My First Million - #216 - Why Today Is the Day to Ask For a Raise

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

In this episode Shaan (@ShaanVP) shares why you should ask for that raise and Sam (@theSamParr) pokes holes in the $75K happiness study. They also debate whether it is better to own the entirety of a smaller company or a piece of a bigger one. The two also talk about MMA fights and how you can package that appeal, the future of maps, and a fractional vacation home company. Sam also shares the story around Wayne Huizenga, this week's Billy of the Week. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:48) Spending time in the Hamptons * (3:11) The Jake Paul fight * (6:59) The local MMA fight * (11:00) Chasing the sensation of feeling alive * (15:06) The $75K happiness study * (19:50) How Shaan got insights on his teams wellbeing * (24:08) The future of maps * (34:10) Billy of the Week: Wayne Huizenga * (44:48) Pacasso for your next vacation home * (49:48) To own all of a small company or a piece of a big one * (59:40) Ask for a raise today

Would you rather own a small piece of something huge or a big piece or everything of something much smaller? 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 off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. Sam, where are you, dude? This looks awesome. You're at like a pool or backyard. You're in the Hamptons. What's going on? I spent the weekend at my in-laws house in the Hamptons and I felt pretty sick yesterday. So I just stayed the night here. I didn't feel well.

I don't feel I'm fine now, but I'm in the Hamptons. It looks good, right? I mean, it looks amazing. Yeah, it looks like what I've never been to the Hamptons, not even close, never got an invite. I don't even know anyone that lives in the Hamptons. Let me tell you my opinion. I'm far away. Okay, my opinion of the Hamptons, incredibly overrated.

You want to know another thing that's incredibly overrated? Central Park. Central Park, so overrated. Central Park and the Hamptons both overrated. The Hamptons, it's not, it's not, it's not, that pretty. It's not that pretty at all. So very overrated. So what's the appeal? What what is good about it? If you're in New York, it's only an hour and a half away without traffic. So you can go to the beach there. So it's a little bit like Sonoma or Napa. Like I think those

places are nice. They're not the best. They're kind of boring. Napa is Napa and Sonoma are prettier than the Hamptons without a doubt in my opinion. Oh, okay. Interesting. And do you like, Do you feel different? You walk around. Every car is like a Bentley or better. You have to have a range rover to fit in. It's crazy, man. It's not my style at all.

It's not even remotely my style. Did you see the Jake Fall, Paul, and Tyrone Woodley fight last night? Did I tell my wife I can't help with the kids' bedtime routine because I'm watching the Jake Paul fight? Yeah, I did that. And I watched that fight. And I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was an amazing fight. I thought it was a good fight.

Jake Paul, I had higher expectations. The drama was there. I'm not talking about the technical boxing was great. I'm saying the drama was there. I didn't know what was going to happen beforehand. And then every round it still felt like anything could happen, which is what you want. The drama was so high. My anxiety level was equal to the best UFC fight.

Like the best grudge UFC fight, my anxiety level was equal to it. I thought it was amazing. We had Jake Paul in the podcast. he was way different on the podcast than he was in like for the for this whole uh boxing thing but anyway it was going to tweet it out i was like hey uh congrats to to guest of episode 170 on your victory tonight yeah it was it was a fun fight i'm happy i got to watch it it was more it was more intense than any uf as intense as any ufc fight i've ever seen it was pretty badass they've done an amazing job well let's talk about it a little bit uh so they for for those

who don't know or kind of just roll your eyes, you're watching Jake Paul and Jake Paul fight this guy. Is this rigged? What's the point of this? Is any a YouTuber? Like, I got a lot of respect for what they did. I'm pretty impressed by this. I think that this move they did to go from YouTuber, Viner to YouTuber and then YouTuber to basically one of the best business models you can do as a as a single person is basically sell pay-per-views. And why is that, right? So like this fight, I wouldn't be surprised if they sold a million paper views. And so you sell a million pay-per-view at, you know, roughly 60 bucks of paper-view, you know,

that's $60 million. And then they partner up with Showtime to do that and do that whole thing. And so, you know, they can make $10 million in one hour doing this, right? in basically a single event. And that's totally different. And it grows their brand. Like this whole thing makes them more famous because ESPN is talking about it and Twitter is talking about it.

Everybody's talking about it. And they're doing kind of like a hobby that they like, which is boxing. Right. They train hard. So it's not easy. But man, is it lucrative? So like pretty impressive jump from one platform to the next.

And as a business person, I think they're geniuses. I think they are, whether it's intentional or unintentional, they are geniuses. the way that they approach this, the way that they promote these things, the way they leverage the brand, it's genius. Also, getting in a ring in front of a million people,

getting in a ring in front of 50 people, it's incredibly frightening. Now, to do it with someone who's like, even though Woodley is at the end of his career, he's 40, he fucking kills people. Like,

he crushes people. Like he could, you definitely could die. I mean, it's not likely, but you could. And that's incredibly bold. Very like,

you could get humiliated, knocked out brutally by this guy, you know, in front of everybody. Yeah, 100%. And so I do think it's incredibly courageous, even though whether I agree or don't agree with, like, a lot of the shit they do, it's wild. I can't believe they've pulled this off. It's wild. It's incredibly wild. The crowd on TV, I've been to like three or four or five, I forget how many UFC fights,

and I've been to some of the big ones at Madison Square Garden. The crowd on the TV, like on the, in Cleveland last night, felt the same. as when I saw UFC fight, like the same energy. It was pretty wild. They built this. Yeah, they did it. They pulled it off. I also went to a live MMA fight, a local one here in San Francisco. Where? In the Dragon Den?

Dragon House, yeah. Amazing. You went to one? I went to one. This weekend, I went to one. I've been to a bunch there. It's badass, right? It's way scarier than UFC. Way more intense. So we get caged side seats because they're only 50 bucks.

Right? So like the, you know, it's not a huge. huge stadium. It's Kesar Stadium. It's a very small place. But we went there. We get cage sides seats for 50 bucks since COVID, you know, started. And they said like, oh, everybody's got to be vaccinated. They didn't check anything at the door. So that was not so great. But I walk in and the crowd is just lit. I don't know what. They're all, they're all like super drunk. Yeah. So I think there's like four or five factors going in. So first of all, it's their friends fighting usually. So like there's a whole in every fight, there's at least like, 20 people that are there because they're friends with this person. Because these are amateur fights.

These are people who by day, you know, they deliver for DoorDash or they like work at a, you know, consulting company or whatever. And then this is like a nighttime fight club thing for them where they just like decided, screw it. I'm going to try this. Because I get there early. I get there for the amateur fights. I find those way more interesting than the pro fights. And so first of all, there's 20 people that for that's their friend. That's their brother. That's their kid. I'm seeing moms just yelling like kill him because it's like there's something. in the ring or whatever. Second thing is it's like people are drunk.

Yeah, so people are drinking. There's only like one concession stand. One concession stand and it's only beer. Well, they only sell beer and Costco pizza, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like beer and things that make you want beer. And then third thing is, I think, so I think the third one would be, I'm so used to like you're in the Hamptons right now, dude.

I just hang out online on tech Twitter and crypto Twitter. And like the group of people I normally hang out with are so nerdy. And like they're just concerned about different things. The priorities are different. I went to this thing and everybody's like super dressed up like not like fancy, but they were dressed up like I might meet someone here. Like this is like a club to them. Right.

I just feel like everybody here, it was like more real people than the like kind of bubble that I usually live in. And so it was just different. It was like shocking. There was three fights that broke out in the crowd just after a fight would be done. I would break out in the crowd. And I'm sitting there with my sister and my brother-in-law and we're just hoping it doesn't happen near us. And the last thing was COVID. Like, COVID, I think, has riled people up.

Like when I came in, I was telling my brother-in-law, I was like, dude, this crowd is way better than the last time we came to Dragon House. Be-Cove. He goes, dude, people are ready to live. He's like, people are just ready to get out. And you can see it, dude. People were just like, I don't know how the kids used the word lit, but people were lit at this event. This was, the whole event was lit. It was insane.

I love going to those. I've probably been to three of them. Were the Mongols there? I guess they weren't there because they can't travel. No. I've been there and there's, they have, there's like a large, like contingency in Mongolians. And they have their family there. There was one Mongolian fighter.

And he, yeah, his crowd was like, his crew was pretty crazy. And then he fought this Irish dude. and I swear to God, it was like Kahnem O'Grueger came out. As soon as the guy comes out, it's like, O'A, O'Le, O'A, O'Le. The whole crowd is chanting, O'A. I'm like, where did this huge Irish contingent come from?

He's got a tattoo silhouette of Ireland on the side of his body. He gets in the ring and they had a crazy fight. And so it was a lot of fun, first of all. So if you have like a, I don't know if people, I don't know if it's only for people who like UFC, but if you like the UFC, which is like maybe 1% of our audience,

go to a local show. I bet it's more. Go to a local show. I didn't think it would be this good. It's like amazing. It was like truly amazing. But it also made me feel like what is it about people who, why would anybody sign up to do this? And then I know you are the type who you sign up to get punched in the face quite a bit.

What's the appeal? And would you ever do this? Well, I signed up for a smoker. So what a smoker is is it's amateur. So there's no judges. And typically you can kind of have like in a like you can like say ahead of time like, hey, I'm new. You're new. Like you don't actually, at the fight that you went into, they're going in with bad intentions.

You know, they want to hurt you. With the thing that I signed up for, sometimes, like, you'd be like, hey, let's get after it. And you'll try to knock people out. And you might get knocked out. But it's like not nearly as angry. And you could like say, hey, we're going too hard. Let's take it easy. So I've like above a sparring session.

It's above a sparring session, but it's not quite a real fight. At least it doesn't have to be. And I signed up for it because it makes me feel alive. It makes me feel like I feel soft when I just sit in front of the computer all day. It makes me feel good to survive getting beat up because I know that I'm not going to be stressed out about anything else that I'm going to do throughout the day. Because like when I stress out about like this podcast or if I get mad that our freaking internet wasn't working really well, I'm like, dog, I just got my ass kicked. Like this like everything else is fine. Exactly.

I went skydiving once and we did it in the morning. It was like eight in the morning. and so the rest of the day, like, you know, from 8.30 onward, you kind of only last like five minutes. Like you're just, you fall for 60 seconds and then you've kind of float down gently for five minutes and then it's over. But the rest of that day, I was like, I couldn't be bothered by anything. I was like, dude, I jumped out of a plane this morning. You think I'm going to worry about this presentation I have or this person who didn't call me back or this person who cut me in line? Like, bro, I flew.

I was flying in the air this morning. And so it was like, if I could bottle that feeling up and have it more often, which, it sounds like you get by sparring, whatnot. That's pretty good. I also have been rewatching Breaking Bad. So did you watch Breaking Bad like once? Yeah. So I just, I just started rewatching it. And it's like enough years have gone by where I kind of forgot it. And that's basically the premise of the show. The show is basically this guy lived kind of his whole life, you know, by the book and was like, always like kind of just like worried about, you know, it didn't want to offend anybody, he didn't take much risk, blah, blah, blah. And then when he finds out that he's got, you know, a few months to

live, he starts doing this stuff initially to help his family. Like, how do I provide for my family? If I pass away, I don't want them to have nothing because I'm just a teacher. I didn't save up too much money. And then once he starts to do it, it starts to feel good. He starts to feel alive. And so this has become kind of like a theme I'm thinking about. And like if we want to tie this to business, I'll force it here, which is there's probably a whole set of products or experiences that just make somebody feel alive. And they're kind of counterintuitive. Like, why would you choose to get punched in the face? Why would you choose to take this risk and almost get caught by the cops? And then how do you bottle that up and package that in a product or service so that? Because I think

a lot of people do want this feeling. And once they get it, I think it's very addictive. But I would say that that's what you do with a lot of your investments, right? Like when I think about what you're doing with an NFT or what you're doing with crypto, to me, it's a high adrenaline, high risk type of thing, right? kind of i think you'd think i'd take more risk than i actually do but but yeah i could see that that's definitely a piece of it there's a bit of the roller coaster that you get to go on and a rollercoasters for a thrill-seeker but i just think in general like you know we were in l a went to dsnieland why are there even roller coasters right well because people in 30 seconds you can get that feeling

like you might die and then you live and that little package that thrills it taps into this thrill-seeker part of people and i just feel like there's problem more experiences that could be built that are like that. I think if you're building in VR, for example, instead of trying to build a VR like kind of like fantasy land, I would build things in VR that make people feel a little bit afraid, a little bit scared, a little bit alive. And I think a lot of video games tried this, right? Like, it's why a lot of video games are out shooting people and stuff like that, because it's cool and it's an escape and it's something you can't do in real life. So you get to live vicariously through this. But I just think there's a lot more

that could be done. So instead of talking about fear, can I tell you something that I read recently that's about happiness? Can I tell you something that totally like, I read something recently and the data seems pretty clear and it totally like goes against what we've been told previously. Can I tell you about that? So lay out what we've been told and then what you saw. So, you know, there's these like things that you see headlines. So one of these headlines is like the average American doesn't have $500 in savings. something like that. That's that's mostly bullshit by the way. That's that's a bullshit headline. But the other one was that after you make $75,000, your perceived happiness level doesn't really go up

significantly. And I read about that a while ago. We read about, I mean, when did that come out, you think? Like in 2012 or something, 2013. Yeah, I feel like I've heard this kind of my whole professional life. So maybe at least 12, 15 years, something like that. I've always thought that that was bullshit. I've always thought that was bullshit. They didn't pass the sniff test for you. Not even a little bit. Not even a little bit. And so I came across this study. And so what these guys did was they got 40,000 people to install this app. And this app at random times would ask you, like they would ask you a bunch of questions, but it would be on a scale of like

one to five or one to ten. I see you're highlighting the app. You could click it and you could see it. It's called Track Your Happiness. Yeah. And it's pretty cool. It's just a simple app. And what they did was they got 35, 40,000 people. They had all types of ranges. And they asked people how they felt during different periods of the week, of the day, and they would track your income. And what they found is, is that while it is true that after you get past a certain point, your happiness levels doesn't necessarily go up in proportion. But what this study found is like, up until like 500, 600,000, $700,000 a year, it was definitely still going going up. like yeah we can we can show this graph if you're watching on youtube we'll put this graph on the screen

and it's basically two lines it's your life satisfaction and your uh experience well-being and uh they're both like from 15,000 dollars of household income up to 500,000 dollars they're tracking like up into the right just like a straight line so the more income you were getting the more sort of life satisfaction you were having um during at each step of those it didn't just plateau at 75,000 like the old kind of like that quoted quoted study is. And it may, like the difference between $2 million and $3 million probably won't be significant. But like according to this study, like the difference between $10 million and $1 million is significant and does impact your happiness. And that totally like kind of broke my frame, even though I always thought it would be true.

I thought this study was actually really interesting. And there's a few reasons why, a few reasons why basically the other one was nonsense was the first one was remembered feelings. So the $75,000 study, basically what they did was they asked people. how they felt in the past. And that's kind of bullshit because you always think that you remember things better than you actually did. Or like during one period, you'll think it's great and then you'll say how you remembered it and you'll think it or sorry, you'll, during the time you think it's horrible, then you'll look back and be like, oh, that was actually awesome. Right. This actually asked you right then and there how you felt. The second thing was before

it said, were you happier then or were you happier now? And that's kind of nonsense because there's no variance. Like the variance is too low and like, you know, sometimes like it could be able to I'm a little bit better and that matters and so that's two binary it's it's just yes or no there's no like there's no granularity yeah so I don't know I thought this was interesting I wanted to bring this up because that's one of the it's one of those studies that I always thought that people base like you read this headline and you believe this to be true and a lot of people probably make decisions based off of this and I think it's important to say no that's I think it's bullshit and and you shouldn't base your life on that data or that study right yeah yeah and I like I love this topic by the way I think it's

great. It's sort of like myth busting of these like common things you hear. Like another one is like the 10,000 hour rule that got really popular because Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book called Outliers. And he's like, oh, you know, to be great at something, you got to spend 10,000 hours. And so then a lot of people run with that. And it's like, well, there's obviously a bunch of caveats, but like the caveats get stripped away as the thing just gets kind of like turned into a fortune cookie tweet. Right. It's like 10,000 hours. That's the rule. And sure, there's instances where somebody spends 10,000. hours, it gets really great at something, but there's definitely instances where it doesn't take 10,000 hours to get great at something. I've had many of them in my life. And so you wanted, like, I guess, question a lot of these things that you're told and try to figure out what, what's the truth and what's the truth for me? What am I going to experience? What do I choose to believe? And so I'm with you on looking into stuff like this. I also think this app is cool, this track your happiness app. I'm going to actually use it. At my previous company, when I was running the idea lab, It was my first time, like, as CEO of like a larger group.

We had like 20-something employees at that time. And that was, I was 25 years old. It was the most people I had ever managed. And I was like, okay, well, how do I manage people? I was like, well, there's a bunch of books on this. But I created something pretty simple. I asked one of the programmers, I went to the guy Quinn. And he's like this young hacker guy.

And I was basically like, hey, Quinn, I would love to know. I would love to just kind of like, if I could go have a conversation with each person each day saying, hey, how are you feeling? how's it going? I think I could be a better manager, but that would take way too much time and it would just also be like a full-on conversation with each person.

I said, can you just set up a thing so that at the end of every like workday so at like 4.30 p.m. or whatever, it just pings everybody individually in Slack and it just says, hey, Sean, how you feel in today? You know, one to 10. And what's your happiness right now? And it would just, it would basically do what this app does.

And they would put it in. And then I had a dashboard as the manager as the CEO, that would show me all these different people. And what I found was two things. The first is some people have a very narrow range of emotions that they feel. So like there was like our CTO is this British guy, Paul. And he's a, he's very kind of like stoic. He's sort of like, you know, like British people sort of dry humor.

And so like he never got too far too high up, too high down. Like he was always like a, you know, like a seven or an eight. He didn't, he never hit a 10. He never hit a five. He always stayed in that range. So I had to interpret his data differently because I was like, like for this guy, his self-assessment of his own like kind of like happiness or well-being, his range is different. So I can't just say, oh, eight, you're good. Eight is actually

great for him and a seven is actually quite bad for him. Whereas for other people who were like, you know, the hot mess folks, it's like some days it's a one and some days it's a 10 and I had to interpret them differently. So that was the first observation. The second was when I would go and I could I could ping them afterwards. I could just say, you know, it could basically ping them once they submit their score, I would say, cool, do you want to add a note on why? And the reasons that affected people's happiness were so different than what I would have expected. I thought people would be unhappy because, you know, they feel like underpaid or overworked or, you know, maybe the colleague sent something to them. It was always like the smallest shit.

It's like, like, it'd be like, you know, it'd be something like, oh, you know, at lunch today, you know, I, whatever. or, you know, this table was full, so I kind of had to go sit over there. Or it'd be like, you know, at, you know, we're working on this project. I really wanted to get more done, but I got a phone call. I got distracted. It's like they were like, some people were like, some people got off on high output. And so their happiness was like, it's like, oh, yeah, we had to do that team meeting. And so I didn't get to go work on my product.

I didn't get to write enough code today. Or it'd be like something really, really small. It's like, yeah, I'm really dealing with this kind of like back pain. So this chair's really uncomfortable. It was always things that. I wouldn't have otherwise seen. And so it brought those to the surface. And then I could decide, is this something I can affect and, like, improve?

Or do I just like, at least I get a better understanding of them? So that was, like, one of the better products that we built. We probably should have productized it and made it an actual, like, work tool for other people to use. Yeah, I used to use this thing called 15.5. Do you remember that company? They're doing pretty well, dude. I think they're pretty successful. I bet they, I would bet they are.

So they kind of like went quiet for a little while. And typically, that means it's failing horribly or it's actually quite large. Like, it's usually like one or the other. And so it was called 15.5. And basically, they would send you five. The whole product, it was very simple. And it's probably thrived during COVID. But basically, they send you an email every day.

And it takes, is it 15 questions that are five minutes to answer? Or it's 15 minutes to answer five questions, one of those. And that's all it is. Is they just send you an email at the end of the day and they say, what did you get done today? How do you feel? Yep. And that's all the product is. And I would imagine that it's quite large.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it raised at like $130 million valuation recently or something. So, you know, maybe that's a little out of date. That's 2019. So I bet it's doing pretty well. All right. Let's do a different topic. What do you want to talk about?

Let me tell you about a different company that I recently discovered. So it's called ESRI. Have you ever heard of that? No. Sounds like a government agency. Kind of. Okay. So ESRI.

So basically there's this entire. sector, the entire industry that needs important map information. If you scroll all the way down to where it says felt, you'll see where I am. But basically, the idea here is there's this company called ESRI. It was started in the 1960s. It's 100% owned by this one guy and his brother. So 100% owned by the same family. No debt. They never taken any outside funding. You can't find anything about it. It does over a billion dollars a year in subscription revenue. And basically what it does is- In subscription revenue, nice. Yes. It's software. It's a software. I, guess you could call it information, but probably at this point, software, because it started in the

60s. So at the time, it was basically information. But what it does is very simple. So 20,000 plus cities use it. So most cities, most like reasonably sized cities in America use it. Most states use it. Most Fortune 500 companies use it. And what it does is they have loads of, um, of information on maps. And so if you're a government and you want to build new gas, new, new pipes or something like that in your city, you're going to take their data and you can also give them more data and it's going to give you an interactive map that you can use to figure out where the other pipes are and you're going to be able to build this this this pretty complex system that you can continually use year over year that's going to show where your pipes are it's called geographic information system you never heard of that you

never heard of that yeah yes yeah i've heard that yeah i thought for sure you would have heard of that so um it's almost like uh google maps on steroids so in the same way that apple or sorry the same way it's like b to b google maps yeah so in the same way uber's i i'm Uber uses one of the Apple or either Google Maps. This is what like the city of like the Hamptons would use when they're building new roads and when they're building new electricity. Now, there's a few reasons why this is interesting. One, it's one of the most complex and one of the most interesting family-owned businesses

I've ever seen. Total monopoly. So in the way that they got their monopoly is they go into colleges and so they work with engineering students. They've worked really hard on making sure all the colleges, they give their software to for free. So the engineering students start using it at a very young age and they're used to it. Then when they graduate, they go, oh, yeah, let's just use ESRI.

So they know exactly what they're doing. And it has a total moat also because selling to a government is impossibly hard. It's incredibly difficult. Why? Because when you're a government, you want to make sure that the vendor that you're using takes 100% responsibility of something F's up. And so when you're like signing up, if you're a government employee, if you're working out a Fortune 500 employee, you want cover your ass insurance. You know, you want a company that's like well known and like not new and like they're going to take responsibility. responsibility if something bad happens. That's ESRI. Crazy fascinating company. But I'm curious about

which businesses are going to, because whenever you see something old, you know, from the 1960s as a software company, you think, well, like surely they're like, you know, you can't crush it forever. Also, the founder of this company, ESRI, he's probably worth $10 billion at this point. I think he's like 85 years old. So he's going to die. They're going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy's name by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean,

come on. How old is he? I can see why people don't want to compete with this guy. He's pretty old. I don't know. He doesn't look. He's 80. It looks like he's,

well, he's rich. 60, 70, something like that. Yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother

when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business. Crazy fascinating business. And I came across... Never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangeramon's mother. crazy, right? Crazy, fascinating company. And he seems, I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, so he's an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that somehow reduce wildfire, which I'm going to explain in a second. But basically there's a new company. There's a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to Felt.com. It totally is not. I went to this. It looked, it looked, well, this is like an early access site, but.

My, I saw it and I said, oh, this is kind of interesting. So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No, no. I, we just, I've never talked to this person.

So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. His first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. I mean, he was doing that. He learned all about the inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, well, I'm going to create a better map business, something that. people can add stuff to. And it's almost like where ESRI is like Google Maps,

this is like Ways. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Kind of fascinating. And it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, like this company, this guy Jack started, I think it's badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and kick their ass. I think it's very fascinating.

Yeah, this is cool. I like this a lot. There was a company called... What's the name? They're based in, they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. And while you're looking for that, so they describe it as the world first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven't said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you're going hiking with your friends, if you're planning a trip, you're allowed to use this.

I imagine what they're doing is their grand scheme though, their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires, uh, uh, uh, uh, go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they're going to happen. And then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they're going to do is they're going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very user focused, whereas it's, they're going to make all their money from B to B. So it doesn't look the same. It doesn't look like a B to B product. I imagine what they're going to do is like just like ways you're going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit. And then they're going to go and sell

the data and mapping tools to be to businesses and that's how they're going to win crazy fascinating go yeah i think it's cool so the company has thing is called discard his labs and uh what this i met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and i was like wow this is kind of amazing and this became one of my one of my misses i was like oh i really should invest in this and at the time i wasn't really investing super actively and i missed the boat i think this has become like a very big company but at the time i was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner and um why why is that. So they spun out of Los Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It's like this like, it's kind of like NASA or something like that. So this is like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out. They create this commercial company that's called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take, I don't know if it was their own satellites or other people's satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, cool, there's this image from a satellite of a field. and then they could run all kinds of machine learning

and like kind of computer vision and different more modern technologies on top of that and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year or they could give you know so it's like if you ever watch billions they kind of do some of this sometimes where it's like oh look how many trucks

are leaving this factory so before the earnings call I can figure out you know how much volume they're doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after things like that so they have a whole bunch of different products But basically, at the time, it was like, they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me this story. And this is many years ago. So I may be getting this wrong.

But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn't have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that. Like they're putting their own. They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting, basically. And they were showing that like, look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy. that's how valuable our data is. And I think since then,

I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But either is them or them in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this,

whether it's like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the way that, anything,

any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more

sense of it, getting more actionable like data and insights from that. Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder? The name of what company? Oh, no, he told me, am I saying it wrong? Is it French? Have you heard of the philosopher? DeCard? Yeah, what's the French philosopher's name? Rene Descartes. Maybe. Maybe that's what it is. What did you call it? Descartes. It's Descartes. Yeah, it's Descartes. It's like the, I don't, I forget.

Renee Descartes, is he the guy who said, I think, therefore I am? Anyway, it's, that's right. Well, I think therefore, I know. I know that I got that pretty bad, pretty badly wrong. I met this guy years ago, so I don't even fully remember the idea. I just remember thinking, oh, that's interesting. All my friends are making, like, apps to, like, order pizza and, like, to do lists. stuff like that. And this guy's basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it,

my two takeaways were I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this, competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a, you know, a takeaway I had during that process. You want me to keep going or you want one? No, do one. All right. Let me. me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Hazinga. I love Wayne Hesinger. I read his book. I believe it's called Building Blockbuster. So there's this guy named Wayne Hizenga. All right. Now I'm going to sound uncultured. Is he from, I always get it confused. Holland and the

Netherlands. Are they all the same thing? Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands? I'm not sure. Dude, I don't know. I'm sounding unculture. I'm sorry. But it. What does it say? What does Wayne Hizenga say? So he's of Dutch descent. Of Dutch descent. King of those states from the Netherlands.

All right, good. All right. So he's born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced had a young age, went to the army. And when he was in his 20s, he started this company called waste management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck.

And he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door, throwing away your trash. and eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these, this business is incredibly, there's loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, well, fuck, I'm just going to buy all of them. And so he starts buying a shit ton of them, something like two or three a week. And his business eventually has become waste management. Today, it's got a $64 billion market cap. It's the biggest waste removal company in the country, and it's incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business. And you'd think, all right. So that's great. Go and chill. Next, when he was still in his 50s,

I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 1987. He bought, he found one blockbuster. It was one Blockbuster store. He bought it with a little bit of money. And he took it public like two years later. So this guy's like a financial arbitrage machine. So he's like, is really good at raising money into deploying capital. And so he raises this money. And so Blockbuster, after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores. And then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it's pretty crazy. And if you would have invested $25,000, and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 into

blockbuster when it went public in in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he's pretty amazing. I mean, he's got a good track record. He also started something else, right? He'll start in automation.

Yeah. So the guy, all right, so he's in waste management. He's in Blockbuster. At this point, he's in his 60s. You think, all right, now you're just going to chill. Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it's the largest seller of used cars in America.

So he went from waste management to block to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he's also doing the same with resort. So have you ever heard of Extended Stay America? I believe now it's owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended State of America? So basically they've got something like

five, six, seven hundred motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like a handful of, or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the 90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. and I think he bought another Florida. What's the Florida football team?

So that's the Dolphins. And then he bought the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Pretty amazing. And so I always was amazed at this guy. And the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here's a few things. Here's a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about were his philosophy.

The first, we made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy a guy who's a guy who's already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I'd hire a bunch of salespeople to go out and do the internal growth. The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes you to go out to a certain market and just buy a guy who had three or four trucks and to say, okay, let's do this on her own. And that's what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses, except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but, and they grew on

their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There's another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He's worth like $5 or $10 billion. He did this over and over and over again. And I think that there's still a ton of room to do this. So what other industries could you do this in?

I've been thinking about this a lot. And I'm not entirely educated on the topic. But I think you could do it for all types of moving businesses. Because moving businesses, there's not actually one leader that you trust who's like the best, right? It's like a lot of mom and pop stores. What other industries could you do this like consolidation? stuff in. I mean, these roll-ups happen kind of in every industry. I feel like people have done it with dentists. Right now, right now dentists is like the hottest thing going. There's also like pet,

you know, vet, vets, you know, veterinary hospitals or veterinary clinics. There's pet cemeteries that somebody has told us about that that's like a pet cremation, basically, is like another one that you could do. Again, fragmented market. There's a, there's a lot of these. There's rural wireless internet service providers. There's, there's a huge number. of these where in a local market there's somebody who has maybe not a local monopoly, but a large local footprint. And going in, you can't, it's very, it would be, it would be too expensive to go in and try to rebuild that. It would take too long and be too hard to do that in a small place. So you buy it at a fair price, but you buy a whole lot of these and you make the sort of the

sum greater than than the, than the parts. And so I think this roll up strategy is one of the more, like, I would say, intriguing ways to build a monstrous empire. Like, otherwise, you kind of got to build a Facebook, build a YouTube. It's very hard to build a multi-billion dollar individual company from scratch. I think it is far easier to execute one of these roll-ups and create, you know, $100 million, create even a billion dollars of value in, you know, five to 10 years. It doesn't interest me personally, but if I wanted to become a billionaire, I think that this would be one of the lower risk ways to get it done.

Um, 100%. Murdoch did this with local newspapers also. So Rupert Murdoch, this is kind of what he did. Local newspapers and then local radio stations, local television stations, whatever. He revisited about local media companies and then aggregated them and rolled them all up and created like giant, basically news corp, which is his, his, like, his mothership brand. So yeah, by the way, this guy, Wayne Hizenga, if you're watching on YouTube, put this guy's face on here from his Wikipedia. Looks like an evil Steve Balmer. So that's what this guy looks like. Bradley Jacobs, the other guy you mentioned, who,

who's done this with XPO logistics and a couple other companies, literally looks like couldn't be a sweeter, someone's sweetheart dad who, you know, coaches the local soccer team. I love looking at these, because I think to do this, you've got to be pretty, I don't want to say ruthless,

but extremely aggressive, ambitious, a great deal maker, and you're moving like at a freight train's pace. And so I love to meet these people. Now you can't meet them sometimes. I love to just even look at their photos and just, just read their,

bios, who is this person? Where did they come from? Because it takes a very specific attitude to be able to go do this with self-storage or local, you know, landscapers, pool construction companies, rolling them all up. I've read a lot about both of those guys and I've seen them talk on YouTube. And my opinion of them is that they seem highly ethical. They seem incredibly high energy, super high energy. And they seem very entrepreneurial, even though they both look like Wall Street suits that don't like create. These guys definitely are creators, even though they buy stuff and you think, well, that's not like,

you're not inventing anything. And maybe they're not inventing anything from scratch, but they're definitely creators. And I, because I remember I saw that guy Bradley Jacobs and I saw what he looked like. And I'm like, dude, this fucking suit, like, he's just like, he's just some arbitrage square. And he's not.

He totally, uh, he's a creator and it's really interesting. He's maybe not like Mark Zuckerberg where he's like coding shit, but he's a different type of creator. And I really like these types of folks. doesn't this seem a little low? This guy's net worth was $2.8 billion when he died? I feel like how is this guy's net worth so low? Because...

Doing auto-nation, waste management system, doing blockbuster. Like, how does that add up? I think that the number that we have there could be wrong, but... I think it's wrong. What I read about in his biography was that with waste management, because they raised so much money

and because they bought so many companies, they simply didn't own that much of it. I mean, they owned a smaller piece of a massive pie, and they were okay doing that. And so when he started waste management and when he left, he was the largest individual shareholder, I believe. But he probably owned like single digit percentage. Right. Yeah, even just owning the dolphins. I feel like the dolphins themselves are going to be, you know, $500 million to a billion dollar franchise.

So that seems a little low. But yeah, this guy's definitely the billy of the week. Extremely impressive career. you know, shout out to this guy. He passed like he passed away a couple of years ago at age 80. So, you know, respect. Okay, what else we want to talk about? I have another kind of fast-growing company I think is worth talking about.

This thing called Picasso. Have you seen this? No, I'm going to Google it. Is that how it's spelled? Picasso, yeah, P-A-C-A-S-O. So two execs at Zillow spun out and created this thing, I think, a year ago, and it's already worth one or two billion. kind of in startup valuation world.

So I think they created all that value in basically a year to year and a half. And what does it do? It's basically a fucking timeshare. So what they do is they buy homes, they convert them to LLC, and then they sell fractions of that home to investors. So they bought like, you know, let's say a house in Napa Valley. They go buy a million dollar house. They convert it into slices of one eighth.

So you can own an eighth of this house for whatever, 125,000. thousand dollars you can buy a piece of this home so you're a fractional homeowner and it's meant to be for second homes so you don't do this for your home you do this for your like second your vacation home and when you buy that one-eighth of the house that gets you 44 nights of a stay um in that home for the year and you can either use them yourself you can gift them to others i think you can rent them out or let them rent it out for you. And this company takes this insane rake. So they take 12% of the purchase price up front, just straight off the bat.

And then they charge you a monthly management fee because they have the app that you and the other owners use to coordinate who's booking what, what's the rental share, what are you, how are you sharing expenses, all that good stuff. And if, you know, if the house goes down, you know, you're on the hook for it. They took their money up front. So I thought this was kind of an incredible riff on a timeshare that I'm surprised, frankly, I'm surprised is growing this fast. I didn't, like it doesn't, it's not something I look at and I say, that's awesome. I wish I had done that or thought of that idea. I actually think this is kind of dumb.

What do you think? So timeshare is a huge business. The idea of a timeshare is not bad. I would be into owning one. It's just that I don't want to go like through the sleasiness. of, of, you know what I mean? You don't want to sit through the webinar? Yeah, I don't want to go to the seminar.

So it's weird. So I think it could be cool. Why is it worse so much so fast? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, they've grown, you know, so Picasso evaluation. I saw it because there was a big protest going on. So Picasso raises $75 million goes from launch to unicorn in five months. So I think part of it is.

What was the protest? What's that? You said there's a protest. Oh, the protest was basically like in Napa, the home that they bought, the neighborhood was like, yeah, what is this? Like we don't want, we don't want this. We don't want this like timeshare, rental. We don't want all these different people coming through. Why are they doing this?

And so they basically, you know, they were trying to like, they were trying to say, hey, timeshares are not allowed. And what this company says is it's not a time share. In a timeshare, you own a block of time. in this you actually are a part owner of the home. So it's different than a timeshare. And then people were like, dude, you can't just call it cooperative ownership, make up a new term. And like, it's a time share. And so they're kind of going back and forth about that.

So the guy who started, his name is Spencer Razcoff. Is that how I say his name? So he started. And Austin Allison. So she's actually the CEO. They were both execs at Zillow. So yeah. So one of the co-founder's name is Spencer.

Have you seen what this guy's done before? No, the name sounds familiar. It wasn't he one of the original, like, founders of Zillow? Like, yeah, so check this out. In 99 at the age of 24, he founded Hotwire.com, a leading travel internet company. I mean, obviously, that's hotels, right? They sold it for $700 million. Then he started Zillow and he took it public.

He was a CEO through its IPO and bought loads of different companies. He's resigned in 2020, so I guess he's out entirely. Then he started dot LA, which is a media company for, uh, California startup. So I guess that's kind of like a passion project. And then now he's started Picasso. Dude, this guy's prolific. And he's on the board of Palantir. This guy's like, this is why it's worth a billion dollars because it's like, oh, the ex-CEO of Zillow is doing this new real estate thing. Cool. We're in and we're sort of price insensitive on the valuation. So I think it has more to do with the team than it does probably the traction in terms of that

valuation. Yeah, this guy's a badass. I mean, he's a hardcore badass. Would you, would you want, when I think of these types of things, these companies that raise all this money, we talked about Zillow, or we talked about this company, Picasso, and this guy looks like Spencer, that's his history. Also a podcaster.

He's got Office Hour's podcast. There you go. Oh, we should have them on here. Spencer, if you're listening, come on. Do you think that, do you like this strategy of raising, would you rather own a small piece of something huge or a big piece

or everything of something much smaller? I don't think about it that. Like that wouldn't be the deciding criteria. If it was just between those two, I would rather own the whole thing of a smaller thing. I find it to be more fulfilling. And I think economically you end up doing better. You have more options because when you own a small piece of a bigger thing, if it happens to go a little sideways and doesn't have big unicorn exit, doesn't go, doesn't go public, doesn't get sold for $3 billion. dollars, it's very easy to kind of walk away with very little because you raised all this money.

So now you have the first hundred million dollars go back to investors and maybe you only sold it for 70 or something like that. Whereas you owned like a huge amount of the hustle. I think that path is better because you could sell for $12 million and walk away with $10 million out of it. And so I think it's a it gives you more options on how to build your wealth. Now, that being said, there's something fun of. about building something massive and going for something that's like truly game changing with three extra zeros on the back of it. So like, you know, I respect both paths. If I was picking between those two, I would own, I would want to own more of a smaller thing because it gives me more options.

What do you think is easier? Oh, for sure, owning, uh, owning a small thing. Now, easier in one sense, which is it is easier, I think on a day to day basis because you don't have to worry about fundraising, shareholders, other shareholder management. And you get, again, you can exit for smaller amounts. The harder part, when you go rate, like these guys just raised $75 million, they're not going to feel like they're like roughing it every day. Whereas when it's your company and like, I don't know, you probably ran payroll for, you know, the first year of the hustle. And you probably had to worry, like, let's say, you know, advertisers pull out, you know, you probably were feeling that pinch because you were more or less bootstrapped. You raised a little

bit of money, but like, I don't think you ever felt like, you know, you have this huge cash cushion that you can just fall back on. Well, yeah, I did not. But my opinion, I normally would have agreed with you. But when we had Mark Lorry on the podcast and I talked, I had a lot of his coworkers reach out to me after the podcast. And basically, Mark Lurie's our judge.com. And what he's done is he, what was his vision?

He had his like, he had this like phrase. And I forget the phrase, but it was like vision capital people. Is that what it was? Yeah, that's his his fun name now, so we can look it up. But yeah, it's vision capital people. Yeah, you got to write VCP. And so he like, that was his whole premise. He's like everything. I come up with the vision. I get the capital. We get the people. That's what we do. And when he says that, I'm like, what does that mean? Like, that's a pretty like a vague, fluffy thing. But I started talking to people who worked with them. And they're like, he did that so well where he would raise all this money. And he really like, he did a lot of work. But it wasn't like, he wasn't like doing like like like, like, you know, the shit that you do when you're just starting out when you don't have any money, you know, uh, uh, you like I, I ran my own payroll. I did all the banking. I did, I, you know, I would go out and get all the vendors. He was like,

he just like hired amazing people and they did most of the work. And he just took care of the hard part of like selling people to, uh, join the company and selling people to give them money. And I thought about that. I'm like, dude, that does sound so easy. Yeah. It sounds pretty awesome. It sounds pretty awesome. I thought that it's easy. It's awesome. I'd put it. Nothing's easy. Anything valuable is typically, you don't go to it because it's easy necessarily.

But I'm totally with you. What's more fun? A small vision or a big vision, a big vision, right? What feels better? Having a lot of ammo in terms of capital or being strapped for cash and not only having to worry about how to get customers and grow, but can we pay the bills every single month? Yeah, definitely. But on the other side, if Sean wants to fuck off for a little while, you can do that.

Yes, exactly. You can bail for a little. So I optimize for freedom. I optimize for freedom above most things. And so, like, if you ask me, would I rather work? My dad taught me this a long time ago. He told me once because my first startup was a sushi restaurant chain. And I was like, I was talking about, you know, why it's fun, blah, blah.

He goes, he was trying to convince me to come work in the energy industry. He's like, he worked at BP. so he worked in the oil and gas industry. He's like, he's like, you know, the minimum is like, you like to play poker, right? Now, when you go to a poker table, you can either sit down with $100 or you can sit down with $10,000 or $100,000. You're still playing the same game. You're still going to sit there for six hours.

He's like, it's why not play the bigger game? And he's like, in the energy industry, the minimum stakes are in the millions. Nothing happens in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like you're saying a restaurant, one location if it works, can produce $100,000 a year of net income or $125,000 in net income. He's like, why not just, he's like a small project and a big project. If you make it your obsession, which is what you're going to do when you go start a startup, they both take the same amount of time.

They're both going to be all consuming. All right. So might as well do the one that has the bigger payoff. So when he said it like that, I was pretty sure, like, that's why my next start, I stopped the food thing. And I went and did a biotech company because he was right. And biotech, like, we made one deal that it was worth $5 million. And I was like, wow, that would have taken us like,

five years and 25 locations to do in the restaurant industry. And this was like one, one great meeting, one great presentation and like, you know, a year of technology development and boom, $5 million came through the door. So I kind of got to taste both sides of it. And so if I was going to a big project and a small project both take the same time, a big project's more fun. But what I don't like is big companies because in big companies, I feel like I lose my freedom of my time and my energy of how I want to spend my day. And so that's why I'm trying to find this mix of my perfect situation is I work for myself and pretty much by myself, but I'm working on things that I feel are big and can pay off big. And with the world of the internet, that's now possible.

One of the most expensive mistakes I ever made. So trends now makes millions of dollars in subscription revenue. It's a really good business. Had we made relatively minor changes, like not that different. Like it wouldn't have cost us more. money. We may have had a few more people. And we right now, we charge $300 a year. There's a world where wouldn't have had to have been that much different. And it definitely would have been of similar amount of work. We could have charged $30,000 a year. Right. And I didn't understand that for a long time. Now I completely do where it's like, well, I remember we were talking about that when you were doing hustle con. When you were doing hustle con, the hustle con ticket was what, like $200,

$300 or something like that? Yeah. On average. And you had told me, because I was like, dude, why are you in this like events business. You're like, dude, events business is going to be big. Look at this one. Look at that one. And I went and looked at him because you were right. They did actually like make tens of millions of dollars. But I was like, dude, the ticket price of this is three grand minimum.

And it looks like they have a $15,000 ticket package for like some people. Yours is like 10 times cheaper than that. And you were like, yeah, we should. We could. But you didn't feel comfortable going that route or whatever. I don't know what your reason was. Because you knew it. Yeah, I knew.

I was being a, there's a few things. One, I was a pussy. So I was just, I was being fearful. And number two, when I started my company, I was like 24. What I don't, and I never had a job before. What I don't understand is how these young guys, like people who are 21, 22, 23, like when the folks who started box.com, which is an enterprise cloud company, they were like 20 or 19, like in college still. What I don't understand is when you're a 19, or in my case, I was 24. When I thought about the company, I was like, well, like, I don't have any money. I would never buy something that was $2,000. Now that I'm older and I have more experience,

I realize, well, $2,000 is not a lot of money. And so what I don't understand is how these young guys who are in their early 20s, who don't have a lot of experience, how they even fathom that someone's willing to spend all this money on their product. They're either just courageous or they have more faith. I don't know what it is, but kudos to them. Because when I was 24 and starting my thing,

even though I could have charged way more money. And I tell everyone to do it now, I did not have the courage or the knowledge should do it back then. Right. And you see now, because you're inside HubSpot, you see how much companies spend on just stuff. Like what amount of money? It's like going to a really wealthy person's house.

And then you see them tip, you know, they tip some guy $100 or they, you know, they buy this fancy espresso machine for $8,000. It's like, oh, these are normal expenses for them. So then when you're on the outside, you're like, I should be charging a lot more. But when you've never been inside one of these big companies, it feels like a $3,000 ask, dude, I better be giving them like my left arm. And it's like, actually, they feel more comfortable with larger price tags. And that's like, in fact, a $300 product is a little bit off putting to them and sort of strange to them.

Yeah. And it's like disrespectful. It's like, dude, this thing isn't good. Charge more. So like knowing what I know now, and I think Mark and Driesen had like, I forget like this is, it was a very like headliney quote. But it was something like if Mark Andreessen had one advice for his his startups, it would be simple. Charge more. He goes two words, charge more.

And because most startups do what I did. You charge way little, way less than you should because you, I don't know, you're trying to be cute. I don't know what it is. It's just it's cuter to be cheaper. But it's like insecurity, right? Because at the beginning, you're like, oh, I just want some customers. It's not that big of a deal. Then you kind of, then that becomes the anchor point that you mentally,

anchors you to and the market anchors you to. And then you're afraid if you raise prices and everybody going to run out the door. You know, what happens if I raise these prices? I'm going to get complaints. People are going to quit, you know, blah, blah. And so it's, it's really like a form of insecurity. And it's like a corporate insecurity. And so if you're out there, I tweeted this the other day. I was like, if you're working at a company, go ask for a raise today. But do you think anyone did that? There's a cycle. I just got a promotion. Go ask for a raise today. But I'm, I don't know, I haven't really proven myself. Go ask for a raise today. Everybody should go ask for a raise inside of a big company. Why? Because there's almost always wiggle room. Like when I was

hiring, they would, they had what they called a compensation band. What does that mean? It means for the same role, we can pay this much on the low end or this much on the high end. And guess what? You start people low or in the middle of the scale and then you flex up when you need to. When do you need to? When they ask for more money. And so like, so there's already in your exact role without getting a promotion, there's more money that can be had. The second thing is, what's the worst that happens? They say no. And when they say no, you might learn something. They might say no because like they might give you essentially a soft hell no. What's a soft hell no? Hell no is sort of like they say no and they're like, look, look, if you want more, you can go elsewhere and get it. That's kind of a you're not so valued here.

Like, go for it. Or there's a no that's like, look, we love you. We value you. We value. you, I would love to give you more. I just can't right now because of X, Y, Z, or can you demonstrate, can you hit these goals because that will help us build this case? And hey, you're one step closer to making more money than you were before you asked. And so, or they say yes. And boom, you get more money. Like, there's no, there's no loss. I was, uh, except if you work for me, don't come ask me for more money. That doesn't count because I gave this advice. So don't ask me. But, you know, other people. This is for other people. I was notorious at the hustle because when people would ask me for a raise how to always say yes.

I was horrible at confrontation. I just said yes to everything. I'm like, oh, my God, I don't feel like dealing with this. That is not true. Dude, you told me a hilarious story. We can bleep this out if you don't want to tell it. I don't know if you remember me, you and our friend Sully, we were at Delaroosa or we were at some restaurant. And you told the story of, okay, bleep this.

Do you remember this? No. I don't remember fully, but you were just like, no, and you can leave. If you think that. And it was just like, it wasn't just no. It was like, you don't understand. Like, you understand. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So the story was like, well, yeah. So I remember this. So I should rephrase this. When people do good, I say yes to everything. When people do bad, they're like, well, I want to raise. I'm all right. So you're like, you are a machine to me.

It sounds horrible, but it's like, look, like our business is a machine. And like, humans are like part of the input. Humans effort are part of the input. Right. And you're asking. me for a raise. Right now, I think that the money that you are paid like breaks even. So, like, we put money into this into this machine. We put in the same amount out. And we get the same amount out. If I'm going to give you more amount of money, I'm putting more input. How much bigger is the

output going to be? Because right now, I don't think it's, I don't think that it's worth it. And so, I don't think it's worth it. And so if you don't think that that's fair, then you should go to some other machine and figure out where that input can have a bigger output. Because right now it ain't working. Right. Yeah, exactly. I love that because, A, it was honest. B, it was a little bit brutal. And, you know, it wasn't like, I would say you have many, many super strengths, like A plus skills, like I would pick you over anybody.

Softly wording things is not one of them. So I found it to be super funny. But really, again, even if you find that information out, and it hurts in the moment that this person says, look, it's not like, it's not on the table with the way things are currently at. If you find that out, you know, that's a good, that's a good piece of information. It hurts in the moment, but it's a good piece of information. No, because you might say, shit, I need to create more value here. What would it mean?

And you can have a conversation. You can say, well, what would I be needing to do for you to feel great about paying me double what I'm making today? That's a question you can ask. They might not know the answer on top of that, but they'll come up with it. They'll help work with you on it. And then you'll realize, oh, that's. where the value is created in my business. And so maybe in this machine, that's where the machine

needs the oil. I should go oil that part of it and create all this new output. And then, of course, they'll give me some more because I've created all, I've created disproportionately more value out of it. And so it's a good conversation to go have if you haven't had it, you know, with the people you work with. All right, good. Well, let's see how many who are going to do that. All right, good pod. Yeah, let's get out of here.