The Simplest Way To Make $1M In 2026

we have this podcast called my first million where we're coming with all these complicated schemes of how someone could make the first million meanwhile in the relationship sara made first million before sam with the simplest scheme of all i feel like i could rude to wear i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on road so we invited our buddies from tv mh john geo here to do one of our favorite episodes that we do every year called sarah's list and it's called sarah's list in honor of the queen herself sam's wife sarah you know it's a classic story really she just joined a great company that was clearly already great as like employee three thousand and the math was like this she got a job at airbnb and i think of you know her numbers aside the general math is you get a job and they'll offer you maybe like a forty or fifty k a year stock package in addition to your salary so you get your salary you get your health care they got a kitchen where they're serving your lunch they got oat milk in the fridge so you you're not sacrificing anything she didn't have to come up with the idea of airbnb she joined it she wasn't the first employee grinding like crazy she was employee three thousand but that's stock package which over a four year period is you know you're granted about two hundred thousand dollars worth the stock five and she made a million bucks before either me or sam and so we kinda wanted to honor the brilliance that is joining companies that are already clear winners especially in tech because the winners can run so far yeah and so every every few years me and sam have i've done this where we come up with our list we call it sarah's list which is the the ten companies you would join right now because as a person your time is essentially your investment right you're when you joined a company that's an act of an investment it's funny because i know some investors who did who who made an investment in that unicorn round and they had the exact same logic they were like complete par market fit obvious runner like just but just pile money into this like easy investment that it worked she joined i think at the eighteen million dollar valuation something like that okay and then covid happened and we were like wow sure shit that was a good idea that sucks it didn't work and then obviously everything changed in six months and then i think it it peeled around a hundred billion dollars and you guys remember that famous interview with brian c where he's told on air he's like the share price is this and it's worth a hundred million dollars he's like i i i didn't know that until just now because back then in two thousand and nineteen or eighteen when it was eighteen million dollars we were like this could be worth like thirty billion dollars like you know like if works yeah yeah like if everything works and so anyway that was her story and it worked out great because she worked a normal amount had great maternity pate maternity package had great benefits all that stuff and so we've done this for a few years but you wanna you know it's something we've actually haven't actually done this in like eighteen months because it's been so hard these last twenty or twenty four months with everything going on with ai and so you guys are pretty cool to have because i think you'll know a lot more about some of the latest and greatest yeah we wanted you guys on because not only not only you guys aren't you guys super smart but you guys part of your show is you're talking to the ceos these companies in these like fifteen minute interviews every single day and so you're getting a good sense for kind of like who's who's doing well who do you believe what what companies excite you so we wanted to hear what you guys have by the way last time sam went back and checked i think of the ten companies that we did in our last round which was something like eighteen months ago or two two eighteen months two years ago something like that i think we got six out of ten that are like already either there or pacing to be there so for example like when we did open ai and we were laughing we were like hey here's this shocker or open ai it was a hundred billion dollar valuation at the time it's now like you know close to eight hundred billion now and so and we even said like look there's no bonus points for difficulty in life in the game of business like sometimes the best companies are just hidden plain sight the right in front of you and so i think we've done pretty well the biggest one was andrew we did andrew in twenty one i think and that was four billion at the time and i think it's ninety or fit i don't i don't i remember a lot of those companies would stay on the list honestly like i think you know even even if you just done andrew last year like the valuation has increased so much that it still makes sense to include yeah the the biggest mistake that people make is not going with an obvious winner because it's already in the couple billions and it just looks like okay what what's the potential upside from here and and that's just been right wrong so many times in the last ten years do you guys have to take shares or equity instead of dollars for advertising we we have but it's more just just over last year we're super young business and it's made sense to to optimize more cash for like actual real revenue yeah john and i the the suits come by themselves yeah yeah it was a actor but yeah laura don't pay monopoly money alright so jump in wait let me tell you one quick story sean i saw i was at ramps office so and i saw the pitch that jo or i think all you guys this is great both of you guys sent and i saw one line and and eric said that jo wrote it or something like that where he was like the the the beginning of the pitch it said if you advertise with us you'll get so big that you're gonna be dragged in front of congress because they're gonna accuse you of having a monopoly i think this is john's line this is yours very yeah that's so good there's i don't know if you guys are all fans of it's almost sunny in philadelphia but the dentist system one know dennis has this thing where he's basically talks about the implication yeah and so it's like it's not it's not that they're in danger but it's the the implication of danger exactly and there's this famous line in advertising that craig clement told us when he was on the podcast and he he talks about how there's just one i know if it was a supplement or like a a perfume or something like that that was it was having trouble selling and then they switched the copywriting to say you know the the founder swear she swear that this does not contain any illegal stimulants and it's like she swear it just there's nothing illegal in this it's just that damn good it's and it's the implication that works yeah yeah i mean it's it's so funny because yeah we wanna win super hard with our with our sponsors and like the hardest you can win in tac is like you know that mark zuckerberg moment when he goes on hill in his senator okay wow he's actually at that level that big one's senator internet i thank just editor we run ads right that's like with my fitness campaign no one's accusing me of taking anything yet which means it's not working on take more capital yeah yeah why does everybody think i'm all mad this i've talked before about the way that i know how to make money about how how build of money making skill about how to leverage your time and energy and the team at hubspot actually went through the video where i explained all that and turn it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money now this is not you know get a quick advice it's just core principles foundational principles about building wealth things that i wish i knew when i was you know just getting started and so if you wanna download it it's in the description below it's totally free you can go get it thanks to the folks at helps hubspot for we're doing the research making this document and make it available to all you guys alright back to the steps episode alright so let's jump in we each have roughly three each we're gonna try to get twelve maybe some bonus honorable mentions cool my first pick this is a company you guys might not even know about which i like i like to surprise you but i'm just coming in strong here zoo tech okay zoo tech is a company that's based out in new zealand and they're the third biggest toy company in the world so they make if you've ever seen mini brands sam a big mini mini food collector he bet he likes the little mini toys they make some of the most popular toys in the world the the bunch of balloons where you can fill up thirty water balloons at once know that type of stuff yeah so the founder nick came on the podcast he's the wealthiest man in new zealand and his stories insane probably the craziest grind story i've ever heard by the end of the episode i told him i ago i think you're the closest thing to elon musk that i've ever seen people just don't know about you because you live on the other side of the world and you were in the toy so kinda of people overlook you so he's got a new company and his new company or it's actually based in there it's they're building homes with a factory basically here's what you do he's got a three you know it's like chad you just described you drop a pin where you're gonna put the home it automatically no matter where in the world any country in the world any city in the world any neighborhood in the world you put it it automatically downloads all it has all of the building codes and the permitting and the terrain so it knows if you're on an incline if there's a hill there or whatever right it has all of that already built in and it's called dream catcher so you basically describe the home you want you're like want this like kind a minimalist bubble blah blah five thousand square feet make it cool blah blah so you basically describe like chat you do the home you want mh and it renders it all using like unreal engine so it renders the whole thing in front of you it creates like an ai video of like a home walk through for you using kinda like a you know mid journey type of thing and then you literally like build the home you click it and he's got a factory in china that's like the iphone building factory but it actually builds all of the sub components for this home and it's insane like they went and bought like when the pal fire happened and people needed to sell their lots they bought like eighty million dollars worth of lots in la and he's building he's basically gonna print these i say print just it's it's building with a robot yep like fifty million dollar homes in la and so this it was the most impressive demo i've ever seen seeing the homes that they're building and it's real like this guy is he's basically like you know manufacturing genius him and his brother they have huge factories in china to be able to do this stuff and the crazy thing about homes is homes is a space that's really never been touched by by definitely not ai but really even most technology doesn't really go into construction and home construction and when you're selling homes that are multimillion dollar homes you don't have to sell that many of them to be doing billions in revenue and so if there was one company that i could kinda empty the tank of my life savings into i would be pouring it into this which means it's a contender for ce list for me love great case did he talk at all about why previous attempts in this category haven't worked because i there's been there's been a number there's kind of like a i like this i like this bet because there's actually like a graveyard of silicon valley companies that have like made efforts yeah because he's not a silicon valley company he's the guy him and his brother have been basically been building factories in china for like the last twenty years so they're were manufacturing powerhouse so for example they were in the toy space and they became the third largest toy company in the world do like over a billion dollars of pure profit a year just into the two brothers pockets like it's crazy then they went into the diaper space they're like oh you know what let's go compete in one of the most like difficult to compete with things against pro and gamble it built the fastest growing and now think i think it's if it's not the number one it's basically like right up there with hug and pampers now even those it's brand new diapers company you know the selling and target walmart like crazy and they manufacture their own diapers and the reason why was he found that in china there was like a different style of diaper manufacturing different materials and basically brought that to market in the us they built the largest that then they do the same thing in hair care and they did it with they have the fastest growing brand on tiktok for hair care and now they're doing it for homes and so that i think the big difference is like elon hardware is hard and most software founders you know go for a rude awakening when they go into hardware whereas these guys have been doing literally like not just hardware but like the the building of the factory is the hardware part the factory that makes the product is sort of secondary to it but building an all highly automated factory is the number one one thing and they've been building factories for a very very long time it's actually hilarious when they went to china to start their toy company they built like he went there because he heard oh all the manufacturing happens in china but what that usually means is you go find a manufacturer you'd tell you tell them what you want to make and they make it he went to china didn't realize that like an naive mistake and built his own factory there like on the side of a river that's great like did it all from scratch because he didn't understand like oh when people say they manufacture in china it doesn't mean they go manufacture in china they find an existing manufacture he he missed that part and just went the hard way from the beginning that's funny that's great sean sounds like sounds like you don't like this guy at all did i say i'm a fan fan of this guy what do you think but will this actually work as the bear case like what what unpack that a little bit well the the demo was so insane is that you just have to ask the question like is this like many ai products that demo well but production shot sure sure sure and so basically the demo was so good yeah that you know you just kinda gotta see a home first before you you know you fully believe well i mean what i i would put like tariffs is more of the bare case like if you if china america relations degrade further than it's gonna be harder to get stuff across the borders gonna get hurt well here's here's the craziest part of the whole thing yeah i thought you know you try to find cost savings when you do stuff like whether you did in china or you're using new technology and so the question was is it ten percent is a twenty percent what how much is it it's basically like like more than an order of magnitude so it's more than ten times cheaper to build the homes this way which i think is the kind of the exciting part because if you could build the cost to build if you could bring the cost of building down you know that's actually like very very meaningful for like i don't of progress in the world but this breaks the whole point of the list this is not sound i don't wanna work with the person that sounds like elon there was no caveat that said the founders is completely saying and i didn't we didn't add that we just said you join a company that's already got exist these guys have a hugely successful business already anything but it has a chance to 5x x because there's there's a pathway there alright what's the that was my first company let's switch to somebody else yeah let gas go first let let the guest go first let's be be good okay quick caveat so we were under the impression that we had to be picking companies under a billion dollar valuation it's a good kind of exercise and actually like understand that early stage today still means sub one billion basically jordan are you carrying like a five thousand dollar handbag in that in that photo it's not it's a duff bag can we do the origin well well so so so the i mean the bit the the the you know origin of t vpn is other people have described it as you know espn for tech in business what's funny is that john and i do not watch any of the traditional american sports football basketball baseball etcetera anyway first one var space industries helm by none other them than delhi bass wi former spacex valuation seven hundred and twenty six million but were you like one of those multi decade projects that could have really really large tam really really large what expected do you so they manufacture things in space so they do not build the rockets they partner with spacex to launch a capsule and then inside that capsule they effectively have created a manufacturing environment where gravity is an off switch and so for certain things imagine you're trying to grow a crystal where you're trying to grow a drug or heart tissue or there's applications for certain types of fiber doing a lot of biomedical biomedical work right now and then there's also defense applications if you can get things up into space and get them down there's a whole bunch of interesting things you can do there and so the company's maybe four or five years old at this point hundred and fifty employees based in los angeles obviously you know very hardworking working environment but especially with the new nasa administration things are moving much faster spacex there was a lot of uncertainty last year they started landing the starship and launch costs are starting to tick down again and so it gets easier and easier and when they first put up their first capsule in space this is the real question with a space companies like how long will it take them to actually do something in space it used to be five ten years they got their first capsule up in just a few years they're already on their fifth or sixth capsule people stop suddenly got it back they got about of space companies put stuff up into space but that's kind of the the end end of the story and so i think our our kind of framework for var like if you get a group of ultra talented and people together ultra hardworking people together that can develop the capability of simply put stuff up in space and bringing it back down it's gonna have a really wide range of applications over the long run what's the founder like will brewing is like completely like super sharp by the book spacex engineer background who has been able to talk to big pharma ceos and get them to sign up and then dal you know in delhi deli who's like obviously quite a character very very loud has but the company in general has been very like anti hype so there's a lot of companies in space that are just hype businesses they will get all the way to the public markets with without having accomplished much if anything at all yeah and var has been doesn't chase the hype they weren't coming out this last year having like a new pitch around data centers just because that would have gotten them and so for being a space company they're extremely i would say grounded focused on developing capabilities that are gonna be like john said very valuable in a wide variety of applications and there's like one i it's a very difficult space capital intensive they're not a lot of there's some they're a decent amount of companies they're sending stuff up to space there are many fewer that are bringing stuff back down and it's and it it hasn't been a huge hugely competitive space where there's like ten players we we had someone sean on the pod i think like last year explained this company and they went through this huge thing about why it was cool and we were like why do pharmaceutical companies need to make drugs in space like why like we like they forgot to explain doesn't explain that part there were like oh it's great because you can men like you know no no manufacturing thousand times more expensive than doing on earth but there's just specific chemicals like very rare things but but again you have to view this says as you know multi decade thing if you believe in space if you believe that you know launch costs are gonna continue to fall it's gonna get cheaper and cheaper then there's like this interesting trend that you're on the frontier of and right the company's been very good at weather storms whether there's like some slight you know sell off in the market or the narrative changes like the the company is well managed and so if you can just keep getting through those and just always be the best space the the best company that like does stuff in space space like that's good you know i i i do like so i do like that you're riding the wave of basically like is elon gonna get better at doing rockets yep and if he does the cost per whatever per gram to take something up into space is gonna keep falling you just keep you get to keep your business keeps getting better yep the more hard work elon does i kinda like that in general as a as a thesis so last year origin landed their heavy rocket and so now there's actual there's actually two companies and so that means real pricing power pressure which is like very very good by the way i was this is my i have two two tangent yeah i was reading the elon biography which i'm late to but kinda like it because every you know everybody's is out on everybody's done with it and i'm the only guy you still in there poking around there's an amazing section i don't know you guys have read this but it's about the tweets back and forth between elon and bezos the the sort of rival the this passive aggressive rivalry around the launch thing sam i don't know if you've seen this there's no recent ones bezos just posted the tortoise tortoise i'm the tortoise going he's going tortoise about sloan steady who's the passive aggressive one both of them so first so blue origin was like the first to do a reusable launch which they elon wanted badly right but blue up but he was basically like they didn't go up very high yep they and so he was just like he's like bezos post a picture be like oh my god we did it i'm standing next to one of the the perhaps the rarest item on earth a reusable rocket or or a reused rocket a a reused rocket we're he's saying basically that's so rare you never see and reused rocket and then elon goes congratulations but perhaps not the rarest yeah because spacex is done that six times if we're counting sub orbital hops and then it was just like kinda like you're you're rocket doesn't go high enough and then when elon did it like a month later basis like congratulations to elon a really excellent sub orbital launch sure one of the best sub orbital launches and elon was like fuck you dude it was so high but technically yes was still sub orbital and they've been basically going back and forth with these like congratulations but and i just kinda love it i love it i love the pet yeah 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 then tearing out four 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 in 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 let's move on to the next one what do we got back to you i think okay i'll do one okay my next one is sun okay i've talked about video before if you don't know sun is basically a app or website you go to and you can make music even if you got no musical talent right so you can just go on there describe the type of song you want maybe you bring your lyrics maybe you don't maybe you just give it a vibe and you basically are vibe coding music mh it's amazing i'm addicted to the app i use it all the time i've probably made i don't know forty or fifty songs i've burned tens of thousands credits on this thing i guess it's crazy how addictive it is how fun it is to do and i just think this company has a long way to run so right now valued at two two and a half billion something like that they have two hundred million in arr so it's not like an ai app that's like three hundred million arr now three hundred million alright troy the breaking news we got the three hundred million already and so i met the founder you know i really like kind of what they're all about yeah and they they also just struck a deal with our licensing company with with a musical music label which is important basically the the here's the upside because i was like okay this is already at two two and a half billion does this have that five x potential and i doing some math and it basically sound cloud has forty million music creators okay so that's forty million people who around the world who actually have musical talent that are publishing on the platform sun is only at two million users on their platform so they still they and that's that's people who don't have to have the musical talent part the skill so the the the market for number of people who will make music that don't know how to make music is gonna be something like ten twenty possibly more than that possibly fifty x the number of actual musicians who create music so i just think i think this thing has an incredible long way to run i would not be surprised if there were hundreds of millions of weekly active users of people who are making music on this thing and when you do the math of what that turns into because people are willing to pay right like imagine not having to like practice or do music lessons or any of that shit you just pay fifteen bucks and boom you're a musician right like it's kind of an amazing trade to make so i think this thing has a long way to run i think sun becomes a fifty billion dollar plus company it'd be also a really fun company to join if you joined right now because you'd be doing something that's both on the frontier but it's not like manufacturing in space it's not like actual like rocket science yeah and you're just a part of culture it's gonna become a big part of culture which is always fun if you're gonna work when you guys think about these companies that are you you we were laughing i think we said they were launched two years ago and they're at three hundred million dollars in revenue does that have longevity you have to ask a couple questions one is is it a fad right do i think this is just like is it like i don't know whatever dub smash or like you know one of these things are like everyone's gonna try it once like the year book photo thing and then there's really no reason to come back in i don't think this a fad i think people are gonna wanna keep creating stuff the second thing is gonna have too much competition and i do think that they're kind of on an island where all the big model companies are probably not going to this isn't the kind of primary war front and they have so many like bigger battles that they're fighting right now i kinda think soon is gonna go un tested for a little while longer where it's not the main thing that open ai or ant philanthropic is gonna try to roll out and make mainstream and so i think by focusing and specializing you they have a lot of other stuff built in like if you make the song they have like an editor where you get the stems and you can actually like remix the song and they like a discovery platform like there's a lot more depth that they can go into so i think that what why it would be around is because it's not in the cross hairs of all the you know the highest deal battle in the world the genius battle which is like you know what open and you know g and and topic are all doing what what are the yeah i think i think we're what you're getting at basically like sun is the front door to ai music in the way that chat has been the front door to out large language models that has a lot of value i made i made a pretty similar case to a friend who had worked in the music industry for the last decade he's a he's a real musician you know has gone on tour all over the world he had the opportunity to join sun at around the same valuation and i said you know i think like you've worked in the music industry your whole career where is the growth gonna be in the industry over the next ten years it's gonna be in ai whether or not people like it and i think what sun tapped into is the same thing that the vibe coding tools have tapped into where billions of people have an idea for an app but like very very few people relatively can actually build an app and now with five coding anybody can build an app same thing with music everybody's had an idea for a song or could come up with an idea for a song that would you know create even in in the most simple way you know creating we've heard stories from people that you know every single night they make a new bedtime song with their kids right to kind of like motivate the kids to to settle down or or go to sleep or whatever and so there's so many magical moments it's the kind of thing that can have these sort of viral moments where people like realize it's available create all these songs or there's like memes that could form but it has this like kind of like i think i think people will continue to come back to it so i'm i'm with what it happens to spotify market cap then spotify market cap should be resistant to this because it's a tool for creating music and music will be distributed on spotify and so spotify never created an able competitor or fruity loops competitor they never sold guitars they never sold any tools to to create music they might wind up launching some some competitor but i i in kind of a tough spot if you think about it if they what what what would what would all the biggest artists on on spotify think of spotify coming out with an ai tool that is competing for listening time right with those artists so it's like it's they're kind of in a position where spotify can't jump into this without infuriating a lot of the artists on the platform so i i think it's possible that sun could eat into the listening time of spotify yeah but it's hard to imagine a world where i subscribe to you know and i don't subscribe i would just see it not similar to so and instagram reels or v three from google and youtube shorts like people will be scrolling these feeds they most people don't want any ai some people are okay with just like the best ai and so they want one out of a hundred reels to be actually great ai funny inspired and people on spotify well wanna listen to the hits and the songs that everyone knows and then they might wanna listen to that one breakout ai generated song but it's just gonna take one minute for whoever creates that bang on to export it upload it to spotify and spotify will be able to instantly monetize it so i wouldn't see it as like a major threat to spotify there's also some interesting like downside protection here that it just if you if you think about sun at two and a half billion who could possibly acquire them if they don't make it to escape velocity and like spotify has the market cap but also amazon could put in amazon echoes it could be an apple thing it could be a a google thing it could be an open thing like there's so many other companies that have the market cap and scale to just pick this up and make it a good outcome the other the other thing is i know the industry like the traditional music industry is using sun yeah but they don't wanna talk about it because it's still controversial i heard i heard from a friend that their friend was a backup vocalist for different artists so like a studio vocalist they their job would be to go into this somebody would write a song their job would be to go into the studio and sing the song and then that that sample would be taken around to artists that would put effectively like bid on it and so the vocalist would like sing it in the style of one artist sing it in the style of another artist to give people a feel for it and they said that that person's revenue went from you know humming along for the last you know twenty years and like effectively to zero because you can now just generate any you take the lyrics you generate it in the style of any artist and so the challenge for for that individual and their careers is nobody people that don't hire backup a backup like a a backup guitar can go and tour with a band right because people are there to see like the front man or whatever but a backup vocalist there's not really like touring demand because imagine you get a ticket to your favorite artist and then there's just like someone else singing you're like not really getting getting your getting your money's with so certain like already disrupting certain corners of the internet and i think that part of what's holding sun back right now is just that the main artist will not talk about it because they know they're gonna get blow back but that'll eventually work sale yeah alright you guys are doing next pick yeah let's move on to t med because i think it's it relates to home health interestingly we have a couple other hard tech stuff but t med is thin tech company founded by justin mayer i think we all know her guest to the show i think we all have a well i don't wanna speak for you guys but he's in the man crush category he's yeah he's a pretty amazing killer chad so t med adds a compliant pay with hsa health health savings account fsa button to online checkout by handling eligibility through embedded telehealth so when you go to whether it's peptides that are gonna be popular or aid sleeps or supplements or whatever you're doing to improve your health if you're gonna do it online there's a there's an economic advantage of tax savings from paying for it with pre tax dollars through your hsa or fsa and so t med is this like layer on all of that so you don't have as much like individual trend risk like oh is protein more popular than cr this this month or this year like as long as health continues to be a trend you're sort of like the is like buying like investing in an index fund for wellness right like they're gonna be taking a cut of a huge amount of the volume going towards yeah wellness products in the us we i started a company called aurora with my friends brian and charlie and and we're we're a happy t med customer t med has a very meaningful take rate a bigger take rate than a traditional kind of payment provider but it's a great trade because you're able to sell incremental product because people are able to buy it in a tax advantaged way and i'm just like an incredibly firm believer in the entire mission yeah of the company i think that eventually we know we know that running is going to increase your health span increase your lifespan you should be able to let people purchase products like this yeah as a form of as a form of preventative treatment so incredible founder like very very strong tailwind and great experience as a as a customer what's your company joy aurora r o r r a dot com at the water water filter so humor andrew humans kind of been of a early partner there which is which is awesome and that that was me you help start that yeah so i i stumbled into kind of the kind of water crisis years ago at this point and started looking at started looking at all the solutions in the category and kind of ultimately felt like there needed to be kind of like a dyson type brand in the categories a brand that was like incredibly focused on r and d and making products in a variety of of different form factors because you're constantly interacting with water in your day to day life whether it's in your shower bath drinking water whole home filters etcetera yeah the market is was was our it was like something i was personally motivated by because i my my son had kept getting eczema i had like a six month old getting eczema and i was like trying to track down where like why it was happening and it ultimately was like tap water baths that we clocked and so like able solving that and then realizing there was an opportunity and and partnered with charlie and and brian to bring it to life and they've absolutely crushed it are you sort joy the you know i i follow you online i've i've followed your work for years before i think even party around yeah are you the design of the two or the design guy of the two because you seem like you've you've had an eye for aesthetics like for a while yeah i would i would i would generally say so i mean john john has great taste and and instinct around the stuff but i've i've just loved like advertising marketing product design i've been obsessed with it since i was since i was a boy basically i was super into like skateboarding and surfing and snowboarding growing up and so i i i had this sort of like i i was trying to figure out from a very young age like why there was like a snow board available for a hundred dollars i really wanted the one that was eight hundred dollars and so kinda working backwards from that and understanding design and and and brand and advertising and all these things and so bring that to i mean that's the success of tv vpn is due in part to our obsession with with brand which is i think something that podcast podcasts historically would think about okay let's design our cover our that was the first thing sean's told me when we launched technology brothers the original podcast i was like you you sent me a really nice message you were like i think this gonna work i think this is the thing you gotta go full time on this do it dude it and i was like yeah like it seems like the numbers are pretty good i was being very wonky and you're like no like this is a brand that like like you've actually broken through and created something that feels it has feeling around it like brand i was like yeah that's like a lot that's almost all jo i helped as much as i could with it but just the idea to actually create this world in this brand we had a lot of fun with yeah and funny that the thing that's addict about media is you're doing like basically product development but the feedback loops are so rapid every with aurora it's like we have this idea to build a water filter company but then the r and d process was like eighteen months or something between like idea to actually shipping a product yeah and then with media it's like idea to product like in like these really rapid you know hour long twenty four hour cycles and that's like something that i think we love because we'll be sitting here you know we'll be sitting there on a friday and be like okay we should have a stock sticker on the bottom you but it's the same day yeah so are you guys disciplined with sticking within your brand parameters or sometimes like because because that could be hard and require does require i think i think i think it's gotta constantly be it's gotta constantly be evolving and i mean look look back to like the the skate and surf and snow ward brands like any brand that was just like stuck in their way and didn't kind of expand and evolve and and reflect culture like ultimately just didn't make it right these are brands that now you could go back and buy and like bring back into the modern era but yeah it has to be flexible i mean the transition from being called technology brothers to tb vpn was like a big moment for us a lot of people would have said like technology brothers is a great brand we had already kind of like saturated acts at the time so we were small but but people knew about us and so we we knew that that was gonna be necessary to evolve into becoming the kinda media company that that we wanted to be but yeah i think you need a commitment to evolving and i think the internet the internet allows you a lot of a lot of like the ideas that people had around like brand and advertising we're created in a world where you're doing like long term planning around like print and television marketing and catalogs and things like that and now with the internet you can just like iterate on on ideas so rapidly and evolve your brands so rapidly and it's like a few clicks to like fully update yourself and so i think the the only consistent thing for our company is like the feeling that we're trying to create kind of like what what we want people to feel when interacting with the brand and i think that that has to that's all that has to stay consistent because like that is that is the brand it's not necessarily like whatever whatever logo whatever your logo is at at any anyone given point dude that's great you guys are and we get back to the list let's do it but sales say my first my first ever company was was a skateboard company and this was like this was like the pivotal moment for me at twelve years old i realized i found somebody in the midwest that would manufacture skateboard decks for me so that was like that wasn't my first million but that was my first hundred dot make my first time making a hundred dollars from building a product and that was such an insane moment i was like you'll make this and then i get to put my logo on it and sell it like this is the most amazing thing ever and so that was like my first experience building any type of brand was was j man designs i still still have i still have i still have a board at in my home office and i think that once once i realize like hey you can just that was my moment of like you can just make things like everything you see in the world is a is a business and there's no reason that you can't bill it yourself we have to shred the na sometimes i still skate yeah i've seen you're incredible at getting those videos i realized i realized by like a teenager i was like this is a hobby that that destroys your body so i switched to surfing i can't believe you still do that it's every time i see that video it's looking the insane anyway yeah i i i still like to get after it i wanna be a forty year old man doing hand real still it's crazy what do you do with the money once you've already made it this is a question sean and i ask our successful guests all the time and the reason we ask it is because if you are successful if you do have a little bit of money information on how to spend or invest your money it's actually really hard to come by and i know this because instead of hampton which is my media founders people ask this question all the time people have made ten or fifty million dollars how do you spend it how do you invest it and so to help solve this problem and answer this question i actually interviewed eighty plus founders guys like scott gallo alex mo brian johnson people who are worth fifty a hundred even billions of dollars and we got them to reveal everything so their net worth how much they pay themselves their monthly expenses their portfolio things like that and we turn these eighty interviews into one document and i don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the internet and it's completely free so if you wanna see behind the net worth of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios or expenses everything you go to join hampton dot com slash reveal again join hampton dot com slash reveal check it out alright alright should i do mind you guys are gonna make fun of me my my next one is sure self promoting you love this no this is amazing it's just okay i'm so oh my listen guys here's the deal thought i thought you might do this i was gonna make fun of you but because i love it but it just makes sense okay so i picked hubspot but the reality is is there's probably thirty or fifty or a hundred companies that could go in this case here the saas apocalypse what was that what we're calling it yep insane insane to me so hubspot i think they peaked around nine hundred eight hundred fifty dollars a share went down i think the low recently was two hundred bucks mh i think that is insane hubspot and again sub this out with so many different companies and it's probably the same story hubspot just three billion dollars in revenue with a fourteen billion dollar market cap okay i think that is insane they're projecting to do three point seven billion in twenty six so you're buying a a subscription software company that i don't think people are going to tear out of their of their business something like three x revenue like everyone talks about like all the nerds on twitter which i'm one of them are talking about like building their own crm maybe maybe the nerds are doing that but a roofing company with twenty employees in tennessee ain't gonna be doing it anytime soon and so i do think that there's a lot of i think this is overblown with them plus however many companies i think i saw monday dot com i think it was yeah they're i think they do a billion in revenue at a two billion dollar market cap something like that i forget exactly and i think that's insane the bare case with some of these saas companies is i do think the seat model is a little bit insane because like do you guys remember just the other day that subs sec article went live where it was basically a guy telling a story about how like ai is gonna be so good that people aren't gonna work and if they aren't gonna work they're not gonna buy stuff and so it just kinda like bait the question if like software companies you'd pay per seat if you have less employees square just laid off however many people forty percent of their staff or whatever like do they need to continue buying software at the same rate that they were because of the seat model that's like the better case but i just think the saas totally overblown when reaction yeah i mean i one one going back to the sarah's concept the amazing thing about hubspot equity is that it is liquid right and so and so you you it's it's very real there's a lot of companies in our in our industry where you might get a massive grant but you have no you're you're fully locked up and i think i think to the tune of like can you get the three four five acts well if the narrative flips and people are like wait actually like hubspot has some real significant mode and that thing that we thought was gonna kill them isn't gonna kill them well it just pops right back up and so that's sort of the option value i see i would ask would say like more pressure from like like maybe startups that are that are not doing the seat based model they're doing more outcome based model but a lot of those companies are just getting started and it's gonna be years until there's ever like some real disruptive pressure so yeah my general framework is that it's gonna even like hubspot will need to evolve in a way that it hasn't since inception just naturally and so be great leadership i don't believe that saas is going away but it's gonna require great leadership to help evolve and help the company like actually build a lot of momentum in this new era so i'm i'm with you i don't think the local roofing company is gonna you know just be five code and kind of maintain their own yeah software stack but leadership is going to have to like actually you it's going from like hey we can just compound at this rate annually forever and like this is just yeah easy easy mode saas that we saw if they're gonna bake off with a company that has some really crazy agent features and basically the crm cleaning itself up and adding stuff and lead scoring even better then they're gonna need to invest a lot more but in general very very strong position to be in system of record let's say you sean you don't it doesn't even have to be hubspot it could be any it could be that dozens companies of i've been looking at this i mean i've i've been looking at it actually just as an investor to say like okay definitely seems like a over reaction yeah you know you know mon ish came on the podcast and he said a great thing which is that risk and uncertainty are two different words and most investors don't understand that and he was explaining how the stock market responds to uncertainty more than it does to risk and so if it and which is what's happening right now there's just uncertainty and uncertainty is very different than saying something bad is actually gonna happen just that we don't know what the future cash flows looks like we don't know what the future growth rates look like so you get this discount just for uncertainty and so i've been looking at all these saas stocks and i've been trying to decide like okay fig mod and you have salesforce and you have hubspot you have like all of these on sale and i'm like do i wanna stock up while these are all on sale these i think these are pretty good companies here but they have they do have some level of uncertainty so i've i've definitely to been looking at this like i was joking you know groan at your pick but i actually think it's it's a pretty good pick especially because the way john said it like you're gonna be liquid the whole time if you say us list this company yep gonna be working at like a well a company with twenty years of success under its belt you know systems and all this good stuff and then it's like at this all time low basically for for where it's at one thing you have to be aware of is like ai there's not gonna be some announcement by the labs it's like hey guys ai is actually reversed in progress and it's getting way worse we think it's gonna be much worse in in the future and then the stocks gonna rock it up it's like hey the the ai is only gonna get more capable there's gonna be new capabilities unlocked and so you have to be making this thesis with that in mind and i think there's a way to do it which is that hubspot serves an incredible amount of small businesses they're in a great position to actually deliver the value of ai to all those people but that's what i'm saying it's like it's it's all gonna come down to management and their ability to not just build the story around ai as a tailwind for the business but actually show that like we are delivering the power of ai to our customer base and they're giving us more money every single month than they were the last month in your bold case sam i think you wrote ai feature still suck which is a funny bold case but it's true i think there's been a few companies like this like intercom zen where they added ai to their existing thing and they're like oh yeah our i think zen was that two hundred million or something in arr off of their ai feature intercom is over a hundred million on their ai intercom has been around forever with customer support and you would think oh they're gonna get disrupted by ai and they're like well actually the harder part is getting all these customer relationships it's it's essentially much easier to integrate an ai feature than it is to go get hundred thousand small businesses to trust you and use you and integrate you yep and the question is like can they do that if they do that then the narrative is not just like oh they're not they're not getting disrupted but actually oh my god look at all this extra growth they're getting because they have the thesis that i have been buying into for the past two or three years since they yeah got really popular there are gonna be a lot of new entrants but the vast majority i think jo jo you're when of you guys made this joke but it's not a joke the vast majority of value creation is going to be by big companies just getting bigger i just think that it's the there it's it's it's much easier for a salesforce to get more efficient and launch new features than just a new company we're at least picking those new companies very hard but like picking a company that works already and it's gonna get just a little bit better it just it makes so much more money right love it alright let's move to the next pick let's get one from the t guys what do we got we can do semi analysis this is an interesting one so semi me analysis looks like a subs stack like if you go to the website it might even be hosted on subs stack they have a website they break down semiconductor and ai infrastructure build outs they have a model for how data centers are progressing how much it cost to inference different ai models how the different chips are doing they'll do a review of the latest google tpu they'll they'll they'll explain to you how the latest nvidia chip works they're doing it's a great business because based you have wire cutter it's like a it's this like a it's like a couple but but wire cutter for the richest people in the world because they run trillion dollar companies yeah institutions institutions so hedge funds banks also the actual hyper scaler themselves so if you're amd you wanna know what nvidia is doing if you're nvidia you wanna know what amd is doing and semi analysis is gonna talk to everyone do a ton of research put together a whole bunch of data into a cleanly organized spreadsheet that you can import into your valuation model for whether or not microsoft is gonna beat earnings and so they sell those models it's a publication or it's a it's like possible dude your company right it's a public that think to subscribe you can subscribe to like like as a sweater subscribe like at the you could also models that are pre built like excel models with data in them and those are very expensive and then so yes sam have you seen this guy dylan patel no this is great never met an indian guy named dylan but love it love it and so he he is when he goes on podcast podcasts yeah this guy is so knowledgeable yeah about what's going on with be yep but have you ever seen the the louis ck k bit where he's talks about like how he likes to somehow sometimes use the n word but in a positive way and he talks about like if he goes to a coffee shop in orders a cropping the guy just like fully like foam it fro and like makes it perfect he'll be like that edward made the shit out of my car that's how i feel watching d patel talk about gpus and if infrastructure he'll be talking about the new colossus thing and he knows the megawatts under the the flops everything what cables they're using and he knows everything he's like we got satellites watching the parking lots and we we figured out this is how bad they're scaling this guy knows he knows so much it's incredible the how much this one person is no is knowledgeable about gpus and it's he writing all of this because it looks like an ai blog so it's so so they use ai imagery but all the all the text is is written by their staff of analysts so they have about fifty people working there and on a particular deep dive they'll might have five to six authors attached dylan might write something other folks might write something doug laugh also over there and how much money are they making because of is this like a five million dollar fifty five hundred like what's going on with this i would put tens and millions i would put it in tens of millions but this is the interesting like bull case is that right now they have like a very respected analysis group but they're also launching fund allegedly according to the information to invest in both semiconductor stocks and startups and they're already doing angel investing and then also they're gonna do credit ratings and so the real model to think about this the comp is moody's so if you're familiar with moody's they credit ratings and moody's got started during the railroad build out because the the the railroad build that was so capital capital intensive that there was a huge there was a huge secondary market for like okay is this person that's gonna build this railroad from from chicago to atlanta like are they good for it do they have the money and so moody's is now an eighty billion dollar business and i and if you look at the stock like it moody's has not moved during the sell off like it's doing fine and yes this is very indexed to to the ai boom but the the actual business can be very very stable very high margin and very big like much bigger than people think when they think of just like publishing analysis this one's this is the best one this is the best sign this is super cool yeah one of our one of our teammates his brother just got a job here and john and i were so excited for him yeah because if you wanna if you're if you're excited about if you're excited about ai and you're not like a researcher or a product designer or a product manager or a founder but you wanna be at the center of the action yeah and actually understand what's happening this is a fancy fantastic a super interesting job with a lot of ups upside they do they have offices it looks like the founder lives in us up is it like an in real life yeah they have a a west coast and a east coast yeah but it's a lot it's a lot of time with like hedge funds and banks and managers and this guy and also dylan patel is is very young i believe he's in his twenties and so i i like your your your your description of his you know en knowledge of the semiconductor industry is correct and i think if you just look at what that compounds like over two decades i think you're gonna you're you're already seeing one of the most important voices in the most important industry but it just compounds have you guys ever read this book called how to get rich an author called felix dennis felix dennis you guys have guy right the magazine guy you you should google felix dennis so felix dennis he was that cut he was like a combination of richard branson and mick he was kind of vulgar but he had this like british ari crap vibe he was really funny he's very funny he died for cancer and he used to joke that he he he was he was a crack head like he was literally a cocaine and crack addict and he spent a lot of his money doing it and he wrote about it he was but he's like funny he wrote about it anyway he he got rich because he created the thing called dennis publications and dennis publications was a computer magazine started in the late seventies early eighties and it made him a fortune when he passed away he was probably worth eight or nine hundred million dollars and this is like an o eight two thousand and eight so was very very wealthy and there's like been like ten different guys there's just got named pat mc govern who was a multi billionaire because of computer magazines in the nineteen nineties there's z davis if you guys heard to that bill z there's been so many of these and what you were explaining right now by what dylan patel does it's this exact same b to b publication in a technology boom owning a very small niche and just kicking ass and doing the same playbook of research media events and it has created many billionaires yeah one one way to look at semi analysis is like what they're doing to like sell side research firms which is like hey wait like you're a subs stack you can't do yeah you can't do like advanced research on semi you know or you can't like compete with us you guys were you want you like aesthetics of like a goldman sachs equity like to morgan stanley report but the data is just as good if not better and and with t vpn and it's like wait you guys aren't you don't you don't have a cable network like you like you you you guys can interview this person on the day that they're ipo owing and it's like you can just you can just you can just do things this is this it's the same thing we've i've i as someone i'm a a little bit of a media historian nerd it's the same story over and over and over again and this is a great fine sean you wanna bring us home what he you got alright i got one for you guys doesn't name me a lot of people know but i haven't really put too much thought into it so harvey harvey is basically very simple it's ai lawyer it's ai software for four law firms spend more specifically and i think right now they've they've just been i they're raising rounds so like you know if i did this episode six months ago would be like whatever two billion dollar company five billion now they're a eight billion dollar company so i gave i might be getting priced out here as it's as it goes but i do love the space so they're about two hundred million in revenue off of just like a thousand customers i think like half of the like top hundred law firms in america are using them in some some capacity and was just cutting it again i like to do kind of bottoms up math to to make make my own case for these things so i think in the us there's about half a million law firms that's just in the us and right now harvey average contract value is like a hundred and ninety and which means they're basically getting paid like they're a lawyer who works at the firm mh and and so you know i don't i don't think that will be be there for you know smaller law firms i think there'll will be know obviously be a lower price point but just in general a a legal work is very like a perfect candidate for ai work right because it's mostly text documents it's mostly writing and reading and summarizing and then there's all these like really bespoke workflows that a law firm needs there's compliance their security there's validation there's all these like things that you gotta build that's like for a law firm versus like would a lawyer rather just upload into chat gp i don't think so i think there's actually gonna be like purpose built tools for for law firms so harvey won leg is and other they're both companies in the same exact space kind of competing for this and i think the cool part about this is that if you can add leverage into the legal system you you know that that'll kinda transform the economics of how these law forms work lot law firms work right because they currently they build there's billable hours you put more bodies this sort of this incentive to spend more time on something i think that's gonna change i think you know more and more law firms are gonna use this and realize like we don't need to have as many people to be able to do the same amount of work and i think their billing model's is gonna change but anyways i think i think harvey is a perfect example of like as ai happen as ai happens right now there's gonna be these winners for the deck like oh that remember all those companies that got started when the ai happened like yeah there's the big ones open eye and and philanthropic others and then i think there's gonna be these like vertical ones and to me the legal one is like a clear cut obvious in your face vertical one that will be is pretty big if you do the math by the way of like you know every law firm is gonna use ai this i don't think there's gonna be any law firms that don't are not using ai depending on how much market share you think they're gonna capture you sort of multiply that times a hundred thousand dollars per firm and you very quickly get into the tens of billions in revenue available to to for harvey has there there hasn't been a lot of big outcomes of just building software for lawyers so when investors have backed harvey it's been a general thesis that they're going to capture some of the current like labor spend right which is which is a much much bigger market than enterprise software i had a i've got a friend who is at one of the big law firms he got an early demo of harvey when i first talked to him about it he was like oh it's like it's cool and then a year later somewhere in like early q four of last year his like eyes were like wide open and he's like i might like it it's it's a real real deal now so they've made a lot of progress the the product gets better as the models get better the question is like how much do the labs actually care to build out the kind of more enterprise functionality that that harvey already built out and and so they'll there'll naturally be some competition there over time but we had john we had john quinn from quinn emanuel on on our show today the most feared lawyer in the world really really cool guy you guys would have a fun conversation with him one's lawyer yeah yeah and i was i asked nice do you think no super nice oh he's he's a he's a sweetheart but but not the kind you'd want on your on your bad side but but i asked him so so ai is really good at generating legal docs already it might make some errors but it can make him really fast he's i was like do you think we will potentially have a hundred x more litigation and he was like yeah possibly right but he also said that that's kind of like the the bull case for lawyers still being at full employment is like we yeah you might a lawyer might be way more effective but there could just be way more cases so that would be kind of a very american outcome it's like what what's that story like in india where they were like there's too many python and they put a bounty like if you bring us a dead python you get like whatever over dollars and then the python population boomed because people just started breeding python yep that's basically what you're saying is gonna have we're just gonna breed more just like useless litigation love it well this already happened in legal there was a piece of software that would help lawyers write down their billable hours and it would sort of pat it out and then so there was software on the client side that would automatically scan it and say that's not work i'm paying for her get bad out of there get that out of there and it became like bought on bot war very fun did you guys see the opposite episode we did with john morgan no oh for morgan and morgan yeah so we had john morgan on so for the listener jo i don't know if you would see his i know if he's in california you're i've john morgan me the episode i inc it might be the largest type of his law firm what is he he is a injury injury yeah yeah i think he's he his commercials everywhere and he comes off like a sweet he's older he's in a seventies he almost comes off like a grandpa like you wanna trust him yeah so he comes up like a very like you know pc soft guy but you know whatever he's a lawyer so he he we had him on the pod i swear to god the very first sentence that he says to us i say to him john i hear that you own a museum on crime and punishment that's really unique verbatim oh that thing that thing prince that's the first live i swear to god that he said to us this word for word it's a lot of money that's because he owns he owns an amusement park business and he owns seven museums called the the alcatraz of the east i think he called okay and we were like how do you have time to do this you have a five billion dollar law firm yeah and he was like i don't hunt dear i hunt money i were like really this guy's incredible that's from john morgan and some it was it was one of the craziest interviews i think that we've ever done it was the most difference of the commercial versus the reality was like way different there's a number of harvey for personal injury people that are making working gonna a software more specifically to qualify these types of cases and will naturally be controversial because some people don't like the whole the whole category but that's just an area there's gonna be like vertical harvey terrible just send me your deck i just gotta take a look i can't believe you guys are doing that but just send it over we got one more for you guys that i i i think you'll that i think you'll like have you guys heard of send cuts send no you're that what is that okay so fun name for a pretty serious company they let engineers upload cad files and quickly get custom parts made using software automation made quoting and production fast and frictionless so this company doing a little bit what what said yeah yeah you you you send in like a like a three d file that says i want you know a cube milled out of aluminum and it's gotta have a cylinder put staple terms yeah so let's say you wanna cross sign your own pair of trucks yeah your own truck yeah you designed the trucks on a computer trucks and then you take this file and you send it to them they got it then they send you look send send them the file they cut it up they cut up the metal they send it back to you so this one's cool because it's it's fully aligned with like everything you hear about industrialization yep the kind of things that america used to do but forgot how to do that we we ship these capabilities overseas but send cuts send is a bootstrap company the founder jim has been on our show scaled over a hundred million in annual revenue you know completely independently and have thousands and thousands of of happy customers all over the us doing something that again you would you know people talk about the why entrepreneurs end up manufacturing in asia one reason is because of of cost but another thing is just like speed like the you you know every every person that's manufactured something here we'll tell you i reached out to this shop i asked them to make a part they didn't get back to me for a week when they got back to me they said they could do it in a in a in two months and so send cut send is really focused on awesome speed and ease of use and they've scaled up organically and the founder gem is is just amazing and so how'd do you guys find this this is not this is not appear to be in your wheelhouse well yeah i we love we love having companies come on the show that don't you know every every single day there's probably half a million to a billion dollars worth of fundraising rounds that that get announced on t vpn but we love having founders on that that that have never raised a dollar and i met him through jason carmen because jason carmen profiles a lot of hard tech companies and he is a supplier to a lot of those hard tech companies so you can kind of think of him as like the index on all of those like somewhat more risky industrialization bets where is this drone company gonna work or is that drone company gonna work well they're both gonna be buying parts from sun cut signed wow great fine man this is a really cool one he used to so this guy owned i would when you described it i was thinking like a more of a blue collar looking guy he owned a landing page company and then went into he's just a he's like a he's like a just a hacker that decided to make stuff in the real world yeah but he's very i mean the the bootstrap thing is i think important because like it's a capital intensive business but he's been you know thinking about profitability thinking about scalability from day one set up a very healthy business that's that's not gonna collapse at any point yeah we we joking with him when he was on our show we said if if you were venture backed you'd be valued at at five to ten billion yeah he'd be getting some insane multiple but he's happy to just build a a great business and compound every single year and we hope that he scales up dramatically and enters a bunch of different verticals over time because lord knows we need it dude there's been so many times where sean and i talk to someone and i'm like what am doing podcasting like it sound sounds so much cooler do you do you guys do you guys feel like that all the time by talking to all these amazing people i think most of the people we talked to we know we have no business being in their business yeah and so i feel like we we're we're lucky with them like i wouldn't wanna compete with like peter ra in selling protein bars even though i could go make a protein bar right yeah yeah i think i'm missing that common sense because every time i talk to these guys i'm like we're so similar me and you i was like i just doing what you're doing this is great and i somehow thinking yeah like all of those halfway through the interview sean like acts like i'm interviewing him he gets on these sean like you know like sam guys like us we're just here like do amazing things and like build great products it'll he'll sign off say thanks thanks for having us sam oh jeez come the guest on you know dilute but they do like the bootstrap side because i mean one of the things with sales list is you don't wanna be taking a ton of dilution right because even if the the stock price is going up you don't you don't want this company that's keeps requiring more and more capital has a bigger prep stack all that stuff i had one on mine that was i i we'd don't to go into it too much but it's call bank this kinda like this i out if you guys saw tell story yeah came out just the the founder of plaid his new company global call them yeah is basically like it's a fintech company so as a bank he actually bought a bank for i think sixty million dollars of his own money mh and then he started this and he basically uses it as a the the underlying bank under mercury under ramp under b under all these companies and so he and it i think they're doing this numbers out of day and twenty six are doing two hundred million in revenue he he owns all of it he never raised any money wow and it's it's like you said it's an index so it's a index into all the new fintech shit yeah it's like great if you think ramps gonna keep growing and you think mercury is gonna create keep on we'll guess what column will keep doing well this deepgram and they're they're doing extremely well and here you gotta founder who owns the whole thing and so you you know you go work there you're not gonna to take dilution the same way because it's a profitable company that's awesome yeah and the they're they're competing with all the banking as a service providers because historically you'd have the fintech like a neo bank like a mercury and then there'd be like a banking as a service provider and then there would be the actual like chartered bank underneath it and so column is like eating up the bottom two layers of the stack and saying hey build the consumer facing financial services company but we'll handle the you know all all the different you know the api layer down to the actual bank so the i'm just browsing it looks so he started this is i feel embarrassed platt or play it i noted this it's one of the yeah it's one of these words where i read i never say column was started due to his experience building plaid right because plaid is like the yeah the rails allows you know is basically create in in large part and help create the the overall fintech boom and so that's a good example of like when you're picking these companies there's a there's there's like this you know in silicon valley we all wanna believe that the founder with no experience can just come in and just dominate the industry just based on you know sheer willpower but sometimes just going going and and attaching yourself to a team led by somebody who has deep deep deep experience and has vision that is grounded around having worked in the industry for a long time is like sometimes you don't need to overthink it just like if you're gonna join a company go work for somebody that has done it before a massive scale what what an unfair advantage not only do you see the problem like you said but how many meetings can you get with fintech companies if you're like by the way i started plaid right you get it you can get every single meeting you walk in with incredible credibility and then you have you own the underlying bank and then for for whatever reason i'm not a developer but like for whatever reason like having great easy to use apis is like a really big competitive advantage that seems like every company should do because it sounds like handwriting you know it sounds like something so simple like well a well documented well designed api but apparently is a pretty big competitive advantage when you go into a space that historically didn't have that and you know it's no surprise a company like this kicking ass what bother we gotta get him on amazing person looks like he's only thirty five thirty six years old hey the bros you guys are the best man and really thank you so much for doing this of course not the technology brothers anymore we're by the way john i was wrong i texted you when you changed the name to t and i was like oh no not gonna work technology brothers that's the one yep but i was wrong you you guys you guys made t work in an incredible way no i mean it still is a mouthful but online people just type it out and having four letter domain four letter high handles like you know the other reason you know the other reason we did it is at that point we were shifting from just being the two of us talking to doing guess and we wanted the aesthetics of being like a cable network because we wanted to go and get these like public company ceos on yeah if you're trying to get a public company ceo some of them the really founder mode ones you just talked to dm with text and jump on but a lot of them there's like layers of of people in the communications department that that you're kind of like needing to gain their trust and and so like by having the optics of being like a network even though we are just a podcast we were able to you know end up getting a lot of those guests and and twenty nuance yeah of that it's like oh yeah the the folks from tb vpn have reached out actually feels very different than you wanna come hang with the technology brothers like jordan be is calling at s oak strat like mom there were guys like it's just a made up name it just sounded official yeah thank you guys this is awesome awesome welcome time and we appreciate you thanks for having did we did their sign on maybe we should let them do our sign off so we we we basically asked you is that it that's it and then you say that's the pod so could you give us a we'll set you up is that it we done that's the past the pod i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back if you made it this far then you're gonna love what i'm about to tell you so there's this amazing entrepreneur james neil patel he's been on m mfa he's one of our favorite guests and he has a podcast is called marketing school and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network marketing school brings you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learned from years and years of being in the trenches they have over a hundred million downloads in over twenty five hundred episodes marketing school gives you bite sized marketing wisdom that you can implement immediately 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