My First Million - #46 - Corporate Universities, Hotel Experiences & New Credit Cards with Lance Armstrong

Episode Date: February 15, 2020

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. Today Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) happened to drop by to talk investing and celebrity life. Join our FB group: facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Topics for today: Brandless.com shutting down (2:58), Buying dying businesses (7:53), Hybrid VC's (9:32), Launch of Ramp Capital (11:13), Corporate universities & online degrees (13:47), Lance Armstrong joins! (18:26), New beverage companies (21:07), Is investing boring? (22:47), Hotels offering more experiences (27:07), Are celebs on Cameo broke? (30:12) and Shaan's last minute meeting idea (33:35).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Is that what they do? That's what they do. All right, we're back. Before we get it, so you know how I said leave reviews? Yeah. I think we got two or three or 100 reviews off of that. Yeah, it was crazy. And we promised people with cool shit.

We got to like fulfill because people are like, here's my receipt. I left you guys a good review. I got about 100 messages of people with the reviews. I replied to all of them. Last night, I was sitting on my couch. So I'm just the asshole who didn't. Well, I see CD you on a few.

I replied to all of them with the special gift. I just let, I called them basically. That's great. Video voicemail. You know, at YC, they have this thing, which is like you'd rather have a thousand people love you than a million people just kind of like you. And I think that's the one thing that is now abundantly clear about this podcast. It's like, we have these goals of like, we're going to grow this thing big.

But we already did the hard part, which is you get a small number of people to love you where they're like, this is my routine. This is my favorite podcast. And I've been listening to a podcast for five years. Yeah. And so that's very, I don't know, feels good. Feels great. Yeah, I had, I got, I was shown Adam last night. I got, I don't know, I mean, at least a couple hundred, like DMs on my Twitter, people with the review. Exactly. And I said them all a video. So, review us and leave a video, or review us and let me know, because Sean hasn't been doing it. But at least if you let me know, you'll get something back. All right, you know what's my fear in all this, though? So I have a fear. That's crept up now. The fear is, I never want to be.

the smart person in the room. And so there's part of me of, I'm sitting in this red fucking throne and throwing out ideas that I'm admittedly saying are half-baked, you know, probably bad ideas, but they're interesting to me. I want to make sure that we're learning doing this. Like, I want to be learning stuff and sharing it. I don't want to just be sitting here saying, hey, I got answers. Let me give them to you.

And so my commitment to myself, really, more than anybody else, but I want to say it out loud because that commits me is, you know, as we do this, it's not about, oh, I have great ideas let me say them or we're brainstorming great ideas it's we're going to learn interesting stuff by talking interesting people and doing research on things and then we're going to share what we like we're going to share what's interesting to us so that's my fear is you never want to be the guru you want to be the student um and so that's kind of my my little mini rant i agree i'm not trying to be a guru and i'm certainly not because some of the dms we get people are like help me yeah help me you know i'm like no no no i don't know anything and me attaching my name to

your thing does nothing. Like, we've got to do the work. Yeah. And like, you know, I'll help you. But I hate, I'm not the answer. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not the answer. And we could preface this by saying most of the ideas we get, I just steal from other people. Yeah, for sure. Of course. All right. You want to get in, what do we want to talk about? You want to talk about, can I talk about something that's happening recently? Yeah, brandless. So is that what you want to talk about brandless? And I want to talk about these new credit cards that are popping up. Yep. All right. Pick one. Let's do it.

You go ahead. Brandless. All right. So brandless, people don't know. They went out of business. What they were trying to do was they were like, look, don't pay for the name brand. You should just have high quality products and they should just be brandless. And because we take away the name brand, we can lower the price. That was like the initial promise or the premise of the business. Awesome idea. Awesome idea. I'm glad you said that because a lot of people are shitting on them now because they like failed. But I still think fucking awesome idea. And actually, of course, ironically, brandless is a good brand.

and so I think that that was really cool. They raised a shit ton of money from SoftBank, like $200 million before they really achieved any product market fit. And that sort of like was the death note for the company because it was just the expectations when you raised $200 million is you're going to be a billion dollar plus company. And if you do that too early and you haven't actually proven out your model, you haven't figured it all out. Expectations crushed the business. So I didn't prepare because I just thought about this. But what's the biggest grocery store chain in America, you think? Albertsons, maybe Safeway? I don't know.

Okay, let's do Safeway. Can you look up? Try and find this. Just a headline. Trying to tell me what the revenue or how many sales, like, generic brands for grocery stores. Or like... The Kirkland brand or whatever. Look up how much revenue the Kirkland brand does. I mean, I bet you it's astronomical. And so actually, I mean, if you think about what brand list could become, it is the generic, the generic brand. A trusted Kirkland brand, yeah.

I think, and I think it's a great idea. Yeah, the problem was that they raised all that money Ralph the bat. I have a problem there was some incompetence with leadership. I don't actually know this. Yeah. 39 billion. Kirkland brand sells 39 billion dollars of products. 2018. Fuck. Henry, quick with the trigger. I like that.

What's that source? Business insider. What's the source? Do you think he's lying? You think he's making this up? Costco's Kirkland brand drives for a Wow, $38 billion in one year. So one thing I loved is I... Sale of Costco's Kirkland signature product a little pretty not in the office. And that's just Kirkland. Kirkland crazy. So I listen to her on a podcast, Tina

Sharkey, I think is her name. And she's like an internet OG. She'd been around with a bunch of companies, all of which I think have not done super great. But she went on this podcast. She said this thing that I liked, which was she was like, think back to when you were a child. And like, let's walk from room to room. You're in the laundry room. What brand are you going to see? You're going to see whatever. Tide. You're going to see whatever. Go to the pantry. What are you going to see fruit roll up and pop tarts and all this stuff. And then, And open up your fridge. What are you going to see?

And you see these brands. And actually, it's kind of like you've seen these stats where the S&P 500 turns over, like, I don't know, 20% of the S&P 500 turns over every decade. Basically the same thing happens with these household brands. These brands that seem like staples of your home. Right. A lot of them are like minute made. It's like, fuck minute made. You're out.

Like, you know, now, you know. Or tang. Yeah, Tang. You know, like, these brands just like, like, they are not. They can come and go. generationally, they don't all make it from one mom to the next mom. And I actually believe that premise. And she was like, look, the moms of this generation, they don't want to pay for this, like, the consumer package good brand in the same way. They want to know it's high quality ingredients,

sourced, you know, ethically. And, you know, they don't want to overpay. They want to be, you know, value conscious. So I liked a lot on the premise. I'm sad it didn't work. But somebody, I believe, I believe you should just go out today and pitch, I'm brandless without soft bank. and I think I would invest in a credible entrepreneur. I agree with you. I think I had three people reach out to me that said, hey, can you ask, can you introduce me to the people who are selling brand lists? I mean, I don't know them, but I just tweeted it and I got an intro.

And I introduced three different people who are wanting to buy the assets. And what are the assets? What are you getting? You get the name? Maybe some inventory, probably. Okay. The name. An email list.

And then unfortunately, probably a bunch of incompetent teams. I mean, no disrespect, but look, if they couldn't pull it off, by definition. Well, you'll need to restart for sure, right? You'll need a clean slate and you need to lower the burn. Yeah. I think it's cool. I would probably charge a, do they do membership? They did a subscription because they started off with everything was three bucks. I forgot to mention that. That was like a key selling point. Dude, I think that's awesome. Everything's three bucks. Three dollar store. And people say the CAQ was too high. It cost too much to acquire customers. That's probably true, but like Wish is doing it.

Yeah. You know, I don't know the economics, but this brings up an interesting half-baked idea. We got a DM from your friend about like businesses that are in the spot brandless is in where they're doing essentially a closed down slash fire sale. And do you want to share the idea that? Which one? Narenda shared this good idea this morning. Yeah, that was a great idea. Okay, so we actually should bring this guy in.

I have an investor in a good friend of mine. I cold emailed them and we became friends. He invested. He started a company called Web Shots. And I think he sold it for $80 million. And then he bought it back for pennies. and then sold it again for $20 or $30 million, and then now has bought it back again.

And he was like, you guys, or you know what something would be interesting is if you could be like a graveyard or an unwinding service. Undertaker, you go on. An undertaker where you can just buy these dying things. And that exists. It's a service to basically wind down your company.

You take a fee and you do the sort of fire sale. And I'm sure there's services out there like this, but somebody could specialize in tech companies, wind down both you have talent, you have hardware, you have assets that you're trying to fire sell off, and then you have all the normal business closing stuff you got to do so you don't get like taxes next year because you have to actually shut down your company officially. And nobody wants to do that. It's not fun.

And investors want to make sure that that process is done with no like funny business so that they like maximize the value. And this kind of reminds me of something that I wanted to bring up, which is I think that Now that private companies are staying private for long and not going public as much, what I think needs to happen is I think the venture capitalists, a lot of VC firms need to start buying companies and just need to own them for the cash flow versus wanting something to go public or get bought. And so what I think is going to happen is I think a lot of these VC firms are almost going

to turn into hedge funds or private equity funds. They're going to buy and operate a lot more than they are now. And that's related to that. So I don't think VCs will do it, but the sort of new age VCs that are going to be hybrids. So like Andresen Horwitz shifted their model where they're not a VC. They're now, I forgot what it's called, but like they wanted to be able to just own cryptocurrency. Just buy it and hold it and do other things. So they needed to reclassify.

And then this guy Chamath, he basically has a fund called Social Capital. It started off as a traditional VC fund. And then like he had to restart it for all kinds of reasons. But one of the things he does now is he has this thing called a SPAC. which is his special purpose vehicle for taking companies public. So you're a company, you don't want to go public. He's already public. And he just acquires a stake in your company, I believe, is how the mechanics works.

So they just did this with Virgin Galactic. And so it's like a fast track to being public and getting that liquidity without having to go and be your own independent listing. Yeah, I'm into that. I know Andrew Wilkinson's probably listening. He owns tiny capital. And they've been doing this. the companies that they own collectively, I think, do about $100 million in revenue. And he, I think, takes dividends and buys companies with the cash flow.

Right. And it's an awesome model. But a lot of these companies like brandless, there's no cash flow, right? It's going to be a cash sink. It's one of these go big or go to zero. And in this case, it went to zero. Yeah, but it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be.

But it's also, that is also valid, right? Like to do what like Jet tried to do, which is like, you know, they never made their core business work sold for $3 billion because they went for the plow money in today, try to get the scale, and then be the first to have scale doing what we do. I know, it's a model. No, I'm into it.

What's the other one you want to talk about? Credit cards? We can mention it just for a second, but Ramp. Ramp capital, right? Ramp, let's ramp something. It's based out of New York. It's Brex, but from New York, right? Yeah, I'm into it. It launched today.

Okay, so I went, my company, we do, let's say, eight figures a year in revenue. We have seven figures in cash. I have been using one big bank for a long time. And to get us to raise our credit card limit from $30,000 to $80,000 was a nightmare. Oh, my God. A nightmare. Yeah.

I had to go meet them in person two or three times. I had to show them my personal, Sam Pars tax returns. It was stupid. I signed up to Brex and I got three or $400,000, hundreds of thousands of dollars in like 12 hours. Awesome. And I told these guys and like, yeah, we can't compete with that. They basically admitted it. And I go, okay, well, this conversation's over. Thank you. So I really like this new business credit card space. And I'll explain how I think they're making money. But Ramp just launched. And what they're going to do, what they said they're going to do is they're going to analyze your

credit card spending and they'll tell you where repetitive purchases are coming through. And I actually mentioned this on the podcast three months ago. I was like, I'm telling you that businesses are wasting so much money by buying multiple subscriptions of things. And I think something amazing can be built by helping you save a little bit of money. Right. That's what this is. That's like a side feature they have. The main feature is the same like Brex, right?

Like it's like, here's a business credit card. Well, that's how they're differentiating. Brex's advertising says, we will get you better rewards. Right. And this is we'll save you money. Yeah. And I think it's cool. And I'm really bullish on those things.

And I think the way they work is whenever a customer, when I have my, credit card and I go and buy something, the merchant pays a 4% fee. And what Brex does is they go to MasterCard and they go, hey, you guys are getting a 4% fee for all this stuff. Give us a cut of that. And we'll create more credit card users. Right. And I think that's how they're making money, I'd imagine. I think so. I don't know for certain, but fintech companies are very interesting. I know a couple guys that are deep in fintech. We'll bring them on. A lot of people are not deep into that. And a lot of people like Wellfront and Betterment, a lot of people hate those, like buyers. I don't know how they're ever going to get bought.

I don't know who would buy them. We'll see. All right, what else we got up here? Let's see. I feel like, Sean, when we come for the last few times, I've been the one doing all the research, and I have a feeling that you're the one who's done all the research. I did some research this time.

So first, follow up on last time I was talking about corporate universities. I'm going to keep talking about anything, education, because I just love it. I had a lot of people reach out to me about that. Really? Okay, so I went back to my notes. I already had these notes, but I just wanted to mention a couple them. So Hamburger U, that's the McDonald's one.

19 full-time professors. I thought that was interesting. I don't know how you say this. Crotonville, that's from General Electric. So Kaiser just opened up their own med school, which I find really interesting, because that's exactly what I was talking about, where you want your own pipeline of doctors, so you create your own med school. Then some companies do it more like training, Apple University, Deloitte University. I think those are more like just a training

program, so you could be a better employee. That's different. Another one that I thought was interesting. So we talked about So, Zoho has their own university, and the graduates of that make up 15% of their workforce. No shit. Which is pretty insane. So 100, they have about 1,000. Maybe they have more than 1,000 people. I'm not sure exactly how many total that is.

The Google IT support certificate has 75,000 graduated students, which is pretty crazy. So I think this is going to be a big trend. So where's the opportunity to be a company that can create these education? So I think what you can do is, so there's these companies that are called, what the hell are they called? I know one is called To You or something like that. That's the name of one of their companies. So there's a set of companies that what they're doing is they say, hey, university, hey, Berkeley, you should have an online degree. And for years, universities were not so interested in this.

And then they saw how much money gets made by online degrees. And so they're like, okay, we'll take that money. And so they don't want to, you know, Berkeley doesn't want to have to sit there and build out an online degree portal that has like the technology, the service, acquire students. It's like Berkeley doesn't know how to do any of that shit, right? So there's a couple. There's three big companies that basically go to these universities and they say, hey, do you want to offer an online degree? We think it brings this much incremental revenue to your university. And we will run the whole thing for you so you don't have to lift a finger.

And here's the, but we want, you know, 30% of the tuition revenue. And right. So what happened is all the universities said yes. So there's a billion dollar company that's doing this that basically offers this to all the universities. if you go look all these, you know, traditional universities now have a online degree or certificate program that they offer and it's run by these other companies. I forgot the name of what these companies are called. There's like some generic term.

But I think you could be that for corporations. And so I think you could go to a corporation and say, hey, would you like to basically have your own, you know, developer boot camp or university for, you know, essentially we're going to pop out people who are like management consultant types. and it's good for your brand to get students early. And anytime you hire one of them, we take essentially a recruiter fee and we'll run the whole thing for you. And so I think that's one way you could take advantage of this trend. So VaynerMedia does this thing called 3Ds or I don't know what it's called, something like that. And it's 10 grand and you go to their office for a day and you learn how their business operates. So if you're an agency owner, you get to hang out with Gary Vaynerchuk for an hour.

But then they also have like the head of each department for an hour. and they come in and they explain how their companies are run. So Tucker, who's on here, he is thinking about to do the same thing as well, where users can pay a fee and they can come in and see how the company operates. So book in a box itself is a little bit different. Book in a box is you want to write a book. This is a book in a box. We're going to help you write it, promote it, do the cover work, all that stuff.

And they do this for, like, high profile business type of people who want to have their own book, right? And that business does good? It's a good business? Yeah, he bootstrapped it. They have a, he was telling me he was like, Amazon's going to buy us for so much money. That's what, like the joke that he has said. So who knows? And what they want to do, which is different, which is talking about, our idea is,

give you exposure inside these companies to the, like, leadership of these companies. Is that it? Yeah. Like take you on corporate tours, essentially. Yeah, because book in a box, what they're famous for is their culture is really good. Like their own company culture? Yeah. Interesting.

And so that's and we thought about doing it as well. I mean, we're not big enough that we have something to offer. But it's kind of a cool idea is where like I would do it for other companies. I would pay money to see like if Barstool did a thing where you could see how they're, how they operate their business. I would pay money and go. Right. And VaynerMedia, if you guys want to research this, if you want to like if you think that your company is special and people would pay money to do it,

to see how big Vayner's is. They put all of their events on Eventbrite and you could see which how many tickets they're selling per event. So you can actually reverse engineer this and see how much revenue it's bringing in. I like it. Hold on. We have a guest. Hey. How's it going?

We have a special guest. We're recorded right here. Here, come on here. How are you? I'm Sean. Hey, Sean. Nice to see you. So we have a special guest.

We're recording right here. So if you're listening to this, you don't have video. Lance Armstrong just walked in. As he does, you know, at certain times. So we have this podcast here. Yep. Every day? Three days a week at this point.

It feels like every day. Right. Our goal is to get to 100,000 daily listeners. Yep. Per episode. Per episode. I don't push a button and get to the 100,000 earballs every morning. Right.

And we're doing a good job. We're getting close. Good. I bet you are. You have a big following. We have a big following. And so the back story behind this podcast is, and now we're doing videos and we're chopping it up like you do with forward. The forward.

The forward? The forward and the move. So then there's the second one. The tour one's called The Move. What we've been doing, so Sean had a company that he just sold to Twitch, and I've got companies, and all we've been doing is scheming out loud. And for some reason, people love listening to it. It's been working.

And we have, like, everyone's messaging us saying they're starting little things that we've been riffing on. Good. And we just... In any podcast? Or you make the content don't listen. I'd listen to a few. You know what? I kind of get...

I'll occasionally listen to Rogan, if it's a guest that I'm interested. to then. The whole thing or the clips? No, he goes long, man. Three hours. I'm like, when I did it, he was like, I was like, so how long ago you think I'll be here? He's like, oh, three hours? I was like, what? I've never talked to anybody for three hours. Like, no, I'm not

talking for three hours. I'm not that interesting, but yeah, no, so I'll get into these crime ones. Me too. Me too. Like I got sucked into this root of evil. Yep. That was just super fucked up. I've been listening to that one.

Do you have the 12 hours? afterwards we have to Google and like follow up and be like okay I need to know even more no yeah you try not to and then what was the other one that was um oh it was just I do serial killers do you know that one no but they're all about serial killers right no there's one called serial killers yeah and it's awesome we crashed about we work kind of crime I listen to all those ones as well wow the Wondry and parkast yeah yeah and they just one of them one of those companies just sold to uh Spotify Spotify for a couple hundred million bucks so did the ringer the ringer Bill Simmons just keeps making money.

Yeah, apparently, I think he owned, I bet you he owned the majority of that company. Wow. So he probably walked away with a couple hundred million bucks. Good for him. We've got to get you off the LaCroix. Have you seen the Austin brand? This isn't mine.

I just leave them here. Have you seen the new brand at Austin? Waterloo? What's Waterloo? It's like a sparkling water, but it's better. So this is what the podcast is. I'm an investor, full disclosure. Okay, well, this is what the podcast is?

No, but they're crushing it. They're absolutely. So what is it? It's a, look, what is it? It's sparkling water, but it's... Our Austin office buys it. Yeah, I'm sure they do. I mean, it's all the rate.

Well, from the Austin office, their HQ is on East Caesar Chavez as well. So from where the hustle is, or at least where it's always not moved? We moved into a bike shop. Yeah, we're on E7 now. Okay, so you guys used to be on Caesar Chavez. You moved up, but so they're still on Caesar Chavez, which is where our studio is. But no, they're just, they're cool guys. They're killing it.

How much did they raise? They just did a new round. It's like 30. They raised, I want to say. I'm probably getting there wrong. But they did 50 million sales last year. They're going to do 100 this year. Holy shit.

No, they're knocking. Yeah, it's lighter, cleaner. The can has, they have all these different story. Yeah, they're the ones with the cool looking cans. It's like past, it's like a white. Well, they have a lot of flavors now. It's probably up to 10 or 12 flavors. But it's like a retro looking can.

It's a real sort of groovy looking. They brought in the guy that ran smart, pop and sold that off and so he's the CEO so they got real austin has a lot kavu ventures is the big covoo ventures out of austin that's the guy from the vodka company is that the tea so he clayton was was from deep eddy he did sweet leaf tea deep eddy um and then went and started kavu with two other guys he's now since left but um anyways he's still on the board at waterloo and high brew coffee which is a big advertiser of ours do you like besting it's kind of boring No, I love

What's wrong with it? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with this guy? He doesn't like making money? I like, I like, you know, there's probably, there's probably some charity right down the street where you could go give them all your dough from Twitch and give them all your time.

You know, investing sounds fun and the initial pitch is fun. Yeah. But once you give them to check, it gets very boring to me because, uh, you're so hands off. And I like, I like being a part of creating stuff. Dude, it's like being an uncle. You get all the fun stuff and not on any of the hard. work. That's actually a good announcement.

You might have convinced me. That's a good analogy. Being an uncle is the best. Yeah. I mean, we launched a fund and we almost, you know, probably 90% of the companies were super involved with. In what way? Well, either through the board or being on the board or just, they just need help. I mean, you know this.

I mean, young entrepreneurs, they might have a great idea and be smart people, but they're going to come across things. They just need help navigating and or connect. I meant in our part. I remember once I went to pitch an investor Founders fund. And Founders Fund is like a top fund or whatever and he offered us a term sheet. And I asked him, I said, you know, we have this other capital source right now, like self-funded by my business partner. We could just keep self-funding or we could take this.

I said, you tell me like, you know, how much value add do you guys really bring? I'm ready to hear like the sales pitch. And he goes, honestly, the worst companies need the most help and I can't save them. the best companies never need my help. And then there's everybody else in between. If I'm giving you this term sheet, I hope you're one of those that are the good companies that I really don't have any influence in.

I just get to take credit in the end. And I was like, I dig that honesty. That feels true to me. The best companies truly, like, I've only made a couple of investments, but Lambda School is probably the best one. It's done pretty well. And I'm like a needy girlfriend.

They're like one of the hot Silicon Valley companies, doing super well. And, you know, I'll text the founder, to be like, hey, what's up? You want to jam on ideas? You want me to help you with this problem? And he's like, dude, I'm just busy with all this fucking growth. I hate what people we have right now.

I hate when investors ask what I need. And I'm like, oh, this is what it feels like when you're winning, when you're really, really winning. And you just are too busy for any of this bullshit. Yeah, we won't tell Neil when he gets here. Well, what I do is I send monthly updates and they're very clear and succinct and I'm very transparent. And they're like, how can I help?

I'm like, you can't. Unless you have ideas and you can tell me how you can help. do it, but I don't, I can't think of anything. Yeah. Like, it's like, I don't know. How can you help? You know what I mean? It's like, what are you going to come in here and write emails for me and do work for me?

I mean, like, I don't know. They're like, do you need insurance to anyone? I'm like, who do you know? I don't know. Well, that's, I mean, I think the intro part is big in our world. And so, you know, in health and wellness, fitness, nutrition. I mean, it's, you know, I've been doing this for 30 years just as an athlete. So I've gotten to know everybody.

I mean, if we make an invest, these are just examples, a bit of we make an investment in a company like AMP human. they need, and it'd be very obvious that they'd be connected to Strava and vice versa, it would take them a month to get a call. I think you're different, though. Well, thank you, Sam. Well, that's your value. Well, that's our value.

Everyone knows that you know everyone. I mean, you're a celebrity. Like, you could get in touch with everyone. But, like, if, you know, I'm an investor, you're an investor, it's like, they don't know who I know. Yeah. And I probably don't know that many people who they can't just call email. Yeah.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, you need it to be unique. Is that what your angle is going to be? is that you have... There's that, and we call it, I mean, we refer to it as the flywheel just because now the one show, the second show, the move, is about 15 million downloads a year. And so, you know, once that started to really take off,

then I was getting all this interesting deal flow. I thought to myself, we should just start a fund and invest in some of these companies. And then what happens when we reintegrate or occasionally integrate some of our companies back into that audience, right? That core, sticky group. of 15 million people. That's what we bring to it. They'll get it. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, there is the connections. There is the flywheel.

There's the audience. And then we got a pretty kick-ass advisory board that we pull into, whether it's, you know, researching deal flow or or sitting on boards. So you were doing a thing. So we've talked about hotels out here for a little. I've been riffing on hotels. I'm really interested in hotels. Yep. Because they're growing, like the biggest hotels, the top 10, growing at a really high clip right now because young people are doing experiences more. You, George Hinkapi, has this thing called the Domestique. And you were doing a ride there where someone could pay a fee and hang out with you for two days. Well, we call it a camp. Yeah.

Camp, that's what I mean. It's probably four days of riding. Right. And something that's been interesting us, me and I've been bringing up, is hotels that offer more experiences. Yeah. And so it could be as small as being filled with Peloton bikes. Yeah. Which I have found myself going to more hotels just because they have a high-quality gym.

Are you, did you see that his hotel or the domestic, did it get increased bookings because of that? Because of that. The camp that we sold? Yeah. And well with the demand. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting. His hotel, it's only, I think, 12 or 13 rooms.

So it's pretty easy to fill up. So if we announce, and he and I are doing the same thing in Majorca in September. but at a separate hotel, but obviously. But when we announced that camp, it just kind of fills up. You know, it would, it'd be a different jam if it was a 200-room hotel. And that's his problem, right? He can either sell, he either has one room full or two rooms, or he could sell 200 rooms, right? 13 is a tough number.

I would love for that to happen. I wrote an email to you one time. I was like, you need to become the Jimmy Buffett of Weekend Warriors. Right. And you need to have a hotel where people can come and... Dude, I mean, Jimmy's, he's branded everything, whether it's blenders. He's doing nursing homes now. Jimmy Buffett is?

Yes. So, I mean, he's got, I mean, when I talk about Jimmy Buffett, I mean, if you think about a Jimmy Buffett fan, like a parrothead, right? So if it's the day of the show in Dallas, Texas, which I say that because that's my mom and stepdad go every time, from the minute they wake up, he's owning them, right? They're listening to Sirius XM. They're listening to his station, right? probably at some point pre-game they're drinking his beer the land shark beer then they they buy the ticket which is again his um they get to the show they're buying his swag they go back or they pre-game or tailgate out there they're using his margarita blender he's got everything

yeah and he has a then he's a hotel he's got the and then his clothes right i mean i think it's so why is lance armstrong not the jimmy buffet of weekend warriors hotel. Jimmy, I don't know if you paid attention in the last seven, you know, we're getting back there.

No, it could happen. I'm telling you. Yeah. Like, what, the world that I want to live at is like, I can,

like these UFC. Cannabis. He's all into cannabis. Is he? Yeah. These UFC guys are, the coral reifer. That's what it's called.

That's what it's called. The coral reefer. These UFC guys are kind of doing it where you could pay money and go and work out with them and live at their gym. Yeah. Layard Hamilton's doing it. You know, you know, You know, I did for a sec, and I did, no, dancers, no, I just, I don't know.

That's how you can... You can see it, or this is not worth the sort of... I just, I just didn't, I don't know, it didn't feel right. I think that's the thing, right? Like, do you want to, like, how much of yourself and your time do you want to spend on? Yeah. How much you think Jimmy Buffett spends on that shit? It's on your phone, right?

I wouldn't do cameo. That's how you could tell which celebrity is broke by how much their, how much their... See, that's probably the reason I stopped. You're like, oh, this guy is the kill shot. Wow. This guy's charging. Fucking right. Like Gilbert Godfroy is charging $50 for a two-minute slot.

This guy's broke. By the way, that's... That's an excuse. Nice people. I talk to them, you know, when I... They were great, but... No, but you... It's doing well, but...

Yeah, but like... It is more reality TV, YouTubers, Viner. It's like Uncle Joey from full house is really hurting. He's only charging 50 bucks for a three-minute spot. Like, he's broke. I feel this is horrible. Whereas Snoop is charging two grand. He's the one.

who's doing good. Snoop charges two grand on Cameo? No. Something like that, yeah. I got T.J. Lavin from... The awesome was the max. Or whatever, he's the max. I got T.J. Lavin to say hi to my wife for like $100.

It's a great gift. I don't even know who that is. He's like on the real world. He's the host of the challenge. It's stupid. Former BMX guy. But that's how you can tell who's broke is by what they charge on Cameo. The more they charge, the more broke they are?

If they charge a little bit of money, then they're really hurting. And I set mine high, and it was just... You know, it was to be barring it. Why would, why would anybody pay that? I would pay. Can I, I, I thought Neil and I were going to go have lunch. Oh, yeah. Well, let you eat in lunch with us or you're going to keep podcasting.

I'm going to wrap up here in a few minutes. Yeah, let's go. We got food here. We were just kidding. Whatever. That was fun. Yeah, well, we're making. Yeah, that was fun.

I don't know what's going to happen with this. Yeah, this podcast is going to be interesting. It's going to either be great or not great. Like one or the other. Right. Not going to be in the between. So. Okay.

Okay, so are you going to wrap up? Because if you want to wrap up, we can either do two minutes of more stuff. We can do two minutes. I don't know what we're doing. Can you pull up the sheet again? It's got like email on there. This was a crazy. So if it matters, I mean, this is what our office is like, we do get a lot of cool people coming by.

Yeah. The guy that Lance was with, the gentleman you maybe just saw on camera, his name is Neil Dempsey. He won't ever tell me this. I'm pretty sure Neil's a billionaire. And Neil's one of my investors. And Neil, we'll have a- I felt like a billionaire. I felt that Billy energy. We'll have him on the podcast sometime.

But basically, he was in his, he was trying companies and he kept failing. And up into his late 30s, early 40s, he was failing, failing, failing, failing. He got a job at a VC and met this guy starting a coffee shop, brought to the VC. Everyone laughed at him and said, no, we're not investing this stupid. So Neil invested his own personal money into it. And that company ended up being Starbucks. And so Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, says that Neil's one of the people he looks up to. and he's one of my investors.

They named the stadium, one of the stadiums at Washington in Washington. Is it Washington University or University of Washington? They named it. It's called Dempsey Stadium because he donated. Wow. So he's a big deal. That's cool. This is, that's legit.

Our office. That's a great story. Wow, how to follow that. Okay. I think that we should probably kind of wrap it up and hope that there is some value in here for people. Yeah, okay. Okay. Let me toss out one.

idea because we owe people ideas and let me toss out one good idea um which one okay i'm gonna do the i'm gonna do the i'm gonna do the one i started so i started off talking about okay these meetings are are meetings basically are like the the bread and butter of big companies and so i calculated we have on on every floor we have like i don't know 20 meeting rooms say and nine floors so let's call it 10 floors there's 200 meeting rooms and uh every hour let's assume i don't know 80 percent of it is occupied so i basically did the math and saw how many hours and then you think, oh, every meeting has on average five people in it. And so you start to realize how many people hours are spent in meetings. And then when you look at a meeting while it's happening, there's basically no technology. So the only technology

in a meeting is like video conferencing, typically. And I think that's kind of crazy. And so I actually believe that there's someone out there who could build a meeting, a meeting kit of some kind that makes meetings more effective, more efficient. And I'm not talking about. And I'm not talking about like transcribing although that's one possibility what I'm thinking about more is like the ability to give so I'm imagining like a physical device and you push it when you want to say something so this doesn't reward interruptors and loud voices because you sort of buzz in when you're ready to talk so it just has a little light next to your thing that says Sean sounds like you have something I would ended at the memo thing that alone is worth it well the memo doesn't require any like there's no

business there right like companies just adopt that principle you know I I think you're wrong, and here's why I think you're wrong, is Axios is coming out with this, and there was a new product called Recess that just launched, and all it is is a software, SaaS, it's a service, you pay money, and you get this internal emailing tool that helps you write internal emails to your company, and it tells you who read it and who didn't. So it's more concise, or what does it help? Yeah, because Axios is super concise, as is. Yeah, basically I think that there's a meeting tech that will sound really boring, but if you just think about how much of business happens in meetings, how many hours, how much salary is spent every

hour in these meetings. If you could make a 10% lift and how good the communication was or how well that meeting ran, that's a big, big lift. And I don't think anybody's really doing much interesting stuff there. I think people only really worry about like, how do you schedule the meeting and how do you conference into the meeting? There's a lot of money built. Running the meeting. And those are successful. And I think the meeting itself could use some improvement. Anyway, so trying to throw in an idea here, but this will be known as the Lance Armstrong podcast. Yeah, we'll actually get them in here real time. I hope that people will get value from this.

I think we should publish this, but we'll apologize that it's only I, maybe. And we have a ton of ideas to go through for tomorrow. You have a few on here that I'm like, what? You're curious about. Yeah, so we'll report tomorrow. All right. Peace out. Thank you.

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