hilarious you could give us the second idea you're you're your twitter social media management tool idea yeah well it's not just twitter like part of what's needed about it is i the same tool does linkedin and threads and and mastodon which it isn't isn't really working but okay here's some stuff i think is is special and and also other people who could just do this even manually if you want so one is there's certain people that i that i want to have more interactions with so i have them in a twitter list because then you can search for it right but i do a search where it's the purse people in that list and they've posted in the last twenty minutes which is a pretty small window and there might be a couple of things like they have some favorites or i don't know if some whatever okay and i'll look at that and sometimes there's nothing it sometimes just one or two but i'll try to if it's relevant to me then i'll respond somehow and because it was it just got posted it's much more likely that they will respond or see it also if it's a good comment like if i spend time making it really good then there followers who might see this over the course of the next ten hours they may see my comment and uploaded it i may be one of those comments near the top that ends up with a lot of likes and maybe some follows i've seen times where i have a follow bump because of a reply to someone with a lot of other followers right by doing it early i get that so if i just scanned everybody it that time frame is important so it really focuses my attention on that so i spend almost no time on this and yet i have this big outs sized impact of what those what those are whether i'm talking to that person or the replies so that's something you can just take like my system does that but you can just take that the other effect that has which is funny as people are like dude you're always online like i saw der post and like bam you were there like in two minutes what they don't know is yeah but i see like one fiftieth of wood damage posts it's just whatever it happens to you exactly be post i'll see it so you your perception is quote unquote i'm always online but the fact is no it's this trick and so it's like a really funny trick that that has that effect why do you care why do you care because efficacy you you you had you had this one thing well no i i asked that because you wrote this other thing that i totally agree with so let me let let me say it this way i have a bunch of buddies that are very successful you have no idea who they are they'll see me get popular on twitter and they go hey sam can you can you help me write some tweets and i'm like dude why who gives a shit like you you're winning who cares about this because goes i don't it seems fun so i so i help him write some stuff and every once a while it'll go viral and they get popular whatever and they get addicted to and i'm like dude don't get addicted to this you get addicted to the thing you're already doing it that's way better yeah yeah and you have you have this post or it was a sentence in somewhere one of your blog posts where you're like i actually think that people who have audiences that then launched software products to those audiences i think that's really dumb because they're actually not gonna get they're not gonna get that many customers that doesn't work but that's not why i'm doing it i'm not i'm not launching another product because of social media okay so then why do you care so i mean when when i filed you i got an automated dm from you you told me that you built something to do that why do you care about building something like this for social media it's strictly for fun now what i have done for even longer than wp is right and so that is at this point just a part of in and i get a lot of fulfillment out of it and like you said you're like wow there's a lot of good stuff here every time i hear that it feels good and also it's really just the craft of it like i like to try to get the thoughts that i have as clear as possible as interesting as possible but there's so much that gets triggered that way that's useful to me and fun for me too and sam sent me this blog post that you wrote that i loved and i think it's called rich verse king and this is great because we talk about money and we are honest about the fact that many people get into entrepreneurship because i wanna make a bunch of money and that's okay you don't have you don't have to pretend you don't have to like lie about that part which is a i think is is common unfortunately but you also built bootstrap companies have i've enabled a great lifestyle for you and your employees and so i'm curious can you explain for people who haven't read the rich first king post what is the premise of this post and then how it's played out for you i think the key thing that people really like out of it is this two box problem that i put near the end that was my final decision of why to sell smart bear which is let's say there's two boxes in front of you and let's say if you are wealthy suppose try to remember when you weren't in one box there's ten million dollars like period that's what's in the box in the second box which is opaque there's either twenty million dollars or nothing and let's just say it's a fifty fifty chance of which one it is and the question is which box do you want you have to pick just one which do you want well if you don't have money yet i mean almost everyone's gonna pick the ten million for sure because it changes your life permanently now you could argue you know what kind of lifestyle bubble blah but like that's a life changing amount of money whereas the other one is even more money but it's actually not that much more life changing and there's a good chance that you won't get it at all that's silly this is why when you get offered some money to sell the company it's often a good idea to take it of course it could be big in the future but if you haven't crossed over to this life changing amount of money yet but i was in that post called the freedom line you could argue how free how much money okay but when you cross over some sort of line which maybe you should decide for yourself it's it's awfully hard not to take it now what's interesting with the box game is if you're a statistician or you're an economist what you would say is there's no difference between the two boxes because the expected value of both box is ten million so they're the same and my point is no they're not expected value is not the right way to evaluate the situation furthermore in real life i said that one box was fifty fifty in real life you don't know what the probabilities are what's the chance the company will grow and sell and be huge what's the chance to stagnant and it doesn't sell what's the chance that it goes to zero like nobody knows so it's worse than that it's uncertainty meaning i don't even know what the probabilities are much less risky which means i do know what the probabilities are so it's actually far worse so i know you know yes some people might take the other box it's okay you can do whatever you want obviously but most people will take that sure thing when it's real money now if it's ten dollars versus twenty dollars you know whatever you want as take a flyer in twenty because who cares so the magnitude relative to your net worth also matter which i didn't really talk about there in that post because i wasn't getting into that but that's also true but it it is it changing something substantially for you or not is actually a critical question you're a great writer and there's two or three great sentences that i like out of this post it was you very bluntly you say i was always in it for the money especially in the form of an acquisition i would tell everyone here we're here to make money and if someone offers it buy the company someday i'm gonna sell it and then you said after you sold it you go i have the freedom to work on any project i want for the rest of my life while simultaneously providing for my family never again worrying about bills debt having a place to sleep or setting my daughter to any college she wants and i particularly the i was always in it for the money i think that's just great to just be very clear in knowing exactly what you want in that post i thought that i thought that was beautiful how you said that also it's not incompatible with things like i want our customers to be happy i want our employees to also make that much money blah like it's not incompatible with other positive things that you wanna do there's a big difference between now wanna make money and do ethical things and create products that actually have value are not just a middle or something like that or arbitrage you can say both in fact you probably should so you wrote that post o nine i think originally and you have this cool graph where you show like there's like a threshold of that matters in two thousand twenty three twenty four what's that threshold do you think now and what do you think it was then well what's interesting is i it's this is not relative so at this point at it's a adobe pinch pigeon also we've had a few secondary rounds which by the way all employees got to participate in as well and so now i have enough money that i don't have a line anymore like it's okay if i don't make any more money ever again i really don't care you know i i don't care oh can i get a a jet or not is not interesting to me just this is personal right everyone's different when it comes of money or what they want lifestyle i lifestyle that i want i don't need more money so there's no line like i just don't that that's not what's motivating or what will make a decision for me anymore well what about jason cohen and o six when you sold like was there what was the number where you're like anything above is gravy oh and that's that's a threshold for me i think then i was thinking like ten million i think i think nowadays it's it's much more clear that you need something like twenty million this is on the us by the way to have what would be considered to be like a rich lifestyle in america because okay you know people say things like well i spend you know eighty to a hundred k a year right now so if i had ten million i i could live off of that and you'd be right but that's not how people are i mean i'm not very materialistic and even i wouldn't wanna do that oh i'm gonna continue to live at that rate forever isn't usually what people wanna do it could be again if that's you then that's that's me that's awesome perfect you know what to do that's not really what happens so probably more like twenty million because you have to you have to you there's a lot of things to do but you have to think about averages and having a portfolio that's balanced and then taxes and then inflation and so even four percent of of interest taking out per year is actually kind of a lot given that you wanna maintain it and to keep up with inflation etcetera and that's where the twenty million sometimes comes from is is you know four percent of that is like a little under a a million after tax and then you can have quite but what you what anyone in america would consider a rich lifestyle i'm happy that you put a number on it one thing that i think it's cool we should put this chart up are the graph on on our youtube channel so basically it's like there's like the levels he's like you can't afford to lose your job you know at some point you're at that level where losing your job would be detrimental to you okay then you can owner in house then you can and erode never look at the right side of a menu alright so you only look at the dish you don't look at the price never have to work again and then it's like private jet and you could see that like it's as todd the the the value of the cash is you know definitely flattening out the further you go and so you draw that line yeah the the freedom line basically of like you never have to work again you could have total total control over your time as like the important threshold yeah but see so much also depends on things like i mean if you're twenty six and you get this offer and you know you do wanna work like you don't wanna not work again that's not what you're gonna do you're gonna do something so it's like alright i don't need to never work again quote unquote what i would like to but but let's say you're burned out it's been six and here's you just wanna do something else and so well you know you do take a ton of money off the table then you can invest a couple million into your next venture while still keeping a couple million in the bank and so no you couldn't live off that for this you're like but you don't wanna live off that next july you want enough to self fund something and do the next thing and so i mean you have to look at the goals of course that are in front of you but certainly you don't wanna adopt other people's goals i mean i think that's maybe the unspoken other message of the post is what is it that you want and how do you know that and how do you get that and if someone else says like no you should you should build a unicorn like it doesn't matter what anybody else says yep play your game so you know your blog is basically like a a gold mine of startup up wisdom and i was mining it last night when was doing my research for this going back through reading some of the stuff that i liked and there was a few things i had never read that i actually really really like i wanted to read a couple of these get you to react to them because you had some like kind of just nuggets small small short things and i want you to elaborate a little bit on or maybe give an example about just to make it real for people because they they rang true to so here's one you said all startups are screwed up including the ones that work it's just that the ones that work have one or two things that they're excellent at even though they screwed up a bunch of things that didn't it didn't kill them they didn't die so explain this because i think people have a perception of my business is kinda screwed up and that's maybe why failing the ones that work it's all working all good it's you know that that's something big difference that's right explain that one yeah it makes sense that it's our perception number one because we all have like some form of impostor syndrome with like somehow everyone else has their shit figured out we don't which of course isn't true but it makes sense that we all kind of feel that way the other thing is we see every problem in our business and we only dwell in the problems like the things that are going well we're not spending time on those things because that's not what needs attention needs fixing so you know we're spending ninety percent of our time on all the problems of which there are many so we feel like we're just drowning in bad things which we are that's the truth then you look at a competitor or whatever and somebody on tech crunch and what are you seeing some weird var outside not true version of it where they're super confident and everything's fine blah the the way i like to say it is whenever you see a company kinda like immediately what a business go look at what they posted on their blog the previous week and go look at the last podcast they did i promise you it was a hundred percent optimism everything's going well we're growing like crazy we're getting profitable we're hiring people are loving i guarantee it's all that the week before they went bankrupt that just proves that it's bullshit now that doesn't mean everyone's failing or everyone's not failing it just proves that what you're seeing is definitely not the truth but you are seeing your truth and dwelling on the bat so this disparity makes sense but once you so so it's logical once you know that you're like okay so it's not like every it's not true that everyone's public persona is is the truth then the other thing you can do is read the more honest accounts of businesses like twitter or you know facebook all stuff when they're were coming up and it's just full of shit they could just roll those down all of that but what do you see in those things not that you should be like facebook i'm not saying that but just as an interesting factor but what is it about them it's like well here's this thing there was something about connecting people at oncologists with the faces and the whatever that was just so correct so good well we might say now had such good product market fit that despite all of the other problems it was arranging success at twitter like this idea that you're posting just the headline of your blog post why was that so perfect i don't know maybe no one does people have theory it doesn't matter point is it was so compelling that all those other problems just i mean there was a fail for years for years they couldn't kick the site up something about it again i maybe i can't put my finger on it but something about it was so compelling they just see they succeeded despite this obvious public massive year multi year failures you know so that's what i mean by like okay so everything screwed up okay different ways different levels screwed up shore but everything screwed up and if there's those one or two things that are just so compelling whether it's delight people are so useful or it's built into their workflow there's various reasons why something might be just so good and i have thoughts on that as well of course then then it it you succeed to fight those problems so it doesn't mean this problems are like okay and you shouldn't attack them but it does mean a few things that are very useful one emotionally like get over it it's okay everyone else screwed to two you're not gonna fix everything and you don't have to because success besides like facebook blah blah but even bootstrap solo companies that person also does not fix every problem they have of course how could they there's just not enough hours in the day so you don't have to fix every problem oh that's a relief then it begs the question which couple of problems only should i be fixing right now that really are holding me back that really might lead me to go out of business that really is hindering my growth the much the most that's really why people are canceling the most you know these these are example things that might be that critical problem or two identifying that by answering questions like those that's what you should do and you should be seeking with that one or two you know critical things are that's the reason people don't cancel despite that crap the reason people sign up the bike the reason they advocate for you on twitter review sites what are they saying in there that's so freaking good because whatever that is you need every every customer to experience that thing like maybe you can change your processes or your salt your features are the onboarding process whatever so that more people will experience that amazing thing whatever it is so identifying those one to three key things the one to three problems that's what you gotta do then that's where you focus your time whether you're a solo whether you're wp you have twelve hundred people those are the few things you focus on on you know how do i remove some of those barriers that are actually should how do i enhance these things that are the thing that's making where and though all the rest of it you don't wanna ignore you wanna do it you see it but you must just for capacity and actually it's okay that you are and and again i gave you lots of examples of why it is okay in fact that you are so that's what to do about that dude i remember i used to host these events and i have i would get the we'd have all these speakers come and they were founders of every startup you've heard of and i would hang out with him in the green room with about six of them at a time and it was nothing but complaining and fear and i remember we had this guy named alex alex started this company called the athletic you guys know the athletic it's like a subscription sports blog or media company they eventually sold to your times for hundreds of millions of dollars i was with him i think on a friday and that wednesday the wednesday before they just released an article saying they'd raised a hundred million dollars in funding everything was going great or and they had this beautiful photo shoot and he was a ball of stress and i think he he was just kind of venting a little bit to me of saying everything that was going wrong how he's so frustrated with this and that and i remember thinking like you're the new york times like on wednesday and he had this beautiful photo shoot like it sounds like everything was going great and he was just it was just the reality was it things were going mostly great obviously you turned out alright but he was just complaining so much to me because i was just kind of a sounding board for him and i remember like thinking after all of these events that i've hosted that was my major takeaway which is that the people admire they were shit shows just like i was and that was like kind of a game changing kind of mind altering belief that that happened doing i gonna be careful well i gotta be careful asking how's it going you know you never know what you don't ask yeah yeah yeah yeah i was like how are you it was like this bitch talk constantly and and and i also like i like a hey i gotta give these guys respect i was egg them on and it's not like they ever just like bitch business i was something does change with scale so before product market that it's obviously you don't know what you're doing it that's the whole point and then you do and you're starting to scale up if you do then it's just all this should show all of it because everything's growing and weird and know one knows what to do and and the things that got you to product markets that are the wrong actions to take when you scale you're like all i'm doing experimenting not when you scale you know what to do now you need do more of it you need specialist in it you it's a totally different behavior it becomes more like a like a tumultuous the ocean kind of thing where it's like some things are riding high and and fine and and some things are not but it's not true that like a hundred percent of the things are broken it's just not true anymore because we've have the time and the people and and blah blah to build up and you need to like as you scale up you need it needs to not be a food fight forever like it has to mature to something because you can't you can't operate like you're just saying with a thousand people that's just complete chaos so that's that it can't be you you had a good quote from the guy from box aaron levy he he said he goes starting up is the act of doing as many jobs as possible to make sure your company doesn't die and then scaling up is the act of shedding as many jobs as possible to make sure that your company doesn't die to make sure it survives right i think that's true you know another thing that aaron l specifically said is at any given time half of the company isn't working i just don't know which half right dude aaron levi doesn't get nearly enough clout i think as he should so for those listening aaron levi started box it's box dot com he started box which is a it's like very similar to dropbox but enterprise he started that company when he was like eighteen or was a eighteen was he that young like he was just out of high school i think and he's and it's out publicly traded company and he's still the ceo he's been doing this now for fifteen plus years maybe that guy does not get nearly enough credit i guess demand we should have that guy on yeah aaron you're welcome on i have a few few other spicy takes i wanna get your get your reaction to because i was like reading this guilty of that because a lot of your advice even though wp is this huge company and you could talk about like scaling this big thing a lot of stuff that resonated with me was the early stuff like the i don't have product market fit just pulling me yet you said one the you most founders were doing customer discovery or like that early stage research about an idea you go it's just a founder who's in love with their idea essentially doing like fake sales calls but just looking for evidence to support their belief i've definitely done that i'm sure sam we all have that's why it rings true because of course we all have done that yeah and you asked like the stupidest question ever which is like does this interest you will you would you buy this you wanna make a good advice that dumb useless yeah yeah you're into this aren't you yeah you just ask these like leading dumb questions you have another one i think it's pretty good you go sell more value not more time customers don't value their time they do crazy things to save two dollars don't sell them time because they don't even value it sell them more more value yeah that's especially true in consumer consumers really don't value their time but even in business that's true and so like a classic example is if you you you could have a product let's say that makes it less expensive to get marketing leads and so you could say this has your cost because it does but what are you guys gonna do with the money they might just save it it's possible what they could do is buy more leads so it also could you could say the same thing as double your leads so that's the same thing half your costs or double your leads same product but how much will they pay for having the cost i will pay some percentage of the cost that i save twenty five percent that's actually kinda high usually people won't pay quite that much they should they should pay up to eighty percent you know because why not but that's not really how people think about it so you could you could maybe charge twenty five percent of the cost you save but if you say double the leads what will they pay well what were they paying now for leads a lot but will they pay to double the leads the same amount there'll be a hundred percent more to total leads because they are already willing to pay that for leads they're as demonstrated by they're doing it right now so it's a difference between twenty five percent of one half of your spend which is an eighth or a hundred percent of their spend same product so it's just now now the assets that's ideal lies and so forth but it just goes to show saving money saving time it's not a bad proposition but often the same product can be shown to generate value instead of saving time and that sudden it's literally an order of magnitude more valuable now you could take all of that in price but as a a a quote that i took from michael malibu who amazing in finance but start folks haven't heard of him he has this great thing about this which is the thing to do para but the thing to do is to generate customer as much values as you can for the customer and then decide how to split it with them so you could split it with them by charging more you could split it with them by higher retention they just love you and they stay they're getting so much value or getting new customers or advocacy they love you so much they talk like these are always ways you get value harder to measure than price i grant you that but they're they're very real and it's very real in terms of their healthier business of the risk and the growth like very real and all those things so of course that's a that's a something of a subjective statement i i get that but nevertheless it's it's really useful to think first generate a lot of value then think now how do i split that with the customer whether that's some price i'm not and if so what how even if if it is price how am i positioning that with them as in more value versus less you know saving money or less cost or less time something like that the only way that the story not ends but the exit you guys have to take this public right there's a there's a variety of things you can do when you're our size one is going public one is the another pe firm another one is getting purchased by a sufficiently large company either directly or due to another investment which again could either be a private thing like pe or they could be on the they they might be on the public markets and and therefore have a stock sale or something like that you would you wouldn't want that though right so the the way i think you you should build a good company is you want optional the ability to sell and at good terms but not not have to the ability to raise more money at good terms but not have to right the ability to go public but not have to like optional is power so how do you do that you build a good company in the usual ways the company that's growing and as profitable and the employees are happy as evidenced as by they stay and customers are happy as evidenced by they stay you know like these very obvious things of like what's a good company you do that and that maximizes your options because you because it's good and therefore your privacy see that's what i've said all along and still believe this very day that's the right thing for us to do is that can i ask you one quick question as we wrap up we talked about tk k sean and i both love them but this was the talking about stocks he he picked the copy that owns you have seen wwe e tee k is i don't know majority minority owned or you know one of the brain brainchild behind tee k is silver like partners and they're ceo i think his name is gon du is that say his same i was looking them up the other day real fascinating guy does he sit on your board is is that right did i see the no no there's there's we have several people from silver lake on the board really impressive interesting people who have really helped the company yeah what are those guys like on the finance side it's just this level above what you ever see otherwise right because in finance you either go to wall street to make a lot of money or you could do pe but like this is the cream of the crop like they have you know the you know vale from warden doing like spreadsheets right so and that and then it goes on from there so it's just like this amazing analysis and inside the things plus of course they see a lot of different companies so they can bring a lot of like this is happening to a lot of our companies now that's sort of thing another thing i will say that's special is you you think pe and you think okay well they just take the companies apart and don't care and of course there are those kinds of pe that that absolutely exists so that that reputation is earned with silver lake though that's not the case that's not the reputation they have so when you have an investor who on the one hand sure they can they can do all the cut stuff they're capable of all of it but also they have that sort of a view on what is product what a success how do you build value that's incredible so so so really has been really amazing but obviously it it there are two things one is a lot of firms aren't like that the other thing is it depends on the person if a different set of people on the board we'd have a different and that's true of all investors everywhere so all the times people are like should i should i raise money from x where x is some venture firm and the answer is always who at x because the firm is is there is something because there's a culture and there's an attitude it's not nothing it's not nothing but the number one thing is who at the firm that's what makes all the difference and unfortunately that can change but we appreciate you doing this man jason cohen a smart bear on twitter a smart bear i'm a smart beard dot com your blog it's best man yeah you're the man we appreciate this this is fun that's the pod i feel like got rude wear i know why i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days off on a goal travel never looking back