Bill Gurley: 6 Out of 10 People Are Making This Mistake

if you're crafting your own personal career and your high agency ai is like a jackpot we've taught children young adults how to grind we've caught them to persevere for the sake of perseverance and if you're stuck you're stuck in order to like do these exercises of finding your passion you sort have to be like a ruthless fast for you unless you're trying to find that edge somebody else may you have to understand the difference between risk and uncertainty people most threat by ai or the ones that aren't continuously learning that are just doing the same thing they did ten years ago how many times in you're doing it did you wanna to quit i don't ever remember wanting quit really g what did the voice say when it was like i found my calling i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go lester year i wanna talk of the book because there was this there's a bunch of crazy stats in the book i wanna talk about the noble lau thing that was interesting but the craziest like one of the craziest things early in the book i think did you run this survey and it said that like six or seven out of ten people hate their job yes so i'd had a c writer c researcher on the book and we spent a ton of time together on zoom calls and someone encourages to dive into a bunch of academic literature we came across this gal pole that said fifty three percent of people aren't engaged at work and so we had this idea to ask like a thousand people if you could start your career over again would you do it differently and and seven out of ten said yes and then we we took that to to toward the people analytics to do the official academic version so you you make sure you get all the statistical data correct and that their number came back six out of ten so still a really big number and crazy there's a great book by daniel pink called the power of regrets and he has a somewhat similar survey data of longitudinal through people's lives and as you get older you you regret of action start to really weigh on you and rum in your brain and a regret inaction is is tuesday actively not doing something versus a regret action is i made a mistake and humans are really good at allowing themselves to make a mistake but the path i never traveled the door i never opened is heavier in their mind and in the survey might have been getting at that like people thinking wow what if i had done something differently well the reason i was asking is like i kinda want this whole like i'm kind of obsessed with this idea of finding your passion not just because of your book but like one of my favorite books is mastery by robert greene yes if you change my life that changed my life but the reason i'm i'm interested in it is because like i previously had a company that i sold and it was like very successful in all the traditional measurements i have a now that's quite successful and i like what i do but in the back of my mind i think that it's normal and maybe you could tell if i'm wrong that like even grown ups like who are successful still like don't if i'm am i following like the right path like am i following am i gonna be in that six out of ten or the four out of ten do you find that like even when you were when you left compact and it eventually got into vc which i imagine that would be your calling that you still questioned it after the engineering degree i went to wall street for three years so i you like be in research i was in a sell side research channel yeah so i had two stuff before it i made it to to venture and in both cases i had a moment of reflection and it it's more clear to me now than it was them but where i i asked do i see myself doing this thirty years from now and in many businesses there's a life or in the room you know that's that's done at their whole life and i it don't that sounds a little judgmental i don't mean it to be like but it it gives you a way to reflect on whether that's the the place you wanna be in yeah because they did it and and in both cases after about two or three years i got to a no even though i was doing well in those jobs but thinking do i wanna be still be doing this thirty years from now was was clarifying for me but you said something interesting so like alright i thought the book was amazing the best chapter the the best part was the early part about fat finding your passion and you're like that's the hardest part and like you said that just now you're like it didn't seem clear to me then but it does seem clear to me now that i was questioning that well i did do that exercise in my brain and there's another exercise that bezos is famous for what he calls the regret immunization framework where he said what would my eighty year old self advised me to do in this situation which is another way to get at what i was doing and to get at this this notion of you know you only have one life like are you really thinking about this decision with a reflection of the whole life and so if your eighty year old self is probably more risk seeking than you are in that moment because he's trying to minimize that that regret what was the exercise you did then how old are you i would the the thing i did is what i already said i asked myself do i still wanna be doing this thirty years from that and i did it once when i was an engineer so i was twenty three twenty four but was that voice loud i think it was loud i had no inhibition whatsoever about walking away like it didn't bother me and i i may have benefited in the back of my brain from the fact that my father went across the country he he took a flyer on a job he got recruited from virginia to houston to be one of the first employees in nasa that's cool and and i knew he had done that and and so i i didn't come from i think if you come from a family where multiple generations have stayed in the same town it may feel really wild to just take flyers alright so this episode is all about excellence a while back i shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life and the team at hubspot turned it into a thirty day operating system you can check out right now it breaks down the systems it took me ten years to figure out and shows how i actually use them day to day these are systems that genuinely change my life so if you wanna build a good life scan the qr code or click the link in the description now let's get back to the show when i was twenty one years old i'm from missouri i went to school in nashville tennessee i had a hotdog dog stand and that's why i paid my way to college it was called southern sam we as big as the baby's arm and we had a bunch of locations that these hotdog dog stands it was really fun and i was like this is so hard to be out in tennessee weather solid hot dog it was so hard and so i googled like where do internet companies live because i didn't even know because i was obsessed with the internet and it said san francisco and i was like what internet companies are cool or like i don't know what like what's like the hot thing well at the time it was uber at the time it was called uber cab still and air bed in breakfast yes and so i started looking at this thing called air ben breakfast and i cold emailed this guy named brian the ceo and he didn't reply to me but then i found like another employee to email named justin and i emailed him and i was like i'm gonna be there on monday can i interview for this company obviously air ben breakfast call airbnb and they're like yeah you live in the bay area i was i live there which of i didn't i was in college in tennessee and so i flew out there the next day got the interview got the job went back to tennessee dropped out of college sold everything i had but my parents are entrepreneurs in missouri they started their entrepreneur entrepreneurial career owning a fruit stand yeah and i remember when i told them was like i'm a leave school i'm gonna join this thing and they're like what's a startup up and does it have health insurance i was like it has health insurance that it's paying like twenty two dollars an hour i think it's gonna and they're like okay cool we'll come pack up your stuff and i remember at that moment like that emotional support at what's is one of the biggest things that separates what allows people to win versus allow people to lose because i've met so many people a lot of my friends are immigrants and like the immigrant experience is interesting because a lot of the immigrants it seems like they've fallen in two categories one categories like the came with nothing so there's they they're willing to do anything to to win and they go down one path and then the other path is i came here to create a big life don't screw this up take the safe path right and my parents were not the safe path and that was like the most support that they could have for me and it was so amazing i'm glad i'm so glad you told that story because even though the person this book is written towards is the the person on the career path and and and i mean that we don't have a chapter on how to advise people like it's not written for the adviser but i think it will be particularly interesting to parents and advisors to test whether or not they're willing to help support people in a way that your parents did well i think that's a big deal because like for example you go to the doctor to get like your basic stuff checked i go to cal i go to school to get good grades but at no point do they ask like are you asked like are you happy you doing this and i think that that's like i think that's why i'm still i don't think i've ever formally i don't think we've ever formally learned how do you find i call it e guy which i'm sure you're very familiar with it's this japanese term where imagine like a venn diagram but there's four it's what the world wants what the world wants to pay for what you're good at and what you're passionate about the goal is to find something right in the middle but no one teaches that right it's and so it's interesting the reason i like your book is because that's what it's about in the yeah and in in the chapter titled chase your curiosity i tried to borrow as many of those type of exercises as possible even went out i'm surprised i didn't find that one but i found like ten others and and i put them all in there like i'm i'm trying to give people as many of those pathways as possible because i think the very hardest part is to figure out actually what it is that drives you in this way that's gonna make a very easy for you to differentiate yourself and it's funny you know you you you mentioned that one there's a story in the book about this guy burt beverage in austin texas who's forty years old and he's watching a pbs show and they say to take a sheet of paper put it horizontal draw a line down the middle right on the left what you love to do in on the right what you're good at and try and find something in the middle and through that exercise he quit being a mortgage broker he had been a s mileage before that and launched a vodka company called tito at the age at the age of forty i think there's this like famous mo quote where someone was like asking mo like how do i find my way or how do i like do i have what it takes to be the man and mo was like dude if you're asking a question the answer is no because the conqueror is just conquer and i i hated his reply to that because but i'm curious so i don't even know all of the companies you've invested in because you've been doing it for so long you've like i don't know how many the courts have you invested in i don't know i dozens sure a lot yeah and you've been around all the movers and shaker whether you invested in or you pass or not you are somehow like i touched all these amazing people did they follow a similar path for the founders i think you'd find a lot of different stories and different pathways that got them to where they are i mean if you the like the zuckerberg story is pretty famous he's at harvard doing messing around and and that's very different from the path they gates took or or even bezos so i don't know that there is a pathway to that place i'll tell you i i once to ask jeff bezos how he could possibly be good at angel investing was running this company what did what did he do angel wise oh he did google uber but to murder wrote he was on the he was in the seed round of google yes well that's amazing what was the valuation then i think that first round was a ten poster but but but to get to the point he said the only thing he looks for is this insane deter he like he he wanted to believe the person was gonna go do this no matter what come hell high water and i think that may be a common trait of a lot of the founders they're just really really determined and pushing against this thing the other thing that's true of any tech founder is they're hyper curious about the edge of what the technology can do and anytime there's a big disruption ai being the most recent before that there was social media and the mobile wave and the saas wave and all these waves and they create opportunity because incumbents are usually slow to embrace them so you can run at these things fast but that requires you to be hyper curious about where the world's going and what's changing so that you can master it before anyone else does you there's a cool book called grit we talked about a ton here on this podcast and you cite it a bunch yeah it's awesome i forget the exact equation but it's basically like she angela duck she's like i think she started the original book with fifty percent passion of fifty percent perseverance and one thing we highlight we actually had a chance to talk to her which i'm super grateful for but when we found this podcast she had done ten years later where she said it probably shouldn't have been fifty fifty that it needed to put more weight on passion and her her fear is that we've talked children young adults how to grind so the we've taught them to persevere for the sake of perseverance and she believes that now that now she believes that leads to burnout and so if you have like all this effort without the love for it it it feels more like work and one of the things you know my the second principle here after you chase your curiosity is to hone your craft and that's a lifelong journey always learning and for people that are in the right space that comes free like you just do it and naturally you wake up and wanna do it like you're drawn to knowing more about the craft and and i think that that correlates nicely with where where she came out which is you it's hard to do all the things i recommend in this book if you don't truly love it i didn't realize it but passion i think is probably i think passion is kind of a bad word because like passion kind of implies that i'm gonna like everything i do and if you like talk to like a lot of athletes they're like i love competing i do like practicing but there's definitely days that i hate doing it but i'm a pro and i'm gonna do it no matter what and like i love winning we highlight in a book that that word kinda and overused seinfeld gave a talk at duke corey said fascination was a better word i think obsession is a good word we titled the chapter chase your curiosity like what just what is it that you you can't ignore like what is this thing that you love so much that you always wanna know more about it you know what was your you did a good job of like listen all these exercises like find it what was the most productive one that you found i mentioned the one that tito had used the the team that wrote designing your life has has one that they say is most popular which is is battle kart so like come up with three to five potential career pass not just one and let your brain roll around in them for a while so you you could do that especially with ai today you could imagine i'm gonna do this what does it look like two years from now like who are you know what might i like what might i not like you can you and then you know you could say well wi over this or this so that's an exercise i think having the mental relaxation to not feel like some path you've been down at some cost like i'm gonna go try this and if it works great if not i'll do something else just as your parents said it's okay to quit collagen and go work there it's okay to quit the job you're in as well and i just fear we put so much weight on economic stability you know you mentioned some of those immigrant families and what they they pushed the that that there's this burden to do that above and beyond what might be fulfilling in your life and i i think it'd be better if we got out of that and and or or at least this way think of it as a of a you know a gauge we've gone pretty damn far to one side let's let's bring it back a little bit have you messed up with you like have you had to pull yourself back with your kids yeah yeah i think there is a and having they're all in their early twenties so they're all trying to find it like i don't know if they're all even there yet but there is this intuition as a parent and i i think it's well intention to to to worried to feel like they're on a safe path and safe is usually economic but it's also it's just risk feels like your risk like like and and i i love the story where your parents did and i've got a few anecdotes i found since we finished the book that are great on that are very similar to what your parents did but i think it's the exception i don't think it's the rule i think a lot of parents would have tried to convince you to finish out and get your degree i think that's built into to most parents and and so there are other people other than myself that that have highlighted that the i'd call like this industrial college mat path has gotten very rigid in and it's competitive and it's grind that the the like getting into college now is significantly harder yeah they've not expanded they've not expanded the enrollment at these schools but the number of people that wanna go to college going way up it's crazy it's crazy and in starting around sixth grade once again well intention parents start building the resume to get into college and so we overs schedule children today compared to when i was young for sure and so they're they're scheduled from when they wake up to and they go to bed there's actually a chapter in jonathan heights book calling of american mine called the decline of play where we've just we've we it's harder i think for a child to explore and try on different ideas because they're caught up in this game to try and get into college you had this crazy stat you said i think it was the people who won a nobel prize in science the scientist who won nobel prize is correct me her wrong but they were twenty two times more likely to participate in things like acting or dance class and things like that what was that stat so this was work that keith h could done at ucla and it relates to a lot of the concepts in the back of range book by david epstein but it it was the people at the top of their field are like much more likely to have a a breadth of hobbies speak more languages do more things and and almost i think have a lens on the world that's broader because they were able to try so many different things today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com so i wrote this book mastery and like the premise is like being a generalist is kinda nonsense you have to specialize in something but once you specialize then you become a generalist i think that's the right pathway like i i do i do think you wanna get started in an area where you can differentiate yourself and then and then in many in both the principal chapter on mentors and peers in here and even in the learning principal i recommend you know as a more advanced level once you get you know up to this level then go broader like start to learn outside your field find mentors and peers outside your field and you'll get pulled in more innovative ways tell me more about that that like just like kinda blew my mind well i think what keith work highlighted was that some of the people that are able to reach the top of their field are able to draw on mental models from much from a variety of different places and where a hyper specialists and and david have epstein book range is all about this specialist versus broad thing like that's the really the the whole point of the book and he quote totally as well but many different innovations and science have come from people who repo from one place to another chemist who becomes a physicist the person who's a lifelong this has mental models they're pretty rigid at that point in time because that's all they know and so once again i think this is an advanced skill i don't i think after you're succeeding you start to do this i don't think it's the pathway to the beginning of success because i you just be too broad but some of the smartest people i know could like like one person profile in the book is danny meyer the grass great grass front tour we were asking getting him about his mentors and one of them that influenced them the most isn't from the restaurant industry you know and so it's it it it is a more advanced skill but it is where you will look the whole goal i think is to differentiate yourself along the pathway that is a great way more advanced way but a great way to to take yourself places you wouldn't have thought of you this cool line you said there's if there's one takeaway that you should have from this book peer groups more so than coaching consulting courses whatever it's probably the most powerful thing that you could use and it's under discussed because it doesn't feel intuitive to like wanna be peers with someone who might take the same job as you but it's really powerful i think the way you to describe is right like everyone talks about mentors and no one talks about peers so i do have a a chapter on mentors and i offer a ton of very practical advice about how to play that correctly but the peer thing the idea is that when you get on that first rung of the ladder you're trying and climb it if you could develop a friend group it might be four might be six that are also on that same journey and hopefully i think outside your organization i think you could start maybe with one person in your org but for all the reasons we just talked about how breadth of knowledge might give you insights you wouldn't have if they're outside your org they're gonna see different cultures they're gonna see different management structures they're gonna bring a different viewpoint to you that you wouldn't have had if they were insights and then with today's modern tools you know created create if your adventurous create a slack channel if you're if you just wanna do it a whatsapp group for a signal group and share you know share your learnings along the way when i moved to san francisco for airbnb it i didn't actually end up getting the job by the way they offered me a job and i got it and then when i was in college i was like kinda crazy and i got arrested i got dui and i'm so sober now i don't do any drugs where i'll alcohol uncle completely clean and and by the book but they're like you lied on your resume said you didn't have a a criminal record and so i didn't end up getting to start and so i was stuck out in san francisco i was what's how i gonna do so ended up starting a company and it worked out well but it was like super low point in my life and when i got there i created this thing called the anti nba it was my version of a book club and we met once a week and we would get a book and we would read a book a month and talk about a quarter of the book every single week and it changed my life like having those group of guys like sick and i think that like you need a few things to make a group like that work i think you need like rules you need like some rituals and you need like tickets it serious yeah and i think if there are people that are sharp elbow or climber that that step on other people you kick them out like i i i think you need like minded people who are equally gracious to one another who was in your group now that's like a big shot now well we one thing i've i've i've discovered lately is setting up different like whatsapp signal groups for different topics i think for someone coming early into a career it's better to have people there are on that exact journey and i'm not in that place anymore i have a company called hampton that's my main company are you from with y po sure it's like why pos we have thousands of members all over the country and you it's chris peer group and then we have executive coaches who like lead the conversation it's for ceos so we have like the average person has like thirty million twenty million in revenue or so and it's been really cool to like watch these members like team and i'm in a peer we come core groups i'm in one as well and it like you have this a bunch of lines in there about peer groups and i'm like oh you write my ads for me yeah but but but and those things exist with y ipo and and your thing for ceos but it could be done by any but sure i mean like my wife when she was pregnant she had one for moms i've got a a buddy of mine has one for jewish dads like like it could be anything you know what i mean but like it really does like change things it does i really does i think it can in and almost all of the other principles are accelerated so your learning is accelerated there's a great story in the book about mister beast that ties to that there's your your your network is accelerated so your network isn't just your network it's now the network of the group if people are willing to share introductions and that kind of thing you know both mentors and other peers and and then the group i think can be really helpful on bad days and everyone's gonna have bad days and there's a support element that comes in into play that i think is really useful and then also you you may be at a shitty company like your your dream job may be the one you're in and you might be at a shitty company and if you're alone you have no way of knowing if that's normal or not like the the stuff you're exposed to whereas if you had a group of eight people that were all doing this in different companies you'd get different perspectives on that what did the voice to you say when it was like i found my calling there was a lack of that voice that kept asking is this what you wanna be doing thirty years from now like that that worry was gone like i i wasn't having those negative thoughts if you will and what was the thing that you're doing investing yeah one i became a vc i just adored every minute of the job you'd but but a lot of that that's fitting my individual personality you know there are people who you know are kinda they go i can't be a pc because you're not the one actually doing the work that never bothered me you know i i'm someone who's really drawn to virtual brett and so a service job whether it's working in banking or working as a vc gives me a window across way more companies than if i were working in one and i also i'm fairly certain i have add and like focusing on details is not something i'm good at like you when p i've heard jeff bezos there's warren someone was like i tapped dance to work every day and then you're you're saying you adored every minute of it it's like i think i found my passion but like i probably like running a company it sucks like eighty five percent and like my last company that saw that it was great like if you talk to my wife shoes like you laid on the floor like all the time saying i can't do this wanna quit this sucks like is the adored every second of it the right is that i don't really i i'm i'm telling you the x post kinda summary of it all like how many times when you're were doing it did you wanna quit don't ever remember wanting to quit really really that makes me feel horrible i think the ceo jobs the lone job in america said that many many times before his heart and one of the things that makes it particularly hard you need to run culturally opposite what's happening at the company so if the company doing poorly you have to bring the positive energy and make people believe it's possible and if the company running hot you wanna bring them down to earth and this is my this is my theory on why the ceo job so hard so running counter emotionally to whatever everybody else in the organization feels is exhaust it's exhausting in a world where like i i've all i've grown to dislike the word and the idea of authenticity it's sort of like when you're a young kid and you're trying to meet girls people say just be yourself and i'm like girls don't like myself like i wanna be myself like i need a change it'd be better and the people are like be authentic and i'm like but i'm not a good leader i need to be better you ought be it's so they'll be like be authentic like be transparent with your team tell them that you're not feeling great i'm like no lie like you have to like convince them that like we're gonna figure this out and somehow you you what you know what i mean i do leadership really really hard i think one of the things that is often not talked about enough in the the whole both silicon valley and just the the celebration of the founder is that that if you're successful and your company grows you're gonna go from ten employees to a hundred employees to a thousand employees and eventually leadership gonna be required and matter and you don't have a place to learn that you know it's not there's no book that it teaches oh here you're founder you wanna learn to lead people like and it's not discussed much but but the zuckerberg of the world i know for a fact that larry and sergey there's this gentleman named bill campbell who unfortunately passed he was kelly dollar coach yes and this campbell was there ten years after the ipo he was still running the weekly team meetings with larry answer boy they just bad leaders i mean what what i don't know steve jobs used bill also so i i don't know that that makes some bad i i'm just highlighting the fact that there's no reason from a dna standpoint that a founders should naturally be able to lead a thousand people because there's a skill set required to lead a thousand people and no one's taught it to you can you learn it yeah i think you can learn it i think certain people have i think zuckerberg berg learn it i think bezos didn't have any leadership skills going in like he had never run a large team but what do you suggest to someone to learn how to be a better leader get to know bill campbell but that's no longer with us so you know i've i've often said get two or three mentors that have ran large groups they will all have their leadership philosophy and patterns and try those on and see which one fit to you the best so maybe that's maybe in the middle between between the authentic and like you having a program and philosophy is better than none i can't tell you how many founders have gotten to like two hundred employees and they're not running a weekly meeting like they don't know to do it so some structure is better than no structure and therefore rather than say one of those ceos you talk to is absolutely right find out what they're doing and see which one feels best for you and your org well you talked about that with with danny meyer danny meyer i think probably most known not outside new york for funding shake shack you said that i think he was gonna be a lawyer or something any he any he and he hated that but he went and toured about his uncle was like dude what are you doing you gotta be you gotta get the restaurant business and so what he did was he did like a field trip to like tour restaurants and then eventually got a part time job as working at a restaurant before starting his restaurant yeah also did a tour through europe as a s which is a fancy word for work for free but you in the book you're like he still does that so like whenever like they're opening up a new restaurant he goes and like a field trips and then you're like when he opened up i think a barbecue place he like went back to saint louis and like tu stuff is there a world where like a white collar job person can take these field trips like i think so are or at least the notion of it i what one of the arguments i make like pound the table in in the learning chapter is that most people don't think about continuous learning in their job now there the founders do because they're they're learning these new technologies and maybe doctors do because it's required by law but most people that get into a field i think i think the college experience and the high school experience were so exhausting they're like worn out and they're like glad i'm done learning and then they're gonna go to work but whatever you do i guarantee you especially with ai out there there's some nuance of what you could be doing that's new and and unless you're trying to find that edge somebody else may be and i think the people most threat by ai are the ones that aren't continuously learning that are just kind of doing the same thing they did ten years ago because they're they're kind of a widget you know and that could be automated and the people that that are curious about what's possible they're naturally gonna see this ai thing pop up and go wow that's a new tool i better figure out what it can do for me and those are the people that are hardest to replace like if you're if your company trying to figure out ai and one of your employees is spending more time on it than everybody else they're the last person you're gonna fire i think that like what i've been trying to tell a lot like we have a lot of young people listen particularly a lot of young men and i'm like you have to understand the difference between risk and uncertainty and that risk is oftentimes a lot less than people think but uncertainty will always exist no matter what and you just have to get comfortable with that and i think that in order to reduce risk i don't think people realize how many things in life they can try before they buy for example i moved from texas up here yeah i rented an airbnb for two weeks in a neighborhood that i wanted to see and like i tested it out and i actually realized i hated that neighborhood but i like this other area yeah or like you could do that i remember before i wanted i one time i wanted to buy a fancy car i tested it on toro and i was like i don't wanna own this car this is a pain in the ass yeah and like you can email someone you gotta email probably fifty people and you could like actually shadow them i mean most decisions are reversible and there are ways to like reduce risk no doubt and like like when i was an engineer and before i went to wall street it turns out i had read peer lenses went up on wall street i was trading stocks in my spare time so unconsciously i was testing that in this field that i would eventually go towards and so yes like don't quit your job tomorrow just because you're unhappy start figuring out that you're what direction is the right direction to move towards some of the people that you you talk about like for example in the book talk about robert zimmerman aka bob dylan and you're like he found his fascination and he like followed it root like pretty ruthless and and and became bob dylan and but then you also were like he's also like you barely mentioned the spear like he's notoriously prick like he's hard to like get close to it but then like i know you've worked with travis cal who's like a pretty wild guy the people who in order to like dude these exercises of finding your passion do you sort have to be like a ruthless asshole you i don't think so i mean danny is one of the nicest humans i've ever met in my entire life even though someone like bobby knight who we have in the book is known as being that way he's probably got the biggest coaching tree in the history of the sport which means people have developed underneath him and both as coaches and players and become coaches so even if you know this prick guy you see throwing the chair is is not the one that developed all these humans you know and put them on their way and on their path and one of the things i love about a lot of the stories in the in the book is that these people reach a place where they're touching so many people in their field i think that's a more fulfilling test of where you successful then did you hit some milestones yeah but it's a lot easier to do a bunch of stuff like following your passion when you have hit milestones like sometimes when people people say follow your passion what i really wanna tell people i'm like basically it sounds like crew but i'm like if you can get rich fast do that some people get in a position where they spin right up to what they earn and then their pay they don't have flexibility and so you move from one town to another a lot of the people in the book do that and if you're stuck you're stuck you know you might be half to stand a job because you've built a expense burden that goes right up against the top of it i saw a ton of those people when i came to new york what did you see i mean we were getting paid decent money like for this is when you're a researcher yeah yeah for entry level jobs but they would run and get they'd go get the place in the hampton and they joined the private club and they'd run their budget right up to the top sometimes above it it's where if they don't get the bonus there under water i know people that make seven figures a one million dollars a year and we'll literally have zero dollars in savings i understand when i early on i used to use this app called my weekly budget and i created a a budget and i had a spreadsheet that would track how much cash i'd had save so ten thousand to twenty thousand it was like this is how long you could live without any income so the the name of the game would said squirrel away as much cash while keeping expenses low and it was like want anything above six months that's like your f fu number meaning that you you could like go and like try and experiment yeah it gives you flexibility yeah and it was like but it was like ruthless disciplined to make that number bigger even though i didn't make a lot of money but i was like living very frugal and i don't think people understand that i'm like things like college debt which i'm very privileged i didn't have completely ruins it and so like there's a bunch of these irreversible decisions that can really screw you up when it comes to like being able to like chase down some of these things you know i agree it what do you do with the money once you've already made it this is a question sean and i ask our successful guests all the time and the reason we ask it is because if you are successful if you do have a little bit of money information on how to spend or invest your money it's actually really hard to come by and i know this because inside of hampton which is my community founders people ask this question all the time people have made ten or fifty million dollars how do you spend it how do you invest it and so to help solve this problem and answer this question i actually interviewed eighty plus founders guys like scott gallo alex for mo brian johnson people who are worth fifty a hundred even billions of dollars and we got them to reveal everything so their net worth how much they pay themselves their monthly expenses their portfolio things like that and we turn these eighty interviews into one document and i don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the internet and it's completely free so if you wanna see behind the net worth people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios or expenses everything you go to join hampton dot com slash reveal again join hampton dot com slash reveal check it out they were last night was special because i said across from jim cram and then next to him with henry blu who founded a business insider or just a lot of like crazy people when you knew these guys when they were younger was it clear that you guys were all going to succeed or have you been surprised that someone has been as successful as they are well i think he i think it goes back to our discussion on peer group so like like connecting with i've just always found and and i think i got more att to this the older i got like haven't have a big tent mentality like have as many friends as you can try not to judge people too much root for people to be successful when you can and and it'll come back to you in spade you know and i guess i've never been surprised that the people that end up you know in sam in in silicon valley in the middle of it all continue to move forward just because it attracts so many ambitious people you know and so i no i i i haven't i haven't been radically surprised by anybody staying power keep in mind i'm fifty nine years old so i have the benefit of time to build that network i had twenty five years as a venture capitalist but i think you were on the board of a what's the moment you and danny meyer you're on the board open table that was like twenty years ago mean yes it seems like you you kinda like hit it was right up pretty early in yeah into investing right it's kinda key venture what do you mean oh just to be in front of the the the wave or whatever rolls out like you can't can't be late with ai going on right now is this does this remind you of a different period venture i've never seen it quite like this really really i one thing i think throughout my career venture only gotten more competitive and now today it's you know as i've i'm hanging up my boots and watching the next generation it's even more competitive and the the burn rates that the vcs are comfortable experimenting with are bigger and bigger than ever like i thought our two billion a year burn rate at uber was pretty frightening open ai burning way more than that how much are they burning i i don't know i've seen different number i don't have access to their financials but like uber was losing two billion a year yeah but opening ai is it like eight or ten what did what does it make you feel when your company's losing two billion dollars a year scared shi really yeah oh yeah how did you map that out like how do you go to bed at night knowing that like are you like what do tell you your yourself you're like well right didn't i sleep my there was a piece of it there was that did i think is as the venture industry gets more industrialized was a problem which was i think the lyft investors knew that they had to keep funding liquidity and and for all bunch of reasons that relate to network effects that it was always supposed to be kind of a single marketplace that would win and but you if you don't have the constraint of financial viability you can lose money to create like to the perception of liquidity you can pay drivers to be present when they wouldn't naturally be that yeah i used to joke my last company in san francisco we didn't take venture capital but we to say we were still vc funded because uber and all these companies would give like the craziest referrals so like i i've ever like giving my referral everywhere like i drive audio uber for or right i'll uber five great i get it and and and and it wasn't until a lift went public first which is probably the best thing that could have ever happened to uber where wall street held them accountable for being profitable and and it's it's at that point when things really tipped and and where uber was able to then take advantage of the network effect them being larger and and now spits off well north of ten billion a year in free cash flow that's how they get it now nothing insane did you did is that bigger than your prediction owen i made a prediction about the the market cap it had a bunch of ranges i i don't have it in front of me but da got it to two hundred billion mark cap and i don't know if that was in i i've assume you're referring to the blog post no i haven't okay yeah what did you say or what what was there was a professor at my you that it wrote blog pressed it said it would only be worth four billion and i pushed back remember that we did talk about that yeah do did you see the blog post the of other day about on subs stack where their like ai is gonna make the economy worse do you see how one blog post like brought down it's pretty amazing that's crazy right yes did your blog ever do that not not at that scale no yeah that was that was insane insane there's a lot of fear out there just remember warren buffett said be be greedy when others are fearful and fearful for when others are greedy so the first wave of ai was a lot of people being greedy and now all of a sudden there's fear for the first time so if you're a net buyer of stocks this is when you it's when you sharpen your pencil you see all these interesting founders other than like i mean i don't wanna hear like travis or like some big name ones who kinda had stuck out as like being like particularly sticky and formidable well one of the most impressive people i know is a guy named rich barton he founded ex media and then zillow ex expendable was acquired by dill so he knows barry and all that but but rich has this remarkable ability to be top one percentile as a product technology disrupt but also as a leader that thing we're you're talking about before and i i usually see people tilt one degree or the other and not both in each this rare person that did doesn't it on both and so i frequently lean on him for advice do you have an example of like story of like where good leadership changed getting companies to pivot fast when they need to i mean right now with ai any companies out there you mentioned what happened with this report like that that door dash is down five percent because the report said you could build door dash for free which i don't believe but you know whatever yeah in that report by the way for the listener it was basically like what happens in the world if ai is so efficient that we don't have jobs and if we don't have jobs and we're not buying stuff and it was just like a story it was it was an idea but how do you get so the the thing that i was gonna mention is just how do you make sure your company is properly aware of this new wave and how do you get everyone super excited about figuring out what it's gonna mean for your company and that that's not easy to do and you know i'm back on the border of zillow so i watched him do that recently and it requires having both the conviction to make that kind of pivot and move and then the ability to get the people to follow you that's funny that you said it was like being good at product and being a good leader i think you also said do you also say that like jeff bezos is one of those guys who does two things really well it'd be a good exercise to for someone to kinda of write down the leadership techniques of jeff bezos because amazon remained innovative after it got to like a hundred thousand employees and that's very hard to do and it's not one human it's one human creating a system that reinforces whatever he thought you you see what i'm saying and like how do you make that system keep doing that even after you know on days or not there and him and elon i just don't think people fully g how they're able to lead a lot of these people who are these like kind of the titans of industry that you know do you think that there's any correlation or reverse correlation of a happiness i don't know anyone that laughs louder than jeff bezos if you've been around him when he lets go one of his his gu fa man i and i and i think he really loves life i'm just saying that i don't think there's a correlation i mean i i every chance i get if toby from shopify does a podcast or something i'm eating it out and i find his attitude on leadership in life to be light hearted he seems like another one of these product leadership guys he's got a very unique flavor of leadership he has a very wise there's something lies about years yeah there's something wise about him do you see where he's took screenshots of his computer screen every ten minutes for the last twenty years and because he was just he's like i'm a nerd and i just love like having this diary of like what what was on my like he was tracking all of this and he's like i didn't know what i was gonna do with this now that ai exists i can like upload this and like it could like teach me about myself but he's got this like really cool i caught like nerd wisdom him like you know da mesh at hubspot i have men but i don't know miss the same thing where there's like there's these groups of group of guys who are like very like you need have a leader sometimes you think like a napoleon like ra ra like ra people up but there's this other group of like fairly introverted people and they're quiet and when they talk you listen but i think they're they're both useful for someone who's like eighteenth nineteen twenty they're listening to this you did all this research for this book are there what biographies do suggest they go read i mean i think it it'd be heavily depending on what interest them or rather what made the biggest impact on you i don't know if i was reading biographies at seventeen i really got into reading when i got to business school and i they're all listed in here there's thirty five books listed at the back of the book so i but it i think the key is just to and i don't even know that it has to be reading there's there's so many podcasts like the ones you do and and youtube interviews with people like it's so easy to go learn about something so i've just like whatever it interest you go learn more about it and see if that takes you somewhere see if that makes you excited see if it makes you wanna pick up the next one and if it is i think you're probably in the right lane if not just pay attention to what fa you you know pay attention to what interest you i'm a big believer that more people can chase careers in their hobby than someone else might say like like if if if there's something you're just super passionate about and even if it's a hobby you might be surprised there might be there might be a way to make a career around most lot easier out the internet it's this is but by the way i i'd love to close with this point that you just made if you're a what like i said if you're someone who's disengaged at work that went through some process you didn't care about that much i can understand why this ai thing would feel threatening to you if you're crafting your own personal career and your high agency i think that's the word you used earlier ai is like a jackpot like you can do more stuff than you ever could before you can learn faster than you ever could before in the history of time you can find people to connect with you can network faster than than you ever could before and so if you have agency and and of direction you're headed in ai is gonna make things way better so i think it's just this interesting paradox that there are people out there who fear that it's gonna dismantle them and there's people out there who are like oh my god i can't i've met so many what i would call like smb founders or regional founders running you know businesses there laundromat mats or storage facility and and they've discovered all the things they can do with ai and now they they feel super so i'll i'll wrap up with the story you'll you'll dig this so my mother her name smith she came here to to america from haiti at like fourteen years old didn't speak english married my father jeff jeff owned a moving company smith was a state at home mom for a long time the kids grew up and she was like i've i'm kinda lost i need to do something what's going on so about five years ago she says to same me she was saying sam i think i'm gonna start an online store that sells pillows like pillows or whatever sounds good and i like i was like there's a thing called shopify just start just start there it's been five years since that she has a pillow company that sells over a million dollars a year in pillows she has a warehouse in new jersey with five full time employees selling pillows she was just in the pod and she uses ai like all day to like she's like how do i buy an ad and like you know chad like teaches her or she's like how do i whatever like it's youtube but chat jb like telling her what to do and she didn't know she didn't know the word e commerce she didn't know what that meant she basically just knew what google was so that was it and now she in her late fifties started a e commerce business that does millions of dollars a year that's amazing crazy right yeah no but there's never been a better time to propel yourself forward if that's if that's what you're prepared to do well thank you for doing this brother alright alright god bless okay yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back if you made it this far then you're gonna love what i'm about to tell so there's this amazing entrepreneur name neil pat patel he's been on m he's one of our favorite guests and he has a podcast that's called marketing school and it's brought to you by the hub hubspot podcast network marketing school brings you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learn learned from years and years of being in the trenches they have over a hundred million downloads in over twenty five hundred episodes marketing school gives you bite sized marketing wisdom that you can implement immediately whether you have a new website or you already have this huge established business you're gonna learn about the latest seo content marketing social media email marketing conversion optimization and general online marketing strategies that work today you can get marketing school wherever get your podcast