Unicorn Founder on Unseen Arbitrages, the Paradox of Wealth + Charlie Munger Wisdom ft. Ryan Petersen

today we're talking to ryan peterson ryan's interesting guy because he started out we're gonna a pizza shop bootstrapping his own company to millions of dollars and now he runs flex which is a multi billion dollar company so he's kinda done both sides the big silicon valley game as well as the bootstrap makes something out of nothing form of entrepreneurship and we talk about three things the one big lesson he learned when he became friends with charlie mu what charlie mu really taught him number two is a masterclass class in negotiation so things that he learned about negotiation back when he was in business school that still helped him today and the paradox of wealth so why chasing money while money is great and you wanna make money and he says money is great too but how instead of chasing money directly you should do something else and instead calls this the paradox of wealth so enjoy this episode with ryan peters i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a road let's try today you have the silicon valley success story so you've got flex port this like behemoth of a company multi billion dollar company went through y you did the silicon valley you won the silicon valley game which is great and i live silicon valley i like you know i'm i spent ten years trying to win that game the other side of it though that's all i think a lot more relatable is you were you know working at domino's pizza as a team you flipped scooters from you know on ebay you then built import genius which as a bootstrap company that i think had kinda like real eb like i think you're making millions in eb along the way right still i'm still i was still your good business exactly so you've done both right you've done the bootstrap game you've done the the flipper game and then now you've done the the big you know silicon valley disruptive disruptive game and so i think that's cool that you did them and not just that you did all those things but one sort of led to the other is that right like the scooters led to tape genius which led to ultimately flex sport yeah i think they're definitely drawing the lines backwards you can make that pattern really easily that really the scooter i was working for my older brother and and his business partner michael can and we had a lot of frustration with freight forward and customs brokers and we had a lot of frustration with finding good factories those were kind of the two big problems that we saw i have this e comm business that has over i started it kind of right before or right during covid basically we launched right after covid and we've now done over i don't know fifty million in revenue but i would not have found my factory had i not use import genius and i i remember i was like i'm kind of like a shortcut taker in general so i was like okay either i can go on alibaba and i could try every single supplier on here or try to find a good one or i could go to whoever i think has the best quality and just try to reverse engineer who is their factory who is their supplier and actually i remember like buying the ninety nine dollar or a hundred ninety nine dollar i remember what it was like import genius subscription and then actually there was somebody in your chat team that did the search for me because it wasn't showing up initially and they went back like further in the records twelve months fifteen months ago and they found one manifest and so if people don't know how this works what you guys did was basically you took public data about the shipping manifest and then you organize and instruct so you could see for any business who is their supplier for any supplier who are all the businesses they work with is that right is that the right way describing it yeah that's what the important genius does it's still it's still we have my raise price as much either it's still about the same as you nine or hundred and ninety i wanna raise a tiny bit but import genius dot com is the business that i started and you know if i you mentioned alibaba because that's i started that business out of frustration i was living in china for a while and i would use alibaba to find the factory that would show up at the factory and they weren't expecting people to show up and it'd be like fake factory like here's just a middle man right you know we're like one time they did give him a couple advanced days but i showed up and they like very clearly like making it like this was not bunch of guys in the warehouse with no equipment or anything so yeah it was frustration for that i i think it been poor genius kind of light up organic search results like google you know if if it was all adwords you'd you that's kinda like what alibaba is like people paying for rice med etcetera alibaba dot com is of course the original business was b to b searching for factories but that that's not what charged their market cap their market cap is driven by tao and ali pay and all these other products right but yeah the original business is like finding factories i think import genius is a much better way to do that i do think that my brand is around seeing problems that somehow other people just kinda take for granted and they're blind to in some way that they just sort of accepted it as oh that's just reality and then actually getting really curious about it and looking at what could you do to solve it and that's where import genius came from that's where much work came from and that's sort of that same problem it's annoying i'm kind of annoying that way like when i go to a restaurant i'm like doing bottleneck analysis on the cash year like when would i do to like you know get this get the traffic flowing faster through this place but yeah i can't help it what what does paul worth for this sc blindness right he's got yeah usually point people to that essay sa on on paul graham essays called slept blindness which is this idea that you you're kinda blind to the biggest problems in the world paul has a good quote about you i i found of my research this is a this is the make you blush section alright so it says paul graham founder what comb says ryan is what i call an armor piercing shell a founder who keeps going through obstacles that would make other people give up a do you think it's true and b why do you think paul thinks said about you i don't know if it's true wait we work we i do work really hard and don't give up easily paul and i've had a great relationship for a one time he's seen me since the very early days i met paul when i was before i even i'd started flex sport but barely my brother did y comb the year before me we were renting a house actually say it used to be max house because we used to get his mail i don't know how long before it must been a long time before because it wasn't a very nice it was like a hell park pretty the house it was like before he got rich but we were renting this apartment and it was near a dog who was there a park where paul would take his kid george she's now older when it was and we would we would take my dog there to play so we just like run into paul and my brother was in yc at the time so we got this striking out conversation so paul seen me since like flex sport was just an idea basically he's been a great adviser for us it said nice thing so a lot of people what what did paul help you with because i've asked people this a couple times and i feel like everybody's got a great paul story of like there was a you know these there's these like crucible moments in every startup up or there's these moments of uncertainty and bo brings either certain level of confidence or clarity or a question or a bit of advice that was was helpful early on do you do you feel like there was one of those for you i think paul's got his superpower is like not he only sees what's possible and like how valuable or big could this thing be if everything works and he ignores every other outcome that's possible that is probably the right way to do seed investigate you know in a power law world to find like that and so he always saw inflict what really work the outcome is so outs sized and enormous given the industry size and their an importance then and and then he could help us sell that story to other investors to candidates he would send emails early days to like top engineers saying really great things about us quotes like the one you'd mentioned to different press and stuff like that he's also been a really big supporter of flex dot org which is our humanitarian and relief logistics division that that helps nonprofit doing refugee camp logistics or other sorts of disaster recovery logistics he's been he's donated millions of dollars to there and helped us get the word out about all that stuff so he's yeah huge supporter of flex board that's a basic yeah i always think about like the the first believer i think everybody has this person who believes in you more than you believe in yourself for a period of time and it's sort of like a it's like a short loan it's like a short term loan that you can get of of conviction and it's very helpful to an entrepreneur and it's actually very helpful to be that person especially once you have a little bit of success as an entrepreneur you now can lend a little bit of conviction to other people you believe in when they when they don't really have it yeah i mean paul's job is hard well he's he's retired now but the job of being a yc partner a leader of why sees super hard design a lot most of those people are gonna fail so you have to kinda of dilute dilute yourself if you really wanna say it only focus on what good happy well i was probably now what's gonna happen if most of the case but that's a very hard psychologically i'm sure yeah maybe he needs another essay that's like sc warned but it's on the investor side it's like you know fail failed blindness just like the ability to easily forget with import genius you took publicly available data you structured it you made it into a useful business that generates millions of dollars of your profit see it seems like your brother also did that same business model right in a different space with build zoom can you explain maybe what is the underlying you know way framework of how to think about it business ideas like that that might that might succeed it seems like there's a pattern that there's multiple ideas like that that yeah builds in was born out of the frustration of finding a contractor builds jim's my older brother david's company one of his companies and he was my c founder at hip airport genius and and my boss for a while and yeah you're sort of my mentor in startup up world building with foreign out of the frustration of finding a contractor work on your house and underlying it is this public dataset set of building permits are largely public record but hard to access and we had a lot of experience of doing that with import so they're built a search engine on building permits and lets you look up any wherever you are anyhow you can see who the contractors where they're built on that that worked on it which is pretty useful as homeowner by the way otherwise a tool see who who built the problem would you have a problem and go find that person they probably should help you with it but also you're doing due diligence on contractors no you know be able to talk to the actual homeowner or she worked like who worked with them making sure that the reviews are actually for people that hire this contractor or like there's a great data out there so they built they built a nice little of business on top of that dataset i think that government data has a big opportunity the government has tons of public records on all kinds of stuff and no real incentive to organize it in ways that are particularly useful it it it makes it hard to build def onto these businesses because other people can if it's public record other people can access the data to so you have to get distribution or build some kind of a network effect on top of it like in build zoom case it's like reviews that you're layering on to this and and sort of brand is always the ultimate network effect that you can build onto it but you know i think people overthink to def a little bit like how could you have def you're a startup just like right know if it was depends how could you possibly do it yourself yeah that we we did a episode recently on a i was like i found this app that's called oasis it's a water water quality tracking app so basically like how much how much you know forever chemicals are in your water oh yeah this it's this kid it's this kid who did the same thing he basically was like he lived in i think minnesota where they had like clean water he drink tap all the time he moved to la start drinking a tap water it tastes funny he got a little bit sick he's like oh man wish i could figure this out turns out every city has their own testing data that's publicly available turns out that you can request from every bottled water company their reports as well so then he created this app that basically presented it to the consumer and then he goes viral on tiktok with these like kinda like fear based like did you know that blah blah blah but you can check this using this app and he's built a you know a thriving business on this thing i think he's at like fifty k mr r and he's just a kid in his twenties nice it's not the most defensive to r junior man that's right but i i think it's kind of amazing that you could do this taking public data and make making that happen yeah i brand and network effect distribution getting users getting people loyal to it exe high velocity yeah i i remember i got a fight on twitter like five years ago with some guy oh talking about mo and i i was just making a play on words saying well you know the mo turned out to be not that useful once someone invented artillery right right so mo we know use the mo like when you gonna put alligator to the defend your business so i was talking like actually you know there you don't really wanna hide behind some walls like the real ever ever since the blitz creek in like nineteen forty on nineteen thirty nine whatever we learned that like high velocity attack is the way to win not like sitting behind defensive walls right and i i don't know some investor like gabriel upset with me that i didn't believe in mo of course you know it's i'm just making a play on words but right well you you wrote and hear something that found pretty interesting i didn't know you were friends with charlie mu and speaking of emo buffett mu famously talked about how def and mo are super important can you tell the story how did she become friends of charlie mu yeah our ip what how oh i know fred friendly with charlie mo let's say i i i had dinner at his house seven or eight times before he passed i which there's ninety ninth birthday party last year actually i i i'm a huge fan of he has this essay which i think every young for every person should reads especially young people trying to figure their way through the world called it's called the art of worldly wisdom yeah definitely if you go a worldly wisdom charlie won you'll find it i actually founded it on paul group's website i believe pg published it to the y comb website at some point and i had read it when i was young and feeling uni inspired or like trying to figure things out what should i do with my life and the the the essay basically argues that there's in every discipline like biology or chemistry or whatever the dis there's you know you can define number of disciplines however you want sort of bit somewhat arbitrary but just say there's few hundred disciplines in the world and then in each one there's two there's two or three big ideas that carry eighty percent of the freight that if you know those two or three big ideas you kinda will get eighty percent of that whole discipline like in biology it's probably like darwin you know darwin evolution and something to do with genetics which are obviously related but like you can get those two or three pig ideas you'll have enough biology to be dangerous right and that you can learn these ideas by going to read the textbook so if there's only three hundred disciplines in three two or three ideas you're like okay i've gotta do about six hundred to a thousand ideas that if i could learn them might be like what mon ko worldly wise as an interesting concept that set me off on a journey of i've probably read the hundreds of books as a result of that and so search searching for the big ideas in every space yeah i'm like what are these disciplines i'm like disciplines i don't really then i found boring well like okay whatever i'll just go find i still learn the top ideas from it nah i'm not saying i'm succeeded there's some disciplines i just can't bring myself to and by the way his essay isn't just saying there are these ideas he actually list a bunch of so he's like for example things gravitate towards winner take all therefore it pays to be number one or number two or just be out and then he gives example right so he'll give he the essay sa isn't just the concept of these ideas exist he gives a bunch of examples in yeah and then there there the you know he calls them like mental models that do you build these mental models from one discipline it turns out they're often applicable in another and that's where a lot of the good ideas can come from and a lot a lot of innovation comes from applying an idea like richard fry is a great example of this famous business he spent like two years as a biologist and like i it's a groundbreaking work in biology just because he took ideas from physics that people hadn't really thought of frameworks and applied it in biology right anyways i i was very inspired by mon for many you know decades really silly and i was at a party at one of my investors houses and i was just talking to his older guy and neither of us knew anybody at this party or didn't know any people and out he asked me what my favorite book is and i started talking about poor charlie alma the neck which is a great book that stripe just reprinted reprinted by the way i i told him that book is my favorite and he started telling him why and i told the story of the you know worldly wisdom and i was living in china i was bored out of my mind sometimes and so i bought all these books and just started reading books like hours a day every day and he let me talk for a long time before because he's like yeah i know that book really well i wrote that book and it's turned out i was talking to was a guy named peter kaufman who wrote the book poor charlie alma neck he's like one of charlie mu best friends and he just thought got such a kick out of me telling him so what about how great his book was that he brought me to charlie house for dinner and many what many times we became friends with a few other of charlie friends it gotten been involved you know invited to lots of dinners and charlie i remember when i first told him about what flex sport does he was like oh this is that's great you have a great business because the key to success is dumb competition and he started of ranting about like all it his experience working with great companies and i i i i i also think that's a great little tag on too is like a remember you know when you're trying to think of what business to do all these guys doing an ai startups like make i i think applying ai to some old school frozen industry is a great idea but just going straight head in head on against other ai geniuses is like a recipe like who wants to compete with people that's more like you rather compete with knuckle heads wherever you can yeah exactly that's a very simple principle like in poker table selection is like probably the most important decision you make so everyone thinks poker about like you know the the bluff and the advanced betting strategies or whatever it is and a huge amount of your success comes down to which table did you choose to sit down at if you chose to sit at the fish table you're gonna do pretty well and that one decision was the most important decision you could have made if you sit down with all the sharks well good luck it doesn't matter how good you are you you're probably just gonna you know bash your head against the wall for a while that's why i don't blame poker when you met this guy i i like how you said you're at a party and you're like we built didn't now anybody there's just like alliance of the out cast that happens and i i don't know if you you've heard the story about ben and jerry's but they they asked ben you know ben how'd you meet jerry and he goes well they go were you guys friends immediately because they've been friends for a long time he goes no he goes we we just were in the same pe class and they had we had to run the mile and both of us hated running so we were the only two guys walking and eventually if you're just walking at the back with one other guy eventually you'll start talking and he's like that was the foundation of ben and jerry's also i wanna ask you about this you said you moved to china what was the thought process i got you there and then once you get out and doing that it was two thousand and five it was clearly booming it seemed like the future we were at that time i was working for my brother we had this scooter company buying dirt bikes and road we say scooters but off road vehicles doing buggy all kinds of cool motors sports products and we were buying everything from china but not like they're were buying everything off the internet no one had dead to china right and during college i lived in south america i i lived in chile and brazil and i learned i speak spanish in portuguese so i was like i can if ben we can learn chinese i could probably learn chinese i learn these other two languages which was very naive so i saved up a little money and just like moved there did you plan to be there for a while buy one way ticket what what was the what did you tell yourself going in i don't know i didn't have an exit plan i was just gonna learn chinese and and learn about chinese culture in history and economics and what's going on in the boom what what's your tip if somebody's in their twenties and they're kind of intrigued by this like the adventure path what would you tell them like how would you tell them to think about this now the you i i think it it's really about your values you know and and really intros you can select your values too well a lot of people just kinda go through about thinking about this i i did and my value without knowing it consciously my number one value in life until i was about twenty five or twenty six was adventure and i just wanted on to light trial kinds of go all over the world and remember this was pre iphone so it was like pretty adventurous it's like i didn't have gps in my pocket or translation apps or any i mean i had to like figure stuff out walking around asking people for directions and hoping they'd be nice to me which they were but it was definitely an adventure i i i and so at that time that was my value was like chasing adventure that's not for everybody but if it is it's like it's pretty easy to achieve going to cheap places it's a lot less adventurous these days i mean you show up what you call you guys china call uber dd d or did i guess and you got google trans you got maps you got translation apps it's like full too easy i i once rode my bicycle from china to vietnam and no map we the map we had was all wrong which is he worse than no map almost and we just had to figure it out if we selected people's houses at certain times like it was like yeah old school adventures i i think back to my question about why paul graham called you you know an armour piercing shell who just figured you who figures things out i i think i think this is where you get the reps in right like it doesn't start the problem solving and confidence that i i'm i'm gonna figure things out it doesn't just start the day you you incorporate your you know your startup up in delaware it starts by getting a bunch of reps earlier in life maybe be i think learning a foreign language in that country is a extremely i it's not a good roi from like you probably won't make any money off of this especially now with chat is incredible i can do live translation into every app and every language i mean but like the humility of like peep everyone thought i wasn't freaking idiot i mean i was like i couldn't speak and like you know bus drivers think i'm an idiot and having that over and over and over again every day is pretty good for your ego and your humility and also for relating to other people like in your country and when you went there so you're like i'm gonna go i'm gonna learn language of a travel eat but you're a business junkie like you said something i saw in the research which was like you know i was like this guy's my kind of people you you go my form of entertainment is making a landing page one night and sending some traffic and seeing people click to buy right so did you were you kinda scheming and dreaming about business while you were there what what what were you doing on the business side what well so we were we're sourcing all of our products from china and so i was like i was go to factories fine like evaluate quality shipments i would i do a little everything make websites we do marketing customer service was that was that scooter business any good should making money doing that what was the result it was pretty good for like you know you made salary like out like w two level income that was above all my all of our friends at the time but not like change your life kind of income right you know this podcast the title of is called by first million and one of the things i at the beginning the premise of the podcast was always gonna be let me bring people on and ask them how they made their first million and that's that's where it started ended pivoting to something else and kept the name because when something gets popular change the names a little risky but i still you like the question of like when you when you did make your first million this what change because i view money as a tool to improve the quality of your life and i think it's very easy to slip into money is this kinda of measuring stake or just think this thing you accumulate over time and so i'm curious for you once you kinda had a win made probably during the import genius days were okay you've made some some like real money that give you frees up your time how'd did you use it and how did it feel and what you what was your mindset you know during that time can you share anything like that because i that's where a lot of people wanna get to or they're they're just who listen to this and i think they'll be pretty for year your guy did when i started making when he was paying my student debt okay that that that felt great i'd invested it wisely put a lot in the wealth front index fund investing bought a couple of like real estate cash generating real estate properties i made some stupid decisions so i once invented to invested in that night club that failed that was stupid but it didn't change much well first of off people who tell you that money's is not important or won't i i don't believe these studies that say like oh like you know you stop at seventy five stops improving your life at a certain point i'm certain that that can't be rep you know most most of these psychology studies turn out to be not there's a reputation crisis since psychology and i'm certain that that's one and and like you know that money is great because the more people have the more they want must be great right now must be amazing k can you know of it wait could you say more about this paradox of wealth because i saw you right down this idea i wanna read you a line from this and and just kind of hear hear you talk about this so you here's what you wrote you wrote paradox about focusing on making money will cause you to make less money nobody wants to give money to people who are too focused on money they perceive them as greedy and self interested should try to avoid them they give money to people who add value for them it is fine to want money it's great in fact money is one of the best things in the world but it's a paradox the more of it you want the less of it you get so hack your brain into instead focusing on the things that are upstream of making money what's upstream of making money yeah i think upstream making money solving problems for people at the end of the day which means learning to gotta gotta build your skill set so you can learn in upstream with that is learning what the problems are and and they're developing a set of skills and capabilities to let you solve them salespeople people that can suffer from this or they can be great like great salespeople people are really consultative like cute at asking questions good at diagnosing problems understanding what their product or their firm can do to solve that problem and you know you bring those together you win and you everybody wins creating win wins but but the perception of a salesperson is a push that i'm gonna make i'm gonna try to get you to buy something you don't want their village bad salespeople people or just a bad salesperson more but that's the image that most people have when they think of sales hey you know this is true because we can't even call people a salesperson got account executive because sales is such a bad word yeah we had to re rebranded it it we had to go ale instead of mayo there's only a couple of this made a changed i think it did in fact it a few years ago when i looked into it were only three universities in the united states that offered a major in sales wow being like it's part of everybody's job it's like probably ten percent of all the jobs in the whole world or sales there explicitly and then everybody has sell their ideas is and we've yeah kind of been wrongly scape coded as though this was like the terrible profession when in fact they're the key driver of every company even tech so many good tech companies fail with good technology because they can't ever learn how to sell it get customers and then there's companies with where the tech just have tech and they're just good at selling so right yeah i think so hacking the brain used to say things are correlated with money but i think it's better to go upstream and actually causing right generation of wells and the more you can study that then you'll get lots of wealth and i i don't think it's bad to want money but you just have to realize like it it it might cause you to get less it's a be like love by the way someone's obsessed with look finding like a girlfriend or husband or something and like it can't kinda creepy you like you know work on yourself instead yeah that's a great one there's a great story about buffett i don't if you're heard this one where he goes to a classroom and there's a bunch of kids sitting there and he says alright let's play a game and he basically says i want you to point to one person in this classroom you could choose any class mate not yourself but somebody else and you get to get ten percent of their earnings for the rest of their life write down on a piece paper with the name of the person you're picking and why and so have you heard the story before i don't wanna yeah but maybe he's not gonna summarize surprise you but like it's it's interesting to the yeah i it makes the point well so he writes down the name and then he brings it up he's like you know okay who here just raise your hand did you pick the person with the best grades and nobody raises their hands so this already that tells you something right about school and what we think is the valuable thing versus what everybody intuitively in their gut new is the valuable thing he says okay did you just pick the person with the highest iq and a couple of people raised their hands did you pick the guy who could throw the football the farthest nobody raises their hand and so he then he finds it starts asking he's like what qualities did you pick and basically that's where you know it came down to some version of the following characters that buffett ultimately used for for picking people which is you know he talks about like energy so there's it was people who are really they're really obsessed with things really into things when they get when they put their mind door a project they just never stop they just never give up they just kinda have a endless energy towards something another one was like integrity right because if this person is gonna act out of bounds then you know owning ten percent of their future if they're in jail is not gonna do me much good i gotta have somebody who's gonna play by the rules and play by the law they know what rules to break and what rules notch and then last one was intelligence which was somebody who's gonna at figuring things out specifically so not your grades or just your raw iq but somebody who tends to figure things out and he's like great so now you have the formula of what you need to be right like if that's what you would pick in others that's what you need to be and there's that sort of reminds me of the the paradox of wealth which is like if you put a hundred people together you're like alright who's gonna be the wealthiest i think intuitively we would know it's not the person who's gonna just like sort of only chase money and try to just extract as much money as they could out of some system it's probably not could work as well as somebody who does the things you talked about speed of school i took a negotiations class once and it was one of my favorite classes everyone should try to get into one of these things because work is your always wanted to take this i don't wanna go a school but i'd love to take a negotiation classes they're get you're given like a case study where both parties read this document you have why they different rules to play and then you negotiate with each other under those conditions but what's what's amazing is it in a class there's thirty other pairs if there's sixty people in your class there's thirty other pairs or fifteen women however many people's doing the exact same thing so you can compare yourself how you did against other people in the same seat as you and that was over almost twenty years ago and it it's very interesting because i've seen in touch a lot of these people and you can track and people were the best in negotiators in a classroom environment or not the most successful because they're very good at extracting too much in a one off negotiation but that's not how life works right in life there's repeat games like you gotta let the other guy win you gotta you know i if you just took advantage of someone like they're never gonna wanna do business with you again just why like you're not gonna do that well so it's kind of interesting a like long longitudinal of study that someone could deal on these things i worked with my dad for about nine months and working with your dad's interesting experience in a bunch of different ways but one of the things you actually get to see your data in a new context i got to see my dad at work and one of the things that i asked other people work i what's my dad good at what's his strength and they all said you know he's a good negotiator he's a great negotiator but he's a little too tough and okay interesting that's because i asked strength and weakness and they kinda said the same thing so i got into the situation where it was one like high stakes negotiations basically like the future of the company was like kind of up for grabs and somebody had leverage somebody else had leverage we all sat down this table and my dad did one thing really great which was he was like we didn't really like the options on the table and he's like oh okay cool i'll always go with the third option then no i was like know what like what's your counter he's like no counter no and he's know he's like basically in the negotiation he's like i was like well are you gonna you know explain this he's not explaining you know in a negotiation the more irrational person tends to win the the more stubborn party wins because the other person will just realize this person's irrational so i just have to play by their rules so he was super stubborn any won and at the end they took a break this kinda like okay let's go break before we kinda come back and finalize and i asked this other guy who was kind the ar arbitrary sitting there and i said what do you think he goes i think you took too much and my dad kinda smiled he took as a point of pride and i sort was like what do you mean by that he's like is like you you were at a poker table and you tilted the table and all the chips went towards you there's no way this deal gets done eventually gets done right because they have nothing to gain you've taken everything away from them so they have nothing to gain out of this transaction today they feel forced but soon they'll just realize there's not even i don't have to do that i'd rather not and that's exactly how it played out and i you know i learned a little lesson sort of that my dad's expense about in a negotiation you you sort of both sides need to leave a little wanting or even if you take too much you see need to give back at the end in order for something to be sustainable or especially if you're playing a repeat game where have you had you know negotiation in in in your life since then right because maybe it's just not a not a not a everyday thing it's a once a while oh man we run a global logistics company where we're we have to procure ocean freight and air freight and then we have to sell air freight and ocean right maybe working custom services everything else that we do on the end to add basis so physically huge about of negotiation i think one of the big opportunities we have in this industry is i i think the industry very short term focused and transactional almost mercenary and some of these things you have to kinda go with you is you can't change everything about the industry at once being able to play the loan game and say hey we're gonna win we're gonna make tons of money by build a trust with people and showing them where the prospect pools are in not not taking too much of it and figuring out how do we create the right win win scenario and not i think it's a good framework actually for evaluating any company is kind of there's six stakeholders at the table for every company you have your customers you have your vendors which in some cases don't matter that much but for us they matter a lot you've got your employees your investors you have regulators and you have like the communities where you live and operate and so you've got these six stakeholders and you gotta create a win and it's a very simple way for each of them they need to win in an ideal scenario and you can go through a almost any any company and say okay let's score them a through app on for each one of those things very rare to find a company where every single parties winning right somebody usually you know like so so what's the goal as it mostly as and but nothing below a c what's the be but but where here have something that's bad like you've got a lot of risk in that's no good right it could all come to a stop like if they're especially if that like the regulators are not happy communities are like i don't know protesting you trying to run you out of town like i think it like every airbnb is example i is a great company guests pretty much love it the the homeowners definitely love it and making free cash off this unused asset investors done really great they've voice seem really happy over there the regulators they not drilled in some cases they right did manage it sometimes they like it because the generates stocks revenue communities i don't know i don't want people throwing a party in the house next sort of mine and so that's an area for them if as they have this framework going go okay where should we emphasize what are we doing and they have they they look at this i don't know they use that exact framework but they certainly are going okay let's band partying what else can we do to make neighbors like us more right like and so it's it's a pretty simple framework i think someone looking for a job at a company they should definitely take take the time to score each company they're considering on this framework or investors the same way because it you know if everybody's not winning then the thing might not be sustainable for the long term and all the good returns as an investor come by a whole age for a very long time and letting the the the the compounding machine run yeah the risk of accumulates it may not be a problem right now but it's it's accumulating yeah eventually that's a powder cake you are also a partner at founder son right yeah a venture partner a venture partner founder fund your linkedin says looking for a generational company to back how's that going great i mean i founders swan i've been very loyal part of the founders fund network for a while they they were our first series a investor they let her a and our b and participated i think in the every other round that we've done basically and when they asked me to join it was kind of no brainer her for me i mean it only took me a little said no a bunch of times i shouldn't say no brainer but they only find out we can consider joining because i think they're really unique in their refusal to follow the herd and to thing for themselves but i i joined actually full time as a general partner and then i came back to pledge i i took about six months where i was the chair executive chairman and then i realized i had to come back and be the ceo again at flex work and so i kind of scaled my roll back at von sean but i'm still part of the team you said like you know they're unique in how they do things i've i've been interacted with them a bunch to and felt that but i'm always interested like what's the cause of that effect so like what what is the example of something that they do differently on the input side that leads to the output of being you know sort of independent thinkers or contra or willing to make bets and others don't well a lot of it just comes from peter being refusing like he's just like that's his whole life thesis is that people are mime and they will chase the same outcome that same goal the same object the same meme desire everybody wants the same thing and if you can avoid that i there's a huge arbitrage opportunity if you can go look where other people are looking and so a lot of it just comes i would say probably just from peter but they've they've really trained into the team it's how does that manifest itself it it's a very high paying job power's one actually has a vendor compensation structure it's almost all tied to the outcomes the performance but like a lot of vcs just make super huge you'll be surprised how high the salaries are yeah at a lot of the at other vcs so they make a lot of money in a job they can't really be measured except on a ten year time horizon and even on that it could be luck and so and and you don't have like an overseeing like a boss breathing down your neck like you can do it from anywhere kinda nobody's every time i email a vc they seem to be in france so it's it's it's a job that like is kind of a dream where you just so what's the incentive structure therefore like just don't get fired and it's hard to fire you for performance because takes a long time for these things to mature and again it could be luck so the way you get fired is by everybody consensus agreeing that you're doing dumb things is that why doing dumb things it's by having a consensus form around you that this guy's is making dumb decisions we got a fire and there a lot of cases where funds fired someone who it turned out a few years later had like been their best guy but they didn't know it so therefore the way to avoid getting fired in vc again this is not found that's what i like about them that they're very different but is it the way to avoid getting fired is to be well to double check everything you do with other vcs right to make sure everybody agree and you don't wanna do it internally because then you look like you got no opinions can operate so you do it with all buddies at all the other vcs so it's just a collusion massive collusion racket on per like there's no there the incentives are just structured sense that everybody's talking to everybody to double check and make sure then then that leads to regression herd mentality regression of the meeting and it leads to people not wanting to take a lot of risk which is just a lay it's it's just lame right like venture capitals reveal about risk taking but it's not often it's not and think found one's very good at not participating in those things it don't really go to conferences is the conference they do do is called here con it's like literally about here ideas that you know allowed to say loud that's probably the most unique conference most of people probably don't know what it is can you explain what he is and then maybe some examples of what a talk at might be about it's con is idea but most conferences people on stage are like you can't say anything that's not sitting the mainstream narrative right and on the ideas that you come up into stage and say something that would like get you canceled or some idea the definition for again they don't publish the talks online i don't think because of the nature of it all but i'm i'm working on i'm gonna do a talk if if i can make maybe next year i'll try to do it talk guys guess the definition for fred eric a person holding opinion at odds with what is generally accepted i texted a bunch of friends who went i said hey what was the best thing and they were like well like you know somebody gave this i like my belief in the probability that aliens exist has like has like actually meaningfully changed based on ex talk or this person gave this talk about you know the conspiracy around x y z and it just sounds fascinating sounds like the you know one of the few conferences where i i would get there early and stay late yeah they're we just like them the market like one brand right like don't don't just follow the herd and they they're not trying to like just reference check every deals they'll put their nick out there make some crazy bets what's amazing you i didn't haven't figured out is how they have such an amazing track record because i don't think just yellow it in the they're very gonna pick founders i think right there's no formula for it because people are unique but it's it it it is a really interesting and they're writing they're very big fun these days and they write large checks with conviction but without being like spreadsheet monkeys who are just you know it's not and of course they do with due diligence and analysis and stuff but there's a they're much more built on who the founder is and what they're all about right before you came on i asked i and the i sent this like doctor to every guest and one of the questions i asked is like what are three strong opinions or life philosophies you live by so one is related to what we're talking about yeah this quote from emerson says the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of sol att and you had some examples under this can you talk about that and what what that means to you and what are some examples well there's some great very practical examples that you can use in your life and you'll be able to see is true okay and literally related it to crowds and next time you are entering a stadium watch your brain will wanna just follow the people mindless into the stadium but if you were able to snap out of that and go wait let me think for myself right now people have no idea most of them have never been to the stadium before they don't know where the entrance is right there's always another entrance that nobody's lined up for you could just walk right in always like we're a parking i'm a big skier whenever you go to the ski resort there are these guys that are like waving parking attendance and their their job is to park the cars but their job is not to park your car as close to the mountain as you could be like their job like there's not a thousand spaces right next to the chair left so they're gonna point everybody to where there's a thousand chair spaces which like for sure you're gonna have to take some kind of shuttle right it'll take you an hour to get to the ski lift but if you just ignore that guy i mean i don't wanna be rude and figure out a way to do this it's not like breaking the rules or whatever but go straight to the front and there'll will be a spot right next to the chair lift because somebody leaves somebody always leaving and and so yeah you could you can apply this at at the very practical level of like you moving your own body around when there's large groups of people and watching the herd mentality play out is very difficult often for people to do like people are terrified of public speaking for good reason like for thousands of tens of thousands of years if you were standing in front a large group of other humans they were probably about to kill you you're either they're leader or they were gonna kill you so the bad good happen yeah this should be of course it's terrifying and learning how to become their a leader is not instinct i think it maybe for certain sub you know it's certainly not me it take me a one time to get practice some some degree of just practicing to not feel terrified in front of groups and then do enjoy it and like don't think leaders are terrified they they love the crowd or like but even bruce bruce spring says he still gets nervous when he goes in place and then he has to like hack his brain to believe that that that's like energy and harness to give the fans what they want yeah like you've mentioned a couple things like just like that bridge the mindset hacking your mind are you big into mindset i think any founder is it's a it's very hard for people to understand what a roller coaster it is emotionally and how painful like the low are pretty low and and the high and the low can come in the same day you get a punched in the face constantly and yeah you can get pretty down you need to have release mechanisms and hacks and ways to get yourself back up because it's not it's certainly not not for everybody can tell you a little hack i do that maybe maybe it's useful for for anybody out there so i have a slack channel called literally highs and lows and what i do is that time there's a high or a low i'll go post it there the beautiful thing about it because it's the slack channel you could just scroll up and realize you like three months ago oh yeah i remember that felt like kind of the end of the world that felt really bad and now i i don't it's like a stub toe it's like do you remember how your last stub toe felt like this like a pride channel just for yourself it's me and my c cofounder so we can do this and i this in across every business i have and so whether it's a high i and then i go back and i get humbled immediately by a low i'm like okay don't don't get too high on your own supply here or it's a low currently and i'm like well i've already gone through if you just scroll up i've already conquered a bunch of mountains like this before i dealt with this i'll be fine and it's like an an immediate like kind of perspective machine and it's not even like somebody else perspective it's like i also was in the same channel three months ago saying the same thing crying wolf basically about this higher or this low and neither neither are as good or as bad as they seem in the moment it's yeah i i like that i might try that but it's it's very hard for another a non sound there to appreciate how difficult about it my my wife's is a former journalist as tech reporter in fact nice her watching my ride firsthand watching uses the wrong word participate in it has really kind of i she's like i wish would've have known this side of the thing when i was writing about t home you know understood like because you know i think tech reporters are the all reporters like very important function of like holding the powerful accountable but like founders you're not that powerful kinda self through like right you know we're we're up against some very powerful forces in the world like we feel like we're the ones like trying to you out speak truth to power and like for the lower guy and stuff and then mean meets on the the narrative within the media has been like out the tech the you know the founders are the ones that we have to hold accountable be like what about this like multi billion dollar truly almost tens of billion dollar mega corporation that i could compete with like come right i'm kinda pathetic sometimes i mean we're we're we're beat them every day but like sometimes they're better than us in certain dates i'm like we're trying to get better we get better what's faster than they do but we're not always the best we're starting out like especially as an early stage founder you have another one of the life philosophy that was simple it had no extra words so i want kinda want you hear i kinda wanna hear your explanation of it you said you can just do things what what what does that motto do for you oh i i don't know i think there's this idea that you need somebody's permission did i mean if you should have it's why by the way the a law class is useful for people and undergrad take try to get like into a basic class a lot a law class yeah law like don't break the law but you should have an understanding what's legal and what's not china gp is pretty amazing for this but in general like it's not illegal you can just do it and there's a lot of things that people are expecting you know we come up through this like education system where it's everything's gated and you can't get to twelfth grade math until you finish a eleventh grade math or whatever and you don't get to go to college unless you get these grades and stuff so within the institutions of the world like yeah you can't just do things you have to follow the rules but like in the real world that's how it works like there's no boss like waiting to tell you what you can do a lot of people are believe that they have to raise venture capital to start a company for example and like well maybe you should think of a different idea that doesn't need any money and just do it and that's what we did and we raised vc after ten years of doing companies without right yeah you don't need to have like the victim mindset you have you they're on yc application there's just a question about like what i mean yc application is not long either so if the questions on there it must have some value there's only like seven questions on the on the whole application mh and it it's it's what's an example of a real world system that you've hacked meaning like kind of like this like you could just do things or not following the crowd finding the side door into something i asked front my friend shield who i think invested in flex early leon on i go hey got ryan on the podcast today what's a good ryan's story from early days he goes oh there's a bunch he he he gave me one he goes he bought adwords for the keyword uber promo and just put his own promo code there and just got a bunch of cheap uber overrides for himself that way is that true did you do that i got i i became uber best customer lifetime probably because i did i got like ten thousand dollars in uber credits by doing that and then i treated uber like it was free because it was free for me for a while and i probably with net out netted out to spending like i bet you that you know i i spent way to was winter as a result yeah that was a good hack i didn't come up with that copied it from a friend but you know what's funny is i had two friends that did that and i never it occurred to me to also do that right like i just assumed it was done because other people had done it and i know they they kinda shut it down i'm sure i'm not sure was even bad like i think i paid for google's adwords edwards campaign for or uber adwords edwards campaign for them so we had this dude call into the podcast once and he's a guy in india and what he was doing was he realized there's an arbitrage where uber had this like credit like kind of a you give credits to somebody and then you'll get credits right that was the the the kinda like the paypal give ten get ten type of model but what they didn't do was they didn't account for geographic differences at the time so he would just get a bunch of people in india to sign it they'd give them you know ten dollars of uber credits which is like a big deal and they would sign up and they would take a ride and then a ride in india is really cheap he would get ten dollars of credits that he would sell it to american and so i bought thousands of dollars of credits off this guy and i wrote really really cheap because you could buy like five grand of credits for like a thousand dollars because this guy was farming them in india basically and this worked for years and he called into the podcast and he was like literally in like a small apartment in rural india and he was like it's a he's like i make you and like what i forgot what it was like fifteen thousand dollars a month which is more than like my entire village makes basically doing this he goes i know how long it'll last that's why i'm still living here i'm just saving it up for now but eventually they'll close this loophole and when they do you know that'll be a a sad day but it was amazing to see that that loophole that hack yeah i definitely sped through the credits pretty quick and then just became uber biggest customer for a long time no no now i'm mostly ride my bike i stopped riding uber gonna to one thing i find fascinating is you have a side hustle and i i i find this interesting when entrepreneurs have these like side things that just work right off the bat you did this one about phone booths like phone booths and companies could you just quickly tell this story because i think kind of inspiring yeah well unfortunately it closed down they sold the company and i didn't make any money i think it was kinda madness to be honest okay for we we basically it it started that flex court we never had enough conference rooms or and so i made i got this carpenters on craigslist to make a couple of phone booths out of just like wood built a phone within our office at flex and put like a lot of foam padding in there to make it somewhat sound turf and they were terrible the ones i made myself on craigslist because i didn't put we put a fan but not enough ventilation so you'd come out of this thing just dripping and sweat and yet people were in there nonstop using it i was like if the products this bad and yet everybody wants to use it there's like something years yeah so my fred henri who's the founder of air help really ran with this idea up and get it should give him all the credit he built it do a company i kept talking about it this another thing to do is like talk about your business ideas that add parties and stuff if everybody i every time i talked to about this idea with founders like i wanna buy five of them they was like oh man i should just start this company but i've got like waiting list to buy the stuff so we've made like these really nice swedish design and now that the company's failed or been sold i can tell you the ip the secret here the the intellectual property was we didn't we put three fans in that thing damn genius with the genius hack so was doing like fifty million dollars in sales fifty yeah we're signed thousands of them and somehow it could make money i was very frustrated we hired a ceo just the economics wrong or the overhead too many people on the team spending william on ps i'm not sure what happened i'm i'm a little pissed about it because it's like to selling fifty nine dollars of the phone was you should make ten million profit at least like the high margin alright somebody should reboot this idea and just do do it without limits management i i believe so now they might have become very competitive space i think there's was a lot of people at the time there was no good cheap phone booth out there trying to make like i think we someone for like three grand but you can make a phone boost for thousand bucks like come on it's not work oh so i i think in the you could just do things category i'm gonna put this in i think somebody could just do this again but yeah feel free to run with that one works because that company didn't work they sold to somebody why but i think the founder had an ambition to be like billion dollar unicorn company instead of like dude let's let's sell this thing to staples for fifty million dollars and like be happy right exactly right thanks for coming on man this is this been fun i'm a user of flex port i use it for my e comm biz we've you've you've helped me forward a bunch of freight i i here's how i know you've helped me i still don't know what freight forwarding really is and we've done you know tens of millions of you know year in revenue and that's the beauty of it i don't have to know i just know that our shit gets taken care of it's a low price it's the easiest to use tool so thank you for for making that happen thank you for import also because i would have never found my supplier had i not used that where should people follow you and and find out more i'm on twitter my handle on x dot com slash types fast is my handle and go to flex dot com if you're a e comm business where you run any kind of logistics you need to ship things from anywhere anywhere we we started in freight forwarding which is well i joke it should be called free email forwarding sean like passing emails around the world to get a container or air freight move but last year we acquired shopify file logistics and now we do direct to consumer fulfillment all the way to the door as well as like distribution into amazon fba handling that problems like getting appointments and managing all of that so helping brands solve problems in their supply is what we're all about there we go by the way you're at your handle is types fast and i love it your brother's is types faster ultimate big brother move for him to do that it was true he does type fast with me so anything alright ryan thanks so much man thank you i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back