My First Million - #52 - AI Teachers, Deskless Workforce & The Passion Economy with Zak Kukoff

Episode Date: March 1, 2020

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) talk ideas, trends and businesses. We're joined by Zak Kukoff (@ZCK), a 25 year old VC of $500M Emergence Capital (emcap.com) who's home runs have been Zoom, Salesforce, Veeva, Yammer and more. Topics for today: Introducing our guest Zak Kukoff (1:22), Equity vs Cash comp debate (3:40), Zak leaving school at 16 to raise money (6:49), Does investing in young people work? Should they be building businesses or partying? (11:12), Deskless workforce (17:49), The passion economy (23:43), How and when to build a sales team to accelerate growth (33:07), Buying engineering-led businesses and raising the prices (36:22), AI teachers in sales & language (38:35) & Optimizng your copy (46:39).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Yesterday we asked people to do a thing. To do a thing. We told them that we would send them a, like a gift. I don't know what we said. Oh, I know. They could ask any question they wanted to ask. And me and Sean would answer it. We'll do a Q&A.

And in exchange, they had to subscribe, unsubscribe and subscribe again. We're trying to game the podcast ranking system. I love it. We're willing to have our real listeners kind of click farm it, but we're not just paying somebody in the Philippines to do it. That's our line. I'm down to do it. No, I'll do that.

Okay, well, so far, that's been our line. We dropped the Stu episode today. People are liking that. Dude, Christians everywhere are hitting me up. The CEO of Prey reached out. I was like, hey, dude. Ray.com, Hollywood at Stu? Because we've been talking about religious stuff for like two or three.

It's been a theme across a couple episodes. And we went super deep on it. I don't know if you listen to the one with Stu. And so a bunch of people who are like church tech, a bunch of church tech entrepreneurs reached out. I had a rabbi email me. Really? about this podcast. I also had another guy email me saying I'm out of a job and Stu's going to replace me. And for the record, I'm great with that. I'm totally fine with that. Okay, so we have

a guest here. Yeah, what's up? Who are you? Hey, how's it going? My name is Zach Kukoff, an investor in Emergence Capital. We're an early stage enterprise SaaS fund. We're known for investing in Salesforce, Box, Yammer, Zoom, Viva, gusto, et cetera, et cetera. It's a pretty cool job to get to meet with some of the most interesting people in the world all the time. I get to be a dumbest guy in the room, although we'll see after this room at the end of the podcast how I'm feeling on that one. Yeah, you should be the smart guy here. So I ended out all my bad jokes at the end.

Just keep the good jokes in, get rid of the bad jokes. So that portfolio is pretty badass. You said Salesforce, Zoom, Yammer, blah, blah, blah. Are those like you guys get in that series D and you just get the logo? Or did you, like, actually invest before it was obvious? We predominantly invest in Series A. That's what we do about 85% Series A, 15% Series B. Zoom were the largest investor of Viva.

We were the only... What's Viva? Viva Systems was a pharmaceutical R&D. Still as a pharmaceutical R&D. That sounds huge. Yeah, it's a huge... I mean, think about for a second, like, you know, 10 years ago, right? Nobody was thinking about vertical SaaS as an investable category.

The conventional wisdom was, oh, SaaS is a small category, but sort of if you go horizontal across 30 different industries, maybe there's enough investable space there. And Viva was the first multi-billion dollar hits. in vertical SaaS. It was kind of Salesforce, but just for pharmaceutical companies. And they've done phenomenally well. We're the only institutional investor. We led their Series A, and they went straight from Series A to IPO. So a huge, huge apple there. Right. And before this, you worked at Flexport and then you had your own thing. Yeah, years and years ago, back in 2011, started a company called Trude Today in the

ed tech space, and we can talk all about that because that was a very fun experience. Ask us how we know each other. I asked them how they know each other. Let's hear the answer. How do you guys Don't know each other. We met downstairs. He's a funny guy on Twitter. And I was like, hey, funny guy of Twitter. Come on the podcast. I think the exact response was, all right, go.

Make me laugh. Make you dance. Dance for me. What do you mean he's funny? He's woody. Yeah, what do you mean? I'm funny. Like, okay, I'm going to find one of your tweets that's funny.

Like, do you make, like, wisecracks? Yeah, he's trying to make a joke. I would say I make a joke. As whose expense. My own mostly. Oh, that's cool. You know, so occasionally some others, too. We were talking before we started recording about the recent hot take on whether or not employers should offer equity.

That was pretty fertile ground. But there are a lot of the truth is Twitter is this weird engine where it rewards people for saying pretty dumb things all the time. And so I find it funny to comment on a lot of the things I think are not particularly well-reasoned that people sort of just tweet out without particularly well-known or influential people who you feel like should probably know better. and yet instead just constantly say dumb stuff online. You want to give an example? I think that equity things are pretty example. For those who may not have seen Jason Freed of Basecamp was tweeting about the fact that employers shouldn't offer employees equity in their company, right?

Which I think on the face of it, you think about tech as a wealth creation engine, if you're talking about beforehand a little bit too, the engine of wealth creation, it's not cash comp, it's equity, right? It's the ability to be 27, 28, 38, a relatively young person come into a startup and almost to win the lottery in a serious way. It doesn't mean that everybody who joins a tech company is going have a $5 million outcome at the end of the end of the end of it. So what did Jason say? Jason said people, employers shouldn't offer equity to employees. Why? So his take, if I'm Jason, and I like Jason, he's a good guy. I don't know for friends, but we know each other. He basically was like,

you know, what tech companies do is they sort of low ball you on the cash side, offer you this promise of equity, which most likely turns out to zero and you're left holding a losing lottery ticket. Better to just pay people, treat them well, give them great perks, give them good work-like balance. That's how you should compensate people. That's his take. The first part of that is right. The second part is wrong. The first part you're saying that people lowball on cash and offer equity instead.

Yeah, because they don't have money. I don't know that I, so. It's risk adjusted, I think, right? Here's what I saw. I saw a take and I forgot who said it, but I'm going to totally rip it off, which was, if you think about the number of companies hiring people and who kind of weight that by the equity offered, it's predominantly like later stage companies that are really making equity offers and really a lot of fang companies are making offers, right?

Yeah, but those aren't startups. Those aren't startups. So cut out like anything public. But even if you just wait private companies offering start like equity, there are many, many more jobs at these later stage companies where the equity has some defined value and it's unlikely to go to zero. It may not have exponential upside that's unbounded, but it's unlikely to go to zero. And the cash comp is pretty good or at least relative to what you would make

working for a non-tech company of the same size. Definitely in early stage. You can get low-balled on cash and make it up in equity. I think low balls are not a good Yeah, that's his terminology, but you just pay less. Yeah, maybe you're making a little bit less on cash. But if you're working on like a series D startup, you're probably making a pretty good cash comp base

and you have real upside in the equity portion too. I think that's the part is missing. His other piece was like, oh, because you have equity, hey, you got skin in the game, you should work your ass off for this and your skin in the game is like, whatever, 0.1% of the company. And he's saying, that's not actually having skin in the game. So that was his take.

He triggered everybody, which I think is his goal. goal with 90% of these, right? It's like to trigger Silicon Valley. And then therefore stand out as the contrast, the anti-silican Valley. That's the brand. And he plays it like a fiddle. It's awesome. So let's talk about this is related.

Your- Flexport. No, before that, he said he raised money. And he said it turned into nothing. But the Flexport one is actually the perfect example. You worked at Flexport, which was a, which was a hot startup. 200.

Okay. So you joined a 200. How did you think about your cash versus equity? What was the equation you did in your? head. I mean, I think it actually does help the backup a little bit to my startup first, then we can kind of come back to Flexport. So if you think about my startup, I started really early. It was 2011. I was 16. Oh. And there wasn't like, to be clear, like this was not, yeah, this was like I'm still fairly young.

I was really young then. I didn't know I didn't know to a large extent. And so I sort of stumbled into startups. You want to contrast for a minute. I think the Flexport approach was pretty well reasons versus my startup when literally it was a science fair project that I ended up raising some money and going to TechStars for, right? Like, I had no idea what was going on. I was frantically kind of paddling. Did you drop out? So I actually left my sophomore year of high school early.

I, like, took AP test and I was like, peace, I'm out of here. And I spent the, like, three months in Boulder, Colorado for TechStars. Back when TechStars was like two locations or three locations. Or there was like Boulder in Seattle. How old are you? I'm 25 now. So I was young, then I'm still pretty young now. I think so at least.

And so that was like very much not a well-considered. It wasn't like I was thinking about this move and I was like, oh, I've evaluated all the options in my opportunity space and I'm going just for the one that I think has the highest upside in learning or value or whatever. It was one of these situations where I fell into it and it became a really steep growth curve, but I couldn't have predicted that at the outset. Versus flex port where I was. How much did you raise for that one? We raised by 250K. So we didn't raise a ton of money. And it went out of business.

Yeah, I went out of business. Did you ever make revenue? We made some revenue and we had some, actually, some partnerships I went in. But the challenge was I was 16 and my two co-founders were 17. they're going to take you seriously it's like funded via allowance yeah it's my lemonade stance that happened

we've spun into this no I mean listen we've raised a little bit of money but the challenge was we actually had some investor interest and one of my co-founders had gotten into Stanford and his parents said to him if you start take time off from Stanford

to go to a startup that's it we're disowning you like we're cold shoulder froze Is he Asian? Yeah he got he was Asian I grew up in an immigrant house All my Asian friends Their parents are the same exact thing And you take time off to do a startup

That's it My folks were pretty supportive But at that point If you're losing one of the two co-founders Of a company Your fundraising prospects It's tough Pretty good to not great

And still by the way I was 17 At one at that point So it was still really Really young by relation That's kind of one end to the extreme We have these guys who work out of here Andy and Alice

And they have a company that makes I won't reveal up But it's a great company Yeah A great business to own And their parents were like like, when are you going to go back to being a consultant? They're both have Chinese parents, like from China.

And so I've learned all about the Asian culture this way. It's this like very, you know, my parents are both, I guess, second generation. Their parents were immigrants, right? And there's very, from Italy on one side and from Eastern Europe and Argentina on the other side. And so it's this very like traditional immigrant mentality, which is, which is, by the way, been the right, like, if you were to pick a choice for the vast majority of time in America, the better wealth creation tool was to go to college, go to grad school, become a white collar professional. That was the successful path for a long time. It's only recently that kind of

playing the startup lottery for lack of a better term has been the successful choice. And so for these, you know, my immigrant grandparents, their attitude was they're going to work hard. You know, my great-grandfather was a factory worker in Argentina, right? And he worked his ass off so that my mother and grandmother could be school teachers so that in their minds I could go get, you know, a Ph.D. or an MD or whatever become a professional. And clearly it's not necessarily happening. But that was like, that was the, the life plan for immigrant families in this country for generations was every generation, one more level of educational attainment, which correlates with one more level of professional success. It only recently has happened to

coupled. Totally. And then so, so you go to, you go to flexport. So you were saying, have that experience. Cool. You're now 1718. Yeah. So yeah, did the start up like 1718, Instead of go to college, went to NYU, a really special program there called Gallatin, where you basically make up your own major. And so the whole school is, it's like Bill DeBarre University is what I used to joke about. But it's really like you can do independent study, you can do work study, you can do classes, sort of like hodgepodge this program together. That's cool.

And then while I was there, I was helping run dorm room fund, which is First Town Capitals, college university fund. It's a, but a million dollar a year, actually it might be more than that. I'm not sure now. But a million dollar a year vehicle just for investing at pre-seed for, uh, student founders. Is this shit a good idea investing in these young-ass kids? How's Dormer Fund's been around for a while? How does it done? This is a fucking horrible idea of it. Well, we have the experiment ran. What, what happened?

The experiment ran. It was a pretty successful experiment. What came out of it? What was a I mean, there have been some, listen, there have been some pretty big hits and there have been some pretty big misses, you know, and they got a big hit, like fiscal note's done pretty well at a Dormon Fund, Bevy, the beverage company's done pretty well at Dormon Fund, Brooklyn. Wait, those guys were... Yeah, student founders, yeah. Brooklyn, the Linnens Company, and I'm sure I'm going to get probably railed on Twitter. after for not having come up with the whole portfolio, but I'm sure there are more that I can't think of. And on the mystic side, you have like Lily AI, which is the other, if you guys remember,

Lily drones. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They raised, uh, huge failure. Yeah, they raised like, I don't know, like 30 million. I can't remember the exact number. They raised a bunch and kind of flamed out. And that's the, the counter side, too, is you can have people who, and I remember

it when I was one, or an experienced founders who don't know how to manage your account. And what's the, what's the one out of Berkeley? There's another, uh, there's a Berkeley specific fund. Jeremy runs. Yeah, the house. Yeah, Jeremy's great. And the Peter Thiel thing. Dude, I'm down.

Like, if you're, like, old enough to be an adult and start something. But I also think that you should just be getting drunk and, like, hooking up with people. Yeah. Get drunk and kiss some people. That's our fellowship. The Sam and Sean Fellowship. I mean, live a little. Booze and kiss him.

At least that's what the dream was. The goal, I don't know. And then give it up, go keto and start intermittent fasting after that. That's the like plan. I'm at 5 a.m. like a little bit later, but stay up until 5 a.m. Yeah. Stay up until you're rolling to the next one. I mean, listen, there's like an important socialization element of college, which helps you learn emotional maturity and learn how to deal with people. And it's tough if you don't have that.

I don't know when you make it up. Certainly don't make it up by moving straight out here and working really hard early. Plus you don't make friends. Dude, you don't make friends after you graduate. Your friends are who you met in college. And then the rest are just, you just go to work and then you go home and you're like, wait, where do people make friends after that? no more friends. I'm like Uncle Rico.

Like I think of college, I'm like, oh, I would kill to go back. Yeah, give it all that. Yeah, for sure. Like, is Sean who produces the podcast? He's always like, oh, well, you know, he's like 20, 21. He's like, well, you have, you know, experience. You have capital. You have this network.

You have, I'm like, dude, I would give all of it up just to be right back where you are in your position right now. Like, I'll trade you if we can do some freaky Friday thing. I completely agree. We remember that young guy. Oh, you were there. We met a young guy at our meetup. and he was like 21 and he flew up. I'm like,

wow. So like if I was, if I was 18 and I lived and I went to NYU, I would be not be in the dorm. I would only do the dorm room fun if it helped me, me girls. I mean, if you're in Soho and you're 18,

that's the dream. NYU is a really fun college to go to and certainly, uh, had a really fun time there. But here's the flip side of it, right? Like I see the other side of this, which is it does feel today like they're a,

compounding effects, both of reputational and professionally, so working and exposing yourself to put some kind of real tangible ownership of work really early. And the earlier you can do that, whether it's like a startup or working for a large company in a significant role or building some reputation, even if it's just tweeting dumb jokes on Twitter, like that compounds over time. And if you wait five years, you can both have fun and build compounding professional returns at the same time. It's sort of the argument I would make here, right? You can do. Yeah, you can do both.

For sure. For sure, you can do both. Anyway, it's not as fun as just doing the fun. It's not as successful. It's just doing the success. But a lot of folks try to walk up. But you'll end up way ahead of the curve because most people are just having fun and not doing anything that builds their sort of like career foundation, ironically, when you're in college.

Okay. So you do all that stuff. And by the way, when you said emergence, you really emphasized the C at the end of it. Is it because people think it's emergent capital? I think people, there's a couple things. One, if people think it's emergent capital, people think it's like emergent. capital I've heard like five or six different issues with the name the other thing is our website is emcap.com that I when I first joined I'd say oh it's emcap and people were like oh the letter

m and then the you know C-A-P I probably yeah you need to rebrand I've not up to me but probably I probably had like six months of emails I didn't get because people were like oh this jerk gave me like a wrong email address of that party yeah it's bouncing I was screaming M-cap on the top of my lungs people were like oh yeah like Zach M-C-A-P right so if we're up to me to be a different URL. All right. So let's get to some of your ideas. Also, I promise you're a funny guy, and I found a tweet from you.

Oh, perfect. Okay, so Bird. Did you hear about this? Bird launched Bird pay? Yeah. Bird Scooters launched Bird pay. Zach comes in on Twitter, says, when you make scooters, but then you see four fintech companies get acquired in one week, you make this pivot.

You got to put a laugh track afterwards, so it sounds like the... Turns out tweets aren't that funny when you read them out later in public. The room is like dying. No one could hear it, but the room is dying when you read that. How big is the fund? Yeah, but I have a half a billion dollar fund. And what size checks do you, right? It's a good question.

We are less constrained by individual check size. And so just from our perspective. Just come on. Give me the answer. This is the answer. This is the real answer. I've been here about a year and a half now, and I've seen us do everything from like $2 million up to like $15 million.

Okay, there's my answer. So it's a really broad range. So when you're coming from this perspective, are you going to come from these ideas of you think that wealth creation is in raising money or in owning all of it? It's a tough. I don't know the dichotomy really made. a lot of sense from where I'm sitting.

But I'm also going to tap my own book. That is a false academy. I agree with you. I'm not up my own book, but whatever. I guess what I would say is this. Like most businesses probably shouldn't raise venture capital. Doesn't mean you shouldn't raise outside capital at all. But like when you raise venture capital, there's a very specific growth trajectory you are

signing up for. And the challenge is that can be ever, it's unbounded upside, right? Like there's a huge opportunity if you do that well. And if you don't do that well, it can go to zero really easily. So it's a high risk, high reward sort of life to be in. if you're trying to build, if you're thinking, like, I just want to optimize for, I don't know, like what number is I can retire, but I'm not going to buy a yacht, whatever number that means to you. Maybe it's $7 million, maybe it's $10 million, whatever.

Like, it's likelier to get that by building your own small business and growing sustainably and slowly, rather than having a venture-sized outcome, whether that's positive or negative. Yeah. I'm going to throw out some bullets. You sent me some bullet points beforehand. I just, I don't know what they are. I don't know what they mean yet. I just have the headline.

So deskless workforce. What is that? Yeah, so that's one area we think a lot about an emergence. And so think about, like, where do venture capitalists invest, right? Think about, like, what are the biases that VCs have? Most VCs invest in things that are pretty easy for them to find, like, things that are around them. So if I think about, like, every VC I know, where are their investments, it's, you know, it's SaaS tools for white collar workers. It's social, consumer social tools.

It's, like, CPG products that have, like, pretty subway ads in New York. That's kind of the areas. Coastal elite people. 100% like yuppies who like have disposable income right you get it really quickly you see it you know it's like oh I viscerally understand like people who listen to this shit right anybody else think yeah all you yuppies out there yeah yeah I'm gonna get dragged by chopper later for that one but yeah like anybody who's like an upper middle class yuppie is solely in the demographic adventure and you think about the fact that 80% of workers don't work behind a desk

every day and that doesn't mean they're all blue collar but it means they might be like a nurse they might be a doctor, might be a teacher at on desks, right? There's a huge segment, particularly in enterprise or in B2B SaaS, a huge segment of folks who fall into that category. And right now, 1% of venture funding goes to companies that sell to that category. Can you give me an example? Of a company that sells that category? No, what you're thinking about.

So, like, an example of a company that does it was like a rigup or something like that, or like whatever, earn in or something like that. Or like Upkeep is one of ours, too, just down in L.A., which is like facilities management. Like any company selling software to a bit, like we have another one in Trishby. So what's a, what's one that you think could exist? Okay. That doesn't.

Got it, got it, got it. I think there's a lot of innovation still in manufacturing itself. Like, if you think about the line of manufacturing, we have one bet that helps people learn how to do artisanal manufacturing better. So like, there's a lot of manufacturing that's just put slot A into portion B, and it's sort of wrote over and over again. There's a lot of manufacturing that's human-driven, where you actually have to know some skill to build the thing, right?

And so we have a bet in that. space. When you think about the rest of a warehouse or the rest of the factory, beyond just the line itself, optimizing how everyone moves, optimizing where you store things, optimizing the actual process and workflow, I think there's a huge opportunity there still. I was in the ed tech back in the day. I think there's a lot of opportunities still in ed tech. That's a huge one that's considered... Can you go back to this first one? Yeah, yeah. What's an example of a factory who would use this? So you can think about, okay, I know you guys have a lot of like fulfilled by Amazon guys in the show, right? You can think about any factory in like Shenzhen that's making a bunch of tools.

If they could have like a 5% more efficient factory, that's probably kind of creating some real gross margin if that doesn't exist before, it probably gives them some leverage on labor costs they hadn't had before. So any factory that's making commodities probably wants to optimize their ability to work quicker because the pricing is an area where they can't really increase the... Who's the leader in the space now? A lot of this is Bluefield. A lot of this is like there's not anybody making software for it.

Today it's like I have a factory manager who might have a clipboard, who walks around and says like, okay, step one is do this thing. Step two is do that thing. And they're on foot saying, hey, make sure you're doing this at this time, teaching a process. And so the question is, in the same way to like Salesforce for sales managers, created optimization or workflow for those folks to understand the actual levers of their business. Is there like a similar opportunity in manufacturing or you can kind of sit at this higher level and do that as well?

Which industry would you start at? This is interesting to me. That's a good question. So while you think about that first, So there's one, which is what he's talking about, which is a software tool to manage the actual work that's being done. Then there's all the like sort of robotics and automation that's going into these factories to improve them. So like, for example, I was looking at a video of this printing factory. So basically they print, you know, if you're wearing, you know, none of us in this room are wearing a pattern.

But like, okay, Adam's wearing a striped shirt. So that fabric has to get printed. And basically it gets printed on these like, you know, football field yards of fabric. and then they literally have a guy and the guy's job, there's a machine that unspools it really fast and he's just looking for defects.

So he's just staring at it, not blinking, and he's just looking. Where was this? Does all the stripes look right? In China? And so I was just thinking like, this is something that a camera

with computer vision does way better that a human who's got to stand there and be like, is there any defect or is there a defect? It's like QA, right? Quality control. You know, this guy is literally

just staring at this thing as it unspools the whole role and then he's like, yep, look good. Or if he sees something You have to hit the button, rewind the spool, it would be like, oh, no, it was fine. Sorry, continue. You see that shit all the time.

Have you seen on the, remember, did you ever watch that TV show how it's made? Yeah. I love that show. And you see it all the time, like, where they're making candy and shit and Hershey's. Right. They're just like staring at it. You know the Twitter account machine picks? No.

It's the same thing. It's how it's made, just on Twitter. It's phenomenal. Machine picks. And see, like, thousands of really cool examples of machines you never thought about. So I think that's, like, one opportunity. The other thing is if you particularly think about like really high margin goods, I think about an iPhone for a minute, right?

Like, iPhone is a big margin patch to it. Every component Apple has like some presumably upsell they're paying that manufacturer for. That's the kind of situation where that may be humans who still do a lot of that work because it's too much finesse for a robot to do effectively. It's not the stare at this like thing unblinking for a couple of hours until your eyes give out. Right. Peel this, put it on the backside, put it back together and push it forward. It's delicate work in a lot of ways.

And so people do that and it's expensive to have people. People are hard. And by the way, people get tired. They're not optimal. There's a lot of challenges if you have a company that's built on human labor. And so if you can help people be better at their jobs, A, you can ideally uplevel them to more intellectual roles,

but also B, you can increase the output of the whole factory entirely. So you're not thinking about a collection of individuals, but you for the first time can look at an entire system at once. So that distinction makes sense. Right. What else? What else we got? Can we scroll down a little bit?

So your stuff's at the top right now. So passion economy. Yeah, I think there's, oh yeah, this is kind of something I'm thinking a lot about. And this is a term that Andreessen. Dude, you're speaking in my language. These are all boring-ass topics. I love boring. Listen, maybe this is not like five listeners, but I love boring stuff.

No, people like that. We talk about that a lot. That's my go. I mean, listen, emergence, everything we do is boring. It makes way more money. It's, I think so. Yeah, these are things that do really well. And by the way, boring is good.

The more, like, sexy, big press and tech crunch stuff you get, the more competition you have for that slice of your market. If you are boring under the radar, like Viva, great example, right? No one knows who they are. Multi-billion dollar company that only raised one round of funding in a huge, like, big whale hunting market. Yeah, that's magic. That's the kind of like, that's the dream scenario, because then you can really walk that tightrope of raising money and still owning a ton of your business.

How much did they raise? We put in seven, I don't know, I think they only in total raised like 10, and then went public on that, which is, like, obscenely capital efficient for it. That's crazy. even heard of this. What's their market cap? I want to say it's like 20 bill now. What the fuck?

I feel like I know of all the cool shit. Awesome. Yeah. Sam's upset at himself. How can I let this get by me? What do they make? Sorry, say again. What do they make?

In like revenue or in the products. Yeah. It's think about like everything Salesforce is for sales managers. It's a CRM or CRM-esque tool just for pharmaceutical companies. Like for research for clinical trials, for managing new drug development pipelines. Like all this kind of wild. donkey, gorpi stuff that no one from the outside looks at, that is hugely lucrative. Did the founders work, and they had to have worked in that industry?

Yeah, it's a good question. I believe, actually should know stuff off my head, but I believe one was from the industry, and I believe one maybe even came from Salesforce or had some Salesforce background beforehand, too. Because how do you even find that that's a problem that you have to make? I mean, it's always helpful when you can come from the industry you're tackling, because not only do you know, like, where all the boring, gorpi stuff that's not public visible is, you also know which those are good business ideas. There's a lot of boring stuff that It's impossible to go after.

We're not possible unless you have millions of dollars to burn, which is less attractive. So this idea of like passion economy, think about for a minute, all right, there's like a long tale of people who are building really small businesses. Some cases like podcasters. Podcasters are a great example of that, right? Podcasters, newsletter writers are kind of classic examples. Anybody who's on Patreon, like there's a huge long tail of these folks. Streamers, YouTubers, anybody on Twitch, right? Writers.

Family fans, right? There's literally a huge tale of these people. And today, there's a lot of work that there's some software that's starting to be developed to make their jobs easier. So I don't know what you guys are used to distribute this podcast, but like substack for newsletters is kind of a classic example of this, right? Patreon for creatives in general. I think that's a horrible business. I like that you call it Patreon as well. Yeah, I call it Patriots.

It's nice. It's not. It's nice. Patreon. Like a patron. Like a patron. You know, I feel like that makes a lot of sense. That's right.

I don't even realize. Welcome to the passion economy. Yeah, the passion economy is so passionate. That's the password to get in. Patreon. But like, it's interesting because some of them are not good businesses. Some of them, the whole business is just collecting payments and having a huge margin on top, which is a really great. GoFundMe is a great business.

Because the whole thing is cash comes in, you take your margin on top and you distribute cash app. So it's a really easy business to run. Anyway, you think about, okay, there's a long tail of these folks. And there's a long, the people who have been doing the long tail to date have been focused mostly on creatives. Like a lot of people who produce or create new products or content, I think there's a similar long tail emerging in the world of professional services. So think about anybody who's like a one or two-man consultant shop, anybody who's like a tiny little law

firm kind of middle of nowhere, anybody's like a two or three-person accounting firm, and think about the fact they're probably very good at running their specific business. They're probably great at being a local doctor, a local accountant, a local lawyer, but they're not great at all the stuff around running the business. Like collecting invoices on time. Having docs and setting out documents and secure away. Generating documents you use 30 times a month. And I think there's an opportunity to build a pretty low capital efficient business that just rolls up like five or six features around these and then picks our vertical and just sells aggressively into this SMD long tail with them. What features? Probably like someone was I saying, like invoicing is a kind of classic one

where you just collect cash flow, build margins and send cash flow back out. Document generations are really good ones. So if you're an attorney and every, you know, week you have a new client who comes in and they have to submit the same, like, five pieces of information, maybe some of them use docuSign, but docusign is expensive. If you're like a two-manage, you know, a law firm in, like, Idaho, you're not going to spend a thousand bucks a month in a docu-sign subscription so you can have your four clients a month throughout a form, right? And so it's the generation of the form, it's filling it in. Again, these are like boring features. This is not a tech problem that needs to be solved, but there's a massive distribution opportunity in the long field.

Here, let me, can I chab in on this? Yeah, go for it. Okay, so I'm a co-owner in a small software company that makes 50, 60, 70,000 a thousand dollars a month, and it's a checklist software. We try, so here's what we did. Yeah. Checklist doesn't like to-do list. Yeah, to do list. And what we did was, I bought it, and we tripled prices, and that's all we did.

And we just made a lot more money. I mean, you know the guys that's tiny? He's my friend. Yeah. Okay, so I'm telling you things you already know. Like, that's a great model. Yeah, that's what we did. We bought a company for single digit, hundreds of thousands of dollars, triple or quadruple the prices.

I mean, we're talking like $2.99 a month to like $8.99 a month. No big deal. Then what we tried to do was we learn that selling things that are $8 a month is really hard. Yeah. And so what we did was we looked at who uses us and we went to, we've paid hard in what way? What do you mean by that? It costs, it's really hard to acquire customers. So you can't spend on, if you're acquiring someone for a $5 a month product, that means it's $60 a year.

And it's really hard to spend money on advertising to get a customer probably for $60 a year. You could blog and build a brand. But that's a little bit harder for guys like me who are just buying companies that only make money and not like making it, making it like a personality-driven thing. And by the way, it's hard too because you can't invest in customer success then too. So every time you churn somebody, there's like there's not a mechanism in place. you correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see often mechanisms in place that capture those folks in a profitable way if you're selling $10 a month software. Yeah, it only works if like you're a buffer and you could like pick your face behind it and you'd like, oh, this is, I buy it because this guy,

I call this guy on Twitter for us, we were just buying them. It was just a cash cap. It still is, a miniature. And so what we did was we looked at which industries use it the most. And for some reason, this one company that was a dentist had a lot of their customers on it. And so our vision was let's talk to them and build something for them. Were they, any job that has a to-do list, let's build something just for them and see if we can do like a dentist's to-do list. Yeah. And we did it. And what we found was it was really hard to go after these small businesses because even then when we raised prices, it was prohibitively expensive to go after these small to medium-sized customers.

It was very expensive and very hard. And so my opinion with that is that, an idea like that that goes after these people only makes sense. sense if you're going to, if you have an interesting way to get your product into their hands. That's exactly right. This is not a tech problem. It's a distribution problem. I think you said it really well. And people typically don't understand that.

They say, well, I've created this interesting thing. Therefore, everyone will buy it. They're actually, unfortunately wrong. I think that what I always say is if you have amazing distribution in a shit product, you're going to win. If you have amazing distribution and amazing product, you're going to dominate. Yeah. And so it's kind of like Kylie Cargen. What the fuck?

Kylie Cargenner. Charlie Jenner What's that girl's name? Kylie Jenner Dude, it doesn't matter what the fuck she sells. It's going to crush it. She has a huge distribution channel she owns

because this relationship with millions and millions of people and by the way that's what I think about my startup back in 2011 we fell into the trap you just said a second ago we built a really great product

they spent so much time and effort on product and we had no idea how to distribute it to this long tale of like schools and teachers are trying to sell it to

right? It's like the hardest people to sell it Oh impossible because a person buys is not the person who pays. It goes like a crazy cash crunch every month where it's like oh, even though I

have committed ARR of you know, 100 grand, whatever it is, 100K, I in fact have real ARR of zero because it goes through like provisioning goes through the accounting cycle like in the district is you don't get the money for six months after they actually sign the contract. Right. And die in that six months

by the life. Yeah. Generically this is like what they call the SMB problem. Right. And some people crack it and when you do crack it. And when you do crack it. It works. Like even in education, I really want to have the guys from mystery science on because I feel like they actually

have cracked this problem or more than anybody else I've seen in that space where they said, you know, 50% of elementary schools use mystery science. And there's actually, that's an amazing penetration. There's a calculator that you can use to do this, but you can, my opinion,

I'm going to launch another software, I'm going to launch a software product one day. What I'm going to do is make sure, uh, that it costs enough money that I could hire a sales team. Yeah. And I think that number is, the minimum would probably be five or ten grand a month. Or sorry, a year. There's this trend right now where it's very sexy and fun to say we're bottoms up adoption and we're growing bottoms up. No, fuck that.

Well, listen, look at, I'll go through the S-1s of all these major tech companies that have gone public in the last two years. Look at Zoom, which we're going to look at page your duty, look at Slack. And look at where their revenue comes from. I think it's like Slack, like five of their, or maybe it's another one, but in many cases, five of their customers, have like 30% of their revenue. It's super, super concentrated in just a few huge customers. And so the bottoms up motion can, it actually can work in early days, and it works for a little bit.

But when you get big enough that you have a billion dollar outcome, you need big whales to actually pay for the whole company. So at our company, I didn't want to, I was like that. I was like, I'm not going to hire a sales team. And we did. And it was like putting a match on fuel. Yeah, 100%. And normally with BDB, you said something like 5 to 10K per year.

Yeah. That's too low because if you're going to actually have a sales force, right? Like a fully loaded salesperson, they're like, you know, 200 grand or whatever. Well, I guess what I mean is there's actually a stat that shows like the companies that achieve 100 million ARR, there's like a dead zone. So you either need loads and loads and loads of customers at a really affordable rate of like $100 a month or you have to start minimum 5Gs a year. Right. but in order to have a sales team, I think that for software,

what's the sales quote of $500,000 a year? There's a, so David Sacks, who was the founder of Yammer, put out a beautiful post, or maybe it's a YouTube video, that says how to build your sales team. He's like,

look, I didn't know this when I got into it. We started Yammer. We thought we were going to get this bottoms up adoption, then we needed to make money. They did actually get bottoms up adoption, but they didn't make bottoms up revenue. And so they got the product, in and then they go to the CIA and they're like, hey, you know, 20% of your employees are using this.

Don't you want control over this? And so, uh, then he just walks through. He's like, look, this thing, you don't need to be, um, a genius. Like, just follow the playbook. Don't try to deviate an invent your own sales system. Like, like, and so he was, so he walks through it. I don't remember all the top of my head, but he walks through it on YouTube. He's like, look, uh, here's how you calculate your comp for your salespeople. Here's how you calculate your quotas. There's these two options. You're either going to go with this path or this path. Depends on the price of your product. And here's how you need to think about it. here's when you hire, you know, sort of a sales manager and here's what you, here's how

you compensate them. He literally just lays it out and it's like, oh, this is, if you're somebody who's in that, who's, you know, building your sales organization and you kind of don't know what you're doing, just Google David Sachs, YouTube, how to build your sales team or whatever, and you'll find this YouTube video with like 100 views, but it's great. I think Sachs is the best. He's super smart on this. He's obviously done it a bunch of times. I think it's interesting, you know, Sam, what you said earlier, like when we come into companies, one of the first things we help them do is just triple prices. And that's the same if it's a 5K ARR, or a 5K ACV, same thing if it's a...

Doesn't matter what it is, yeah. You almost always can price things significantly higher than you think you can. And generally, like the companies we work with, you want to see them at a minimum, like, 25K ACB. That's like that. If you're having, if you have 25K accounts, like that's $25,000 accounts rather, that's where a year. Yeah, a year.

That's where you start to see some real leverage from running out of sales team. If you're a little under that, it can be a little bit tough to break even on the table. Here's a little trick to make money. I don't think it's the easiest way, but this is a small trick. Find a business, and you could buy these businesses for cheap. Find a business that's engineering led. So someone who made the software, built it, okay? And you could buy these companies for as cheap as $10,000 or all the way to billion.

I mean, it doesn't matter. But you could buy, there's all these quite like brokerage who sponsored this. It is one of them. You could find these widgets or whatever. You can buy them for one-time's revenue. And if it's too expensive for you, you can put a small business loan. put only 10% down so you can buy a $100,000 business that for 10 grand. And if it's engineering led, the likelihood that the pricing is wrong is high. Yeah. So you literally just need to buy a product,

okay, and just change the number on. Command app. Yeah. Like, command app dollars. Boom. You're a coder now. Right. Okay. And put a zero. Like, so if it's like $1 a month, if it's $10 a month, make it $100 a month. And if that's all you did, people will, bitching complain to you. Customers might bitching complain to you. The numbers will likely stay the same except for the revenue will change. Yeah. That is like, most people are shocked by that. No, it's, it is always surprising the price elasticity of most customers. Like, if you have a good product, not even a great product, a good one, an average product. Most people will pay so much more than you think. But engineers in particular are always guilty of this.

And by the way, that's the same thing to you. If you are even a decent marketer buying one of these businesses is a huge opportunity for you. Because A, you can just jack up prices. You're just so aptly pointed out. And B, if you can even get like 1% more efficient than acquiring customers between that and higher prices, you basically built yourself a substantial flywheel that can really be a multi-million dollar business.

One of the best Twitter guys to follow if you want enterprise stuff is this guy, Chathen from benchmark. Yeah, yeah, he's great. Just follow this guy. It's C-H-E-T-A-N and then the letter P. So Chathen P. We're texting that we're plugging him on the show and I'll listen to it. Yeah, he's great.

Great. He's a good guy, too. Literally, he'll just summarize the whole business and a tweet, and you'll learn a lot about how these enterprise businesses are structured just from following this guy on Twitter. And so that's good. What are some of the sort of different companies you wanted to call out? So what's guru? Yeah, so guru is a company that we're, I'll talk my own book. We're investors. I have two here I listed.

I like that phrase. Talk my own book. I got to start using that. I love, listen, any opportunity I can, 25. Talking to some fucking 25. Okay, so. No, no, it's all good. Here's what I'll say.

So, Guru is, we have this broader idea that there's a whole bunch of AI companies that exist, people who are investing in. And a lot of the AI businesses that are out there are centered around replacing the ability of people to do their job. We think there's money in that. There's a lot of money in that. We think there's a bigger opportunity much larger in not replacing people, but augmenting them to do their job better. So, for example, I think for a minute, if you have a tool that could write sales emails for you, right? Maybe it does a pretty good job. Maybe it's not perfect, but AI is a long way to go before we get to true AI.

And so it probably is like doing the job of your fourth or fifth best SDR, not your number one salesperson, but your middle of the tier salesperson. We think the promise of these AI-enabled businesses is they can learn what is the best salesperson in your business do that's different from the 30th or 40th best salesperson in your business. And then you help teach those 30 or 40th ranked people to act more like the top one. How did you do that? Well, here's the idea. You can listen to almost everything is quantifiable. So you can listen to a conversation. I'm talking to you and you're a prospect.

Now I'm trying to get you to buy my product. Maybe you have an objection that you bring up. You say, oh, it's too expensive. Or, oh, we use this thing as an integrate with, whatever. And I flub it. I have no idea how to handle an objection. And the call goes really poorly and you're like, I'm never going to open this company at the end.

We're done. The idea of a lot of these businesses is you can hear, what does the top-ranked salesperson do? that like how do they handle objection really well and no sales coach or sales manager can sit in

every sales call in your business and actually understand the way that you respond to every objection but an AI tool can sit in on every call in your business.

So what's the, so that's the broad concept guru? What's the URL? Yeah, guru it's not get guru no it is get guru oh it is get guru

but I was describing as like the thesis broadly well gurus they should use that to teach dudes how to meet girls I mean Sam's really in this like

You know College in days You know My thing with business is like The best products Either help people get laid Helps them make money Or that's probably it

Actually Made paid laid That's the What is it? Made paid or laid What's made? Famous So fame

Money Or get late There Okay Okay There's trades for And so when I hear Get Guru

I think okay cool You're gonna teach Companies How to get more sales Love it But like I just think that all this is like an early stage thing and it's like on the cutting edge I just think that

the set the sex industry is at the forefront of everything interesting yeah so the internet listen to you have sex what and listen to see you have sex and then he tells you some tips maybe you want to less a little longer let's cut that part like like video streaming uh DVD yeah yeah it was all porn I think that Oculus if they let the porn guys get a hold of it it's gonna make it way better that's what I would do with this if I was yeah I mean no it's true listen, you can think about a lot of consumer applications. Obviously, the sex industry is a big one. The other one's like the example I always think about is you want to learn to play guitar, right?

You're kind of limited because, A, you're going to learn from whoever the local guitarists who can teach you is, and maybe they're not a very good teacher, or maybe there's frankly not a very good guitar player. And so at some point you're going to hit a wall where you can't learn anything more from them. But if instead you could learn from an AI that's been trained on all the best guitar performances in history and all the best teachers in the world, wouldn't you learn better and faster how to be a good? good guitarist, ideally. By the way, who knows? So here's an idea that's like that that is working.

Elsa AI, are you familiar? Yeah, yeah. Elsa? So correct me if I'm wrong, because I only know the surface level. Elsa is basically for English language learning. So there's a lot of people, you know, especially in Asia, who really desperately want to learn English. And so what Elsa is, they don't want to just learn English to read it.

They want to speak it. Right. Like, if I want to learn English, it's because I want to speak English. And so what they do is they have you, you speak into the mic. of your phone and it basically corrects your pronunciation. So it's like a really smart insight. Like my mom's, you know, her insecurity with her English when she was, you know, first moving to America was not do I know the vocabulary, but does it sound right?

Do I? This is awesome. And so these guys were making, you know, a while back. Yeah. So they were, they had crazy stats. So I think, I think Vietnam was their biggest market at the time. They were doing like, I forgot what it was. Like, I think like six million a year already annual from their just.

just like in-app subscriptions of people paying for their pronunciation coach, their AI pronunciation coach. And I was like, when I saw that, I was like, this is a genius idea because there's, I don't know the exact number, but there's in the hundreds of millions of people who are trying to learn English at any given time. And this is a sort of novel take that I think resonates because pronunciation is so important and so hard to come by. Yeah, that's a really good example.

And so you could imagine like basically infinite applications of the same type of tech. And Guru was one of them. How do you build this guru? If I'm building this, if I want to start this from scratch, what do I have to do? Yeah, it's a hard business to build because what you need is a data set to learn from. And what you need is not just the data set to learn from that's static, but one that continually evolves over time. So an example of guru, they do kind of the sales example I was talked through. That's similar work, but for customer success.

So you could think about it sits and your knowledge base becomes your knowledge base. And as your customer success or customer support agents are responding to inquiries, it actually, knows what they need to say back and the content from your knowledge base they need to reference and then brings it up to them in real time. So they're not sending five minutes searching for an article in Jira that was written 10 years ago that may or may not describe the actual scenario they're dealing with it. So they'll like read your email? It sits alongside like usually it's yeah it can be email, it could be customer chat, but it sits alongside the method of interaction. But your companies or all companies? Ah, good question. So it sits in the, uh, in your companies. Internal.

Yeah, internal. So that would only work then. if you had a huge... You need a repository of, like, a corpus of data. That's pretty cool. It's an enterprise tool. So then if I wanted to start with these companies, I would look at something that has a lot of information. So what are other examples you think?

Language is a great one. So, like, for example, you need a big... You need training data. So the tools for this have all become pretty democratized. So, like, Google and whatnot, Facebook, they've basically open-sourced a lot of their ML stuff, the models and whatnot. So now, you know, people on our team, you know,

who are, let's call like, they're not PhD in machine learning or AI, right? They're just like engineers, capable, smart engineers. They are able to, in a couple of weeks, take stuff that's off the shelf, ML tools that are off the shelf, customize it for this application. Like when we did it at Bebo, we wanted to say, hey, watch this video game stream. So watch a video game video and tell us what's happening when somebody gets a kill, when they win, when they lose, when they die, whatever, right? and we were able to train a computer vision system within, I don't know, two months to be able to detect in real time what's happening in a game as if somebody was watching it. And then we used it to score e-sports and do like refereeing and scorekeeping and all this.

We automated e-sports, which is like a goofy application of it. But it was so easy given where the tools are. So for example, if you had a corpus of data like, I don't know, like all the YouTube videos that are out there for like some topic or whatever, you can train, you can train your, systems off of either data that you have or just public data that's out there, books and whatnot. This depends what you're what the applications you're trying to do. So for language learning, you need a whole bunch of people who are speaking and then you have to go in and label it and correct it and say, okay, when this person said this thing that was incorrect, here's what it should be. That's hard. But, uh, but once you build that data set, you can sort of get the flywheel going.

And that's where the opportunity is the opportunity is having either a unique data set or a unique take on that data set. The challenge, the reason why it can be hard to build this kind of business is you have to have some set of data that everybody in the world doesn't have because, as you said, the tools to make use of the data are publicly available. And so whether it's like, we have another one in our portfolio called Textio, which is similar, it's kind of the same idea for job posts, right? The idea is if you were writing a job post.

So you might have seen it. You write a job post and it tells you how to make a better, how to make your job post better. So it started like that. And now what it does is you can just say, I want to hire a junior web designer. And it writes it. and invites the whole thing for you. Yeah, that's so smart.

That's so smart. What most people do anyways is just go copy their competitor's job posting and use it anyways. You want to hear another thing that you could do is I think Axios is doing this and now I understand a little bit why. So Axios, you know, they're like us, or I guess we're like them. They start first and they have a bunch of newsletters. And what they're doing is they're building this technology that optimizes your newsletter, your internal company newsletter for best practices. So if you're fucking Salesforce or Morgan Stanley.

To be more concise, right? Yeah, and you're the head of HR, and you need to make sure that all 10,000 of your employees understand this new policy. I'm a believer in that. Dude, if grammarly can be as big as it is, that shows how much people care about the quality and the sort of looking smart and being smart in their writing.

And so if you can help people be more concise, Dude, look at how much I'm talking. Imagine if I could be more concise. That would be amazing. I think that actually could be a big business, so it would be all about making people concise, just making people understand information faster via email. Okay, that sounds so small,

and then I'll make it even smaller in Nitcher, which is the HR company or the HR department, make sure employees understand new policy. Internal emails. Make sure employees know what the coronavirus and what they have. have to do. And then here's what I would build is I would build a basically a mailchimp for internal companies. And at the bottom, I'd be like to confirm that you read this, click this. And then if you didn't click it in 24 hours, you get you didn't. I like this mailchimp internal thing.

That is actually really smart. That's one of the better ideas that's come out of this podcast. I would build that. If someone wants to build that contract. Yeah, you should build that. I think that is a great idea and I would charge. Forget the AI. Just mailchimp for internal companies. That has the feedback loop is you can crawl all the most successful email. of all time, which is there's data sets for that. Like, for example, my company, I have, how many fucking emails have we sent? We've probably sent half a billion emails.

I could, I could, I have all that saved on Segred. Fuck, I would work with SendGrid. I'd be like, hey, let's talk about this. And that's really smart because, again, you have that proprietary data set that nobody else has, that they haven't built out years and years and years of emails that are sent. How big checks do you write?

Yeah, we'll talk offline. Yeah, you can be in that book of business. I'll talk my book for you Let's talk book real quick Just check this out At my company We've created all these sales training things And I've written all these long blog posts

And I'm like, no one's gonna fucking read this Dude I send your how to write better Your writer guide What's it called your copy guide or your writing guide? I sent that to people on my team For many years I've been doing that Really? Yeah

You also have this tweet that I love That's basically, I don't think You didn't do this but you stole it from somebody I think it's like It's like a paragraph It's like look at these sentences Every sentence has five words. So I've been preaching that shit forever. It's how to make your writing sick.

So that is something where you can just do a grammarly style analysis over the over somebody's email and be like, hey, suggestion, break it up this way. Because now, look how punch your email is. Because a lot of people don't really, so here, I'll tell you this. There's a science to this. Keep sentences below 25 words. Average paragraph, you want to be three or four sentences. You need a vary up your, you're in a certain way. If there's a comma, put a period instead. No, no, are no adverbs. No adverbs. There is totally math behind this.

Yeah, I mean, I would love to get better at it because, again, it's not, I also think it's not a skill you get from talking. You can talk a lot and be a terrible writer because none of these rules are obvious, or least to me, they're not obvious, but I'm not a writer. And you have, you're not realistically, most people, even when they read this, like, oh, yeah, that's cool. That paragraph is better. How do I, yeah, how do I use it to get better?

I want to buy that company and deploy it in this way and make way more money. Yeah, Hemingway should be built into your, email client. It should be built in, right? That's the problem with Hemingway's. It's a separate standalone app. You got to check out textio because that's where they live now. You can stick and stick in email. I'm talking to his book already. I'm talking my book constantly. Can't help myself.

So far this is the most, this is going to be the most lucrative episode for me for this one. And this is like the great founder fit for you is like helping people send better email. Okay, anything else that we should talk about before we go. We were sort of overtime, I think. Oh, we are? Yeah, we're we're, we're at the hour. Anything else that you loved?

No, listen, these are all really good. One of his notes says a microwave that doesn't beep at the end. That's mine. That's mine. I wish I was smart about to come on. So I stole this from my homie, Farza, and his Instagram story yesterday, he goes, guys, I got it. A microwave that doesn't beep at the fucking end.

Because it is so annoying when your microwave just started beeping at the end. Just a silent, Farza. So he has, smoke more weed. So he actually has a, great a great little start of I'll bring it up actually it's sort of related to what you were talking about earlier I was going to bring it up then so he was like he's looking into homeschooling and we might actually bring him on and do office hours with him because he needs

some help like coaching in his business but he's a young guy he's interested in homeschooling he wishes that he was homeschooled and he's like more people need to be homeschooled so he's like okay homeschooling is on the rise I think it's at like whatever let's call it 3% which is bigger than you'd expect but why isn't it bigger and so his philosophy was it's not bigger because if you ever tried to start a homeschool as a parent, there's all this complexity of like, oh, I got to file this paperwork and every state has different rules. And then I got to take a photo of my kid every day, blah, blah, blah. So he's building Stripe Atlas for homeschooling.

Push a button. You spin up your homeschool. It's compliant in your state and it sets you up for success in two minutes. And so like the idea a lot, we're going to bring him in. We'll do an office. How much money is he raised? Yeah. It's going to be a lucrative episode for me too.

Just from his couple friends and family. He's raised some... I like that. The only problem is you gotta deal with... Are you homeschool? No. All right. You gotta deal with fucking people who...

Wait. I like how you checked. If he said yes, what were you... He would have still said. I would have said no offense. I don't want to deal with, like, no disrespect to people who are homeschooled, but, like... That'd be dope if we just had a huge homeschooled audience. It's like...

There's all they're writing in tomorrow. If parents are just having their kids listen to this. It's like... It's like... I'm not against veganism. I just don't want to, like, hang... It's like, I love... going to an improv show. I just don't want to hang out with a bunch of nerds who do improv.

You know what I mean? I like it's the same. Just at the end of the episode is like empties the clip of like, you know, controversial opinions. Hold on before we go. All right, where should people find you? How do they follow you? Follow me on Twitter. I'm at ZCK, so it's nice and short. ZCK. That's a good handle. Yeah, but if you joined Twitter.

I don't know, like 2010. When he was 14. First business. It was my embryo that joined Twitter form. not a good handle. And honestly, listen, you DM me. I tell me that we got in touch. And I love when people DM me

if you're starting a great business, particularly in the spaces we're talking about, I would love to hear from you. All right. Thanks for coming. Thanks for listening. Just remember, don't shake anyone's hand. Coronavirus is out there.

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