#138 - How A Big Bitcoin Bet Paid Off, How To Best Learn From Billionaires, And Should Engineers Have Managers?

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never look came back live sorry i think we're live are we live we're live you look really bad thank you yes i'm very cold i'm very tired i think it shows this is tangent related to business but i wanted to bring something up to you i've lived in austin now for i've been in my house that i just bought for like five days i've been living in the city for six weeks now i don't know how long everyone is talking about moving to miami in austin and maybe a little bit of nashville where else i think it was right i i hear austin and miami the most i hear austin miami the most and i hear austin the most and basically for anyone who's not in our little silly bubble which i've bet actually most people are people are leaving new york san francisco and la and maybe a little chicago and they are moving to austin and so far i'm gonna sound like a sn but so far my takeaway is that austin is cool it sucks right now it's a very ugly city in the winter it's a nice place to live it's easier living but i miss a lot of the i don't know how to describe it worldly stuff of new york and san francisco and la like for example when i go and get coffee from a famous coffee place in new york or do something in san francisco or something in la that's supposed to be like the hottest thing going it's safe to assume that that person might be in the top five percent of their category in the country and i love that i love that i love that i love that whereas as in austin i've been here and there's been multiple times and i'm not that sn of a person but i'll ask for like a particular type of coffee like really simple like an american con like i said i don't think that that's considered sn anymore right and they don't do it doesn't that mean i don't drink coffee isn't that the most basic coffee doesn't not just mean like just coffee and none another the fancy shit it's like the third most basic thing so there's like drip coffee and then there's like fancy versions of that like pour over and then american econ is just hot water and espresso so you need a you need an espresso machine which i see it's not like that fancy anymore it was considered fancy but now it's just table stakes but like small stuff like that it makes me appreciate san francisco there's a little bit of boo in you and that that little bit of boo is missing the boo treats that you get in san francisco and in in new york well and also like for example austin's been pretty good but do you realize that all of our friends in san francisco and almost all of my friends in new york and like my family friends in new york they're all immigrants who came from a variety of different places lots of different religions tons of different ethnicities and it was so cool and like a lot of people like you went to duke we have friends who went to some of like really elite universities and then we have friends who are high school dropout outs and that like i don't know what you want they had i love that i love it i love i love it and it was and it's awesome and i and i haven't had that here yet well i hope you miss it and i hope that people move back the area at some point but i feel like this was a one way ticket for for most i believe i am not sure yet maybe maybe not i think come when the weather gets warmer i think austin is gonna be so fun and so great but i don't know you know maybe now now's is a good time to buy a place in san francisco or or new york yeah you know i think there's definitely like a a a closer knit thing now of the people who are left like when i do a call i'm like where are you based like bae i'm like me too it's like a novel thing whereas before i didn't even ask the question like of course like if you're in the tech industry you're almost always here unless you know i can tell that you're somewhere else and now it's like oh you're still here cool should meet we should you you wanna like go over for a walk so there's like i think a lot of us who are still here are like alright fuck it fuck everyone who left were gonna become like close and we're gonna like create the you know we're gonna build this thing from scratch again and i think he i think that should happen i you know san francisco and california in general la there's like so many great things about it but there's way more worst things about it and i it would be really nice if some of the worst things could get redone a little yeah that would that would be good but the things that are great are really great like i'm driving around here in texas in the wintertime it's very great it's very ugly whereas on the coast of california i mean that's like the greatest thing ever even new york it can be okay sometimes although i have a lot of negative things to say about that place but anyway just wanted the say an update on that and everyone's talking about austin and miami and i wanna say it's lovely but those other places that we're shitting on are cool too okay cool let's let let's talk about something else what else you wanna talk about or do you wanna try the the thing we're bra you pick stuff off list and people wanted more ab bra you and so i think we give him more b you and let him for topics the only thing is he's gonna throw out some topics stuff we don't know shit about because he looked it up he researched it and i guess we'll just roll with it if that happens let's do the the billy thing because i i would love to talk about that okay which one i have two on here dan gilbert and i have a follow for dan okay so alright dan gilbert so billy of the week by the way i like that we were like oh you pick the topic and sam's like fuck that i'm picking it you just told me to or he told me okay he just said you guys start oh okay i thought he was saying i'll pick the ones that you guys wrote anyway anyways it doesn't matter oh my bad do billy of the week so dan gilbert is a guy who i know because he owns the cleveland cavalier so he owns basketball team and he owns the company that names their arena which is quicken loans they do the rocket mortgage commercials if you've ever seen those he also is notorious because and i don't know if you know this when lebron left cleveland he wrote this letter did you ever see that yeah i think he was really angry right he's was really angry and he wrote it and he printed it or published it as a it's like an image and it was written in comic san like like a blue of red comic san font which just made his angry letter seem super childish and ridiculous what what why did he do was that just like no that's just like what he was writing in he didn't do it by knowing that that was like a weird thing so i found that to be hilarious and most people did because he was like going off at lebron he's like you know this self proclaimed king you know i i promise i guarantee we will win before lebron does and then lebron won like two years later and you know the cab were the worst team in the league so and it didn't really work out for him that way but anyways this guy got like a a pretty epic business empire so i didn't actually look up his whole story but i'll tell you what what was interesting so when i tweeted out that thing that we talked about which was the youth combine for free youth sports i got a message from somebody who's an exec at a company that is called zenith football a zenith dot com with a x so zenith football they make football helmets and pads and i was like oh that's interesting like again it's one of those things where if you just look around you everything around you a business you know brought to you and so if you look at like you know little league or football and the pads and the helmets that they're wearing or high school football like the stuff that the school has to buy who do they buy it from like there's a maker so i started talking to this guy about this company so he's like yeah there's three or four big players we're in that mix of like top three he's like this company was started by dan gilbert and i was like dan gilbert started this company and that was the second time i'd heard this because the other company that dan gilbert started or helped start was stock x which is a billion dollar what do you ebay for as makers basically as of today it's a two and a half billion dollar company they just raised more money oh okay perfect so and it's kinda crazy it's not like he was just like an investor like he literally was like this is the story now i i don't know how much of this is true versus like you know rich guys right their narrative but the story was like oh i see my kids are super into sneakers like crazy into sneakers like they're all about it and then he met this guy who had this like kinda like sneaker store type of thing called something else and he convinced him hey let's create an online marketplace a stock exchange for these sneakers because these sneakers are appreciating in value like a stock so let's make it where you can buy and sell these sneakers this way and they created then you know they renamed that guy's company or that he brought that guy in to like kind of do the operations brought in another guy to do the tech and they c founded and he's considered a c cofounder of stock x because he kind of like spurred the idea which is kind of amazing anytime somebody has multiple billion dollar hits it's like this person is the the you know they're the elite of the elite when it comes to business and so what what do you know about this guy that i don't well let me just say i'll tell you this real quick and then we'll go to the beginning of his story because i know if fair a little bit about them you know fat head the wall stickers things yeah he owns it i don't know if he bought it or started it he maybe started it but he owns it for sure wow yeah so he i think he owns like fifty different things and you probably know of a bunch of them but he owns fat head he maybe started it so dan gilbert is interesting i used web r newspapers dot com and i went and read about them from these old articles but basically in like nineteen eighty five he started a mortgage business where they would originate loans from mortgages and i don't know if that means of the bank or if they're connecting you with the bank it was called rock financial and he grew it and i think in the year eleven it went public with like eighty million in revenues like a really good company and that was in nineteen ninety five so let's multiply that by two and that's maybe like you know current revenues or the equivalent and he took it public and then i think intuit bought it for about six hundred million dollars and i think two years later he bought it back for sixty five billion bucks in doing that he made it huge and they recently went public again and it knocked it out the park so he's been doing the same business for a while and he kinda pulled the fast one not a fast one but he strategically was really talented and and made it work he also by the way it says in late twenty eighteen he bought the online dictionary he online dictionaries dictionary dot com and soar dot com like what's this guy do it why you on those two that's hilarious that like dictionary dot com would be a great don't it's a great it's a great business i actually you've talked to somebody about it but just funny that he's involved in that like that just feel like he's got his hands in in several different pots that are completely unrelated right he he was like one of the kind of biggest investors in hundred thieves which is a big esports team so he's he's very it's interesting as a business person i think he's lame is fucked due to that letter like that should me everything i need to know about the guy but like i think his business stuff is pretty epic and well why do you think he's lame i mean that was just like a fifty five year old baby you know no he's just like fifty like i don't know also what's this is it cleveland that's the city i mean i think he owns so he actually is from detroit he just owns the cab the cleveland cavalier so he oh was a detroit that he he's was a big detroit guy and owns his bunch real estate in detroit and stuff like that but he owns the cleveland cavalier because he couldn't own the pistons so he bought in where he could buy in he seems okay enough i've actually seen interviews with them he seems fine enough i don't know but but that's actually a question i wanted to bring up to and so you wanted to bring up what's his name dan gilbert another i think his name is also dan that reminds me of him and i don't know anything about football so i think but i think that people hate this guy dan snyder the owner of the redskins skin yes he's hated yes like what is he a cheap or something yeah or you make fantasies he's like a cheap kid who banks fan decisions yeah that's like the okay you know why they people hate these owners just when they do that i don't yeah i don't know anything about that i'm not like a man's man i don't really pay attention to that but he's kinda like dan gilbert in that at the age of like twenty one he started a non sexy business this business what they did was at first they would go to doctor's offices and buy advertise or like by the wall or something like he would like purchase the wall or purchase the space and he would get pharmaceutical companies to advertise at the doctor's office and they would take a cut and i think it it was called snyder communications and i'm not actually reading this off the top of my head i i gotta i remember it but i think that in a matter of like seven years it went public with a billion dollars in revenue and he was the youngest publicly traded ceo at age thirty two and then eventually sold the company for two or three billion dollars to a large advertising company very similar as dan gilbert and my question to you is people like at my age let alone twenty two twenty three twenty five i don't like like these guys like a lot of times they grew through like really sophisticated financial prowess like dan snyder like acquired like eighteen companies roll them together like i my brain doesn't work in such a way that i can like i understand like some of that the financial arbitrage what do you think is in these types of people and that's what dan gilbert did you know he's that's a financial company how do you think they do this and understand how this all works i mean it's like really fascinating yeah yeah i think it's a question for them like obviously i i don't know what what in their background let them to start you know a mortgage origin generation company that's not what they average you know twenty five year old thinks about doing or or even has any knowledge about and so so i don't know what it is but i do know that like it's the thing we're talking about last week or last episode where i said once you see a twelve it's hard to un see and i meant it in terms of like when you see somebody who's truly great at something you now know what it means to be truly great at that thing like before you thought the bar was here and actually they've they've raised what the bar can be i think it's kinda the same thing once you see somebody make money in a certain way or make a certain amount of money if you're if you're sufficiently motivated and smart you can learn really quickly how to go down that path so for example i remember when i first heard you know what people were doing with buying secondary stock through sp when i heard heard oh chris saga has basically accumulated so much twitter stock by the time i went public that you know he was the largest or second largest shareholder of twitter even though he was not in not a you know cofounder of the company and it was because this guy who didn't have that much money use this vehicle called an sp and found capital and like was super aggressive and so that to me was like wow i'm nowhere near that aggressive or you know like i'm not even po opportunities like that i didn't even know that there's a mechanism called an sv to do it but now i do and so then i started looking at how can i do that what i found was like usually it's not the same exact game that you can play like da for example people right now doing specs you know they're getting fabulous rich off specs i don't and three years ago it was ico people were getting fabulous rich off ico and these windows closed and like kind of the opportunity to be kind of a first mover in them you know slows down it becomes less easy to win when you see the sp thing then you know that when the spa thing starts you're like oh i see the pattern and this is kinda like that or when do you see the ico thing you're like oh this is kinda like that if you decide to jump in aggressively you can rise to be like the top one percent early on it's just like kinda like how jack was talking about new platforms like okay i saw that when the facebook platform launched there were all these winners you know when the app store opened up there were all these winners and so when slack launches their platform you're like oh shit there's gonna be some winners on the slack platform it's worth a bet to go early on to new platforms and so i think you just sorta of see patterns i would guess that these guys kind of early on got exposed to either by reading or meeting somebody somebody who had made their money that way and got them thinking okay maybe i can make my money that way too i i agree with that i think that having a role model or a big brother or a parent or a mentor to kinda show you the way and you start seeing what's possible that's great what is curious to me is how they these guys some people are able to do this at such a young age you know have such maturity to pull it off at a young age is is astounding and second of all i don't know how to explain this but with these spa and these things like that i am such a skeptic and i'm like there's no way this can work i i'm i i default to pessimism and like this is fake and stupid bullshit right and it's it's like i there's no way that there's value here there's no way that anyone's ever gonna do it and i'm wrong all the time right and so the fact that like people who default to oh yeah it's gonna work i admire that and it's quite fascinating what the difference between those two types of personality is the assessment i would have of that is that like that's a leak in your game right that's like poker terminology where when you go back and you look at you look at the hands you play it over this last session and you're like shit every time this happens i'm making this mistake and it's costing me money i think that's the way to look at this now which is like even if some of these things are over hyped or they're not gonna be long term or whatever clearly there's people who profit from every single one of these these like cycles that they go through and whether you wanna do it or not you know that's up to you but i think i used to be more like you where i used to be more i used to love being the one who said it's not gonna work and the beautiful thing about that is you're right nine times out of ten it is stupid it's not gonna work or it's a scam or whatever but one out of every ten you're wrong and it actually would have been great and that one pays for for all the times you know that you that you try these things and so so i think that like i've learned it's profitable to be an opt speaking of that you tweeted out two weeks ago ten days ago that you put a large percentage of your net worth at a bitcoin now it's at twenty thousand dollars is there coincidence is sean pumping and dublin to market i i mean buy is are your fifty thousand followers at are listeners like did you just effectively move the market in bitcoin i hope so that's the beauty of bitcoin the more people who buy and then tell everybody how great of a buy it is that more the it's a self fulfilling prophecy and there's no accountability there's no such thing as over hype when it comes to money you know what i mean we can all say bitcoin is the greatest thing and that we're all growing all on bitcoin and the more people that say it the more people start piling in and all that happens is the price goes up it successfully fulfill its destiny it's not like a stock where you say oh for example that nicola stock right which is like this wannabe be tesla it's like oh nicholas is the next tesla nicholas is a tesla you'll get some hype but at a certain point of like fuck nobody buys their cars or their trucks like they have no revenues they have no profits and you know the house of cards falls down but money that as they say is is the bubble that never pops there is no fundamentals there are no profits and revenues that you need to think about it's just price and so the beautiful thing about it just being measured on price is the more speculation that happens the higher the price goes the more people that butt pile in the higher the price goes that is the beauty of bitcoin and that is the beauty of money in general as a as a concept i agree with you i just find it hard to brother the question the question i gotta ask you are you gonna get rich when bitcoin goes up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars per coin that's what you need okay if you're in you're in that's all you need to do i i i got in very early i've never bought or sold anymore since then good but i i it's a substantial amount at this point but i think i only paid five or ten grand at the time so but that was in two thousand twelve bra you what do you wanna do well let's continue with the bitcoin conversations sean has michael sailor on here what do you wanna talk about there he's kind of another bill of the week i if you heard of this guy michael sailor u so tonight he's gotten famous lately because he came out before i moved with the market myself single handedly he also induced you know some some bullish and people because this guy owns this thing called micro strategy oh yes yes yes so he owns a company called micro strategy micro strategies i don't know what it's worth bridge looks at a form me but it's a it's a public company it's like a one or two billion i think yeah so you know one or two billion dollar company and they kind of do like you know it's one of those enterprise companies you go to the website you have no fucking clue what they do they're like a billion dollar plus company which makes me just think i know nothing about marketing i know nothing about communication i know nothing about nothing it's been around i think they've been around for close to twenty years yeah like if you go to q website you're like i don't know what the fuck this is nobody would use this this makes no sense and then of course everybody uses it so micro microsoft is kinda of the same way but he came out recently and basically bought he took four hundred four hundred twenty five million dollars off their balance sheet and just bought bitcoin which is kind of a crazy move for a company to do and so people will like do this a crazy move but because this guy kinda started it built it you know he has like quite a lot of autonomy with what he wants to do with his company and he's like well while i looked at it we have a lot of cash and the government just printed like you know i don't know thirteen trillion dollars or something crazy the seven trillion dollars like some absurd them basically like they inflated like you know they they printed the equivalent of twenty to twenty five to thirty percent of the monetary supply so he's like okay holding cash is no good i'm getting you know my cash is becoming worth less bonds well the yields are zero interest rates are zero you know maybe going negative i looked at gold golden and i i could buy gold with this but he basically wanted to have a he wanted to put his money in a in a way that would be protected and he's like you know the further i went down the bitcoin rabbit hold the further i got convinced that this is a the best way to protect the money we have as a treasury ass set for our company and the second thing is i think this might be like one of the best investments because i think there's a lot of other people who are gonna do exactly what i'm doing and that's gonna cost the price to go up so he first invested four hundred twenty five million dollars of their own money then he issued new shares just to borrow money to buy more bitcoin so he bought like a billion dollars more a bitcoin sis and he's already probably what twenty or eleven twelve percent yeah he's up probably ten percent already you know so there's forty fifty million bucks easily on his investment i found him kind of interesting so he's done a fun bunch of interesting things so i went back and i was kind of like stalking him and trying to figure out like who the fuck is this guy and like why have i never heard of michael sailor before today so a couple things first is go to hope dot com okay type it in and tell me what happens hope dot com it goes straight to micro strategy bitcoin right so he owns all these domains because early on when the internet was early all he was like dude i think this internet thing is gonna be huge and i don't get why nobody's paying attention to this so i'm gonna buy up all the domains i can and so he bought hope dot com wisdom dot com alert dot com glory dot com all these names like william and emma and like usher and arthur and like strategy dot com speaker dot com courage dot com michael dot com he owns all these domains and he bought them all for like dirt cheap early on because he was convinced that the internet was gonna be a big deal before everybody was convinced that the internet was gonna be a big deal so that was like one of his original big calls that he made and then he since has had several of those companies he's not just like he owns a domain squats on it for example angel dot com was one of the domains that he owned they turned it into like kind of like a a voice operated customer service thing okay again this was early he was like oh i think that's cool you can talk to a computer and the computer can understand you and talk back like kinda like siri early on before the tech wasn't any good but he's like that's gonna be a big deal and so he built names dot com they ended up selling it for a hundred million dollars in cash and yeah if i remember correctly didn't he also start because he owned a domain name didn't he start like an alarm company yes alert dot com i believe is one of his or alarm dot com one of those alarm dot com yeah yeah which he i think sold for hundreds of available lot yeah exactly so this guy's had multiple again multiple wins and multiple in this case early calls i would say so there's a book he wrote called what is called michael sailor call like the mobile wave i think he wrote this book called the mobile wave and he published this win this was i believe fairly early on a brief tell if you can find by the way you are making me so hyped on this person he just sounds so bold on his wikipedia i just pulled it up i think he he got in trouble a little bit or he's been accused of some weird stuff which it's just an accusation i don't know what's true or what isn't it but i did i'd mean to do stuff or what do you mean no no no scc stuff so he had to pay three and fifty thousand and fines for i don't know i just that's just a tip he leaves the sec that's nothing so so he started off he wanted to be a fighter pilot and he tells the story he's like early on i thought that he's you know four or five professions were cool i thought fighter pilot was super cool i thought business owner was super cool like ceo that sounds like a good job to have professor i think that could be cool and so he went and basically tried each one so he tried to be a fire pilot goes goes into the whatever army navy whatever and but then he gets medically released because he has a heart murmur and he's like shit okay i can't do alright so back to the drawing board what's what's what's number two okay i'm gonna do i'm gonna be a ceo and so he and so he went through several of these and he tells these story he says he sounds like some pretty interesting stories i i encourage people to to check him about i'm not gonna repeat his whole interview but he wrote this book to mobile wave what twenty twelve i think brave is that is that right or no we gotta get this guy on i'm looking at them him too went to mit clearly super bright guy very interesting and he's kinda got this like great no given attitude when he does his interviews which is they're like you know because with this bitcoin thing a lot of people were trying to like you know debate him on it and he's was like well and he just like breaks down the case in a absolute no folks given manner and and he tells these stories he's like yeah when we were he's like i started this consulting company this technology consulting company and i didn't know anything about technology he's like i told my professor hey i'm doing this technology consulting company and we're doing it in you know visual basic and the professor was like oh visual basic sucks for all these reasons you should do it in c plus plus that's where the future is and he's like you might be right but like see c plus is too complicated me i don't understand it so i'm just gonna do visual basic for now and like we'll figure it out larry he's like so we grew from like you know no millions to like nine million a year in doing visual basic stuff he's like and the professor was right like c plus plus was getting more popular and it was gonna be the right thing so then like when we were at nine million we were like okay we gotta figure out the c plus plus thing now like you know it was time to make a shift he's like so then we shifted to that he's like and then we were doing this other thing and my professor was like no that's stupid go to this other thing and he's like i don't know about that i'm i'm gonna try but like i'm just gonna keep making money and he's like my professor he had his like consulting business that stayed at three hundred fifty thousand a year in revenue every five years i would go back and he would tell me what the next wave is and i would look into it and i would try but like he's like he stayed at three hundred fifty thousand and i built mine to like a fifty million dollar company during that same time he's like there's a big difference between people who kind of like intellectually know where the world is going and people who can actually like run on the treadmill you know while the world is going that direction two things first of all what is your source for this because i would like to learn more about this person but it doesn't look like he has like a biography he's not he's only fifty five years old i read almost no biographies i just watched youtube interviews with people it was a youtube interview with him and this guy who's was who's interviewing about bitcoin and it was like an hour long thing that i watched and if you are interested in this google the guy michael sailor s a y l o r and then if you scroll down into i always find the references part of wikipedia because they i typically have old interviews i think that's like the most interesting thing to read he's got like a cool couple cool articles in the washington tote washington tony oh i don't know what that is the seven billion dollar man he's got a bunch of cool stuff and then the second thing that i was gonna ask you which is by the way let me give a little tip about how i do this because i think people do this stuff wrong what a lot of people do is they say oh this person's successful and rich and then they say a thing today alright it's probably true it might be true right okay not not a terrible assumption right if you don't know shit okay at least just follow some smart people and rich people and know you probably had up better than than not knowing anything not doing anything but one thing i like to do is i go and i read their old sheet i read their interviews and their their books from ten twelve years ago you and i see what they predicted then like for example our buddy andrew it really likes bill act and he turned me on to bill act i'm kind of ignorant of like the traditional financial world i kind of only knows silicon valley stuff and so i was like oh who's this bill act guy never heard of him was like well he owns just like you know multi billion dollar dollar hedge fund yeah you know pushing square he's got this really interesting backstory we'll we'll do him one week for billy of the week and he was like and i was like andrew how do you like you know this guy he invested in andrew's company and i was like what do you you know do you like purchase queries like yeah go to their net assets thing and you could see like they basically own several public companies so you could see what those companies add up to and you can compare that to the stock price and if the stock price is lower than what the actual assets they hold are just clearly value you had right i went and i bought on that trade but said let me go look this guy a little bit right i wanna do my own independent thinking about this bill act guy so i went and and i watched his talks from this thing called the so conference which is like this conference once a year for like rich hedge fund guys so and then you go on stage and you just make a pretty you make a call you're like this stock is the stock and so i went back and i watched this from like the last ten years and i went and chart their performance no way what did you do this at in google sheets yeah yeah google sheets and so i go and i and i say oh he talks about howard hughes and he like gives us talk at the phone conference and i'm like but minute fourteen i'm like i'm trying to buy howard hughes stock you know like now even though he gives us talk eight talk eight years ago and it's you know because it's very convincing as he talks about you know construction and why this company is well positioned whatever and i go back and i look at the stock and it's like flat for eight years right you know he has he's like really famous calls against herbal life and whatever and he like you know lost a she was yeah and so it reminds you a like nobody knows everything rich smart people are totally wrong on several things so you know you cannot just take their take everything at at sort of their word the second thing is there's a lot of like back testing you can do to like look at somebody's track record beyond their one or two successes that made them big it doesn't mean that they're dumb but it's just a really good counter balance because when you read all their successes you're like oh my god i'm inferior this person's got the midas touch everything they do works i should just kinda blindly follow and what you really wanna do is learn how they think learn how they talk and you wanna like back test some of their predictions just so that you have a kind of a a balanced view of them so i think more people should do that so what's your taking on bill act do you like them him or not i mean i he's incredibly smart i think he's very impressive what he's built his track record he's had so many down years it's not somebody where i look at and i say okay this person has this track record of consistent returns that's not him he's had some blow out return years and then he said several years where he was kind of like you know below market or or worse and getting his asking i think it helps that i think that it helps a lot if you're a good looking dude as well he's like a charismatic good looking guy and he's a well spoken he know he's a master of saying provocative things i believe like he knows how to manipulate the press he's very he's like chu off he is cha off of the finance world as far as i'm concerned not cha trying to go into the finance world but they're very similar not if you logan but he is also very charismatic very well spoke very convincing when you hear i'm saying something you're like oh shit yeah well when you see bill act he just has that look he looks like he is okay we should talk about this by the way so a couple podcasts ago we were joking about this i have to apologize basically we were talking about somebody who i had met talked about their company kinda like a you know like a pitch meeting or whatever we were joking because their name was a certain way their look was a certain way wait well let's recap we joked so the guy who shot talked about i guess accurately that he was probably really good looking he was probably shredded it was probably had a name like tucker eric in which i just made i don't know yeah it's it was mostly compliments yeah like there they weren't like negative things but but i was saying it like you know i was making fun right i i'll teasing him and so he sent me a really angry dm afterwards and i felt bad because i don't know and like if i'm gonna make fun of somebody i'd rather make fun of myself than anybody else i i'm not here to make people feel bad so so i do apologize to him and in general i think it was not a great moment i was trying to just have some fun and joke around but i can definitely see if you're on the other side of that but that sucks and so it's you it's it's a lot less funny to that person than it was to me in the moment and probably to people who listening who just kinda heard and forgot about it so and kinda fucked up on that one that's okay that's good we were a little rude but i don't even know who the guy is so i i think i'm in the clear yeah yeah people are so i don't if he's gonna hear oh he's that angry you said be like a really long rebuttal and then block feet i was like okay or like i can't dm back to just be like hey sorry like yeah that's not how i meant it to be but got carried away with the joke in the moment shouldn't done it alright brady what do wanna do alright so you talked about high tag this doesn't seem high text sam you have sunday lawn care on here what's that let me pull that up i wrote there i think i wrote that two weeks ago but basically this business interests me so there's a company called sunday lawn care agree what's the headline that i pulled up but they just raised another fifteen million bucks yeah they've raised like fifteen twenty million dollars from sequoia i think was the last round they've raised twenty eight million in total so sunday lawn care i'm not a customer of it so just basing this off their website but basically they sell lawn care supplies so to have a healthy lawn you i know i guess you spray different chemicals on it but their whole stick is that it's like chemicals that you shouldn't be nervous that your dogs running around while the chemicals are on the grass and i think it's crazy fascinating and i went and looked at some of the biggest folks in the space the biggest one in the space is orc you don't work no oh sorry not working roundup roundup you know roundup yes you know roundup so they actually got in trouble about two years ago because a jan i think a jan at a university got cancer and i think roundup is i think it's owned by monsanto he sued them and he won a lot of money yada yada but they're famous because they're roundup but they make five billion in revenue off roundup and two billion in profit it's a crazy big business roundup is and what roundup is is it's just like a pretty harsh chemical that's supposed to get rid of it's like a weed i think yeah and another one is another interesting one and they pull this up that's in a similar space is orc do you know what organ does no or is pest control and so it's been around since nineteen o one it's a huge business it's now owned by this thing called rollins which is a a family owned business one of the biggest family owned businesses in america i believe it's a franchise and so whenever you have a raccoon or some dead animal and your attic you call orc and they come and get rid of it and it makes billions of year a year in revenue so i saw this sunday lawn care and i was very fascinated by lawn care supplies particularly the niche of this snow chemical thing and there's a lot of really really really great examples of that so for example do you know guy named eric ryan yes i well i heard him at how's it on yeah that's on yeah so this guy named eric ryan he started method soap what you've see in target maybe target bottom actually but you see him in a target all the time and it's basically soap without chemicals i buy i love it then he started well and then he started ollie and i think well is like band aids that look cute and also some type of chemical free stuff and then ollie which is kinda like bullshit free vitamins for children this whole thing of like going against chemicals to whatever that's pretty straightforward it but i thought it was really cool in the category of lawn care i think it could be potentially really cool for pest control particularly raid do you know raid yes so i saw a pitch deck for a company that was like we're the d word method soap in the category of you know like bug spray was it called ant fanny no i think it was called something else it was this was they're early on they were like just you know not not not too far well there's a company called ant fanny and they're trying to do that it's pretty interesting have you ever seen a raid can yes i have raid yeah it very clearly looks like something that if you inhale it's gonna kill you yeah like we had to get rid of it they're like have a baby and a dog now and like you know let's not kill them like let's let's let's avoid killing them yes and i think it's interesting we had i was at this airbnb and there was like lady bugs in the house a lot of them and they had to come and clean it out and they're like but you have to leave for like forty five minutes and i was like but if i have to leave for forty five minutes because this is dangerous to me right it's probably still gonna be dangerous it's still gonna be there it's six hours like that is kinda weird what do you think about that and so anyway very interesting categories that i've been paying in touch attention to should we let it slide that yeah had like a lady bug issue and you had to call somebody i don't know is that i think i i i think that's a thing in texas like there's like like literally there was like hundreds of lady bugs and we just like called our airbnb host and we're like oh she's like that happened have you seen a cock a texas cockroach yet no is that like was a texas cock but it sounds like you'll know because it looks like a fucking bird they fly i don't think the cockroaches in other places fly but in texas cock just fly around which is disgusting no i'm not seen and they're strongest shit like you could step on one and then you get off and they push back he's just like cracking his next a little bit like oh that's all you got pussy like gonna come harder than that maybe i do need the rate down here but super interesting categories particularly orc i'm very fascinated by orc who would have thought that a pest control business would be that big yeah i mean anytime you take care of something people don't want to do themselves you know do you you sort of have pricing power there so i like sunday i think it's a good idea like i think there's a d justification of everything right what i think you know is really happening with these d products like the common themes obviously they're basically saying yeah forget trying to be sold forget trying to get on the shelf and target and lowe's and home home depot or whatever else like let's just get on the shelf of facebook okay we can control that we can push a button we can put ourselves on the shelf that's the first piece the second piece is hey consumer tastes have changed but these brands like raid and whatever they're stuck in the past and so hey people now like think about the stuff like that think about like how toxic these chemicals might be and if there's a clean alternative that's like good for the environment or it's good for me there's a market of people who will pay more to have more they're slicing up these big old brands like that that neither sell online nor you know take into account these different takes profiles that people have well do you wanna go to another one bring you sure this is one that i had put down have you guys sort of copy dot ai yes they've just sent me a free trial they reached out but i haven't had a chance to play with it yeah i thought it was pretty interesting we talked about gp three a few months ago and this person actually kinda did something about it so we used them we used them yesterday actually i said oh can we use like one of these gp three products to generate a bunch of reviews right we had let's say twenty customer reviews of something and i thought oh what if we just put those in and then can generate like two hundred more variations of those same reviews because that would be awesome it's like the easiest way to like kinda like fake reviews basically take real reviews and then just get more of them for through this automated thing can i guess what happened yeah it was okay and there were some usable ones but most of them weren't exactly and the reason it wasn't was because it's just like a stupid thing that tricked the computer like one of the words it like one of the the name of the brand it thought meant like the literal meaning of that word and so all the reviews were about like something else altogether because it just interpreted you know it's like if you interpret i don't know like let's say it's called like cloud something and it's like a software for enterprise and it's about cloud software but interprets cloud as like actual clouds in the sky and it just wrote all the reviews about the sky instead of about cloud software do you know how i described gp p what's it called gp three or whatever that's subject three so like in the nineteen forties when there was like german spies they like could like do all this amazing stuff like speak perfectly about you know and have his very little accent but then if you did like you could do like two things you you'd be like hey by the way german spy guy who's mickey mouse wife right and they're like right mickey mouse what's what's mickey mouse wife's name like it you guys have shit or like if you say like to hold up the number of the what comes after one and they go two you know instead of two you know what i mean with their index like the these little german nazi spy things yeah that that's the tells that gp three still has they don't know mickey mouse wife right yeah that's that's that's exactly that's a great way of describing it i have another topic that i wanna get your pin on this is kinda like not a new idea but every time i hear i'm like it seems like a good idea why doesn't that really exist in a big way yet i have a friend who's a engineer and they just got a new job and they were basically like hey i got this job offer i'm relieved i just went through this interview process i kinda don't know if this offers fair it seems like a good offer but like how much was it i could probably get more i don't remember it was like a hundred and seventy k plus like you know sign on bonus of a little bit and some stock and like i think this is a good offer i could probably negotiate it feels kind of awkward i don't know if ask for what do you guys think should i do this and then who was just like i wish i could just have like an agent who would just like when i get the job i just say great talk to my agent and my agent basically negotiate it for me and look they get a cut for negotiating anything above whatever the initial offer was they can keep ten percent and you know they only need to work for like you know the three days that for negotiating this thing for me and you know the more engineers that they work with the more they know what the like kind of like what the they more data points right like in any negotiation the side with more information there's like a there's what they call it information as when one side knows more than the other but an agent would help balance that where the agent would also know know what a bunch of different candidates got paid and they'll know where what's fair and what's not so what do you think of this idea well let me ask you this question how many people work at twitch two thousand yeah base pay only how many of them do you think of the two thousand people make over a half a million a year in cash base pay only like cash in bonuses sorry i meant cash not stock very few amazon has a limit you can only make a hundred and eighty five thousand a year on your salary and then you can get cash but the majority of it is stock oh amazon stock okay how many of the two thousand make half a million a year in cash and stock i would say of the two thousand maybe ten percent a little more than that i'd say like fifteen percent yeah so fifteen percent would be three hundred people oh sorry sorry that's way too guys sorry i would say i i got my percentage is wrong so of the two thousand people i would say like maybe twenty five to thirty people get that that amount whatever that is wanna go you know two percent not not twenty percent so i think that this is an interesting idea but i think it would only work for people who make like in the three hundred four hundred five hundred thousand dollar range and you could say give me eight percent about so but let's say you're this person right you're gonna make let's say total comp is two hundred k in a year which is a a normal engineering you take home so let's say two hundred k and if i can get you an extra twenty k per year are you willing to give up twenty percent of that for the extra that i got you so i can make five thousand dollars off this client working you know for a grand total of for four or four days for i don't think that's how it would work i think you need more context to have but you don't even need to know the person you just need to attempt to negotiate you said this person got this many years of experience they're being hired at this level and by the way they're moving no i hear you i just think that that's stupid i think that the way it would work my premise or the idea is like it would have to be more personality driven sort of like an agent for a football player where it's like no look my guy i've known him for years like he comes from a a this type of family and and this just isn't gonna do this isn't gonna work with them you gotta do something better i don't think that's f ages work either i think i don't know i'm just i just i i'm referencing baller right like i said in the in the in the first segment but i don't know anything it's about sports i think that these things are all really standard and there's a range like literally if i go into our hr portal today right because i hire people i could say hey i'm hiring for this role what's the band the band means there's sort of a minimum and a maximum for that level that they're hiring at we never offer the max of the band we never you know usually don't offer the minimum either we offer somewhere in the middle depending on kinda like where they're at how do i find these bands give me just give me the bands and then there we have some negotiating leverage which is if we go to them and they say no or they say hey i have another offer then i can go back and i can go to the backs of my band and that's what i can make the offer at if i did you so what's the percentage band like what's the now that you've seen this how much can you go up twenty percent percentage is hard but yeah it'll range like let's say anywhere between twenty k and like you know it can be as much as a hundred k so then if i'm getting offered a job at a huge company i should always ask for like fifty k more always ask for more for sure and you should just say you know judging by my other conversations is what i think the fair market value is do you have flexibility to do that or you could say i have i have another offer that's higher is this the maximum that you guys could do i really wanna work with you guys but i have another offer that's higher and meaningfully hiring it matters to me so a lot of people listening to this are probably like me now or like you two years ago where they have very little experience at a big company i've asked you this many times and i like asking you because you always have new answers what has changed about your perception of big companies and how that works anything inside or you being just like this this process like for example the pay like that's very process oriented where we're like a guy like you or me or at least me now maybe you a few years ago you'd be like look i'm just gonna pay you whatever i want you know like i don't negotiate in the same way like company does where it's like a set process do you think that's a good move or a bad move so i won't answer that question i don't really and i i was kinda of think about something else while you were talking but i guess i would say one realization that's become more and more clear over time is that when you're in a small company you're fighting the market and when you're in a big company you're basically competing against each other so yeah i shouldn't say fine i actually competing other big companies or internal when you're at a startup you're competing against the market other companies big and small and when you're a big company you're competing against other people inside your company of ultimately like if you wanna get paid more the way to do it in a startup is to win more market share the way to do it in a big company truly and this is like kinda horrible say and you know a big company person would say no that's not how it works you you know you the more impact you drive you know the more you you'll get rewarded in reality it is the internal perception that's gonna matter way more than the external results and therefore you spend way more of your time on internal perception than external results there are so many times where i'm like we should just try this we should just decide and go we we don't need to get their approval we don't get their buy unless make it happen what if the best way to get the results is for us to change the process or for us to not have like consensus or whatever and the reason people don't wanna do it is because there's two things one there's a trade off even if we win the battle we might lose the war meaning even if we get good results the internal damage and disputes that will happen because of the way we did it aren't worth it in the long run it's you know we'll we'll break down our cooperation the second is look for me to move forward i need these people to like me i need these people to vouch for i need these people to promote me therefore i'm only gonna take a certain amount of risk and i'm only gonna move at a certain pace because what's rewarded is not risk taking nor pace what's rewarded is the perception of people internally so one big thing for example is like let's say you guys are launching or you're projecting trends next year when you think about you're projecting trends revenue what do you base your how do you come up with that number what do you think about what are the considerations i take a guess based off of previous results and i say i think we can improve this and it's just a guess right and now you have again there's a band there's a range it's like there's a conservative amount and then there's like a really aggressive amount how do you decide whether to be really conservative really aggressive well i hope for the best and i plan for the worst but when you set a number you set a target where do you set your target i just kinda make it up is it more on the conservative side or more on the aggressive side for you aggressive right at a company you would get penalized every time you do that because you're not actually setting a projection you're setting an expectation is just like you know when the stock results get reported the quarterly earnings it's like they beat analyst expectations by six percent and it's like so what like who are these analysts and who cares about their expectations that's how a big company works too you set expectations internally we're gonna get this done by this date at this level this number and so you're rewarded for beating expectations but you set expectations yourself so optimal strategy inside of a company sadly if you were just were trying to get like further ahead inside your company would be to sand bag all your projections and your expectations and say it's gonna take long say take a long time it's only gonna deliver this much results and you wanna get as much of that as you can get away with because sometimes they'll push you and say can't you do it faster and can't you get more and you're like yeah we can but it's tough and we have all these other priorities do you want me to drop those and they're like no don't drop those and you're like well then this is the best i can do and then you wanna beat that and if you beat that you'll be seen as a hero there's no like absolute it's all just relative to your expectations and everybody is incentivized to sand bag but in a small company it's the opposite you choose the ambitious targets and you chase after them you don't do that same type of sand bag i love hearing these types of stories because this is something that is so foreign to me i know inevitably one day i'll i'll probably will have some experience at a big company so it feels like i'm it feel like i'm going i'm going to practice by hearing you by the way here's the other thing that's crazy and a big company it's just the planning cycles like we were having a meeting yesterday planning for the next year and then the person in charge was sort of like i think in the future we need to start our annual planning in june so basically like by june of next year we'll start planning for the following year which means you're making your road roadmap you're you're getting your budget you're asking for your resources you're drafting it up which is so challenging to do super challenging to do we've had people try to buy our company or invest in our company or just like in potential employees and they're like so where do you guys they're like where do you see yourself like next year and in three years and in five years i'm like well that's like you know like when our company was only two years old i'm like that's triple the time that we've existed maybe this but i have no idea i hope won't be alive yeah exactly and it is crazy because if you're planning in june you only have a few months of execution even even under your belt by then of what you did this year so you're plan you're projecting next year but you're not even done with this year you only just like implemented the start of this you don't even know what it's gonna do yet and also the time it takes the plan is like quite robust like it takes weeks for all the leadership team to just like spend just doing planning and so it's a very different type of thing but i i could see how it's kind of like a necessary way to do things i guess like i'm sure there's some other radical things but this isn't done out of stupidity it's done out of necessity for the size of of the ship as very it's so counterintuitive to what i would what i knew based on my background before this i wanna keep like a a running segment of things that you're learning at big company i think it's good to learn i'm also always curious like if emmett i forget the guy's name who started twitch who's a ceo emmett sheer or like how has someone evolved from being a little scrappy twenty something to the ceo of a multi billion dollar company that does have this process like how they're possibly able to evolve into that position because that sounds very challenging and it's cool to see someone do it so two things i texted him and i said like two days ago i said hey time come on the podcast and so we'll see when we can we can get on but we're gonna get them on and then the second thing is some other guy was interviewing him because he went back and spoke at like yale where he went to school and that guy who was doing the interview reached out to me and said what question would you ask him and i said it would be exactly what you said like give me an example of a situation where you know twenty four year old i handled it one way or whatever twenty six year old i handled it one way and thirty four year old limit handles that same situation differently and he answered that i don't know how interesting this stuff is for other people but like i find it really interesting and so he goes let's say you know early on i used to be super hands with the product or you know as that changed like we started hiring people who now they decide on the product he's like so they you know every company has some version of like what they call like a green light meeting it's like you come in with your plan your proposal for what you're gonna do and then like basically the kind of ceo or executive is giving a year like yeah let's go forward to that or or know for whatever reason the way i used to handle those were very different he's like first i used to basically like grill i'm gonna try to catch them like to be wrong yeah like i used to just like i would read and within ten seconds i know like either this is a yay or this is a may but now we have an hour long meeting and he's like i used to either like you know like challenge them on a whole bunch of points or like offer my idea instead and i used to do it directly in the meeting in front of everybody he's like and now instead of saying this is stupid here's the better way he's like i have learned the proper way to do this is to then say instead just ask questions everything that i think is stupid it's it's not stupid because they're stupid these are smart people so i have to understand why did they think of this thing that i think is stupid either they know something i don't and it's good i should learn it or they haven't sufficiently done the work and we're gonna find that out as i asked questions so now he's like now i ask i see that you mentioned this how does you arrive at this or what other solutions did you consider and he's like that little switch of going from like this is dumb why don't we do it this way to why did you come up with this idea and tell me walk me through your thinking or what are the things did you consider and why did you settle on this he's like that changes everything and he's like then afterwards i'll pull that person aside whoever i think is like kind of the the key driver of on their side you know one on one when we're not in a big group i'm not like kind of humiliating them in front of other people i'll say you know hey like this either you know just wasn't up to the standard we need you know or like you know i just really disagree with this one point and here's my perspective i just wanna give this to you and then as you go back for v two like you'll have you know my opinion here but it's just an opinion you know like but but here's here's what i'm thinking that's been a big difference for me well i think that's insightful and i hope to have him on so i can ask him all about that yeah because he started with his company as i think i freshly out of school and probably has never had a different job it'll be exciting to hear what say yeah i love it okay cool we're we're out of time so that's all for today brady how how'd we do what was good what was bad i like the billionaire air talk we were light on ideas this time well yeah but you're fucking fault i i go up put you guys give me okay well i'll send you the recording alright thank you for listening