my wife is like insane about this stuff she has a drawer full of coupons so we went to costco this weekend because we had a twenty dollar off or something like that coupons so it would still use coupons or coupons i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off wanna go alright traveling what's going on is sam sean's out with some surgery i've been telling people he's getting a nose job i don't know if that's true but let's just pretend it is but anyway we are doing a quick ten or fifteen minute q and a session i asked some of the listeners in some of my twitter fans what type of questions they had for for me and we'll talk about it let's get into it so alright what's the first question what do we got let's start with one that's really timely you're about to be a dad someone's asking what is top of mind as you become a dad so i'm gonna have a child november one that's the due date we'll see a little girl what so in preparation of having this baby i was like freaking out about like just the actual like the physical her physical well being of raising her and so i read the biography of losing and clark because i remember that sac sequoia had a kid like on that journey or something like that and so i wanted to read the book and so it turns out she had a three month old that she carried like in a little sack across america for two years in like you know in the winter and that kind of like encouraged me like i'm not gonna hurt this baby so i'm not too worried about that i would say the biggest thing though that i am freaked out about is raising a boiled kid and raising a kid that's gonna be a drug addict i'm very like like that like i i genuinely have like a deep fear me and so i've been trying to figure out how do i like in a very healthy way withhold things from her like how do i not give her what she wants just sit in order to instill some types of grit because the sounds gonna do douche she but i can give her anything she wants like in terms of like physical stuff and i'm really freaking out about how do i stay strong and not give her what she wants in order to create grit and how do i make sure that she's not spoiled and works hard but my biggest fear is raising like a kid who is freaking out over that or or or who like just it feels like she doesn't need to work and so my current thinking this has not been settled but my thinking this just me that my family me is the only thing that i'll pay for is free tuition and free medical for life and beyond that give her nothing that's kind of like my current thinking that's what i had growing up my parents paid for my school and i never had to worry about getting braces or anything like that and that's kinda like where i am now i read the titan by john rockefeller and he was a rich richest person in the world and his wife has this famous quote where she says something like the biggest joy that i have in life right now is withholding from my children things that they want because i know it's gonna make them stronger and i'm kind of in that camp at the moment on how to do that but i i don't feel very confident on the right way that i'm gonna do that but my fear is the outcome of a drug addicted indulge child who won't work hard that that's my biggest fear at the moment and so i'm preparing by like getting my mind right on how to like withhold things from her and not given because i do give in to a lot of things is that a good answer you have that in my am i i'm i'm a very withholding weather so i totally get and speaking of you being effing ridge this is a next question that i personally am curious about it's what's the biggest difference in your lifestyle now that you're effing rich i have nothing to do with picking these questions i just wanna say that i hate talking i i don't like that topic but i will discuss it so basically before i sold my first company i my four years of salary leading up to it was twenty thousand a year twenty thousand a year i think i paid myself a hundred and fifty thousand a year and then the last year i think i paid myself three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year so so for the first while i didn't have a lot of money i was i was i i didn't have much and then all of a sudden i sold the business and i i had enough at first i did something that i advise everyone not to do which is i bought a few things i bought some real estate i think that i bought a fancy car i think that that brings close to no happiness and might be one of those things that you have to go through in order to to truly appreciate but i think that if you do have a windfall you likely shouldn't buy anything crazy fancy for the first year or two and just get used to it but i've also learned there's just like story about a the study about these people who have studied a amp amputee and they found that after six months the level of happiness went back to where they were when they had both legs so you you get hurt you lose your leg you're bummed for a little while after six months you go right back to feeling as good as you did with two legs that kinda happens when i think when you make some money but the biggest thing that it did was not what it could purchase you but the biggest change is my confidence my confidence went through the roof i'm incredibly confident in my ability to start something and to see it through to be a success i don't think that i have the confidence where i think everything i'm gonna do is gonna be a i think i still have paranoia that i'm gonna lose everything and i still have massive fears about going broke that is something that my therapist and i are working through still but it hasn't changed significantly i think that someone had asked a question about monthly expenses before i sold i think i was spending anywhere between ten and fifteen thousand dollars a month my apartment at the time was four thousand dollars a month i thought that was astronomical i had a girlfriend my wife now we live together so it it's two thousand each and i was like that is insane two thousand dollars in rent i can that is just like that's evil i thought now when i rent the place it's a bit more i you know ten or twelve or thirteen thousand sometimes when i go to new york for the summer and so i increased my rent price my home that i live in in austin i paid nine hundred thousand dollars for it so my monthly nut or my monthly mortgage and taxes i think it's five thousand or or six thousand somewhere in between that with taxes and so i think i increased my spend from like ten to fifteen a month to like twenty to twenty five thousand a month maybe twenty thousand a month when i'm not in new york so i don't spend what i think is a significant amount of money i don't have any car payments i have two cars a tesla and a mercedes those are paid off i have a cleaning lady who comes once a week that's a hundred and twenty dollars a week i do some health stuff so i have a fancy gym and i go to a fancy doctors collectively that's a thousand dollars a month i don't own any jewelry i i wear i'm wearing a fresh clean tea it's a ten dollar t shirt i wear those constantly so i don't buy a lot of fancy things so my burn i think is relatively low when i go out to eat i don't look at prices and when i go to whole foods i buy the fanciest stuff and that's basically besides that i budget everything else out and so like i have a my wife is like insane about this stuff she has a drawer full of coupons so we went to costco this weekend because we had a twenty dollar off or something like that coupons so it we still use coupons or coupons but it has not changed significantly i guess one significant thing i hate flying i do not like to fly at all so typically if i have to go somewhere even if it's like twelve hours away i tend to drive i do not like to fly when i fly now i fly business class and so that makes up three hundred dollar flight eight hundred dollars something like that but my increased expenses rent went up business class but i don't fly often and then my home doesn't have fancy fur my whole house costs thirty thousand dollars to fur so it hasn't really changed significantly other than my confidence my confidence has changed significantly the idea of like creating something from nothing that changed significantly how was that did that answer those two questions love loved every minute of it so now you can get out of the hot seat on your personal life and i'm gonna throw to you the night this was the most liked question so what were your alternative business ideas if you didn't do hampton so i i'm i think i had mentioned this last podcast there's this thing called ic guy that i'm totally bought into i'm very fascinated with japanese culture japan has this like this philosophy where i think i said it last time it was like a venn diagram of like what the world wants what the world wants to pay for what you're good at what you love doing i try to find something in the middle one thing that i'm obsessed about is data and numbers i really am like i if you search if you go to my personal blog which don't judge i started when i was twenty one and i quit blogging there but i used to have this document called the ceo document and i tracked hundreds and hundreds of people i read lots of biographies and i tracked when they're born when they started their apprenticeship when they found success and then like what the success was i made these like in index databases i'm obsessed with databases i'm obsessed with researching things so i have hundreds of page pages of my notion document where i d how different companies work so i thought about creating a research company or a database company the the the reason i didn't start it it's because i couldn't find an appropriate problem to solve for so i have all these databases of information and i like to analyze them and figure out what they mean but i couldn't find a good use case or i couldn't find a reason why people would pay money for it other than it's interesting but i sought out like for six months like different companies in the space and i couldn't figure out the right like go to market strategy so i wanted to start a database company or research company because i love it i thought about sorry a media company i do have haven't not compete so i can't start like a business news email for another one year i think and so i couldn't do that and so i kinda fell in the hampton because i thought it was like it was perfect in my little e guy it was like what i'm good at what the world wants but i was really obsessed with research businesses we just had jason yan of the pod this episode will go live but he came the episode before this and i asked him a lot about research businesses i think they could be really big i also think that there's not a lot of like young ish entrepreneurs attacking that space because it's a pretty s old space that hasn't had a significant amount of innovation and i'm very but i'm very fascinated by it so research in data based businesses is what i wanted to do one of my favorite examples is cb insights i love cb insights i love pitch book i love those companies and i wanted to build something like that okay this next question i love although it's painful for me even to ask it because it's really it it cuts deep comes from omar what was the most painful thing someone told you and how did it change you okay i saw that question and i was trying to think of a good answer my answer is boring so my best friend his name is neville maduro i met him because he had a great blog on copy and one year in two thousand and thirteen i think it was fourteen i called the emailed him and i said neville my name is sam i'm gonna host his conference and i want you to come speak and i'm gonna pay for your flight i'm gonna take care of your accommodation well the conference was really like fifteen of my friends hanging out talking and i bought him a two hundred fifty dollar southwest flight and he's something to my couch and we became best friends after that and when he was there at my in my couch i gave him a towel to like take a shower and it was like a moldy towel and he was like dude you were just disgusting you're acting like this bachelor twenty three year old which you are but like you need to be a man you need to get your act together this is disgusting and i remember that changed my life when he and so i like it got together some of my like my my domestic skill set i also like i was i need act like a man i need to dress better i need like be more appropriate like i i gotta get my act together so that helped me a ton he also he devil does this a lot he criticize me all the time but in a really nice way or he's like i'm gonna tell you this because i love but i'm gonna give you feedback and another thing was when i've met this woman that he was like dating or maybe one of his friends i think was one of his friends he was like you're asking way too many intense questions the first time you meet someone you need to chill and quit talking about work and that was like painful to hear because that was my identity and so that changed how i had conversations and so he's done a good job neville eight six years older than me so he's kind of done a good job of like being my brother a little bit and like teaching me out to like act like a man so that was like a good thing i remember when i started my first company the hustle and this ceo of a large multi billion dollar media startup that everyone knows i'm not gonna call them out he told me i go i'm gonna start to think called the hustle i think it could become a huge thing he said this will never make more than a million dollars a year just come and join my company and i was so hurt because i admired this guy so much in my admiration for him turned to hatred not really hatred but like rage i was like i wanna like i wanted destroy you now and the reason i thought that was because i was so hurt my feelings were so hurt this guy that admire just totally shit on me and he was wrong but i believed him for like six months i like doubted everything i was like this is stupid but he told me that he won't even remember saying this this guy by the way he probably made he thought it was like an off offhand comment or that so something like that but it hurt my feeling so badly that i remember that like terribly and then the last thing was like anytime a girlfriend has ever like broken up with me that like that is always like stung me i i'll i'll i'll remember that for for decades like i'm still like trying like prove them wrong so like i'm pretty sensitive to like rejection yeah for sure the most painful moments always come from high school i think everyone can agree with that yeah like high school and college girlfriends where you're still trying to figure out yourself a little bit and they like and you get and and and they're right like you're not doing things the right way but and they're rejecting you it's like it's the most painful thing ever girls are so brutal okay this next question is from caitlyn what is one trendy business model you think is over height i think the n and web three stuff is just complete nonsense i think it's inferior entrepreneurs slapping their web three name on crap that no one wants and hoping that it's gonna work so but everyone knows that now i think what's over hyped i think starting a newsletters is really popular right now most people don't realize it is a treadmill it is very challenging to create new content just like this podcast it's hard this is a hard job i like it because i think i'm good at it or decent but it is very challenging any type of content business very very very very hard to do for like two or three years and newsletter the the newsletter space significantly different than when i started it is way more competitive way more challenging so i think that is a bit over hyped although i would still start one because i like it i think that most of the people in the space are not gonna work and it's pretty bad their content stinks because it's just a rinse and repeat of what already has existed so i think that's quite over hyped i would say getting popular on the internet can be awesome because you get an audience but in general i think that creating businesses based off your or like getting popular on twitter in in instagram and things like that i think it's incredibly empty feeling for most people and i think it's complete nonsense and your time would be spent building a company or focusing on your family than getting popular on social media i think it's empty i think that it's like small boy stuff i and i find it incredibly on interesting and there's many days that i regret trying to like become popular on the internet okay are you up to do one more we'll do it one more okay this one comes from jared s he is moving to san francisco he's curious about this idea of proximity to power so he's moving to s f with the clear intention to start a company and surround himself with high achieve his question is what did you do when you arrived or what did sean do when he arrived in s f to start laying the foundation to meet interesting people and business builders moving to a bixby city when you are young and have no family i think is absolutely awesome my time i lived in s for eight years i got angry at the government and i left because it was dangerous otherwise i would still be there in a heartbeat i have no problem paying the high taxes in order to live there i think it's a beautiful place i would still even go back there today if my wife wanted two maybe so one hundred percent worth it i loved it what i did when i got there was i went to meetup dot com and i went to crazy amounts of meetups i also did i started an event so i created it's so funny ci because it's so ci is one of my best friends si has a business that does like close to a hundred million year in revenue we've had him on the pod you guys maybe have heard of him he so i created this book club called the anti mba and the idea was we're gonna read one book per month and we're gonna break it up into quarter so week one we're gonna read a quarter and discuss it week two the the second half or whatever and i would have an expert come in on the books topic and we would just shoot the shit on with like thirty or twenty people on this book and i posted ads on craigslist on meetup dot com and where else i think i bought an ad in the newspaper for like two hundred dollars like i just posted these ads and c was one of the people who replied and after doing that for every week for about a year i had an email list of like two thousand people who are like following this book club online because i would write out my notes from the the meeting and doing that book club changed my life so i just hosted a book club and it was awesome it was so good it was such a fun way to meet interesting people and so that's what i did in order to meet interesting people is we just read cool books and we brainstorm and talked about them most people by the way didn't even read the book they just wanted to talk about it because i wrote notes ahead of time on like i wrote a summary on the book so that changed my life the way that i met sean was i had this event called hu con and there was this article and tech crunch about monkey inferno which was this incubator that sean ran and i saw a picture of the his office and it was magnificent and i cold email sean and i said hey man i'm hosting this event can i host the pre dinner at your office well we'll take care of all the food i'll even hire someone to clean it up but can i just like host it at your sick office and in exchange you can come to the dinner and meet all these wonderful speakers and attendees and he said yes and that's how i met sean and so i think what i did what i think more people should do is he just reach out to tons of people and i would say don't even reach out to like baller or people who are like ahead of you find other peers who seem like they got the jews who got the the charisma or who have who seemed like they're going some place like for me it was ryan hoover ryan hoover started this thing called product hunt we were buddies before even started it and i've got lots of friends that are now incredibly successful where we were just all like losers who were ambitious but we had nothing and and i did a good job of like colby emailing those types of people and we hung out a lot and we just i i became wonderful friends with them and it was through my book club it was through cold emailing twitter wasn't popular didn't even have a twitter back then so i just called emailed tons of people and i would highly recommend that's what you do is find peers who you think are gonna go places and you guys all try to succeed together and you try to be pretty selfless in the sense of like like when i hosted my events they all volunteered to help me out when they needed something i help them and so just like succeeding together i think was a really big deal now the issue is that takes like ten years or fifteen years but it's worth it and you're not doing it just because someone's gonna be successful like i had friends who are artists and like they financially weren't successful but it was just people who are were like kicking their dent in the universe and that was addict to be around that and we all kinda did it together and that's what what i i i had a book club the anti nba is what it was called because i was so jealous of the i i didn't go to a fancy school i remember when i moved to san francisco i took a bus out or a train out to stanford because i was like i wanna see what this shit's about like what's what's so special about those points that i felt like it awe and i was like so jealous that i didn't know what stanford even was when i was in high school so i was like i need to create my own stanford because i'm jealous of all these people that went here and so that kinda of the idea it was the anti nba it was free and i organized it so i would suggest book clubs meetup dot com i don't know is meetup dot com still i bet you it is right now when i in san francisco went there like six months ago and there was and someone someone like recognized me and they go sam i love the pod we're hosting a ai meetup and a hack right now do you wanna come and my wife and i were like yeah let's go and so we just like you got a car here we were like at the farmers market and they're like yeah was like alright come work i'm going with you and so we went to this guy's meetup up and it was magical i met all these ai people who i knew nothing about and it was magical to be in those meetups ups at these places where you have like a homogeneous group of people working on something that is not mainstream it felt really magical so i i i would say go to those events alright awesome book club another thing that you and oprah have in common i love it yeah so we have a lot in common me oprah so there were a lot of other questions we didn't get too but we'll do another one a little later let me know if you guys like this stuff peace yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on a less travel never looking back