My First Million - #100 with Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano - The "Export Framework" to Business Creation

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) are joined by Anthony Pompliano (@APompliano) to hear about his time at Facebook and kick around a few ideas. In today’s episode Pomp talks about his experience at Facebook and Snapchat (4:05), Pomp gives the background on how he got into tech after a career in the Army (11:25), Sam expounds on the book Tribes and the impact he thinks it can have on businesses looking to build camaraderie (18:50), Pomp pitches how to reinvent dating apps to be more authentic (24:25), all three of the guys talk about how to get customers to "hook" to your product (33:05), Shaan talks about the future of automation (41:05), the group talks about how good training programs can be huge recruitment tools (50:00). - https://twitter.com/APompliano: Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano - Investments Pomp’s made: https://www.imperfectfoods.com/ (Pomp invested at $12m valuation), https://www.everlywell.com/ (Pomp invested at a $15m valuation), https://cubcoats.com/ - Book recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/1455566381 - https://lunchclub.ai/: Helps you make professional connections - https://thehustle.co/04212020-silicon-valley-clubhouse/: Audio-only social network - https://muzmatch.com/en-US/: Dating app for muslims - https://dilmil.co/: Indian dating app - https://launchdarkly.com/: Another example of an “export business”. LaunchDarkly is a “feature management” tool whose origin was within Facebook. - https://amplitude.com/: Helps companies boost engagement by analyzing data to show what signals to look for. - https://twitter.com/sweatystartup: Storage investor and service business advocate. - https://www.healthstream.com/: Teaches medical personnel latest procedures. An example of a - https://www.eagletransfer.com/: Commercial moving business owned by Sam’s father-in-law. - https://pos.toasttab.com/: POS restaurant system - https://bit.ly/2XR7sSY Convo between Kevin Systrom and Matt Cohler, on selling Instagram to Facebook This episode is presented by Tempo! Check them out at tempo.fit and use code "TempoHustle" for $100 off. Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We're live. Sean and Pomp, you guys did a podcast together on Pomp's podcast. I actually did it last year in New York or this year before Corona happened. Sean, who is this guy? This is Pompon known as Pomp. He's known as Pops. His name's Anthony Pompiliano. Pompiliano. Is that the right way to say it? Close enough, yeah. No, no. So say it how you would say. Pompliana. Okay, great. This dude's everywhere, man. If you don't know him, you don't know us probably. That's kind of my rule of thumb. This guy's everywhere on Twitter. investor ex-Facebook guy, big time in the Bitcoin world. Everybody knows them if you're in crypto. And again, if you're not in crypto, you're probably not listening to this podcast. So I was going to ask you how it's going.

But really all I want to know is who was better, me or Sam on your podcast. That's a horrible question. Well, Sam got to cheat because Sam got to do it in person. And I can't remember if we live streamed or not, but it's always easier in person, I think. It sounds like you're saying Sam. And that's not cool.

But I actually think on the audio downloads, you're beating Sam in the first couple hours. We'll see. Okay, great. I have to go back and look. That's all that matters. Now Sam's going to get competitive. Well, so I just looked, I'm looking at the, someone already commented. And they said, they called Sean a goon.

And I was like going to hop in. But it was actually a compliment. They said, I listened to this goon and the bigger goon, Sam Parr on my first million ever. I was about saying, Motherf, fuck. And then it said, that it said, hands down, the best podcast out there. Sorry, Pomp. You're my second favorite. I'll take second. That's fine. Second place to you guys is perfectly fun. I was telling Sam on the last

episode, I was like, dude, I prepared for this podcast interview I did. I was like, I've sent to my email being like, hey, you know, here's a bunch of shit we can talk about. Because I know if I'm the host, that's what I want to get. And so hopefully it turned out. Anyways, everybody should go check it out. Go to Pomp's podcast. Yeah, listen to us talk over there. We did a bunch of. I basically took, Sam, I don't know if you heard it. I took a bunch of. I did. I was listening to it right before this. I took a bunch of our best ideas. over there. And I was like, here's a bunch that we've brainstormed. And then, yeah, we just shot the shit after that. Yeah. My favorite part is that you sent me that really detailed email, which I told you, and I'll repeat again, was incredibly helpful. And then I didn't return the favor. So sorry. Yeah, well, you know, not everybody's me. Not everybody can put in that prep work. This is like, you know, one of the things I was talking about is how I'm lazy. But then when I do something, I go like really over the top with it. So I just either don't do a whole lot of things I should do.

like for example, you know, now that I was on your podcast, I see all the smart little things you're doing. It's like, oh, it gets posted onto LinkedIn and it gets posted multiple times onto Twitter kind of on like hits the different time zones. It's like, dude, these are, you know, basic blocking and tackling best practices, but I know I'll never do. And so we will never get the gains of that. I don't think Sam's going to do that either.

It's just a lot of work. If you want to, yeah, if you want to understand, I think of it in terms of batches. So like you got to do 50 episodes and then you've earned the right to like learn, you know, one-on-one course stuff. Then, like, you do another 50. Now you've reached 100 episodes. Now you unlock like 201 learnings.

And so as you keep going, like there's things that, you know, these folks who have done thousands of episodes, they understand it way better than you guys or myself. But it's just we've got to get to a thousand episodes and then somehow we magically learn that stuff too. Well, this is episode number 100. So this is a big milestone.

Ooh. Yeah. So, Pomp, you are known for this podcast you have now. And you're known for being a, Twitter personality, right? I mean, that's like the high level. To be honest, I have no clue how that happened. But yeah, I think that a lot of people, that's actually how they know me, which is pretty crazy. How many people listen to your podcasts, roughly? So far this year, we just last week crossed over 10 million downloads for the year. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. So you were, and before that,

you worked at Snap and you worked at Facebook. Were you an executive or a product manager? I was a product manager at Facebook. How did you get this job at Snap, dude? I feel like you went from like a normal person at Facebook to you got a pretty big job at Snap. And I know a bunch of shit went down. So I don't know if you could talk about all of it. But can you talk about how you even got that job? Because it was a pretty legit role for what you had done before that, right? Yeah.

I think a lot of it is one, just the progression of people on the growth team at Facebook. So there's plenty of people who had gone to go run the growth team at other kind of high-flying, early-sage startups. So, you know, Ed Baker went to Uber. somebody went to Lyft, somebody went to Airbnb, yada, yada, whatever. So that definitely doesn't help when you kind of come from the right farm system, if you will. And then internally, really I kind of built my reputation internally, just right time, right

place. I got there and they were like, hey, you should go do this Facebook pages thing. I was like, I have a page. And I know, you have a profile. That's different than a page. And I was like, oh, okay, well, like what's a page? And so, you know, they were just like, hey, go grow that. And small team, but just kind of worked on the right thing at the right time.

and next thing you know it exploded. And it was kind of like this green field, right? When you haven't optimized something at all, literally just like changing the color to a button can lead to, you know, 15% gain or whatever it is. And so very quickly it just became like, hey, there's this game of growth and you seem to be pretty good at it.

So like, let's move you around internally and kind of do a bunch of different things. And then I think really just reputation spreads from there. And I got one question for you from your time to Facebook. So on the brainstorm, when we do the brainstorms, We have all these different kind of like themes. So we just find that a bunch of ideas fit in these same buckets.

And so one of the buckets I always talk about is what I call the export bucket, which is like if you're ever at a big company, you see a whole bunch of problems and solutions. And so you see problems that you didn't know existed. And it's like, dude, we would import a solution. We would buy a solution for this. If somebody could solve this problem for us, we would have bought. And then on the other side, it's like, we had this problem.

We kind of made an internal tool. Man, if this should actually be exported, every company should have this tool. And I think Facebook is probably the most popular one where that has happened, where they just, people have left Facebook and just tick the Facebook internal tool and made it a SaaS tool for everybody else. Is that something you've seen? Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I don't think most people know about that. So definitely that is one strategy.

There was also, although many of them I think I've left at this point, there was this like little angel investor mafia at Facebook. And it was kind of like the right of passage. If you were leaving to go to a competitor, they weren't. and excited. If you were leaving to go to like a non-competitive but large tech company, you know, hey, well, wish it is. And then if you're leaving to start a company, you basically had to like go see the mafia, right, in kind of a very nice, friendly way. But really it was just you could literally walk out of the door with angel investment, right? And kind of have your pre-seed round or seed round done. And so through that process,

there's a lot of people who just say, hey, I'm going to go build, you know, X company. It's like Y internal tool, but for everybody else. And everybody gets it right away. They're like, oh, yeah, they're like, I use that every day, right? So, I mean, one of them that I I'm sure it's out there. I haven't seen it, but was a huge factor to Facebook's growth was internationalization is the way they described it. But the wind they did it was really key. Early on Facebook looked at other companies like, well, how do you get into international markets? Like it's a different language. And so most people would go and they would like translate their site and do all that kind of stuff. Facebook actually took the opposite, which was they just

open sourced it to some degree. They basically said, hey, if you're a user and you speak both like, you know, English and whatever the national languages, like, can you help us? And all of the support poured in. And so they were able to basically tap into the user base and get all of the translations done and also get it done much more accurately, faster, kind of more scalably, whatever. And so I've always won that mechanism of just like, how do you have a tool that you can ask your users to do the work for you? So it creates a better experience for them and all of the other users on the platform. That's like a really interesting mechanism. And then the second is specifically around translation. You know, most companies now that the internet has become much more kind of adopted around

the world, literally just getting into new markets by translating could lead to a lot of growth. So that's kind of an immediate. What was your title at Snapchat? Officially, I think it was, actually don't remember, either head of growth or growth lead. I can't remember. Basically, it was like, hey, you're going to come and run the growth team. Awesome. Wow. Okay. What do you want to do? Twitch hates it because I just put random shit as my title on LinkedIn. That doesn't match my internal title because my internal title is like a real technical, like it's like 10 words long. and I'm like, no, I think what I really do is I lead international growth.

So I'm going to say I'm the head of international growth. There is no such a role inside of Twitch. But I'm the, if there was one, I think I might be that. And it pisses people off to no end. But I'm like, dude, this is one of those things. It can't be enforced or nobody's going to really enforce it. And it's just really funny how people do that. Everyone's like a VP on LinkedIn.

And internally, they're like junior associate. So one of the things that cracks me up, you know, I grew up on the East Coast, went to the West Coast. And there was definitely like this culture difference between kind of East Coast companies, but also like the Wall Street versus Silicon Valley type thing. And so now back living in New York. And what you see is like every single person, like you know exactly where they are in the org structure by their title on Wall Street, right?

Are they an analyst? Are they a principal? Are they a managing director? Are they a VP? Like it's pretty well documented and kind of, you know, level set, right? Yeah. And it's like, and by the way, and people like really want a title in Silicon Valley, it's exactly what you just described.

Like literally people, you know, hey, I'm the chief janitor. Right? Like they could care less about the titles. You know, it's just kind of like joking around. And it's much more about kind of the work products. So I don't know, just an interesting tidbit that I've noticed kind of going back and forth between the two coast. And you're known as like a Bitcoin guy.

I mean, that's like one of your one of your worlds, right? You guys are coming up with every label possible. It's like, hey, you're the Twitter guy. You're the podcast guy. You're the Bitcoin guy. You're the investing guy. You know how like Sean's the framework guy. Sean loves framework.

I tend to like, I like to label stuff and I like to put it in these boxes because it helps me understand, even though I know that it's not the whole truth. It's just, nine times out of 10, well, somebody will come on and they'll be like telling about their, they're, it's like, what does your business do? We ask, as you should. They explain for like two minutes and Sam's like, I'm going to say, like, in stupid words, basically what you guys do is you charge a whole bunch of money for people to read your newslet or whatever, you know, like some random, like simple, oversimplification. It's great. That's a super power. skill to have is take complex ideas and get them into simple language. Well, it's like,

it's like, look, I know that like I'm going to insult you, but you're basically like my space, but you're like a little better and different, correct? So what is your, uh, using that logic? What's your description of the hustle? I usually say we're like Wall Street Journal, but for like 20 year old dudes who are interested in entrepreneurship. Yeah, that's not, that's not the dumb down version. That's, that's still like kind of congratulatory. That's the sales pitch. Yeah, that's what you want it to be. We write about a bunch of business stuff and some people pay money to advertise and other people pay money to access the information. I don't know.

Is that right? It would just be like every morning we sent out like I sent an email with the news and a shit ton of people read it. Like that's basically what you guys do. That's fair. That's like saying calling you a newsletter business is kind of simple. But okay, that is my own. You're giving me my own medicine. But what you're known as, I mean, you do you do a lot of Bitcoin stuff, right?

Yes. Got it. Okay. I'm just trying to give the audience some perspective here. So yeah. All right. So look, basically here's the Hallowett,

the way I think about it is I was in the army. I then built two very small technology companies that essentially were failures, but I like navigated nicely. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, you know,

did way better than I should have. Then went to Facebook, went to Snap, and they started investing full time and started out kind of full generalist early stage investor and then like double and triple down on Bitcoin and crypto and all that stuff. And, you know, I still do some things outside of it, but for the most part, that that's pretty much it. And I just think it's like one of the most innovative areas.

And did you make enough money at Snap and Facebook that you're using your own funds to invest in stuff? Is that how it worked? Or did you raise money? So in the beginning, one of my partners and I, we started out with personal capital. And we did, I think it was like eight deals or something. So it wasn't a lot of money that we kind of put out there. But it was definitely enough where we kind of felt like, hey, do like, we know what we're doing. Right? Like, can we like find a deal? Can we negotiate the actual terms? Like, well, an investor take our money. Like all the basic stuff that like if you're really kind of insecure when you're first starting something new, you want to make sure like if I'm going to lose money, it's going to be mine, not somebody else's. And it also is helpful when you've got a partner who he sold a company for almost half a billion dollars. Yeah, that's how like. Yeah. So like, yeah, so he like, you know, is a little bit more, you know, wealthy than most people. But when we were doing this, it was just like, hey, do you know what we're doing. And then once it was like, you know what we're doing. And then once it was like, like, you know what we're doing. And then once it was like, like, you know, like, oh, okay, like, these are like interesting and like we could like show other people.

Like, hey, here's the first eight that we did. Like, we'll put these into a fund if you put money into the fund too. And then like, we'll like be partners. And the LPs are like, oh, that sounds awesome. And so literally we did that. And then what we started to do, again, because we had no cool we were doing is we would go to a founder and we'd be like, hey, your company looks awesome. You're awesome.

We want to invest. But like, we're like raising the fund as we're writing the checks. So like, I want to invest. But like, let me come back to you with a number. once I like go talk to the LPs. And then we'd go back and we'd be like, hey, if you put money into the fund, then we can do this deal. Like here's the actual deal.

Isn't this a great deal? They'd like, that's an awesome deal. Like, okay, cool. Like, if you gives us 100K, then we're going to put 100K in this company. Plus you get exposure to all the other deals in the fund. And so LPs are like, oh, this is awesome. And they would give us the money and then we'd do it. And so like that's like very like hand-to-hand combat fundraising type stuff.

But when you're starting out and literally you'll take like 50, 100K checks for like a pre-seed fund. It's just the only way that you can is to like build the trade. track record, right? And then what you kind of even work? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I probably can't share the financials, but people, a lot of people know this. So we invested in, uh, imperfect produce in the, I'll call it C round. It was like $12 million valuation. That company has done incredibly well. We also invested in, uh, Everly Wellness. That's their like, dude. Okay. So yeah, so Julia, uh, I think we invested like $15 million valuation. They're absolutely crushing it. What else is in there? So these weren't crypto projects. You were just doing.

No. Tech investing. Yeah, these are all early stage, completely agnostic. Like, what was really interesting is we lived on the East Coast in North Carolina. We were doing remote investing, only there wasn't the cool term for it at the time. It basically was like use your computer and try to be smart and, like, outwork people because you don't live in San Francisco or New York at the moment. And so we ended up investing, I think it was like 12 or 14 cities or something.

Like we literally didn't care where people were located because it was all virtual. And the second thing was 25% of the founders were female. So 25% of the company's had a female founder, I think is the right way to say it. But that wasn't a mandate. It's like after the fact, like all the Me Too stuff happened, like all that, we like, we like, we like, we like, did the math. And I do think that this whole idea of having, like, investing remotely, just naturally like broadens the horizon.

You're willing to kind of invest in other geographies, other types of people, whatever. So it'd be interesting to see kind of the COVID impact to early stage investing. All right. Today's episode is brought to you by Tempo. Tempo.fit is the website. I actually use this. I've used this for a few months now. And it's this machine that has a touchscreen and this 3D sensor. And what it does is they give you weights, like 115 pounds in weights. And it's for strength training. So what it is is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting. It sees how many reps you're doing and how much

effort you're putting in, what your heart rate is. It's pretty amazing. And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift, how many to lift, what workout to do, whether you want to do a 20 minute, 10 minute, 50 minute workout. It's pretty amazing, but the best part is the leaderboard. The other stuff, all the features that they have, that's cool. But I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class. So it's made me want to work harder, lift more weight or have more endurance. It's just pretty freaking fun. And the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer. And this product tempo, it checks that box for me. So they're our sponsor today.

If you use the code tempo hustle, you'll get $100 off. So tempo. dot fit is the URL and tempo hustle, one word, you'll get $100 off. So check it out. I use it. If you look at me up on Twitter, you'll see I'm always filming videos where I'm talking to that company, saying I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard because I actually love this thing and I use it all the time.

So check it out. And then the last business is all mentioned is a company called Cubcoats. This one's awesome. I know those guys. Yeah. Oh, do you? Okay. Well, I've met them.

and then other friends have told me about Kepka since I met him. Because he was always doing little internet tricks basically. And I was like, this guy's smart. Oh, man. What is it? So we invested it was called Jacket Pets at the time. And Jacket Pets was literally the idea of this kid, Zach Park, who, if I remember correctly, he like basically was a Kickstarter guy.

Yeah, he would like go to people and be like, Sam, you've got an awesome product. I'll put it on Kickstarter and like I know the formula and we'll sell like $10 million on Kickstarter. And he did this like multiple times. And then eventually it was just like, hey, I'm going to do this for myself. And so jacket pets was take a stuffed animal. Kids don't want to leave it behind. And so like let's put a zipper in the back.

And then when you unzip the stuffed animal, you can like turn it inside out, like press it inside out and it'll turn into a kid's jacket. And so like you're like, ah, that's kind of like a crazy idea. But like this kid understands Kickstarter. Like I'm sure he could like, you know, come out of the gate. And then we showed a couple of LPs who were already in the fund. And every single one of them was like, my wife would buy that tomorrow. or like my husband thinks this is a great idea, you know, whatever for my kids.

We're like, okay, this might have legs. We invest. He, one, kills kick, but I forget the metrics, but like, you know, knocks out of the park. Two, then he goes and he starts licensing. So he does, like, licensing deals with everyone from, like, major sports leagues to, like, the Disney Marvels of the world, whatever. And then he gets them into retail. He's selling them online.

Like, he just, like, explodes the business as one of our best performing investments. It's like, you know, it's doing like, it is it is. It is eight figures of revenue. We'll put it that way. Wow. So it's like a real business, right? It's not like a, hey, we sold $300,000 on Kickstarter and like we're cool. It's like a legitimate business where Kickstarter happened and then they built the scalable

business on the back end, you know, both retail and online. Okay. I want to talk about some ideas, Sean. Is that okay if we get into it? I've never said no. Okay. Before we do, well, this is kind of an idea. I want to, I'm writing down my notes of what you're talking about.

I want to talk about this export stuff from Facebook. but I'm currently traveling, Pomp. I'm looking for where I want to settle down. And there's this great book I'm reading, and I'm learning about called Tribe. Have you heard of that? Tribe? Yeah. And I have not.

Okay, it's called Tribe, and it's all looks at like what makes tribes. And one of the points this guy makes is that in Israel, the rate of PTSD for soldiers is like 1%. But in America, it's like 25%. Because soldiers go and do their thing, And they shockingly, or this is shocking for me as someone who's ever done anything like that, they are depressed when they come home because they love being in a tribe in the military.

And they even though they're risking their lives and they were drinking like you showed to be non-alcoholic beer and there were so many reasons to be unhappy because it was hard. They felt wonderful. They felt camaraderie. And that gave them fulfillment. And it's like they are in the trenches to not really serve their country but to help their, their peers, their partners in the military. and it gave them purpose.

And in America, we do a really bad job of like, you know, we go to our suburban home and it's like, get off my property or, you know, stay away from my home. This is mine. That's yours. Did you sense that when you came home from, you were in Afghanistan, you said, right? Iraq. Iraq, sorry.

Yeah. So for those that don't know, I was in the military for six and a half years. Ended up when I left the military as a sergeant in the infantry, did deployment to Iraq in 2008, 2009, was in Taji, which is like 12 miles north of Baghdad. So I've never heard it. as the tribes. And I'll read the book and let you know what I think about that specifically. But one of the things I've always told people is people are like weird. And they always

have like, like, stupid questions. And so they'll be like, well, why don't you have PTSD? Right. And I'm like, okay. Well, like, I guess we're just going to have that conversation. Fine. And like, sometimes people ask like with the first 20 minutes of meeting them, you're like, man, you really have no filter. But the way that I've always like thought about it is I went from playing football in college, which is like a pretty violent sport, all dudes, a lot of Like all that kind of stuff to then I got deployed when I was a junior so I literally got pulled out of school got deployed To a much more violent situation right obviously there's guns, there's bullets, bombs, all this kind of stuff But still all dudes and a lot of camaraderie and then when I came back I actually went back and played football

So my transition back was not like in Iraq two weeks on you know transitioning back and then like working at you know one of my friends at home depot right like that's like a really really you know black and white contrast For me, it was going back into playing football, violence, sport, right? Comratery guys. Like all of the ingredients were there. They basically just took away our guns, right? And so I've always credited that with, like, the transition being much easier. And it makes a lot of sense in this tribe's kind of framework where we probably could do much better if we literally just kept people tied into something or some identity or whatever.

Do you feel like, where do you and your wife, congratulations, by the way, you and Paulina, Right. Do you guys, you live in Manhattan now? We do. Do you feel like you have a tribe at all in a high-rise building? So in the building, no, I don't even think I could tell you a single person that we know in the building by name. But, you know, I mean, you get like easy stuff like the dormant and stuff like that that we talk to every day, whatever. But we got a lot of friends, right, that are kind of all throughout Manhattan. And, you know, we generally are social to some degree and try to, you know, kind of meet up with people every weekend or whatever. So I think that helps. It's just not, you know, building specific. The reason I'm bringing this up is because this is a business podcast. And I think that there's a ton of opportunity that's going to happen. I think that Gen Z and now our generation, because we're a remote, I think there's going to be a massive, massive problem with loneliness. And men in particular above the age of 30 who are single have a huge problem meeting people.

and I was reading the stats and it's crazy that since the 1950s, right after World War II, as we moved to the burbs and as we got a little bit more stoic, like where men aren't supposed to, you know, talk to men with a sense of love, although I think that's improved a lot recently. But anyway, I think men are going to be crazy, lonely, more lonely than normal in the next handful of years. And as someone who's ex-military, I don't hang out with a lot of military guys. I was like, I wonder if he experienced that because there's some opportunity there, I think. So two things that I would say is one, I definitely think that businesses that are able to build the communities, not just have customer bases are going to do incredibly well coming, you know,

coming out of this whole COVID thing and then also just in general in a digital age. And some of it is like addressing the loneliness. And then some of it also is just the internet provides you the ability to find people who have similar interest, right? And like, that's really hard to do if you didn't have the internet and you live to Manhattan. Like, you basically would have to, like, try to go to bars and find, like, okay, where's the people who like my sports team, right? Or like, where's this, whatever? The internet, you just like, go to, I don't know, Chicago Bears.com, even though they're,

they're not very good team because the giants are better. But, you know, it's like that, that's kind of one piece. And then the second piece also is, I still think that there's a ton of innovation to happen around meeting people. So you see some of this with like the, what is it, lunchtime.com.a.i or something, right? Lunchmate. or lunch buddy or something like that. Yeah, whatever it is. You see this with like the clubhouse, kind of the drop in audio, whatever.

But it's just like, I think a lot of people think of that category specifically is like, oh, it's over, right? Like, oh, we have Twitter. We have whatever. Like I actually think that it hasn't even started yet. And even if you go to the extent of, so here's an idea for you, dating apps,

what's the number one problem with dating apps? And if you guys had to guess, if you went and talked to 100 people, what do you think their biggest issue would be? for women, creepy men, I guess, inappropriate men. So along those lines, one of the things I've heard people talk about over and over again is like the false promotion, right? Like, oh, this guy looked like he was going to be so hot and attractive and whatever.

And then like I met him, he looks nothing like his photo, right? Or like, man, this girl, like, I was so into her. And then like we met for a date and she had like a squeaky voice and like I didn't want to like hang out with her anymore. She was normal, right? Or whatever. And so I think that one of the opportunities, and I've literally pitched this to so many people and nobody will build it. So whoever builds it, please reach out to me is to create a dating app just called Authentic.

And all you do is you hold down the screen, right? So there's no profiles. There's no text. There's no anything. When you open the app, you just hold down the screen to create your profile and a random question pops down. And it's the selfie video. You've got to answer it on the spot, just like you would, you know, a date or an event or whatever. And you can review it afterwards.

but you can't save it. So you either get to choose right then and there, I want this to be public or I want to discard it. And then if you discard it and you hold down again, you get a different question. And you don't know what the questions are. It's completely, you know, kind of authentically you. There's no filters.

There's nothing. It's video. So I get to hear your voice. I got to see your mannerisms. I got to see if you're smart or not, whatever. And not only do I think people would create the content, imagine the consumption experience. It would be like watching, you know, American Idol audition tapes, right?

Like you could just see there and just keep there and just keep scrolling. So would you, but would you, I would never invest in the dating space, would you? I think that, again, going back to people think that category is over. I think it's probably one of the most ripe categories for not only disruption, but also two, those businesses make incredible amounts of money when done correctly. Yeah, but so few of them are done correct. Like, like there's, it's like one of those, it seems like one of those spaces where there's a few winners that kill it and then everyone else dies.

Do you know what name of space is not like that, right? What space does not have a handful of winners and then everybody else dying, right? Plumbers, cleaning services? Like, fuck, you want, like. Are you going to go invest in a plumber? Like, what is the plan? Sam light. I mean, like, I don't know.

What I mean is with a plumber, it's like a dating app to marketplace. So you need everyone to use that. That's the type of investing he does. You put in a dollar and you're trying to get over a hundred back. And like the only types of companies that can return 100,000 X are going to be, things where there's a few winners that win that win big, right? Okay, hold on. Do you guys know what Muz matches?

Yes. No, I don't. Tell me. These guys are going to love the fact that I'm even mentioning them. They don't even remember. I talked to them three or four years ago. It's a dating app for Muslims. Muslims have the largest religion in the world,

and there are a number of intricacies and nuances to dating. So please, God, hopefully I don't get any of this wrong. But little things like, are you halal or not? Right? Like, what food do you consume? are you willing to move to another country if you meet the right person on this app right like all of these little things that are very specific to that segment of the world population they created an app and it's the largest dating app in the world for Muslims and when I first heard that I was like where they got like

50,000 users like no it's a massive business and I haven't talked to them in literally two or three years so I don't know kind of how it's played out but I still see them all time online mentioned and stuff like that so it's like you could go do that for every single religion and I think people have done that. You can go city by city. You can do all these different things. And so you can take an industry and just segment it and then just rebuild the same infrastructure with a different kind of skin on it and probably do pretty well. I have a friend who did almost exactly that. Not really a friend. I mean, I met the guy and he came to one of my kind of like founder, mastermind things. And it's like, cool, what are you doing? It's like just a handful of people. He's like, I'm going to build this

dating app for Indian people. I was like, oh, great. At the time I was a single Indian person. I was like, great, talk to me. And I realized it's definitely not for me because he was like, the name was in Hindi is Bill Mill, which means like hearts meeting or something. And then basically what it was is like, as people who wanted to get married. So it was more like the match.com or whatever. I remember, you know, the thing you're talking about where every group has like these small nuances that make a huge difference to them.

He was, he did like log in or you had to sign up with LinkedIn. I was like, what the hell is this? And he's like, dude, any people care about like what your profession is. And if you don't have a job,

like you're not a candidate. Like you should not be in the pool if you don't have a job. And that's straight up. That's how like kind of old school, many people think is like number one you know good job good family fair skin tall like these are the attributes and if you you can miss one but you can't miss like job for example dude there's far there's farmer dating yeah what is that farmers or whatever it's something like that yeah so there's all these niches and so he sold so anyways i remember that day being like uh this is interesting actually

that could work and then he was like really stubborn about one thing and i was like okay i don't want to invest and this guy, he's just so stubborn. He was like really insistent that you would only have seven seconds to look at a profile and decide. And I was like, cool. Like, that's an interesting mechanic, but like also might be total bullshit. And like, you might throw it away. He's like, no, trust me.

No. And I was like, all right. This guy's just like way too stubborn. Anyways, fast forward a few years. He sells that app this year for $50 million to, I think one of the conglomerate groups, like match or whoever, like that IAC or all of these. Yeah. They own all the dating apps because he picked a segment and like, you know, just drove that

segment home and knew how to acquire users who had that particular problem. That's pretty badass. Good for him. I love that idea. And by the way, this is like a recurring theme is if you go and if you ask a bunch of people, like what are the verticals that are played out? Like those are actually probably the best ones to go after. Right.

So just where everybody has written off at this point. Yeah. It's just like consumer social 18 to 24 months ago. Actually like pretty good time to start. and you see the rise of TikTok all of a sudden. You see, you know, all these things like explode. It's just right when everyone thinks it's over, like here we go again. So Sean has kind of like invented this export business topic that I want to bring up in a second.

So think about like what could be exported from Facebook or snap or whatever. I can give you an example of one that was that I heard of. Well, yeah, yeah. Tell your example, Sean. And then let them and then we'll go to a one topic and then come back. So he has time to think. All right. So the export example, there's a company called Launch Darkly.

Are you familiar with them? I have not. Basically, at Facebook and many big companies, they have obviously, you know, you've got a billion users. If you launch a feature that sucks or is buggy or is going to decrease engagement, like, you know, leaving a feature that decreases revenue by 1% can be, you know, tens of millions of dollars for these companies. So you have to be really smart about how you roll out a feature. And especially with the app store, you don't want to roll something out and then have to go through app store reapproval and take seven days like this is how it used to be. So Facebook built a system internally, from what I understand, that was basically like it lets you launch a feature with a feature flag, meaning it's off by default, and then the engineer from the back end can turn it on for a subset of people. You could say, I want 1% of users to see this only. And if it goes good with the 1%, then I'll turn my knob and I'll take it to 5%, 10%, etc. So this is like a standard feature that big companies have, but small companies were never going to build the infrastructure to do something like this.

And so Launch Starkley was like, you know, a couple of ex-Facebook people spun out and they're like, hey, whatever, I forgot the internal name of that tool at Facebook. It's like, let's call it whatever code name Medallion. It's like, oh, we're taking Medallion and we're making it available to every SaaS company that exists. And these guys have crushed it. They've raised over $50 million dollars and it's, because it's a sort of a known quantity that you're taking the R&D of Facebook, the infrastructure of Facebook. And then you're basically saying no other company, no small company could afford this investment. We'll do the investment once and we'll sell it to every small company for a small monthly fee.

And so they've been tremendously successful with a small feature like that. The first time I ever heard of this, and I'd never heard of this export, you know, framework is because that's fucking trademarked. It's your boys original. You know, people forget, like, before you go work at these big companies, and I joined Facebook when it was 3,800 employees, like 4,000 somewhere there. And when I left, like basically two years later, it was already 12,000. It's like literally right when we were really, really scaling.

And you forget like life beforehand because you walk in and like a bunch of these tools are there and you're like, wow, I can like go 1%. And then 5%. Oh, I can target based on geography. And we should go to New Zealand because New Zealand speaks English and reporters don't, you know, nobody are reporters are there. So they don't know what features are getting tested and, you know, whatever. But the first time that I started to help a friend after Facebook, I was like,

oh, well, you should obviously just figure out like what is your hook. that identifies retention. And he was like, what do you mean? And I was like, well, at Facebook, like, I think if I remember quickly, it's like if you get 10 friends in seven days or something, right? If you like friend 10 people, then like there's like an 85% chance, whatever the number is. Yeah, but like that takes forever at an early stage company. Of course. That's going to take me four weeks to get like any interesting data. So I just kind of figure it out now. Well, and what they would do is, one, you've got to have the system to do the testing, right? Two, you got to have enough data over a long enough period of time to actually know,

did it lead to 30, 90, two-year retention rates, all that kind of stuff. And the third thing is you're going to have the engineering capacity to change your product around to test all the different things. So I remember being like, oh, this is going to be so easy. Like, you know, it's literally like an internal tool, whatever. And he was like, what do you mean? I have like one engineer, you know, two engineers, whatever it was. He was like, I can't do that.

And so I sort of like Googling around. And there was a company amplitude, which I think now is like pretty popular, actually. But that was like one of their big early selling points was like, hey, we can basically look at a bunch of your retention data and tell you like, here's the thing that. that is the highest signal as to having a retained user base. And then you can like basically manipulate your product, like make everyone go do that thing. So for Facebook,

it's, you know, if it's friending, let's force everyone to give us their contacts, their emails, like whatever we could possibly do, suggest the right friends. Once they hit their 10 friend,

you know, quota or whatever, then we can back off and let them enjoy Facebook. But like we're super aggressive in the first seven days to make sure that they hit that. Right. For every product, there's something.

Yeah. Slack has like your, I think it's a thousand messages was the, was the milestones. Like once you get past a thousand messages, you'll never turn off Slack or something like that. Like a bunch of different companies have their, their magic moment where it's like once you pass this magical threshold,

we know we got you. You hit core value. You understand what this is all about and you're going to have a great experience. Absolutely. So I want to give you a second to think about that because we, because Sean put you on the spot a little bit and or we both did. But let me tell you something that I heard this week. There's this guy named Nick Hoover.

or I think his name is that I met. I was driving, doing a live Twitter thing. And he like started talking. I go, dude, let me talk to you now. And he like called my other phone and we did like a live interview on Twitter. It was kind of cool. And he was like, so what this guy did was, he was in a service business. And then he started to buy storage companies and put software on it and he's consolidating them.

That's cool. But he was like, the thing that I learned about a service business is that it's not a problem about having too much demand. because if I'm providing a service that's popular, like I'm always going to have customers who want it. The problem that I found is that I can't, like the people who want to work in this industry, it's hard to train them. And I need to, and he's like, the real problem is, and I didn't want to solve this problem was I needed to come up with the training system that I could teach a fifth grader how to do X, Y, and Z and have a repeatable and make it work well. Have you guys ever heard of this problem? I mean, I don't know anything about services, but have you heard of this problem before, Sean? Yeah, I think this is the limit of every service business is how do I have enough people? I can't scale my time. I don't either want to or I can't anymore.

So can I get other people to do what I do without losing the magic of what works for me? Right. Like that's the biggest issue. And so I started researching this. And there's a few things that do this. The first is there's a company called Health Stream. Health Stream is publicly traded. It's based in Nashville. I think it does 300 million in revenue. and they teach nurses how to do the latest procedures. So if it like for corona, it's like, all right, the new procedure for welcoming people is to do X, Y, and Z. And they just have like, it's basically they just make videos and everyone logs in and watches in and watch the video. What are some interesting businesses that this could work for? You know, it's a, and I've noticed it with my

company even like training people to do this thing is, it's actually hard. Like I just create this Google Doc and I'm like, fuck, they're not going to read this, even though it's going to make their job better. Well, it's two problems, right? So one is, the people who know how to do the task. Like one, they've got to be good at documenting it. And then two is you've got to get people to actually consume the content as well. Right. So it's almost like this twofold problem.

And I got to imagine that there's a big business in every single regulated industry. Right. So for CFAs, for nurses, you know, just go down the line where you mandate the training. So like, oh, there's some regulation or oversight committee or, you know, whatever the thing is that forces everyone to, you know, be up to date on whatever the latest stuff. stuff is, and if those rules are in place, then basically the demand is, you know, infinite because it's just how many nurses are there in the country. They all have to take this training. And so, like, I can just go build the business. And I know that I can walk in every hospital and they have to buy from either me or one of my competitors, right? My buddy is in the, like, I don't know if

you'd call it like, he's like a professional speaker or something. He like goes and does workshops. And his, he basically has three, three types of clients. One is like high end company, like a Ferrari or, whatever, Chippelay, like a big company, you know, MasterCard will hire him to come in and talk. And then half the time when he's on the road, he's like, yeah, I'm at the Iowa middle school district, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, cool, you're doing like a pro bono thing. And he was like, no, like, dude, these schools pay more than the companies. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, they have this like professional development budget that they have to spend. And then they have these like, whatever the like kind of target is of the year. Like he's like, so for last year,

it was all about growth mindset. And so I'm the best guy for growth mindset. And so, every single school district wanted me and had thousands of dollars to throw up me to come talk to seventh graders or fourth graders about, you know, about this. And the teachers also that, you know, they have, they have a budget for this. He's like, and then the next year it'll be around, you know, social emotional learning or like whatever. It's like whatever the top level says, hey, this is the mandated thing you all got to learn. It's kind of like your nurses thing. It's like, we all got to learn this procedure or this technique or this best in class. And then some, you know, some speaker somewhere is like, oh shit payday uh this year i'm going on tour like lady gaga and that's what he basically does it's

incredible but i also think masterclass is like a version of this right it's it's unstructured training it's not for a specific job but it's like the self-improvement professional development whatever like there's a lot of people that buy that the other element is like who's paying right so like that nursing training the nurse isn't paying forward it's from coming from one of these budgets or whatever but i do actually think that there's going to be and not in like the there's kind of like the sleazy, like, let me teach you to make money on the internet type stuff, but much more like, hey, how do you start a podcast? Hey, how do you, you know, create a successful newsletter, right? Like, like, Sam, if you guys came out with that

tomorrow, it's like you would sell a lot of whatever that is. Well, don't worry, we are. Okay. There you go, right? So like, but it's just like, as you kind of go down the line, you could look at what are all the successful things that people have done on the internet? And if you understand how they did it or you go get them to do it, if they just document their process. Like there's somebody in the world who wants to be that person or have that type of business and they'd be willing to pay for it. It may not be a billion dollar business, but it may a couple million bucks a year just selling, you know, training manuals on a million internet jobs, right? My father-in-law is in the moving business. He owns a moving business called

Eagle Transport where you live in Manhattan. It's a great company. And I'm like, why haven't you, like, it's a cash flow thing. It provides him a wonderful living. And I'm like, why haven't you expanded expanded and this is a common thread because my father owns a old school company as well i'm like why haven't you expanded he goes i don't want to train these people like it's too hard like it's such a pain and you work with like uh i mean i'm just gonna sound like a dick you work with like a lot of like lower end people it's like they're like have issues you don't want to fucking teach them and they're always a pain in the ass and i'm like he's like i don't want to deal with all these people this is just enough already and i'm like what can i what can i what can i do to just teach this is this is

it's not about training it's about actually replacing an automated Like this is the training is an intermediary step that's never going to be good enough. And like what's happening. So I have a friend. He's big time investing into automation. That's his, that's his thing. So he's always telling me like, I invested in this pizza robot company. I'm like, oh, cool.

It's like some sexy consumer thing. He's like, no, like basically they're just trying to get a pizza that can make perfect pizzas 24-7 that they'll sell to Dominoes and Dominoes will replace four employees. And be like, hey, dominoes, this machine never gets sick, never complains, never checks its phone while at work. And this machine will just spit out the same pizza all day 24-7. How how does that sound? How much will you pay for that? And then they're basically like, oh, you know, how much money do I have? Let me give it all to you. And so there's automation, like, I don't know if you've noticed. There's this, there was a head fake early on with like,

kind of like in restaurants, like digital menus, kiosks, like stuff like that. And then it fucking happened, both in airports and in restaurants, like you'll see the kind of order here kiosk tablets. There's a company called Toast that I think crushes it with this. I'm like I don't want to say a number, but it's a lot of revenue every single year. And it's all because they can do the math and basically say, hey, we save you to two headcount worth. And when I save you that headcount, you also don't need the manager because the manager spends what percentage of time dealing with the headaches of people no showing or not underperforming or training or whatever. Because these people switch jobs all the time. And so like Sam, the solution.

your thing, I think in most cases, actually going to be a form of automation where you just get rid of the human in the loop altogether. I agree. There's also a macro trend here, which I think is Chmoth and I had this, you know, epic podcast episode where he basically outlaid a very simple framework, which was simply the United States economy has pursued efficiency over resiliency. And so we basically ran around the world, tried to find the most efficient lowest cost way to produce things. We became really, really good at it. And then like this pandemic basically exposed the fact that we gave up resiliency for efficiency. And so his argument is that like we're going to swing the pendulum back,

maybe not all the way, but like in some direction where resiliency is going to become important again. And you see this with like American companies want to, you know, onshore their manufacturing, their supply chains, like whatever. The number one advantage that the American human labor worker has had is the fact that automation hasn't been able to replace them. Right. Like that's their biggest moat is the fact that like a machine hasn't been able to do their

job. And so therefore, when these companies bring back those manufacturing facilities or those supply chains, now the tech's actually getting pretty close, like 3D manufacturing, automation, like whatever it is. And so if you just brought back your facility to the United States and tried to use American labor at the cost, you would like four to five X the labor cost that you have compared to Southeast Asia or wherever. So like it almost would be like cost prohibitive to do it. But if you can instead use automation and 3D printing or whatever it is, you would be. is now you can actually bring it back to the United States, increase your resiliency and keep some like barrier of efficiency as well.

And so I think like one, there's going to be this rise in popularity of the automation and 3D printing, but also there's going to be a lot of people who like got to go find new jobs. Right. And so like how long does that take? What do they do? You know, we can get into all that.

But it's just like that trend I think is going to become really, really important as we come out of this COVID stuff. Is there any space where you've seen that you're shocked? It's not automated. I mean, like everything. I mean, it's the thing where, like, we all overestimate, right? What's Bogay say, like, we overestimate what we can do in one year? Like, if you literally think of almost every single job, I think that we all believe it's going to be automated.

Like, how many people thought, you know, cars were going to be automated and self-driving at this point? Like, there's a lot of people, right? How many people thought that the segue would eventually turn into the, like, automated robot that goes around the office buildings and make sure that, you know, it's acts as a security guard, right? or there's some level of shutting off the lights when no one's in the room. So it saves on the energy bill. But right now there's humans that literally walk around a big office building like shut a lights off. Like stupid little things that each one of those applications probably ends up being a business at some point. And then you get the like bundling of, okay, like I'm just going to be the guy who goes and buys up all the businesses that optimize the operations of a commercial real estate building.

So let me buy the security robot company. Let me buy the light company, you know, whatever. And then they build a big conglomerate. then somebody 20 years from now, like unbundles it all again, right, and says, hey, I'm going to go and I'm going to compete whatever. So it's just, I think business cycles in general play out that way. And, you know, we're on the start of automation. Awesome. There's an export one that's sort of related to what you're talking about, Sam. Yeah, let's get to that. They have this developer boot camp, right? So like, I have a friend who, he was my buddy. He was like a, I don't know,

like a finance guy kind of thing, went to Facebook, worked in the fraud department. and then he went to the Facebook developer boot camp that they have internally, which is like, hey, in like eight weeks or so, you can learn to be an engineer at Facebook. You'll start at the kind of the bottom, but then you can grow from there. And now he's like CTO of some tech company in New York. And he basically, you know, after a few years at Facebook, so he did the boot camp, worked as an engineer at Facebook for two, three years. And then left and then went to this company that was like a well-funded, well-run company.

It was like, they're like, kind of doing the interview. And his pitch was so simple. It was so beautiful. He just goes, I make your engineering team work like a, a Facebook engineering team. He's like, I know that process. That's how I work. I'll just use that. I will take our playbook over there and I'll make them work over here. What's that called? Like saying like, you know, I'm from the Navy SEALs. I, you know, I'll come to your gym and I'll train you like a SEAL. And it's like, oh shit, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I want. And so,

so he's now a CTO of some company. And so that same thing, though, like what Facebook did, which was not like just some online course you can click a button and take or go to linda.com and we bought you six credits. It's like, no, there's a physical place in the building where you go and you get to do that for eight to nine weeks. You get paid. And then you walk out, you know, with a certain set of skills. That's Lambda school inside of a company. And so Facebook can afford to do it. I don't know how many, I don't know if Google has the same. I'm sure there's companies have variations of this. But there's going to be a central company that does that as a service to every company. So PWC and Deloitte and all these other people, they'll have a boot camp run by like, you know,

whoever. I think General Assembly was trying to do this at one point in time. but like somebody who specifically focuses on upskilling people for coding or upskilling for like using no code tools. I think those will be like that's a no, if I really wanted to run a kind of a people and service heavy business but still make big bucks, I think that would be a way to do it is to go to big old school companies and say, look, we put the Facebook boot camp inside Visa and we will train you train up some people here and we'll train them like the Facebook people trade Facebook. And that would be, I think, a dope business. people don't understand how crazy that training process is. Like as a product manager, I can remember for those four or eight weeks,

but when you first get to Facebook, like you don't even have a team. Like they're literally like, hey, you're going to go here for like four weeks or eight weeks, whatever it was. And they like teach you all about product management at Facebook. But it's not just product management.

It's like product management at Facebook. Like here's how we do things. Here's why we do them. Here's all the things you need to know, whatever. And Chris Cox, who was the chief product officer that left and then came back, he talked to every single individual,

coming class of employees. Like, I mean, it was like, this is serious to us, right? This wasn't like a, here's a one day indoctrination. Like, here's what the bathroom is. You know, here's who your manager is. And like if you have any problems like, you know, send an email to HR. Like this was like a real thing. When I got to Twitch, the first day onboarding, it was that, you know, first half of the

day was like, hey, you're going to get your laptop. And then my guy like, the IT guy was like, hey, sorry, we're short on laptops. So I'll get yours tomorrow. So I'm just sitting there while everyone else boots up. And then it's like, all right, it's lunchtime. Your lunch buddy, someone who works at the company. company will come get you. The guy never comes. And I was like, cool, onboarding complete. That was the whole, that was the whole thing. Like, this is a, this is a multi-billion dollar company.

And so some companies have this like very rigorous process, like the Facebook car wash they put you through where it's like, you come in as like, you know, you know, smart kid from wherever, Harvard or whatever you are. But you're still going to go through that six-week car wash and come out like, you know, Facebook product manager number three, three, four or three. And, you know, that works for them. So I'm going to read you guys. Let me see if I can find it. So you guys know Gardner. So I mock Gardner a lot because I think it's kind of a,

I think it's a little bit of a scam. Not everyone agrees. I think it's kind of scammy how they do things. But, Tom, do you know what they do? Like, you know, it's like the research and they pull people and do all that stuff, right? I feel like you mock them, but you're just, it's like second graders that tease each other, but they actually like each other. It's like, yeah, no, I have a lot of respect for them.

No, I totally do. But I was reading this breakdown of how they work, because, Gardner, they've been around since I think the 70s, maybe. It's worth like $15 billion. And a lot of people are like, how does Gardner do it? Because their research is like only okay. But I was reading a breakdown and they're like their sales training is the best sales training in the industry.

And that they purposely churn like 25% a year of their salespeople because they want a cutthroat. They want it to be cutthroat. And when you first sign up, they do two months of training and they fly you to an isolated Florida Hotel where they split you into teams that compete against one another in high pressure sales games every single day and around 10% of her class was fired within the first two weeks. But the others who made it bonded over it and they shared trauma and they considered themselves an elite cohesive sales organization of highly like a highly covented team.

And that's how and they do it's an eight week. That's like the back of the DVD of like taken three. It's like I have an elite set of skills that I've been trained for. Sounds like boot camp like literally like military boot camp. They give you coronavirus on day two just to see if your immune system can survive. Well, it's actually pretty interesting because when you think about a company, you think, well, it's a product that's amazing. But like as someone who only works in small businesses, I'm like, I forget that it could

be just like this crazy interesting. It's not even that interesting. Like you're like, oh, obviously do that. But a lot of people don't do it, including myself, about these like really good onboarding techniques. Another company I did it was Trilogy Software, which we've talked about on here, which a lot of people don't know about. but they were considered like as good as Microsoft in the 90s and they would do the same thing where they would they would train developers like in a crazy good way and that's how they became so valuable and so that's kind of interesting an interesting idea here I don't know what to make of it but it is something that I didn't previously know that's for sure that that stuff also I think becomes interesting because remember uh cut co cut co knives I think is how it's called whatever like basically they go door to door and they sell knives right or whatever uh I know a lot of kids

in high school or college who would do it for money. But in the back of their head, they would say to themselves, like, I'm learning a skill because the training was so extensive, blah, whatever. And then like, when I get done here, I'm going to have this skill forever. I bet, right? And I don't know for sure, but there's a bunch of people who go to Gartner to be in the sales program for two years and they know they're not going to, you know, spend their career there, but they just want to get the experience and skills and then they leave.

And so, like, that is a fantastic recruiting tool as well. and if you're going to get rid of 25% of people anyways, like you actually probably lose the top like 2% who are like your best people. And then you lose like your bottom 25% or 20% or whatever it is. So I tend to think that like the organizations that spend a lot of time on the training, like word spreads like, hey, working there is good. But the training you get will like serve you for the rest of your career.

And it helps on the recruiting front. So back to the import, export thing. Is there anything at Facebook that you think is? Sam's all about this one. I feel like we have to even have it. So you said a few, but Snapchat as well. I find it so interesting. I mean, only 13 or 15 or 20,

however many, tens of thousands of people do work at Facebook, but they are world class. It's so many different things. What, or snap, let's do snap. Snap's even more mysterious to me. Well,

Facebook is the easier one because I think that people will understand some of the tools and it's probably more, it's a better comp to like what most people are building. And so I would say three things come to mind. The first is the data, a science team at Facebook is absolutely world class and they understand better than anyone in the world kind of the pursuit of truth. And so if you look at the people who have left there, everyone from, you know, the Chamas of the world, whatever, like, it's just this pursuit of like,

I don't care what opinions are, like show me the data and I'm going to set up the test frameworks in order to actually get to the truth. And it all boils down to this one key insight that I had while I was there and I didn't have it like a Eureka moment. Like they literally just told me they were like, hey, when you run these tests, there's two things that are really important. One, you got to have very clear goal. Like, what are we going to measure success and failure by? And then two, whatever the test is has to be executed perfectly. And if you don't execute it perfectly and then it doesn't work, you're left asking yourself,

like, was it because we ran the test wrong or is it because actually we should go spend our time doing something else? Right. So it's like the perfect execution component. And so I think that this testing framework, there's been tons and tons of tools, but very similar to what Sean said about, kind of like, hey,

I'll make your software team like Facebook, just teaching the art of data science and testing and like the pursuit of truth. I think there's a massive business to be built there. Consequently, there's a much of software that you can build around this as well. Like you can see yourself, you go in, you do the training.

And they're like, oh, by the way, like, you know, here's all the watches underneath my jacket. Like, you know,

here's my analytics tool. Here's my screen recording tool so you can watch user pathway. Here's my data. science tool, you know, here's my way that you communicate with customers. Like, you could just walk down every single touch point that, uh, that growth team would have with a product and then just build your own piece of software. And so it's almost this like consultative sales piece where you're making a bunch of money up front on training and then on the back end you're following it with software and kind of

getting long LTV out of it. I have a funny story about this. So I met a guy. This is unconfirm. So this might be total bullshit. I don't know, but I like it already. It's a hilarious. It's definitely true.

By the time you're done, It's going to be true. Exactly. So I'll just share it to, you know, hundreds of thousands of people because, you know, why not? So this guy works at Facebook, high up, and he uses these tools that you're talking about, the testing tool specifically. I believe that there's a tool. Maybe it's called Titan. Maybe it's not called Titan.

I don't know exactly. But there's a tool that basically when you run a test, it tells you not just did your test work. Like, oh, we made the button blue. That made, you know, did more people click that button? But it says, hey, here's every other KPI also. so you didn't fuck up something else while you're trying to fix one thing, you actually dropped another thing. So it gives you this like really great way to analyze the whole picture,

not just your specific thing. Anyways, I don't know much about this tool. But here's what I had heard. I heard that this person was like, okay, I'm going to spin this out. I'm going to export this idea.

I'm going to go make this, um, it's own startup. They recruit a couple of people from internal like, hey, leave with me. Let's go do this. They raise,

they actually raise money. They go, they rent an office, everything. And they get some, you know, goes into, to the office to tell Zos,

like, hey, you know, thanks for everything, you know, but like, peace out. I'm going to go do this. And something happened in that meeting that I don't know, but we believe, here's what ended up happening. The startup never take, never get started. The office rent, they just pay it off. They don't ever go move into the office. The person keeps working at Facebook. And I believe what ended up happening was that, Zach basically was like, you know, you could go do that, but like, here's just, oh, a giant bag of money that I have with me. Like, how about this instead? And like, How about you stay and you take this bag of money and we forget you ever said anything about leaving. And then the guy was like, no, no, no, like I really want to do this.

I actually, I've told my family, I rented an office space. I'm already two feet out the door. And he's like, oh, cool. Okay, so we're not going to let you do this company actually. We're going to have to pursue some action against you. But again, there's this bag of money and this is a great role. If you just want to stay with the bag of money and the great role, you tell me which way you want to go. And so I don't know exactly how the conversation went down.

But from what I have heard, there was a conversation like this that has. happened. Again, I might have been told bullshit, but I loved the story either way, and I choose to believe that this was true, and this person still works at Facebook. Did you guys read the, the text messages? Yeah, so Sean, like, is obsessed with this, and I, he got me obsessed with it where he was like, he like goes and like emails, the founders of huge companies, like, hey, forward me the emails when you were describing the early idea of your company. I love seeing the evolution. I want the raw text. I'm like a fucking paleontologist looking for the original source material. It's pretty cool. I like it as well.

he's got me into it. And so to the listeners, last week, this, this some type of chat transcript got out of Kevin Sistram, the founder of Instagram, talking to a friend who was, or talking to someone who I think was an investor of Instagram, but who also worked at Facebook, I think. Yeah, it's got Matt Kohler. He was early at Facebook and he's a big time BC. And they were chatting back and forth and Kevin was like, hey Matt, Zuck messaged me. Like he wants to, he said this. I think he means this. And then they were talking back and forth about what that could mean. And they were like, he's going to crush you. So like if you don't do this right, like he doesn't care.

He only, he's going to, he's going to destroy you. So play ball. The exact quote in there, Kevin Sistram asked, he's like, if we say no, will he just like go into destroy mode? Yeah. And he was just like, yeah, probably. He's like, fuck. Okay, so what do I say that will not trigger destroy mode?

He's like, maybe we could just say, oh, we're, we're just trying to do this little filter thing. We don't, we don't really see ourselves as like, you know, becoming a social network. And he's like, yeah, he's also really smart. Like he's not going to he said. He goes, he's too smart. And he's like, well, should we tell him that we're going to sell Twitter? He goes, you could help, he'll destroy you. Uh, I thought it was amazing. Did you, and I know we're about that time, did you ever have moments of like that where you're like, oh, God, this guy's like Angus Khan. He's going to, he's going to, he's going to destroy. I don't remember how many times I met with Zuck, but was always in a group setting. So it was

never like we had like a one-on-one, but I was fortunate to work on this very small team that was specifically trying to help figure out like, how do we grow Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg's personal Facebook pages, right? So they didn't want to like manipulate the product, right? Like you could, I literally remember we were, I remember we were like one meeting and like one of the ideas at one point was like, well, why don't we just like put it in eustitial and be like, everyone follows up, like kind of like Tom, MySpace style, you know, type thing. And then part of the beauty of like a diverse team was like somebody else was like no like I grew up in a country where like the president used to like come on you know television and like take over the screen and like with

his like you know message of like conquering the people basically and he's like like there's certain places in the world like you don't want to do this right and so what they ended up saying was like okay like we're just going to have to do this without manipulating the product and like that's like the most fair way to do it uh and so we'd be these meetings and the thing that always struck me was like you've got a guy who runs a, you know, multi-billion dollar business, been working on in a long time. And he could be talking about like super long-term company strategy. And then immediately like there's a presentation up and he would like zero in on a screenshot and be like, uh, why is that buttons pixel like what? And you're like, dude, you just went from like a hundred thousand feet

to like ground floor, you know, level feedback back to 100,000 and then shifted like left or right on various products. And we've been in here for seven minutes. Like your capacity in terms of like ingesting information and also being able to like sift through high signal, low signal stuff is just like bar none. And so I was telling somebody intimately at the company, they're like, well, look, first you have to remember,

like he has the most context here. We're like he's literally been at the company the longest. And so like he's seen like these iterations of the product. He remembers the conversations before they got launched, the things that went right, the things that went wrong. whatever, but it was still this thing of just like, man, this dude's on it. And so, like, I'll read articles even today.

And people like say whatever they want about Zuck. They've like never talked to him or never met him or whatever. And I'm like, do you think he like built a multi-billion dollar company because he's an idiot? Right. Right. And the thing that I'll leave you with on Zuck is a friend of mine was talking about them when they first announced Libra and going into crypto. And he's like, look, there's a lot of people who probably don't like Zuck.

But there's not that many people who thinks he's dumb. Right. Right. And so like you may not like him for whatever your personal preference, you know, reason is. But like, if he's going to do something, a lot of people are going to be like, wait, why is Zuck and Facebook going to do it? Right. And they were talking specifically about crypto. But like, I think that's generally true across a lot of different things. And so if all of a sudden people here like, you know, they're making a huge investment in VR, there's a lot of other people who are like, wait, why is he doing that? Like, what does he know that I don't know? And, you know, they try to start looking around the corner. But I think what you saw, I didn't see the text messages, but I saw. some emails or something, I think, from an Instagram thing, it's just like, look, he saw the future, right? Or at least like where he thought it was going. And he, like, pretty much was like directionally correct, which is pretty impressive.

Yeah, that's crazy. Interesting. I love those stories. Thank you for sharing. Me too. We should go. Yeah, you want to wrap this up, Sean? Damn, I feel like we were just scratching the surface, but this was, this was great.

Pomp, thanks for coming on, man. Hope you can come on again. I think people are really going to like you and your, your thoughts. So I appreciate you coming in. Absolutely. Thanks guys for having me. This is awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.