and the real story blockers i went home that afternoon i was like i'm launching a consulting firm to help companies figure out ethereum hours after learning about ethereum i feel like got rude wear i know i could be what i going to put my all in in like a day's off on travel alright we're live this is it this is how we start van we get in you just rip into it we get right it where are you calling from your place looks nice this is your apartment yeah this is black works office yeah we got a new office like about a year ago in manhattan how many how many people do you have like sixty i think we're up to sixty five maybe we had six people start this week so i think i think that might put us at sixty five what's the pitch for what you are you're just i mean at the high level a crypto media company but at what did i tell you the other day i go you do everything right you do things the right way wait let me just get this straight so as sean not joining this because do you know that sean told sean dm to me one day he gave me his cell phone he said dude hit me up would love to meet and chat i've never met the guy i he he gives me a cell phone i text him i go yeah it's jason yan what's up man i said something about friend tech guy ghost me never just left me on red really this was gonna be my time on air to call out sean but the last well you called them out no sean's out sean's getting a a nose job he's out with surgery this week really yeah but but he'll he'll hear this alright sean's is a ghost man sean is a ghost or i give him a hard for i give him a hard time for that mh but you know he brings the heat so he he gets a pass so what are we talking today i don't know man tell people like you're under the radar but your business is shockingly big and i think it's gonna be incredibly successful what do you what's like the pitch for what black bricks is block work started six years ago so my c founder mike and i started it in december of twenty seventeen basically the thesis back then which remains the same i think we've got a lot wrong over the years but one thing we got really right was the thesis six which is that crypto as an asset class and as an industry is going to grow exponentially over the coming years and this was back in twenty seventeen when most of the information about the asset class was basically like siloed on reddit and twitter and our thesis was that as the industry grew exponentially those investors who and professionals who came into the industry they weren't gonna you know listen to crypto pan or like crypto whale about this new asset class they wanted this professional source of information kinda like a bloomberg or wall street journal for crypto so yeah we said hey let's go build it and that was six years ago so what we've built is basically for the first five years we built a media media platform a media company right we own the largest network podcast in the industry we have a couple big newsletters we have i think the best team of reporters and you know journalists in the industry we own a couple of the large conferences in the industry and we built this big media company and a year ago we thought the industry was ready for like deeper what i call almost like bottom of the funnel information about crypto data analytics research protocol governance and that is our subscription platform that we launched called block works research so that was a year ago so that's what yeah we're we're media information platform just about crypto crypto native media information company do you say how big you are did you see the research my guy i so i have eu eugene he's my yeah he he like had your rep and eb was that all right right yeah it's crazy i like he's doing like these that guy's digging he said to two thousand twenty three you're gonna do twenty five million in revenue with eight million in eb he says two thousand twenty two you did twenty five and seven million in eb is that right not gonna say specific numbers but what i will say is yeah last year we had a goal of twenty million of revenue and we pretty decently exceeded that and we've been profitable since day one so yeah we we bootstrap the business for the first five and a half years and then back in april or may we took we raised our first outside round of capital from from ten t and framework in in the angeles angel santiago we raised twelve million bucks at a one thirty five valuation and yeah we've been profitable since then since i mean kinda since we started we did a decent bit of eb last year this year those numbers are wrong because this year just to kinda share a little bit of insights into like the crypto market i don't know how i i think you followed pretty closely sam the market's just gotten crushed right so what's actually done really well for us this year is our subscription revenue on the research platform but the ad market across the board both in crypto and digital media you probably talk to the morning b guys or you probably saw the buzzfeed numbers because they're probably like like it's got it's it's it's been a tougher year than last year on the ad market is it coming back now it's the ad market is just starting to come back yeah but you guys crushing on conferences i mean went to your conference what do you have five thousand people there the conference the final number was a little above four thousand this year yeah i mean that was amazing you it seems like you filled it there yeah i mean i think that like i'm a media nerd i i think that everyone who has a media business it works in the media business they hate it and they love it i hate it but it's like an art that i'm addicted to i hate selling ads but i love creating media and when i look at you know media is an interesting business because the barrier to entry is really low particularly for the written word well even for podcasts everyone can write therefore everyone the the pool of people who think they're are good writers is significantly higher than like building some other type of business and i think that most people do it really poorly myself included i made a lot of mistakes but whenever like you're telling me about your guys business i'm like oh i see a well from an outside i see a crystal clear path to like a hundred million in sales you just do the same shit but more and more and you just are thoughtful man you do things right and i i think that you're one of the more under the radar operators in the space thanks man that's why i think a digital media business is actually one of the best businesses to start it's not gonna make you a billionaire there's no like go start you had the you had the the the the flying guy on the podcast the other day like that's why you'd go through if you wanna be a billionaire like a digital media brand i think is like the best venture into entrepreneurship for first time founders and mike and i like mike and i were just roommates at the time and we were twenty three when we launched the business we basically just work we'd wake up like four am we jump on linkedin we had no media business we didn't even know what media was we just we just wanted to host an invent because we went to an event realized they made like five thousand bucks that was big money to us and so we just jumped on linkedin every morning we would wake up and just sent like three hundred messages right ten percent of those people reply that's thirty you get like three out of the thirty to actually buy a ticket our first event february twenty eighteen we had two hundred and twenty people and we made top line twelve thousand bucks i think it was and so we're that's that's off to the races and then we ended up building the a media company basically asked backwards right like how you probably started at the hustle was with content yeah you you you did it horribly horribly horribly horribly i would argue though like the problem with most media companies and the reason they don't work is because they're started by folks who can't monetize so they're usually started by a podcast host or a newsletter writer in twenty twenty three and they're brilliant at content and they don't understand how to sell so what happens is they're year and a half in they're like oh shit i need to monetize and they don't know how to build a business they not to create great content and for us we did events then we linked up with pump right and we that we got into the podcast in games so our first podcast was pumps well i used to be called off the chain now it's called the pump podcast but you were just selling ads for him right we were doing everything i would go into palms office seven days a week saturdays and sundays too i would put the mic in front of his face i learned how to use garage band i was editing the podcast i was producing the podcast we were designing the things on ninety nine designs i was selling the sponsorships so we're doing all of it and then we built that business out and hosted shows for other people realized that business was great for revenue sucked for ip because we don't actually own the content yeah you're just an agency yeah then covid hit and eighty percent of our revenue got wiped out overnight because we're were eighty percent of revenue came from events and then that's when we pivoted into like we said let's let's go do the media thing how much could you say how many how many how much in sales your your like one event would do yeah our biggest one i mean last year we did like well over ten million from permission list did that's insane man my whole thing with events was i started with hustle khan hustle con i so i did it the same thing as you were like i threw it together and hosted it in six weeks i think the first time i did it i think it did fifty thousand in revenue and like twenty thousand in profit the second time i did it i think it did a hundred and sixty thousand in revenue and fifty thousand in profit maybe and then the third and fourth time it varied between like five hundred thousand and a million i think in sales and then i don't remember what the profit was but the margins got smaller and events were hard i was like i know these events can get big but i screwed it up because what i did was time i made the event about i just like looked at like i had never been to conferences i just looked at what a ted talk was and i was like i'm just gonna do i'm just gonna get people on a stage and people are gonna sit in the audience and like listen to this that was really dumb for from a money making point of view that was a really stupid thing to do and i knew that some of these events were doing like tens of millions in sales and i totally screwed it up the the way that you really make revenue and income through these events is the speakers are simply a way to get the similar like minded people in the in the audience and you make money through more expensive ticket sales because you're doing networking and you make money not through sponsorships people call sponsorships but like through like a booth so they could actually like it's basically just a marketplace that day where like you have to make people are making deals conferences are basically just three day marketplaces where you build the marketplace and you shouted it down three days later and that's what the show floor is sheldon ad so this guy named sheldon i think his name's name sheldon ad he managed just died he started this thing called com i think it was and it was eventually turning into ces i think it like rebranded but anyway he created this conference called com and it was like the computer show or something a computer it was right when computers were getting popular in the seventies eighties and nineties he built it up he actually sold it for a billion dollars but sheldon ay the guy who basically made the vegas strip like it made it happen because what he's noticed was he goes oh wow this conference i'm basically just creating like a it's basically a real estate business because i'm creating a marketplace and i'm like a merchant in the sense of like i'm selling like corner space because it's the best space that i'm selling this space and like marketplace it's a marketplace for those few days and then was like well shit i'm just gonna get into the real estate industry because he saw like loads of different parallels and anyway when i like read that i was already like pretty deep into like my one big event and i was like shit i did this all wrong you know what i mean i don't even think you did it wrong you just needed to go bigger so the secret with events so we started with small events the thing that a lot of entrepreneurs get wrong with events is the business model of small events is a is a really good experience for attendees it's really fun you bring people together a good community building it is a shit business model so the kinda secret to events is you need to figure out how to go really big and you go bigger and bigger and bigger and what we found out some early insights was let's say you have a company like let like coinbase right and coinbase might pass a million dollars to sponsor our conference if we launched another conference they're not gonna go pay us two million they're gonna take that million that they allocate to their block works conference budget and they're gonna cut it in half so then they're spending five hundred with us here and five hundred with us here so but we're doing twice the work right to go run two conferences so we basically consolidated all of our things we now just have two conferences digital assets summit in permission list and the reason for that is like that is the best business model for conferences is bigger better what's really tough is big conferences you have to plan out years in advance so our events team would like us to book venues like four or five years out we can't do that because crypto too cyclical so we but we still have to like i think we just booked our twenty twenty six venue or or or we're like about we have we we have the contract for them so and why that's really tough for our business is because crypto is so cyclical and if you think you're planning a big event but you don't end up having you're not able to host the big event you can crush your business right coin almost died in twenty nineteen because of that reason they had like i don't know ten thousand plus people in twenty eighteen and then in twenty nineteen they fell to like two thousand people right they fell eighty percent and that almost wiped out their whole business and their takeaway from that was hey maybe events big events aren't gonna come back big events aren't gonna be big like crypto events just aren't gonna be big again and what happened is you end up losing money on the upside when the when the market comes back you lose money on the upside so for us like it's just a big challenge to running a conference business in such a cyclical industry is you have to plan these things years in advance but then you're basically act asking yourself to like predict market cycles very tough thing to do but you're big enough now that like you said that like cities are like court you right yeah so these the bigger conference gets the more gdp you bring into a city so i forget the i forget the specific number but i think for palm beach last year we brought in like i don't know three or four or five or six million dollars of gdp to palm beach just in those three days so they so they're at the mayor of palm beach came to our conference he really want us to come back and the bigger your conference gets the more cities and then even countries will court like countries will court like web summit and money twenty twenty and folks like that and they'll give them big upfront how much do you think that upfront was for a summit summit has what fifty thousand people yeah a couple couple million pride i don't know five five million maybe tech maybe some money in tax credits but to say man i yeah yeah i mean like i i i haven't cracked the code for an event but you have that's why that's why i it out with you but like it's freaking stressful it is stressful that's the one reasons why hate events yeah fifty percent of tickets gets sold in the four in the four weeks leading up to a conference so imagine the fifth week out from a conference you're basically thinking that fifty percent of your attendees aren't coming and you know it because we're six years of data that they're gonna come but it's stressful but ultimately the conference serves is like it's the reason we were able to bootstrap the business right it serves as like the cash flow into the podcasts and into the research business and into the digital and news and all that stuff and another thing that i like about by hanging out with you so like basically for the listener i i spent my summers in brooklyn one year jason was like hey there's this apartment in my building that's available you wanna rent it out and i was like hell yeah so i lived three floors below you for about four months hung out with you a bunch and an interesting thing about you is you're are one of the better storyteller i've ever hung out with sean sean perry partner sean awesome it's awesome at telling stories you've you've told some of the craziest stories i've ever heard of particularly one about when you like won a did you win a corvette oh man so i was super i was nervous for this podcast not because i'm nervous to go on podcast but i'll telling dana last night i was like i actually pretty nervous for this podcast sam knows too much about me to to make this this give you i'll give you i'll give you a pass on anything anything you don't to talk about you know and i asked you i i had of time i i said what don't you wanna to talk about i'll share anyone i think sean and joke were like if you were like really good at gaming if you were like good at poker if you like were a hacker if you did like most people not most but a lot of people who end up with like huge amounts of financial success they were doing something like gray early in their career before they realized like oh i should like follow the book and like do things by the rules because that is way better for long term success but they had that like jean in them a hundred percent you told this story and when i heard that story i was like oh yeah like it would have been obvious at the age of sixteen or eighteen that you were gonna be like a massive success so when when he told me this story it was one of the crazier things i've ever heard of i'll tell i'll tell them abbreviated version because i don't i don't think it's as interesting as you do but i've always had this company don't don't give maybe abbreviated version i've always had this entrepreneurial tech like i my parents showed this store with me the other day i guess when i was in like fourth or fifth or sixth grade or something i would buy this is not the story i'll get to the story but i'd buy ml showdown cards on ebay that i thought they were marketing it poorly and like maybe the picture was bad or the description was bad i'd buy the ml showdown cards i'd take a nicer picture with a nice camera re upload the this exact same card to to ebay with just a better picture and better marketing copy and sell for like two x what we bought what i bought it for so have always had that kind of bent this has pulled me down good rabbit holes like that or like clockwork works and then some less good rabbit holes which i think is the story you're getting to summer after senior of high school i somewhere after senior of high school i wanted some money some summer money so i went to my parents was like hey guy can i get some money i'm in high i don't have a job let me get some money they're like you're not you're not getting money we're not giving you money go i remember my mom said shit i think your friend jake is getting a job at taco bell go work with jacob taco bell i i'm not going to taco bell and we we would go to taco bell every day i love taco bell and sounds like i'm not gonna i'm not working at taco bell so my buddy was a year above me in school and he would he were he went to school at the university of hawaii and he was back from his freshman year of college he's like hey i heard about this thing where it was actually the soy podcast guy or the soy guy brought it up on his on your podcast with him it's he's like most companies spend like forty percent of their budget on marketing these there another type of company that spends zero on marketing forty percent on affiliates who market their products for them and that was kind of the pitch that my buddy gave me he's like if you able to sell this energy drink to other people you can make money you get like a percentage of what they make and again i'm eighteen i didn't know anything i just wanted money and i didn't wanna work at taco bell so i signed up i bought like thirty energy drinks and started telling people that like hey you drink red bull and monster you should you shouldn't do that you should buy these healthy energy drinks from me go you go to like yan it's dot you know the web the website dot com and anyways i i i did it for a couple months didn't make any money i get to college i went to emery marie dunn in at atlanta and i really didn't wanna be like the energy drink guy you know i'm trying to be like cool on campus freshman didn't want want be like the energy drink guy and i talked to some friends they didn't wanna do it but then i discovered like digital marketing and actually like noah a ka and like all those people like that whole crowd they were kinda booming didn't back in the day like they were just kind finding some success and found that whole crowd of like that guy branson something or russell b yeah figured out how to create landing pages went super deep down that rabbit hole and the business got crazy so you got paid like a percentage this is where i didn't realize what i was doing looking back there's a lot of like i'm not sure if i do this well i i probably won't do this again i actually think about like what i let my kid do this in the future but yeah i ended up having four thousand six hundred people in my down line had like a thousand people in france you know because it was a it was it wasn't that you were making money just from selling this drink you were making money from enlist people to sell it for you so basically it was a pyramid screen multi level marketing yeah you told the story you're like you i told my parents what i was doing and they're like jason you know this is a a multi level marketing here you're like what do you mean i'm just selling a drink like you didn't even know what that meant right i so this company was the like official sponsor of the phoenix suns that doctor oz was on my if any of my friends from college listening to they're gonna laugh at this because they have heard this pitch probably a thousand times i used to like get on skype it wasn't zoom back then to skype and i'd give this pitch to like a room of five hundred people like doctor oz says that you know a can of canada this and a handful of almonds is the healthiest thing that you can put in your body blah so they had all these big names i had no idea i really fell for the pitch that it was like look a lot of companies like a nike spends billions on marketing why don't they just spend billions giving it to when sam tells me about nike they should give sam like ten percent of that ten percent of that what i didn't realize was there's all these companies there's this multi level market i didn't realize that there's this whole industry and it wasn't until well to to bring this story at home in the in the car wasn't the corvette was a bmw i got so high up in this company or i had so many people below me the company gave me a bmw my sophomore of college i i tried dropping out my sophomore year got like a two point two or two point four gpa my obviously my parents wouldn't let me they knew they they were like i later learned that it was a big debate my parents had about whether or not to let me keep doing this my mom wanted to shut it down from day one and my dad was like it'll teach him a good lesson i don't think they were i don't think they thought it was gonna be successful but it wasn't until bill ackerman and carl icon gotten to that really crazy battle over herbal life and i watched the full thing i watched the whole presentation about bill ac that i realized i was like oh my god he is explaining this company that'll work that i'm working with and and then my and then my roommate junior year like yep one of my best friends like basically slap me in the face junior year he's like alright man we're gonna get internships you should join us stop doing this stop doing this thing and and wish end it shutdown so you what is it how much money do you make if you have four thousand people on your like down line or whatever it's called bet i was making probably a thousand fifteen hundred bucks a week as a sophomore don't but that's four thousand people a shit load of people i would've have thought you'd make way more there were people making millions a year who had like if there i probably had four thousand on one side like six hundred on the other if my sides were like even then then it would i guess they probably did some model internally that is like made the company more sustainable if it was like even so four yeah that's so that's what it was i was i mean for i was nineteen right i was a year and a half after wanting to work at taco bell or not wanting to work at taco bell so like that was crazy crazy crazy money for me and you're just like giving speeches in heard of hundreds of people in skype about why this drink is is awesome or why the business is awesome basically the pit yeah what kind of both like the so the difference between you so you brought up pyramid can be like technical difference as the regulator see it between a multi level marketing company which is i would call very shady but technically legal versus appearance scheme which is illegal is the percentage of people who buy the product for the product itself versus the number of people the percentage of people who buy the product just to get access to be able to sell it and make more money so that's the like the reason something like am or like herbal life can be still exist is because there's actually a pretty high percentage of people who just buy the products because they like the products or like cut c knives and all those so knives is a multi level i mean i've got a ton of friends that sold cut code knives and you know what's crazy they all say awesome stuff about the product so like an ml isn't inherently on unethical right i think like wasn't like tu aware like so this this company had been around for ten years that was the other thing it been around for like ten or eleven or twelve years and they sold to like fifty and sixty year olds who wanted to get like protein shakes and all that stuff and it was a really good product and nobody did the money part of it they just got it and they might tell some friends but like most people who use am products they don't tell their friends about it they just actually like the products so that was this company and then they realized hey who wants money more than anyone like nineteen year old kids so they launched and what do nineteen year old kids drink they drink energy drinks so that's when they launched that they did flashy marketing they sponsored the suns they got doctor oz as a spokesperson all this stuff and that's when it really that's when the percentage of people buying the product for the to make money start to outweigh the number of people buying the product for the for the drink how big was that company i don't know i don't i don't have metrics the ceo i think went to jail for a year or two though oh my god that's well i have a lot of i this one of the things like i actually i wasn't even sure i wanna talk about it on the podcast today because i have a lot of not regret but like that's it is inherently kind of a shady thing to talk about right it's like multi level marketing is a shady thing and i didn't realize it at the time i truly i truly had no idea i'd like drank the cool ko aid so hard i really had no idea and the debate i have i don't have any kids but if i had a kid would i let my kid do this and the immediate answer is no like that at this super shady no but it did teach i'd i i'd i know for a fact i would not be here today if i hadn't done that why that clockwork started by just me posting on linkedin a lot about crypto and nobody was posting on social nobody was supposed to on linkedin back then like it gave me the confidence to post on social a lot it gave me the like understanding that most does like most of growing a business at the beginning is just like grit and hustle and really marketing and sales it's less product eventually that changes over time as you find product market fit and all that kind of stuff and it just taught me this like it it made me realize that i there was nothing in the world i wanted to do outside of build a company and it gave me the i like i didn't i didn't know how to build a software company like you have some like geniuses come on the show like their code like i wasn't like that and it just gave me the confidence to go do it so were you were you thinking about any other different ideas before you started black works yeah i was desperate for something i was really desperate for to do something but i a bunch of shit ideas i the way block works originally started who's the consultant that you had on the show ovens sam ovens yeah so the way block work started sam ovens plays a role i wanted to start a consulting practice because i saw i read sam ovens of stuff and i like i didn't buy his course but i saw all of his ads and i was like this dude's making it it was funny hearing that like new york photos shoot that he you know what i'm talking about i like remember seeing that ad i was like obviously now i know how the game works that wasn't a real thing but he i i wanted to like do a sam evans instead start a consulting firm by the way sam evans is this guy who came on our pod nowadays he's like a really nerdy like almost like an intellectual he started a software company he's doing everything right but previously he started the thing called consulting dot com he rented out this slick apartment slick back his hair wore a bright blue blazer and i don't think he did anything unethical but he was like selling the dream he was like i started a consulting business that makes money i'm gonna teach you how to do that too for this amount of money and he came on our pod and he was like i don't remember exactly what he said but i think the energy that i got from him was he's like i don't regret doing that because i helped a lot of people but i was playing a part that wasn't authentic to me and i got bummed out may maybe there's was a little like regret he's like i fucking played a part like i was an actor and i don't think he regrets it because i don't think he did anything wrong but he just pushed it to the to the limit yeah so i saw those ads i that's what i wanted to do i was like really sick of my job i wanted to do that and so i so the i used to go to this thing called brunch sc or something in new york i don't think they exist anymore but i'd go to all these events they had a thing on how to build a consulting firm at two pm on a sunday i think it was like two pm on a sunday they had a thing had to build a consulting firm i thought it was get sucked into these like sc i i'll me one day if you ever talk to mike they'll tell you about the the jerry seinfeld field ticket ticket flipping scheme did not make money anyways we i get there an hour early because i thought was at one pm and they were doing a talk on ethereum and i already knew about bitcoin from since twenty fifteen i was living in bud past heard about bitcoin twenty seventh this is twenty seventeen now got really into ethereum from this talk and so i decide i went i came home that day and the real story of blockers i went home that afternoon i was like i'm launching a consulting firm to help companies figure out ethereum hours after learning about ethereum hours after i was like sold the dream yeah i was like this is what i've been looking for well i i yeah i've known about bitcoin for two years i was i was already like listening to bitcoin podcast podcasts and stuff and like han had heard about a theory but i didn't didn't clicked didn't get it and came home and i was living with four guys at the time and one of them was mike who's my c cofounder founder and i we remember it slightly differently what i remember is him saying let's do it and then waking up in the morning and saying hey this is a horrible idea i currently work in consulting nobody's gonna buy consulting from us because they don't trust us we're twenty three years old we need to build trust with community how do we do that and i said great how do we do that he said what if we hosted events we went to that event last month that made money so we started hosting events to then try to sell consulting and six years later we have no consulting but did it it's so funny i think that like alright black works is gonna be a huge success i don't know what how big but i believe you're gonna have a multi hundred million dollar exit before the age of like thirty three very likely what do you twenty eight now twenty nine you're gonna be you're gonna be worth so at least a hundred million dollars in the next five years i i would imagine liquid that that's my prediction but in order to get there i think what people like there we sean and i talk about some time they're like there's this always like revision history of like oh i had this great idea when in reality like you just do dumbass like kinda of meat head stuff and you just kinda can iterate your way and then after like you get to like some type of sustainability and some type of mastery you're like okay i actually clearly see the path now and like maybe i'll go back at time and say i i had this like revelation that we have to build this big thing you said your story earlier you're like i thought this i thought crypto was gonna be a big thing but no one was covering it but in reality it was like a theory i'm sounds sick i i i need a job i'm just gonna host this event and see what happens like you know what i mean you just kinda like do shit and it works out sometimes there's always basically a like that is true what i said about like we had this vision that crypto be this institutional asset class because once we said hey how do you host an event what what what what we talk about i think our first talk like one of our first events was like crypto and the institutional age of blockchain or something like we had that vision right but yeah i think you are dead right and i think that is a almost a problem that gets pushed is that everybody thinks that founders had this vision from day one but if you talk to founders who have built big companies ninety nine percent of them do not they do they never did at the beginning second time founders actually do i've noticed like second time founders will but i'll honestly like a hundred percent of first time founders there's no grand vision it's this kind of it's this like how did block risk get built i don't know we took one foot in front of the other day after day and like s it out and that's how you build your first company second company i think is different second company can be like you know robotics and like all this other shit but that's you can have a grand vision but not the first company yeah i don't think it is i think that i remember when i started my first the very first thing i started i was like i wanna start a newsletter and then i had this horrible idea i just read the biography at ted turner and he like employed all these people and i was like that sounds amazing i wanna employ ten thousand people and then i had like a team of ten and i'm like no i i definitely don't want ten thousand of these all hanging around like this is just too hard like great hundred people yeah and like he he inspired me but i'm like oh my god i don't want all these people and i just made so many mistakes but then the second or third time around you definitely have a more clear vision you also have more you have more you have more wisdom in and that shows up in the sense of like and look like after we do this for like two or three years i have a feeling we're gonna be able to do this in like five years like you have a little bit more vision but you know it's still pretty murky but you also have a lot more patience and trust in the in the cycle or in the evolution because things evolve but when you're first starting stuff you like you're like this isn't even gonna work to get to point b let alone like thinking get about point c and d you know what i mean a hundred percent i think that's a big fallacy and i think the other one is this idea that it gets easier as you grow right that's i think anyone startups are like this weird or being a founders is this weird thing we're like i think what they you kind of hold constant the rate at which you can tolerate problems and everything else kind becomes as variable that moves and you're always as a founder in this zone of max pain and whenever you are able to if you're ever below that threshold of max pain you take on more stuff and i think that is that's something i thought at the beginning which was like when block sits ten people man it'll be a lot easier alright when block sits like thirty people lot easier and that's some i don't know it's just listening to patrick call the founder of stripe on a podcast at dudes in max pain right now do you think so oh yeah oh yeah he is reading between the lines of that company it he is in max payne and doesn't get easier so do you have you read the have you read the elon musk biography i'm ready right now i'm like two hundred pages in i haven't started it yet but i've all my friends keep talking about it and his life sounds miserable he does it does not i wouldn't trade i wasn't trade what he has for in a million years i would i it sounds miserable yep like his personal life sounds awful his professional life sounds awful everything about it sounds bad it does not sound enjoyable in the slightest can i flip the script am i allowed to ask you a question here sam this is a conversation you guys were talking with the soy and guy by like what you're optimizing for basically and you guys are like like some people optimized for money right some people are optimizing for happiness some people are like he said the things like you you know every person has a duty to make a big impact on the world some people are i did not agree with him i did not i i know you called him out on that but what are what are you because you're doing hampton again you pro i don't you probably have enough money where you could just sit on it and put it in some like treasuries for the rest of your life but you're doing hampton again what are you optimizing for so i'm optimizing for fulfillment so i'm so yeah when i took time off after selling my first company i was incredibly lonely i was i i think i think they're scott gallo talks about like a loneliness epidemic particularly amongst young men and i i experienced that where i was like i'm just so alone i i feel alone i i feel like quite unhappy i felt proud of my previous experience but i i felt lonely and so i started the business because i wanted a new challenge where like i just wanted to achieve something and i wanted to succeed at something but more so i wanted to be less lonely and i wanted to be in the trenches with the troops and like create something together i think that young man i'm i imagine young women but i'm a young so i only know that perspective is that like i need something to chase after with a team of of people who i enjoy being near and that's really what i was optimizing for i'm also optimizing for living life on my own terms so the reason why i'm not willing to do like this what john said he what did he say he was like you gotta build something big i'm like dude that right i don't want that because i feel like you're signing up you're signing up to to live a life where you where you have so like there's like three things there's like what do you want to do what should you do and what do you have to do and i only wanna spend my time doing like the things i have to do and the things i want to do i don't wanna do things that i should do so let's just say that you have a huge company with ten thousand employees you have to do you should be doing lots of meetings with them you should be talking to your investors i don't wanna do any of that there's shit in my life that i have to do like no matter what i'm okay with some of those but i wanna maximize my time for things that i want to do and so that's kind of what i'm maximizing my life for is is spending my time how i want to spend it not things that i should be doing does that make sense yeah it does make sense yeah and i think that when you sign up for those i think that like brett av talk was on the pub yesterday or monday and he's this guy who goes big the thing about him is i believe he's happy like he's doing what he wants to be doing i listen he sounds like it and i'm happy that freaks like him exist but i am not that person i like i don't wanna go into the warehouse that or his factory on a sunday and like mess robots that's just not how i find fulfillment i would rather read a book and beep by myself on a sunday so yeah like i i i just don't i don't wanna like sign up to those big world changing ideas because i feel like you're ob obligated yourself to live a life for other people do you know what i mean i do not i mean is that how you feel kind of i think fulfillment is a good way to put it but if i had to like dis steal that into a couple different things like well for first off there's safety and security in starting your own business i think it is a one one idea that is in like people's heads in the us especially people who like graduate from good schools and they go into like the workforce that has been broken in the last year which is gonna be really interesting to see how this plays out is that working at like a big tech company is a safe thing to do like the number of people have been laid off from like big tech and from banks and stuff like that recently is is incredibly high right and so i actually think there's more safety and security and doing something that you own and where you can like manage a hundred percent of the risk like you can be the best employee somewhere and if all hell breaks loose and like the company's doesn't have a good business model you can get like i there's their safety and security and doing your own thing i think there's autonomy like just the type of personality that i am i've never done one of those like myers briggs things but i'm sure it would say i need my own autonomy like i could i i would not work well in other companies i would say and then i think there's this like need to i think building a company is also like a very personal growth type of thing and i think you like you there's no way block works can grow if mike and i don't become better as humans and i like that the it's this forcing function to become a better person yeah and i think in some in a weird sense and i don't wanna like grand grant like act like this is some like big world changing idea or that like what i'm doing isn't selfish but there there it's almost like being an artist you know i joke about it i'm like dude just like give pablo picasso like a freaking tub and he'll make art out of it like and and that's sometimes how i feel about when i'm playing on the internet yeah we were talking about like different ideas that you're you're tinkering with or that you're like different opportunities that you're spotting what what interests you at the moment you you're not gonna go and start anything because you have a full time gig but is what interests you i mean they'll like just crypto right now i'm like head like just super deep into crypto i think there are other startup up ideas like if if someone waved a one today and said you couldn't go working and you couldn't go working in crypto what would i do i would probably there's probably two maybe three things there's probably two things i would look at that i think are huge opportunities first off if everyone everyone started creating like the uber for x like the uber for whatever i think we're about to see that with with bee behave actually what is that what does that mean because this newsletter platform that's just like a ten times better newsletter platform than anything on the market i know you our friends with the convertkit kit guys so sorry sorry to handle tyler i like cover convertkit too or i like a b too i'm also supervised because i'm an investor in high like we don't use it yet because it it'll be enterprise scale soon but it's more for like the individual creating their their newsletter all they did is they just had a super deep understanding of newsletters right tyler was i think cto of warning group before this they just had a super deep understanding where a deep domain expertise and then they just built a really slick ui ux and a really deeply technological like technologically more powerful platform than anything that exists on the market and i think you're gonna start to see people basically say hey bi was able to do this in newsletters where there's all these platforms right campaign monitor send grid sail through convertkit kit subs stack and they just did a ten built a ten times better product i think you're gonna see people try to do this for other industries if i were doing it i would do it for conferences we have used six different ticketing platforms in six different years of block works and it's always been we like our current one actually kinda a little bit right now but in the past it's just been a nightmare to find a ticketing platform and there's this company called hop that it was like one of the hottest start ups of the year couple years ago during during covid i heard the founder took a hundred million dollars in secondary yeah he did he did i actually heard it was even more than that but he that's insane yeah it's insane they raised a seven billion dollar valuation they just sold for fifteen million so down from seven billion to fifteen million and they just sold hop sold hop and sold for you should you should fact me on this but i think for fifteen million no way no way yeah ring central acquire hop events and session products for fifteen million holy shit and the founder took over a hundred million dollars in secondary yeah funding yeah that's save dude he's live one that one yeah he did when like said anyways that's that's what i would do so i think hop kind of hop could've have dominated this market but they had the stupid thesis that virtual events were gonna take over physical events which was like the dumbest thing i've ever heard and and and so they failed but if they had just built a better product for event host and conferences that was just a ten times better product that's a that's a the lost business that's a ship business that's it's a good business no i don't think it is i think that like if you look at event bright look at their their market cap i i i haven't looked at it in forever i i'm pretty sure it's been like slow growth i also think are you looking it up let me know what i'm is i i also think that there's this company called splash do you remember splash splash that dot com oh yeah you're right you're right i remember i think they rebranded the splash so it was it was great it was like event right but they just made a slick landing page for cheap or free events and it was great it was really fun i i created so many events with splash i think it was splash dot com and i have no idea if they still exist and the problem with them is that most of or i i think the problem was is that most events are like ten dollars or forty dollars or something like that and they could only earn like three percent or two percent or some number like that of the ticket sales and it seemed like a really small business that raised tens of millions of funding that never came to fruition so that's a good that's a good pushback i would go enterprise so the reason i think probably event right so the reason splash that didn't work is because they were trying to sell to like random people just setting up events it was kind of like a party full if you know party now and then like they were kind of flirting with with yeah so many people are using that i i don't think that will work they're of flirting with enterprise but like weren't really doing it event right like their probably cost of support alone is like a total nightmare just because they have like anyone can go create an event on on on a you know what you know it's a better comparison sam biz i would just go make like a ten times better biz what's biz it's an enterprise events platform it's like it's they sell it like saas it's like twenty k year thirty k year subscription you host all your platform your events on them they don't take a cut of the of the of the ticket sales i don't think it's just a for the platform sucks it's a shit product but they just dominate the enterprise space right now why are you interested in hair transplants the rate of baldi in man right now the hair transplant hair transplant space is the one of the fastest growing markets in in all of medicine right now hold on have i was actually researching this before this do did you ever get late sick eye surgery no i'm afraid to do it i should do it but i'm afraid so las twenty years ago was this like kinda sketchy thing to do or maybe twenty five years ago and now it is so the success rate is ninety nine point nine percent the cost of come down ninety five percent for surgery and everybody gets las it's like a thousand bucks or something like that but before it was way more expensive and way risk here and i think you're about to see the same thing happen with hair transplants and the reason i think it's so first off the market market size of five billion dollars last year it's projected to reach thirty billion by twenty thirty one so eight years it's gonna go from a five billion dollar market to a thirty billion dollar market that's a compound annual growth rate of twenty percent year year over year the people that you are selling to are the most desperate cohort of individuals right like start to losing a little hair on the back of my head that sucks like that is a thing that you don't want right so i think and i think you see this already with him and the other one i forget roman or something whatever the name is like they are selling like fear of baldi basically and they've been able to create these huge businesses and i think if you're able to do this like if you look at the hair transplant market today it's a bunch of just like kinda like semi shady plastic surgeons who like billboard like like billboard having like billboard yeah exactly those kind of people and like you have to sign like these waivers where it's like you know like fifty pages of like i will not sue you what it sounds like and i just think there's a an opportunity to build a better to build to build something like that can you tell me how so a a thing that before i started hampton i was really interested in the research business particularly data i screwed this up with trends man at the hustle we had this business called trends i charged three hundred dollars a year it's really dumb and i went like fairly broad we should have just done that before a more narrow niche and you're one of the few companies i think that's gonna a few media company few media first companies that's gonna pull off having a totally non related income stream to ads how does their your research business work because i'm i'm i'm what i've noticed is that there's very little innovation not innovation but there's very there's very few younger people talking about it because it's not very sexy but if you look at a lot of really large companies for some reason a lot of are in england but there's like a lot of research businesses that are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year and they've been doing that for fifty years but they're so big and the founders are dead and so like i'll go and read the biographies but i'm like i don't know even know how you started this damn thing because like it's been lost in fifty years of history how is how does your what's your research business providing the user and how how do you operate it how's does it work basically in crypto are these things called protocols like uni swap and ave and compound and then there's like these layer ones like a theory you've probably heard of sol all these other things the industry's is moving from treating these protocols like they're these like weird esoteric things to treating them what like what they are which is just businesses so maker or out for example they'll do a hundred million of revenue this year that is a business they have like people they pay like employees and contractors profits costs that is nobody talks about them like that so what block research does is it's a platform for investors who allocate to crypto assets to basically look at these crypto protocols and look at their user metrics financials get research on them we're very early to trends with what's happening with the protocols you can look at the governance so like if you wanna look at who's voting on different proposals if you wanna look at like how people are how people like who are the big stakeholders inside the protocol you can look at all of that inside the platform so it's probably not useful to you it's incredibly useful if you're a crypto fund who alec who has like two percent of their portfolio in in crypto so and and you're getting and so the way that you built like the v one was did you just go and find like a dozen or something public or private databases and aggregated all of the information into an easier to use way and then do like write articles on their findings we started with we started with with research so what we started with was we just hired analysts and had them right like what feels like almost sell side research on these protocols and we put it behind a pay wall i'm super easy we started with twenty five bucks i don't know i don't know what sell side research means you're using these words and i don't know what they mean so i'm gonna interpret it as disrespect is disrespect it's it's like the ten page research report you got a lot to learn my friend i don't know fuck at anything dude is these like ten page reports on like how is something doing so they'll be what's like the sell you know so in in in finance there's no i don't anything man you had a family in finance you know this shit man my dad sold onions for living i love onions so anyways we have there's there's like deep research basically on these protocols so instead of a new story which might be a couple hundred words there's like a ten page report like here's how we think the asset gonna do here's how that we think the protocol is gonna do here's how the last quarter the user metrics looked compared to this quarter that all went behind a payroll that's how we launched then we did what you're talking about which is we basically just started there's all these inside these protocols they vote publicly on what to do with the protocol and it's called like forums and proposals and that's a total pain in the ass to track that it all happens in like discord and all the and on these disparate sites we just super manually scraped all that information put it into a database and then built a front end for that and put it behind the pay wall and now we've automated most of these processes but back then it was just a lot of like very manual uploading and then two weeks ago we launched our analytics product which is like the data product where you can see the user metrics and the financials for any of these protocols so if you wanna look at hey what was ethereum revenue yesterday i can tell you that hey what was this ethereum revenue compared to salon long revenue yesterday i tell you that user metrics of like this exchange was this exchange i can tell you all that how much did the first product cost to build like like a million bucks probably so we have we have a team of eight analysts and a couple of engineers and how big you think this business could get just the research side i think political pro what what were they doing they were doing like a hundred million in revenue weren't they mh yeah political sold for a billion so the reason yeah so the reason political business was nice was they had a huge media business and then about you know point o one percent of their audience converted into the research platform and that was called political pro so yeah we think i mean we think it can get much bigger than that we think that there's a lot more ad dollars and a lot more research like subscription money in finance than in politics so like low end of the spectrum we've got political they sold for billion bloomberg terminal is like the super high end almost like it's like saying you wanna build a google or an apple it's like bloomberg works is one of the best businesses in the history of the world they'll do like nine billion in subscription revenue so that's a crazy business but somewhere in between there's like ref right nobody knows ref finn they're at capital markets information platform they sold for i think twenties seven billion cap q right facts set lot of lot of like multi billion dollar companies just built on the back of basically one asset class like bloomberg was just bonds and then you expand out from there are you taking all your personal money jason's money from the company and buying crypto right now so mike and i don't pay ourselves that much so we don't i mean most of my money is just in block works like if blocked like it's just yeah i don't i don't like i don't have too much money yet but you're heavy on crypto right person i mean of what you're of of your liquid portfolio of my liquid portfolio i'm until very recently i was a hundred percent in crypto yeah but you're insane man i think that's so stupid that is the insane you and my wife you and my wife agree so that's not the case anymore but if it if it was up to me i'd be a hundred percent in crypto really still that's crazy man what why i have deep deep deep conviction on this industry yeah more conviction than the energy drink slightly yeah i have deep yeah deep deep deep conviction and like i think it's one of the best things to work on for the world and i think it's from an allocation perspective like risk reward perspective there's no better industry in the world to work in than crypto i was talking to sean on the air other day like through text i was like i my my preferred route for personal finance is just like his argument is i was like well do you think that i think the trailing one hundred years is going to repeat itself and he and he kinda is like well i i actually don't believe that okay so because i believe it i think like an eighty twenty of stocks and bonds is the way to go but what i think is if you have a private company like black works like i used to i think it's reasonable to keep most of your liquid money in a in almost mostly bonds or t bills or some type of like liquid but low rate of return but safe bet and then you have what's it called the barbell strategy and then you have the rest of your money in a high risk thing being to a private company you're private company i would say is not crazy high risk because it's a profitable business with years of operating history but if i'm in your position or my my my criticism of of that of that portfolio is you have your liquid money and a high risk bet at the moment and you also have and you also have your private money or you're you're your the majority of your net worth and also a a somewhat high high risk thing doesn't that freak you out i know i know you're neuro like i am how do you go to bed i like thinking like that don't no it doesn't figure out i don't i i it doesn't figure out at all and here's one difference you you have money right nobody ever got wealthy i through diversification no single person ever got wealthy through but you are wealthy it's just not in cash your black works is wealth it may not be cash money but it it is wild it is something i get that and then you could make the argument that look if crypto works block works is a you know billion and multi bill whatever you wanna call hundreds mil whatever you wanna say whatever number you wanna assign to it so i'm basically already betting big on crypto so yeah put it in put in equities that's the reasonable thing to do i'm i'm not i i think you're probably right i just am it's you know what is it's it's this cheesy jeff bezos for regret mini mini thing it's like you know what would kill me sam if i didn't have any of my personal money in crypto and crypto went the way i think it's gonna go that would that would like kill me to my bones you know what wouldn't really like it would suck but i would be like at least i took a bet is if crypto went down another like ninety percent one phase me at all i'd be like you know what i took a i took a bet and and even though even though i make fun of you i respect that i i think that i i do respect it i think you're in a really good i i think you you you're no different than the brett ad cock who we just head on of like who's just like you have an idea you have a vision you have a you think the world's tend to go one way in you're talking you're talking the talk and you're walking the walk and so i i deeply respect that i think the good news is is that you're you're such a wonderful entrepreneur that it's gonna everything's gonna be great in the grand scheme but i always like to push back on people who yeah are dude there's pretty also of just like the way the world is so i probably agree with you about the s and p like the s and p will most likely just keep doing what it's doing and like i say it's a safe place to go but like does any part of you look at what's happening with the world and say like things might be a little different in the future you ever do you know who peter church is no is it wait is he a does he does he spell his name funny does it actually start with the t it does it does so alright so peter church this historian and mathematician he developed this field called cl and he kind of studies the you would like them he's a history guy studies like the cycles of cooperation and conflict amongst elites in societies throughout history and his argument is that periods of internal peace and cooperation are disrupted when the population of elites grows too large and then competition emerges among them for what is actually these limited elite positions which then because there's too many elites and two little positions that leads to in fighting in the elites as they try to maintain their wealth and status and it causes social instability and a breakdown in cooperation and it doesn't historically that breakdown cooperation social instability does not stop until there's a crisis like something big right say collapse revolution whatever it may be and then a new new cycle of cooperation resumes so the i don't know if you tend like if you look at history you can cut you can see history through the lens of whatever he lens you wanna see it there's like the the fourth turning which is like these live for big periods and you can explain it like that there's like this peter church and include dynamics view but one thing i believe is like crypto is a better way out of this whole system so let me give you my argument against that cool i think it could be true and and i don't know anything about this guy but i wanna re i wanna learn about what he what do he thinks i know i read a lot of history books and that's i do it for fun not for like trying to find the answer to this question but what i've noticed is that when empires cease to be number one they don't go to not existing oftentimes they just go to being like number five or number seven for example england so or or let's just like look at i just pulled it up i just look at what the ish shares emerging markets etf is for the trailing thirty years it's compounded annual return is something like five or six percent a year so the reason why i'm i'm willing to bet over the next hundred years that the trailing hundred years will repeat itself is because if it doesn't repeat itself it's not it's still not gonna be that bad it will go from so actually in the last fifteen years i think it's been you know crazy i think it's been like thirteen percent a year i think that if it's not seven or eight percent it might be five or six do you know what i mean yeah i can go agree that it's not gonna go away it will maybe may not be as good but it's not gonna go away that's kind of my point that that's what i believe in i i agree that i i agree that i think i think we're on the same page but i i think that you just i think i think it's just far more exciting to read about america ending than it is about the same shit happening over and over again i don't think america yeah i don't think america is gonna end and i don't think that this is my problem with kind of like the bitcoin which you're not in like you don't spend time on crypto twitter so you're in your lucky man for that but like the wave the best way for bitcoin to really work think is for the us to collapse and that is a really shitty vision for the future and that's why i like don't align with a lot of like the the bitcoin i would say bitcoin a good hedge but like i don't want it going to go to a million because the world in which bitcoin goes to a million is the world in which like civil war is back in the us so but but a theory but ethereum and like what is happening in in d defy is a very different vision and that is a vision that like says look these companies that were built in the in the in amazon facebook google and apple they have become far too powerful the traditional way to or like what the us thinks is the way to like decrease their powers through regulation i don't personally believe that that's the way to do that and i don't think that will work and i think that the best way to to like build a better future there theirs through is through crypto so as we wrap up tell me the the books and articles that you read on this topic who was that guy what was his name peter tu okay and what are the other it sounds like you've read about this what what else is good fourth turning is good how long is that book do i i can't do read a thousand pages on this topic what is your current thought on crypto just out of pure curiosity here and like seeing something like permission list with like thousands of people walking around like do you think that it is a scam do you think it's just not gonna work do you think we're excited about it but you don't understand it like i'd just be very curious to get your take there i'm not incredibly well versed so i will preface anything by saying that like i'm not i'm not that well versed isn't it but i would say that the major things in the space like they couldn't in ethereum i i do i i i enjoy the i like the ideology of it like i i respect that and so i support it i think that ninety percent of the rest of the stuff is a complete scam i think n t's are for the most part total bullshit i think web three for the most part is total bullshit and i think that the people who entered into that space oftentimes are horrible entrepreneurs who are looking for get rich quick schemes and by slapping web three or an n onto it rather than building a widget that truly solves a problem that people love that isn't just built to sell to other people in that space so that's what i believe so i own ethereum and i own bitcoin and i like to sit on it and i enjoy the idea that it could exist because i i i'm in favor of like the government not controlling certain things i think it will exist for a very long period of time it will potentially become more useful but most everything else in the space i think is nonsense cool interesting what do you think what do you think about that i think you're i think you're generally right that there are a lot of like hu who come into crypto and that was probably true two years ago know who's still in crypto i would isn't is not a scam artist it's too that no one no one operating in a market that's ninety percent down trying to scam people but two years ago generally the same and i think like you love history you read all the same history books that i do like you there are a lot of parallels to new industries right whether it's like all the scammers coming into the oil industry right in like the eighteen seventies like very similar because just get rich quick money trying in into the railroad industry same thing get rich quick money into the car into the electricity industry into the car industry like basically ninety percent of people who came into those industries they were scammers and i think that america because we're talking super macros like america's is probably the most optimistic country in the world and that leads to fraud and you can't have one without the other so like in places where they're not optimistic they don't have fraud they also don't have companies that get built so i think those are like you can't have best part of someone's also the worst part about someone say one of the same i think the worst part about crypto is that the people who were selling bullshit social media consult or agencies then or they got crypto i agree i agree and now they're in ai now they're an ai and now they're in and now they're in ai and i think it's that's bad for that industry it's like being a presidential candidate and like the k casey being like being like oh we love you you'd be like no no get the holiday of here you what i mean that's like what it's like like like we're like i don't wanna get out of your yeah so i think that's been quite bad for the crypto industry in this in the same way yeah is ai now but that that's kind of my opinion i agree what's your plug black works research yan on twitter what are you what are you doing yeah jan on twitter we got block research dot com i have a pod we have eight eight crypto podcast a block works so if you like crypto podcast code to yeah we got a bunch i host one called empire that's the plug come to our conferences das london coming up march twenty twenty four going across the pond well i appreciate you coming on that's the pod that's the pod yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back