Brainstorming business ideas with a billion-dollar founder

don't have a lot of money but you have access to ai out loud let's go through this framework i almost wanna turn this to my whiteboard awesome great this is like showing us nude for for my first feeling this is like exactly what we like i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel now alright you've done everything you built a template dollar company you're i i think a seed investor in facebook or early investor in facebook one thing you haven't done is sitting still i'm looking at your biography and your timeline it seems like you start a company it either sells or fails and six months later you have a new company and you've done that like eight times it feels like do you ever sit still i'm working on sitting still my partner hillary we said she's like a tree and i'm like a humming bird and so i'm i'm trying to be more like like a redwood tree what why is that why not just embrace your nature of just being this extremely generative creative guy who cares why i be the tree be the bird well i think it's good to have a balance i'm trying to i'm not trying to sit still from a creative business work perspective but in creative home life i think it's more it's good balance you know i've added like morning practice with breathing and meditation so i definitely have extreme ad and so but i i do better when i focus but they both work really well together you know my daughter carmen has d lexi and ad and we tried adderall and some of those things and she liked it first and then i was like wait your brain is beautiful the way it is i don't wanna normalize your brain and standardize it let's figure out what works best for your brain you know so it's a i'm a little bit like that with myself of just saying the way i work the i call my investment and incubator play ventures because i love this kind of tri tribulation between play and usefulness to the world and that's why this book took so long and was difficult because it took me a long time to find the the fun kind of narrative and voice for the book one of the cool parts is that you you're very transparent about money and that was pretty cool i think you were in your late twenties or so when you sold free loader i think you said you made like two or three million dollars you sold it for eight thirty eight million you walked away i think with three or five you can correct me if i'm wrong five after taxes five after taxes and had to pay short term gains because it was so fast it was like a ten month or something like that yeah which is crazy and then you wrote a thirty eight thousand dollar check to facebook i think you said that would be worth six billion dollars now how often are you doing the math as to how much that would be worth had you not sold is that part of your morning medication you calculate what nine million shares a face dollar that i it's amazing i i say in the book that it is so true in this life like some of the patterns that i recognize is if you pick the right body of water it you don't have to pick the right boat but if pick the wrong body of water the best boat isn't gonna help you and it's just been so true and the internet obviously was the right body of water now it's like it's like the whole thing you came to call it a body of water and you know ai is like that now and there's so many instances of where i sold something that i was early and it became it would have become worth a lot i mean but even in selling like first company free loader you know we said no to yahoo they had i think thirty five employees they've been public like six weeks they're were worth eight hundred million we would have had five percent of the company i would have had one and a half percent i remember all these numbers for sure but i i wrote on the back of an envelope like if i got fired in year one which still be better if i got fired from year two i knew i get fired and so i just was trying to figure out well what point how long would i have to make it before the yahoo deal is better you know and i thought i'd have to make it at least like two to three years and that seemed unlikely so but i was wrong even one year would have been amazing and and and that check was that ten so that was ten percent of your net worth you put into facebook seed round is that right is that math right no no no no thirty eight thousand i oh thirty thousand sorry i was looking at five hundred thousand no i the there's nothing brilliant about my facebook investment and i get kind bugged when i see people on their investment resumes put that they were you know a seed in or early in there only three seed investors in facebook because me read and peter t but you would have anyone listening to this would have made the same investment that i did if they could have you know it's probably more impressive that i was in a place that you know zuckerberg and sean parker walked into my office then that i you know decided to invest so so tell tell the story of how that happened because i feel like the peter t gets a lot of recognition for that and even read kind of i think introduced or facilitated the meeting i feel like you're not included in that story as much so as a historian of silicon valley i wanna know what what was going on then so can you take us back how did that investment happen what was the what was going on i think sean parker was your intern at one point it was maybe sean has this amazing nose for viral consumer hits and and he found free loader really early and wrote me this whole long email and said he was a uni program and he come work for free for the summer he i think he was sixteen and i said sure and he came and he was awesome i don't know if he actually knew how to program uni or not i still haven't actually ever come back and asked him but but he you know he was a force even then and and then he started naps with the other sean fanning and emailed me about naps and just said we turn on these couple servers this music sharing and it's every server is full we need more money and we need a hundred thousand dollars and i just mailed them a check for a hundred thousand because again that was just a no brainer you always send that check but you know and naps could've have been gigantic and i think that was the beginning of the whole social media you know wave and revolution but just a bunch of years a few years earlier and then hey i wanna tell you about something pretty cool we have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast so hundreds of episodes the team at hub hubspot went through they pulled out all the simple relatable interesting profitable ideas that we have brainstorm and they're all available for download for free just click the link in the description below thank you to our friends at hubspot for sponsored this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys back to the show and reid and i had met while he was at paypal around politics and then we both kind of came back to consumer internet and o two thousand two there's a small number of people we both wrote the first checks into friends stir which we just thought was like a useful experiment and then it started to blow up in february o three like a month after it launched and i guess it was in o four that sean walked zuckerberg into my office at tribe and said you gotta see this i just joined this company and and i'd heard about the facebook you know i'd heard they were in a couple of schools he's said we have a waitlist list for all the rest of the schools or that wanna be want us to launch and you know but we launch a school it's sounded just like naps service like we launch a school we get eighty percent the first week the next week we get the other twenty percent and zuckerberg was just sitting here this he'd really looked like he was like fifteen or sixteen i think was nineteen and he was in like basketball shorts you know hawaiian flip flops had his feet up on my table and gave me a car that said you know ceo bitch and and it just he was just from another world he was just so una and it just didn't matter because his metrics were amazing like between sixteen and eighty percent of his users logged on every day or just stayed logged on he had nailed trust you know every single person when i looked at their profile had their cell phone and at the time it connected to their computer they had this product a wire hog i think that would was like naps that would upload every file and music and things from your computer and and i was i was failing so miserably with tribe that well tribe was also a social network tribe was before facebook it was it was one of the first three social networks and and i like to say that a part of the the deep painful scars and learning that went into z and went into this book and i'm hoping to save other founders from doing because it's it really is like a friend who's just in a bad relationship and you're like he's just knocked that into you like stop it like just have some dignity like you could go back and shake me when i was doing tribe and say mark you're there's so much like in this stop just sticking heroic to this one idea that's too complicated got trust wrong and and it's not working and there were probably ten social networks that launched that era and eight were successful like you know be was around that time you know michael birch he was he sold for a lot of money to aol as you know tagged later my myspace and i managed to fail with tribe like because i just stuck to one idea when when everything was working and so by the time zuckerberg and sean walked to my office i knew enough to invest i should've have copied them i mean i should've have said okay they've nailed trust i don't necessarily have to do the dot edu although it was brilliant and i could have done it but i think like so many founders i was stuck in this pride and and and didn't do you know peter till would call that a moral arbitrage right that we don't feel good about that right but someone's gonna copy it and and did and will and and now that's you know una part of zuckerberg playbook and we see them coming out with their own ka or you know and that's it's it's just the efficiency of the market and the internet that somebody is is going to do it and it's actually how we get more innovation because if they just exactly copied it it will probably fail but if they did proven better new like i write about in the book they might get to something that that's an innovation hey when he when a young guy like that does what he did or you know he's got that audacious business card he's got his feet on your desk or whatever are you turned off by that you're like this cocky arrogant prick or are you like i love this hot bow this is awesome you're both you're everything at once and you have some deep self loa thing too because you're like you know remember like i was not a first time founder at this point i i had some swag like i had my first two companies were very big successes and that was on my third one and it seems ordained you know and social networks working and it's not mine isn't working it it was it was like a sinking speed boat like we had huge viral vitality no retention or very very limited retention and you're like he he's got he's holding you know if you're playing poker is he's holding the nuts like he's got the cards so he can be arrogant you know in your front of brain hopefully your executive function is working enough to overcome your ego and emotions and say dude you you have to invest in this if you can because you he's got the winning hand and you you've been playing this game you know enough to know this is the winning hand what was the moment that you saw oh this guy's is gonna be like generational this isn't like a oh a short term viral app this is this got could be one of the greats that that came later as he went it it went from just this fun kinda he had lightning in a bottle this rockets ship he was having fun hiring all his friends and all living in a house together i remember who's was at like the d conference cara wishes conference he was there maybe it was the first time he was speaking i i can't remember i don't know if it was the time that they kind of famously i think it was later time you yeah i don't this i don't think this is the sweat con but i i went up to his room with him for some reason i was always trying to like have impromptu do product meetings with him so i was in his room i think he was gonna speak he he'd forgotten i think that i had invested or that was part of it and said right you you own stock but you put in and he did the math and i think maybe i owned like half a percent of the company and he was like wow he's like that's amazing he's like that's that's gonna be huge or something you know he was almost like in the third person not saying it as z the founder the ceo but he was just like almost like a a friend and pure and then it he morph like by the month and he had such a sense that this was destined to be this generational company and i i found he had that pretty maybe it was around the time that he brought cheryl but i think anytime that we had issues like we were getting in their way like by twenty ten when they were trying to roll out credits and and z was starting to be a very big part of their platform we were we were like eighty percent or of the ecosystem app ecosystem we were like this really overgrown teenager and you know they were trying to explain why we needed to voluntarily sign up for their credits because everyone would follow and it was like he wasn't explaining it in just business terms he was explaining it more in a way that like mouth no even there's a little mafia and with you know they said they said you're not leaning in you know and i started they they had language that everyone repeat in the company and you know i started to kind of hear lean in you know at the time as as so they wanted z it to voluntarily lean in for credits even though credits was it would it wasn't just like thirty percent tax on our revenues it was it was so primitive the way they built it that we were losing fifty percent of transactions and it it would have been kind of elective surgery to like chop off our legs if none of the other developers in the ecosystem were doing it but they said you know he said cheryl worked in the treasury department and she can explain to you why this makes so much sense economically for our ecosystem but it was my point is the way that he was talking about things where like don't you get that this is like in the way of the destiny and the fate of this company so you can't stand in the way because this is fate you're in the way of fate it sounds like like have you ever read about like some of the conqueror like have you ever read like about napoleon or any of these folks like napoleon hess quote or i'm i'm para where he was like someone was like what's your what's your heritage they wanna know like where he came from he's like oh i come from the people who conquer worlds like most people say irish whatever and he was like i i guy i i i come from the winner side yeah like what you're describing is very similar where it was like a sense of destiny and that's that's very rare and into it's an interesting question that's not related only to z right like i think one of the cool things that you've been in the game for so long and you've been early into a bunch of the right what you call the right oceans or whatever water bodies of water i i wonder do you can you pattern match now when somebody is sort of has has that that extra gear or that x factor or whatever it is or do you think it was a lot more of luck and there was a thousand other people just like them that just didn't happen to catch a winning winning train ride like i guess what's your conclusion i i talk about this in the book that there's pattern matching around lightning and bottle and it's every metric and anecdote comes back to this the reason why we don't pattern match that is because we usually haven't seen it and and this is where b plus the enemy of an a if you have to ask somebody do you think this is lightning in a bottle it ain't lightning in a bottle you know when you've got it you don't have to ask anybody it's it's like true love of i mean it's like i hope you guys you know have experience that kinda love that you didn't have to ask anybody else if they thought this was the one and there's so many things i mean naps didn't have to ask anyone friends didn't have ask and it's friends was like i thought it was the most unlikely thing when we funded it but then i was sitting at a blackjack table at the hard rock hotel in vegas and there were these two girls from they're like kind maybe post college from ohio and sitting next to me as one finds himself in vegas and one or the other and said oh can you i think she said can you friends me or this a month after it launched and she said you know can you it was invite only and she said can you invite me to friends and my head like spun around was like what did you just say friends and and that's these kind of shocking moments and so it can be a one anecdote like that it could be i mean the first time i played restaurant city which was for our competitor play fish i was like holy i was so addicted to that game like i just tweeted back and forth with a guy who was the product manager on it just huge respect i mean i was so addicted to the game i just think there are patterns that you can just see their metrics like every time you see sixty percent da to m a just invest that was facebook that was friends when when sixty percent of the people who you know tried this come back every day then you get that kind of engagement that's just lightning a bottle what about for personalities i can't say that there is one pattern but there are a lot of similarities but there's there is a certain swag that i see it's it's not a personality it's more of an energy that they have when when someone's got the nuts like when they have it there's a way that they don't give any if you care that is deeply authentic now you can fake it like we saw in the show silicon valley people can try to be a derivative fake of that and that might work for a little while but there's things like i've invested in the last few rounds in this private company that has an online the biggest online bank in europe called rev okay i've never met the founder i'm deeply in admiration of him but i started hiring him from afar just because i saw every six months they do another round and beat the projections they've given us six months earlier that's what we were doing at z and when you see that you also just invest without asking what the price is that's this is not investment advice i'm sorry this is what i've done you know when when i see a company that's just beating its own numbers and yes in the public markets there used to be cisco trying to manage us with they very carefully manage you know beat and rays that we've started a pattern recognize is not real but when it's real and you're like they give you numbers that sound like hockey stick and then they beat those just invest who else have you seen that with it it's pretty cool to hear that so rev which we don't we don't use it's it's your pm obviously now ant t yes and they've got that right now philanthropic i i did the same i stupidly skipped the first two rounds i wouldn't say it's even that stupid you know i skipped the five billion valuation in the eighteen and it was because at the time nobody believed there was gonna be room for a second ll and i worried they wouldn't be able to raise enough capital to compete then amazon led that third round at like twenty billion and then it changed everything because they had clear access to capital then the next round that i saw i think was a hundred and eighty billion and i just invested i was like okay i was wrong i'm just gonna invest i don't not gonna worry about the fact that i could have invested like ten weeks ago and how do you how do you think about upside here like i invested what it was at like for eight hundred billion or something crazy and i'm almost laughing at myself like oh yeah let me just yeah eight hundred billion there's clear upside from here but then you sort of have to break your brain and be like i if if these work how big are these gonna be how do you think about the case for how big these big ai companies are gonna be my pattern that i've learned in the last couple of gigantic platform shifts on the internet is that whatever we think we will underestimate how big and profound and impactful it's gonna be i don't think anyone even believed really ten years ago that we would have multi trillion dollar companies say i remember when all these companies were three hundred billion and that seemed like the cap microsoft facebook or meta tencent cent and the company alibaba and i would have theoretically believed they could ten x but i wouldn't have i wouldn't believe i wouldn't have bet my money on it yeah do you still struggle with that like just under like we all know this pattern we all know this pattern like for example i like track and feel and i always think oh this record is un break and obviously every rec every record gets broken or there's always a new freak same with companies so there's always a new freak so even though i know that it's still shocking when you see it and it's still like i can't believe that you just have to get comfortable with this this kind of emotional intellectual dissonance and separation and yeah it's it's just it is hard to grasp like on the one hand but then you know yeah if if basically this ai kinda centralized computing becomes part of the stack of the way everything gets done it it just it makes sense that it'll ten x so i i believe these companies will get to at least ten trillion and that means they'll probably get to like twenty or thirty trillion and so and it i'm not to i'm not saying they won't crash before then and there won't be despair you know who knows with in cute a lot of people are betting that in q one of next year you know this these infrastructure bets aren't going to re up but that's what they bet this year and that's why you know the memory stocks have been on this wild ride and it's exciting do you play the stock market do you do you just like kind of the game of investing whether it's angel at stock are you pretty active everywhere with your like it and i i am like more active probably than i should be can you give us an understanding of what your portfolio looks like as a pie sure it's well i'd say i'd say fifty percent is probably in private of some kind does that include them is that the markup that's probably with i mean some markup and then fifty percent is liquid and i've been managing my liquid portfolio for about eight years i i got out of all the hedge funds and different kinds of funds and i i just decided that they were protecting me from some amount of volatility and that if i could withstand the volatility i'd rather have control and and i it just it wasn't obvious i actually i mean i looked in the previous ten years i had averaged two point two percent annual returns on my whole liquid portfolio with wealth managers and funds and everything like massively under perform the market thanks experts yeah all thanks experts for keeping me safe safe and low you know it was very consistent two point two though they nailed that two point two every year no volatility and i just i stopped any fixed income thanks because i just i just believe that the governments the world have no choice but to print money and so i i i really like macro like i've connected with peter till on macro investing for like twenty five or thirty years and so he's better than me but similar you know can can you explain what what does that mean i i don't know i don't i don't i only buy index once i don't know anything well it's sort of like you know peter deal has us talk on youtube wouldn't i know it's like twenty years ago and he's basically describing bitcoin before bitcoin he's describing like the macro plot problem of fiat currencies and printing and all the stuff i he's like if you understood that then it's no surprise when something like bitcoin shows up give us an example of some of your ideas well were the biggest care it whether they're right or wrong last year i found myself in late february like almost fully invested in equities of my liquid portfolio was very bullish a very bullish on what trump would be for tech in the economy and then i started looking at the how bad the dislocations were gonna be from the tariffs and i was okay my read on trump is he's somewhere between he's a good poker player and he's gonna bluff he's gonna have some cards but bluff but he's gonna have to keep making his hands stronger so he can't if people don't come to the table he's gonna have to like show them some show them some cards and do some damage so i like this is gonna get a lot worse for it gets better and the markets are gonna over react so i put most of my portfolio in gold and then around april when these deals started coming in these tariff deals the market wasn't give coming back and giving much credit i was like okay trump is gonna like land this plane before the end of the year and so then i moved hugely back into the market and the most volatility and change you know i've ever and this is not meant to be a brag because i've had bad years but but i was up like thirty five percent on my whole liquid portfolio last year because of these trades because of gold and because of going in and out of the market this year not nearly as good i've gotten i i'm a huge long term believer in snapchat and i've been crushed so this year i've been crushed in snapchat crushed in bitcoin trading is stressful why are you been trading in the first place is it just just because you love it that's why i said i shouldn't be i mean i should be in some place where kinda set it and forget it i enjoy it and and sometimes it feels like because there is no fund manager there's some things i need to do just be responsible for instance this ai infrastructure trade i don't it's a belief trade right now like i don't know whether or not all these hyper skills are gonna re up in q one of next year or or take a pause and i love these companies and i love the trade almost too much because it looks generational that you could buy these companies at peg ratios that are like point three or point two five where nvidia micron so many of these companies are trading their trade their pe rate is a fraction of their growth rate that's called the peg ratio so on the one hand that looks generational but it's because every the market is worried that the buying the capex rate isn't gonna keep up at this and so i colored all of it just because i don't wanna worry about it but that made me be like a day trader because i had to put all these collars on like ten or fifteen different positions but now i can set it and forget it because they're like down fifteen up fifty oh for the next year okay i i don't know have to worry about it one thing i really like just listening to you is that i like that you are kind of una willing to just have fun and like you said blur the lines between work and play i just wanna read you this i think you'll you'll appreciate i i screenshot of this from blake my who started tom shoes he put this on the wall of every office he's had he said a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play his labor and his leisure his mind and his body his education and his recreation he hardly knows which is which he simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing to him he always appears to be doing both i yeah i love that i really do believe that there's like a singularity of idea ocean and building which is that we all will feel like elon you know that we're all i cut of that's why i started the book saying that we're so close to this future point where we'll all live like elon and we'll just put our intention in the world and won't need to go through all of the painful steps of raising venture capital and hiring lawyers and all of the beat down of life and we'll just turn our idea into something in days that other people are using and we're in some ways where there already but i think at a business creation level i think i think that's the very near future and and and it's awesome you have this cowboy guns attitude that i love i admire it i would not say that's how i roll and i'm in and but i'm and i'm en of you like when i see a guy with great style and fashion like i appreciate it couldn't be more difficult like but i but i heard the way that you it the way that you view life it's it's not exactly how i do things so and i'm of you for it are there downsides to this sort of like like you have this very stereotypical silicon valley energy that i love do you think that you feel stressed the same as the normal person i don't think there is like a constant state of mark you know like i'm not like i love what's name the guy the music guy who wrote the creates and the create creativity book from hollywood rick rubin rick rubin like i wish i was like more like i have admire rick rubin right he's so zen i'm not i'm not not that level and the here's what's so weird sam maybe you guys can relate to this and and i guess it is funny hear that i'm kinda stereotypical typical silicon valley because i i've i spent so much my career feeling like such an outsider to silicon valley culture that i'm like okay i know what that means now to be in the middle of the whole thing up have to think about that but this whole idea of work life balance relates to this because i find that when people say like how are you doing are you are you stressed or relax i say i'm not stressed enough i miss the level of intensity that i was the storm i was in the middle of z and because it was such it was such a high to be in this creative loop that i could be working with amazing product teams and and making these huge leaps every week and come up with ideas get them out see users love it see metrics move see our financials move weekly that's a high that i miss and when i'm in like the abyss which is what i call anytime in between those i have a different kind of stress and anxiety it's it's not like my aura ring is happy and now the most stress it shows is is around my family my five kids and i'm like i wanna i want my work stress in some way to to trump my family stress and it's not it's too it's too calm and i wanna crowd out the time for investing or anything else i wanna be in the middle of this like just creative storm you know and and i'm not and so that's where i feel kind of antsy it's like i think it's like the caveman like we were designed to get restless and that makes us go out and hunt you know i i definitely resonate with that and and you when you had the z thriller you know in some ways you can always be chasing that feeling again right because it's it's such a entrepreneurial thrill ride that you caught you caught one of those waves and you were surfing it you may you may be out there pad in the ocean for for another decade you may never get another wave of like that but you you want it and you you found your it's it's bad addiction like in some ways my life with so much easier if i didn't have that addiction because i could just go be a venture capitalist full time or i don't know a professor or something hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses i wanna ask you a different question i kinda want a brainstorm with you actually you're a creative guy and you're talked about being in the right body of water right now ai might be the right body of water maybe you have a different definition where do you see the opportunities where do you get excited where do you brainstorm with a with an entrepreneur right now of what sort of products to build what sort of experiences to build what sort of problems to go try to solve where do you what do you think that the moment is now for i did a podcast with gary tan and we started brainstorming like this about can we close our eyes and imagine two years from now where the tokens that we use today are free we there might be an overall spend on tokens this higher but the per token can spend per kind of unit of intelligence is going to what we look at today will probably be close to free it'll be like water and then i think we already passed the singularity and or you know i or sorry but i don't know if i say the singularity but i'd say we already passed ag what the way it was defined and so if you could have a a human on the that was available twenty four seven live for anything you wanted i think most of the time we would take that if if they were available and knew the context and so so i get back to like you know that's why i kind of showed my the front of my iphone in the book i don't know if you can see it there yeah and i said this is what makes me so optimistic about the consumer future because man app i your nana one was missing there in the book you had nana oh yeah well i that was like my you know she's eighteen months i don't need the it well now they all sleep with me so i i don't even need the the camera but but what i'd say is like half of that screen is empty and the other half of it is generic apps and maybe we won't even have the screen right so maybe i'm even dating myself with that this will this may not age well but either way we will still all do the that digital life stack of those functions we'll still wanna know about the weather we're still gonna wanna look up your podcast calendar photos whatever and if there was a live human agent that was managing all that all the time twenty four seven i think we would use it if it was free and i think freemium will come back because i think we would use it free i do believe i'm i'm an ai opt i also believe that jobs are gonna skyrocket it and not be not go away and i think that we're going to be pulled into these services and then we are gonna want to get to a human sometimes like take travel i think we could have an amazing travel agent but when your flight was canceled and you're trying to get home you know from london and it's july fourth and you're racing to like re book the next flight i think in that moment you probably pay fifty or a hundred dollars to have a human jump on book it get it right trusted those are the zones that on some level kinda term me on and then the biggest thing i talk about in the book is this social cocktail party i read settings about people people and people and i'm with him i think what we care about most across all these services is the social and i think we're moving from to generative i think that what the dopamine hit that we're gonna get and we get already from being generative is so many times bigger than the dopamine we get from entertainment and we feel bad about ourselves i got off instagram it was like a bad drug it was giving these very little value now x x's my thing and i i love x but now these real sometimes they do such a good job of looping into others and my daughter will come in and be like to add what are you doing i'm like i don't know what i'm doing i'm just i don't know i'm watching matthew mc mcconnell and he's awesome talking about july fourth so how can i not watch this and then they're string me into somebody else but it wasn't a good use of my time and i i don't feel good i think that with ai we are going to literally make music you know i think that we are going to look at mid journey the magic of mid journey i i could make you guys believe i'm a good like home designer or a logo designer just you using mid journey it makes me more creative than i really am so the i like the the proven better new bit from the book i mean that's the one that's like one of the biggest pieces of book can you kinda like close your eyes and put yourself in the position of like a twenty five or thirty year old a young person you know just like mark was when he started free loader mh you don't have a lot of money but you have access to ai out loud let's go through this framework of what you're gonna do to figure out what you're gonna work on in the next couple weeks i almost wanna turn this to my whiteboard awesome great great great great this is fantastic okay just this is like showing us nude for for my feeling this is like exactly what we're like okay whiteboard number one is what are we passionate about doesn't matter do not worry give zero fucks about business or anything just i am mean past not surfing being a dad i am passionate about like cocktail parties connecting people we call this sw people together like merging people i love connecting disparate people and they form like interesting i i introduced two friends and they made the movie the dis like that turns me on i i just love do that so here's your passion board so then then we wanna rate like what is a real business let's not forget about real businesses what what is on the internet or what are industries they might be mature thinner that are making a lot of money like you know like that guy who started the peptide company okay peptides they're making a lot of money but then you could put like you know online dating you know jobs video games like it doesn't matter are just what are just things that are addressable that are real businesses okay and then on the third board you kind of frankenstein these things is and he say well okay if i connected these boards okay you know i don't know being a dad plus jobs or dating you know you you're looking for the intersection of proven business then with brings shit about we're not at even the proven better new part yet which is you you come up with any mash up idea okay that kinda turns you on and it could be like you're into agents or you're into club bot or what you know i i'll give you like an example here's here's a real life example for me okay i invested in riot and i found them because i was single they were sixty percent da to maus and ra is a dating is like tinder but for high profile people it's it's human curated online dating okay so you have to apply it's like the really high end social club that has facilities and soho house like so soho thanks so it's like soho house in a way so it's curated you have to have an instagram account and they have committees in each market and just famous hot rich cool people only that's the reputation okay okay it has grown beyond that what it really is is i like to say that that online dating feels like a one out of ten experience in rye feels like a three out of ten like it's it's still not great i mean i i don't wanna dis because i i'm an investor i i think we're one of the biggest equity investors and i think r is amazing but the difference from the one of the three is that iphone with just using these online dating apps there was the same odds of second date if i went on the date or didn't go on the date so it was like zero percent so i was like why don't i just not go because i'm saving myself so much time in agony and with ra it was not a waste of time i had second dates and things and it just wasn't curate enough okay so the point is the insight from that that is human curation so then the mash up is can we apply that same thing and it's a lead business you're you're paying for lead generation well could we apply that to anything else could we apply that to i had an idea to create like a luxe like could we do human curated listings or what about human curated uber like could we have a high end uber where the the black cars actually are black they're not just colored black that's actually sean what you're talking about the other day with jack's steiner yeah i i don't know if you mark have you ever heard of jack's dining is this he's this instagram kid who goes around the world he's like i'm at this place in italy with the best gelato and there's like a you know a amazing visual hook for instagram where this like this crazy gelato thing that he's about to try he tries it and he just he's trying to find the best foods of different genres in the best places around the world and when i met him i told him i said look you're trying to cut these brand deals like why don't like you should create the new yacht because the yelp is completely generic platform with everything but if i trust you and i have trust as a service or curation as a human curation as a service i would just if i go to new york and i want the best ramen i would trust jack over so let's let's freeze frame on that okay and now like professor pink i did i created a class at stanford around this two classes and the students still didn't do that great so it tells me either my frameworks not perfect or i'm not the best teacher but let's let's freeze frame on that okay so let's do proven better new on yelp so we say okay well proven is let's not with anything about the way that yelp displays listings rates listings let's let's do a legal copy of yelp it's we're not gonna change it we're gonna freeze and isolate and assume that yelp has taken the time over the years to to make that what the world wants most okay so we copy that pixel for pixel i mean we copy their onboarding of a new user everything we copy it then we say do we have anything that's better meaning ten out of ten users would say yes that's what i want not yelp we probably don't have that okay better is actually really hard to get to but we think is better is new so we probably are just proven and then some new ideas i think our new idea here is human curated and probably can we human curate it first and get to can we can we take some slice some verdict some blade in a city so we take you know florence barber shops or you know florence maybe better as like coffee shops in florence we're gonna go do that ourselves and then put it side by side and test in some way and see whether people like ours better or not like they used to be tablet at hotels which was like a better version cooler design hotels is that better or not this kind of the brian chest ways do it by hand first if people don't like it better you do not pass go there's no reason to even try to build this in software if they do then we could start to use ai and say is there a way to use ai agents to automate this but that's a very very secondary the first is can we can we get to a clearly better product experience that's the hard part that's the lightning in the bottle not the ai and and then what i would tell mark at twenty three or twenty five to do is just force yourself to do everything in ai right now like force yourself to code this to you know i've tried vibe coding i personally find c plus clog code easier for or i get to more real things for myself but but force yourself to use it and see how far you can go creating agents as employees and other things and then and then do some like hire some in addition hire some really cheap people who could just do some of this stuff by hand you know i would avoid founding a company around it i would avoid hiring expensive engineers or people before i've connected all the dots hey you have this interesting kind of dichotomy about you which is you seem like you're all about like going big and building these huge viral things that get big fast but at the same time in your book i think you said i think one of the titles is like big or something like that yeah scale and it's like that you're like it doesn't matter how many people you're gonna get you have to nail the product and that's sort of what you're talking about right now but also i know that you're big on goal setting you have this i forget what you call this do call it i haven't written done to life book of life yeah which i want you you have to explain that that's pretty cool but you have this like cool thing of like goal setting so when you're idea new companies one of the things that kills ideas amongst successful entrepreneurs and new entrepreneurs is asking like well how big can this really get and like and like that's always a challenge people always ask that question and like you said earlier and we all know this to be true you never really know and whatever things can get big oftentimes shock you no one really knows entirely so do you set goals early on and how do you deal with that thing in your head or with the odd entrepreneurs you work with of like this constant like question of well how big can this get yeah yeah it's so hard and and and part of this book of life practice and part of this painful journey is killing our ego and and our ego wanting our our ego is where the hope comes from that we we fall in love with the idea we fall in love with the potential of it and that works against us mh because do we we gotta get to a very very small small use case that really works before we can do anything else and i'm guilty this too and we tend to skip it and and we get so excited about the bigger macro the bigger idea the bigger body of water and we get so committed to this and it's part of the danger of ai and vibe coating that we can build something in three months instead of a year or two and so we do and we skip testing it and we don't set real objectives for ourselves like absolute objectives and goals that we hold self accountable to and the next thing you know you're just kinda in this b plus relationship and and you don't love it and all these things are paradoxes on the one hand i start the book talking about this book of life practice of i've been doing since nineteen ninety four of really trying to have a conversation with yourself over time and writing in this book for one period of time every year about the same things so that you can go back and see like did you what were your hopes and dreams and have you done anything about them and and the real point that's come to me over all these years is not do you achieve these goals but are you att to these goals and are you in alignment are you living in alignment with your goals that i found is more important to my well being happiness than achieving so if my goal for twenty years has been to launch dot earth and create my version of the meta is different than z version okay cool i it's okay that i haven't done it but have i gone for it or have i just talked about it and that's i say these these ideas and things haunt us and over time weigh on us because like i've had this idea but i haven't ever done or i've always wished i could do this and the point of the book of life is let's stop time let's stop time right now and let's go to an absolute place and have a real honest conversation with ourselves and say you know sam are you are you serious about this desire or are you just around and if you're serious about it well what's wrong with you like you're you're capable you're a free human and why in the last year have you let's be honest you've you haven't done shit about mark every year you say you wanna learn guitar you know you could do it but you don't so why don't we just stop putting that down as a goal because you're not serious about it let's i'm not gonna like beat myself up i'm not gonna beat you know mark twenty twenty five up and mark twenty twenty five did go for it launched dot earth and the version i launched wasn't right and i pulled the plug on it i'm good with that you know like it doesn't have to win for me to feel like i'm living a full life i have to at least know i went for it and that's that's the point of the book of life when when did you start doing it i started doing in nineteen ninety four and i started the book off talking about this that i had made a series of terrible career decisions and i was being pushed out of this kind of fledgling venture capital firm and there was nowhere to go to like it wasn't like a next job and so i'd kind of kind of messed up my resume i'd had nothing to lose when i started a year later started my first company but in nineteen ninety four i went to temple i hadn't been the temple for the jewish high holidays juice new year's for since i was a kid someone invited me i was in dc and i sat there didn't understand what anyone was sang or doing and i just wrote a notebook about how shitty my life was and all the hopes and dreams that i hadn't pursued and the thing that i came back to i hated most about myself that represented just how little control i had of my life was that i smoked cigarettes and i was part of my book of life practice what can we do this year that would make this a seminal year in our life like what could the three of us do that you would remember this year for the rest of your life and thank you because so many of our years and i can tell you at age sixty that there's years i can't write anything down for most years i like that i feel it's sad to not have something seminal not one thing that's memorable about that year and so i was like okay at least if i quit smoking if i do a lifetime quit i'll remember this year and i think i'll be happy later that i did it so i'm partnering my future self it's important enough but it's it's easy in my control and for me that was that was my path to changing my life hey you are you still doing like you know i you you you said it's sad that you don't have like a seminal year you don't have this thing and like you know sean and i both have young kids you have young kids too i don't know how your old this is but you have at least one young kid i'm in the phase now my life where i feel like a little bit tread water and that's okay like i'm like i looked like that sad like you know a kid being born is seminal but i didn't achieve anything it's not like i did that no but i'm enjoying it are you still achieving great stuff and are you still a dog even after you've had kids yes but but you also have to be realistic because now you've you've committed to be in service of raising these these great humans and that's and that feels great too and i think the best thing i've ever done in life is be a dad and i think the greatest achievement in my life is my five kids so every year that i've had a kid that's been the seminal thing that year and to your first question yes you can still achieve it's just different than some of your friends that made different decisions and you gotta stop comparing but you can i built z while raising you know carmen georgia wyatt my third kid hey what was your schedule then to accommodate them taking a company public while still trying to be it sounds like you've mentioned being father many times it sounds like that's super important to you how did you balance the schedule you if you treat the things in your life like these are non movable rocks everything else becomes the river that moves around it and and it turns out that it's great modeling for your company to show that you are prioritizing your family like if you ever walked in z you saw kids and dogs everywhere and so people loved it we we worked really hard and we played hard and we family hard and and we integrated our kids and our pets you know we brought them to work or we brought work to home so the way i did is by my friend and coach bing gordon he said the most important thing is they are there for first and last fifteen minutes of their day and they're always gonna remember that and i i made that like my religion i was like i'm never gonna miss yeah the first or last fifteen minutes of their day i'm never gonna miss breakfast with them hopefully not dinner but i'll always do bedtime bath and bedtime and and i did it's so funny so many of the things you say are echoed by other guests but they came up with on their in their own way with their own words but it's this you know we'd have to be dummies at this point either listening to this podcast or doing this podcast to not pick up on some of these you know ryan smith who who did q tricks and he owns the jazz now when i we i went out and visited him for the podcast and hung out of his house and stuff and he goes hey let me just he's like i just gotta do one thing it's gonna take me three minutes and i was like that's a weird number i've never heard anyone say like you know you're going he's not go to the bathroom he's got a task to do that's gonna take three minutes what's and he basically said i have these three three minute interval like three minute moments i just make sure i'm fully present with my kids and it's basically right before i drop you know dropping them off at school like you know i'm not like half here half in my mind somewhere else like i'm fully there three minutes right when they get home and three minutes right before bed because it is the most important nine minutes of the day because you could be a busy guy but you always got nine minutes and if you could be fully fully present he's like it's not like he's only doing nine minutes but he's just make sure that sacred like my kids know like by fifteen year olds know i will always answer when they call like i'll be in the middle of this podcast and they might call and i might be like guys i gotta take this so they just know they can always reach dad and there there's like a a priority that they get you know they they feel that and some of this stuff carries over i think to like management principles like i my policy at z was i will always read and respond to your email to everyone in the company we got to i don't know thirty five hundred four thousand employees globally and it was a lot but i said i'm always gonna read and respond to your email and and now i kinda try to i come close to pretty much do that on on x that anyone listening if they go to my ex at mark pink i'll i'll pretty much reply to everybody i i probably don't hit it a hundred percent time but i'm probably like ninety five percent of this time and so there's there's an availability that we can prioritize that's important in life so yeah i'm i'm i'm on that next podcast is brought you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market definitely mercury i will fist fight any anybody who dis disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic can i ask you a question you know i'm a framework guy so when you whenever you have these frameworks i love it at the same time some of my friends who are much better entrepreneurs than me don't use any of these frameworks they just go to operate on pure yeah all instinct and sort of following their nose did you start z by doing all this stuff mapping out your passions and then cross referencing it with proven models or you know existing business model or did you just now you think about it this way or did you create your biggest hits doing this like most people this was all going on but it wasn't written down so i didn't just set out to show that i could make a poker app on the facebook like i was forty one you know i think my friend's peers thought i had no dignity then it was this was not like impressive i mean i did it because i had i my ego been so beaten down a tribe that i had to do something small that worked i just like i need you something at work but i wasn't gonna just make like at the time the obvious apps to make where these wall apps and these throw and drink these poke i wasn't gonna do that i wasn't gonna that's what was working okay poker was not working games were not working on the facebook ecosystem i did it because i i saw this ocean i saw two oceans you know two bodies of water social networking and video games so i was thinking okay if this works it it opens a little crack into mass market casual gaming and i had this belief one of the things i talk about in the book that i just fucking love and i and i will encourage your listeners to consider this available to all of us all the time find a mature market that's over that's done that's dead that's been played out online dating you know ebay with listings or analog businesses that are not attractive they're almost not invest like vcs won't like them they're they're red oceans they're not growth markets find a market like that but it has a lot of money in it and has a proven behavior in it and that's video gaming by the way here's a gift here's easter egg take video gaming in two thousand seven it was a twenty three billion dollar industry it was barely growing there was no it wasn't a top ten behavior on the consumer web and it was stupid to go into people know but it was not fund okay here we are nineteen years later it's a two hundred and eighty three billion dollar industry that's not fund okay it's not growing it's mature you'd have a really tough time getting a vc to fund it perfect place to try to do something innovative because if you can find a new dimension to this that sparks people you you don't have to prove that anyone's gonna do it or wants it or it's gonna spend money on it it's unlimited right and that was search when google showed up so i do love that and i was think like that when i started z because the year or two before i was trying to buy cn net they were public company and i said i need a gigantic captive consumer audience to test ideas like gaming i need to sell distribution consumer was not invest because of distribution today consumer is not invest because of distribution it's a perfect parallel the new thing then was social networking the new thing today's ai and agents this is like a mere you know in time so we are living today in two thousand seven go for it consumers not invest do consumer you you've made these bold claims multiple times and i love that you've like you did it with investing you said like i believe this you have a point of view which i like and i think people who have points of view where they're confident they're either stupid or they're like well read and educated and that has shaped it their point of view and that's why they're confident you seem them in that category do you have any good like honey pots of information that you consume on a regular basis that aren't well known that you could fill us in on like people you follow on twitter people you follow on subs stack books newspapers anything that shapes how you think yeah yeah there's they're they're really wide ranging and and disparate i am grab i gravitate towards people that have you know non mainstream more con coherent views i love everything peter till says like it's like cat nip for me i just heard him talk and he's he's saying that we've lived in this fifty years of stag nation even though the economy gdp stock markets up so much when we think about how people live and how our parents the gap and how our parents live versus their parents we didn't see that gap again from our parents to us and now the next generation like the the the kids of the nineties and the early two thousands they don't look at their life and opportunity you know if her parents were in the nineteen or my parents you know in the nineteen sixties and seventies their parents were in the nineteen thirties and forties and you think about that difference and it's just it was the middle class was formed and so much and so peter's kinda coming at this thing from the the same problem but the opposite side of like the democrats democratic socialist and the far left progressive democrats and he's saying the only solution is growth we've got to grow the economy and grow the opportunity base for the middle class and for people in order to save capitalism and democracy and i thought i hadn't thought about it in that way because i think of the last fifty years as unbelievable growth and and in the worldwide standards of living and in technology and you know stock markets and all these things but but i thought that was really brilliant insight that got me thinking but i i'd say that who i follow i i love pirate wires the mike s and the there's there's so many insights that dave had early that were not mainstream you know that have changed my thinking do you read a lot of books what what genre books do you i i have a lot of trouble reading books i do books on tape i i'll tell you that i listen to a lot of podcast podcasts while i'm walking or driving but i i get a lot and i i connect to a lot of friends around social political issues first where we have you know non mainstream views i mean like i came out for trump you know a few days before the election that was not a mainstream or popular thing in my community to do but i guess i i pay a lot of attention to people that break through in any way in consumer that's probably something that i pay more attention to and i i think it was announced like two weeks ago or something i invest in this company fo that's i when i find the resume for me and consumer is traction i have no idea who or why i mean but when i i cold milled shane at poly market on twitter when they broke through so you know i i would pay a lot of attention to anyone who's getting heat in consumer because it's so broken and it's so rare so you know i think those are good leads and and i do i get a lot of macro and stock investment ideas on x have you outperformed d index over the last ten years you think last year i i definitely did but but no i i can't say i don't know i gotta look at the last ten years i don't know if i've i'll outperformed the index i probably i haven't this year i'm and we've had more fun in memories and that's what counts you beat you probably beat the two you'd beat two percent maybe i'm i'm way behind i i think this year i'm up like four and a half percent not i was at i i got a big distribution of spacex i don't include that in my returns because that was a private investment you know so not including spacex i think up like foreign and change and i think that the market's up probably like i don't know three two or three times that so i'm not you don't wanna follow me this here one thing i really like about is you're very so you're insightful that's great the second thing is i like some of the kinda of life wisdom like the book of life practice and having an honest conversation with yourself i think that ultimately that's actually the most useful thing that any of us could go do and then the other thing i like is that you are you're know not one of these people who makes everyone feel bad because you're so disciplined i like that you're a little not disciplined and you do some stuff you shouldn't do or you're doing things for other reasons than just like what's purely utilitarian and optimal and and i like that because a lot of times super owns this podcast and i'm like i should be doing this should be we should all over or yourself like this i don't i don't like train ama of like investor punk rock consumer good dad like there's it's a very rare you have this very weird that's why i was like so misunderstood by the media you know when when reed hoffman said to me mark what's your narrative what what's your three bullets and i'm like i don't know i don't have one he said well either you make that up or they're gonna for you and i think you said before we started that that when you when z was bad you you saw me as this villain i think that i'm authentic and nuanced and people will meet me in person or hear me talk to the say wow i really connected with you i really like you and like thank you but it feels like this backhand cup because they they really mean like oh i'd hate you yeah what i googled about you was so bad what i first started dating my partner hillary i said just do both of those favor just don't google me because you're not gonna like anything you read we kinda to understand why people hated you i'm trying to like not hated you but my fill but like did you wear a lot of black i don't know like what what what does i found my black t shirt yet i no i it's i i was telling this before that all i cared about was winning all i cared about and winning was in the eyes of like a teenage girl or a middle aged woman you know who wanted to play one of our games and they weren't gonna read this they're not reading the wall street journal i hired a p firm to keep us out of the press and when we were in the press to to dampen down the story because i just we had figured something out with user pay and i didn't wanna like go announce it to the world and we were just trying to win as many sprints as we could before inviting a lot of competition and venture and every we were buying a company every month you know a lot of the companies we bought you know no one else was bidding on them you bought the company that became farm bill right well not really i the real story is that i couldn't get anyone in z to build farm bill because they thought it wasn't cool they wanted to build like coaster cafe world and nobody in video gaming wanted to make a farm simulation game that was not there's nothing less cool why why did you wanna make it i wasn't from video gaming i wanted i had a farm fantasy i wanted to create pink valley ranch and you know have our vegetables served to shape pan you know so i had that fantasy and i have four sisters and i feel like i really connect with middle aged rim i'm like i don't want twitch you know fast moving games i want me i don't have to pay any attention to i don't have to pay any attention to a affirm you know i just i wanted that game and i thought that would be the game that could appeal to anyone in the world because nobody needed instructions on how to play bing won't admit it but he tried to convince me not to build it even from a business standpoint and he he's like farm simulations never do well mark and and i i finally bought this little failed flash gaming company because they had four flash engineers and then i put them and like four or five other people in an a c outside my office and checked in with them every day and we built farm bill together in six weeks did it come out the gate hot what was day one day two you know we were gonna buy this company that made farm town and the guy was to me honest was kind of a jerk and he had the right to be a jerk he was he was winning i think he doubled the price he wanted from like forty million to eighty million and he had the right but we were building our own version and we took out some of the things we didn't like in his game so ours was not proven better new was proven better less so our crops were better than his our art and math were better and we we had more polish but that was it and we took out the stranger danger part he had ways to meet other community members and we just thought our users didn't want that so we turned it out i i said on a friday i had his tough call with him i said you know i don't think this is gonna work we're we're not gonna buy you and in our game our team was like mark this is ready to go and so then on sunday we turned on farm bill and it was one of those lightning and a bottle things that for some reason so many things was z just worked and which isn't great to hear because how do you repeat that but we turned on farm bill and i think it did like a hundred and seventy one thousand installs the first day with no marketing it was just viral it just was viral and and we're doing like a million installs a day by the end of the first week with no marketing and you know we passed farm town within like three or four weeks they were at like four million da what what was the peak the absolute peak of farm villa what was it doing i think it peaked like thirty or thirty two million da and at its peak i think like fifteen or twenty percent of people on facebook were using it or had used it and what did it make in terms of revenue at that game farm bill two came out with a lot more lessons and mechanics and made more revenues you know i know farm bill two did over a billion in revenues now no one at that time thought a video game you know definitely not a casual video game could do over a billion in revenues and i remember trying to explain that to fidelity i'm like that's gonna be a normal thing like the three million a day baby that's gonna be the new benchmark for a good game but you had a question i really like that was like the beginning of this whole thread so i hired this p r firm because i said i don't wanna have my fur coat moment i don't wanna be on the cover of fortune and the fur coat moment came from that movie american gangster yeah when he's in the front row at the boxing match in the fur code he's on the front page in york times and his everything goes downhill from there like i don't wanna be on the front page and any the police are like this young black guy when fur coat in the front row this he must be something yes is what's a situation i was the equivalent of that this forty one year old retired guy that's not supposed to be doing anything important that's when we were ready article saying can you back a founder under you know over thirty in consumer and so i just didn't fit the narrative i was a counter factual and consumer wasn't supposed to be working and so our financial performance was a trade secret i wouldn't tell investors i said you i'm a tell you price you decide if you wanna invest afterwards i'll show you our financials and if you don't like it you can get out but if if they're not better than you think which obviously made people even wanna invest more and and when you say that you know wait what was what was your first five years revenue and profit i mean we went public we're forced to go public after four years i mean we had over a billion dollars in cash on our balance sheet when we went public we had never spent a dollar that we raised in capital from i didn't know we wouldn't spend it but and and i think that the year before we went in public i think we did like four hundred and fifty million in free cash flow oh my gosh so in the year three you're doing four hundred fifty million of free free cash flow is that what we just said that might have been year four yeah i mean we started mid july o seven so o seven wasn't like a full year you know we did like maybe a million and a half and zero seven of cash flow revenue revenue revenue i mean we were cash flow maybe i did more than that revenue because by october november we were making like two hundred thousand month in cash flow we in o eight we did like thirty eight million in revenues and we probably made like i don't know twelve or fifteen million in cash flow but but we were we were putting all that money we were putting it into big data and then data centers and then we were raising more and more money because i didn't wanna ever slow down but but my point is i let our story be told by our competitors and by press i didn't talk to and i'm kinda nuanced and z was nuance and so it i let the story go out that we're making all money from advertising but it was really user pay and i was fine with that i didn't wanna say no you're wrong and then michael harrington wrote for tech crunch a whole series called scam they said they must be making all their money from these really scam ads they're showing and they were no different than the ads on google but we also were not all of our money was user pay and i didn't wanna come out and say no you idiot we're making money from our whales you know and and then but eric who i'm friends with i'm an investor in his fund now he used city he played city he's spent five hundred fifty dollars in the game and then he said i'm so sorry i was wrong i get it why adults would spend money in your games now because remember there was no in app purchase yet and so all of the adults were like there's no way adults are paying money for art but we had you know a nurse in indiana spending a couple thousand dollars a month in farm and this was her hobby and maybe her husband was spending more than that you know to go fishing and skiing and hunting this was her hobby and so we reframe this as we are helping to nurture a hobby somebody has and this is a small amount to spend on a hobby whereas you know for a video game it was a lot right and i did not do myself any favors i did not go on press tours i didn't talk to investors i said i'm going to be selfish to our users and our employees i'm not gonna talk to anybody else ever my kids my players my employees and so my everyone else told the story and it was and and we fired a lot of people and they worked out telling our story because i had a merit talk a force curve we forced you to rate ten percent of your team as a low performer every quarter and if you were two quarters in a row you're fired without question or exception wow that's you also have i one other theory for that which is you have the nickel back problem like if you ever heard of like a v good it's like a good where the demand goes up the more the pricing goes up there's like the nickel back problem is basically everybody hates nickel back and wants to shit on it it's like a easy it's a easy thing to look down on you look cool for looking down on it but yet somehow they'll sell millions of records you nobody knows them but somehow they're selling millions of millions records like it was never cool to say i love farm yeah i play i love to play farm and but but somehow everybody's playing but nobody wanted to say it was cool so you you had a little bit of a game video game industry hated me i was like the darth vader so it didn't help you either exactly they said you're not real games we're never gonna give you an award or invite you to g i was like that's cool they none of my users go to g there's just a article i'm looking at old articles of you there's one from two thousand eleven and it says old mark pink had a farm and it's a picture of you you look like a motorcycle a guy like what your boots up like overlooking the city like you're you're had you had that swag that you talked about with z i mean you had swag and you look pretty cool and you kinda had like a you i'm gonna win like smile on your face and i think that's kinda cool but also that will be that will rub some people the wrong way yeah and that there's a great tweet because i love by this guy yesterday he he has some company called like tiny c or something yeah andrew wilkinson consent that's our it's our good friend i loved his tweet and he referenced the courage to me disliked and he said said it was a huge turning point for him when he's stopped trying to be light and he's stopped trying to be like warren buffett and worry about his reputation basically his resume i'm like yes that's that's my career and that's what i advise people i'm like burn your resume don't look for respect from your peers i say if you're truly ambitious do not look for respect from the people around you because you will not get it if you're doing things differently than them because they don't like that i mean you're supposed to like stick to this one mold and and if you do something different like just like you were saying sam and it works it makes them question themselves so they don't they kinda don't wanna see you succeed do it it's like it's like but i paid all these dues and i don't want you to make it without paying the same dues because i'm in a job i hate you're supposed to be in a job you hate or else i didn't have to do this a lot of people made fun of mark reason because he had that thing where he says like no one successful is intros intersect which i thought was i disagree with him i think that's kinda silly that was a very intros thing of him to say but you are you are an example someone who i think you live life fairly intentional and fairly intros ineffective in trying to like live like a full good life while also you have this like swag about you but also bowl the china shop like this like really cool dichotomy that i think is like very admirable and really exciting yeah here you got like the california woo and then z and your stuff is so was so metrics driven you were like the most metric driven company of anyone if i ever wanted to hire somebody who i knew would be like super metrics driven under product side z was the the perfect pool to go higher from because you guys had like a navy seal training for for pms it was they'll do it i'm happy to say i do wanna say it was just what you're saying sam that it felt a little like funny and bad to come out with my book like pretty much the same week that andre and the all in guys they all started saying how it's a waste of time to be intros and shout out your book man she's can you show it show your show your book and shout it out okay i i do have one copy life in there you have life of the speed of play there there was something on the all in where they're talking about how i forget the word they they say contemplation is is a total rum waste of time this is obviously an example of smart people saying dumb things such just a really stupid or it's right for them i mean it's i don't think they're but that's not what they do i just saw think about cha say talk be retroactive looking at his time doing specs oh yes yes i will cha off is is a lot of things but he has no problem whatsoever contradict to himself i mean i heard them all talk about how ai was gonna put everyone out of work and now they're proudly saying like i think just yesterday i saw something from them saying that's bullshit look the facts don't support ai is not putting anyone out of work i'm like but you guys were saying it and i kinda love that they don't care they'll just contradict themselves you know a few months later and they don't they're not self so in that sense you there's a freedom to it i'm not tied to what i said three months ago i'm i'm pounding the table now on the opposite point of view and unless i'm right then i'll show a clip yeah yeah so yeah i i i i do think there's a mix of all of it i i think holding yourself accountable to real things in the world is useful tool used in the right way and sometimes you to just go do stuff alright well we should leave it at that you're awesome man you didn't try to earn our respect but you certainly have it i really like talking to you guys we'll wrap up here that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never look kim bag alright let's take a quick break let's talk about a podcast because if you're listening to you like podcast and what's better than one podcast another podcast and let me tell you another podcast you should check out it's called success story if you like hearing about different success stories and hearing q and a sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics is a great podcast for you so check it out wherever you get your podcast