I spent 48 Hours With 10 Billionaires. Here’s What I Learned.

alright you just got done hanging out with some big baller if we're off on you to where you think you have the audacity to wear a varsity jacket i have a stylist now is it marty mc from back to the future stylist it's ac slater let the bell i feel like i could rude to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a roll less track we just threw one of our annual events it's our basketball camp for founders what forbes calls the billionaires basketball camp they never covered it but i did pitch that to them in an email that they didn't reply to and yeah so we did this thing it was amazing and i guess what you wanna debrief what do you wanna know yeah yeah i wanna know everything so i've gone two out of the four years and it seems like each time the average net worth has gone up like you've added a zero to it because i i think i heard you did this event this year in greenville north carolina i think which is a very small town and there were seventeen private jets in town that weekend yeah out of like twenty five guests yeah it's pretty crazy so okay so i i wrote down some learnings because i don't wanna tell you too much about the event can you give some background to it the thirty second description is i hate conferences because networking suits and ties ice breakers awkward forced social interactions don't like that part but i also do love meeting new interesting people so the idea was like can you have the good without the bat can you have your cake eat to and i've learned in the past that basically every time you complain you've planted a seed of an opportunity so like my complaint conferences signal to me that maybe there's an opportunity to reinvent this right in innovation comes from irritation so my irritation at conferences has led me to ask a different question what would be the type of conference that i would love to go to and so we kinda architect of this thing that's basically just the three things we like the most put together so it was well what if we got together and instead of being in like a a ballroom c of the hotel and we're all just standing around awkward what if we got to and what if we got together and we played sports so we'll load if you played basketball so the the the ice breaker is when you get to the event you could put on teams and within an hour we go play back pick a basketball together and you get to know each other that way before you do small talk and all this other stuff the second part is so you play basketball sort of sweat all day and then at night we all hang out in a house and we do like impromptu to versions of ted talks so the idea is everybody in the room is world class at something it's like that guy knows more about how to sell on tv info commercials than anyone else and this guy could build the largest company in x category this guy built the largest company x category and so you pop them up and you say hey tell us something know teach us about that and they have little like rough slides that they that they take a ten minute talk about so that's the idea of the the event is two days with twenty five of the most interesting people in the world you play sports in it field you have a summer camp vibe but then you get the sort of lessons learned of a ted ted ted talk event and you're you're hosting it c hosting it i don't know how you describe it with jimmy a aka mister beast at his campus in last year and i think every year you get like a two one of the activities was like a tour of his movie studio if if that's what he tells us and it's pretty this year's cool we actually played a mister beast game so like we they thought they were going for the tour but we set it up so that he's like well i could show you this or you wanna do it and he had the cameras and the microphone set up and so he got to play this game and they made a video that's like private just for like it was it won't go out on youtube but it's like just for the group it's like the rich man version of of like going on like a six flags ride and they take a photo of you on the ride yeah exactly i was like have you ever done this before like we do this for the make of wish kids i was like oh perfect this is great and so do what can you say who was there or is that he i don't wanna talk too much about who was but i'll give you a couple of i i just wrote out three little lessons learned i'm trying i'm gonna try to keep this short because i can go all day about this type of stuff i have like pages and pages of notes that i wrote afterwards but i'll give you three things that i thought stood out so this is my lessons from billionaires number one intensity is the strategy so here's one of the things that happened at the event we had i think five people who owned nba teams at this event which is crazy that's like i don't know one sixth of the league and we're like what's the hardest part about owning a team you didn't really anticipate before you bought it right you've been a basketball fan your whole life and he was like well the hardest thing is that here's a guy on my team who's got a five year hundred fifty million dollar deal guaranteed so he plays good hundred fifty million dollars he plays bad hundred fifty million dollars his knee feels stories got boo he wants to sit out hundred fifty million dollars and he's like it is very hard to lead an organization where your upside and your compensation is guaranteed regardless of performance and he goes in my life i'm on a day to day contract with myself that's how i've always been let's fast forward about an hour now people broken up into smaller groups and two two rich guys in the corner are talking and i think they're about to get in a fight they're talking so loud and so passionately they're like nose to knows almost i'm like oh shit i gotta get over there so i've walked over i'm like i don't know what to do here turns out they're not finding they're just both so passionate about this one idea which is about living in the details so one of the guys was nba team owner named matt he owns the phoenix suns he also owns one of if not the largest mortgage company in in the country so he owns united wholesale mortgage you know he basically took over this business from his dad it was like a dad his dad side hustle and had twelve employees when he joined it and probably did i don't know like single digit millions in in revenue maybe at that time and you know that was you know whatever two thousand four they did like forty five mortgages know not not huge volume two thousand five still slow two thousand six still slow then o seven zero eight zero nine it starts to take off because other mortgage lenders during the financial crisis the subprime mortgage crisis they went under because they were writing bad mortgages he was not and so they picked up tons of business so they grew literally ten x in those years and grew and grew and grew and so now they do like i don't know over two hundred billion in loans two billion a year in profit at the company level so he's one of the wealthiest you know fifty wealthiest people in the country at this point with his dad's company big or is it like was it a subsidiary with a successful company or he really it was his own twelve person you know side hustle dude that's crazy i feel like there's also a bunch of different basketball or sports teams owners who's are in the mortgage business yeah dan gilbert all in the mortgage business i don't know there's any others there's definitely those two and their rivals so he he's talking to the this guy so i walk in and they're i think they're about they're not fighting at all the boats just passionate it and they're were both talking about dude you've gotta be in the details and this like a and so he said this this story that i thought was really great one of the things is if you weren't on the private we try to get you on on one of their private jets on the way out and so my buddy ram and got to ride with him on the way home and i was like what's the story because dude i walk the floor of my company every day i think his company has like thousands of employees ten maybe ten thousand employees or something crazy like that so he says i walked the floor every day and i'm looking for three problems and what he means by that is he talks to everybody like entry level people jan or the senior executives whoever he bumps into and he's just trying to find who's got a problem that's blocking them from this company being more successful like where our bottlenecks and he's just searching for it and so he goes i'm trying to find three a day he goes if i find a problem then right there i'll try to fix it on the spot so you know i will talk to my sales guy he's telling me about a problem with the it system we call the it guy we're like hey this guy's got a problem with the it system and the guy's like okay i'll look into it thanks you know he's like no no get off your ass like this guy's got a problem and needs to get fixed today and the guy comes and fixes the problem now all those sales guys don't have that it problem anymore and he's like i do three problems a day for three hundred sixty five days a year i'm solving a thousand problems that are stopping my company from growing so if you ask how do you grow it's you remove a thousand bottlenecks to growth every year and i was like that is that is awesome i loved that hey everyone really quick if you're enjoying this episode on ceo stuff and i've got something for you so the team at hubspot they actually went and fit together a bunch of best practices that sean and i use in our own companies and they put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand and so if you wanna just save yourself ten years of headache and heartache then you should check it out i wish we had this long time ago would to help me a lot but there should be a qr code on your screen that you can scan or a link of the description so check it out it's totally free and totally awesome did he talks like that just talking to one other guy yeah so the other guy was basically saying kind of the same thing about how he lives with he's i broke so in the detail and there was i'm at i'm selling the details contest that they were getting into and they were whole loving it they're like they're because you know i think the perception of a ceo of a managers that you're dealt work this visionary ten thousand foot level sort of thing and what they were saying that works for him for them is that they they live in the diesel they're on the ground floor of solving problems and we do this other thing which is we do a store so at night there's so many people there that have built big cp g brands that we wanted to we're like instead of just giving the talk what if we just went to walmart or target you just taught us about it there and so now we shut down a target at night so after the target closes they hold it open for an extra hour and a half for us we go there and we tour the target and then basically it's like every aisle go that's the pet food guy pet food guy teaches it up pet food hey you know jamie from ring was there like we're in this home security aisle jamie tells the story of ring but standing in the ring aisle holding the ring product tell us about this hey this guy dominates the board games category eight of the ten best bestselling board games in the world are his tell us how to hell that happens and he's like look check this out he's like you know they're so bad at restock our games he's like check out he rips the panel open underneath the things he's like they like for games they don't restock in the back they're just down here he's like so i will crawl under here and pick this up and put this back and this myself and so you see the scrap of people who are literally like baking billions of dollars and i just thought that's like at odds would i think which i think how most people view the role of a of a ceo so intensity as a strategy is interesting let me ask you if you if you've noticed this to be true or not i often wonder do you think that they were intense when they're in their twenties on the come up or are you just intensity and sharpness dial up the more you progress and the bigger opportunity you see that you maybe didn't actually think it was big but you kinda fell into for example there's this famous one of jeff bezos famous pitches was he's like man i think if we kill it we're gonna be this is gonna be a hundred million dollar company so it'd be pretty big and then like as the opportunity it opens up like did the intensity dial up or was he already intense so i think like with most things in life it's if you go to the people at the top it's always the combination of nature and nurture right it's the talent times the the ability to exploit the talent and so you know there's nobody up the top he was just totally talent us so you know it didn't they didn't get there with zero intensity so for example with matt he was a you know he's a small white guy who basically was a a a you know bench guy at michigan state basketball which is like the most hard nose grit ba college basketball team and program under tom and so he's like he even said it during his talk he was like look if you guys saw me on the court today like i'm not the most talented guy what i've always been like this mentality of all out work you and i wanted to clarify one thing so like it's never one or the other so when i say intensity is the strategy that doesn't mean they don't have any strategy or vision it means like all of one or the other wouldn't work so if you're all vision no walk right you're not down on the floor target getting the stuff out from under the shelf like that's not gonna get you anywhere if you're only restock the shelves and you have no vision you have no no no key insight this also gonna get nowhere work it's the combination that makes you dangerous and so for example the guy who does it with board games elon who who came on the podcast he he had the the right vision at the beginning which was we're gonna make games and the game is not fun the game helps the players be fun to each other right so you got the right big idea yeah which was how do we make games where the game itself is not fun but the game makes the players fun so when they're acting it out in char aids it's not that the card of char was fun the card of char sc let you be a fun or funny person and that's the secret we're gonna be the best in the world at that and then you know and then we pair it with the scrap ness same thing with the united mortgage united wholesale thing he had like a strategy which was different than everybody else most people like rocket mortgage they sell mortgages to the end customer right right like you need you're buying a home come buy it with us what he did was was different he's like look there's all these mortgage brokers out there what if we sell holds wholesale wholesaler to them then they win but they become our sales channel and all of a sudden there's thirty three thousand of those guys in the country we turned them into our salesman for us that's our sales fleet and he had very simple metrics he's like cool we think that broker mortgages is gonna become a third of the market and we think we can get to fifty percent market share of that we do those two things we're the biggest mortgage company in the world right so like a simple two sentence level of clarity about like what the hell do we need to do and then everything else is just intensity at that strategy i have a bunch of questions about that but do think that owning a basketball team is sort of like owning a house where you like dreamt of it and you finally get it and you're like this is a pain in the ass i wanna rent like well there was like a guy who's a minority owner and i was like yeah that's the way to do it because the minority owner yes you don't have the control but he only goes to games when he wants to and he could save the owner chime in and feel like an owner but he doesn't have like all the headaches right i like the other guys you know they're going to every single game you know regular season tuesday game against charlotte and you're you know you're you're in town for that it takes over your life completely and for some of them that's what that's exactly what they wanted for me i probably wouldn't want that you know that version of it there's there's other ways to it to have it poor guys now you give yourself a job right like you have total freedom at that stage and then you give yourself a job so this is it it is a way poor guys now they're not they don't feel that way they like that job they chose that job but it is no doubt a job one time i got to go it's so funny i was i participated in this share this charity thing my buddy has this thing where we were he and i participate occasionally help inmates skip jobs out of prison and it's like a universally loved foundation and one time i went to indiana state prison and i was sitting next to this guy just like talking as we were like it was twenty of us outside outsiders getting ready to go to the prison and talk to these guys i didn't know this guy was i was just talking to him and talk to her a little bit longer and then eventually it came like so do and he's like oh i own the pace and i got to go to the game with him afterwards that night we went to the game with him and seeing him walk around the stadium of his team was the best feeling ever restaurant owner energy it was him a billion it was restaurant owner energy tied of billion it was the coolest thing i've ever seen where i'm like have you seen the napoleon dynamite where the ladies looking at the little ship at a bottle and she goes i about that that's that's hot i'm like what's i was like i want that it was awesome today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com alright what's the second thing alright second thing would be culture is an action word so one of the things i was like you i'm looking up these guys and i'm thinking what do they do better than me where can i steal from their game where can i notice some delta some different so obviously intensity is one where they have this sort of psycho like enjoyment of being a man act in the details great that's one what's the second difference i noticed the second difference not psycho pass by the way i hang out with mario a bit who went mario who's one of the founders of oscar which is like a four or five billion dollar publicly traded company not psycho at all have you talked to him not at all he is technically brilliant and the cto and i think the cto and the technical brilliant people is ceo though they have a slightly different like superpower that they're bringing to the table but even guys like jesse it's who i think went this year and he has gone previously you know he's like a pretty nice calm guy he's a psycho just like in being calm do you know what to mean he's like an adventure psycho yeah so he is still has a little bit that psycho which funny okay sorry go jesse you wanna do for leisure he's a hundred mile races yeah you're like no no he's cool he's jill alright so culture is an actual word okay so i think for most companies culture is just a a you know a a set of generic words that are written on a wall that nobody remembers and definitely nobody's using in their day to day action and i think that probably want if you look at the companies that i thought had the most unique outcome most unique output of what they make right what is the unique input that that leads to that so jesse cole was there jesse cole from savannah bananas we had him on the podcast you know unbelievable story he made minor league baseball essentially right like something that almost like in the dictionary definition nobody gave a shit about and now has like a three million person waitlist list for tickets sells out eighty thousand person stadiums has more followers in social media than every other baseball team including the yankee combined so you know obviously it's done something magical with with the product so what's the what's the magical input alright so he's telling the story so this story was very inspiring to me so he goes okay the ceo the founder has some vision of how we wanna deliver this magical wonderful a plus plus customer experience but how do you get if that if it's in if your experience is in the hands of you know some new guy who joined nine months ago and you know is getting paid a modest salary and you know they've never worked in an environment like this how do you get them to care the way you care it's very very hard right i think this is like the biggest challenge i once met the founder of chipotle and he said you oh you're going into food service anybody in foods service is gonna make a billion dollars if you can figure how to get a minimum wage employee to treat the customer as if it's their guest and you know so so that's like the mindset okay so how do you do it so he he goes you gotta show him not tell him he goes so we have this value called you know you always plus the experience meaning like whatever the experience was we plus it the next time so he goes this year our players were coming to like first day of mini camp so before the season even starts so they got all their players and he goes you know he thinking about it with his team and he goes you know we want them to put on a show for people we want them to know how special it feels to go to something we want them to make the fans feel special but we never make them feel special he's like so here we go he goes we have like i don't know he like a week to plan this or something like that and he goes we're gonna turn their first day orientation into a show and so he goes they get down from there their you know they're at the hotel it's you know we're gonna report we're gonna go through orientation so they're kind of like how anybody is for first day employee orientation in a player for a first aid player on the job you just sort of you know zombie walking through through life at that point he goes they come downstairs the cars have been replaced by the psych special bus the bus is surrounded by a police escort they're like what and he he's like we're only going like twelve hundred feet away but but you have a police escort to go from here to there because you are special you are a star and we're gonna treat you like a star and he goes as they start going with the police escort all of our headquarters staff and employees we're outside we're cheering we got signs we got because they get there they come out of the the the bus boom fireworks go off oh you got fireworks going into the sky we start singing the song to them they're they're being serena by us they walk through the aisle they enter the stadium in the stadium we have the motivational video on the screen they're seeing themselves as kids when they were baseball players and now they're grown up and the story is telling them is that you made it to the big show you are here and he's like he tells this story about how he fired up his players and how they were like what just happened for there and there's no fans no customers are even at this this was how he trained his employees basically this was just how we welcomed his new new players and he goes you think after that they're gonna walk a little differently for day one of doing their job he's of course of course they will of course they now know what we mean when we say you put on a show you plus the experience all these values like you gotta live it you know if you want them to live it and i was like i had goosebumps dude it was awesome alright can we queue the sound bite of sean make in fun of me for caring about culture and values there's was literally ten days ago who's like you care because we're like you know we've i've been working on culture for like last two months and yeah i think i decided that integrity is gonna be a culture for us and that is not how it we're good we're gonna really we're gonna really do a good job that is not how it went down and two you gotta start feel like how made you just feel what jesse cole was telling that story that's what i want from you saying that's the level that's the bar dude i don't have a bus or a place to go to bus we have no reason to leave sue whatever you gotta do you do it it is pretty dope i mean that is i i have been working really hard at this and when i hear this i'm like that's like a ten out of ten i'm doing like a two out of ten i wonder what it was like in the year one versus the year whatever he's in now but that that is like actually inspiring i do totally buy into treating people a certain way and you do things that don't math out on paper and it definitely does math out on paper eventually right right yeah that's so true yeah because i mean obviously that's just a cost right those fireworks aren't free that buses isn't free that police escort isn't free where where's the roi i can't put into excel sheet the roi of getting people to care of getting people goosebumps but it just it just feels right you know like its intuition is a hard thing to justify within a company which is very strange and and this it's the same thing by the way with all of mister beast crew because it's like you work jimmy you're doing things in a certain way he makes you feel like you're a part of something huge something special something unstoppable something that's gonna be you know and something that's a once in a lifetime ride and so people give a once in a lifetime level of effort towards it i'd be curious to hear how some of the people who have more boring companies like a mortgage lender how they instill this because you know excuses or assholes and we all got them and they all stink this is an excuse but i wanna hear jesse i'm like okay that is a baseball team that's i can make that cool how does the insurance broker do it and so that would be curious to to hear how they do it and like yeah it's easy to do that when you're mister beast i don't actually think this way but this is like an excuse that a lot of people listen to this with says yeah it's easy when you're mister beast and you have and you're making videos online that's pretty cool but what about if you're selling nope notepad i don't know like boring yeah i don't think it changes at all like if it's if it's boring to you there yeah it's boring to them is it boring to you like next the guy selling the notepad is he's selling a notepad or is he selling something much bigger than that right is it like you know jesse it's he's there he sells a wall calendar a piece of plastic you put on the wall it's thirty dollars now you could look at that you could like it's just a calendar who cares or you could be like you know he tell he told me the story you know about like people in his life that pat like why did you get so into this and how did you turn away from the money monster because i that's what i think is really remarkable of him he's unlike the rest of people in the room like he seems so secure that he's he's not still chasing something he's just like living the life he wants and he was like you know behind had people in my life pass away alright like you know people very close to me my family members pass away and i realized like how short life is and how i'm just pissing years away like years are important bro we don't get very many of them and he starts talking about years and when he talks about years it's like you're holding bricks of gold and that there's only twenty five of them or thirty of them left in your life and like if you only got thirty of these bricks of gold left in every year one melts right through your fingertips like are you gonna let that happen like we gotta be really intentional about how we treat our ears and what do you think is just gonna happen or you think you got plan it if you're gonna plan it guess what you need a biggest ass calendar on your wall right like he takes you down that road he didn't that's not him speaking that's me speaking for him but i think with any product if you don't have a big why behind it you're not trying to play at a high level with it then obviously you can't instill that at anybody else so for the listener jesse has been on our podcast a bunch of times and he's famous and popular the internet for being he was already a he he was a successful entrepreneur started and sold some companies married a very successful woman who started it and sold the company what i wanna ask you sean is did you whenever i'm around incredibly ambitious people like the billionaires of the world like for example i've been to ramp you know ramp the credit card company is like a take over the world startup i've been to their office and whenever i'm around these guys you start like getting these desires where you say like a i want what they have and b their energy becomes contagious you know the most successful people the energies contagious where you're like should work harder i should do you know if you're around elon musk or something you're gonna wanna like work harder but then when you're around a jesse you think he's doing it right you know what i mean like like people who are really successful and regardless if they're in the grinder or the calm path they're contagious were you finding yourself getting like you know caught in the bro i'm a leaf blowing in the wind at these are ads i talked to one guy i'm like i should start a youtube channel i started talked to another guy i'm like board games are sick and then i talk to jesse i'm like i need to run a race why i'm running yeah know i've i will i'm i'm so easily manipulated and influence it's wonderful whenever i go to these things and and and the truth is is like just like this podcast the truth is not i mean in you're setting of hanging out with him for twenty eight hours that is not actually the truth either like you know there's always bullshit on the back end that everyone's life that you don't truly see so nothing's as good or probably as bad as it seems but were you attracted to one lifestyle i mean the truth is over time i've figured out how to do these events and how to do these events is you are curious about everybody so you should not ride anybody off open mind second thing you're looking for the parts not the whole so you're looking for what of little elements that i wanna steal for my game because nobody's perfect on the whole and nobody's the right match for you on the whole no advice is right for you it's just what was right for them and so you sort of you're looking for the parts that resonate the parts that make you excite the parts make you interested you sort of note that you become aware of those because there's something in you that's that's there even after it sparks some interest in you you have to sort of ask like do i want the life or the lifestyle that like yeah i would love to walk through target and be like that's my product on the walls then i hear about what it took to get there and i'm like this is an absolute like deaf game to play i don't wanna i would not wanna play that game yeah i'm not willing to pay that price yeah you know cool i like that you know gi the you know he gets to do all these incredible things because he's the most like followed guy in the world that's i mean incredible wow how inspiring at the same time he's got four assistants at every hour of his day they're like you gotta be doing this and need be doing and you need be doing this you need be doing this and like he just got off a flight from here and now he's gotta go to fight from there he's i mean that is not a lifestyle i want so you gotta understand like you have to want the lifestyle of doing it not the life of having it and it's too easy to want the life of having it that doesn't count that's like i like check me yeah sure so do but like do you actually like to pay chess like you know that's kind of a an important distinction to make so i'm always looking for the lifestyle not the life because if you like the lifestyle you'll actually do it you'll stick with it long enough to get whatever your results are gonna be based on you know your talent and your luck as as you go alright let's take quick break because gotta tell you a story let me tell you about the first time i try to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a junky interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send in froze they flagged the transaction they lock my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new bank solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why you use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking to level of your banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank baked surfaces are provided through choice financial group call man a and evolve bank trust members fdic what about the third one alright third one you can't top pigs with pigs you ever heard this phrase before no what's does that mean surfaces so it's a walt disney store well one of walt disney's early movies was three little pigs and i was like a short base that he made and it was really successful i think he won like an oscar or something for it one like it would did very well and so of course the distributor comes to him and he's like walt what's next there what you know what's like yeah work out what next he goes hey i got a tip more pigs and he's like he would but they're serious to like you gotta do a sequel and he's like walt had this thing he goes i don't think you can top pigs with pigs and he had this belief that like if i wanna do the next great thing i can't just try to do that again and in fact he ended up sort of getting influence over time to do a sequel and it did okay but he was never proud of it he thought it was like shit i should not have done i knew it i knew it you can't top pigs with pigs and he had this emphasis on originality and reinventing yourself and i would say at this group there was kind of two groups of people there was what i would call the exploit you know guy who sells a company in one space for three hundred million dollars and guess what he's back in that space again with a new company and it's gonna solve for three billion dollars this time he knows the space so well he's exploiting his deep his depth of knowledge and maybe his passion for the space and and that was one group of people and there there's like ten of them about the event and then there was ten at the event that we're just reinventing themselves and i personally was very drawn to the reinvent maybe it's just like you know what are romantic as you would say like like i think it's just more romantic of an idea for how to live life can you give an example of of one of them yeah so joe j the founder of airbnb he's there and joe actually like he left airbnb he initially started a company a really cool company but it was also in the kind of housing designs with they called since there i'm sorry i think and it's basically like backyard ad if you're in california and now you're allowed to have a backyard unit well here's like a manufactured pre fab backyard unit cool and it was doing well but joe reinvent reinvented himself so at this event he gave a talk that just like brought the house down it was unbelievable literally like you had thirty people chanting usa at the end because he told the story of his meeting with trump where he ends up becoming the chief design officer for america which wasn't even a role before joe got there and how he wanted to serve and he wanted to use his super superpower which is design and creating this like delightful like user experience but bring it to an area which had been like zero care about user experience which is like you know government paperwork government websites you know things that literally look like the first version that was made in nineteen eighty six and you know actually like taking the time and care to like up those experiences you know very simple example was the you know people this has been talked about publicly so i can talk about this to retire from the government the paperwork was kept in the mine like an actual like physical mind and it was paperwork and that's what made sense in the sixties because that's all we had was it paid like six months just literally physically walking around and fetching the paperwork and getting all the right people to sign off on it exactly so like let's say you served you know thirty years you're ready to retire and now you go through the sort of brutal six to twelve month paperwork process to retire and like look nobody's ever that's never gonna be a top priority for anyone to go fix so you just have these like tragedy of the commons type problems where it's nobody but nobody wins political points for fixing these nobody makes any money nobody themselves by by fixing these things and therefore they just never get fixed and so it takes somebody like oh who's just like i just don't like seeing bad bad design bad feelings bad user experiences like i just think we could do better like why can't we do better and so he's bringing that to all types of the government they told this incredible story and you out of i think you've seen him talking when he when you just chat with him one zero one he's you know he's a quiet guy when he talks he's an absolute show well he's got politician energy a little bit we're not a bad way but in a good way where he like turns it on he turns it on my man could use a pause let me just put it that way if a man knows how to use a pause like he he is unbelievable at public speaker i've seen him do a public a few talks i went to the airbnb office and i've seen talk and then i i've seen youtube videos of him talk and then i met him in real life last year and i was like do you hate me i was like why why are you talking like i thought you were this like extroverted guy and he was just incredibly quiet he was just super quiet very low key and then i've i've seen him turn it on and it was like that was pretty remarkable there was a so reinventing himself so that that was a reinventing himself literally created a the perfect role for him that didn't even exist in the world and i think about that was example of like you can't top pigs with pigs like he couldn't top airbnb with another tech start but he could top it by doing this incredible thing that's like takes his genius applies it in the act of service at the nation's scale what has he designed like have you seen he showed us some some stuff but have you seen like so there's the retirement side of things like the national parks website like national parks are one of the like best things that america has like most countries don't have this amazing free beautiful land that anybody can go and and and and explore and he redid the national park stuff he redid the food pyramid so like he's big into like the bobby kennedy side of things about like look it's crazy we're so unhealthy as a country and we're chronically ill and then you go look at the original food pyramid which was like the foundation of your day cereal carbohydrates bread grains and it's like so they made the new food pyramid in the new a new website that kind of educating people about that so you're just every every touch point and so i think there's there's some more big stuff coming other one there was a guy on the on the phone there and we're like hey man we yeah we got no phone policy here you keeps just be taking calls otherwise everybody would just start taking calls here this event sucks and so we walk over and was like hey you got a lot of do this he's selling his company right now for today for five billion dollars it was the founder of b and so you just sold his company same day for five billion and he's just there like he's there with us but i'm i i assume like part of him is just like somewhere in the clouds you know like enjoying himself at a whole different level but did you see people in twitter like like mocking that yeah how big of a loser do you have to be to try to mock somebody who just sell the company for five million dollars it's he like twenty nine years old or something insane he he's yeah that can't even fathom how people do that it's not funny but a few hours later you know he's in the asana and he's telling us about like how he's just been tinkering with cloud code and how he's how he's just building these things and he's like relearn learning to code basically through ai and what can be built now and he's really like asking these questions and he's going into a whole new space now with his next company and doing something completely different and i just thought wow that is like the same day he's you know sells is gonna for five billion dollars he's already begin already back to being a white belt at something new and full like beginner mind with that i was pretty inspired by that there was just several people that were that were in that in that boat so you and i have founded companies and i believe both of the or all the things that we have founded have range from millions to tens of millions in revenue and huge percentage of our friends are in that category which is like yeah very successful but then there's different levels of success did you notice and this is a very selfish question for myself because i wanna get better did you notice any distinct differences for the people who had like relatively mild success companies versus these breakout home runs like companies so for example i've met you know when i to host hustle khan i distinctly we've had probably a hundred people speak it was my conference series years ago and it was all the hot startups ups from like two thousand and fourteen to like two thousand nineteen and like i remember talking to like one of the founders of we work not adam but the other guy miguel and i remember talking to the founders of casper and all these like great companies and then a bunch of other companies that were in the billions of dollars and i thinking oh you're definitely not more special then like a normal successful person you just have been at it for a while or there's been like some luck that happen your our away or you you just didn't give up which is which is special but then i've met occasionally i'll meet other people like i met the founder of grammar and i remember talking to sky max and i was like oh you're just a you're a genius you are legitimately better than me or same with mario the founder of oscar when don't you talk to him i'm like yeah you're you're like one percent the one percent the one percent of iq and also you're fairly bold so it's a no brainer that why you're successful and we will never be the insane and so did you like notice any trends like that yeah definitely i mean i would say if you ever wanna get a really big number in math you probably can't like you're probably not just changing one of the variables it's a because these are multiplier right so it's like you multiply several variables together suddenly you get to sort of ga you number at the end if just try to add numbers together it doesn't really work it's a multiplier and so for example what are those what are some of those variables i would say one variable is endurance so a lot of the people there had sold their company and like if you just look at the people who had sold their company for let's call it fifty million hundred fifty million five hundred million a lot of times that same company is now worth five billion and it's like they just sold early and they were ready to move on and the what's the difference between them and the guy who actually is worth five billion or their company source five they've just stayed at longer they stayed in the company for a a longer period of so i'd say an uncommon level of endurance is is one i would say there's a multiplied by zero moment so almost every company there was like tell me there's other story about when you almost failed and they're like oh happy to i remember when it was christmas time and we almost ran out of we were growing fast we actually ran out of cash we didn't realize it because we were so dumb about inventory planning and so here we were we were gonna three hundred eighty million dollars in revenue and we were about to go broke and i had two weeks left and i had to go get a loan i had to go get funding and then the funding got pulled out within twenty four hours of the deadline and then i personally you know like mortgage my house and then i got this and then this and then this and this or like you know we lost the deal to get into retail to this other company but then i came over the top and i guaranteed we would spend three million dollars on tv ads and by the way i had three hundred thousand dollars in the bank but that sealed the deal then i had to hustle to get the three million and then that got us into retail and now we do five hundred million in retail every year right or whatever it is this is always a story like that everybody's got their own flavor and so they avoided the multiplied by zero events when you hear joe from airbnb talk about airbnb the number one takeaway i had is this company shouldn't exist it's a miracle child like it should have died at any of those five points you mentioned because that those are we're left it's over at moments like there's no recovering from that but you guys did and that's miraculous and it was like five miracles to get there so i i feel like that's another one so endurance is one i would say not getting multiplied by zero not dying at a moment when you could have died or like you didn't get the deal but then you did get the deal like they were gonna go with somebody else over the last minute you you flipped it like and those turned out to be huge fork in the road moments for what the outcome of that business was gonna be i think project selection so you know you know like james clear is there and james clear has written his book is like the number one selling book in the world over the last five years all categories it's not like just non fiction not like just in the us everything and why and you know part of it is he talks about like this moment when he was making he's like he really wanted to make the book about deliberate practice he's like that was actually the insight was that you have to do just deliberate practicing one of the core insights he goes it could've have been a deliberate practice book that talked about habits but guess what nobody would buy a book that says deliberate practice on the cover but a lot of people turns out wanted to buy a book that has habits on the cover about breaking bad habits and building good ones and it has to deliver a practice as chapter or whatever three or whatever it is and so just picking things that have like the right tam either because you knew it in advance or you stumbled into something that actually had a huge market but even though it sounded kinda small and so wait to begin with so those are my three takeaways to recap intensity is the strategy being at the ground floor level that idea of three problems a day for three sixty five days solving a thousand problems in your company i thought that was great culture is the action word the jesse cole story of treating the players to a show to instill them what it means to give the fans a show and then you can't top pigs with pigs being willing to reinvent yourself after success go back to the beginning and have the beginner mind go back to the bottom of the mountain and do it again i was inspired by that so those are those are three of my my big ones alright well that's pretty cool i'm happy you had a good time i'm happy that you it even happened you chose it literally the worst weekend of the year i know there was the biggest like storm in the country happening the same day so we had to twenty four hours before changed the entire event that we've been planning for months it was like you know all these planners and whatnot but we pull it off it worked out that's why i hate the events business it's it's very stressful it's it's like running a marathon it sucks while you're doing it it sucks in preparation when you get done with it you're like that was awesome i wanna do it again ours is worse not even a business we don't charge anyone anything we just pay for this out of pocket so you have all of the headache without the roar the reward is just getting to attend something that's dope and you know hang out with cool people well i'm happy to that i'm happy with a good podcast that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and ph are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top newer and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast