My First Million - #94 - Is GPT-3 the Next Big Thing?

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. This episode Shaan and Sam talk: GPT-3, a business referral network, better company onboarding, and Shaan's experience working at Twitch.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

All right, what's up, everybody? It's July. The whole world is locked down or not lockdown. We don't know what the hell is going on. But me and Sam just recorded this episode. We talked about a bunch of things. We talked about a project that one of the podcast listeners has launched, erotic newsletter that's doing $6,000 a month very quickly. And I think he built the project in about a month. We talked about this crazy thing called GPT3, which is this AI project that came out of Open AI that everybody's losing their mind about. We talk about BNI, this old school business referral. network and then we talked a lot about, Sam asked me a bunch of questions about life at a big company, which we're not sure if it's interesting or not. So I think we're going to put it at the end of the episode. We're going to chop the episode out of order. We're going to toss that at the end. Maybe it's not interesting. Maybe it's interesting. It's up to you guys to decide. All right, hope you enjoy this episode. As always, let's do it. All right. What's going on? Dude, I had like a perfect day yesterday. I did everything that I'm supposed to do, which is great. Perfect in the, and that my actions were perfect. So I feel good. And where you are, I'm obsessed with weather. Where you are,

high of 82 today, currently 72, you have nice California weather. I was just outside. I take all my calls by the pool. It feels fucking great. It's excellent. Can't complain. So in San Francisco, San Francisco has been horrible weather lately. It's currently 60 degrees. So it's been like 60 and cloudy the past week. Do you think you're happier with the sun? For sure. Yeah, for sure. Greenery and the son, you know, I'm a human. I think that works on humans. So my wife is from Manhattan, like her mom and dad live in like the heart of Manhattan.

And she's trying to convince me to move to New York. And my down, so there's two, here's the pros of cons. The cons are New York's pretty like objectively horrible weather. Like at least nine months of the year, it's just like cold and like kind of wet and gray. Yep. And then taxes suck. And then like it's pretty, it's fairly dirty.

Right. And crowded. And the pros and crowded. And the pros are like you're like if sometimes if you're in the hustle and bustle, it can make you more ambitious and it can be inspiring, but also wear you out. But so my question is where you've moved out to, there's way less people. It's more space. Do you think that the risk of getting fat and soft is worth the being happy with space and

weather? Yes, given where I'm at. If I was 24, I'd be like, yo, this is not the right move. In fact, when I was 23, 24, I was living a sweet life in Australia. And Australia is like sunny, you go to the beach. People don't work that hard. Everyone in the country basically has a truce. Like, yo, I won't work hard if you don't work hard and we'll all stay, you know, at the top.

And I was like, I got to get the fuck out of here. Like, I'm definitely going to become less ambitious, less motivated. I'm going to become less of a person because I'm not going to, challenge myself if I stay here, I'll be so comfortable. But now where I'm at, 32 years old, sideburn's all gray, you know, got a kid, got a wife, got a dog. For now, that slow down pace and being less in the hustle and bustle, and having experienced it, I'm good. I'm ready for that next chapter now. So this is, I feel good about it, but then again, I'm human and we just justify whatever the fuck we do anyway. So, but I believe it. I don't, I don't think I'm talking myself into a

into a bad decision. I think I'm in a good decision here. Especially now that everything's online, dude. I actually believe this. Silicon Valley is on Twitter. Like Silicon Valley moved to Twitter some number of years ago. And like San Francisco, you know, South Bay, New York, London, it doesn't matter. Twitter is where the heart of the action is actually. You can build a world-class network on Twitter. You can get access to great conversations. You can see ideas and become a part of them. you can raise money through the internet Twitter is Silicon Valley I'm pretty convinced of it yeah I agree I I've been getting sick of it lately uh I'm like I don't want to it's been getting a

little uh what's it called uh you can say Twitter homogenous uh so I'm having to like follow different stuff I watched the um this docu or this TV show or the Ford versus Ferrari thing and they're in like racing cars and I was like this is way cooler than the internet. I need to surround myself with these people. Dude, I had a moment like that where yesterday I was listening to, I opened up Clubhouse, that app that's like still in beta, I think. Yeah, I quit using it out of picture. It was like, you know, the notification was like, Mark Andreessen is talking to, you know, whoever, you know, a bunch of people. And so I was like, oh, Mark Andreessen's on. I went in.

And they were talking about like, if an asteroid was coming to the earth, what would be our mitigation strategy? And it's like, you know, they had all looked into it. And I was like, who looks into this? You know, they looked. look into this, like I look into conspiracy theories and like I look into the, the drama behind MTV's the challenge. So, you know, they were like, oh yeah, I've read about our, what we would do and here's what would happen. And then I like happened to like kind of swipe and just like miss, I like switched apps into Twitter. And then at the top of my feed was the guy from Parsdoll, Dave, doing a watermelon eating challenge against this kid. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to watch this

instead. And it was like opted into like the mindless entertainment of that. And, um, No regrets that choice. That was the right choice for me. And so I agree. Similar topic. Have you seen a TV show Peaky Blinders? I actually started it. I watched 15 seconds. I haven't gotten into it. I watched yesterday. I started yesterday I started. I started watching Peeky Blinders from the beginning. For anyone listening, it's fiction, historical fiction. So it's mostly fake, but it's supposed to be based on real stuff. But it's like a crime family or a mafia or something. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So they just like, it's these, this guy, Thomas Shelby,

and he has this family of five or six family members. And they start out mostly illegal. So gambling, selling liquor, fighting, betting, just like your traditional 1920 gangster. Story of me in your life, yes. Yeah. Then they get a little bit legit, but they're always still kind of doing bad stuff. They just drink and smoke and fuck and fight and just all bad stuff. Just not bad stuff, but love vices. And I was like, this guy's way cooler than like Mark Zuckerberg. Like, let's just like.

Mark Zuckerberg on his surfboard with his white face and huge ass. Yes. I'm like, dude, this guy, like this guy's a rock and roll star. Whereas like, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't survive a day in peekie blinders. Right. But, you know, who knows? Maybe. I mean, he's pretty gangster, but in a dork way.

but it was just like, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, uh, I need to figure out who I look up to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point. You are who you admire and, uh, and like, you know, whatever, no judgment. They just go through, go through phases. And I think both you and I are at a phase where it's like, I, I'll speak for myself. I went like pretty deep on the, admiring the people who did great things in tech and startups and kind of modern day business. And I don't know, you shifted to like, fuck modern day. Historical business is where, you, like, it's at historical pioneers and settlers and shit like that generals and then uh but it's cool to admire different things but not get stuck in the admiration and so um so yeah i don't know i don't know it's a good

question to ask yourself who do i admire right now and then should i stay admiring them or do i need to switch it up well and also i read a lot of personal finance stuff so i read a lot of subrides around personal finance stuff and some of it it's like people who have high net worths and how they're doing personal finance and they're like buying a three million dollar home and they're like making all these justifications and or buying a fancy car and every once in a while I'm like the only justification for me doing this is because it's fucking cool and since like we need to remember that that doing something just because it's cool is oftentimes a wonderful reason why you should do anything and it's a life worth living and like I get I'd get too caught up and like well you know

if I annualize this out over 15 years. Like it would be cheaper. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, yeah. But also like rock and roll. Like let's just do stuff just because it's awesome. That's just, it just makes me happy. There's, you know, people say like, you know, what advice would you give to the 21 year

old self? And like I asked that question too to when we have guests on here. If you were 21 again, what would you do? And there's all this like, what would you tell your younger you? But also good question is what would 12 year old? you or 21 year old you say to you now if if if 18 year old me or 21 year old me came out of a time machine and got to see 32 year old me what would he say he'd be like dude you got fat what's up with that like yeah yeah this is all cool but like you got fat aren't you lose aren't you getting fit

though I'm getting fit but like 18 year old me or 21 year me this would be fat and he'd be like wow that's lame or it'd be like dude you're a millionaire like okay what are we doing with all this money what is the cool shit we're doing like are we going here are we gambling? Are we taking our friends on trips? And it's like, oh, you're buying equities? Like, all right. Well, like, you know, so I actually like the other way. I want, I want in some ways, 20 year old, it's like, I think forward 20 years and I think backwards 20 years. Would 21 year old me be proud of the way I'm living my life? And then would 51 year old me be proud of the way I'm living my life? And these thought experiments help me make these adjustments and get out of the fog of like just the, or just the

routines that I'm in because routines are really fucking dangerous. I agree with all of that. And I think it's good questions to ask. I find myself asking that stuff all the time of like, it's just so easy to get caught to this optimization type of mentality. That's, and this is what I told,

we had a meeting today at my company. I was like, you guys, less optimizing, more innovating. Like, let's, let's remember,

let's just do cool shit and not like worry as much about the click through rates. Right. Well, you want to bring up B and I? Yeah, so, okay, two topics. Actually, I want to start with a different acronym, GPT3. Yeah, I've been talking to Sam about it, and I've gotten access. Oh, nice.

Okay, great. So give people the simple explanation, Sam, simple explanation. Ah, man, I, there's a lot going on. Let's make it really simple, which is, do you remember smarter child when you're a kid that, that, AOL, that, that, A bot where you could ask it with the weather and you could ask it like, is God real? And it would come up with like things. It's like that on steroids. So from my understanding, it's a, it's an AI tool where you can use a lot of people are using this thing. So the guy who was the leader of Y Combinator, quit Y Combinator, become the CEO of this. And it's basically this, I think Elon Musk is

considered a founder as well. It's basically this engine where you could tell this AI bot to do stuff and they do it. For example, someone's like, create a website where there's the Google logo and a search engine and somehow this bot like turns it into a search engine and it just so happens to look like Google. Yeah, exactly. So I don't even know what GPT stands for. So that's how much I know about this. But basically, you feed it little inputs of text, but you can also feed it actually images they've shown as well. But most people, what they're doing with the right now. They feed it small snippets of text. So for example, somebody can feed it a snippet of, you can just say, you can just ask a question and it'll answer like smarter child. Then there's a,

there's a website called Learn From Anyone, I think, dot com. Someone built a little tool, which is you pick who you want to learn from, so you can be like Einstein. And you can ask a physics question, and it'll answer based on what Einstein would say to this. And it's like shockingly good. And so you can kind of like pick a teacher and then ask a question and then you can get an answer from that teacher based off of whatever that teacher had put out into the public domain that this this algorithm has ingested all the all this like raw text from the internet and through it has found okay what would this person say and so there's all these crazy use cases like you said like I have a friend Sharif who's the guy his tweet went viral where he

basically was like just described what he wanted a web page to be and had spit out the HTML code or the JavaScript code to build that site so he was like make a make a a to-do list where I can add a to-do and then I can mark a to-do as done. And then it actually built an app that was a to-do list app just off of that description. That was your buddy? Yeah. And he did the Google one too where he's like, put the Google logo up top and then add a search bar and that two buttons. One says search.

One says I'm feeling lucky. And then return the answer to whatever question is asked in the search bar. And he built like a Google competitor. It's been out of Google competitor. So, but let's talk about like real. Like, do you think that this is actually going to be legit? We all know that AI is pretty transformative technology. It's going to be whenever AI, you know, as AI progresses, it'll be the next big tech shift.

You know, the previous tech shifts were from, you know, non-computers to computers, computers to the internet, from the internet to smartphones. And now it's smartphones to AI. and that AI is either really narrow, like it can only do a specific set of things, which is like when you see an AI beat the best Go player or chess players or poker players in the world. That's very narrow. It can only do that one thing. Or if you said, okay, this AI is going to identify faces and it's like, cool, facial recognition. That's a narrow AI. This seems a lot more general.

And the more general AI gets, the more exciting things are because that means it can do a lot of different stuff that you can't really predict. and the kind of if you want to get real futuristic and crazy general AI or AGI as they call it is considered the last invention, the last human invention that will ever be needed. Because once you have AGI, then AGI invents everything else. What like I think I'm a little bit of a normal, like a pretty normal basic ass person when I think, well, this is just like the end of everything I ever believe in. Right? Believe in meaning what? Like I don't know what's man made versus created by our. robot? There are, what is the point of a human being? Like, we exist to do work, I think. Like,

we exist to, like, do stuff. And if this thing is doing everything, then what are we supposed to do? We're going to consume it and we're going to become entertainers and podcasters and artists. And we're going to, if you take the long view, when this gets really, really good, we're all just going to be playing video games and making art. Okay. Well, this thing can definitely do that already. like but do you think it's actually good? You mean is that a good outcome? No. Do you think that this technology is good at them?

Yeah. Or is it still pretty basic and overhyhymed? It's not good enough, but it is shockingly good. Like when you're like, oh, it's like when you see your niece after like three months and they had a growth spurt and you're like, whoa, like you're, now you're up to, wait, last time you were up came up to my hip and now you're like, I level with me somehow or whatever. Like now you're up to my shoulder.

you're like, that's crazy. You're still not a full grown adult, but like, damn, I didn't realize you grew this much. That's what happened with this project is there was a, damn, I didn't realize it was this good. Where like, holy shit, these conversations seem very human like. Somebody put in like the first half of their blog post about how to run a board meeting. And then it spit out the second half and finished the blog post about how to run a startup board meeting. I was like, wait, how does it know that? How does it know what I would write in my blog post?

It was kind of indistinguishable the first half and the second half and the first half was written by a real VC or the second half was written by the robot who was just basically guessing what the next word should be which is like kind of insane. I almost want this to fail.

Like I'm like nervous. That's not going to happen. Yeah, that's the best inventions. They always say like the best technology seems like magic. And when you see real magic or you see magic you're like a little bit scared like when you see David Blaine do some crazy shit

you're like whoa hold on. Hold on. What's going on here? How did the car end up in my boxers? Like, that doesn't make any sense. That's kind of how this feels. It's a little bit scary. So, but that's my question.

Do you think that what your buddy did, do you think that it's actually good? Or do you think it's like, do you think that it's still like a car in 1930? It's still like a car in 1930. And I don't know what those cars are like. But basically, in a sandbox, if you can control the inputs and you can kind of play around with it, you can demonstrate, you can create really cool demos. Really cool, even prototypes. We're not at products yet. But we'll get there.

This GPT3 is improved on GPT2. So it's like, fuck, how good is four going to be in five? It's like, you know, the original iPhone really wasn't that great either. And then now it's like if I can watch movies on my phone. And, you know, like it's amazing. And like things get amazing pretty quick. And so I think this is going to get amazing pretty quick. I, yeah, I'm a little in awe.

So I've applied to get access and I've talked to Sam about it. And he was like, yeah, the person who gives access is on vacation for like two or three days, but they'll get back to you. Like, all right, well, I guess I'm waiting on her to reply. But I want to use it for writing articles on the hospital. Yeah, I was going to say, you guys should write the news through a robot one day, you know, basically like one day we can just see what happened. Well, that's what we're, yeah, so I'm waiting to get access for that. We'll see. I wanted to run our transcripts for our podcast through it.

I basically just wanted to be like, hey, it's Sean and Sam talking. What would we say if we talked about X? And I bet it could recreate our, you know, stupid conversations. Well, can't you ask your buddy to set that up? Yeah, I can't. So I'm going to bring him on. So next week I want to do a segment where I'm going to bring on the guy who built that thing, as well as either Furkan, who's kind of my trusted tech, like, you know, a sounding board.

Because he's also realistic. He doesn't get caught up in the hype. And then there's also this VC at Founders Fund who wants. to come on and talk about it. Who? The young guy? Deelian, yeah. I don't know him.

It's kind of a troll on Twitter. Good. I like that. Well, I'm curious to learn more. I just feel like I'm not smart enough or educated enough to actually know what's legit and what's not. And I want to know, like, with your buddy, was it as simple as you literally just type into Google Doc and you tell this thing what to do and it does it? Or does it require more, is there more stuff to it?

Yeah, we'll ask him. So, yeah, we're nobs, but we know and enough to know that, hey, this is interesting. This is worth understanding more. Yeah. But it's like there's been so many things like that where I mean, there's a lot of, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. This is everything.

And then you dig into it. A lot of fall starts. Yeah. Yeah. So all right, what's BNI? Okay, BNI. So let's go to the exact opposite end of the spectrum. The most fucking dumb down old school thing that I discovered that I didn't know about.

So BNI is a business referral network. I don't even know what BNI actually stands for either. Is a company? BNI is a company. Go to BNI.com. So these guys, I think, are making about 50 million a year. And what they do is, let's say you start a local chapter. So this is kind of like the Vistage model that both of us are interested in.

So this is a little bit different, though. So what happens is they have 10,000 chapters and they have 270,000 members. So you can do the math on kind of how much they're making and their membership fees. But the way it works is in a local chapter, they'll be like one, let's say, financial advisor, one plumber, one, you know, whatever the other occupations are that people have. A whole bunch of like kind of self-employed people. And it's a referral network. So it's like, cool, I'm in this chapter.

I meet you guys. You're my homie now. So now whenever I know a guy who needs a lawyer, I'm going to refer the lawyer in my circle to any of my customers. I'm a financial advisor. And whenever you're, hey lawyer, whenever your guys need a financial advisor, you refer them to me. And so it's a referral network for basically tradespeople to swat.

customers. And super simple idea. Obviously it drives a lot of value in that if I'm, you know, every business wants more customers and if this is a trusted way to do it, great. And it also has the kind of benefits of like, you meet other people who are kind of in similar buckets and you're like, oh, cool, like we're kind of brothers in arms, except for you do law and I do financial advising. And then this guy's a mechanic and then that guy's a whatever. Pretty cool. Been around for a while. Hadn't heard of it. Since 1985. I'm looking at all up now. Is it interesting. Is it this is the guy who is the chairman of it. He just, his photo, he looks like a slick.

He looks like a, so we're looking at a photo. He's got his hands on stage. He does the thing where he put a keynote speaking thing of his, which is always a tell that this guy's insecure. And then, I mean, he could be a great guy. I mean, wearing a suit and tie, hair slicked back. So that's why Sam's saying what he's saying. We have to paint the picture so people understand why you would just say that.

Yeah. And I'm not actually saying this guy. Nobody knows. We don't know this. guy. I don't know. But so is this a scam? This is so weird to me. The first, the top searches is B and I a pyramid scheme. That's what the top search is. Like if you type in BNI. Yes, I believe that. And you do think it's a pyramid scheme? No, I believe that people would be curious about that because it's organized like a MLM in a way. You become a local chapter owner.

Then you recruit members in your local network and then all of you paid dues to the mothership. And like, that's, you know, whether it's affiliate or actual, like, you know, MLM, like, that's a similar model. And so I understand why people would be skeptical. But I found this really interesting. This is something a business I had never heard of. I'm looking at it now. It says they have over 270,000 members. In 2019, members generated $16 billion in revenue through referral business. I just never would have thought that this many people would buy into this. You know what I mean? How big, yeah, I'm a little flabbergasted. I'm looking at. everything I can. I'm flabbergasted. How'd you find this? I was talking to somebody,

like, so I run these mastermind groups, right? And I was talking to the guys and I was kind of like, I run three of these groups now. And they're like, oh, it's great. You know, you have so many people signing up. I want to open up more. And I was like, yeah, but I don't know if I want to do this anymore. I kind of am tired of these. Like, this is kind of a lot of work. And then I was like, you know, there's these interesting, like, either I want to scale it up and make this a big deal or I want to wind it down and not do it at all. Like, I don't want to be in this, like, little bucket where I'm like doing a few and it's kind of a time suck but it's not making a shit ton of money. And so he, one of the guys in that, when guy Ben, he told me about this. And I was

like, oh, interesting. I never heard of this. And then they were all, they were actually all aware of it, which I never really, because they're all small business owners. So they had been contacted or, you know, offered to join this thing. Yeah. What I've learned about those, so I've been investigating this. Those, these like groups, they are, they do scale. It is hard work. Yeah. It is very hard work. Yeah, this is your business. It's not like everything.

If this is your business, your business is going to be pretty hard work. And this is actually a pretty decent business. I think it is a good, well-designed business. There are many worse businesses than this one or the Vistage YPL model also. And so, but you'd have to make it your business, which I don't personally want to do. Do you want to talk about one more thing? Yeah, sure. Wait, did we talk about the erotic newsletter?

I don't remember. Did we bring this up already? We did not, no. Okay, a listener of the podcast launched an erotic newsletter two months ago that is currently making 6K a month and uses Pornhub as an acquisition channel. I don't know anything about this, but let me tell you guys some background here, which is I've done tests by creating like audible for erotic novels. And in the process, I learned a few things. One, women are absolutely willing to buy this stuff. Two, erotic and like romance novels is like the, I believe it's the largest category on Kindle.

and it's the most engaged category. And I'm a man, so I think of this differently, but like women, like, this is pretty much like porn to women. Like, this audio, like, for a lot of women, they just loved, like, these audio books and written text that describe sex and all these types of, I don't even know how to discuss it, like, because it's so foreign to me. but like there's all these subreddits where it's like where they just like write erotic stories and then there's like wattpad and all these websites that get hundreds of millions of monthly unique visitors and all they do is write erotic stories it's just right yeah it's totally new to me and so interesting and abrac do you know more about this can you tell us more about what he did so the the guy's Latana he's a cool member of the of the group he's done other projects too he's the one

who launched that church tipping app as well alter um he seemed to to be a hustler. What's his story? Yeah, that was basically it. He had launched the church app. I think it launched, but I'm not sure he's still working on it. He's got another business, which I think is growing. That's his main thing. That's like, you can book. Influencer thing, right? Yeah, that seems to be doing well. It's like an influencer booker thing. And then he just did this as like a side thing. He has someone running it. He basically set it up in a few weeks and he's using. What is it? What is it? You sign up and what do you get? It's like an erotic story, like every week or however. Have you read any of them, I pray you?

I have not, no, that is the truth. Dude, do your research. You know the name of it? What's the name of it? Yeah, I talked to this kid. What's it called? You want Hinge Club. I got to go to there now.

Yeah, like Hinge, like a dating app? Yes, Hinge Club. It's for, it's erotica for black women specifically. All right. Beautiful. Hingeclub.com. I can't find the URL. Yeah, neither can I.

We should bring him, we should bring him on for like a 10 minute segment. I want to hear how we did this. I also want to hear about using Pornhub as an Acquisition Channel, what that's like. I've never done anything like that. It's Hitchclub.substack.com. Okay. Hingeclub. Substack.

Okay, one quick idea and then one, one story. All right, quick idea. Employee onboarding at a company. So every company onboards new employees. So Paypoint every company has. I've hired somebody I need to onboard them. Every company kind of bakes their own little process and there's not really like a seamless way to do it. It's like, oh, okay, cool.

You're going to talk to the IT guy. He's going to get you hooked up with XYZ. Talk to the HR person. They're going to get you hooked up with ABC. Talk to your manager. They'll tell you about this. Oh, this other thing you'll learn about it four weeks later because we forgot to tell you about it.

Oh, you should get some swag or like a computer. There's all these different systems, right? I think Rippling is trying to do this in one way. But I'm curious if there are other angles. Rippling seems a bit like the utility side of things, like the getting set up side on payroll with your IT stuff. What about like this sort of human side of thing? So how do you welcome employees?

How do they learn about your company culture? How do they, is there like a easy way to do these like kind of customer, sorry, like company culture like training, indoctrination, welcome to the cult type of things? I think companies really care about culture. I think they care about like people learning like what it's like to work here, what the origin story is, like of the company, all these good things. And there's a lot of like folklore that gets passed down and a lot of like tribal rituals that get done informally. Can you do that formally? Is it kind of a question mark. Can you do Rippling?

But for the info for the non-utility stuff. Is that a question, do you think that people have? Or a problem that people have? I think so. Because, like, for example, at Twitch, I know that one of the earliest employees, like, there's only few OGs left now, or, you know, eight, nine years in or whatever. And one of the OGs was putting together, like, a kind of a little booklet that was like, here's the, like, history of Twitch, like, all the cool, crazy moments that have happened in the company's history.

I do, like, a, I do that with the- welcome thing, right? Yeah, where I say, like, here's, like, the history. That's hard to scale, right? because it's like you're using the most valuable people's time, which is good. They get FaceTime with the CEO and whatnot. I think small companies deal with that way. But as you get bigger and bigger, those become less personal and also harder to do every Monday,

you know, because every Monday you're hiring new people as your company grows. Like, I don't know how many people you guys hired this Monday, but like you probably either, you know, between zero and one employees hired per week, max, right? But at a bit at a bigger company, they're hiring tens of employees or even hundreds of employees per week. And so how do you get them in? So I think there's a service there. There's like a welcome week and you go through the boot camp of the of the company and you like, you get both the utility stuff and the fun stuff. But they're all pretty lame. And as the world goes remote, I wonder, like, can you simplify this to being a link? And can that be a really well-designed page that tells

your story that tells you about something? Well, this is what we've discussed earlier, Sean, of like a high school newspaper paper for your company. Right, but that's like with the recent stuff. I'm saying there's just like this is more like a drip campaign, right? It's like everybody needs to go through this sequence of getting this information and you don't want to be the one retelling that joke manually every, every, every, I know, but if you build this product that we've discussed over and over again, which I think you can do it. Yeah, like what you've just said is you need a drip campaign for a company. So you need like a media company for it. It's quite, I mean, it is quite fascinating. I understand what you're saying. I haven't, I don't want to work on this because I think

that is kind of boring, but I understand the need and I totally get what you're saying. And I bought, I bought it. So, and also a bunch of people, I think three different teams have reached out to me since we got excited about that idea and are working on prototypes of it. So I'll show you when we, when somebody has one. I even have cool names. I don't even know if they have names yet. They're like, we're working on that thing you said, here's the mockups. And I said, all right, Send me a link when you have it when you have a prototype. I'm very interested. Okay, one other last little thing.

So are you a basketball fan? You don't follow the NBA much, do you? During the playoffs, I'll pay attention a little bit. Why? What do you talk about the bubble? So the bubble started. There's something interesting here. So in general, sports leagues are trying to come back.

They're having great difficulties doing so. The NBA is trying, like, the most robust attempt at this. They're creating like a biological seal, a bubble. basically. Aren't they like at Disneyland or something? It's in Disneyland, or Disney World, sorry, in Orlando. And basically it's like a summer camp for rich NBA athletes. And they're like complaining that they're like, they put them up in like a Marriott. And they're like complaining. They're like, oh my God, this is only one room. They're complaining about the room because at the beginning when they come in, they have to quarantine for seven days. And so it's like seven days not leaving that room. And so anybody even if you just stay in a hotel room. Yeah, I would hate that. I would retire. The food that gets delivered, they're showing, the food looks like, you know,

worse than my middle school lunch somehow. I don't know why they're serving these guys such horrible food. And then they can't have like their side chicks come to the place because it's like a bubble. They can't have new people coming in. So like, you know, these guys who are used to being, you know, out there, you know, popping bottles of the club, they can't do that anymore. So all these funny things are coming out. But what I thought was interesting, hey, I'm just interested in Ken Sports come back, you know,

during COVID and I'm an NBA fan so I'm into it. But the second cool thing that happened was a bunch of the players, because there's only like two media members in the bubble. And so they're reporting on ESPN. But way more interesting is all the stories and vlogs that are coming out direct from the players inside the bubble telling their story. So there's one guy, this guy named Matthias, I don't know how he says his name, I think it's Matthias Taible.

So he's kind of like a rookie on the 76 years, not that great of a player, but he's cool. He's interesting rookie. But he's doing vlogs like Casey Nystatt. Oh, that's pretty neat. He started his thing two weeks ago when they entered the bubble, which was like 10 days ago or so. He put up his first vlog. He started his YouTube channel. He's already over 200,000 subscribers.

Casey Nystatt posted a comment on the first video being like, this is awesome, well-made video. And like, this guy was geeking out about Casey Nicestad. He's like, dude, I love your videos. Yeah, I'm trying to emulate your thoughts. And he's like a multimillionaire NBA athlete. And so I think it's cool what's. going on. And these guys are telling, they're showing the food. They're showing what they're, you know, how the COVID testing works every morning. They're showing these little Disney magic

bands that they buzz in. And if it's green, you can go into this area. If it's red, oh, you got to go, get tested again. And like, and it reminded me, the reason I'm bringing this up is because a lot of people ask me, oh, how do we get more customers? How do I market my business? I just want growth. Could you have any marketing ideas for me? And this is like the universal marketing idea. And I saw this, a heat and shot tweeted this out the other day. He goes, the time. The time. timeless content marketing idea. Show your work. And I was like, that's so fucking true.

And that's what these guys are doing. They're just showing their work. They're going about their life as an NBA player, and they're just showing it. And they're editing it into a good vlog, but like it just works. And this works for your company too. If you don't know how to market your company, just show how you're building your company. And trust me, that will bring you attention. Yeah, there's so many different words for this.

It could be like document, don't create. There could be show your work. There can be learn than teach. It's like it's the same thing though. It's just like do everything out in public. Right. Ryan Hoover always says work in public. And I used to say that.

I like show your work a little better because I remember taking math tests back of the day. And like you could get the wrong answer. But if you showed your work, you'd always get partial credit. And if you got the right answer without showing your work, the teacher would mark it down. And it's sort of the same thing in business. If you're showing your work along the way, even if your business is not successful yet, you will get a big halo effect

if people want to work there I mean you guys do this you guys put out a lot of content you know barstool does this even more they show them behind the scenes I like posted the job listing that we had I got like 200 applicants in 24 hours you've shown your job listing

you put out your writing your writer's guide for your writers you've put out like what else you put out if you put up more stuff that you've worked in public a little bit I'm gonna I'm gonna create a newsletter course right so there's like a whole bunch of things that you can do that are but there's more that are just like

showing the life of you trying to do what you do. And it's easy. It's easy. It does take time, but it's actually quite fun. Well, what I mean is it's simple. Right, right, exactly. It's in your control. And you don't need to look for some other external genius idea.

Hey, here's a simple idea that'll work for everybody. And it works for some better than others. So like, for example, it'll work well for you because your customer is also business oriented and a business owner or an aspiring business owner. So you showing how you build your business, it brings you customers. Your customers are directly interested. For others, it's more niche. A portion of your audience will care about that and a portion of won't.

But the portion who cares will love you. And that's really ultimately what you want to do with marketing is get people to love you. Yeah, most people are just really bad at creative content. But this stuff definitely helps. You just write what you are learning and you posted on Hacker News and you do that 10 times and probably two of them might work. Right. And we should do that with this podcast.

We should be like, cool, how we grew the podcast to a million downloads in six months. Like, that's an easy thing I should be putting out there to work in public, to show our work about how we're building this podcast up, that people would be interested in that I haven't done. So I've got to take this lesson for myself as well. Yeah. Well, let's fucking do it. Great. I'm going to write a book called A Hundred Great Questions. And I'm going to write the best questions that have helped me in my life.

either question for yourself or questions you ask others. 100 great questions. I'm going to commit to writing a book. That's a great one. 100 great questions. Because I feel like you already have like 15. Yeah. I have a little note sheet.

Because sometimes I'll hear somebody ask a question. I'm like, oh, great question. I'll give you a really simple example. This is not a great life question, but this is a great question. This is like more of a management tip. So probably wouldn't make the book, but I'm going to say it anyways. You know when you are talking to somebody, and this often happens with engineers. You're talking to an engineer and you're like, all right, when is this going to happen by? Any

leader is always asking their team, all right, I want this thing to happen. You want this thing to happen. You say you're doing it. When is it's it going to happen? And like, you know, the problem is people suck at forecasting and predicting things. And also there's this weird, like, incentive. Like, first, like, I'm kind of overbearing when I say shit like this. I get like really, I'm excited, but it sounds aggressive. And so they're like, they don't want to say too long because they know I'll be like, what the fuck? Like we're planning to do this in six months? Like that's way too long. Also, they don't want to say too short and then not deliver that because they, you know, they don't want to be seen in somebody who missed it.

So they kind of sandbag into like some middle ground. So I've always just like been like, fuck. People suck are predicting this question is useless to ask when are we going to have this bite. And I was in a meeting the other day. And Dan, who's my manager at my company now, he's way more experienced than me. He's like kind of the gray-haired guy at our company, super super. smart and way better at managing people than I ever am.

So he asked, so the CEO of Twitch asked this question, when are we going to have this by it? And I can see the person shrinking and trying to like go through this. Do I do I underestimate, overestimate? I have no idea what the real estimate is. And then Dan came in and he goes, let me ask you a different question. At what date would you be surprised that this hasn't happened by? And the person, like, relaxed.

And they were like, well, you know, I'd be shocked if we didn't have this by Q3 or whatever. they were able to like answer a different style like just ask a better question get a better answer and so I was like that's a different way of thinking about this. What date would you be shocked that if we're sitting here what date would we be sitting here would we be surprised that this hasn't happened by or shocked that it hasn't happened by now that becomes the upper bound okay cool now I know that and it's like you know what's the and then he has another one which is sort of like what's the soonest you could expect us to start to see results from this like where we would look at it and

We would be, you know, we'd be smiles in this meeting because we'd see some tangible result. That became the lower bound. And I was like, dude, this motherfucker is a smooth operator. Like, he knew how to get to the, and the crux of this answer I always want without like the bullshit of the person's psychology getting in the way. So I like that little one. This is not going to be about an idea, but something similar that people will like. And I'm just going to interview you a little bit, Sean. So I've never worked at a company, really.

I mean, I've worked at my companies. and you up until recently worked mostly at your companies. But now you're working at Twitch with 2,000 people. You also interact, I imagine, with a lot of Amazon people, which is supposed to be the best and the best. So I have a couple questions. First, is your company, I think, was kind of similar to mine, which was mostly young people who were inexperienced but smart

and kind of figuring it out. Very much so. Now you're at a company that does it have a lot more experienced people? Yes, very much so. So what I want to ask is, does that matter that the people are experienced? Do you think or not? Yeah, I don't know if it's experienced, but there's a certain level of wisdom that comes over time. And also, I wouldn't say it's everybody, right?

I would say everybody is more experience or just like generally smarter, better resume, better talent than the people that we recruited for the most part. because we were recruiting these like kind of underdog, jack of all trades, non-specialists who had never done it before, but we're hungry and we're smart and could learn. And we were taking bets on people. But is that good? That was good for what we had.

So now I realized, because at some point I was like, dude, when do these people work? Because my calendar became booked. Every 30 minutes was a meeting. And I was like, so when do I go work?

Because I always used to, you know, you probably did this with your company, less so now, I think. We had a meeting today at our all hands. And I go, we're going to start,

We got to, you guys, let's innovate instead of optimize. And also, like, cancel all meetings and start over. There's way too many meetings. Right. So I used to do that where I'd have a couple meetings a day, two, three, max. And then for the most part, I was working on something. I was looking at the data. I was trying to figure out what to do.

I was sitting next to my designer and, like, working on a feature or sitting next to the marketing guy and working on a campaign or engineers figuring out what the fuck's going on. And I felt like I was in the work. And I felt that that was real. And now I'm like, the schedule is just meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting. So when I first got here, I did the normal startup guy thing where you judge a big company. You're like, yeah, these fools, you just sit in meetings all day. Nobody here's doing any real work, blah, blah, blah. And I think there's an element of that's true.

But what I figured out was, okay, what do you actually need at the top of these companies? Right? This exact team, like the top, like, let's say 20 people of this company, that's like 1% of the workforce. And this 1% their job is basically to be this like two things. One, they have to be the accountable party to everybody. So they need to be like good cop or bad cop depending on what's needed for their like chain of command. And so if even if you didn't do any work, if you're the scary meeting of the day for the next

layer of leaders and the next layer of leaders below that, you become a forcing function that helps that whole orc work. It's kind of abstract. but that's one job that you have. The other job that you have is basically to call bullshit and redirect when you think that resources are being wasted. And so you sit in meetings all day and you're like a computer. You're like, I feel like I don't use my hands anymore. My brain is just in a vat and it's in this like vat.

And basically I come into the meeting. There's a memo. I read. So I'm ingesting all this information and then I make a decision at the end of it or I approve a decision at the end of it. And it's all I do. I approve or I make a decision. Or sometimes at audit when I'm like, wait, this doesn't make any sense. Why is this, why does this have all these holes?

And that's the role of an executive, I think, in a big company. And like we try to say it's about all these other things. Like it is about recruiting, sure. It is about strategy, sure. It is about setting up systems, sure. But like fundamentally on a day-to-day basis, I'm a brain in a meeting room. And then I get fed information and I either approve or I make a decision or I audit a decision that's being made. That's all I do.

So do you like that? No. And do you think that the people that Twitch has needs to run their company, these highly paid, probably very wise, older folks? People with great judgment. Whether you're great judgment because you're experienced, great judgment because you're a domain expert, or great judgment because you have awesome intuition on some shit.

Like whatever, it's a great judgment person. Typically easiest way to get there is a bunch of experience. So do you think that those folks actually make the company better? Or do you think it would be better if it was just like a bunch of startupy people like you hired? Yeah, I think they make it better, but I think they are great with established systems. When you need to innovate, that brain in a vat doesn't work. But a company of this size that's doing so much revenue and so many has so much users, most of the company is just to make sure the ship keeps great.

growing naturally and reducing risks like, oh, you know, like I bet I was actually thinking about this the other day. I was sitting in like a two-hour meeting that was about a topic that was like, there's a whole team called trust and safety. I bet it to hustle you don't have a trust and safety team or like a, you know, Facebook. I don't even know how many resources now. How many millions of dollars? I mean thousands of people are just working on the like abuse, spam, porn, fake news and like

account takeovers, fraud. Like, there's just a huge amount of that at any big company. Because when you get big, you become a target. And so you have a huge amount of your emphasis is just on that. And that's just making sure the ship doesn't sink. It doesn't make the ship faster. It actually makes it slower. It doesn't make it, like, go to new destinations.

It's just making sure this valuable thing doesn't sink due to all the vectors of possible attack. And I was sitting through these meetings, and I hate those meetings because I'm not good at that. My brain doesn't help there. And I get super impatient. And, but now it's sitting there. I recognize like, holy shit. I didn't even know this was a problem that big companies have. If you had said it, I would have agreed, but I didn't understand.

I didn't really understand how much time and energy goes into shit like that. At what point did Twitch become this thing where it no longer required innovate? And maybe like, like saying they no longer innovate, innovate, I'm sure they would disagree. So we, and they're probably, they could be argued. They're like, well, we do innovate. And they're right. So that's maybe not the best word. but basically huge drastic changes kind of is what you're saying.

Yeah, I think the first three years, three to four years were more of the scrappy innovation, hustle, throw shit at the wall. Oh, there's something broken. I don't have time to fix it right now. I'm going to keep growing this thing. And like, yeah, we'll deal with that later, you know. I think that was the first three or four years. That's my guess.

And we'll bring Emmett on. I got to bring Emmett on. He's got a shit ton of business ideas too. How will they innovate? you know, Amazon has kind of definitely innovated even after, I mean, you know, Amazon had like 2,000 employees, I think after three years. How do you think that they were able to continue to innovate? And how do you think Twitch will be able to continue doing that? So I got put on basically the core, like one of the core, like innovation or like big like new things at Twitch. Because

basically Emmett was like, okay, this guy is like good at that. He's a startup guy. He's good at the zero to one phase. Most of our company, the people we hire are not the zero to one. They're the one to end, they're about growing an existing thing that's working and making it work better. This guy's good at making something that's not working or doesn't even exist today, exist or work. And so he put me on that. And basically what he did was he carved out a team, called it a strike team. Other companies call it a tiger team, a SWAT team, or whatever.

And so he carved out a strike team. He said, what do you need? Name my resources. He's like, boom, here's your resources. So I have basically a team of 30-something people. And I actually wanted less. He was like, don't you need more. I was like, no, no, no, less.

In fact, even 30 is way too many. I actually think I need less initially. And so we started smaller. So, yeah. We started smaller than that, but it quickly adds up. And so, and he was like, okay, you know, you guys are going to operate over here. You don't have to do these traditional processes. You're going to report directly to me.

And you have a clear mission and you have a blank check and break all the rules. Actually, you're new here. You don't even know the rules. Good. Go. And so that's what he did. And we've made like amazing progress to date because he was able to carve out a system like that. And I think other companies frequently do that.

Now this was in response to like a risk to the company. So companies are good at like, oh shit, there's a risk. Boom, assemble the SWAT team. Facebook always had this thing called lockdown. We're going to lockdown. And nobody leaves until we solve this problem type of thing. And so that's as a risk. Then there's other areas where it's like more opportunistic.

It's like, it'd be nice if like we should be innovating. I think that's harder for big companies. But companies are pretty good at responding to like existential threats and risks, at least more so than just continued innovation driven by their own motivation, you know. And Emmett, when Emmett started the company, he was a college kid. And it started as one thing. And then after six or eight years or something, I mean, a while evolved into Twitch. How do you think he has done going from being a college kid who's just like creating some stupid thing in his dorm room to now running a massive? I think he's great, but I didn't know him before.

So I only know him. I've only known the guy for a year. And in that year, I'm like, this guy's great. He does all these, you know, I can see. He still has the entrepreneurial edge. And they're like, in the meetings, he'll be like, cut the bullshit. Like, we need to go fast and like, why are we not going fast? And then we'll be like, oh, excuse, excuse, excuse.

And he's like, okay, cool. Let's kill all those excuses and let's do it. And he has those moments. But there's all the other shit you have to do to run a large company that's managing a P&L and you're trying to get profitable and as mature and you have to deal with these trust and safety issues. And like, I know that wasn't his base strengths. Like his strengths are he's super strategic.

He's super smart. He used to be a programmer. And now he's not programming. He does strategy stuff, but he's not the product person anymore. And he's got all these people in his company. And so I think he first surrounded himself with other people. So he hired Sarah,

who was the CEO of Pandora. She's the CEO of Twitch now. And she's a great operational, like, kind of she can whip an organization into shape. Then he brought in Dan. Dan was at Google. He ran YouTube's engineering and product, and then he was at Nextdoor as the CPO. So now he's the chief product officer essentially of Twitch. And Dan knows how to also run an organization.

So what Emmett didn't know, he brought in people to do it. And then he just kind of kept doing the thing he's good at, which I think is the right way to be. And like, you know what I said that thing about a brain and a vat? Like he literally just sits in a meeting room essentially all day and a different team comes in. And then they have a memo. His job is to read the memo and respond in a way that like helps the team be better in some way. and this dude, like, within five minutes, the memo is digested. He's figured out the, like, he's found the one inaccuracy of the memo.

He'll call that out. And he's found the two, like, important things of the memo, and he'll focus the discussion on that. He does that better than anyone. I think he does it better than anyone because he's probably been doing that one exercise for five years straight. And plus his brain already had, like, very high horsepower. So it's pretty impressive. I like, I enjoy talking about this because I think that when people who are listening and me included are building companies, you forget that you can build your own reality and you can kind of make it what

you want to make it. And I enjoy hearing about this because sometimes I'm wondering, I'm like, which reality would I enjoy? And so I like hearing about other people's reality. I also looked at his life now and I was like, I would not want that life. And I thought that's what I wanted, which is really actually important, right? When you realize your dream is actually a nightmare, not a dream? It's not that extreme.

But like the dream of what if I built a big company like a Twitter or a YouTube or a Twitch, And I was a CEO and we had this really unique, we were the market leader and we had this cool company culture and all this bullshit. When I see what his day to day is like, I'm like, okay, I think it'd be cool to build a thing like Twitch, but I wouldn't want to be the CEO of this. I don't want this headache. This headache is not a fun lifestyle for me. Well, I think people don't realize is that A, it's shockingly boring. And B, you actually have to just do a lot of negative stuff all the time. Yeah, the amount of time that he's thinking about what is the future of Twitch.

What's our strategy? How do we get there? How do we build an awesome culture? Is small on the pie chart compared to dealing with headache of the day, headache of the week, headache of the month, and then like recurring headache of the year. And like those are, it's mostly dealing with pain in the asses, either people or problems. And that's what he gets paid the big bucks to do, right? But I realized, whoa, shit, that's not what I would want as my lifestyle, which is good to know because that's what I was shooting for before. So it's good to see it and be like, oh, swerve.

I love hearing it. I love hearing this stuff. So I did one smart thing, and I recommend anyone does this. So I think I mentioned this before, but I asked Emmett, I said, hey, he sent me the earliest pitch decks, memos, meeting notes, anything you got from the early days of Twitch. Just go to your email, sort by earliest, and just forward me anything with an attachment. And he did. He sent me a bunch of stuff.

And so I saw the first slide decks when they're pivoting from Justin TV to Twitch. Or his user interview notes, when he called 100 streamers and was like, hey, how do I get you just switch to Twitch, you're on this other platform today and how they became the market leader. And just seeing the way he, and now it's funny because like now everything's so structured. It's six page memos, formatted in a certain way. Like you have to say, you don't say like growth is really strong. You have to say, we grew from X percent to Y percent, which is plus or minus this percent month over month, which is plus or minus our quarterly goal.

And that's the format. And if you ever say something like, you know, things are going well or this is a big risk or whatever, like you need to back everything up in this formatted way. But back then, like, obviously his players and theirs was like a startup, right? Like, it was just, you know. Shoot from the hip. Yeah, shoot from the hip. All right.

So then I went to this guy, Ethan, who's become kind of a cool little mentor of mine. Ethan is like L10, which is like one of the top levels under Bezos at Amazon. And he runs the prime division. And so I asked him, I said, so here's my email to Ethan. I said, AWS origins. That's the subject line. So I said, were you involved at the birth of AWS? Such an incredible business.

I said, was this a high profile big bet that they knew, oh, this could pay off big, let's bet big? Or was this like some unassuming little project with modest aspirations that happened to become a monster? I said, did this start with one of those six-page memos? Is that memo now framed and hung on the Hall of Fame walls? I've read some articles, but I want to know from the inside what actually went down. And so this is great. And so then he was like, I was around. I wasn't directly involved.

And so then he answered question by question. He goes, it started small as far as I know. know. He goes, there's three little services, you know, SimpleDB, S3, EC2, a database, storage, and compute. It started with a small team of engineers, which is like the Amazon two pizza team. I don't know if you ever heard that. Like, they want every team to be small enough where you get fed by two pizzas.

And he's like, you know, S3 came out first. It worked. It was, you know, modest fanfare when it launched. But then EC2 came out. It was an instant hit. Hockey stick growth. No looking back. We all realized, holy shit, this is actually going to be pretty big.

we started adding services and then those services we added were just we just looked at what people were doing on top of EC2 and oh they're hacking that together let's build a really good service that everyone can use that does exactly that or hey they're using the service in a way that's breaking it let's quickly protect the service and make sure it can't break in that way so he's like if you think about like a VC portfolio ADWS was three bets one was a we can get our money back with a little bit of profit acquisition exit like S3 was like a small win. EC2 was like a unicorn that went to IPO, and one was a small loss, which was simple DB. But you know how it goes? The unicorn pays for all the other losses that you had,

so it ended up working out. How does this match with the public lore or the public story? And then he lastly came, and I came back and I said, you know, this all kind of is interesting matches up. I said, how come AWS didn't do payments? You know, it seems like payments is a core infrastructural service. Stripe did that. Stripe was basically AWS payments and built like a 25 billion dollar company what happened you guys launched payments early on why didn't it work and he was like you know our failure in payments was due to us like wanting to narrowly control them um rather than our old playbook which was give up margin and and use that to get to mass adoption um every every payment thing we ever done is flopped we overthinking always um stripe was a big win but we didn't

catch it and um and then he was he was looking for the memo to send me the original memo to send me And I was like, I love being an internet historian in this way. I don't know if I like this stuff. I love hearing that. Another thing is that I was listening to a venture Medona or I forget, whichever guy gave Bezos, their seed money. And apparently he was telling a story when he interviewed him. He was like, Bezos was like, yeah, man, I think, I think this might be a hundred million dollar business. Right.

And I just love hearing those stories like that. Yeah. And there's people who tell these other folk stories. Like, so, for example, and you got to know that a lot of this is bullshit. So Chris Saka is pretty famous for this. He tells stories. He's like, the greatest entrepreneurs I know from the first conversations, it's like they could see in the future.

They knew. He's like, I remember I bumped into Kevin Sistram from Instagram in a co-working space, and he was telling me like, you know, he was showing me his little app that nobody would even use it. It was just on his phone. And he's like, yeah, like, when we get to 5 million members, we'll do this feature. When we get to 50 million, we'll roll out this feature. And he's like, I remember thinking 50 million, dude, you're going to be.

smoke and crack. Like, nobody even knows what the hell your app is. He's like, but he knew. And so it's like, it becomes a story. He's telling this on CNBC. And then I've heard Peter Thiel tell the story of like, you know, I was the first investor in Facebook and Facebook was doing well. And then Yahoo or whoever, I think Yahoo, offered them a billion dollars to sell.

And Mark came into the board meeting and was like, hey, you know, this shouldn't take long, maybe five, six minutes, just a formality. But yeah, we've received this offer. We're obviously not going to take it. And then so Peter Thiel's telling the story. story to make Zuck seem like this like, you know, this monster who just kind of always knew, this like, this omniscient, who person who just knew what the future was going to be and was so courageous to just turn it down, no-brainer.

And, you know, us mere mortals would never do that. We would be, like, so excited to get a billion dollar offer. But then you hear the real stories behind these things. And apparently, and I'm going to have Josh Elman come on and confirm this story. But from what I know, Zuck did say no to the initial offer. And then Facebook started doing kind of like, had like, kind of a down. year. Growth was kind of low. They took a down round. But before they took that, Zuck actually went back and actually agreed to a deal to sell to Yahoo for, I think, a billion dollars or $900 million. And it was

going to happen. And then like a week later or so, Yahoo came back and tried to renegotiate the deal down to $650 or $750 or something like that. And Zuck was like, all right, fuck this. Like, no, we're not taking that deal. And they went back to independent. But like, let's not forget, he was going to take that deal. And like, same thing with all these other, you know, famous stories of like, Oh, you know, Chris Oakenek talks about Uber. He's like, Travis Kalanick, he would come to my house in Tahoe, sit in my hot tub, and we'd talk about we're going to destroy the taxi industry and all this shit. Yeah, but also Travis Kalanick didn't think this was a big enough project to be CEO of and, like, recruited a random CEO of Twitter to kind of run his pet project until he realizes things is going to be big and then he took over. So like, let's not pretend like these things don't have humble origins and really humble beginnings.

And, you know, Zuck was like, you know, there's interviews of him on a college couch being like, why does this have to. expand past colleges. It's just a cool college thing. It doesn't have to be more. And like, now he's putting satellites on, you know, above the earth to give people in India internet access so they can use Facebook. Like, these things start humble. I think that like, there are occasions. Like, I've been reading Henry Ford's book where it's like, there's definitely people like him and Edison who are visionaries and it's like, oh, everyone in America should have lights. That those people exist. But then there are also people who are described as visionaries and it originally started out as like, isn't this neat, this little widget I made?

Yeah, Google, they wanted to sell for a million dollars. They were happy to take a million dollar offer and they just didn't get it. So they kept going. So I love hearing those stories. Okay, that's all I got. There's a long episode. Tell us how this was. I think this was maybe a C-minus episode.

Give us a grade. Just throw a letter at us on Twitter. Our Twitter handles will be in the description. Just tweet at us a letter grade or go on our Facebook group and give us a letter grade. I want to know what you guys thought of this. I guess we'll find out. But yeah, hope you enjoy this episode. As always.

Cool, see ya.