#140 - How Much Do VCs Make?, A Booming Startup Replacing Fridges, and A Board Game Making $5m A Month

u yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a road less travel never looking back we're live sam it's almost christmas are you a big gift i do everything last minute as expected and i overs spend right my close family so kinda are you i'm my gift i'm also a last minute in fact usually so last minute that they get a photo of something that's today and i'm famous in my family for like oh remember the time i got a photo from sean of stroller but the stroller never came or like get this photo of a of a bag that i never got and so i'm the famous kinda like photo only the gift it's just like it's not well you know your love language yeah know what i'm talking about yeah it's like touch service information yeah yeah gifting and gifting is not mine and so i just like forget that a lot of people really care about it i'm like but i actually get gifts so like you know i'm doing christmas in austin my mother sent me a book and it was a lovely book and i like it and then someone else but someone else sent me something else i'm like more packages i don't wanna get rid of all this cardboard it's like stressful more than it is good that's good i have one of my my goals this year was to become a good person like ramon who's like our our good friend who is the best guy now i would say he's like the best gift give or too that's he's the best gift give and super thoughtful so i was like i'm gonna out gift ramon this year and so i have created a system where i'm giving gifts like at scale i'm gifting like to thirty forty people who i think are amazing and i care about even if we don't like talk all the time or whatever i made a list of the thirty forty people who i i think are awesome i wanna invest in like i want to give them gifts i just been too busy slash lazy slash not thoughtful to do it and then you gave me the the great idea for the perfect gift for for this month so i sent out a high quality pair of christmas socks from stance to everybody on that list and stan was like oh this is great cool we'll take care you know just upload a csv of their their addresses and we'll we'll send it all out and we'll get you a bunch of credits and all the stuff and i was like this is amazing this is how you that's awesome you email them so ben next she took care of this whole thing for me i was like i told ben here's what i'm try to do he's was like i got you just get the addresses for me i put all the on a spreadsheet and he's like aaron i talked to stan and they said they're gonna do this and i was like ben i love you i love dance i love that this is actually happening now and so what i'm gonna try to do is every month i'm gonna try to send them a little something maybe it's a sucks that that's great or a little just something small that i think is cool and ramon had this thing he said once which was like from now on i buy two i buy anything i like i buy two i buy one for me i a one for you and i was like he wouldn't even say this to me but i heard i was like wow that is like the ultimate ramon friend philosophy because he means it he's not like a bullshit and he's not smoothing anybody he just does it because he doesn't spot me so ramon is our mutual friend when he was the first or top five or one of the first episodes sean did sold this number two i think the soap pub soap barbara a website for ten million bucks almost he's given me a five hundred dollar helicopter ride like nina sarah went on a helicopter ride right he's given me an apple watch he's given me a asana for my wedding he's amazing well else did he give me i was in las vegas and i just told him hey in las vegas and he goes oh that's great have a good time blah blah blah the next day he's like hey at six pm today you need to go to t mobile arena you and your friends and he cooked us up with like a vip pass to the u event like we got to meet some u he arranged for u fighters support subscription and like yeah he came to our seat i was like hey are you sean and i was like oh my god ramon dude he ruined gives you to the point where you feel uncomfortable you're like i live up to this he does that to me all the time and to the point where i i actually had a tell i go dude you make me feel your make me feel bad like please like if you're gonna give me something keep it under fifty bucks of like right you you're go too hard he's so it's like m and m's like there's a there's a point where too much of good equals bad at some point and so he is that that much of a give that you'll feel guilty and bad about self and by the end of being his friend he's coming over to my house for christmas tomorrow or dude you better have a gift for i bet you he's coming with the heat no we do so this is the second christmas so he spent together we we hooked them up last year and we're gonna get up some good stuff this year he doesn't listen to this so i can tell you we got them some clothes because ramon is from east he's got this eastern european vibe and so he sometimes he hasn't fully acc acc aquaman and he's a single dad so he hasn't like fully acclimated to like american like hip fashion even though he like once we got out in date and so sometimes he'll wear like two religion jeans and so last year we bought them lulu the lemon because he had never he didn't know what lulu the lemon was i was like ramon this is like what like yep fancy people wear like instead of like a friction hoodies so we got them mad and then this year we're getting him a fancy cashmere sweater so he could wear on dates so we're trying to step up his fashion a little bit i like it he's gonna wear the cashmere sweater with a a friction hoodie on top that's what he does like where's like he's like a hoodie he he wears like just stuff that like was cool like ten years ago and we should say so the next episode we're gonna do is our big bang end of year end of twenty twenty finale it's gonna be fun we're gonna prep for it it's got a bunch of kind of like year end type of thing so i think that one's gonna be good for today we have a bunch of little things so where do you wanna start i have a cool idea wanna tell you about that's this company i i saw that is in brooklyn so it's a company called fridge no more have you ever heard of this company no but i'm gonna a google just go google go to fridge no more dot com okay and it's called fridge no more because their idea is like if you use our service you don't even need to have a fridge so what they do is they take grocery delivery that's like insta car or whatever that are you know have gotten super popular during covid and they actually just shrink it down into the most sort of simple delivery service that you can get it's fifteen minute delivery it's like a corner store it's like a cloud corner store and so they have a one mile radius that they operate these out of they have these like electric bike messengers yeah ahead as soon as you place the order they're gone in fifteen minutes you have your and you could just order like a pint of ben jerry's and that's it you can order like you know six bottles of water you can order fruits of festivals you can order whatever the hell you want it's a really cool concept and the guys who started it so i get on this call because i'm thinking about investing right i love the idea it's like post weights but even simpler and more lightweight because you get it even faster and the the trick is they're not going to so unlike post nights unlike door unlike insta cart it's not like a shopper goes to a normal shop and buys it at the retail price and then kind of sells it to you and and and they charge delivery fee and it gets really expensive fridge no more themselves is the grocery store so if they go by wholesale snacks and all the shit they create a small tiny cloud you know corner store and then they sell it to you at the normal retail price that's how they make their markup it's just because they buy wholesale they sell retail so unlike insta card insta card goes to a normal grocery store they buy a retail and sell at double retail right so that's the kind of business model here is to be an actual grocery store i don't know the answer to but have you asked yourself why insta doesn't do that so it's a different model this requires like capex so basically they have to open they have to open up locations right so they have to like get a space buy the inventory hold inventory and then like do the delivery themselves whereas was like cool we'll just get a network of delivery people and they'll just go to the existing grocery stores it'll be fine it does work insta clearly works right a multi billion dollar company but this is a little bit different because if you either are more price sensitive or time sensitive if you want it faster this is the way to go because insta current stuff they deliver everywhere they deliver to the suburbs all this stuff so they'll take like at the minimum two hours to deliver your stuff these guys are fifteen minutes i'm looking up the founders they seem very accomplished they've got some hardcore russian names it looks like right exactly so so that's what i gonna tell you i get on this call and i'm a little bit skeptical because i'm like ben i don't know i feel like insta card already won there's farms dead which is a great company that that my friend started that is this model but a a little bit different and i said i don't know i feel like these guys are five years late to this party but i get on the call first thing i see is these two hardcore russian russian dudes i'm like alright already i sit up straight in my chair because i've i've learned one thing in business is that the russians when they get into business they win these guys are incredible class of entrepreneurs it's like anton and what's the other guy's name all anton and pavel yeah i mean they sound like like their last names they're like double o seven golden i villains right if you're ever are competing you know you're doing a startup up and people are like don't worry about competition unless your competition is named anton and pavel did you better fucking watch your back yeah or like surrey from israel right exactly you just don't wanna mess if like israelis or russians and yeah you know they've all served like three years in the military and they're here to take ass and yeah so i start talking these guys and i'm like okay tell me about your background first because i'm intrigued by the russian thing first so the first guys like you know i'm pavel i sort the last ten years actually had finance working for a russian billionaire there and i was like which one his name is miguel broke off and i don't know if you heard of this guy but he was the owner of the brooklyn of nets yeah the tall guy yeah to super mining and he did mining now he those guys are all rich because when the soviet union collapsed they gave they like allocated like parts of the government billionaires basically yeah yeah it's like young people and they're like hey man here's your cut you gotta give it to us and he goes yes yes sir i'll do it and then now they all ability so i'm talking to him when he's like he's like yeah that was a funny time like because he doesn't own the nets now but he owned it then he's like you know what a business to own like you look at the fix cost the salary commitment was like a hundred million dollars a year for the players he's like that's just your salary commitment and he's like that was a crazy business so he's was telling me about that business then the other guy i'm like what about you what's your story i thought okay maybe this guy has a lame background he goes oh you know i started this company called coup i was like that sounds coop holy shit do you remember this company called cub c o u b i don't know if you ever heard of this no this was basically tiktok before tiktok and it's still but tiktok of russia so i remember once upon a time i hope i used to do these things where every friday once a month i would have a random day i would invite random people either speakers or just guest to come over to the office and i just wanna expose my world view to new things one of those random days i invited a group of students who was entrepreneurs traveling around from the ukraine i think and they came and they talked and they're like oh tell us about silicon valley if you remember i was felt weird because i was i i haven't done shit i don't really wanna tell you anything but my office was so legit back then like our office like looked like i was a billionaire myself and so it was always this weird thing where they would come and and i they would come and ask me to speak and i would be like i don't really know anything i can tell you what we're doing but like and i used to asked them tell me what you know what do you know that i don't know and i said what's the hottest shit in ukraine i asked it kind of as a joke and they go oh coop and everyone's like i coop coop coop and i was like what's the fuck is coop and i go to the website and it's basically tiktok it's see short videos with audio that's like mashed together that doesn't fit the video and they were funny as hell and i was like oh my this is great i was like is this like a startup they're like yeah it's new but it has like ten million users over wow i was like what and like yeah ten million i was like registered users like no daily users and i was like whoa so they ended up getting recruited into y comb they just didn't make it into america like they didn't make the crossover the content didn't have the same humor that like would have fit america and then like you know five seven years later tiktok comes out does the same concept but better and wins you know like in america so so that was coup so this guy's like i invented coup i was holy shit you're amazing you guys are both amazing tell me more about this concept so they're telling me about this concept and they're basically like look we're gonna open up a hundred of these in new york and each one just gonna deliver in a one mile radius this only works in dense areas like cities or college campuses which is where another concept that's like this called gop puff is like a massive winner gop puff is a company that was started by guys outside of silicon valley they basically did this for college campuses where it's like it's kinda like the the vibe is like you know like a stone just pushes a button and once as cheetos delivered that's what they did they basically just created like they've already raised three eighty three hundred and eighty million at a four billion dollar valuation so it's exact and i think they're cash flow positive exactly our friend c told me about this because he had a college based startup years ago he goes you just gotta check out this thing called gop at that time i think they were raising it like guess i don't know what they're raising up i think he said he told me i was like i was like it's cool concept i just thought it was like an idea he's said yeah they're gonna do like a hundred million in revenue this year i was like what and i had never heard anybody silicon valley talking about this thing and still i feel like nobody in silicon valley really talks about gop plus i think this was start these guys sound russian too are they no yeah they are russian are they russian i believe so yeah eastern european russian and they must be penn folks exactly and so they they do it on college campuses they're own like five hundred campuses or something they're doing hundreds of millions a year they were profitable than soft bank backed up the truck and invested like two hundred or their hundred million into the company so i know if they're still profitable because usually when that happens it's like here's the truckload of money go grow like crazy burn this money to get all the market is so funny i'm looking up this go puff their israeli we called it we've called it it's hourly and this type of company is like heavy on logistics and you could pull it off but it's a really hard business you probably have to be incredibly aggressive and very precise this is a very like i think these if they're from if there israel israeli they definitely have a military background this is totally like what you need for this type of companies funny because one cofounder has on linkedin hub as language of the other has russians honestly that's still funny i love what we get this stuff right i love when are things that are like you know you say it'll would probably get you fired if you if you say it like you know in a normal context and sounds like a total like bro assumption but there are these patterns you noticed that like you know you can't help but notice the more companies you see like this and so you know i'm sorry well have you ever i my bias i'm in the advertising world and a handful of my buddies who run these huge companies like how many people you think live in israel with ten million or twenty million it's tiny it's like six million people or something tiny it's something small a brand chicken out it's nothing and yet the amount of successful people in ad tech who are israeli it's astronomical it's like who play football yes it's like you were saying basically like if you see a samoa they're strong if you see a mormon like it's like the mormon religion small number of people growing like crazy israelis it's like tiny population eight point eight million people that probably own like i can half the world's that worth it's crazy they're so successful with business yes the and particularly in ad tech so like tab bring everything like that i've got a friend na who has changed the name of his company i figure forget what's it's called now actually a huge ad tech it says ad tech and then my friend joe spies who have you met joe sp yes he's a investor of my fun yeah he oh yeah he told me he did that he's a great friend of mine he all of his friends are israeli all in ad tech it's crazy i think there's is a cool concept i'm curious to see if it can works i'll tell you why i think it can work i'll tell you why i think it can so why i think it can work is it's pretty clear at this point that like the phone is a magic wand and you just say they magic word and then shit magically appears at your house right like e commerce you know buy buy an item you just buy it on your phone push a button it arrives food delivery same thing push a button food drives from door dash or whoever grocery delivery same thing i think this is a subset of grocery delivery for people who care about speed and convenience it's the equivalent of the convenience store instead of the grocery store but it's in the cloud so i do think inevitably this is gonna exist and i have some numbers behind it if you're curious about anything so like just for example they need one so basically they're gonna do two hundred stores just for two cities so that's how many locations they need that's a lot of like locations you gotta and you gotta be very efficient what's a rent on a store at three grand a month very low yeah asking like three grand a month and the upper in the footprint is also very small so it's not like a huge warehouse they need because they're just storing small like kind of pack packaged goods and things like how many a hundred or two hundred they're gonna do a hundred per city so you're talking close to half of them maybe a half a million a month of in rent in one city i mean i guess that not sound like the end of the world oh what's it called so so basically they're doing like one store per zip code they guarantee the fifteen minute delivery it's all through bike messengers the average orders like thirty five bucks so it's not like a grocery delivery where you're like two hundred dollars for your groceries or whatever is thirty five dollars so it's small things but they buy really frequently so what they're seeing they're showing me some of the data is like somebody buys once on the first day they don't have a super high repeat rate the second day like kind of shockingly high almost like a social network app which is not not normally like for e commerce or you know buying something usually don't buy the second day and then they're they have this set of users where once you buy certain number of times it's like they basically buy like three to four times a week and they're just like they like to click the button and get their stuff are they raising in an eight figure valuation or a typical seed round of like three or five million yeah more more like a seed round wow if they're listening i wanna join that sounds okay cool i'll i'll email to you yeah i think these guys are cool okay so here's why i think it might fail and i told them this you know customer acquisition is really hard in general it gets way harder for things that a specific geographic like restriction because to make the one store work they need like two thousand households in that zip code right so the zip code will have twenty thousand they need like two thousand of those households to be using them for them to be by profitable on that location let's put our optimistic hat on which is it's probably not that hard in a city like new york i mean you probably could just pay hourly workers to hand out so i was like are you doing they're like don't know we tried a bunch of shit we tri mad we do direct mail direct mail seems to work really well but like can't do it that often you know can't keep sending letters yeah i wouldn't do any online ads i would just have young men admire and ass shit yeah i was like yeah handed it out at the church like whatever he's like yeah we're really doing all that here right now we don't really know like what's the scalable thing but right now we got two locations in new we're just gonna keep filling them up but we'll figure it out which i like that answer but like go for example i think they have one advantage which is on campus shit spreads like like literally like herpes you know like there's you if you get something on campus it's gonna spread throughout that dorm then that's gonna spread to the next dorm whereas in new york people are in apartment complexes yeah but can't do that with apartments like if you leave someone outside of a like i had never heard of good egg until walking around my neighborhood and i see good eight boxes right so i think it does work but less so than a college campus right because you i mean i don't know my neighbor i didn't know my neighbors really when i when i into on our apartment i you like let's say one out of five and we didn't talk that much whereas on a campus you just see way more and you talk way more so i think campus is easier and i think that's the one variable would which is like this is go puff in cities is either a gop just gonna beat them or b is campus is just a magical thing that works way better than cities and so that's the big bet maybe i'm wrong but i wouldn't really care if go like gop puff could beat them or not because it's like it has to be one of the biggest markets out there yeah it's like a trillion dollar plus market and so i wouldn't frankly worry too much about competition would you i wouldn't about competition it's that really that customer which just something thing i was talking about like is it gonna be really hard and expensive for them to fire customers in that little one mile radius or they gonna figure out some really simple tactics that like let them scale up and do it if they do it it's gonna be a big winner you know so they they got a cute little landing page as the app good haven't used it because it's not in my area i'm in california there's only as twenty six ratings for a four and a half out of five stars yeah the reviews are great people are saying it works seems good the one the first one seems too good to be true but it's true it's reviews also which also you knows if they're ever true right they probably aren't but it looks great so cool okay cool so that's for no more kinda of went long on that one but i i like that that concept okay i'll bring up one i was fooling around i go to this website called starter store you know what that is yeah what is that that's like a startup up kinda like how how they make guy named pat and i think what he does is he just has a form and he emails people form questions like how'd you get started what's your revenue and things like that and they answer and then auto populates to his websites it's pretty neat and i found a game called a hunter killer so it's a game called hunter killer and it's twenty five it ranges from twenty five to add ons of maybe thirty dollars a month you can go to landing page it's a board game and you sign up and you get your first pack and then they send you new and you're like i think you're trying to find a killer and they send you new clues every month so somehow like ongoing this game just five billion dollars a month in recurring revenue wow and it's just a game it's crazy i would i i started fooling around on this or looking around on it and i was like is this real it's only five years old it was in the ink five thousand it was the six fastest growing private company in america or at least who submitted themselves to inc and i think it's bootstrap i imagine the margins i have to i if they weren't making thirty percent profit on this i would be a little bit surprised it's pretty wild have you i guess you've never heard of this i've never heard of this game i i i've literally just an passing i heard of it at but i didn't know about this business and the five million a month is is honestly very impressive incredibly impressive what's five million divided by twenty five bucks if that's our average subscription i'll do it two hundred thousand it's a huge market it's two hundred thousand customers is a lot but it's not like i mean it's a big market and here's let me tell you why this is interesting to me i listened to probably two to three hours a day of crime podcast such a insane amount of time so it's usually three episodes in that episode if sam ever tells if ever sam ever tells anyone he's busy now you could be like bullshit you listen to if fucking get three hours of true crime a day well i do it while exercising or i do it while i'm just sitting working or i just like while i'm cooking i just i love it there's a few that i really like i love anything mob related and there's a what is the best one like if somebody doesn't listen to any what's the best one they should just go listen to date line so i like date line and i like serial killers serial killers just produce oddly by this company be called par cast and they have all types of stuff on crime and i like serial killers is what it's called but date line do you know about you know what date line is the tv show yeah it came out in nineteen eighty something right it's thirty plus years old they launched a podcast a year ago and it's already gotten like a hundred and fifty million downloads it's all if you look if you go to podcast top charts date line is always in the top and it's a thirty year old program and i listen to so many episodes is so awesome and just the appetite for anything crime or mystery related is just massive massive massive massive so it is the number twenty one podcast in america of all podcast right now it is and is always goes between fifteen to twenty yeah and they produce i they might do one every day are they just taking the tv show and then just like being like that's just taking the audio and that's the podcast or i don't watch the show anymore but i think so it seems like it maybe they do a little special but yeah it's nothing and and they have a lie a thirty year library so like i'll listen like an episode came out yesterday and it was from two thousand fourteen and all they're doing is repurposing this which i actually think that every tv show should do this like even though i was gonna say even a family guy or jeopardy i don't know why every jeopardy is not a pod yeah because i do that all the time i turned jeopardy on my youtube and i put the phone in my pocket and i just listen and play in my head i have this question i just get to know your question that i used that you have like ten of the best answers for which is like the first one the question is what's something if if people knew that you do they'd laugh and i feel like you just spout out like ten of these forever wait you think that's weird listening a jeopardy episodes yeah dude they're on youtube like they're great i listen to it all the time ken jennings is a new jeopardy host starting tomorrow i'm afraid you mile is that weird or is that normal do you do that brave you have you ever thought about it i've never heard of anyone dude i'm telling you these episodes get tens of thousands of views more people are doing it i want i like listen to do them all the time or if i'm on a long drive means sarah that's what we do we'll play jeopardy i love it are you good at jeopardy awful that i can't watch the show because i'm just like dude i i i know any of these like if it's college jeopardy i would win if it's normal jeopardy i'm hit or miss but like college jeopardy i crush so i always watch the university once because i know i'll kick those cornell kids asses it's jeopardy crazy yeah fifth grand jeopardy of of of a winner they ever tell you when i audition for wheel fortune and i got on no you really got on by so story time it's kind of a a lame story because i didn't end up going on the show but i got cast which is i was doing my first startup which was a like i've talked about a little bit before it's a sushi restaurant chain cloud cloud kitchen for sushi basically that we started and me and my buddy dan are in the kitchen and dan is the type of guy that always applied for any contest and we always used to call him like the sucker at first until we realized he wins a lot of these because nobody actually applies he would open up a pack of gum and they would be like oh create a thirty second jingle for our our gum and you could win a lifetime supply gum so he he won a lifetime supply dried gum that's hilarious then there's this sandwich chain called like something like pickle pick some pickled sandwich chain or whatever he named their mascot he won that contest and he got taken into the headquarters and like they gave him a big like round of applause awkward in front of the whole company was very weird was like this a penalty or a victory and so the last thing he did was is he was like y i'm gonna try out he's like i gotta go for a because i go for like an hour can you cover i was like where the fuck are you going and at this point i'm like beating down from the startup up i hate the restaurant i hate the kitchen i hate the food industry and i'm like no you're not leaving don't leave i don't wanna do this shit you don't wanna do this shit that doesn't mean you could just make some lame excuse to leave he's like no it's not only lame excuse like i gotta go do something i'm like why if he was something a legit you'd tell me what it was because alright i'm i'm i'm auditioning for wheel fortune i was like what he's said like yeah they're in town it's ten minutes away i'm obviously for will fortune and i wanna go do it and i was like okay well shit i'm coming with you then so we built just left the kitchen close down them you know you could just take a cloud kitchen offline just push a button and it's we're not taking orders and it's so weird how they do these things so i'll tell you what happens in a tv show audition for a game show i didn't know this by the way i didn't actually plan to audition i just wanted to go see it but they said if you're in this room you have to audition so i said okay sure i'll audition then so there's probably a lot like eighty people in the room and there's a woman up front she's the casting director and she goes okay and by the way am i say wheel fortune is the one where you spend the wheel on you guest the letters spin the wheel guest letter exactly that's the show so she's like you know at the beginning what's his name i don't know what his name is like pat or whatever he's gonna ask you or no i'm sorry so before it bounces round two round one was we're just gonna have me stand up and say a letter because if you ever watched the show they don't just say like i think maybe like a d they go r yeah like give me a d so they're like stand up and say a letter and you're like well what's the puzzle they're like no there's no puzzle just say a letter with energy and so there was let's say eighty people in this room they go through everybody stands up says their letter and then they immediately dismissed half of the room so they were just like you guys didn't have the energy right second thing was a written quiz like puzzles and then the third one was so that eliminated another half so now we're down to like twenty people left and they're like okay you gotta have a store you gotta be character like this is not really about like how good you this game but like pat's gonna interview at the beginning and you need to either be like a stay at home mom watches every episode or like a businessman who like you know is a you know owns this company or you need to be like whatever you need to have your stick so we were like whatever we're starting a speech sushi restaurant and so they have everybody you know you say your name and you say you're one line kinda think about you and then they call you back a week later or two weeks later and tell you if you got it or not and so both me and dan got casted on it he actually went on i had moved australia in you can make three weeks later or whatever yeah and so i was like i was in australia i when they called me was like i'm gonna fly back for wheel of fortune but dan went on and and had dynamic epic joke on the show that's crazy well too bad didn't make it friend of mine was on it actually very coincidental facebook friend of mine who i went to school with was on it he one fifty grand last night last night two nights ago or yeah this week that's amazing well he was on it i guess weeks ago but he posted that he's like yeah i you know i won fifty like he's posted the photo of him winning fifty grand i've also audition for survivor twice and not going on but i will keep trying and anyways my i don't know why it went on this huge tangent but you're saying tv shows you're saying they should turn them into this the podcast and i think like you know how we had ty lopez is on and he would tell almost like oh i'm buying up the commerce rights of these brick and mortar brands like dress barn and whatever i wonder if an entrepreneur could basically go by the podcast rights to certain shows game shows or whatever that's out of date like hey arnold or something right and just convert it into five or like because would you listen to that i would listen to like some of these tv shows i like i used to listen to family guy when i was like i don't even remember what i was doing but like i put it in my ears it it was just funny background noise and the other one that's the other idea that sort of like this my friend jason was bringing this up the other the day he goes you know tv shows is what they should do is they need to go like form so basically let's say you have friends you have this hit tv show friends people get invested in the characters right it's like would you listen to a podcast of chandler and joey doing like sports betting or like talking about dating if they stayed in character but they off the show they could probably make a fuck ton of money just being the character in more places now in more mediums and podcasting i think it's a really good one for that where you could take these characters and you could take them off platform if people really love love these characters i'm down i think that's a fantastic idea i think that there'd be a lot of a lot of contracts around s dedication which would be a pain in the ass can we talk about this thing you tweeted about angel investing sure so you wrote i double down angel investing over the past six months i've invested six hundred thousand dollars into eight startups a few standout outs and do you wanna talk about the standout outs yeah so i was just kinda doing an end of your review seeing you know okay i've ramped up my investing let's see kinda like what i'm excited about what i think i could be doing better next year etcetera okay so so standout outs i i said there's some themes here so first is like india i think i've talked about this before but i invested to indian companies which is always hard to do if you're not on the ground it's hard to you're not meeting the people face to face stuff like that you don't know the market as well but these companies were just great ideas that we're growing really fat that i could just see like already had great adoption and what i'm seeing is that in india there's this thing happened called do have ever heard of ji j o he's a billionaire guy in india who people kinda hate because he has he owns this skyscraper well it's not that's last his name but yeah the bonnie family basically they owned a company called reliance reliance is like i don't know like exxon mob of india they don't they have like a big energy company but they're not just exxon they're also like at and t and they're also like verizon and everybody else it's like berkshire hathaway exactly so india was kind of behind infrastructure wise internet infrastructure wise so they released ji which is basically like a a cell service like at and t or t mobile or whatever but it brought people up to kinda like four g connection for really cheap they like subsidize and just kinda gave it away at cost or below cost and they call this the ji effect in india because so many hundreds of millions of people now we're online that just weren't online before this and this one company kinda like took the whole country and moved them forward seven years by doing this and because of that there's this crazy opportunity for tech startups right now in india we're like if you have product market fit if you have a good product you're gonna grow at this insane pace so i was just talking about two of the companies one company investment called du the con means store in hindi and it's basically shopify for shop keepers of india so if you owned a little shop that like sold scarves or shoes or food or you know sweets or whatever covid killed your business killed foot traffic killed brick and mortar stores and so du com basically is this little android app that's kinda like shopify that just lets that shop keeper put their whole store online and anybody can order from their phone and then it gets delivered locally like to wherever where based on where you're are who found this i found this one how i was just lurking on twitter and i've been following this guy i think i've talked about it once before so i won't go too much debt but found the founder dame sm and he had built something called ranks which is seo tool and so i wanted an seo tool to grow my website i was looking at them i saw ranks i was i was actually a well made site and anytime i see something well made i go find out who made it and i wanna be friends with them that's like how i built my network and so i go and i find this guy and i'm like you know you built this this thing's fucking cool like let's talk he's like go hey and i called him and literally on the and i just did a zoom call with them right there on the spot no scheduling i was like are you free right now to talk he's like yeah sure eight am in india alright no problem and i call him and i'm just zooming from my backyard and he's like and i'm like what's your story and he's like and running growth for all these startups he's like i ring growth and you know for all the stars they wanted to growth seo so i just made my own seo tool and i thought why am i growing all these other guys start like i'm the creating all the value for them they're raising at these huge valuations and they pay me like dirt you know they get famous but i'm the driving the growth so screw this i'm gonna do my own startup and i was like what are your ideas hey he told me about this idea and i was like that's awesome i just gave him kind of my usual spiel like i love to help you advise and invest at some point and then the next day is like i got three hundred stores on i was like what he's like you know i just kept going and so he's had three million merchants join the platform in under five months which is just to absurd numbers growing like crazy it seems like it might be a hit and you know you are the first money in yeah we're in the we're the first round in the company and so and there's only like three or four of us from the us who invest in this thing so it's me it's ryan hoover and my friend kumar who also knew also is a internet lurk and had found this guy in the same way i did and was like yeah sure i'm in and so and then the rest are the big vcs of india like whoever lights speed or matrix or whoever whoever they have and this this company i it's either gonna explode like it's gonna grow so fast that it kills the company or like expectations get too high they get taken too much money it's like it's one of those companies it's like it's gonna die of excess or it's gonna be like a multi billion dollar company it's gonna be crazy so this fun that you have it's gonna be it seems like because every company you're naming i'm like you know who knows if it's gonna work but they all seem legitimate and like promising they're definitely promising so this one by the way khan i did before i started my angel funds just is my personal money before that but all the others in the thread are are from the rolling fund itself and yeah i think they're all promising like i obviously feel good about them but i'm sure every investor feels fucking good about their companies maybe i just sell them better than other other people like i don't i don't know definitely probably but exactly we sell them better but maybe they are better yeah i mean i wouldn't have invested like i wouldn't have invested in them if i did but these ones i'm talking about right now like i legit think are gonna win of course that the the giant caveat is you know almost all startups ups fail and blah blah blah you normal disclaimers but like what i mean is within the basket of startups these are relatively at the top these i think are very very good startups amongst startups now of course all startups could fail and blah let's talk about you did fitness ai i was a customer there you said was past tense you turned out i turned out i signed up right when they launched and it was clear that they were just getting started so but i could see i can see why great yeah so there's two fitness companies that i invested in one they're both like of the kind of core mindset which is no sorry is this fit to say i is this one when they send you an apple watch no oh never mind i didn't use this one you told me about this one though and i would love to use this i'm almost about to buy what's that thing called the tonal you know tonal yeah i wanted to buy one but this company fitness to say might i may not even need it because of this yeah so this guy basically his dad was a body builder and he also like lifts weights but like his dad was like kinda of like a did competitions and shit like that and so he was like i'm doing this fitness app and i was like aren't there kind of a lot of these like personal trainer in your pocket he's like yeah i'm being the best one for building muscle he's like if you break it down he's like there's one for cardio it's called sweat and it's all about like kind of a high intensity interval training there's there's something for running and that's like my run keeper sold under armour for five hundred million and then there's things like peloton that's for biking he's like the way the digital fitness is playing out is like people don't just like workout generically they do have specific type of workout with a specific kind of like body they wanna they either wanna lose fat they wanna build muscle they wanna like be active or whatever it is so i invest in too i did my yoga teacher which is yoga based one and so what they're doing is they have yogis in india who are you know yoga have invented in india so they like experts in india that teach you over zoom a one on one yoga instruction where they're like oh move your foot to the right like do this do that and so it's a zoom yoga class that's can be one on one or group and it's great because it's way cheaper than a traditional yoga class in the in the states so for from the states if you go to a yoga video here you're gonna pay thirty bucks for that class this you'll pay thirty bucks like for the month you know what i mean like you know you can get one on one training for nineteen dollars on this app versus like a group class of forty people where you don't get any attention you know what i would do i think this you know my yoga teacher's is interesting indian company as well looks like yeah you said that if they're based in the us they just leverage the like labor arbitrage so there's a lot of business that that make money like design pickle for example they make money because it's a us company paying us dollar rates and the designers are in the philippines right but for most things you can't it's like a worse quality experience when you get somebody overseas for the service with yoga these yogi idiot are actually like expert yoga teachers and so you don't have that same drop off you normally get outsourcing so they get the cost savings without the quality drop off the following that a lot of these yoga folks have because i follow a lot of them on instagram and on youtube and like there's this one called yoga with adrian do you know her i've i've seen it yeah oh i love yoga with this woman she's got like this girl next door look she's very end very cute she has let's see how many followers she has she lives i think it's she's big right like ten million maybe eight point eight million she's huge and so i used it during covid when i i don't even know i mean still do it all the time wasn't it just covid but i was using her like crazy and she has like a thirty day thing and it's awesome it is so cool she's so just got a good brand good personality so she's a soothing and those are recorded right it's youtube yeah so i think that there's if again if you segment these markets it's like some people want the recorded but it's a better experience when it's a live instructor peloton is that way right well i agree but here's what i would do is i wouldn't i would do what these makeup guys like ips etsy did with that michelle fan or what yes or what brian lee at honest did with jessica alba to get distribution and get users like overnight i would call adrian or the hundred and fifty people very similar her there they're are slightly smaller and i'm being like hey i'm gonna give you equity the business and you're gonna be a brand partner you in and it would crush i think it's a great idea but getting customers for this yoga thing is would be very very hard i think yeah so i like i remember when i was kind of researching for the was like okay so you have the subscription i was so what's the churn like you know like every all your numbers sound good but like churn is always the scary thing with any subscription business and he's was like well our quarterly churn is negative three percent i was like well mean negative i like you have negative net churn he's like yeah we have negative net churn like so more people increase their membership value than we lose in dollars every quarter and he's like that's been the case for the last three quarters we hope it continues but like three quarters it's kinda like almost the whole year and i was like okay i'm in like you know like because it's a marketplace right on one side he's got instructors and the other he's got students and the more instructors and students he gets a more valuable as marketplace is gonna be it's a paid marketplace around subscription and the subscription so the churn is negative churn every quarter i was like okay those are enough at the seed stage you really can't get more signals than that you know you can't be asking for more validation that and how do you find yoga one did this one's funny some famous person either dairy v or jason ka had tweeted it out like what's the you know what's a cool startup i should be featuring or what's this what's a fast growing start and this founder had reached had tweeted back at him and said you know we're my yoga teacher or marketplace for yoga and we're we're doing seven figures in revenue already and we're growing you know this percent per month and i was like normally those threads are like trash it just was like y i got this idea and like you know you go to their landing page is awful and i was like that tweet alone i was like this is good i looked into his background he had built a start up already his previous startup is currently worth about three hundred four hundred million dollars as a private startup and so i was like okay it's like a credible guy who's had success before what's his previous one it's called punch punch with i think two inches at the end what do they do i don't remember it's like some marketing thing or like i don't know what it is it's like it's like seven eight years old as the company is it's like done well but i don't think it's like one of the like super bright companies so that's like gonna go public so it's like somewhere in between which who knows what that means so i was like this guy's credible that tweet those metrics sounded promising i like the concept in general it's me take a punt so that's found him i'm and then you have this other one called bubbles which i just installed i'm i i saw the while i was talking to you bubbles is a chrome extension that helps you capture screenshots and videos and you could up right yeah exactly so you take a screenshot or a screen like a video screen it's either a photo or a video screenshot so you could just say okay here's what i'm seeing and then on top of it bubbles is like kinda like a chat bubble like you can annotate it so you can type like for example you could go to the hustle website or trends website let's say you wanna tell your team how it could be better so you go to the hustle website you screenshot it you didn't the click and do you like sort of add little annotations or comments about stuff that you think could be improved and you just share that link with your team and then they can comment back and be like oh yeah i'm gonna fix this one now or like let me do you have any suggestions on what we could change it to and like they can just you collaborate on top of a screen screenshot on top of a screen screen cast so for more and more companies working remote you need a way to collaborate i do this all the time i take like a thousand screenshots a day and it's so jan i like annotate it with a big area can capture part of a screen you can hey yeah maybe not fully a auto i don't know it's sign is obvious but you can do a video you could just full screen one one other thing i like is you could do a long screenshot so you know it looks when you're trying to out a long page this lets you just grab the full page instead of ten screenshots that you gonna have to like pace together and this is to me a makeup of a company i i should have invested in and i friends with the founders of loom early on which has turned out to be a three hundred million dollar valued company now and i'm growing and you know i could have invested that and probably like five million six million bucks and so that would have been a been been a pretty big you know sixty seventy x return before dilution loom did the same thing they're like oh quickly record a screen cast and share it with your coworkers what have you learned doing this i mean it seems like a pretty fun job is it gonna be lucrative i think so the thing with start up investing though is it's more like oh what i'll call it is it's a fun retirement account why do i say that because like you know when you're putting money in your four one k it's like cool i'm investing it's compounding but it's like i can't touch a time i'm sixty five right that's the thing with startups right it's ill liquid for a long time and you don't get answers about whether these are gonna be the big winners that they could be and for a long time it takes time for these things to grow and even when they succeed like right now airbnb went public door dash went public all these companies are going public but they're are like ten plus years into their lifespan times i think airbnb b's is what eleven twelve years into its lifespan something like that maybe about that and so it takes a long time so it's like a mini retirement account but that's like fun and so it's like this is something where you invest in it when you're thirty you get paid out when you're forty and your money has been compounding to at this very fast rate but like you don't get to touch it until you're forty forty or forty you know so it's like you have to think about easier it's seems way easier than starting companies easier but it's also less lucrative i to go for all right like you start a company you could become worth tens of millions or hundred million dollars so do that with angel investing you have to hit one of the giant winners right like so for example it seems i was doing some calculations of the returns of these companies so for example door dash one of the early investors of door dash put in two hundred thousand dollars into the early round and that appreciated like seven hundred x so they put in two hundred grand and it the that stake is worth like a hundred fifty million dollars right now in the public market and so you know a seven hundred x return is so crazy but doesn't the individual or the company only gets thirty percent of that then right or twenty the investor yeah so basically okay so was doing the math on for example sequoia sequoia released sequoia is one of the big brand funds and they released their what's it called like their earnings and so or their returns if they're the previous funds and so one of their funds they said return to investors an eleven x eleven x returns so let me pull up my spreadsheet because i was doing some math and i was like okay how much do the individual partners at si sequoia make how much are they make it off this so let me just give you some numbers so their fund was a one point three billion dollar fund and it returned eleven x which is crazy but i've returned that because it had like whatsapp and several other big winners in it the total return on that was about eighteen billion dollars the amount they gave to investors of fourteen billion and so for the for the fund managers themselves the gps is the gp the boss gp is general partner that's the top level out of at an investment fund they're might be like a managing director but they don't get paid more so gp is like the guys who actually get a share of the profits and they're putting up a little bit of their own money but they're not always putting up their own money they're always putting up with their share yeah basically that's their that's their so they get paid in two ways they take a two percent per year management fee so let just on the one point three billion that's two hundred sixty million of just what's it called management fees no that's twenty it's twenty million no no because one point three billion two percent of one point start but it's ten year fund so the over the ten years oh my we get two hundred sixty million dollars now let's assume i don't know exactly how many gps sequoia has let's say they have eight so those guys they made about let's say at eight gps that's thirty two million dollars over the ten years that's three million dollars a year of just their salary from the management fees now of course some of us gonna go to the office and other things let's just round down aggressively and say they're each pulling home two and a half million dollars a year just to write the checks just to meet that really think so do you think that's the number that seems awfully high first sequoia because they're raising mega mega funds or is a billion dollar plus fund yes i do think it's that high and so so that's the first thing so so they're they're pulling analyst let's call it two to three million dollars a year salaries if there was a eight partners then you had the carry on this fund which their share of the carry was about three point three billion dollars and again they had multiple winners in this thing so this i think this was a extremely high performing fund but whatever that's four hundred million dollars each that they get as their carry after the kind of twelve year is one of the current parts partners roll off both those like is this one of them that tell me one more alfred lynn so alfred lynn you started the company with he starts zappos with the toy hs so then this guy's gotta be close to a billionaire there no i believe so yeah and roll off the same thing he was cfo i think of paypal with peter till them and so he was i believe the cfo during that time so he obviously has done well so before this right they didn't like make it rich with this but i just wanted to know how much did the top gps that the top funds make and i'm pretty sure that if you annual analyze it out these guys are bringing home somewhere between thirty and forty million dollars a year do really think that that is wild while the while somebody can correct me we have a bunch of people who are vcs who listen to this you can correct me if i'm wrong i'm doing my back of the app and math i'm not i'm not from this job john i mean sequoia has the is the best top of the top the best ever maybe i think that the partners at smaller kind of still reputable known funds but they're not billion dollar funds and they're not getting this type of crazy eleven on a one point three billion dollar fund i think they're bringing in a tenth of that so i think where the top guys and the top years are bringing in thirty to fifty million dollars each i think that three to five million is what the v you know normal successful gp vcs c's are are making i'm on sequoia website they're they don't tell you how many gps they have their website is slick yeah wow it makes me wanna like them i mean it makes me wanna be part of whatever they're part of wow oh wow and michael mo went okay yeah he was the the guy in charge he's worth multiple billions so should we wrap up there and next week we'll get to yeah we should wrap and the last thing i would say on the investment front for me what i've kind of like my takeaway at the end of this was like this is cool the financial way to think about this is like a mini retirement fund meaning it's awesome that it's gonna grow and i think it's gonna do wealth i think it's gonna compound compounded at a fast rate but it's liquid for some period of time normal four one k is like forty years this is gonna be ill liquid for like ten years on the other side of the way i think about it is this basically like getting paid to go to business school it's like i get to sit front row learn about new businesses learn about new technology meet cool people but instead of paying for it you get to get paid by investing in and start would you do this full time or would you start something i wouldn't do it full time i love it in the capacity that it is right now which is i just keep doing my thing you know building cool shit making content like this and in doing so i run into cool people and when i run into them cool people doing cool things i say kinda invest and then i put this at the bottom of the thread which think is really important which is in most investments right if you're a real estate investor or you're a hedge fund guy it's all about you know the investor picks the asset that's it investor picks which asset to invest in starter so the only asset class where the investor picks the asset but the asset also has to pick the investor most of these deals it's not just me saying i here's a check it's can i invest and then they say yes or no and for how much and so this is the only industry there's only asset class where that happens that match happens and so the game theory of that means you have to be a desirable person for them to want on their cap table in the meeting you have to behave well so that's good that that game theory helps everybody behave better you have to be helpful and have a reputation for being helpful you also have to like build your brand as somebody who if your name is on this company it helps that company like legit itself for the next investor or the next customer that that comes by and so it's cool because the more successful you get the better investment returns you get also does having like a podcast help significantly for sure yeah there's several of these like bubbles is a great example their round is overs subscribe they don't need me i think a bunch of your audience would use a product like this and i think you guys are you guys have a good platform so like i want you in because you have a name or like invest in gu like new ed tech thing which is like a way for influencers to launch courses and i was like hey i wanna teach anyways i'm gonna launch my own course he's like perfect like again that guy's built to like kind of rocket ship companies already one that's worth multiple billions of dollars in the tech space already so he had every investor he wanted to invest he could have had in the only way i got access to that round was because i said not only am i gonna invest i'll be a teacher on your platform and i have an audience that will come and so that i'll make your platform more more valuable i'll give you feedback as a user yeah i i missed out on that one just because i was that was when i had lime and i just wasn't take i wouldn't talking to anyone i don't know i won't regret it because by the way i think you still can because he's doing something cool which is he carved out a very small part of the round i think like quarter million dollars five hundred thousand dollars something like that to let any a credit investor from public invest in it know but the valuation is way higher than when you it's not the way higher five million dollars higher so i invested at twenty million this is at twenty five million so it's not that much higher that sounds five million dollars sounds like a big number but in valuation terms it's just like i put this in my mistakes part of the twitter thread which was there was a bunch of companies where i was like i oh this is interesting but i'm not sure let's just wait and see and like four months later i wait and saw and sure enough they proved it out more and all of a sudden the price was three times higher yeah that happened with or a ring i think were you part of that i wasn't part of that one now a couple of our friends were and they're like or a ring hundred million dollars that's a lot of money for evaluation and now it's ten times that right exactly and that happened to be with with several these public company we were talking about right before they launch was pipe and i was like oh this is genius idea you realize this a genius idea we could've have put some money in at that time at a lower valuation and now i'm talking them now and know the valuation was is much higher because he's proved it out a lot that david sachs business he's one of the investors i wouldn't give him the credit harry hurst is the founder yeah he's pivoted out all the time yes yeah and he was the lead of their kinda like first round i whatever him right we did miss that alright i missed that one too okay so i feel like i take this episode a bunch of different tangent what do you think was pretty good better than the last couple for sure fact i believe we do zero minutes of prep we did like ten here so i want people to let me know like because there's some stuff like this like angel investing i don't know if that's interesting to people or if it's not i think it will be you so i do yeah i think we should do like i don't know because people are kind sensitive with salaries and stuff but i find so super interesting and nobody talks about it like how much these guys actually make we should have one of these folks on only if they're just gonna say how much they make let's have jason tele come on because he's kind of a loose cannon he'll he'll he'll talk yeah we should i was on his thing he owes us we'll get him one yeah get them on that'd be great i'm looking at the download numbers people seem to be like in what we're doing what's going up yeah surely slowly but surely we're that we are in the top fifty of all business podcast today hell yeah ahead of who are we head of a bra you that's what i care about top fifty alright that sounds good who are we head of next what next motley fool okay crush morning brew who else we're beating all the big names reading pop naval vol morning brew podcast beating all the big guys yeah those phelps well those aren't big guys but that pop is i guess i mean yeah like a million plus followers on twitter he's he's pretty good yeah but he doesn't actually do that podcast does he yeah tim the neville vault podcast isn't naval vol is it oh it's him yeah is him oh real where's that guy even do does he do anything like is he just like a personality is he like tim ferris now well he hired a ceo for angela so he he's not the ceo anymore so yeah he just thinks about shit and meditate and investors did he lived does he live in san who you think i have no idea where you loose that kinda weird to me i mean in a good way someone sent me a shirt they sent me a very every kind letter i should find what the person oh and pray you sent you a naval ball book yeah right so i got the book here that my friend eric wrote this actually a really smart tactic by the way it's guy eric jorge he was like does take the fastest way to build your following and build a mailing list is to just capture all the philosophies of a famous person like neville or charlie mu warren buffett or whoever he just wrote the almond act of naval he just took all the shit neville had said in his different podcast podcasts and blogs and stuff like that jack butcher did it with him yeah exactly jack butcher got famous too with with visualize value he just took neville philosophy and created dope visuals around it and tweeted it out every day until those caught on and so like instead of you know i'm going the long hard slow shitty way of trying to like come up with my own ideas and make those famous i should just be hijacking these other people's fame and building content about them and then slowly slip myself in whatever it works yeah i mean now i at this point now people are doing that with jack butcher the he has like a yeah he's like a jack butcher someone made like a fan page for i i might have made i love that guy he's great correct their calls no i don't get that joke what's that don't get the joke and i was a lame joke okay i'm out of here i talk you guys soon later