My First Million - #122 - Not Getting These Jobs Cost Us Millions

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamPar) are back on the today without a guest. On today’s episode you’ll hear: Escape your city with new modular homes (4:20), Cerro Gordo was a ghost town in California sold for $1.2M (10:45) how to make channel/market fit by learning from TikTok (14:45), Shaan introduces an new twist on the stock market (17:00), Sam and Shaan reminisce on missed opportunities and how much money they would’ve made if things didn’t fall through (25:10), Shaan explains limited details on a very interesting opportunity that came to him in the past few days (38:37). Big thank you to Azoras for sponsoring this episode! Follow them on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/azoras. 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.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days on. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. All right. Well, Gucci. What's up, Sam? How are you?

Hey, our friend Novel just hopped on the podcast. We were checking in with him. The summary, it seems like, is we, except for Sean, many of the crew is going to be in Austin in the next two weeks, three weeks. Yeah, that's exciting. I'm kind of rooted in here now. So my old family lives here, so I'm like, okay, I'm not going to move for like tax reasons or whatever reasons. I want to be around my family.

If your family's not here, there's no point being in the Bay Area right now. I think that what I've learned doing this whole Airbnb thing, I'm in Nashville now. I was in Utah. I was in all these places. Having your family and friends around you is significantly better than being in a cool place by yourself. For sure, absolutely. People always ask me, because I lived in all these different cities. I think I've lived in like 10 or 12 different cities around the world, whatever, Jakarta and,

in Australia and stuff like that. And people are like, oh, which one was your favorite? It doesn't matter. It's just based on like who my four friends were when I was there. That dictated my whole experience. It's like, city's fine. You know, Sydney was the best, but who cares? You lived in China.

I would be interested in China. I would be really interested right now in moving to Japan for a little while, even if I didn't know anyone. I think the Japanese are so cool. You didn't live in Japan, did you? No, but when I lived in Beijing, I played sports. And the weird thing when you go to international school,

I didn't realize this. but you don't like play sports against other schools locally. You play against other international schools. So when we would, we'd have like an away game, we would go to Osaka and we would go play against the Osaka International School or we'd go to the Philippines for an away game. And you would go and you actually live with the family of the player on the other team. So you live with them and then you play against them in there two or three times

and you fly back together. It's like an amazing thing. So last episode, you said something that shocked me. You said you referred to Corona as like the Chinese virus. And you made a couple slights towards China. You've lived in China. Are you anti-China? No, I was mocking.

I'm anti-Trump. I was just mocking Trump. How long did you live in China? Two years. So like we're not talking about the Chinese, obviously. We're not talking about the people in general because obviously, of course, you're not anti that. But are you? I just come out as racist on this episode.

I'm like, yeah, I haven't told you guys yet. But are you, are you, are you, I mean, I'm relatively. So I had, same thing, the same thing I was saying earlier. I had an amazing time when I lived in Beijing because I had amazing friends and we had a blast. Were they Chinese or international? They were other international students at that school, some of which were Chinese and some of which were from Sweden and other places. If I was going to go live somewhere, I'd never go live in Beijing, right? It's like super crowded, super polluted.

There's no like natural beauty really in the, and kind of the surroundings, no like kind of oceans or beaches or mountains that you can really see or speak of. and like the food is hard, the language is hard. Like it's just like not an easy place to go live, whereas like Australia was like completely pleasant and easy and like it felt like a vacation. So I would be anti going and living in China again unless I had a really strong reason to. But I had a blast when I was there

just because of my kind of social situation. When COVID started getting popular in December, I had this Chinese intern named Hung who worked for us. And in December he was like, man, my parents live outside of Wuhan and they're telling me about, how bad this is, it's going to come. It's going to be here. I go, hung, okay, whatever.

And then in January, he goes, it's so bad. It's going to be here. I go, hung, this is America, okay? We don't have SARS and bird flu. We don't do this. We don't wear masks. That's a Beijing thing. You were right about that.

We don't wear masks. And then in February, he goes, it's here. Watch. It's going to shut it down. And I go, whatever, you're so wrong. And then finally in March, I was like, hung, I'm sorry. You were so right.

And he would tell him, he goes, my mom and dad are texting me from Wuhan. They're telling me all about it. I go, whatever, dude. It's like the coal. It's like a coal. Anyway, it was pretty funny. So we like, he totally like predicted this. You want to get into some ideas?

Yeah, let's do it. Oh, love it. I could see you. You added a bunch. All right, give me one. Okay. So I got into this idea of tiny homes. I've been very fascinated with it.

It's not like a particularly new thing. When I was younger, we'd call them trailer homes because that's what my grandparents lived. They live in a trailer home. It was just a home that was prefabbed, pre-made, and they dropped it off on a trailer. And it was just, it was kind of like what poor, we were poor. It was a poor person thing. Now, I think that these are going to get quite big.

And a new startup called a bodoo, Abadu, A-B-O-D-U. They just raised a few million dollars. A bunch of these tiny home businesses have raised a few millions of dollars. And now that I'm thinking about like homes, it seems like a pretty interesting alternative. You can buy a 500 to 1,500 square foot modular home, and it's kind of a cool idea. And I've actually met people who are buying plots of land and putting it on outdoorsy, and they're like making money off of it. And now I'm like, man, I should do that with one of these modular homes.

And here's why. There's this new startup called Getaway. Have you heard a Getaway? No. Collectively Getaway, Bray, who looked us up, but a Getaway, I think, has raised $40 million, and I've had family that have went and stayed at it. And they love it. It's a tiny home and a small plot of land outside of New York City, outside of Austin, outside of San Francisco, outside of Chicago, whatever the popular cities are.

And millennial people go and they get away from the city and they spend $200 a night or whatever it is. And it's like a cute Instagram home. And they're doing well. And anyway, I think this is a really interesting market and I love it. I like this one as well. I also like how when you go to getaway.com, it's like escape. from. Like that's instead of like where you know like where you travel from. It's like escape from Atlanta. It's escaped from Boston. It's from New York. Yeah, we've seen this trend. There's also

rent the backyard. So I think it looks like abodeu and rent the backyard are doing the same thing, which is their pitch is not like outdoorsy or whatever. There's is put a little prefab unit in your backyard, you know, your own little in law unit that you can use to live in or rent out. And so you can turn your backyard into an Airbnb without having guests come, you know, into your house. And we've actually written about this on trends. We wrote about it. When did we write about We wrote about this September 2020, so somewhat recently, very recently. And we were looking at backlink data where we were looking at searches. So it was something like a quarter of a million people were searching for modular homes a month.

There's Dwellito, which is an online marketplace for modular homes recently launched. There's just a bunch of interesting stuff about these modular homes. We call them the cute name for millennials or young people, Gen Z, is tiny homes. But when I grew up, we called them trailer homes. I think this is so cool. Maybe I should do it by a platelaine in Austin and get one of these modular homes. I think you can get a mortgage on them too. Yeah, they're not that expensive.

How much are they? I think they're like 100 grand, 50 grand, less. $200,000 for this new startup one. And if you look at Duelito, it looks like these are like 80 grand, roughly. I was attracted to this is you know Kid Rock. Of course, you know Kid Rock. I remember reading this article about it when it was pretty funny. He bought this huge plot of land in rural Alabama on a lake.

And it was like, I just wanted to get away because he lives in Nashville. He was like, I just wanted to get away and have my own platt of land. lot of land. And he goes, I was going to build this big old house. And I was just driving on the road and I seen a trailer park like a modular home salesperson, like a lot that sold them. And he goes, I'll just buy one of them to put on my land while I wait for my home to get built. And he put this 1500 square foot trailer home there. And he was like living in it. And he's like, oh, this is great. This is perfect. I don't need anything else. I don't need any more space. This is exactly what I need. And I was like, damn, that actually is pretty cool. Maybe we should do that. I'm with you.

I like this trend. Personally, I wouldn't build in this space because I don't know. enough and I just think that it's like there's an authenticity that comes from people who really like this lifestyle or have a background in this lifestyle or want this lifestyle. So I personally wouldn't build in it. What do you think or do you think there's any opportunities here? So where would you get? Let's say you're like, like you're into this trend. So you're like, okay, I might buy one of these and live in it slash rent it out.

So that's like a simple opportunity. Would you start a startup in this space? What do you think are some of the open opportunities? Yeah. So there's a couple. The first is backyard offices. That is very, very cool to me. There was this company called a phone booth maybe.

This guy Ryan Peterson from Flexport actually launched it on the side. And they made foam booths for your office because those are really expensive. And then when COVID hit, I think he was like, oh, let's just make backyard offices. So I think backyard offices are amazing. I think I would totally invest in that space or if I didn't have a job, I would for sure be interested in that. I think that there's always like, I don't want to sound like some startup douchebag and be like, oh, this is totally new. This is, like I said, this is a trailer home.

This is not new. But I think there's a lot of money to be made in repackaging something. And own an old thing cute. Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity there just to start one of these businesses. Yeah, I like it. I like backyard offices. I think that's pretty smart because what you could do there is basically you could have one and then you could make it a, you know, a mini distributed co-working space.

You could sell the backyard office and then you could basically make it where you have the outdoorsy type of landing page, where somebody can come and search for a backyard office near them that they can go work out of. And you can turn people into little mini we work, you know, landlords. I also need to check my perspective. I don't know if it's because I'm doing it and therefore I think everyone's doing it. And I don't know if it's because I'm, we're these like yuppie city dweller startup nerds. And a lot of people are doing it.

But I do think that there's this idea of people our age or younger not wanting to permanently live somewhere. and not wanting to buy a home and not wanting to own a lot of stuff. Yeah, I think there's in general been a move towards rent versus own, not just in terms of housing, but like, why would I own a car when I can just Uber on demand and get what I need when I need it and then not own it after that, not owning stuff. But in general, I just think there's just so many people, right?

So like, if you're in this lifestyle category, there's plenty of others that are in that category, even though I'm the opposite, right? Like, got a kid, you know, I'm not trying to be moving every three weeks. Like, I'm living the exact opposite lifestyle as you, but it doesn't really matter. There's a lot of people like me and there's a lot of people like you

and there's a lot of people in all these other categories too. There's enough that you can serve them and that actually is where some of the opportunity comes is where somebody's doing a generic catch-all solution and you say, huh, I'm going to build for this lifestyle segment. I think there's a lot of people who are like me who want to do this. I agree.

And then for the listeners and you, Sean, there's this town that I almost invested a small amount of money in and I didn't do it. It's called Cerro Gordo, C-E-R-R-O-S-G-E-O-S-G-O, R-D-O, Sero Gordo. And Nathan Barry, the guy who owns Convert Kit, a few of my friends that I've just met over the years, just internet entrepreneur-type folks, Ryan Holiday. Do you remember a ghost?

It went viral in 2013 or 14. It was a ghost town that went viral on all the blogs and it said, you can now buy a ghost town in California for $1.2 million. Do you remember that? No, but I heard about it later. I didn't hear about it at the time. So my friend Ryan and all these guys, my friend John was like the ringleader, him in Brent and they were trying to get like $10,000 to $25,000 ahead.

And we're all going to pitch it in by this town. And I backed out. But a lot of people did it. And they bought this ghost town. And it's like 400 acres. It's like four hours from L.A. And it's very hard to get to. But it's beautiful.

It's so beautiful. And it's an old ghost town from the 19, probably 1880s is when it was built. And it's so beautiful and pretty. Well, anyway, the guy named Brent. Brent runs this thing called the Daily Stoic with Ryan Holiday. It's a cool business. He has been living there. I think for the whole bit of COVID.

So starting in March, he went out there. And he's currently retrofitting it by himself in the middle of nowhere, turning it into like a getaway town that people can rent. And I think it's really interesting and it's fun. And he has a YouTube channel that you guys should all check out. And you could watch it in real time of what he's doing. It's so fascinating. This is amazing.

I love this story. And I want to go watch that and see what's going on. And you haven't been there yet. No, but John Beyer, who has asked me to come on the, podcast. We'll have to get him on. He's been asking me constantly. But did you see the photos of what this place looks like? Well, I see the photos where it was like a ghost. Like I see these black and white photos. I don't know what it looks like now. So one of the places burned down, unfortunately, but this guy, it's such a like romantic story. Brent Underwood. Is that him? Brent Underwood. Yeah. So he's Ryan

Holliday's business partner. Ryan Holiday's business and stuff. Brent is his partner. And they have a good little business, whatever. This is like his vocation now. He's like dedicated to restoring this town. he's doing it live on YouTube and you could watch him do it. And his YouTube videos probably have millions of views. And the day that they're able to host people there for money, he's going to knock it out the park. This is amazing. Also, quick update. Remember we talked about Nathan Resnick from Sorcify during the bubble hotels? Which I bailed on. So this guy, Nathan, he has his business. He pitched a hotel business where it was like a bubble that you could rent. And it's pretty cool, but I didn't think he was going to focus on it full time. So I bailed. But go ahead.

So the Indiegogo campaign just launched. So they had this idea of the bubble hotels of these cool, like, sort of like, glamping this camping experience that you're in this like little bubble dome kind of thing instead of a tent. And, you know, you get to sleep under the stars. And it's like in Joshua Tree. It's amazing. So he just launched his Indiegogo.

And the goal was 25,000. And he's at 286,000. I checked it last night. It was at like $150,000 or something like that. So he had like $100,000 today so far on this thing. So it looks like it's got a lot of momentum. And basically he's pre-selling like one night's day, two nights day, three-night's days. And he's basically going to bootstrap and fund pre-sale and fund this entire hotel in Joshua Tree, which I think is kind of amazing.

So the way that I would think about this is there's this idea called, I'm stealing it from someone. I didn't invent this called the Forfeits, which is a growth, this idea for ideating a company. And the guy who invented it, his name's Brian Belford. He helped make HubSpot popular. and he has this thing called them channel market fit, not product market fit. And channel market fit basically just says you need to think about where is your product going to get popular and then adapt your product to fit that pot, like where you can get popular. And when I think of this bubble hotel, we all think the same thing, which is Instagram and

Pinterest. This is going to be so easy to get customers. Well, here's another kind of like channel market fit example. The music industry is changing because of TikTok to make like shorter, catchier songs. The average song length has actually gone down. Why? Because Spotify just pays you per stream, not per minute streamed. So instead of five minutes for a song, they're doing two and a half minutes per song,

because why would I want a long song? And the second thing is TikTok. So a lot of songs are now being written, working backwards from, okay, if this was going to go viral on TikTok, how would I do it? Well, I need to make it have a dance baked into it. So the song is saying, like, put your right photo up. You know what I mean? Like they're trying to engineer the song.

so that it's going to spread on TikTok. And I think that's a great example of channel market fit. Yeah, I think that's like a very simple way to understand the importance of what that is. What else you got? You have, okay, I have one here. So I saw a tweet from somebody whose Twitter handle is Tomi. I don't know who this is. This is T-O-M-I.

Okay, no bio, but at T-O-M-I. And the tweet said, you know, what, like, it's kind of about the stock market, right? So the stock market, most people who invest in companies, they will invest, you're not in just investing in what's a great company. You're investing in what will the market think of this company. So it's called a like a Keynesian beauty contest. You are judging the beauty of an asset, not based on how beautiful it is to you, but how beautiful you think it will be to the other judges of the contest. And so that's how the stock market works. And so Tommy had this tweet, which was just like, you know, what if there was a market where

you can bet on the fundamentals instead of the price. So instead of investing in Tesla today, because I think that Tesla has all this like retail momentum and its price is going to go up, if I was just betting on how many cars will get bought by Tesla in the next six months. And if I'm right, I get paid. And if I, you know, so it's like over or under this number. And if it's over, then I'm right. But it's on the fundamentals. It's on real world business metrics and not perception and kind of like random price fluctuations based on investor moods. I think this is kind of cool. Maybe there's something like this that already exists. But I actually think is a pretty provocative, like, simple idea that to me has legs. This is sort of like what we talked

about with the long-term stock exchange as like, oh, this is a cool different model for how a company might want to be listed where it's not subject to the swings of the moods of the market. What do you think of this? I think that you love these ideas and I struggled to grasp them because they're very innovative and they're very not straightforward. To me, that's hard to understand. Can you explain to me more? So let's say the hustle. Let's say the hustle was a publicly listed company. instead of people betting on the hustle based off of, instead of buying your stock because I think your stock price is going to go up, and I think it's going to go up because other people are going to buy it and you know, you're going to announce some new products and all this good stuff,

if it was literally just a prediction market that says, will the hustle have over under $15 million in revenue? And then you just say, like this year, for example, it is a verifiable, measurable metric. And if I am bullish that, man, I think the hustle's got a great team. I think this product they launched is going to do really well. I think they're going to go over. I can bet on the over and somebody else can bet on the under. And then I can make money on the hustle, you know, as a prediction market rather than as a stock market. How is this any different than just gambling?

I mean, this is just gambling. It's gambling, but it's gambling on the outcomes of companies rather than on horses or sports. Right. You can't do this today. You know, so it's an old solution to sort of an old problem in a way. But then why wouldn't I just buy stock in Tesla if I'm betting? So this is the big gripe a lot of people have about Tesla because they're like, okay, Tesla can literally report a bigger loss this quarter and the stock goes up. And they're like, what the fuck? What is going on? Like, did you not read the numbers? Like, just because Elon went and did a cool presentation about some, you know, self-driving and he says it's going to be here by Christmas and everyone goes and buys it. Like, it would have been better if you could actually be smokes weed on Joe Rogan. Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Why is the price fluctuating based on these things rather than how many cars got bought? And, you know, it's, And so you don't want to value the whole company on that, right?

Because there is a, some companies have such high prospects that you'll say, okay, I will bet that in the future they'll be worth more than they're producing today. So it's not like you don't want their valuation to be based on it, but it would be nice to be able to just bet on this, which I think crypto is trying to do in a way there's these different prediction market things that are really complicated. I like that. I think it's cool.

I'm into it. I think that's pretty innovative and pretty interesting. That's cool. I think that's a hard-ass business to make happen because you have to, and I don't even want to talk about it because I'm so ignorant, but I guess you just have to be really good odds makers or do you? Well, yeah. So you could be odds makers or the marker will also settle, right?

So if a whole bunch of it's just like normal odds. So a bookie tries to place the bets, place the odds at a marker that will draw action. And then it correct. So if everybody's betting the over, then the number goes up, right? Automatically. So then less people start betting the over because the number went up. And so you would just need it to do that just like a normal betting service. That's interesting. Who's this Tommy guy?

I have no idea. There's no bio. But got a four-letter handle with a verified check and 50,000 followers. Yeah, this idea could definitely go viral. And I would do it immediately if I was ever going to do it because the Robin Hood nerds who are into this shit are like rabid right now. Right. Which is hilarious. There's a great little blog post, by the way, that I recommend you check out.

There's this guy. He actually works at Amazon. He writes this thing called The Flywheel. substack and did this great article about breaking down the Robin Hood business model. Check it out. Do you know how, I think you know this, but I would say most people don't. Do you know how Robin Hood makes money? No, I don't.

I don't know anything about it. So they came out and they were like, you know, free trades, right? That was like kind of like the initial thing. I was like, oh, wow, you're a man of the people. Thank you. You're giving us free trades. All those other guys gouges us. And so then the question was like, okay, well, how are you going to make money if you

offer free trades? They do is this thing. I forgot what it's called exactly. It's called payment forward order flow or something like that, which basically is when you place a trade, they basically sell that trade data information in real time to hedge funds and quantitative traders who want to know what retail buyers are trying to do. So for a whole bunch of people, average people with $1,000 in their Robin Hood account are going and buying Tesla because they saw some good news today or whatever from Elon.

Before that trade gets executed, the order flow is sold to hedge funds and quantitative traders who want to front run the market. they want to actually go place a bunch of bids before that retail trader's bid even gets placed. And there's a small pennies that they can sort of take per trade as an advantage by having that advanced information by front running. So I'm not criticizing them, but on first instinct, my bullshit detector alarm just goes off so hard where I'm like, why not just, like, why overcomplicate things? Like, can that actually work?

Why not just charge the retail investor money? Because their hook to get users was, hey, it's free to trade here, right? That's how they grow. Yeah, but my whole thing, what I thought they were going to do was just do that for a while and then be like, all right, now we're charging you money. No, because this is more lucrative. They made like $200 million last year on order flow data. It's crazy.

So they make 70% of the revenue or something like that from this payment order flow. If you look, it's kind of, they get criticized because the traders, the buyers of this data, they'll pay more for options trades because options trades are usually like these like high leverage, high risk trades. And so an option trade is worth more than, let's say, if I'm just buying Apple stock, Buying Apple stock doesn't really, that data is kind of useless. But if people are buying options trades on small stocks, that data is actually really important because you can swing a small stock or you can kind of make more on these high volatility

stocks than you can on Random Joe buying 10 shares of Apple. That data is worthless. So the reason this gets criticized is if you go in the Robin Hood app, the button to like buy options is above the button to just buy the normal stock, I think. And so because their business model depends on more people buying options. So they'll do like, hey, you want to buy options? Most people don't even know how to buy options. It's like, most people don't even know what the fucking option is.

I was like, look. You know what's funny? I don't know what an option is. I have a very loose understanding. I've made them lost a few thousand dollars doing it, but just for fun. But like, I don't try to do this. But what they do is they're like, hey, you can already borrow this much margin, right? Because for an option trade, you put down a dollar, but you're buying or selling four

dollars worth of the stock or $10 worth of the stock. And so that loan essentially that you're taking, Robin Hood is like pretty happy to give those out because they want more people doing options treated. Do you think that Robin Hood is a net positive or negative to the world and do care? I don't care at all. And I think it's like everything, it's got positives and negatives. I don't know where it nets out. It's hard to say. If I was going to bet, I would say it nets out positive because I think that I'm of the mindset that look, it's on the person, not the platform to make decisions for themselves. And if people go and they make bad decisions, like I don't blame the casino for people losing money gambling. I agree with you, but that doesn't

mean I want to support it. Yeah, sure. You know, that's a, that's a personal decision. So I don't know. I would invest in Robin Hood, for example, like I would have no problem investing in Robin Hood, just like I'd have no problem investing in a casino. Speaking about investing and making money, let's play a game. And it's going to call how much money would I have made if I weren't an idiot. Okay. So in 2011, I emailed the CEO of, I forget who, the founder, one of the founders, Joe Gebbya, a Airbnb. And I somehow got an interview, yada, yada, yada. I got offered a job. I think it was June 2012. I actually, and then the day before I was supposed to start, they took my, they fired me because I had a criminal record and I wasn't truthful about it. And they found it on

a background check. I wasn't not truthful. I was still on trial for a reckless driving ticket and they found out how much money would I have made when Airbnb goes public in 2012? I think I would have been the 300th employee. So I don't think significant, but maybe significant. So do you remember your job offer because they would have said like here's how much stock you got do you have like an email that's like here's the strike price go no i've deleted it i what yeah i know it was using i was using um go daddy as like my email service provider and like they have like a one gigabyte limit i can maybe find it i was 21 or 22 so i uh i think i was using my belmont university student id or whatever Anyway, I think I was getting paid an hourly rate of $25 an hour, and I don't think I would have gotten stock.

But I think I would have eventually. When I got that job, my mom and dad were like, what is Airbnb? This sounds like a scam and does it have health insurance? You know, I didn't know anything about anything. But if I got in there, I probably would have figured it out. You think I would have made money off this? Yeah, for sure. For sure.

If you had stayed. Now, you might have gotten itchy and left, so I think that's always a piece of it. I had a very similar situation. I think I've told the story where, and I just pulled up the email. So September 2012, I did the first job interview I've ever done in my life. I've only done, I think, like probably three total in my life. And this one was with Stripe. So Stripe in 2012. So basically I interview because I thought, hey, Stripe, this seems like an awesome company. I think this company's going to do well. I interview and I reach out. And the guy who gets my email to reach out, it turns out like on my resume that I had sent in, I had like a few references. I was like, this guy's my mentor. And he was like, that guy's my my mentor too. I called him and he speaks extremely highly of you. And this guy, this mentor guy, loved me. Like he put a blog post out that said, this guy has the highest bias to action of any entrepreneur I've ever met or something like that or any of entrepreneur I've met the last five,

10 years. So I had like the shoe in of shoe ins and then I like totally blew the interview. Like they had this, you know, test of like kind of like sell me this pen and I fucked it up. I think I've told the story before. So I'll skip it now. But I think at that time, I don't know what stripe would have been worth so like, I have it. I have it up. Okay. So what, what month was your, September? Okay. In February 9, 2012, they raised $18 million at $100 million valuation. I don't know if they raised immediately after that, but let's just assume that it was $100 million. What do you say worth now? So they're worth about $35 billion now. So 350 X. So let's pretend. That you have a hundred grand. $100,000 worth of a stock, you know, round math. You know, there's dilution and there's all

kinds of other things, but that's $35 million right there, which is like, you know, if I had worked there for four years, it would have, you know, got my whole grant and probably, you know, like if I was doing well, I would have been getting promoted and getting new grants along the way. So like, it is reasonable to believe, let's just be conservative. It's reasonable to believe I could have made $10 million off that job if I had taken out. I think they had like, I want to say 40 employees at the time, but I don't know. I can't remember for sure. It might have been like $140 or something. Okay. So I don't feel as bad as mine. I just Googled mine. in October 2012, Airbnb had a valuation of $2.5 billion.

So they were already big. But if they go public at $50 billion, that would be $20. So low seven figures. I think if you worked there that whole entire time, I think you personally wouldn't have made $10 to $20. Yeah, which is crazy because that job wasn't like some sick job. It was like, I was going to be like a biz dev person on the like sales, outbound sales team or some shit like that.

Yeah, but what would happen is you would have gotten in there. would have excelled and then he would have climbed your way up. That's what I would like to think. I think probably I would have just stayed on that path because I would have been like, wow, this is easy. Let me keep doing this. But it doesn't matter because I blew the interview. And honestly, like, you know, no, they didn't even offer you a job.

No, no, that's what I'm saying. I had the biggest shoe in going into the interview. It was like, to me, it was like a formality. And then I fucked up the interview so badly that, like, it's not a fit. How many people worked there? I don't know. I think it was like 50 people, but it might have been 100 or 150 people. I interview with the collision brothers?

Collison and... Collison, what's her name? Collison, yeah, Patrick Collison. I thought it was collision. Fuck me. That would have been cooler. No, I interviewed with this guy, Benjamin. Ask him.

Ask Ben how much money he made. I actually DMed him the other day, and I was like, hey, man, and he didn't reply, I think. I DMed him to see what I said. I said, hey, you're still a stripe. That's amazing. You probably don't remember this, but I interviewed there six or seven years ago. You know, I'd been referred by our shared mentor. And I said it didn't end up working.

out, but, you know, it was all for the best. I went on a totally different journey. Just wanted to say hi. And then this fucker didn't even say hi. What's going on here? So the guy who fired me at Airbnb. And by the way, his thing says he's on sabbatical, you know, that's like you've been at some company that did really well for five, six years.

And then you're like, yeah, I'm going on sabbatical for a year. The guy who fired me applied to work at the hustle as an executive. And I was cool with them. It's my fault. I got, I lied. And he caught it. And he was like, I have to do this. But I'm still buddies with the guy who fired me.

What were you saying, Abrae? September 2012, Stripe had 32 employees. I thought I was missing out on like a $5 million prize until this conversation. And now I realize it's probably more like a $20 million prize. So in 2011, I had heard about this company that was making like a cab business. It was called Uber Cab. And they had this job position called a city launcher. And I was like, dude, I'm so competent.

They could send me to Germany and I not know a single person. And I would get people to use this thing. I was so confident. They didn't interview me. But in my head, I'm like, what would have happened if I got that? And then, by the way, we'll play this game one more time. I actually interviewed at Vungle. I interviewed with Jack Smith of Vungle and Zane, who are Jack Smith's now my best friend.

And I interviewed at his company, and he sold it for $800 million. We became friends three years later. He didn't even remember interviewing me. And they turned me down. He said no. He said no. I got to the final interview and he said no. and I didn't get the job and now we're best friends.

And so I always joke with people. I'm like, if you want to know a good company, you could start up to invest in. Just figure out where I apply, then I get turned down and just invest there. Right. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there's a,

Naval has this great quote where he's like, you know, I want it to be where you could, you could drop me anywhere on earth with, you know, but naked with no possessions to my name. And 10 years later, I want to be rich.

He's like, I want my skin. skill set to be as such where I don't need to get lucky to be rich. Like if I played this game of life thousand times, you know, nine hundred ninety eight times I want to to end up successful. You know, each of those times I might end up with a different amount of success. But like, that lines up with a with a view I have, right? Like when I worked with Michael and Zocci Birch, a lot of people asked me like, are they smarter? Did they just kind of get lucky? Because, you know, they sold Bebo, made $8, $850 million. But like, Bebo's not around anymore.

So was that kind of just like a fluke or what happened? And what I always said was like, them being successful was inevitable. They were going to be successful. They actually were successful even before BMO. They became millionaires on the previous businesses. But the magnitude of success is highly variable. So like I think I would have if you played out that. So that's that was 10 years ago, right?

Roughly eight years ago, we're talking about 2012. So if I played out the last eight to 10 years of my life a thousand times, I think I probably on average end up with more money than I have today. So I think I actually, the real world scenario, I've netted out less than I would have on average. But I think in 90% of those circumstances, I would have ended up successful. Or, you know, rich and richness is successful either way. Because, and that's, I think, the goal is to get yourself to that point. So you take luck out of it to the extent that you can.

I think we're probably both on this maybe. I don't know if me more than you or you more than me, but we're both on this idea of like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get it done. And I think that you can brute force your way to some sort of financial success. and happiness. Like, I think that if you spent 10 years and took a risk and worked hard, you will make a million dollars. Right.

But I will be the first to acknowledge that some number beyond that, which I don't know what it is, it is very, very, it's luck. There's a lot of variance, right? Like, even just if I think about when we sold the company, the number could have been zero with like, it could have very easily crapped out at zero or it could have been double what we got. And I think we, I think we ended up on the high range of like where we, like, I think we maximized what could have been or should have been out of that.

But I'm like, man, that was just one scenario of many, you know, many roles of the dice that I've done in the last 10 years. And these situations, they like, they have such a huge amount of variance. And the good thing that I take out of that is like, well, I want to develop myself and my skills so that I'll have some level of success if I stay at it for 10 years. And then I don't want to stress and compare myself to others because, look, there is a huge amount of variance in luck that's outside of your control. and so, you know, don't get fixated on the exact numbers.

Just keep playing the game for as long as you can. And eventually the luck just keep, you know, it'll break your way if you play for long enough. Yeah, and I completely agree with that. Do we want to go over anything else? I have one more question that's sort of like that. The only scenarios I can see myself not being as successful is if I had stayed on a more traditional path, like just a job path, because I think it's very hard to get wealthy from a normal job.

We're talking about, oh, if I took this job at Stripe. Well, Stripe was like probably the top four or five investors. of the last decade. So like, yeah, being an average employee, being a biz dev rep over there, I still would have somehow ended up with a lot of money there. But most jobs that I could have taken would not have done anything like that. Do you think it was inevitable that you were going to be an entrepreneur? Like, did you know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

I kind of feel like I fell into it. I didn't really consciously decide until I was already doing it. Yes. I would have done it no matter what, but I would not have done the internet. I would have, I think that I'm, I would have owned a small store, like a corner store or a gas station. or, yeah, what switched your path to digital businesses? I met a guy named Casey Smith. So when YouTube came out, did I tell you about this?

I used to make $50 a month because I would, I feel horrible saying this, but I'll be honest, I remember this. Videos, because if you typed in the word, you would type in words and it would auto fill. So one of the words, I don't know how, I typed in the word black, auto fill to like black guy beats up white guy. And then if you auto fill, if you typed in the word white, it was white guy beats up black guy. And so I would make these YouTube videos that just had a plain picture. And then I would add money on it.

And some of the videos got millions of views. And so once I made $50 a month doing that, I was like, oh, the internet's cool. And then I met a guy named Casey Smith and he taught me how to buy my own domain name. And then I created an online store and was making money. And that's when it changed. But prior to that, I would use eBay and Craigslist to sell stuff. And I would imagine that I would have opened up a restaurant or some type of small town thing. Yes.

I would have done that no matter what. Because that's what my mom and dad. You know, my mom and dad, their business that they still owned to this day, it started as a fruit stand and eventually grew to be something beyond that. And they were always encouraging me to do this stuff. So that's interesting. So you knew, okay, owning a business or starting a business is the way. Your parents did it.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, but by the way, they didn't call it like starting a business. It was just, this is just what you do to make a living. Right. Every single person in my family, every uncle, except for, I think one has a job. And almost all of them were like engineers who got an engineering job at some company. and it was like, the question wasn't, what are you going to do? Like, are you going to start a business?

You can do this. It was like, what job are you going to get? And is it a good job or a bad job? And so I didn't even think about starting a business until it was like, I had accidentally started one. And then I was like, oh, shit, okay, this is this cool? And I started to meet people who did that as their life and that like, you know, my version of Casey Smith.

But like, isn't it funny how like Casey Smith, who the hell is Casey Smith? And like, what if you hadn't met Casey Smith on that day? You know, like a lot of this stuff feels inevitable, but it really wasn't. Yeah. And I was just listening to this, Chimath, what's that guy's name? Is that his name? Yeah, Chimot, probably happened to you. He was talking about, like, the thing that changed with him was he had, he was like an intern at,

like a multi-billion dollar company. And he was walking to work. And one of the VPs saw him walking to work and picked him up in the car. And it just so happened that the VP was carpooling with the CEO. And he got to, they're like, well, they're like, hey, we'll just drive you to work every day. And Chmoth says, like, then like the word billionaire came up. And he was like, Jamoff was like, what's a billionaire? You can have one billion dollars.

And that is when he was like, that changed my life. And I think about that all the time. And I'm like, having a community is so important. And you have to be purposeful about it. Or, I mean, you could get lucky like I did and what he did. But having a community, like these Gen Z mafia people, that's so important that they have that community. Yes.

We should probably move this at the beginning because it can be, this is going to be interesting. I should have started with this. Something very interesting happened to me that I wanted to tell you about. I got to be careful about how much I say, because I can't say, too much and maybe I'll have to bleep out some later. So a very interesting opportunity came my way in the last few days. Okay, so what's the situation? So close family friend has a very, very large collectible card collection of a type of card that I had never even heard of before called. Do you know what that is? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they have a card collection of a lot

of that plus like, you know, Star Wars and Simpsons, like a whole bunch of like kind of toys, collector stuff, collectible items, mostly cards. And we're talking like a multi-million dollar collection of millions of cards. And due to the person's personal reasons, so, you know, health and other, they have to off-load this. And so, you know, because as a close family friend, long story short, I have the opportunity to sell this very large collection of items. Are you going to buy them or you're going to help? him is like the person's on the internet person and you're just going to help them sell them and it'll give you a cut yeah something like that so basically the idea is how the hell do I sell this

collection that if you if you if you went in and you took the best cards and you sold them individually on the internet if you just look at the eBay mark value right now this is like a $1.000 collection wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait what yes and so you can't sell all these cards like it's just too much so you can't sell them all at the eBay mark value right like You know, that's, you know, if it's like if you took one card that sells for $10,000, he has like a $1,000 of that card. And so you know, you can't sell them all at the $10,000 card price. So almost certainly it'll sell for a fraction of that.

But the question is, what's that fraction? And also, how the hell do I sell this? And so what comes to my, I don't know, help me brainstorm. I can only say some limited details there. So help me brainstorm. How would you go about this? So you have three choices. One, you totally ignore this opportunity.

It's a distraction. you move on with your life. Number two, you look into it and you try to see how might you actually get some value out of this. How would you actually like sell this collection? And the third is like, you go balls to the wall and you're like, I'm going to find a way to make a few million dollars in the next few months off this lucky bounce. Let's go with the easiest option, which is an auction. So I would use heritage auctions or Christie's or Southbees. Is it called Southbees?

Sothebys. Sothebys. Sothebys. I would use one of those three auction houses, but you would probably not get a premium because it's a bulk thing, but it would probably be the easiest. Right. And also because we're talking cards,

they're not like graded, as they say, or, you know, they're not all verified and graded yet because it would cost you an absolute fortune to grade a million plus cards, right? And this is like more than that. And it would take a long time to do it. So these are like,

you know they're good because this person's been a collector for 20 years. they're like a stable in the community, but you know, when you sell these items, you typically need to go get them graded first. So even just grading them. Like how many items does he have? In the collection. So even just holding the collection is an expensive endeavor. They've been doing this for a long time. They put in a lot of money. Oh my God. What an interesting problem. Could you go to so top like you kind of alluded it to being maybe more than just you sell it back to the tops company? Maybe. Okay. So that's like one option. Although yeah. Okay. So that's that's an option. What else? What else could you do?

Have you seen what Logan Paul's doing with Pokemon cards? I have seen that. So what's on your mind of where you? So, I mean, kind of doing something like that where you sell random cards to people and, you know, maybe they might lose a few thousand bucks or if they get the big names, they might make some money. So that's what he was doing. He was signed packs for 100K.

And you might lose your money, but there might be like a holographic charzart in there. That's worth 100K. Let's go down that path because I have thought about that of like, what if I just sold these as mystery boxes. So look, I don't want to go through the process of grading and marking these. I know that there's X millions of dollars of value somewhere in this, and I'm going to sell them as individual mystery boxes. Now, the challenge I thought of was, how do I get the word out, right? I'm not Logan Paul. Why can't you be? Like, this is such an interesting concept that why wouldn't this get popular on YouTube? I don't know. It would have to be a production. It would take a lot of time

and energy to like make a big ruckus about this, right? So I'm looking, I don't want to spend months of my life doing this. I'm looking to see, is there a simple path? Like, I don't want to pay for a bunch of ads to try to get people to buy this because that's going to be expensive in and of itself. But I think you would need, like, let's say you're doing $100, $100 mystery box. You might end up with one of these items that has that's worth $10,000 or $20,000 inside. That's the game. If you did that, you know, you'd need to sell like $50,000 or $100,000 of these mystery boxes at $100 a pop. How would I do? Do you have like an input, just like, could you make videos about around this, just like the Saro Gordo guys said, where you just document this whole journey.

then be like, we are going to auction this off in person and digitally on this date. Everything's going to be gone in 48 hours. Yeah, I could do that. Like it's a 48-hour bonanza come in person and on the phone. Kind of like there's this car company that I love called Barrett Jackson. And they probably do this for all the auctions. But I watch Barrett Jackson. They do it live on TV.

And I always watch the car auctions that you could call in and bid. Yeah, like maybe there's just a live stream that I do from the venue. And it's just selling it right there. I would probably do the simplest thing, though, of calling Christie's or one of the auction houses and be like, guys, here's what I have. Get your ass out here and give me some opinions. Do you actually think, be conservative. What is this person's collection worth? But it's hard to say until you go through the inventory in more detail than anybody's ever done because, you know, was bought 10 years ago. And it's just been in a case. You have to go, you have to look at the condition of it. And you have to

graded so that the buyer feels good about it, and then you have to, you know, figure how you're going to sell these things. And I know nothing about cards, I should say. So, so I am a total looking. Is there anything more you could tell about the story of the person before you, without revealing? No, it is very interesting, but I cannot say. And this person is a fan? A fan? Would have been a fan? Like, they've just been doing this offer love, I've loved? Yeah, they're a collector. Oh my God. This person or persons is a collector. Do you want to answer this question? Do I know them? You don't know them. Do you want to dedicate an entire episode to this on Monday? I don't know how much I could share is kind of the thing. I'm measuring my words right now.

Can we give the person like a voice cover up and talk to them about it? No. Would this be tax at capital gains or income? For the person? Yeah. Yeah, it would be like a long-term capital gains. Wow. What a weird situation. So, okay, I'm going to have to run. I got to go now. But if you think of anything. And let's have people tell. us in the podcast reviews what they would do. Right. And before we publish this to Jonathan, our editor, let me think about,

let me just make sure I didn't say anything I'm not allowed to say. Okay, wow. Yeah. All right. All right. We'll see you. Okay.

See you there.