From $4/Hour to $4 Billion Net Worth

if i told you that a kid flu out of first screen i don't think the first thing you would say is that's a future billionaire but you probably would have joined the crowd of people that made fun of me for being dumb today he's known as the sky you see on the cover of forbes tech entrepreneur this billionaire sun god because of all the work he's done in the solar industry but the crazy thing about hey is that his story is very much a started from the bottom of story a lot of great leaders that are level five leaders there's daddy issues there's large disabilities or there's a near death experience he's pretty much never does podcast podcasts i pulled the front card i asked him to do this because i think he's got a story worth telling i never told that one before definitely on camera but you're in the eye of the storm right like the wait subprime morgan crisis you're in the mortgage business i would like literally throw up in my driveway before i could go see my family every night you said the difference between a rejection results is just how long you stick with it a lot of people quit when it gets hard sometimes you don't even know your quitting you just come up with a reason why you think you need to quit what it like i'm meeting you on the first time well when i at on for the first time i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a day's off on a road less travel i think what's interesting about your story because i have all the research here and if i just zoom out and i think about i think how does a guy who flu out of first grade end up you know one of the macy's class oh yeah it's shout up to miss mac how does that guy and you know where you are today super successful you've built a ten billion dollar company you're doing what a lot of entrepreneurs wanna do right like if i think about how i got into entrepreneurship like what would have been the win the win would have been i'm having fun i am building a company that matters you know i'm having the success i'm doing it with talented people you're you know one of your cofounder founders is like a fourth grade friend so that's kind of that is winning to me and you've done that and so i think what's exciting to me is to hear i guess how you approach this how you've gone from the guy who can flu out a first grade to to make that happen if i if i had met you when you were a kid maybe twelve thirteen years old fourteen years old would you call yourself like were you really ambitious then were you really smart oh you if you would've have met me in in grade school you probably would have joined the crowd of a lot of people that made fun of me for you know being dumb you know i i would go to this room called the resource room and the resource room for kids that couldn't read and so then i would go and i would write all my letters backwards and they would like give me a dick and jane book to read in the third grade and i would struggle through it and it was it was so right yeah yeah i i have d graph in a form of d and i didn't no one knew what it was in those days right people just thought you were stupid and people just thought that you you you you just couldn't read and you couldn't keep up which is why i flu the first grade so it's not fun when you flu the first grade when all your friends to go to the second grade make fun of you every year for basically twelve years of your life to know you're the kid that flu the first grade yeah because that we're all friends in the first grade and then you didn't go with the rest of the kids and so i had a a lot of self confidence issues i would say i had a lot of questions about you know whether or not i was even gonna be able to provide for myself at at that moment in time i over with sports i guess i over with you know trying to be a dynamic person i don't know that i over compensated in in the best ways but i had a couple teachers that took me under their wing there's this one guy ron edwards he was the gym teacher he was this amazing guy man and you know gotta imagine i don't father i'm raised by a single mom and he kinda stepped in and he would be like he knew i love football and he would say look hey do you wanna go and at the time the saint louis cardinals were there and there was this court quarterback his name was jim hart and there was this running back his name was o j anderson and that was like my outlet that i was like a fast runner you know because i wasn't get at school good to something my man i got i need something i needed some that i can anchor on that maybe i'm good at something and it was the only thing i was good at was the forty yard dash but he would take me to these banquet where i would have the opportunity to meet jim hart or o j anderson and it was just kind of a lens for oh okay these guys maybe maybe there's a way out and so now if you meet somebody who maybe as a kid who's d or has a learning disability like that what's the perspective you have now now with the benefit of hindsight yeah about those same kind of like quote unquote limitations well it's interesting now when you sit down with with people that have achieved extraordinary outcomes and jim collins wrote a book about this called good to great he talked about level five liters mh and i had an opportunity to have lunch with jim collins at stanford i had to be fifteen years ago and this was an unlocked for me and he goes hey you're a level five leader you know you're operating on this frequency that allows you to you know create these business and do these things i'm like how what what is a level five leader what's the well oftentimes with a level five liter they have a great deal of compassion and empathy for people they'll off they often give up to go up they have the ability to empower people instead of micro manage people for recruit top talent and put them in a place that allows those organizations to scale and so the reason is for this if you dig a couple layers lower is oftentimes they have a learning disability many times they're on the spectrum and so people that have burgers or that are on the spectrum when they're in in school they get made fun of a lot too this this turns out this big tea trauma where all your friends make fun of you and you don't have a lot of friends in you're an out cast as a young person wants you to do things later in your life to gain affirmation and get respect especially if you're a male and you want male affirmation the second component of that that often you'll see is daddy issues okay a lot of great leaders that are level five leaders have pretty severe daddy issues they had a major falling out with their father maybe it's a situation like me where my father left when i was too so i don't really remember meeting my dad i didn't meet him till i was i think you know around thirty years old and so when you dig till somebody's of these elbow five leaders you go oh there it is there's he's looking for male affirmation he's looking for respect he's that's why he grinds and does the hun hundred hour weeks right to gain that affirmation and the third one oftentimes is it's a near death experience or it's a career ending injury in sports or something along those lines and that will force that individual to make a greater sacrifice that and and and it also forced him not to quit in the face of a pretty significant amount of adversity which unfortunately you know a lot of founders and leaders do you you set a phrase in there you said they they get what you say the give up to get up what what did you say you gotta you gotta give up to go up give a so when you're really bright let's say hear the guy that gets a thirty five out of thirty six on the act or you get a you know fifteen fifty on on the sat and yeah you get to a brag about it you know at at the cocktail parties about what you did and you realize like i'm the smartest guy in the class okay by the way my two business partners jason walker matt dawson we're the smartest guy in the class they had all the tassels and we graduated from high school all the tassels we graduated from college i wasn't stupid but i'm like hey i want you guys on my side right and there's lots of other people in my life were they were the smartest person in the class the smartest person in the class oftentimes it's not ego it's actually they're just very competent and they get frustrated quickly with other people that it takes them longer to learn things and so what do they do so forget i was do it on my own right right i'll do it more efficiently i can do it faster why would i take an hour to train this individual on how to do it when i can do it myself in fifteen minutes well the problem is they keep doing that same task over and over and over for fifteen minutes and they never give up to go up mh and they end up becoming a control freak and then they wonder why their business isn't gonna scale because they have to be involved in everything all the time right and so someone that has d demeanor has an example well you learn to surround yourself with really smart people right they can do oh wow you're amazing a bond math you're like the best math mind i've ever met in my entire lifetime i'd like to start a company with you you're brilliant and so you start to surround yourself with all these really talented amazing extraordinary minds they're good at different things and instead of trying to do it on your own you're celebrating that talent around you right have ever heard what aria emanuel says about this what so ari runs cia a now endeavor he's he also i think was d diplomatic and so there somebody who's asking asked him to like how do you read contracts so your whole business is contracts basically you're you're a talented agent like you're every day is contracts he's like i sit in a room with people who are amazing at contracts he's like because i couldn't he's like i literally could not focus enough to get through it so i just built i built in a machine of people like who can i bring in that will bring that to the table and the same thing like i respect them i value them i need them and they know that and we because of that i am able to have my zone a genius they're able to have theirs and we built a great you know team from that yeah you worked with and for larry ellis and with elon both of whom i would say are like kind of legends in the in silicon valley and as as leaders long leaders of companies what what was their style is it similar to what you said do they have their own play style that's totally different and give me a sense how close proximity were you yeah i i was probably like six levels away from from larry allison because literally i would say kid in a cubicle that was a good bother of database administrators i would basically but have my headset on i would call you i would bother you to buy buy oracle seven dot zero they're like oh man you're so good at bothering people we're gonna let you manage twelve other people and teach them how to bother people yeah yeah it's like hey can you teach the other twelve people how to bother people and and sell oracle eight dot zero i was like yeah no no problem at all and then were like wow you know we're thinking about not selling one or two products but like three hundred products so by the end of it you know i i was there about eight years you know i i i was fortunate i was a global account manager i could sell the whole suite of products in different things but what i learned the most was one what phenomenal products do the fact that you could sell error for eighty ninety million dollars and all you ship was a cd blew my mind i just couldn't believe this whole concept of software and and and the talent of people that could come together to deploy those assets at that stage and like the information age it was the biggest wealth creator at the time when i was there is between bill gates and larry ellis on who is the wealthiest individual in the world at the time and so i was super inspired by larry ellis and very inspired by the collect the talent that they recruited and and surrounded you with what's his superpower right you said at the time maybe one of the wealthiest people in the world vision he could pivot i mean you know obviously we just started with as a database company and there's was a handful of other database companies at the time it was like side base in form mix you know sql server with microsoft and then some of those started to drop off or we acquired them but the superpower was his ability to have big bold vision and ideas to go nope now we're gonna be an applications company now now we're gonna be a middle company now we're gonna go acquire some of the hardware providers now we're gonna become a software as a service company and being able to persuade an organization of that size at the time to shift those gears and and peep it was such an aspirational inspirational place to work with such urgency like no matter how much we grew you know just the urgency to close out a quarter or the urgency to close out a year you just saw the grind factor and the give a shit factor from a group of people it was next level right and so i i learned like i learned how to grind i learned like yeah this is why you come in on a saturday this is why you get in the office at five thirty in the morning this is why you skip your lunch this is why you go to training and so a lot of people candidly they were gonna go play basketball at three o'clock in the afternoon because larry built out all these amazing facilities with basketball courts and six restaurants and all these things and i was like nope i'm gonna go back into training class i'm gonna sit down and i'm gonna go learn about you know negotiation skills i'm gonna go learn about all these various courses you could take to to learn about the technology obviously so if you are a fever learner and you were driven by growth it was it was just a platform you could run as fast as you could and his mindset was i don't care if you're twenty three years old i don't care if you went to harvard stanford princeton yale all i care about is your numbers hit the numbers get promoted and so humbly every year i got promoted in this company and they would joke you know when i would joined the team they go okay we know you're gonna be our boss next year but it just came down to work ethic and your ability to post up numbers against your your peers it was very competitive the bottom twenty percent got cut the top twenty percent got promoted and you could look around and it didn't matter age race you know anything it just came down to performance it's like a it's like a pro sports team more than it is like because you know you people describe it like oh we're a family or you know they try to create like a comfortable environments but it sounds like this was more competitive and merit bureaucratic in terms of the the culture absolutely and it it was it was high risk high reward i mean if you if you performed you were compensated accordingly you know i made a a tremendous amount of income as a young individual there and what you started to see is the confidence build amongst all these other individuals on what they could achieve when they were pushed to to their peak performance level and so you started to see people like you know craig conway leave and go run people off at the time which is our biggest competitor on the hr software side of the business tom si left he built this amazing software program we used to do all of our customer resource management called oasis and tom si left to do to go start si systems and and he created a great company another gentleman left to go start nets sweet mark ben leaves to go start salesforce dot com so you see all these individuals and and learning and and believing in themselves and their ability perform regardless of their background and where they grew up from a kid they grew up in cr core missouri with his mom in an apartment while she worked three jobs and and you know walked to the washer and dryer every day to you know they they the guy that you know had an undergrad from harvard and it and went to gs at stanford you were all equals right and then you watched these people and their ability to go launch their own companies and in some cases larry was very supportive and you know he was a big investor in salesforce dot com as an example when mark left and did that and then the others he acquired he acquired peoples soft back he acquired si systems back he acquired nets sweet back and so it was just really interesting to see collaborative alpha right like a group of people that just saw themselves as as the ability to kind of create technology within the valley and the level of respect and admiration that we all shared with one another right hey i got a quick break because i wanna tell you something cool so our sponsor for this episode is hubspot but instead of the ad telling you about hubspot they just wanna do something that's useful for you so they did some research and they found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustle they start a business on the side they get it going and then it becomes their main hustle over time and so instead of just tell you about the features of hubspot they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle and so they put together a database of ai prompts so things that you could put into chat g or your favorite ai tool that will help you with your side hustle so check it out it's gonna save you a bunch of time i think it's a prompt database that you should be using to make your side hustle a little more successful and you could use this as your little personal little cheat sheet your tool set to be a better operator with your side hustle so you could either scan this qr code that's on the screen or get the link of the description to get the ai prop database alright back to the show thanks up hubspot you also get the itch to leave to start your own thing well you see all those other individuals leave you can help but be inspired right but you have a c job at that point it wasn't c i gotta tell you good money let's yeah i was i making good money i was making really good money when you're making seven figures and you're like i don't know man twenty five twenty six years old from a kid in missouri like you're you're had explode what'd you do with the money as i yeah kid by the way did you i i couldn't believe it was real i just kept it in my bank account you know i put it under the map i was i was sharing an apartment with matt dawson and and down the marina in san francisco running the golden and gate bridge every day and matt and i started to whiteboard all these crazy ideas in our apartment what was on the table what we're what's on the white you would laugh man so like so we loved tahoe he and i built this home in tahoe and there's this guy his name randy paul and randy paul had hot tub company and so matt and i had this idea i was like man we could just buy randy paul means hot tub company i'm sure randy like a little checked out he's getting older he's ready to sell it and i mean the annual reoccurring revenue of of these hot tubs and the maintenance of these hot tubs could be a great business around lake tahoe will will snow board in the winter will wake surf in the summer and we'll just take care of the hot tub business we almost did it like the the hot we're we had we talked to our our fiance at the time there are wives now and we were like would do you guys think you would move to tahoe with us we could all live in this one house that we built up in pig's would estates you know this house matt and i built up there together and we'll raise our kids there and we'll just sell hot tubs and we'll maintain hot tubs let's put it this way the the wives shut that one down mostly the living together was the problem yeah yeah they're like no we're not we're not doing that we thought about starting a car wash we put a bunch of time and energy and into hey we could start all these different car washes together and then ultimately what we decided was and this was based on kind of a background of learning that you could remotely sell anything once you realize you can sell really complex items like we were selling from a software perspective you could do it virtually over the internet you're like okay you can sell anything virtually over the internet it was a huge breakthrough moment for me in my career and that led to everything else that i did and so ultimately i said hey what if we took matt and jason's background in residential mortgages and we just digitized it we just created a virtual technology platform that allowed us to sell these mortgages and other financial products maybe it could be insurance or other things virtually so you were like i could take my sales playbook not maybe not playbook but my sales experience of like i can sell the stuff over the phone and through the internet but now let's find a product that might work for it not hot tubs but mortgages what was that i guess like what was the sales model back then this is is this like good ads didn't lead into a phone call or no no no google ads there's bare barely the internet at this point in time what was the model what we do yeah so so here so here let's just go back in time so ninety seven ninety eight is when the internet really starts to catch it's it's it's some tailwind right and so you start hearing about like dot com verticals and this is all the big dot com companies start popping up well really when you look back at the internet in those days and what was going on the internet was a way to sell things online it was like hey do you wanna do a trade maybe you wanna do that on e trade right do you wanna you know you remember web van i don't know right if you wanna buy groceries or anything you can buy them online and web van will deliver them to you amazon at books on amazon so it was basically like hey now there's this virtual retail environment where you could sell anything so led you to think okay well what are complicated things that everybody needs in the world that you could basically bring to the virtual ecommerce world it's what people are doing today with agent ai it's the same thing how do i take a complex business that's very people intensive maybe it's insurance company maybe it's a mortgage company i'll just bring agent ai into it and automate automated it well that's what people were thinking about in ninety seven ninety eight and so our idea when i left in two thousand and three right because what happens is dot com crash happens in two thousand everybody gets wiped out eighty five ninety percent of everybody gets wiped out google launches around ninety eight ninety nine once everyone gets crushed and becomes google but that was my window where i said okay i've been here eight years i've seen a lot of people come and go i've seen a tremendous amount of success i've seen a tremendous amount of failure i think now i've got the maturity to think of a big enough idea that can really scale and basically i can take advantage of the internet wave the information age had already happened those guys had murdered it right and became the wealthiest people in the world it was jobs it was gates it was andy grove it was it was you know larry ellis and so now it became the internet age and i was like okay and i basically created a bad version of quicken loans dan gilbert and quicken loans did it a lot better than i did same idea same time dan was a little ahead of me and executed it significantly better course well they bought into it right so that that that was kind of like the the or they they they kind of branch out of intuit it and they had a tremendous amount of capital and they really invested in technology in a thoughtful way that allowed their organization to scale and big a build a bigger a brand dan was older than me he was more mature than me he he was just a better entrepreneur than me period at that point in time i was like a a thirty year old kid you know with the big dream trying to figure it out with my two best friends from the fourth grade in my sophomore year of business school and you guys self funded it did it work right away where you we totally self funded it i think we put each put in like fifty grand or something along those lines you know and so it it it well we from humbly we created success very quickly we decided to move to sacramento california from the silicon valley because we were gonna do these cheesy radio commercials and i got stuck doing the cheesy radio commercials i'm so embarrassed by it to this day i literally like hey hi i'm at oh god it was so bad it was like i this breathy voice and i would be like hi i'm hayes barn you know call me and you know get a rate in the fours which is like the the you know interest rates were in the fours for like ten years so i just said the same rate for basically a decade of my life and then the my last line was i'm so confident i can save you money i'll even pay for your home to be app oppressed and this is when like wells fargo or bank of america or all these players there they're charge is six hundred bucks for an appraisal and i thought hey okay that's a nice thing to do i'll give you the appraisal for free if if if you just give us an opportunity to do your mortgage online for you but it was it it's just funny of the things you do sean oh have you ever done anything like like when you look back at your life and go i cannot believe i actually did that but it was like a stepping stone forget you to another stage in your life this business was a sushi restaurant chain so yeah i guess i and then even worse like you know we were this before door dash before we were eats we were it was like a delivery only because we we didn't wanna sign a ten year lease we're like we don't even know if people want this concept to yeah trying to build the chap chipotle of sushi and so i used to go not door to door but floor to floor in a skyscraper because i realized the front desk lady orders lunch for everybody in the office the most viral way to teach everything everybody in the office that we exist so like if i could i just sc the first front desk lady i can get get like a floral business so i would just put go in the elevator i'd sneak in because i didn't have a badge yeah and then i pushed one i'd get out and i'd sm sure that i'd go back and that i pushed two and i'd go up like a fifty full floor building but again it's like our business idea was terrible objectively it was clearly a terrible idea but you know that type of selling was actually like pretty interesting and then made a bunch mistakes and then the story was kinda good and it led you know the next guy who met me was just like guy who just sold this company for five hundred million dollars and he found our story so amusing yeah that he was like i just want you guys to come do something with me and i think if we had not done something interesting or amusing that made him literally like laugh i don't think he would have wanted to take a bet on us was like he kinda just saw like okay these guys are hustle they're kinda stupid but like you know maybe pointed in the right direction they'll do something or at least they'll bring some good energy to where out you know they'll make me feel young and alive again i don't know what his reason was but yeah it led to the next opportunity in the next it isn't it funny though so people always say like you how'd do you make it i'm like well i started carrying golf bags at the local country club when i was eight years old i would carry one bag when i was eight years old by the time i was nine years old i would carry two and i would walk in your line and i would talk why you're were putting i was like a total knuckle head like a total but they like kinda liked me they're like hey i like this kid rides bike here for like an hour to come carry two golf bags at the belle reef country club there's all these rich guys the belle reef country club that i got to go wow you guys are members of this like super nice country club in saint louis missouri and then i would get twenty bucks a bag and they would buy me a hotdog dog at the turn and i'm like okay cool man i did that eight to nine yeah i'm living large dude if you give me twenty bucks in a hot dog today i'm happy exactly and so like what i think about the waterfall of all my gigs are the things that i did then i went to go i was a sandwich artist at subway and they wouldn't let you work at subway into were like eighteen but like i got this guy jim condom that that was the manager i'm like look man i just please i promise i'm really sure i've had this job i've been working for a while so by a time i was fifteen years old i'd ride my bike to subway i a sandwich artist and so i i like i'd make the best i'd carve the boat back in the day where they carve the boat and the bread just perfectly and there people wait in line and they'd be like no nope wait for the kid have kid gets more black olives he gives you more bo you know pickles like i i'd work there till two in the morning when i was like fifteen years old and then i went to this is another funny one i worked at am i was i worked at the gas station so i'd be the guy that would come out i'd check your tires i'd fill up your tank i'd check your oil i'd wash your windows and then when i really when the when all the all the the grease monkey guys would give me a nod you know these guys were amazing they're incredible mentors of mine they'd be like okay hey you can do an alternator or you can do a headlight or you can change the you know you can plug a few tires or take it off so i clean these guys tools they'd make fun of me they'd just be capping on me all day long and i get there and then dip the tool had a little bit of grease on it be like nope do it again kids you know so we had this funny rapport and then they would leave the whole base just trashed and jason walker and i so would literally go in there and we would race how fast we could clean the base right and so it's so funny if you think about that as kids jason and i would clean the base we put the soap down i'm like dude we can clean these days in fifteen minutes today well of course naturally later in my life i'm like we gotta work together we can read each other's mind right we worked so efficiently together but it started in a gas station in missouri you know with a bunch of guys that would just we had the best rapport with this awesome group of people at at the ami on olive and fee wrote you know and so it just goes on from thing to thing you know whatever working at on a farm after that but it gives you this ability to kinda have this humility and have these stepping stones in your life where you meet people where they got you go okay you know this this these are things i need to do to be successful i learned so many lessons from these people before you picked up your nickname thing because you're a you're a big nickname give something i kinda saw like nickname i was like hayes everyone meets i was like it kinda has a nickname for them right away it builds this rapport right away yeah because look i live in silicon valley there's a lot of rich and successful people there there's not a lot of people who have the like fun to hang charm that you have it's like oh wanna steal a little bit from your game on that you know you it's almost a big country oh i just call on here so like up ben is in my phone now it's been big dog levy right it's like yeah i'm gonna i'm just giving nickname now that's gonna gonna be i is that something you'd intentionally somebody where i picked it up this guy is zeke sig that used to work for okay so zeke sig he was like the black sheep and the sig family and the sig family owned all the car dealerships in missouri now so what is zeke do zeke loved the gamble he loved to drink beer and he loved to play golf so he started he he had a family farm and he started a driver rage on the family farm and i was johnny come cut the grass make sure that that all the tea lines were set right but zeke had these nickname for everybody that worked for him and i'll tell you he taught me one of the greatest lessons of my life and and this this one is is i pass this one on to my kids so i did everything as fast as i possibly could because i learned at the gas station just do it fast get an att boy from your boss you know get the gold star going to the next day and so zeke brings me in and he had all these nickname for everybody and so i'm this is my second summer there and he said you're fired and i'm like what zeke what like what's going on and he'd have his little he he called him his little girls his little girls so he had this little bud budweiser in his hand and he said yeah you're fired you're out of here and i said what and he goes every day you come out here and you run around and you get all these little things you know done real quick you go out there and you weed eat the railroad tracks and then you you you you pull the weeds out of the sand traps and you set the tea lines and you do it faster than everybody else and i said oh thanks zeke i really appreciate it here's you know the problem is you come in here at eleven o'clock every morning after you get everything done and you asked me what you should do for the rest of the day hey zeke i got all that done what do you want me to do you do it every single day and you've done it for a year straight he goes you're fired and i said well zeke i'm not leaving i mean come on man you can't fire me for something like this and he goes no you're absolutely fired until i don't wanna see you for the rest of the summer you don't come in here and don't ask me what to do again and i'm like okay so i was angry i went out there and i picked those balls and then now at eleven o'clock every morning i'd look around i'm like okay i probably need to go take the hey and move the hay up into the barn i probably need to go out there and clean the barbecue pit so i didn't talk to him for the rest of the summer i i was like i'm not gonna go in there one time i'm not gonna get in there you know whatever may be so he brings me at the end of the summer get last day right you're going back back to school i said yeah it's my last day and he goes you coming back next summer and said yeah i'd love to come back next summer and he said you're the boss and he gave me this big ring of keys and he goes here here you go and i said what and he goes you're the boss i said all these guys are ten years older than me and he goes you're the boss of all of them now because you know why you didn't come in here and asked me what to you knew exactly what to do and that stuck with me for the rest of my life when i worked at oracle hey larry ellis i never went to dean pans because office wants and asked him what to do i never went to hillary ko office once and asked him what to do i thought okay what would they want me to do as the boss and when you do that he become the boss you think like the boss become the boss you become the boss yeah and so if the person that goes in there looking for the att a boy looking for the pat on the back looking for the affirmation or hey what's the next thing you want me to do they're never the boss right it's by y you bring your own clarity right versus being a a a sort of direction taker at all times yeah yeah a lot of people get that wrong yeah yeah so if we go back into the into the story for a second so you you leave you're doing the radio ads she said the business is working you start to build this business now a mortgage business sounds like a good business to be in but there's always bumps and and bruises in in in any kind of roller coaster here so what happens with that business well it happens you know the the financial crisis so you know on douglas boulevard where our office was i ninety five percent of mortgage companies went out of business you know a lot of people didn't have their hedge position right they blew themselves up there because interest rates did increased then also the people that did subprime mortgages were done we lucky we didn't do a lot of subprime mortgages we didn't do any reverse amortization mortgages so i wanted to ask you about this so so you're you're in the you're in the eye of the storm right yeah the eight crisis which is the subprime mortgage crisis you're in the mortgage business i'm in it yeah you know i've watched the big short that's my level of knowledge about this i'm curious like a what happened from your what's your kinda like layman's explanation of what actually went wrong and then be how did you not fall into the same trap that many others seems like you know there was an incentive to give these subprime mortgages that you're gonna make more money every mortgage sales guy in the country at that time wanted to sell reverse amortization mortgages and wanted to sell subprime mortgages stated loans was the big thing right let's just have someone make up their income and then we'll give them an any loan we can stated loan so yeah you yeah i'm good for it yeah yeah i'm good for it no you would basically say hey sean what's your income and you would say i make two hundred thousand dollars a okay great two hundred now you're qualified for this loan so what happened at the end of the day there was a bunch of loans that people received that they should never received okay okay the underwriting criteria wasn't tight enough that's what happened that's why the crisis happened the default rate skyrocketed people walked away from their homes they're like hey i don't know i i have no equity in this house at all who cares i'll just walk away i'll i'll take the the light fixtures out of here right and you know whatever else do putting a lot down then basically they were putting nothing down so nothing down stated income yeah and so that felt really really wrong to me like morally i was like i was saying the devil doesn't tempt you with spinach okay right and so you you're like you know it's like oh you know like it's and then the guy that the sales guys would come in you know the mortgage guys hey man you know if people want red cars we gotta sell red cars if people want hamburgers we gotta sell them hamburgers hey i heard every analogy under the sun i'm like we're not selling hamburgers we're not selling red cars i don't know how this movie ends but those people don't deserve those loans and so we're gonna walk away from the volume and and we did we walked away from a tremendous amount of volume we walked away from a tremendous amount of people that wanted to come work for us take advantage of our cheesy radio commercials in the brand that we had created for ourselves and sell those loans because what do they care they'll just sell those loans until that company blows up and they'll go on to the next company and so i give jason matt a ton of credit here jason has a brilliant mind for underwriting criteria and he has huge ethics and he basically said man it's not right it doesn't smell right we shouldn't do it and jason mat were experts in the industry and i said then great we're not doing it and so it was a it was a hard decision at the time because you're right everybody else was doing it it was the only reason we survived there were so many buy backs from other companies they just said hey we can't buy them back we're out and we we had done some stated loans and we had to buy some of those back but it wasn't at all near the magnitude if we would have done subprime loans and we would have done those kinds of things you sort of look wrong until you look right in that situation right meaning like you're just growing a little bit slower than other people or you're leaving money on the table until finally the crash happens and then then you're validated for that strategy but it's like most people are not willing to be to to look wrong or be wrong you know for three hundred sixty four days you know for the one that was right you know a lot of times it's more than three hundred sixty four days sometimes it's three years you know i i just went through it in the residential solar financing business you know there's been about five companies that went bankrupt recently in that space and look we raised pricing i think sixteen times because the the fed raised rates so much right in a short period of time and it was hard because we lost a lot of market share for a period of time people said hey you know if you guys are are gonna have to increase your pricing but the bond math didn't work the unit economics didn't work and i was like look if the unit economics don't work at some point the music stops and you die you blow yourself up and so you know the reason that we're a healthy company and we survived was for two reasons one the diversification and two was because of the discipline and the devil doesn't tempt you with spinach and and the the second piece to the mortgage piece just to go back to it is what happens after o eight is i look i had to lay off four hundred people so we had a couple i would say fifteen hundred employees or something along those lines and i i was so depressed man i would like literally throw up in my driveway before i could go see my family every night i was so so depressed they say you're never real ceo and until you go through a near death experience and i went through mine there i would go to this rock and like literally pray just get me through this and i promise you i'll do good things for the world and so what i did was diversified i launched an insurance company next to the mortgage company that allows us to save people money on their homeowners and auto insurance i then had the idea to get into the energy business and save people money on their electrical bill and the way i did that was through the residential solar business so that diversification is a good thing at times it forces you to kinda diversify the risk within your company but you've gotta have the unit economic discipline on the front end and and have a a good sense of ethics and and the right thing to do you know when when other competitors may or or may not be willing to do that so where do the where does that strategy come from at that point where do where are the ideas to do insurance energy because you're in the middle of a you're weather a storm you're laying off people when i was a little i accidentally almost burned down my house and you know for like you know it's like everyone comes everyone in the neighborhoods looking at you and it's like he tried to bake a cookie and almost burned down in the house like you know like yeah the mortgage interested almost burned down the house of america totally so you're in a tough spot where do these ideas come from at that stage man it's when your soul is getting crushed is when you get the download at least that that that's was it for me when i worked at oracle i would run the golden gate bridge most mornings and i sat in a meeting there where with hp we had just done a really big a deal with hp and what i realized that the time was you know yeah they they maybe needed the software as a crm solution it was a new crm solution for oracle but likely it was a horse trading deal that i was a part of for some reciprocity between oracle buying you know a lot of hp servers and laptop computers and printers and then in return hp saying hey you know we're gonna take a risk here and by buy a crm solution from oracle and i just felt a little bit like man is this what i'm gonna do with my life i'm gonna be in these rooms i'm gonna work with legal groups for like a half a year to get these deals done and then it's it's about it's a trade you know in some way shape or form at the end of the day and so i wanted more meeting in my life i wanted to and so i thought about hey what what's important to me okay my mom and i never owned a home we rented our entire lives i wash or paid four hundred bucks a month in rent our whole lives that we were always strapped i always watched my mom work three jobs was always like mom can't you get educated and buy a home and i just talking to a good friend of mine just a few days ago he's from the inner city in saint louis and he said hey you realize our people went the way we grew up will never buy a home unless someone really sits down and educate some and that was my dream was hey could i create a mortgage company that could educate people online they could educate people in a non threatening way where they could learn about the ability to own a home instead of renting their whole life the american dream of owning this home right and so i found meaning in that and i found a other group of people that found meaning in that of course i hired a bunch of processors and under writers that were single moms because i was raised by a single mom course i asked my mom to move from chicago at the time she was taking care of her mother out to sacramento to come work with me and be along my side and you know she just retired this year but she was with me for whatever was fifteen solid years or more and then of that led me to think about wait a minute what if i could edge educate people on their homeowners insurance and auto insurance and how to protect these assets and then i found a lot of you know i i candidly i had a vision for what could i do that's really solves a big problem around this that also is tied to a big bill inside of the home and that was the vision for it's the electric bill and it's clean energy and i can elect the home and that is an amazing opportunity and so i would advertise with the cheesy ad about hey i can save you money on your biggest bills and people would call in and we would save money on their mortgage payment their homeowners and auto insurance and their their their electric bill that create diversification but it also allowed me to see what three separate entities underneath one holding company could do to make an impact in in homeowners lives right i wanna read you a quote that i really liked you said the difference between rejection results is just how long you stick with it and this is like you know on one hand it's like okay this is kind of just like fortune cookie advice but for some reason it hit for me what's i guess where where'd you get that and i guess like what's the kind of like unpack that what's the story there look i think a lot of people quit when it gets hard and you you sometimes you don't even know you're quitting you just come up with a reason why you think you need to quit just like i had no choice i had to quit right you become master salesman to yourself to point you in the other direction yep yep you know and you you wanna run by all your friends that you know that they were gonna tell you to quit know how you do that start pretty i know the five guys that'll tell me i should quit so i'm gonna go call those five guys and then they'll all tell me it's okay to quit and then i'll know i'm like this is i'm blessed for quitting and so what happens to a lot of companies is all companies they go through really challenging difficult times and it's inevitable if you run these companies these companies are just riddled with problems right that's what they are and you're always constantly solving the next problem and in some way shape or form they're all cyclical they always pays some massive headwind it could be a policy headwind it could be a financial a headwind because of interest rates it could be a headwind because of tariffs whatever it is you're gonna face one and so the key in those moments when you're getting your soul crushed is to find a way to get through it to find a way to not quit and make sure the team stays together and not quit because the valley is the value and no one realizes that when all your competition dies and they they they're going out of business one after another because of maybe a bad decision or maybe they lost the team because people weren't inspired anymore or maybe it just got too hard and people were fed up with it that is the moment where your company is actually creating value now it wouldn't show that in your stock price right it wouldn't show that you know in in in your board meeting necessarily but that's the difference you know i just went through a really crazy difficult cycle in residential solar over the course of the last really two and a half to three years usually these cycles only last about a year this one was two and a half to three years now we've diversified significantly and made a bunch of investments and and innovated in really big ways but the valley is the value and ninety nine percent of people quit in in the moment they're like oh you know maybe i should just join the board or maybe i should just kinda do something else right because again winners have options you know if you got a little money in the bank you're like you know what man i'm just gonna go do something else with my life like like this too much of an opportunity cost for me to sit here and slug it out right but as you grind it out during those moments there's two things that happened one is you gain tremendous market share and respect from your board okay in those kinds of moments and the second thing that happens is you see yourself as a different person in the face of adversity and the muscle that you created and what you had to learn to get through that moment which makes you a stronger executive for the next wave of of pain that's gonna come your way hey let's take a quick break you know hubspot help tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show when you were at solar city i mean solar is kind of a controversial company like i remember from the outside it was like this incredible company then tesla was gonna acquire it and then it was like but wait is it a is it in good financial health is it not a good financial health there's a lot of like i guess narrative around it did you learn anything about kind of like the internal storytelling that's required to not only get yourself to believe but but the whole team to believe when there's a lot of noise on the outside yeah absolutely don't don't listen to the noise like i have thin skin which is is why i don't do twitter which is why i don't do podcasts when like i don't wanna read all the comments of people that say oh gosh that guy this now i don't know why like i care like some people don't care i'm like i actually care everybody care some people say that they i don't care i but i care i i i really care and and and so i'm not i'm not good at the public thing i'm not good at putting myself out there you know which is why i don't do any of the self promotion or anything along those lines because i'm not man enough to take the blows that that come my way i'm embarrassed at saying that but that's that's really the the truth of it if i make myself vulnerable and so well for me is i don't read it i don't read the articles i don't i don't look at i'd x all the time and and all the comments and things along those lines i keep my head down i stay focused on on on and try to feed my mind with the right things that's why i don't watch scary movies you know i i really don't like if i watch a scary movie it's like stuck in my head for a month i'm like i'm not man enough to watch scary movies i just wanna watch happy things like i wanna watch a comedy i wanna i know i wanna watch something inspirational some great documentary i'm just really careful about about what narrative is in yeah and it also comes down to whom gonna hang out with like it's weird man like you know when i'm met my dad i i like there's a part of me i would see things in my father okay and so it's like and i didn't like it after i hung out with him i was like oh wow man like i i do some of those things too like that is that dna based is that like you start to question who you are as an individual right and so you gotta be really careful with the kind of people you spend your time with and what dialogue that you're having with them because proximity is a powerful thing man it cuts both ways right what was it like meeting you on the first time would you have suspected then when you met them that light kind of the the rise basically i mean now he's i don't know the wealthiest guy in the world and he's created this like world changing companies yeah i'm just curious what was your kind of impression at at that stage i thought i had a great work ethic when i was working with larry allison or had my own company no company has the work ethic and the commitment and the sacrifice factor than than an elon company you know when you go to work for those companies my son versus at spacex right now he's doing his second year internship down at spacex out of all the companies in the world that i would hope my son could go work for he's you know nineteen years old i'm like go go for elon man right go see what it's like at spacex go down in a boca chic go light some rockets off with mark c some of the greatest engineers in the history of the world see what it's like to have that level of work ethic that give a shit factor you know i mean like when you're in those kind of environments it's like look you're playing with live ammunition man you gotta you gotta you gotta play full out and you're in the fox hole it ends time to go to war we're the warriors of light you go hard to go home that's just the way that it is because think about it we're the most highly short stock in the history of the world between tesla in solar city everyone said we're the next en ron right we were done the articles you know were were crazy you think they were they're were you know now they're were a balance between the two at that time we were all the biggest morons in the world right because we were the you know the clean energy guys the sustainability guys and there's no way we could ever create a a company of any value we well that's that narrative is is changed but you know just to be just very direct it was very very obvious to me that elon was the ultimate alpha and he had a leadership skill and a magnetic energy to get human beings to make the necessary sacrifices to build the most important disruptive impactful technologies in the history of the world like when i just i worked so hard i never stopped working for nine years of my life i'm not kidding you i just wanted him to be happy you know i wanted i and he was always so kind me and he's always so grateful to me and you know and i would it always get a kind nod in the boardroom but like i just wanted linden to be happy i wanted pete to be happy i wanted you know you to be happy and there there was a a sacrifice that i think everyone everyone makes when you work at those companies a sense of pride and commitment and sacrifice this necessary based on being driven by growth and being around peers and alpha that are gonna gonna push themselves to be the best they can be and driven by contribution and and the difference that you can make in the world yeah i have this phrase that you don't know what level ted looks like so basically i have this theory which is really this podcast actually helps me do this which is in any area of my life i think at a certain time oh okay i know what the spectrum is i know one is the bottom but i know what a ten is and you know sometimes i i fool myself at the ticket i'm a ten at this thing then you go meet somebody who totally breaks your frame and you're like oh that's what like that's that's that's what they did and i call i call it eleven eleven eleven it's like oh didn't even realize the knob actually goes further you could just crank this baby up yeah it's whether it's like work ethic or even storytelling ability or it's you know it's just how sharp they are because because you know work ethics a part of it like you know one of my companies got bought by twitch and i got to work this guy emmett emmett to see founder of twitch yeah and people what's up like you i'm like i can tell you a lot of things but you know one of the things that was very obvious to me i was like oh this guy's oven burns a little hotter like these guy's just genuinely much smarter than me like yeah and so it's not like and and i didn't i hadn't really encountered people at that level of like inc of of sharpness of hiring you know we they do amazon so you write a six page memo and you come in in the first ten minutes as a silent read so i'm reading this thing within like three minutes he's done with the paper he's highlighted the one he's found the needle in the haystack like the one thing that actually matters for talking about and he's waiting for the rest of us to catch up and it's like okay so so i i love saying level eleven fact is why when we came out here we did your morning routine with you yeah because you're kind of like a level eleven of like energy like you're energy rich i don't even know how old you you're you're way more energy to me think like twenty years younger than you you had twenty times more energy than it's fifty two fifty like thought of a pretty high guy yeah and have like a certain viva vicious sniff for life but then you say oh that's eleven okay good yeah now i can recalibrate i'm i'm actually at a seven cool but now that i've seen it that's like a a very important thing is literally just to see it and so you know i hope with this you know the when wanna do this podcast is like we talked to so many people done whatever five hundred or six hundred episodes the goal is that you break some people's frame i it yeah and and what what is the commitment to sacrifice as necessary like i you think about it right so they they buy my company the first one paramount solar rolled in solar city i this big first big exit right of my life what did i do the next day i packed up my stuff i moved into a studio apartment in san francisco by myself remember i'm married i have a wife i have three kids i'm like i will see you guys in a year i'm going down silicon valley don't worry i'm gonna do this i'll buy us a house i'll figure it out out kids are in school all those kinds of things i eat a burrito four nights a week at you know one in the morning in my little studio apartment in you know south san francisco before i went and and built an organization we grew that organization from you know maybe at the time there's fifteen hundred of us max i i think i brought four hundred of the fifteen hundred and we grew it to a twenty thousand person organization that did twenty thousand residential solar systems a month and you know it became the largest solar company in the history of the world but it's like that into energy that you're feeding off of when you sit around linden r and you see his spirit and you see his energy and it's like in literally all every moment of every day i don't care if we were mountain biking i don't care if we were kite surfing i don't care if we were on vacation and cabo we were talking about work we were talking about different ways we can engineer things different ways we could create things and do do things and it was amazing just to be around those kinds of people where you're absorbing that energy and that competitive spirit to do something that no one's ever been able to do before especially when the rest of the world thinks you're crazy and there's no way it's gonna work it's i'm gonna make a guess you tell me this is right it seems like maybe prior to that you just said i found my tribe it's like yeah for a while it's like you don't really quite fit in you're sort of an odd ball and then you finally meet a group of people who are wired the way you're wired you think the way you think you're talking to the way you talk talking it's only normal to be your weird it's gotta be a good feeling right like yeah it was that how it was for you totally when i was in missouri i was a fish out of water man and i was depressed like i was i was frustrated listening to the conversations around the kitchen table i was frustrating listening the conversations on the field there was this level of your your skepticism self doubt highly medicated mindset that lacked they're like man you're just too excited about life chill out and have a cigarette and relax okay you know life isn't that great buddy you know and i just i knew i need to leave i knew i need to pack my car up and i i would've gone further than the silicon valley if the ocean wasn't there i mean honestly i i didn't come home for a long time i i stayed out west for a very very long time and and the reason was i was all a sudden around people that were believers i was around people that were excited about things that weren't getting caught up and what they were gonna have for dinner at night or the two cups of coffee as they needed in the morning to get themselves going or the smoke i was like oh man this is incredible and then i was around with people at oracle obviously you know it really really bright people operating on a high frequency there were hyper motivated to do something with their lives then you kinda graduate to hey i'm a founder in this world of the of the silicon valley with other peers and founders and then i got plugged into that group of whoa these are these are the greatest founders in the world this is this is sergei b this is larry page this is you know the the all the paypal mafia the luke no six the the ken har reese you know the like all of a sudden you were around this peer group of friends that you spend time with and you're like i can do right i can do anything if i bang out with these guys and i feed off this energy every morning i i can do anything right and and honestly i still feel like that way today i'm i this is why i love spending time with people like you i love the young young energy i loved a you know there's there's a guy his named calories the founder of zip line i just went and visited him at his off a couple weeks ago in san francisco the drone door drone delivery i just i wanna be around keller you know he and went on a hill trip together we went snowboarding together we became friends and he's like man come visit my office i got a lot of things to do i wanted to go to keller office and visit with keller and just see his operation and what he's doing and so i'm really thoughtful about trying to find other people with great energy great ambition and drive they're trying to do impactful things of the world and and bring them into my life so if through that door came like twenty seven year old you right we we we you get a second because you're busy yeah and you're doing things and you're already in what you're in you're doing what you're doing you have your company if twenty seven year old you comes in and he's got all the time in the world and he says alright what's the blueprint what's the hayes barn way of doing things which where should i go point my hair wish i what wish i direct my energy what do you think you would how would you explain your way of doing these things what idea specifically like what problems do you think are worth solving that you might plant a seed in in the head of twenty seven year old you man such a that's such a good question i would with with the gray hair that i have day i'd probably drop him with them and i'd say look you're gonna be addicted to success okay you're gonna be addicted to productivity your work alcoholic because you're constantly trying to prove everybody that you're enough okay and so you're gonna take on a lot and it's gonna at times time it's gonna feel like the weight of the world on your shoulders and you're fighting for clean energy tax credits and the big beautiful bill in dc and meeting with senators and and you know the all all the things but i need you to think about more than one level of wealth and one level of success which is the financial success right i need you to think about time success and i need you to think about mental health success and i need you to think about physical health success and i want you to think about friendship and community success because i'm afraid that you're gonna sacrifice those other four pillars of success for one right which is financial success and you gotta realize man like when you grew up like i did and your mom's got her a head in her hand ends and she's crying about whether she can turn the air conditioning on and she's this amazing woman all you wanna do is help all you wanna do is carry a couple golf bags and put forty bucks down on the kitchen table to make sure that you guys can turn the air conditioning on all you wanna do is someday hire your mom to come work for your company right is say hey we're good it's okay all you wanna do is give your wife the life that your mother never had give your son the life that you never had and you're willing to make this crazy level of success so you have the financial means to make sure that they can go to that private school they can go to that you know university that they wanna go to someday well that causes you to make this massive amount of success and give up maybe any time for yourself or maybe maybe your mental health suffers because you've you've grind out and your adrenal glands are shot and your doctors are like hey man like we gotta get you on meds so that you can get your thyroid back in order because you've blown it out and so i'm at a stage now where i've tell that twenty seven year old guy i'm like look man the goal is to also solve for happiness you don't need to be a marty right okay you don't need to just like devote your life to all these other people and all these other things and die miserable okay at some point in time i need you to make sure that you're working out every morning you're doing the breath work you're you're you're doing the swim you're doing the hit workout with your friends you're laughing you're playing but boy because as you create more success it just it gets really really difficult the amount of people to start targeting you and coming after you right someone will watch this pod and go man that's a really nice couch he shouldn't have that nice couch right there and at times i think man i probably shouldn't have that nice couch maybe maybe i don't deserve that nice couch right you know and so it's just this whole mindset that i think you have to think about gas where you're really driven person on hey why are you doing it what are you doing but but it's the how component how do you start politely declining certain things how do you not have fo for all the things that you'd feel like you need to show up for because i feel like i need to be in two cities in the same day and have two different meetings and do it in person and you just burn yourself out on the whole thing and so i need to learn tell that kid take time for yourself create space give yourself an opportunity to kinda rev down every once in a while you'll be better off in the long run you know we need you around for the long haul right yeah because you've you've been around the you know whatever the dinner table of success is like the top of the top been around a lot of those people you don't need to name names but i i i would imagine that a lot of those people are a bit of a murder in the sense of they're not that happy or maybe loving their life in the way that one would assume when you have a certain level of success is that has that been true from your your experience yeah i would say most of the really successful people i know there's a also a meaningful amount of sadness in their life you know because of the sacrifice maybe it's a lack of connection with their kids maybe it's a lack of connection with an ex wife or you know they kinda regret you know the way they they they interacted at certain times because you're revving in the conference room and you're battling all day long these intense discussions it's hard to come back home and then just be like a chilled normal guy you know like you're never a chill normal guy you always have nice intense look on your face you don't smile as much for you're like man i okay like he needs to chill out a little bit and so you know for sure what those level of sacrifices you you you gather more demons in your life and and and and it's sad to say that but money doesn't make you happy money doesn't make you a better person it's like really important the more things that you have it's actually more stressful you know it like and and and people that maybe don't have a lot of things would say oh man you know how how try to view to say something like that but the reality is the only thing that matters in the end of the day is are the relationships that you have you know and the love that you have those those deep relationships that you that you carry on who's the exception i'm sure there's somebody out there that's that's found that you know the these balances right i have a few newer stars yeah there's like man i i like michael dell like kind of the biggest north star i think i've ever met in my life you know his i don't know his marriage with susan is is amazing his wife is incredible she's her own force of nature what they do philanthropic what they do for the world they're very humble just so you're not gonna be able to read about it or anything but the impact they make in the world their children you know like their son zach dell is like i i i'd say to my son luke hey can you spend time with zach read the books of zach red and talk to zach because he's like a pretty amazing guy but it's the humility that he has you know now he he politely declines the things he's taught me that and and and he creates space for himself to read and relax red but he didn't go crazy like a lot of people they create michael del wealth they go crazy yeah and and they they lose themselves in this into environment of winners have opt and you can have anything and do anything and instead he's the kind of guy that just becomes more humble becomes more of a give become more focus on on the impact that he can make in the world through all the now it still plays big don't get me wrong you know he's bold leader and he takes big swings and big bets i mean this isn't a guy going through the motions and you know and but he's somebody that has this level of humble humility about him that that i i respected admire tell me about the the blue ocean strategy insight you had because we haven't even talked about your current company the main the main company yet good yeah which is a a kind of a juggernaut or not but talk about this insight you had what do you do after you know we sold source to tesla elon was great he wrote me a really nice letter you know to the and he and he and you know he kinda cc the tesla board about it and and so you're kinda like okay know i i exited there gracefully i think as much as you can you know i think people always want you to come back and do different things and there's a times i i feel guilty that i i didn't go back and help at times but you where where do you go from there you're like okay well the insight that i had was we were by far the biggest solar company in the country we had forty percent market share in the entire united states and so i was recruiting a lot of people from our competitors and we were building you know the the largest manufacturing facility in the western hemisphere for solar panels and tesla built a giga factory and we're at this stage where i was like man i i'm very passionate about sustainability i'm really passionate about the deployment of these solutions i been burnt out on sales a little bit i was managing around a ten thousand person sales organization and so it's a lot of text messages from sales professionals that that wanna raise i'm i'm joking but you know wanna talk about their comp i but it was i was just like i was like how do i do something that's not really sales focused but technology focused and i can deploy these solutions okay and so i was coming off a big high and i thought about i read a book called the blue ocean strategy and so we were in a little bit of a red ocean strategy which was like hey be your competition beat your competition just beat your competition and i was in a in a mindset where i was like what if i could make my competition our biggest partner instead of our biggest competitor and so i looked into the premise of blue strategy what does it what does it mean yeah it means if you can make sure everybody wins in an environment where literally even your competitors win that creates a flywheel effect that allows that organization to scale so red oceans is like testosterone and you run a solar company i run a solar company i'm better than you we're gonna sell more than you we're gonna win that customer ocean strategy is like hey what do you need like can i support you in some way shape or form red ocean would be like okay let's imagine you know are both gold miners and we're out there you know panning for gold blue ocean is like i wanna be the guy who sells the piston and shovel to everybody right and so the mindset was if i can enable the entire ecosystem from all the panel manufacturer to all the battery manufacturers to all the different installers in the marketplace to all the sales professionals in the marketplace and empower them with a b to b marketplace and platform that allows them to have access to capital access to each other in an environment where they can transact with consumers where the consumer wins they elect rectify the home they lower their carbon footprint they save money the installers win where they can all install any panel or any any battery solution in the marketplace and all the manufacture of these products win because they get access to that marketplace to the the ability to deploy these assets boy that would be a cool business and that was the beginning of the idea of good leap it started with point of sale financing for solar which quickly led to wait a minute we should finance all electrified solutions in the home hvac energy efficient windows roofing smart thermostats you know synthetic grass turf basically anything that allows us to kinda lower that carbon footprint in the home that would be that's a blue ocean strategy and so now the banks are winning and the financial institutions are winning because they're getting their eight to ten percent return on the assets all the installers are winning because they have access to all these great products and great sales professionals and all the sales professionals are winning because they have access to the installers and the products so that that was a blue ocean strategy and a marketplace business that allows us to grow pretty quickly alright this episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over two hundred thousand companies shouldn't be surprised because i use it myself for not one not two but i have eight different mercury accounts i have seven for different companies that i'm am part of and then i have my own personal account because now they have personal banking which is really cool feature i highly highly recommend it like i said i use it myself the reason why is because the way that mercury works is beautiful it's very intuitive and you could tell that it's actually made by a starter founder an entrepreneur you could tell somebody me by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and and annoy and decided to you know actually fix it himself and really any type of entrepreneur you are let's say you're an agency well one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices easily create them send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers well you can do that inside mercury and so i think that mercury is great highly recommend you check it out and thank you for sponsoring the show for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details can you tell the dad story because you told this you told this privacy so you don't have to it if don't want to but it was i think i sent you a note after this i sent you a voice i was like man that that story really moving at my own you know bad issues you know that that are going on but the way you told it it's funny first of all but secondly i think it's really powerful is there's a lot of people i think have stuff like this i don't know personally i would love hear yeah your open share no no i'd look i'll totally share it so it's a it's an interesting story so i remember my dad leaves me in in in saint louis missouri my my mom and he and i moved from illinois to missouri he worked for merit so he was like a guy that would like take people on incentive trips you know so he's a he a drinker you know he had he had a lot of problems with alcohol you know he had he had you know under i don't know i wanna be respectful to my father and all those kinds of things but long story short he left and and they separated you're at a young age yeah i thought i was about two years old okay and and i don't know where he went we didn't hear from him but as a kid you know if you're a decent athlete or you're doing things you really hope that maybe dad calls and goes hey man i saw that wow i saw that article in the paper or you know and you always think about who your father is and and maybe what the situation was and my mom was amazing she never said anything poor about my dad so i didn't know much about my father and it wasn't a focus but i became a man of the house at a pretty young age and and that wasn't awesome for my mom because i would run her boyfriend's off and i was trying to be a little alpha dog around the apartment and things like that you know i regret that too but basically i finally when i'm at oracle and i quote unquote made it i was like i wanna find my father and i sat next to this guy kelly cook he was a good old boy man from oklahoma kelly cook played football at oklahoma state so he was the full back for barry sanders and thurman thomas can you imagine dude this is kelly cook yeah this guy is the bad alright and so kelly was my i called him big papa i got my nickname you call me play up he's gonna be play icon can't be papa up that's so i said big papa man i wanna i wanna find my dad he goes you know we eat this internet thing we can maybe find him on the internet and i was like you think we could find him on the internet he goes and and he goes yeah man let me let me see if i can figure it out so not i swear it wasn't like a day before all of a sudden kelly's on the phone he's waving me over he's waving me over and and and he's like you're your dad i got your dad on the phone man i got i'm like what you talking my dad on the phone and so he's talking to my dad hey jim yeah you're jim you're from illinois right yeah hey jim that's why i thought yeah you it's a way are you're working right now what's going on so so my father at the time he's talking to him about a suit about a size of a suit and the and the length of the arms and not like why is it going on man what is he having this conversation this guy about so he could hands up phone and he goes hey you're not gonna believe it now i was working at redwood shores now at oracle hq and he goes you're dad you know complete this man your father is in palo alto and he works for patrick james clothing shop he found him through tax records and i was like really he sells clothing like across some stanford right there i mean it's maybe fifteen minutes down the road okay and i'm like kelly come on you gotta be kidding me he goes no well that rocked me for about three months i'm like my dad is fifteen minutes away from me what are the odds both of us are here in you know out in the silicon valley well i put up my best suit on i went down there got a big deep breath and i was like alright man i'm gonna go i'm a gonna go meet my dad i'm gonna go in there and make it happen so i'm kinda looking in the store and like is that him is that him excited to have me pictures or anything and i walked in and i said hey how you doing they said great and i said jim barn here and they said no jim doesn't work here on wednesdays you know it's like what it was tuesdays thursdays and sundays or something i'm like oh man okay and i think subconsciously i wanted a reason to come back and so i was they go well how can i help you and i was like oh at the time i bought custom shirts because i have a thirty seven inch long arm okay i can i get a couple custom shirts they're like sure no problem what's your name well i used my best friend's name jason walker you know from the fourth grade i said jason walker oh hey jason how you doing anyway i buy the i buy the shirts and at the end the guy guy's like hey their x amount how do you wanna pay for it i'm like man i can't get my credit card that says hey barn so like hold on a second i left my wallet in the car i go to the atm i get the money out i think it was like a hundred and fifty dollars i go in and i'm like hey man you know i just had cash is this okay like yeah jason you got a phone number cool we'll call you and in those days it was like a month and a half where you shirts are done okay so i'm like alright so now you can imagine in a month and a half i'm sitting there you know making my phone calls at oracle do my whole thing and i'm thinking man i gonna meet my dad i can meet my dad put my best suit on they call they leave a voice mail your shirt to ready i go back well this time i can see him this time i'm like oh man that's definitely him when you see your dad for the first time you're like okay that that's his face i'm shorter than me he's a little fuller than me but that that's his face and i'm like oh boy okay this is it well he comes out and he's got a cigarette in his hand he's he's it isn't lit yet and he's got the lighter in his hand and his dust it's about five thirty at night i drove down at that after work and he goes back and he goes back in the back alley and i'm like wow he's in that back alley back there if i'm ever gonna go back there and i don't wanna embarrass him or anything i'm gonna go there and and meet him and so i get out i can see him in the rearview mirror so my cars parked this way he was kinda behind me so i was kinda looking the rearview mirror so i get out of the car i'm ready and now you can imagine okay i'm like i'm like thirty years old right i made it making good money i got my my suit well my father to be proud of me and you know big big moment for me and so but i'm shaking i'm like i'm i'm a heart's pumping i go around the corner and oh shit you startled me and he's having his cigarette i said i'm so sorry i i didn't mean to start you i just came back here and to introduce myself to you and he said well great he goes my name is jim barn and i took a deep breast and i was like my name is hayes barn and he he had that cigarette in his hand his hand started shaking and you know you could just you could just and he just looked at me and he just said son i said yeah and he's like i'm so sorry and i was like man don't don't be sorry at all and he buried his head in my chest i wrap arms around him and i just held him you know for like twenty minutes he cried in my chest my whole shirt was covered in you know his tears and snot and the whole thing man you can imagine that's really powerful now in the moment i'd like he probably thought this guy come from chicago to come from missouri like like what is this kid doing out here and so you know i said dad it you it's okay don't be sorry don't be sorry don't be sorry you know just wanted to meet you and he i'm so sorry i'm so sorry and i i said don't be sorry you know and so sorry i'm getting emotional we we go inside and this guy bought the shirts from his name is dwayne and he goes hey jason right and i said no no my name hayes and and he said haze and my father said hey dwayne he he'd worked for for about fifteen years at patrick james selling closed there he said this is my son this is this is hay as barn and he said jim i didn't know yet son and he said well yeah i got a son and this this is him and so that was it you know i i kinda met my dad there and he said hey by any chance do you like football you know i i got i've forty nine tickets and i was like yeah you know i i i do like football dad and i'd love to go to forty nine game with you and then that that was it man i learned a lot about my life after that which was amazing you know there's all these super interesting things i learned about my life when you meet your father when you're when you're thirty years old yeah you know yeah the one thing that strikes me there is like you weren't resent full or upset like i mean like that seems unusual to me well i had realized by that point in time probably the best thing that ever happened to me was not having a father i know it i know it sounds terrible now but i didn't have when i was a young boy i was angry you know why don't i have a dad and why do we live like this and all those kinds of things and then as a as an older man you realize that having a mother in that situation and the drive and the responsibility that they gave you was probably one of the greatest gifts that ever happened in my life and so i was there really more probably because i was looking for affirmation from him i wanted him to be proud i wanted him and to see how hard i had worked and the things that i had done and have a level of respect for me that for for some whatever reason it was just important to have that that affirmation from my dad and so i got i got that closure you know he i i didn't get a lot of time with him he ended up passing away but he definitely had an opportunity to get to know me to get to know my kids to get to know my wife to to see me and some of the things that i done and we expressed a lot of love and respect for each other so for me it's like sometimes that's your opportunity to show a tremendous amount of compassion empathy for someone he did the best he could man he had addiction issues he had some challenges he had his own issues with self confidence you know his his father passed away really really young his father was a severe alcoholic his grandfather was a a severe alcoholic and so he was adopted by this guy hayden barn which was this renowned doctor in hence illinois when he was twelve years old his real name was james neil o'brien was my father's name but at twelve years old they changed his name to jim barn and that's why he named to me hayden barn because is the guy that adopted him was this guy his name was hayden hayden barn yeah that's amazing yeah i appreciate you cool telling that story yeah you're welcome man yeah it's thanks for asking it's never told that one before definitely on camera but yeah right i mean i think one of your the things you try to do is you what what is what you say your life mission is connect the hearts of people all around the world for like for for good or for yeah connect parts to others create positive change in the world how do you do that without sharing your own stories and your own vulnerabilities right yeah absolutely i think there's a lot of people out there that probably didn't have a father had challenges with their father in some way shape or form and so you know it it honestly it's a valley for a lot of people when they're young but it's probably a spike for people later in their life right you know yeah you you told me about the laying in the dirt story yeah i love this story but yeah what's that story yeah look look the was a very very difficult time for me and i was really really hurting and so i had this idea i'd from friend of my brad tu went to this organization at the time it was called building with books it's called build on now and he had gone to africa and he built a school and he came back and tu was like this awesome guy worked with at oracle and tu was like look you should do this man you'd find a lot of meaning in this and so when i was like you know had the victim mindset the woe was me oh man i we had to lay out these people oh man i'm really hurting right now i'm in this tough spot i went to my executive team and i said look crazy idea what if we all go to africa we build a school and they're like what man we're struggling right now we just laid off four people why in the world do we go to africa and go build a school with some organization called build on i'm like i don't know tu went he said it was amazing i think we should raise some money from our friends and we should go to lay the dirt and we should get grounded and and it just called me long story short everybody's like we're in let's go make it happen we raised little money we fly over to bam over in west mali africa we we we load up this like van with with a goat on top literally we strapped a goat to the top of this van we all got our backpacks and we drive sixteen hours out to this zara tribe why why'd you need to go on the van i didn't know i had no idea because the handler there has to bring a go i'm like we gotta bring a goat i never been in africa yeah like this is this is interesting and so we get there we meet the chief we got the translators they're doing the whole thing we learned then we slit the goats throat you know because in you in this part of the world you drink the blood of the goat and that's the ceremonial thing and you're welcomed into the village and then a big deal they cooked the goat because most of the time they just eat this grain this mu basically right every single day and then i laid in the dirt and this woman aw i was in her hut so these welcome you you dance in the village every night you saying these people are so happy and alive now it's sad they die by the time they're thirty years old because they drink poison in every single day and and all these other things but they're very very happy people and so i with my brother law we're laying in the dirt in this tent and then everybody else has their own little kind of like hut it's like a mud hut kinda kinda situation and all the k pokemon just spiders are around human man you know you you you go to the bathroom in this little hole and then when you open up the whole there's all the k pokemon just spiders in there as well lamps on and you're like oh man you know your whole nervous system's being shaken up but about every morning about two thirty am you can hear chihuahua she's shaking that grain man and you're thinking man she's shaking that grain for me you could you just hear it and then you're like wow man like she's up there two thirty in the morning she's shaking that grain for me and then all of a sudden you hear hacking something she's hacking the wood and then she's she's lighting the fire for you and i'm like was she lighting the fire for why would she be lighting the fire and like three in the morning so every morning for seven nights you're thinking about this and then all of a sudden i would come out in the morning and the bucket of water would be over the fire because so i could bathe in the morning with this bucket of warm water well i figured out on the second day said where do you get the water and she's like oh let me take you i thought she gonna take me around the corner we're going for five hours we walk like literally like five miles to a river where all this livestock basically lives and she puts the water on her head and then she walks back another four or five miles every i you do this every single day and do this for my bucket of water so that i could bathe and i would bathe in the morning and at night before i would go to bed and the gills it was almost like wait a second whoa man this is like really messed up and so you know i just i just had this epiphany man like the fifth night land then there i was like okay we're building the school but it's almost all boys in the school where the girls while the girls are fetching water they're filling their buckets versus you know filling the brains in the classroom and i was like there's gotta be a way for me to figure this out now at the time i was diversifying in the solar business and i thought man what if i could put solar on all these schools and we could get intel and other players to donate the laptops we could extend the hours in the classroom so the women can get educated to so iowa kids can get educated and so i just had this lightning rod moment man like i just have these big downloads at at certain times of my life from like okay i need to start a foundation that's gonna basically find a way to light up all these schools and and and so that that was the moment that's how i came up with it wow yeah and so you go back and you kind of had a model that was like the tom's model right for for would be sell solar here in the us then we can give solar in africa yeah on the schools right that was the the sort of the blueprint well let me explain how how went down so the solar company takes off quick you know we become the second largest solar company maybe it's the third there was like sun there was solar city and us these are kinda like the three players of residential solar in the united states i was partnered with sun and i was partnered with solar city like you would sell it they would install it right that's right you you nailed it and so and then we were good at financing as well so we started to launch our own tax equity funds or own financing funds this is a new way where we could basically we used of structured finance solutions to offer zero down solutions for financing for people to elect electrified their homes to to put solar on their on their there's a good story i don't know what the story is so they told me it's a good story about how you struck the deal with solar city well so so we're doing about forty percent of solar cities business at the time and and less in sun but both companies the woman that had founded son run her name's lynn uric she's amazing woman and and linden who was the ceo of solar city who's elon cousin i had a great relationship with both of them and they both came and said look we'd love to buy you okay we'd love to buy you we'd love to roll you in we'd love to make you a part of the organization and what we're doing and so we had a lot of discussions and i was like well do you want the insurance company do you want the mortgage company like now you you can keep your other two sad companies you know i'm joking i'm joking but but you you we want to we want you and we want solar business and so after some thought lin and i had become really close personal friends our families were vacation together our kids were really close friends our wives were really close friends his brother pete you know it would also i became very close with him and his wife and his kids and so we were becoming a family they said hey his come on man you know we're gonna ipo this company and we really need you to be a part of it or will i ipo it and then we'll buy you like a week or two later and so i said hey i'm open to it you know let let's think about it you know we had met with elon we had discussions with him and and and talked about how we could build the biggest solar company in the history of the world and what this could look like and all the things that we could do and so i was going to build a a solar system down in for a school for build on down nic and i said look would you come with me would you come with me to see us put solar on a school nic and the impact we can make i have this big vision for putting solar on all these schools linden was awesome because i'm let's go make it happen so we went down to nic we build a solar system for the school lin and i sit on the roof he's like this is unbelievable man this is this is a really really cool thing to do and i said what if for every megawatt of energy we deploy here in the united states we put solar in a school somewhere in the world and he was like i love it man let's let's make it happen let's do it through a five zero one c three non profit and so in three years we put solar on like two thousand five hundred schools and in several countries in the world that's amazing yeah you're doing some amazing things right now with with your fl in around water but your organization named git power you talked about how you're doing solar panels on schools so where where did the shift go from solar panels to water well so three years later i go back to all these places in the world whether it was in nepal or nic or different parts of africa and kenya and i realized that we lit up all these schools and then when you walk into the schools this this made me sad it was a bunch of guys with their cell phones plugged in or people play video games on laptop so i'm like great i bought i brought video games to the developing world you know i brought i got i gave these guys cell phones because they didn't have cell phones i was there the first time the first time they saw my cell phone and you would like take a picture of them and they were like whoa magic me like they've never seen themselves in a mirror realize you know yeah i mean these people are amazing they brush their their teeth with a stick and now all of a sudden i brought cell phones yeah to this area because we brought power to these this area i like this wasn't a great idea and go figure i was so stupid that the women weren't sitting in the classroom till seven o'clock at night they were exhausted they were still going and fetching water for you know whatever it was five hours a day right and so aj was still doing her thing and her daughters weren't in the classroom that was that hit me pretty hard to be honest with you i was like wow we've done whatever it was at the time two thousand five hundred two thousand six hundred schools and yes it was great we bought electricity to school and the school headlight but it didn't accomplish the mission that i wanted and what i realized was we need to invent a magic water box basically we've got to find a way to bring the water into the village in a way where the women are in the classroom they're not fetching water and and it's healthy affordable water so how could you do that and now at the time now i've really got this solar thing under my belt and we were starting to do these things called micro grids sometimes wealthy people will call and say could you do a micro grid on my island i'm like wow i don't know maybe well our engineers were brilliant they can figure this out and i was like wait a minute if we can build micro grids for people on islands off grid with this new battery storage we had invented and solar this is kind of interesting what if we could bring it to the developing world at the same time a friend of mine in my neighborhood in ti had invented a water pump for yachts where he wanted to travel around the world on his yacht and have that water pump pull water out of the ocean so he could drink healthy water all day without having to stop said how'd you do what i did it with a solar panel i'm like oh wow that's super interesting so i found this guy his named kyle stefan who is the president of a company called spec water makers and we went to him and we said look crazy idea could we marry you and you're genius with these pumps with these amazing engineers that we have that work with us at solar city and tesla that really understand battery storage and solar and we marry that together to be able to produce healthy affordable fresh water out of a bra well or out of the ocean utilizing reverse osmosis and d and they were like can't be done it's too grid intensive it's too expensive good good luck you're naive you're you you know you you have no idea you're not as good enough engineer to understand that this is impossible it's too expensive blah blah blah well look i am naive i wanna try you know let's give it a shot and so we spend about a year trying to build that system maybe a year and a half we couldn't get it to work and then finally we crack the code and i was like well we let's put it in the container we can ship it anywhere in the world we will drop these things all over the world and we'll produce healthy affordable sustainable water for people off grid in these communities where we've done these schools and now we've done that you know many times over and that was the breakthrough and the insight was wait a minute okay we could kind of almost turn this into an economic model like milk in the nineteen sixties where we change the model where women can actually make money and earn a living by distributing this waters and what people don't understand like after it's clean basically yeah absolutely instead of carrying the dirty water back take the clean water and become distributors for this i can right yeah yeah absolutely and so there's a lot of people that have these causes they say we need to address migration issues we need to address these soc economic issues women's rights issues education issues health care issues what i realized the breakthrough epiphany that i had was you can't address migration issues until you address the water issue you know when like greg brennan who is on the board of home depot this guy guy's an amazing ceo he's an incredible philanthropist he was like the ceo of yum yum brands for a while bain capital continental airlines he and i went to honduras us and we flew around honduras us together we went to all these different locations that had issues with migration water scarcity all these things and he had the breakthrough with me where he was like you know what we had solve the water issue man otherwise people are gonna move i go greg look at me you and i are pretty capable guys imagine and i grew up here we live here are we gonna leave if we're drinking poison every day and everyone's dying by the time they're thirty he's like we're gonna leave that's exactly so water is is the unlock water is the foundation and fundamental thing that now allows you to say okay now we can educate the women because they have the time they're not fetching water all day long now we can change the soc economic model where people can sell the water and distribute the water within the communities like milk and lightning in the nineteen sixties and their took took since you know all these other cool contraption they build to distribute this water now we can talk about health care issues and so because we're people are drinking fresh affordable water and they're they can stay alive but you can't stay alive if you drink poison and so that's that's why i'm really passionate about it it checks a lot of boxes for me yeah that's it that's amazing i went to africa i went to ethiopia with the charity water and we it was like because you even even when you hear like i there have to walk to get water walk is the wrong word because it's basically it might just be scorching hot first of all you're you're in a like a desert you're walking and then you were carrying like a farm if everyone gone to like a personal trainers had made you do a farmer's carry where you're carrying like forty five pound dumbbells on both sides walk for four hours right so they had us do like the carry of twenty isn't it oh my i i one man steps and i'd like yeah i work out five times a week you know and this woman would just throw it up on her head and walk for four out i was in i mean if it's like the ultimate sales pitch it's like if you could just get everyone in the world to try that walk one time yeah you know everybody would be like yeah we gotta solve this problem yeah i know it in charity waters is a phenomenal organization water dot org like all these people are trying to solve the problem in different ways ours is you know there's two billion people in the world that lack access to electricity they're the same two billion people in the world that lack access to sustainable water that have water scarcity issues and so this is not about just water filtration or you know distributing water this is about dignity man this is about hope this is about opportunity for humanity in these areas and capable people like you i'm telling you sean if you laid in the dirt with me and i just got back from a trip recently i was over in kenya i did a trek over there with twenty ut students and then i went to mba and i got the bowser and i delivered water and i raced the guys with the right with the you know the the whatever the thirty jugs a liters of water in there you just realize like i'm alive when i'm there i i can see i'm not in the vitamin business when i'm i'm in the life saving business and i'm when i'm there every drop of water that we distribute we you know we save life and we've got the unit economics you know it's all comes down to math right we've got the unit economics down to a penny a day a penny a day for someone and so a penny day oh explain that more one cent you can provide healthy affordable drinking water for for one person as for a day it's a penny a day man and we maintain these systems for basically we sell the water in the areas for half of a cent okay and that allows us to take care of all the operations and maintenance it allows us to pay for all the people that work in the in the in the area the the work on the on the system for us that maintain the system and those kinds of things so it's got real teeth to it i mean this thing is a real economic model that scales and and so i'm i'm really happy with the team it's an extraordinary group of people that have really thought through okay now how do we go scale that how do we go you know deploy as many of those systems we possibly can all throughout the world for these people as fast as we can and people go well you know what happens with the salt that goes back in these systems produced about seventy five thousand liters of water every single day so one system produces seventy five thousand liters water every single day and we design them at a scale in which it's a very small amount of salt that goes back into the ocean and then we can now we've invented other systems where we can pull it right out of a bracket well the the little hidden secret that most people don't know is a lot of these bore holes that are drilled they go bracket and then they sit there and and then no one does anything with them we can take our systems drop our lines in there we can des that water utilizing reverse osmosis and we can deliver that healthy water to these communities as well water's life it's it's pretty cool so if somebody's inspired what's the right way to kinda get involved or give what what what what's the call to action yeah look i mean you can go to the give power website and and it's just give power dot org and and you can kinda see ways in which you can give and and those kind of things we're trying to come up with all different types of away where where people can participate we sent about thirteen hundred people on trek over the last few years so i want them to see it i want them to go like you could you shouldn't have to sacrifice your entire life just so you can have a glass of water and you're there and you see you're when you roll your sleeves up and you get your hands dirty and you build one of these systems you see how technology can transform communities overnight like not over a year like instantaneous the moment the water comes on everybody's alive everybody's like celebrating and dancing and singing and all of a sudden the kids are healthier and everybody's vibrant and and it just creates a tremendous amount of optimism and hope and opportunity that's amazing hey dude thank you for doing this i really appreciate it yeah thank you man i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back my friends if you like m then you're gonna like the following podcast it's called a billion dollar moves and of course it's brought to you by 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