My First Million - 3 Crazy Billionaire Stories
Episode Date: August 31, 2023Episode 490: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) share 3 wild billionaire stories. From the secret acquisition of OnlyFans by a mysterious entrepren...eur to Elon Musk's quirky right-hand man', to the controversial history of the Sackler family and their involvement with Purdue Pharma. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:10) OnlyFans Annual Report (5:00) Leo Radvinsky (17:50) The Sackler Family (32:30) Billy of the Week - Steve Davis (49:30) PostPilot (57:30) Kiss back — Links: • Companies House - https://tinyurl.com/mr3m28x8 • OnlyFans Annual Report - https://tinyurl.com/3nw46jxj • Leo Radvinsky - https://leoradvinsky.com/ • Guy Stokley - https://tinyurl.com/vhbn6jef • Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. — Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • #218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This may not be the best acquisition ever, but I'll be damned if a day isn't up there.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, I think that he bought this.
I don't know the, I don't know the exact number, but he bought majority of only fans for,
I think, single digit millions of dollars, maybe low double digits, possibly low double digits.
But let's even say it was $10 million.
This is now a more than $10 billion company.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all.
I want to start the episode with a survey for the listener.
And we'll actually let John and Ben chime in.
So just Ben, turn your camera on so I can see your face.
All right.
So we're going to start with the survey.
So on Monday morning at 7.30 a.m.
I wake up from a text from Sean.
And here's what the text says.
It goes, hey, you got good topics for tomorrow?
I just texted Emmett from Twitch to do a pod.
and he said he'll do it tomorrow.
So I'm going to drive to San Francisco tomorrow
and record an interview with him.
And so what I want,
Jonathan and Ben,
turn your cameras on,
what I want you to do a thumbs up
if you think that it's the first one,
a thumbs down if you think it's the second one.
Do you think that this text means,
okay, in lieu of Sam and Sean recording together,
I'm going to do one with Emmett?
Or do you think that this means,
in addition to the recording tomorrow,
I'm also going to do one with,
Sam and Sean. Thumbs up for the first one. Thumbs down for the second one.
All right. Great. I just wanted to make sure I'm not crazy. And I want to know.
Oh, Ben, the betrayal. Oh, you too, Ben. E too. So I thought that that's what it meant.
And when I heard that, I was like, all right, so I have some free time between 11 and noon.
Ladies and gentlemen, the jury, let me just say this. What I say, do you have good topics for
the pod tomorrow if we weren't going to do a pod with good topics together? I don't know. Seems like
that might be something that, you know, that we're going to do.
All right.
Well, I just want to see what the audience thinks.
So whatever.
I have a bunch of topics today.
What do you have?
I got, bro, you think you've got a bunch of topics I got.
Well, however many topics you have, add one.
That's how many topics I got.
Well, I see a big list.
You have like an interesting, you have a few interesting things.
You want to kick us off with something?
Let's start with this.
Yeah.
So we've talked a lot about one business on this podcast, probably more than any
other podcast has talked about this business.
I would say we are the champions of this company.
We are the ones out here letting people know that this company is legit,
that this company is big.
This company is very interesting.
Everybody's overlooking it.
We've been saying it for years.
Are you even a paying customer of this company?
I'm not a paying customer because I'm a married man.
Well, you can be a married man and be a customer, but like I've never paid for it.
I'm not a paying customer because free porn exists and I'm talking about only fans.
The, so only fans is annual numbers leaked and, um, not leaked, actually.
What happened was actually kind of interesting.
You know this, but maybe a lot of people who are listening don't, which is that any company,
uh, that is based in the UK has, whether it's private or public, has to report at the end
of the year, a sort of a financial summary.
And the more, the bigger your company is, the more data you have to include.
Basically, like a public company, you have to report like.
Like a public company.
So in the U.S., if it's public, you can go look up their information, maybe the quarterly
quarterly earnings or you can go find their S1.
But if it's a private company, you're just shit out of luck.
You're just guessing.
But if you go to OnlyFans.com and you scroll down to the privacy policy, click privacy policy,
you will see that OnlyFans is run by a company called Phoenix International Limited.
And what is Phoenix International Limited?
It is a company based in the UK.
So if you go to the...
there's an entity called Company's House.
And Company's House is where all of the company information is housed.
And so if you go there, you can find, you can look up Phoenix International Limited,
and then you can look at filing history.
And you can see that there are several reports,
so reports about this director replacing this director,
but the one you want to care, the one you care about is the one that basically says,
here is the 2022 financial summary, year-end financial summary.
And when you go to that, you're going to see the following picture of a business.
OnlyFans is a business that generated or collected $5.6 billion in revenue in 2022.
It's take on that it was 20%.
So their company took $1.1 billion.
So for every $4 a creator makes, they make $1.
On that $1.1 billion in net revenue, $525 million of profit.
So this company is spitting off half a billion a year of profit, pay a little tax,
The after tax profit is still $400 million.
And then the beauty of it is if you scroll down to the, I don't know,
the balance sheet somewhere down right after the P&L, it says dividends.
And it shows that the owner, Leo, took $338 million in dividends last year.
Oh, my God.
And the year before that, he took like $200 something million.
This guy is taken out $550 million of dividends in the last two years off this business,
which is just incredible because.
Let me remind you.
This is a company that he bought in 2018.
This is five years.
What did he?
Five years.
He bought it.
Do you know what he paid for?
Non-public information, but he bought 75% of the business at the time for what I believe was low millions of dollars.
Was he wealthy before that?
Yes.
So Leo is a kind of a gangster of the internet.
And he, by the way, if you just go to his website, his website's awesome.
So there's really two things I love about the website.
He's a listener, I think.
Well, that's one of the things I love about the website.
If you go to his website, which is just his name, Leo, leo,
leo, radvinsky.com.
If you go to Things I Like, so he's got a Things I Like,
and then the very first category, podcast,
the very first one of two podcasts is my first million.
So he's a listener of the pot, which is, you know,
just a cool thing, fun thing to see.
But I love his website because I love,
would people sort of put up their flag
and they're like,
yo,
this is what I'm all about.
And it's just,
they just make it really easy
for you to just understand,
here's who I am,
here's what I do,
here's what I'm into.
And if I'm into this,
if you're into those same sort of things,
we'll probably get along.
So his main thing says,
he's a software company,
architect, angel investor,
and open source software support.
This guy gives millions of dollars a year
to open source projects that probably would have died
had he not done that.
He's a huge supporter.
of open source software and sort of like a,
he's like, you know, like a sort of freedom entrepreneur, right?
He wants projects that are increasing the overall amount of freedom in the universe.
So whether it's he'll fund these open source social networks that are like a mastodon type of social network that are,
are not owned and controlled by like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, like one private company,
closed source owned by a mega billionaire.
He funds projects that are.
alternatives to those. And listen to this.
If you go to his, so you see like, he has
sections about me, projects, open
source, things I like. If you click
Projects, only fans
isn't even number one of the listed
projects. It's number two.
And it just says like one paragraph
and it says what it is, but number one
is some open source project. That's what he
has listed. Yeah, B4X.
He's like, B4X is like
tools for rapid prototyping and development.
You know, Microsoft discontinued visual basics
and B4X stepped in to try to make this
happen, probably would have died.
Basically, when I looked into this, it probably would have died.
And then in 2019, he decided to put a ton of money into it just so that this project could
stay alive.
And so then under giving, he's like, yeah, I don't, I don't do a bunch of my time, effort,
and money to causes I care about, including open source initiatives and traditional charities.
My goal one day is to sign the giving pledge.
To sign the giving pledge, you need a billion dollar net worth.
I'm pretty sure he has like a multi-billion dollar net worth now.
I think he's achieved this goal because in the five years,
and you can go look at the company filings,
but like 2019,
2018,
the company has like,
he pulls out like 1.5 million in dividends.
And so in like a three year period,
he went from pulling out 1.5 million in dividends to 250.
And then $340 million in dividends out of this company.
So this accelerated extremely quickly.
And I think like,
you know,
there's all these great tech acquisitions.
there's like, you know,
Google buying YouTube for a billion dollars,
probably worth 50 billion now.
Facebook buying Instagram for a billion dollars,
probably worth 100 billion now.
This may not be the best acquisition ever,
but I'll be damned if it isn't up there.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, I think that he bought this.
I don't know the,
I don't know the exact number,
but he bought majority of only fans for,
I think,
single digit millions of dollars,
maybe low double digits,
possibly low double digits.
But let's even say it was $10 million.
This is now,
of more than $10 billion company.
So he turned, let's just pretend it was $10 million into essentially $10 billion of value.
Personally, not a fund, not a company.
This is him.
This is one guy?
Who owns the other 25%?
And is there a story of him buying this and like what he saw?
Because like, I would, if this was me five years ago, I would have been like, dude, this would never, this will never work.
Right?
I mean, everyone would have said that.
So it was already working in a very small scale.
So this guy, Guy Stokely was the founder.
And if you go look at Guy Stokely, he looks like an Instagram model.
He is like a, like every picture of him, he's flanked by seven women.
And the story is that Guy Stokely, his dad's in the finance world, he takes a small loan of like 10,000 pounds from his dad, starts only fans.
And they kind of co-owned the business or whatever.
It's like a father and son was like sort of the origin of this thing.
Good bonding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Some guys like golf.
Some guys like fishing.
Some fathers and sons start only.
Yeah.
Like that's amazing.
And I don't know why he sold or when he sold.
But yeah, Leo approaches them and they buy,
and he buys the business.
At the time, it was reported that he bought 75% of the business.
I don't know if later he bought the rest.
I suspect he did because there's one of these five.
that Guy Stokely is removed as a director in the company.
So maybe he just voluntary step down.
I don't know.
At some point, you're just reading a bunch into these statements.
You can't say for sure exactly how it happened.
And this whole thing was very secretive.
In fact, when I first found out about Leo owning only fans, at the time, nobody knew who
owned only fans.
It was not clear.
There was nothing on the internet.
This was several years ago.
And I was trying to figure it out.
I couldn't figure it out.
And then I get a message from somebody who's like, hey, I know the
guy who owns only fans and he loves the pot.
I was like, whoa, that's cool.
Like, I've been trying to find who owns this thing.
I wanted to invest in this.
And anyways, that's how we kind of like, we ended up having a chat.
You know, I want to meet this guy someday.
He's got a really interesting story.
So now there's like a photo of him on the internet and there's,
he's a very private guy, but now a little more information has come out about
him.
Very early on, I think when he was a teenager, like 15, 16 years old,
he got into the business up first, I think like domain.
So he would basically buy and sell hundreds of domains, like maybe thousands of domains.
In fact, there's like a some, he got sued at some point.
There's like a court filing of like, here's a thousand domains that this guy still owns.
And it's just like every variation of like, you know, sort of like websites that you can imagine,
many of which were sort of in the adult category.
And then he creates my free cams.
And my free cams basically took over the cam girl market.
And I think that site still makes great.
You know, that's how I think he got very, very rich was off that site.
And he used that money then to invest and to parlay that into other businesses.
But he owns a portfolio of these businesses.
And now Phoenix International, which is only fans, has become a major, major one.
This is amazing in a lot of different ways.
One, it's amazing that company's house, which always a weird name.
I hate saying that.
It's companies, plural, company's house.
It's amazing that that exists.
and it's one of my favorite places to do research.
It's amazing how fast this grew.
Would you invest in this company?
Or do you not, do you, like,
yeah, I tried to several times.
You know, the problem was they didn't need any investment.
They were making so much money.
And so I was like, hey, I can add value.
And I was like, I don't even, you know,
am I really, you're crushing it.
What am I going to do here?
Right.
Like, hey, I'm a fan.
I think I'm a good hang.
can I invest?
That's really ultimately what my pitch was.
It's like,
I'm a fan of what you're doing.
Unlike most people,
I don't,
like,
you know,
at the time when I was saying the stuff,
like,
only guys had they,
it's over time become more and more mainstream.
Over time,
become more and more accepted as a thing that's legitimate.
At the time,
it was seen as very,
very sketchy.
It was sort of the butt of the joke.
And,
um,
yeah,
so I definitely would have invested in this.
Um,
I wanted to.
They were doing so well that I don't think they ultimately
needed any investment. Now, the one thing they do need is liquidity. Like, you know, he's taking
massive dividends, which is great. But like, you know, they could realize a several billion
dollar liquidity event if they could go public or if they could sell. But there's no buyer.
And it's hard to go public with a business like this. And so I think, you know, I don't know what
they're going to do with it. But, you know, it's not a bad plan B to just suck out hundreds of millions
and dividends every year. It's fine. Yeah, I was going to say, is that what he wants? I don't know
why you'd ever want to go public with the...
I don't know if he wants that,
but you always want the option, right?
Like any business person will want the option,
whether you take it or not,
it's secondary.
In fact,
most of the things in my life I'm pushing for
and people are like,
do you want this?
And I'm like,
oh, I haven't even gotten there yet.
All I want is the option.
And if I have the option,
then I can think,
what I definitely know is I don't not want the option,
right?
And I think that's just a better way
to operate as a business person is to make sure
you have the options on the table for you.
At $400 million a year
and a dividend,
there's probably only
five or ten
I would imagine people getting
who have in the world
or at least in America
who have higher income
like I remember Steve Schwartman
from Blackstone one year made a billion dollars
and then the other guy is like
what's the guy's name is it Griffith or Griffin
the like it's usually just like
Pam Griffin
it's usually like the top five or ten hedge fund
managers who make this and they're actually
if they're the best it's barely reliable
but they're like
those are the guys who are buying the $100 million apartments in New York,
you know,
like the Bill Acme's and there's probably only 10 of them,
maybe 20,
but like that income,
you'd be the highest in America in the top 30 or something like that.
You know what I mean?
So like,
I don't know, man.
I would probably still own that.
Well,
this is cool.
Well,
I,
one thing that's cool about this guy,
by the way,
when I talked to him,
like,
you know,
90% of our conversation was not about only fans at all.
It was about these different open source projects.
He's interested in.
He was just,
he's very like,
He's a technical guy.
He's very curious, very interested.
So he was showing me like, oh, by the way, check this out.
I'm going to send you this link.
You know, like try this site out.
It's kind of like, it's like this fringe niche site, open source project.
But like, I think it's really cool for these reasons.
And I just love that.
I love, you know, one of the things I love the most about tech is that it redistributed wealth
to a bunch of people who had different interests.
So like when the wealthiest people were all from finance, you just got this like one
homogenous pool.
of rich people.
It's like,
here's a bunch of rich dudes
that live in the same place.
Like alpha,
white guys wearing suits.
Alpha New York,
you know,
power suit,
watch wearing,
art buying.
Greed is good.
Guys,
yeah.
And then like crypto
made a whole bunch of other people rich,
right?
Because it was like,
you know,
a different type of person
got rich through that
and they had different interests.
They're like,
yo,
I'm going to spend money
on this digital squiggle
and this board ape.
And I'm going to donate
to this other thing.
And I'm going to fund
these types of projects
and these types of
this type of worldview, I'm going to fund.
And tech companies were started by like Mark Zuckerberg.
And this guy didn't, he wouldn't want to start a hedge fund.
He wanted to do something else.
And because he does that, now he could spend his money doing other things or Elon Musk.
He's like, I'm going to fund companies that will do space travel when no investor would fund this.
I'll fund it myself.
And so I love when wealth gets distributed to new pockets of people who have different interests,
different values, because they're going to bring some new, like, it's not the thing.
they created, it's actually all the stuff they do with their money that creates 100 new
things. That's kind of interesting to me. I've emailed back and forth with them just a few times.
I've asked him to come on. I think you have two. I don't know if that will ever happen.
Yeah, he's like, I'm a pretty private person. I don't think he's like, I don't think I would make a
very good guess, but, you know, well, okay, fine. We'll talk about your dividends then, sir.
You either come on as a guest or we find you on company's house. That's the rules of
this podcast. Dude, let me tell you about another person that is hard to find information on
and is really fascinating, but really evil. Have you ever heard of the Sackler family?
I saw that there's a documentary or a movie out on Netflix about them or a show, but I don't know
anything about them. So I'm in the perfect spot. I'm interested and aware, but completely
ignorant. So there's two documentaries, one on who or they're both actually fictional shows.
They're both really good. One called, I think, Dope Sick, one called Painkiller. One's on Hulu, one's on
Netflix. The story is about Purdue Pharma. So Purdue
Farma is basically, I'm going to tell you a little bit about that and then I want to tell you
about the early even before that because that's more interesting to me at this point.
But basically Purdue Pharma started by three brothers. It was Mortimer, Raymond, and Arthur
Sackler. They were in the, yeah, they are in the. Can you be named Mortimer and not be
evil? Like that's, I mean, he's, he's one of the evil ones. And so basically these three brothers,
I'll talk about their background in a second,
but basically they were in the medical industry forever.
Since they started as doctors,
and then they worked at psych hospitals where they did lobotomies,
and they're like,
all right,
let's start making these medicines and drugs.
And so after 50 years of doing this,
they eventually start or buy Purdue Pharma.
They buy it for not a lot of money,
but it evolves over 40 years
to where they create this drug called oxycontin.
Oxycotton was basically,
it's an opioid,
and it wasn't popular at the time.
It was kind of unknown.
They had a drug previously that was similar.
They kind of changed it.
And the big change they did was they called it a time-released technology, I guess.
And they threw a lot of just shady practices.
It seems like they bribed the FDA.
They hired lots of ex-FDA people after they approved the drug and they promised them all this stuff.
They got the FDA to approve OxyContin.
And the big thing was that they called it time release.
And they said that it was believed that were,
believe is important. The first time the FDA ever said that, it's believed that less than 1% of
people who takes oxycotton will ever get addicted. So what they do is they go and hire literally 2,000
salespeople who go to all of these hospitals, these doctors, these clinics, and they say,
look, we have this new drug. It's for a moderate pain. You can use to prescribe Vicodin,
only if someone had surgery and had major pain or if they were dying from cancer. We have this new
drug. Very few people get addicted to it and has a time-released capsule, which means that it's
really hard to get addicted to. So you could give this to people if they just have, like,
a sore back or if they have headaches. Like, it's not that big of a deal. And they train
these salespeople, and they're very aggressive about training. They hold contests where you can
win a trip to Bermuda if you sell a certain amount of drugs. You can do all these types of things where
they would give, like watches. They would throw parties with hot girls. Like, they did all this
stuff, but it was for medicine, particularly in opioid, which is incredibly controversial, in my
opinion, very unethical. And so they make OxyContin popular to the point where the company
is privately owned. It's owned by two families, each Mortimer and Raymond's family. I believe
Raymond's son, Richard, Richard Sackler, becomes CEO. And they grow this company to be doing like
$30 billion a year in revenue. And they're also famous because in order to help their reputation,
they donate billions or hundreds of millions, maybe billions that added up to to art museums.
And so the Met in New York, they have a Sackler wing, like the Louvre in Paris.
They have a Sackler wing.
These guys never went to Harvard, but there's like the Harvard School or the Harvard Museum
that's for the Sacklers.
There's the Columbia.
There's the NYU.
Like they've donated so much of their money to arts.
And it's basically what they call it a reputation laundering.
So they try to like get like into high society, even though they're selling this drug.
Turns out two years ago, I think, the government finally cracked down on them, made them go bankrupt.
And I'm not sure where they are now, but they're very private.
So that's the story of Purdue Pharma.
The book Empire Paints really.
Wait, so sorry, the end was the government cracks down on them and it goes bankrupt.
So the government did what?
Because isn't oxy still like everywhere?
Well, so what's, I don't know much about these types of drugs, but there's oxy cotton.
That's like the brand name.
And then there's oxycodone.
And I think that's the generic drug.
And then there's hydrocodone.
And then there's all these forms of opioids.
I think you could still get oxy cotton.
But basically at first, the government made them pay a $10 million settlement.
And then people spent five years trying to track them down and like, fine, like,
one thing that I did that broke the law because it was very weird because they weren't actually
breaking the law or if they were, it was very hard to find which law they were breaking
because the FDA kind of colluded and allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff. So technically,
they kind of weren't breaking the law. They got hauled up in front of Congress. And what the
government eventually does is they're like, oh, you lied to Congress because you said you didn't know
it was addicting, but we found this email from four years ago where you did say you knew it was
addicting. And so that's actually what they got charged with, sort of like how Al Capone got charged
with tax evasion, not killing people. It was sort of one of those things. And that led to a domino
effect where eventually they had to pay something like an $8 billion settlement. The Sackler family
had to give up control of the company and they were no longer allowed to be involved in this industry.
And so that's kind of where we are today, where Purdue Pharma, it still exists, but not as it did before,
but we'll see if there's any actually long lasting change with all that. But it's a
It's a really fun story, like in the sense of it's thrilling, in that they were just horribly
unethical.
They did a lot of crazy shit.
Did that make sense?
Yeah.
I mean, this basically killed hundreds of thousands of people, right?
Like just through addiction.
It killed hundreds of thousands.
It killed hundreds of thousands of people directly and that hundreds of thousands of people just
taking that medicine were killed.
But then what it led to is what we experienced in San Francisco and all these other places,
you take oxy and then you're like, I love this.
I need more of it.
Now I need something cheaper.
something more accessible, heroin,
and then which leads to fentanyl.
And so it creates this huge opioid crisis
where Purdue was like, hey, we didn't do that.
We just prescribed Oxycontin.
These guys are dying from heroin.
When everyone's like, man, it's such a clear,
like there's such a clear transition here.
Like, you guys are definitely responsible.
So that's why it's like a thrilling story.
At Harvard, there's still this building is still called the Sackler,
whatever, the Sackler Museum or whatever it's called,
still up, which is kind of crazy that they haven't sort of
canceled the name off the building.
So here's where things get interesting.
And this is what I want to talk about.
So I mentioned there was three brothers.
Only two brothers owned Purdue.
So the eldest brother, his name was Arthur.
He died in, I think, the late 80s or mid-80s.
And basically, he was the eldest brother, and he got them all into the industry.
When he died, his estate sold his portion of Purdue to the other brothers.
And the other brothers are the ones who Purdue eventually created OxyContin.
And so Arthur's heirs are like, look, we had nothing to do with this.
It's same name, but like we had nothing to do with this.
And Arthur was the one who liked to donate a lot of money to museum.
So same last name, but their argument is that it's different people.
But Arthur was incredibly shady.
And I want to tell you his background.
This is where things get really interesting.
So check this out.
So this guy, Arthur Sackler, he was the eldest brother.
So he was a patriarch.
And he brought in his two brothers into the business.
And he was originally a doctor.
But his first hit was as he was a doctor.
doctor, he started an advertising agency, a medical advertising agency. And he studied
copywriting. That was his thing. He learned about copyrighting through a traditional agency where he
would work at a traditional agency at nights and weekends in order to help pay the bills. And he was like,
copywriting is awesome. I got to do this for Valium or this other drug, this other drug. And so all
these huge pharmaceutical companies at the time, this was in the 50s, 60s and eventually 70s, like,
what's that big one, Roche, R-O-C-H-E?
I believe that they were the inventors of Valium,
and they start saying, hey, Arthur, you're a little agency.
We hear you have good ideas.
What are your ideas?
He's like, well, we have to hire a Salesforce.
Then we're going to create these ads.
We're not allowed to advertise towards consumers,
but we can advertise towards doctors,
and they popularize Valium by making it like an everyday drug.
Like, oh, if you're a little stressed,
and, you know, just like you would take an ad bill,
just pop a V.
You'll be calm.
And they have like housewives vacuuming in pearls, like with a volume like logo.
Or he also popularizes his tranquilizers.
So he makes him popular.
So he builds up this agency.
But in secrecy, he does two things that are interesting.
One, he finds his competition.
There's another medical pharmaceutical ad agency.
And he buys half of it.
And so what he does is he eventually corners the market for pharmaceutical advertising.
and he owns the other one secretly,
and he'll say stuff like, look,
you don't want to work with us?
Fine.
Go to our competitors.
They sound like they're a good fit for you.
And they collude together on how to like market together
and like which techniques are working.
The second thing that he does is he creates this thing called the medical tribune.
It's a bi-monthly newsletter for doctors.
So he's in the newsletter industry.
It's a free thing,
a free newsletter that is eventually read by 300, 400,000,
doctors.
And what he does is no one knows at the,
time that he owns it. But he starts using his original company, MacArthur, for advertising,
buys ads in the Medical Tribune. And through this, it creates two huge companies. And that is how
he creates his original fortune. And I found, I went and dug through the newspapers.com.
That's one of my favorite sources. You can find old newspaper clippings. I found some of the
numbers. So check this out. So McAdams, sorry, I called it McArthur. It's called McAdams. When he died,
the company was doing $170 million a year in revenue,
and that was in 1985, I believe.
It had 170 employees,
and then his other company, Medical Tribune,
it was not sold for a significant amount of money.
It actually sold for around $70 million to Axel Springer,
who also bought Morning Brew,
our friend Austin's company,
so I've been giving up a hard time about this.
Austin Sackler.
Yeah, for sure.
Austin Sackler.
And so annual revenues for Medical Tribune
range between $50 to $80 million in the last few years of existence.
This was in the late 80s and adjusted for today.
That's around $150 to $200 million a year.
He also, Arthur, while he was doing this, he was buying,
he owned like three New York City townhomes.
He was making seven, sometimes eight-figure dollar donations to art,
to museums.
And he had an art collection valued at $60 million.
When he died, I think he was 75, that was in the late 80s.
He was worth around $150 million, which today is around.
$400 million, maybe five or six years after that, that's when Oxy was created.
But besides the fact that these guys do illegal, horrible, unethical things, what's crazy
is this guy owned two companies that were doing close to each of them over $100 million
a year.
And it was medical advertising and a medical newsletter for doctors.
And he owned, it was him and his wife owned the whole thing.
So, like, super fascinating background story about how this guy originally got wealthy.
Wow.
prolific family for sure that's crazy that's a crazy story it's crazy so a lot of the stuff like
that the Purdue families or the Sackler family is about it's about oxy cotton and I thought that was interesting
but what I thought was really interesting was just like I was like well just from an entrepreneur's
perspective how to get started and so I did all this research right dug deep and then I went into like
I used this thing it's like a historical money calculator and so it helps you calculate how much money is worth
today I then looked at real estate prices from the 70s and 80s in New York City and I found out
how much he was paying for homes.
And I basically like reverse engineered like the income from this medical newsletter
because I was just curious how it works.
I think, by the way, that still works today.
And there was another company.
I don't know if you remember this,
but there was a company that used to give out free TVs to doctors.
And these TVs had like skeletons on them.
And you could like move the skeleton around in order to like show like, all right,
your colon is actually right here and we'll zoom in on that. But on the TV was ads for drugs.
And this company eventually got in trouble, interestingly enough, for fraud. It turns out
they were lying about a lot of stuff. But this pharmaceutical industry is so interesting to me because
it's something that we're supposed to trust. Turns out it's a lot of it's bullshit and it's just as shady
as someone would say that this My Free Cam's website is or even worse. And it's really fascinating
and how this whole industry works,
but medical newsletters,
super fascinating.
A legit company,
Axel Springer,
which is a $5 billion
German newspaper company,
bought it.
And so I actually think
these still work today.
And if you go on TV...
Is it still running,
by the way?
Or no?
No, they shut it down.
I believe they shut it down
and like everything involving Sacklers,
like people don't want to have anything to do with it.
But if you're on,
do you ever watch cable TV?
Yeah,
sometimes.
Dude,
it's only car commercials and drug commercials.
That's like all it is.
It's like Cialis and like it's,
So anyway, this pharmaceutical advertising industry, I would never enter it, but it's really fascinating how it's done.
And it's incredibly lucrative.
It created this fortune.
And I think it could still create more.
Well, I put this out there before, which was that we get asked a bunch about, hey, I'm doing a newsletter.
Can you help?
Can you invest?
Can you advise?
Whatever.
And we've basically, I think both of us say no to pretty much all of them.
The one that I think is interesting still or two, the two areas that I am interested is
who's doing an amazing job of this in real estate?
and he was doing an amazing job of this for the newsletter for doctors.
Those are the two that I really care about.
And I'm like,
I really want to find whoever's doing a great job of that.
And, you know,
invest or advisor partner with them to like help make that bigger.
Because I think those spaces are amazing spaces.
If you have the right person going,
like doing it the right way,
there's a lot of nuance to it.
But yeah,
I still think this idea would just work again.
And they sell for a huge multiples.
So aging media did this for nursing homes.
So somewhat senior living.
Yeah, somewhat related.
I don't remember the multiple, but I heard rumors.
It was like 15 times profit, which is really great.
And so these businesses are still super lucrative.
And I think what Arthur did, whether you think that's good or bad,
the way that he did it, I think is bad inherently.
I don't think it's bad.
But the way that he did it is, I think it's still incredibly lucrative.
So let me tell you, let me tell you another story about a smart weirdo.
All right.
So here's a smart weirdo.
This is the episode.
Smart weirdos slash maybe bad people.
people.
This guy, I don't think, is considered bad, but he's my billy of the week.
Million dollars isn't cool.
You know what's cool?
A billion dollars.
Okay.
So we have some actually multiple contenders.
This is a billy of the week runoff, actually.
Maybe this is actually a campaign.
But this guy is doing something interesting.
So his name is Steve Davis.
You probably don't know who that is, just because.
it's a fairly generic name.
But, um,
and if you Google his name,
it's a,
it's a professional snooker player.
What is that pool?
Yes,
some kind of like pool if you,
if you had like,
you know,
the wrong color balls or something.
Um,
so this guy is Elon Musk's long trusted,
like right hand man.
So let me tell you about this guy.
He,
um,
joined SpaceX back in 2003.
So very early on,
um,
crazy background.
He's got a twin master.
master's degree in particle physics and aerospace engineering.
Right?
So, you know, guys got a dome on him.
And he, but I think what he was doing, I think he was doing something like completely
unrelated, but he was one of the first employees that ended up getting hired by SpaceX.
For some reason, I feel like I remember he wasn't like working in the industry.
He was doing something else and then he got hired.
And the stories about this guy are kind of legendary.
So when Elon bought Twitter, people were like, who's he going to make CEO?
And a lot of people were like, it's going to be Steve Davis.
before he put the lady from NBC in charge,
which was sort of a weird pick.
It seemed like it was going to be Steve Davis.
Why?
Because Steve Davis was living and sleeping in the Twitter office
with his wife and their newborn child.
Oh, my God, dude.
Like three weeks prior.
What a brown noser.
Intense.
So this guy, if you go read the stories about him,
it's like, it's like folklore.
So one person said he has been working six hours a day,
every single day, seven days a week.
for years and years.
Another person said,
he's insane.
He gets more work done
than 11 people working together,
just himself.
What?
One time,
one time Elon Musk,
they were doing something
with the production
of a part in,
one of the parts of the rocket,
I guess.
And this was a $120,000 part.
And Elon's like,
we need to get this down to $5,000.
And nobody,
everyone's like,
what are you talking about?
Like, yeah,
of course,
I wish,
I wish it was free too.
but like, that's just not how things work.
Yeah.
He's like, $5,000.
And he just left the room, right?
And Steve Davis takes that as a personal challenge.
He's just working for months and months to try to figure out,
how can we do this for $5K instead of $120K?
He ends up getting it done for $3,900.
He figures out a way to do it.
He emails Elon so excited.
Elon, we did it after months.
We figured out how to lower the price of this part down to only less than $4,000.
You said five, we got it out at less four.
Elon just replies,
okay, period.
It doesn't matter.
Steve Davis is undeterred from this.
And he just keeps going.
He's become,
now he's the CEO of Boring Company.
So Elon's like,
you know,
third company or whatever that he created after
all that right,
he's got space.
And that company is legit, right?
Boring company.
They actually are making stuff or is it just like a T-shirt company?
No, they are doing things,
but there's a lot of criticisms like,
cool, like how,
you know,
how how's that tunnel going?
Yeah.
Like where's what's going on?
You dug this tunnel,
but like it's only compatible with Teslas
and they have to put like roller blades on
before they go through it.
It's like,
I don't know.
This seems kind of shitty,
right?
Dude,
I want my cities to look like Swiss cheese
just holes all over the place.
Like what's going on?
You're just selling flamethrowers.
And so,
you know,
on one hand,
they have improved the speed of,
of boring,
of actually digging the tunnels.
But the reason I found this guy interesting.
So not only is he like Elon's right-hand man that you haven't heard of that, you know, I find that interesting, not only is he probably worth maybe a billion dollars at this point, like based on SpaceX stock.
I've appreciated like crazy since 2003.
But this guy's totally weird.
So he just is, he's got a great sense of humor that he takes to business.
Okay, so he, basically Elon sends him, Elon trusts him, right?
He's like, hey, we need somebody on the ground in, you know, he's got like this city in Texas.
And like at one point, he sent him to D.C. for a lot, like, you know, they needed to be near D.C.
because a lot of their contracts are government contracts.
So he's like, send Steve out to D.C. from California.
And Steve's living there.
He's doing his job.
But he's like, God, you know what I miss?
I miss just having great frozen yogurt.
He's like, they don't have that D.C.
He's like, all I got is this crap.
I miss the California frozen yogurt.
You know what?
So as a side job from his very important job at SpaceX,
he opens up a Froyo shop called Mr. Yogato.
And he not just opens it up,
he goes and he works there after work for fun.
And so he goes and he works there,
and he starts to make it fun for himself.
He creates just a bunch of ridiculous policies.
So if you go to Mr. Yogato,
if you can stump him with a Seinfeld question,
your Froyo is free.
if you come in dressed as
Bjorn Borg
or whatever the tennis player
you can
or not I don't use the touch
or maybe there's a musician or something
you get 25% off
if you let him stamp
Mr. Yogato on your forehead
10% off
and so he created this long list of rules
essentially on the secret menu
for what he could do
and then when he had to leave
he had to move away
you know Space X needed him
in some other place he's like oh shit
I'm not going to be able to go work in my yogurt shop
after work.
Okay.
Hey,
whoever comes to Mr.
Yogato today,
one of you is going to get the shop for a dollar.
He just gave the shop to some guy for a dollar at the end.
It's like,
here's the keys.
The only rules.
I want to keep,
you know,
being able to come here and eat half off.
And,
you know,
and also you got to keep some of the rules alive.
Like,
if you can recite a speech from Braveheart in a Scottish accent,
20% off.
And so he's,
So he does this yogurt chop.
He also opened up at one point.
The headline, if you Google, Mr. Yogato is, it's from an article in the Washingtonian, it says,
Twitter's next CEO might be the Mr. Yogato dude.
Yeah.
He goes, bro, like, the rules are amazing.
You should go look at the rules of this.
Rule number eight, anyone wearing a kickball uniform and has played hard, evidence by dirt on their knees,
will automatically receive 10% off their yogurt.
Anybody who can reenact
the 47 second Michael Jackson
Thriller dance, 20% off.
If you perform a shorter choreographed dance,
you can get 10% off.
This is actually genius, by the way.
Order a yoga for 30 consecutive days
and we'll name him a flavor after you.
I mean, this guy's awesome.
Yeah, so he's having a good time.
So then he opens up a bar
called Thomas Foolery,
short name, Tom Foolery.
And same things.
Instead, you know, every bar has a happy hour.
He created The Angry Hour,
where if you shout your order
of the drink to the bartender angrily,
you get a discount on your drink.
You know, they served like cookies and ice cream
at this thing and he's like,
this is a place where we're going to take you back
to being a kid, but with alcohol.
Oh my God.
And I was like, dude, I love this guy.
This guy is hilarious and weird
and all the best ways.
And I just went down this rabbit hole
because this guy kind of fascinates me.
There's nothing about this guy really on the internet.
Nobody does interviews with him.
People discovered this mystery ogato thing,
but there's not much out there about him.
How'd you find the bar thing?
There's only a few times.
That's like, you know, just digging in, like, what are some of the other crazy things that this guy does?
When they announced the boring company, it was a press conference with Elon and some guy.
The some guy is Steve Davis sitting next to him during the talk.
And what they did was to make their point.
I kind of love this marketing to make their point that like, why did you create the boring company?
And he was like, well, in like, whatever, 100 years, we haven't gotten any faster at,
drilling. We're still the same speed we were like 50, 75 years ago at digging these tunnels.
Nobody's done anything innovative. And to do when they did the press conference, it's them talking.
But around them is a circular track. And on that track, they put a little like a snail or a slug or
something. And it was just walking around the track super slowly to represent how slow this industry
is and how slow other people are drilling. And at the end of the two hour seminar, it was still
only halfway around the thing.
Oh my God.
And they're like, you know, that's the industry today and we're going to change it.
I love these little nuggets, these little sort of like marketing gimmicks that make a point
in the sort of simplest, most memeable viral way possible.
You know, I got to give Elon credit and this guy Steve, Steve credit for how they do that.
Where did he work before?
How do you get a job with Elon?
Well, just early on, you know, if you're twin master's degree in particle physics and
aerospace engineering, there's not that many places to go work.
you work at NASA or you work,
you know,
Boeing or you go work here,
right?
So he got a job there early on and just like,
started grinding like crazy.
And that's why,
like even now just sort of grinds like crazy,
sleeping in the office with his newborn child that was just like,
his wife just gave birth.
I have a rule.
We have a rule in our house in the,
in the par house where I will only sleep under another man's roof for one night.
And if it's my father,
if it's my father-in-law's house,
he gets two nights.
I don't like sleeping at another man.
man's home. It's the most emasculating thing on earth. I can't imagine moving my wife and newborn baby
into the Twitter office. Can you? To my boss's house. Yeah, my boss's house. Like, Eli's like,
hey, how's our wife doing? Like, you're like a billionaire. Yeah. You're not like an intern.
Yeah, you're like, I don't even like, I don't stay at another man's house. I don't even like
saying at my father's law's house, let alone staying at the Twitter HQ.
Can you imagine with a newborn, with a newborn or a baby?
I can't imagine that.
That's not for me, dog.
What's your phrase?
Coronerose and face tattoos?
Yeah.
It's not for me, but I'm glad freaks like you exist.
I've got it exists.
Sleeping at the office with my wife and baby, you can have that.
I'm happy you exist, but that ain't for me.
Is there any part of you that is envious of this guy?
Because I don't find any amount of envy other than I,
appreciate his sense of humor.
Oh, yeah.
I think this guy's great.
I think, do I want to be him?
No.
That's what I mean.
Do I think that this guy's probably, you know, this guy's interesting and seems like he
thinks differently and I think I could learn or be inspired by it?
Sure.
For sure.
For example, I went deep.
So one of the things he did while he was working at SpaceX and they moved him to D.C.,
in addition to the yogurt shop, he went to George Mason and got like a PhD.
and his thesis, I found his thesis paper and I read it, which was very hard.
I don't want to go into a detail on it.
How don't you find this?
When I'm Googling him, you can barely find anything.
It's the same like four photos.
Just a lot of grit and determination.
You're the Steve David.
You're the Steve Davis of researching Steve Davis.
Exactly.
I apply it to researching other great men more so than being one myself.
You slept on your couch for literally hours to find this.
it was literally
I ignored my
So I'm going to read you two things
So first the paper
The reason I really liked it is it's about
The debasement of the U.S. currency
I think he wrote this in
What year was this?
It's basically like very early
It's like kind of like early Bitcoin days
So let me just serve Steve Davis
Basement
So yeah, 2010
And his paper's
called the trend towards the debasement of the American currency.
And he talks in it about a lot of,
does that mean is at the bottom?
Does that mean devaluing?
Devaluing.
So,
so,
you know,
he talks about the history of like,
you know,
basically,
you know,
I don't have my notes in front of me now,
but like,
uh,
one of the things he talks about is,
you know,
um,
did you take notes on this basis just for yourself?
Yeah.
Um,
so I was like,
you know,
he's like,
one dollar or whatever,
you know,
one,
or,
or,
sorry,
one ounce of gold.
gold was worth this many dollars before.
And now that same ounce of gold requires whatever, like, you know, 100x more dollars.
Like basically, like, we used to be pegged to gold.
We got off the gold standard.
And look at how, look at how much the dollar is devalued relative to gold in that time.
And he's basically like, there's a trend towards the debasement of, of currency.
And he talks about, like, people think this is like a, you know, overtime slow, slow thing.
actually like 95% of the debasement has just happened in the last like 40,
50 years or something like that.
Like it has accelerated quickly and this is not just like, yeah,
this is not just like, you know, a slow thing.
All right, here we go.
So 98.3% has occurred from 1792 to the present time,
but even if you shorten that, like still 90% of it happened in a very short window of time.
He talks about why.
He talks about how.
He talks about like what that, why that's such a big problem.
And this is basically like a cryptocurrency like like like precursor.
He's not talking about Bitcoin in it, but this is like this is crypto is a solution to this
problem.
Right.
Like Bitcoin.
What if you had a currency that could not be debased exactly.
Which is like the meme, but it's also like the truth.
It's like these things are cliche because there's an element of truth.
And that's why they stick around in his acknowledgments in this paper.
So he says, oh, I want to I want to thank this professor.
this professor, I want to thank this person.
And at the end, he's like, I want to think my mom and dad.
He's like, finally, thanks to the unknown chef that makes great brownies at the small
enterprise hall cafeteria.
Hopefully, they will one day become a topping at Mr. Yogato or its successor, little yo hi.
Dude, this guy's been plotting.
This guy's just hilarious, man.
This guy is so funny to me.
And, yeah, there's like a hundred page paper if you want to go read.
The most impressive part is that you read this guy's thesis paper and you,
you've got as far as to the acknowledgments at the end.
No, no, acknowledgments at the beginning, my friend.
That's like the thank you at the beginning of a book.
So I didn't read the whole thing.
There's a 162 page thesis.
I read like 40 pages maybe.
That's so impressive.
Step by step, step by step,
step by step where the debasement started and how it happened.
And I'm like, oh, wow, this is fascinating.
Like, I never knew any of this.
Is that what we have to do to become a day at your PhD is to write a 140 page,
like original work on something?
That's amazing.
I didn't think, I didn't know that thesis were that long.
Not only do we not have a PhD.
We honestly don't even know what the hell of PhD is or what it takes to get one.
I used to tell people I had my PhD.
I thought I meant poor, hardworking, and driven.
Like, that was my joke.
I play a hate and degree.
I didn't realize that it's, you have to write a hundred plus page like report on this.
That's amazing.
I'm not that hungry and driven.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely not.
That sounds really challenging.
By the way, one of the great get-to know you questions in the business world, that's sort of dorky, but actually is a good one, which is, if you had to give an imprompt to 45-minute talk on a subject, what would you give it on?
Like, for you, it might be like copywriting or newsletters, right?
Like, something like that.
The history of denim.
What?
I'm not joking.
I could do it.
You already talking about denim.
I got you.
What would yours be?
There is no answer that is better than that answer.
I don't want to continue the podcast.
You weren't joking, which is the best part.
The things about Looms is in the pre-war...
The illusion of the Georgia.
Shutter Looms pre-1944 were particularly special, but, you know, I could talk all about it.
And then post-war, when Japan was rebuilding Hiroshima,
They needed just a ton of machinery, and that's what the shutterlooms of America went to Japan.
I mean, I can do it.
That's insane.
All right.
Your turn.
What's your topic?
Where do we go from here?
You want to do post pilot?
I like postpilot.
All right.
Let's talk about-
I invested in post-pilot.
Did you?
Yeah, me too.
I don't like, as you call it, talk in your own book too much.
I don't like talking about stuff that I'm involved in.
But since we're both involved about it and we're up front, we could talk about it.
Well, explain what it is first.
Yeah.
So let's talk about it.
So our connection to post-pilot.
is with the owner. His name is Drew. But he actually bought the company. And the reason he bought
the company was because he owned, he used to buy software company. So he bought Designandpublic.com.
He bought Carmeloup.com. And then he owned this thing called Auto Anything, which was an
auto parts store. And the thing about his whole like playbook is that he would buy these
e-com companies. And he would be like, well, your email list stinks. So we can like improve that.
We can do this. We can do that. And one of the things that he used to do at these companies that worked
really well was he would email or mail them, like snail mail them, like flyers and direct mail,
pamphlets on the company. However, it was really hard to do. It was like a painstaking process.
And so he bought this company called PostPilot. He bought it, I think he bought it for $60,000.
And what it does is if you're a econ brand, you just sign up to Post Pilot and they plug in,
I think to Shopify, to WooCommerce, to like a lot of the popular platforms. And they have a
done for you service, meaning they'll help you design a pamphlet that you could
send to not only your customers, but I think some of your email subscribers and people who haven't
already bought from you. And they can send direct mail in a click of a button. And so what he has
found, like this whole thesis is like, look, if I have an email list and some of these companies
that I bought, their email list was 100,000 people, but 90,000 people wouldn't even open the
email. 10,000 would. But how do I get the other 90,000 people to interact with me? Well, let's just
send them mail. And so they created a process that you can use someone's address that they've already
supply to you or I believe what they do is you can you can use someone's email and phone number
and help use other data sources to find out roughly where you live and they'll send mail to you
or that area or people who match your it's like a lookalike audience and they send you mail and they
could track if you eventually bought something through their mail so it's a very ROI positive
business a ROI positive marketing channel and I think he bought this company in 2018
he bought it for 60 grand it's making well over 60 grand a day now I think that
the public information that they said was they crossed 10 million a year in revenue like 18 months
ago, I think, and it's growing like a weed. And he sends amazing investor updates where they'll be
like a theme. So, for example, him and his co-partner, him and his partner sent an update where it was
him and his partner dressed like stepbrothers. And so like he does these really funny updates.
But the business is growing like a weed. It's growing crazy. And it's really fascinating. Is that
I'm not an e-com guy.
Is that what you,
how you use it?
So we use it.
And like, you know, if you advertise on Facebook or you advertise on Google and, you know,
the key metric for any e-commerce brand is your return on ad spend when it comes to marketing.
So you spend $100 on ads.
What's your return?
Are you going to get $100 back?
You're going to get $200 back and you get $50 back.
$50 would be a $1.5 return on ad spend.
$200 would be a $2.0 return on ad spend.
If you can be like getting a $2.0 return on ad spend at scale,
you're printing money, right?
You're putting in $100, you're getting $200 out every single day.
And that's, you know, obviously, if you can scale that up,
that's extremely, extremely lucrative.
If you use post-pilot, you can get like a 10x return on a headspent.
It's not the most scalable, but it is pretty ridiculous,
the type of return you get.
He said a lot of people are getting 5 to 10x.
He said, most retention campaigns come in between 5 and 10.
5 and 10.
So like he kills it.
I don't use it.
These are like retention, right?
So you're,
you know,
you're trying to get people to come back or you're trying to get a warm lead
who hasn't bought from you,
but they gave you their,
their info to try to convert.
So it's obviously different for a completely new customer versus
returning customer versus whatever.
But the blended Roaz for these is really,
really good.
So it's very effective, right?
You send a postcard, it's got a bunch of,
he's got photos on it, it's got an offer on it.
And the cool thing what they did was they basically took this,
they weren't the first,
do, you know, how do you send mail campaigns?
We'll send it for you.
What they did was they're treating it like it's clavio.
So most of people outside of e-commerce don't even know about clavio,
except for the fact that it just filed to go public.
So now a bunch of people are paying attention to this like $10 billion company.
That raised very little money.
Email marketing for, um, for e-commerce.
Actually, it didn't raise that very little money.
It raised 400 million.
It only burns on net $15 million, which just shows how capitally efficient.
That's what I mean. Yeah. Sorry.
So every e-com brand basically used.
is clavio at this point.
It is like the dominant player in the space.
There's some others like Send Lane or whatever.
But they basically said,
we're going to automate this.
So like,
we'll take all your customer data from Shopify
and we'll be like, cool.
When somebody first joins,
we'll make a welcome flow.
So automatically it'll drip out like one hour
after they sign up for emails,
they'll get this.
Three days later, they'll get this.
This is Clavio.
Clavio.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And now what Postpilot did was they took the same thing.
They were like, cool,
you want to send a one.
one-off blast, you can just go in our editor and do that.
You want to create automated flows that are just going to be triggered based on customer
behavior.
You can do that too.
So they basically did for physical mail, the same thing that Clavio did for digital mail,
which is very, very smart.
So yeah, anyways, I think they're doing really well.
And we'll see kind of how big.
I think the only question of this one is just how big does it get?
It's a high floor, unknown ceiling.
So it's like, this business is definitely going to work.
Now the question is, is it a,
Yeah, even when we first invested, it was like, this clear, this was going to work.
And it was a low, it was a low valuation compared to everything.
It was not low.
It was a reasonable valuation compared to everything else.
I think I have about 25 grand in the company.
Yeah, I did something similar.
It wasn't like, you know, massive, massive bet.
But, you know, the question is, is this going to be a $50 million business, $100 million business, a $500 million business, or a billion dollar business.
I have no idea on that one.
Like, we'll see.
But it's definitely like, it was like a clear, this isn't going to be a zero.
type of investment.
So I did this one personally not out of the fund because I was like, you don't know the
profile of this one.
I thought, so I have $25,000 of my own money into the company, I think.
In my head, when I was looking at it, I was like, I think the likely worst case scenario
is that this will sell for $70 or $80 million.
I was like, I think I could $5x, $4x my money.
I think in a unlikely but high outcome scenario, I was like many, many, many hundreds of
millions of dollars this could sell for. And I could for sure 100% 10x this, maybe more.
That was kind of my thinking with that investment. And 25,000 of my own money is, I usually do
small, small checks. That's a smaller checks. That's a good one for me. Right on. I have some of the
topics, but I think we should save them. One thing I want to do is I want to start doing episodes
that are business ideas only. So basically, if you take an episode of my first million, you kind of
don't know what you're going to get. There's a box. You might get a Billy of the
week story about crazy people who have done crazy things. You might get a business breakdown like
we did with OnlyFans. Just like, here's a business. Here's the numbers. Here's how it's doing.
Maybe it's a business like postpilot, like a business you never heard of that's doing really
well. We kind of expose you to that sort of things that are under the radar, not on your
radar. And then sometimes we do ideas and opportunities, things that we think people could do
that could be that could work and um monday i say i'm proposing this to you monday i think we should do
when we record monday we should do business ideas only i think uh i think we're good monday and i have
a good one which are people's favorites the business ideas and opportunities is definitely people's
favorites um so we'll do that but you know if we're going to do that people got to do something
for us right like i don't about you but if i kiss i like to get kissed back if i hug i like to get
hug back. And if I provide value, I like to get value back. Yes means yes.
And all we need from you to give value back, put your wallet away. It doesn't take money.
It's not free, though. It ain't free. It ain't free. It sure is L.A. ain't free. But your money's no good here.
What we do need is if you take that little finger of yours. Open up the podcast app. Click subscribe.
Go to My First Mill and click subscribe. The next thing you're going to do to YouTube. Where do they do that? Where do they do that? They do on Spotify.
Spotify, Apple Podcasts, whatever is your comfortable place.
I'm not trying to get you to go somewhere.
You're not comfortable, right?
Go where you're comfortable, but just make sure you click and subscribe.
Now go to YouTube.
YouTube, go open YouTube.
Type in My First Million, click Subscribe, hit the little bell so you get alerts.
We need both of those things from you.
We just need it.
And I don't ask for much, but I asked for this.
Don't let me down.
And if you want, leave a comment.
You could leave a comment.
We read all of them.
And we even, the funniest ones, we send to each other, particularly if they make fun of us.
Yeah, the most insulting ones definitely get the most attention.
And we can't resist.
We're not one of those, we're not those people who are like, no, I don't read the comments.
I don't read the haters.
Read all of them.
We read you.
Yeah.
Think about you.
And I recognize usernames.
You're living in our head.
Yes.
I've Googled some of these people.
I do a reverse Google image search and find out their LinkedIn.
in. And here, I'll actually leave, I'll leave like a hint. So for next Monday, you can see on here,
which company I'm talking about if you scroll down. So I was going to start this with a business
that used to exist that was way ahead of its time that I think should exist today. Now is the time.
Now is the time if you could possibly pull this off. Do you agree with me? Do you see what company
I'm talking about? I know what you're talking about. I agree with you. I can't wait to talk
about that one, and I have one that is similar to one of the best businesses in Andrew Wilkinson's
portfolio. And I think you could create a new version of that that would work really well. That's
the teaser. All right, Manic Monday, we'll call it. I don't know. We just go from ideas to ideas,
or where we just look at the comments and just stress out over like blemishes we have on our face.
But it's Manic Monday. So you don't have to pay money for this show, but it ain't for free.
and you know how to pay for it.
So all right, that's the pot.
