My First Million - A Billionaire's Guide To Going From $4/hour to $1 Billion Net Worth - Dharmesh Shah

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Get our Business Monetization Playbook: https://clickhubspot.com/monetization Episode 655: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Dharmesh Shah ( https://x.com/dharmesh ) about how to increase the odds of hitting your first million and your next million.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Intro (3:33) Lesson 1: Get leverage (9:26) Lesson 2: Be an asset, not a liability (13:40) Lesson 3: Get even closer to the value creation (19:42) Mini Masterclass on Power Negotiating (24:35) Dharmesh's little-known $2M failure (29:35) Lesson: Insight compression (34:08) Dharmesh sells Chat.com (41:06) Agents are the new apps (44:51) The future is hybrid teams (49:23) Agents Dharmesh uses today (53:20) Dharmesh's next big thing (1:02:58) Uncomfortable company values (1:05:33) Local maximum vs global maximum (1:06:57) RaaS: Results-as-a-Service (1:09:59) Being a first time billionaire — Links: • Agent AI - https://agent.ai/  • Harvey MacKay books - https://harveymackay.com/books/  • Getting To Yes - https://tinyurl.com/43ne6v97  • Connecting Dots - https://connectingdots.com/  • MFM Vault - https://frontend-production-f8b7.up.railway.app/  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

You've had a good quarter. HubSpot stock, I think hit an all-time high. You sold a domain to OpenAI. You came with a pod. You know, I don't care what they say about you, Demas. You're doing okay. I'm doing okay. I'm doing okay. Thank you. Okay, it's my first million. How do we use the hour so that it's your first million? If all you do is spend 100% of your time converting your labor into value and do not increase your leverage, you're not going to get anywhere.

Okay, so what were the things you invested in that had maybe the highest return for you, that did actually make you more high leverage. Never in my mind has been easier to get to that first million than right now. There was no good way to squeeze this and I can't not say it. I know I'm gonna regret. Okay. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel. The first is, well I'll call an unhidden agenda. And my unhidden agenda, so I have a picture of Venn diagram. I love Venn diagrams. Circle number one, I want to talk about things that I think I have useful things to say in some expertise. So we'll definitely talk about AI and agents and things like that. But the other circle is things that I think are borderline guaranteed to increase the probability of you, the audience, making your first million.

Thing number two is that in order to do that, you know, we have at HubSpot, we have a culture of humility. That's one of the core five values at HubSpot. And I've said this particular line to employees at HubSpot, I don't think I've ever said it outside of, but I'm going to solve for utility over humility. So if there's a way to say something that's going to be more useful as a result of, but in order to do that, I'm going to have to say something that's non-humble. I'm going to go ahead and say it even though it's non-humble because it increases the utility of it. And there will be a couple of moments that are completely non-utility and non-humble as well. So that's a couple of twists in there. Okay, so we have to start with this, which is

you're coming on as a guest, but you're coming on as the most prepared guest we've ever had. We did a pre-call. We discussed a bunch of things. Then I sent you some notes and I try to make it light.

I'm like, just maybe one or two things to think about before the episode because I never know how much work somebody wants to put in. You then send back a whole other doc that's like, hey, here's a bunch of stories,

ideas. I have some opening remarks. You have a whole bunch of stuff there. You went back and you watched your old episodes, which are some of the most popular episodes we've had. You read all the comments.

You incorporated the feedback. Is this just how you do everything? Not everything. I'll confession on this particular, in this particular case, not only did I watch my prior episodes read through the comments, but in the process of that, I saw the leaderboard on the My First Million YouTube channel. And I'm number five.

And you don't know this about me yet, but you will. It's like, I've never met a leaderboard that I didn't want to get on the top of, right? It's like, okay, what happened here? By the way, Sam, that's what when we, I was like, so are you coming on? What do you want to talk about? That's an area you know a lot about. And he was like, yes, but through the frame of,

okay, it's my first million. That's the name of the podcast. How do we use the hour so that it's your first million? So if you're listening to this, he's like, I can't guarantee you're going to do it, but I can increase whatever that probability was? Can I, in one hour,

tell you things that will increase your probability? That's a promise to make it. Someone in the YouTube comments had a recent episode, we had someone on it, and Sean and I both sat like this for like eight minutes. And someone was like, dude, Sean and Samber just flirting. They're just stared. They're at awe. I have a feeling we're going to be getting a lot of these.

Yeah, I'm going to just get my hands ready. All right, so where should we start, Darmish? So let's, and I'm not going to give you an autobiobry. What I'm going to do, though, is I'm going to take us back in time a little bit, because in order to kind of understand some of the lessons that I thought now in hindsight were sort of the most valuable for me. I didn't know this at the time I was living it because we often can't pick that up. But I think we'll be useful. So I'm going to go back to my first in regard to the U.S. I was in my early 20s. And I was here just on a, visit to my parents who were living there. I was in Indiana. And applied for a job at Pizza Hut, rejected, applied for a job at Big Lots, rejected, applied for a job at Red Roof Inn. And because I was Indian and my parents were actually running, like, they automatically assumed that I'd, like, I'd known things. I'd only been in the country for like three and a half days. Because Indians are famous, not hoteliers, but like motel ears. Yes, motel. And that's exactly what we had. We had a motel,

like, yes, and it was not even like a franchise motel. It was one of those. Anyway, and so this was for the night shift, right? So that might be partly why I got it. So it was like 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and that's the only thing that would work for me because I was taking classes during the day. And so a couple things out of that particular experience, and this I think will relate for a lot of folks. So in the early parts of most people's career, you're working retail, you're working some sort of job, and you have what I call your currency. And your currency is what's the kind of time value of your time. Like, oh, you're making $3.65 to $0.65 an hour, which is what I was making

the kind of early periods. And you're taking that kind of currency value, multiplying it by how much time you, how much labor you expend, how much time you spend, doing whatever it is that people are paying you money for. And that's pretty much the production value. That's how you create, you know, create some money in those early years. So mathematically, in that particular equation, there's only two ways to make more money. One is work more hours. And the other one is to raise the currency, raise the price that people are willing to. to pay for your time. Okay, great. And that time, I was looking for all the hours I could get. It's like, I want to work more hours. And if someone canceled someone, like, I will be there.

Just give me the hours. Like, put me in coach. I can't believe I made a sports reference. I don't do sports ball. But anyway, it worked. So here's sort of the kind of the lessons. Like, you start there and you're going to end up spending a large part of the early part of your life, let's so call it the first half, converting time into money in various shapes and That's effectively what you're going to be doing. And then you're going to spend the latter half of your life approximately, desperately trying to convert money back into time. That's what happens.

That's life. And so we go back to the yokem, converting time into money, expending the currency. There's going to be this automatic increase that happens in your currency simply as a result of tenure. As it turns out, companies pay more for experience than they were. So even if you're the same job doing rough through the same thing, you're going to get some marginal increase. Not much, but it's going to get. go up. Now my argument here is that in order to really kind of break in, like you're going to start to have to kind of accrue money. If you're in debt, you're going to have to get out of that first.

But you're going to need to get some sort of leverage. Leverage that says, okay, what can I, and not leverage in the kind of leveraged buyout, but leverage in the kind of Archimity sense. The guy as, you know, quote, Archbby's quote, is the, give me a lever long enough and a full chroma wish to place it, and I will move the world, or I shall move the world. And it was interesting about that, that quote particularly, and that's a physics thing, and I love math and physics-y things, is that, okay, so that fulcrum is actually very, very necessary. You need a point on which the leverage is going to pivot. And the degree of kind of amplification you get for your force, that's what leverage creates, is how far you are from the fulcrum. So the lesson is, as you're spending your time,

if all you do is spend 100% of your time converting your labor into value and do not increase your leverage, you're not going to get anywhere. So what you have to do, is you have to allocate some percentage of your time to say, even though someone's not paying for this particular time, I'm going to go read a book, I'm going to go do this, I'm going to do a seminar, I'm going to meet a friend, whatever it happens to be, you have to kind of make that investment, you have to carve it out, otherwise you never get the leverage necessary in order to make it that first million. That's like the number one less than. And the thing that I did that was very, very useful that I still carry to this day is that you sort of have to carve out

literally some amount of dollars for yourself and time and money are equal to me back then. And what I mean by that is, like, I'm going to take 10% of all the money that's coming in right now, I'm going to spend it on books, on things or whatever, that's going to kind of improve my value. And it's funny because even in my first shot, and we'll talk about this a little bit,

is like, they wouldn't get me like a fast enough computer, wouldn't get a computer. It's like, I don't care. I'm not looking for approval from anyone or whatever. Like, if something's in the way that I think will improve, like who I am and increase my currency, I will spend that money, I won't expense it, I don't care. What were the things you

invest in that had maybe the highest return for you that did actually make you more high leverage, that did make you more valuable, increase your rate? What were the top investments you made? Books were the highest, candidly, and I read... Which book, roughly?

So there was an author called Harvey McKay, who wrote some very kind of pedestrian business books now by today's standards, not sophisticated at all, but realized, Like at that age for me, it's like, this is brilliant. It makes so much sense. One of the books was titled How to Swim with Sharks Without Being Eating Alive. I think that was one of his...

Swim with the sharks without being eaten alive. Yes, exactly. There was another one that was less about business, but still, it's like everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten. And these are like basic, very, very, like, basic, basic things. But it's one of those that it's like if you're an alien from another planet, which is what I felt like a large part of my life, it's like, oh, so this is how the world works. kind of thing. It's like, you know, it seems shockingly obvious right now. It just wasn't shockingly obvious to me at the time.

All right. So that's kind of lesson number one. You need to go out and get leveraged. Lesson number two, so after my Red Roof instant, where I was night shifting, they had a computer there, which was one of the nice things to do your accounting and I had to close the books. That was part of my job. So that was some of my early exposure to computers.

But then I was able to get a job at U.S. Steel. No shit. That's pretty cool. And that was my first real programming job. They hired me as an actual software developer at US Steel. I was still going through school, working on my undergrad. And it was great. I loved the work.

But because I was in Indiana, the U.S. Steel plant that I was working at was in Gary, Indiana. And I don't know, things may have changed now. I don't know. Gary, Indiana worked at the top of the list of places you did not want to live, right? That was like the place you did not want to be. as it turns out Indiana overall was in a fine state, but it's like very northish and very cold

and I had just come over from India. And so I did a very me thing to do, which was like, okay, well, I'd have a job at U.S. Steel. It doesn't really matter. You know, I'm talking to a mainframe, I'm writing my code or whatever. Do they have other places? Like it's a big company.

As it turns out, U.S. Steel has a plant in Birmingham, Alabama. Did not know where it was. never been to Alabama. But one thing I did know was like, oh, it's more south than here. Thing number one. And number two is like, it's not Gary Indiana. So the mathematical odds of it being a worst place, because I look this up, is like, are slim to none. So Birmingham, Alabama, still not necessarily at the time best places to be.

But I'm like, so I requested a transfer. It's like, hey, I'm working on software. I know I'm new, but I see that you have a plant down in Birmingham, Alabama. Can I go work down there? And they said, sure, knock yourself out. So I get down to Alabama, I'm working for a U.S. deal, and I'm an impatient person, but I was like working. It's like, okay, well, and I was making, I think it was like around $27,000 a year, which was a lot better than I used to be making at Red Roof Inn. And it was a full-time job, like because I didn't have to like crowns for hours or anything like that.

It was an actual salary, which was awesome. The thing I learned, though, is like, okay, so how do I, like progress? Like, how do I kind of grow? and the thing I figured out, and this was said to me by kind of my manager, it almost said it in these kind of words, which is,

Darmesh, look, if you're not making steel, shipping steel, transporting steel, moving steel, or selling steel, you're overhead. And like, that's the time that the epiphany, like, sort of hit me. It's like, well, I don't want to be overhead.

I don't want to do that. And so then, like, this is, once again, I'm a very, very simplistic guy. It's like, okay, well, my thing is software development, where do I need to work where I'm not overhead? Right? And so then the kind of extrapolation is, oh, well, I need to work at a company where software is the actual product, just like steel is the actual product for UST, like to get closer to kind of what the actual value is. So I opened the Sunday paper, which is what we did back then. This is pre-internet days.

And I'm like, look for jobs at companies that are software companies. And so I applied for a job at a software company that happened to have a job at in the paper in Birmingham. and it was a place called Samgar Data Systems. It was a modified software company. Apply for a job there, got that job, which is awesome. And that was life-changing in of itself. It's like, okay, software companies, when it comes to software developers, are much better treating developers than non-software companies, as it turns out, as a rule.

So, like, this is awesome. And so the kind of the file away lesson here would be your value is kind of inversely proportional to the distance from the actual value creation, whatever it happens to be. So if you're not in there, find a way to get there. Whatever it happens. I'm not saying you have to be in software development,

but like the guy, like my manager had said, you have to be making steel, selling steel, or shipping steel, whatever. Everything else is sort of meta and is just overhead. And once again, this was a 90s, right? I think people have a more nuanced approach to how value gets created. But if you have a chance to get closer

to the actual customer culture of the actual product, you should take that. That will increase your leverage, increase your currency. So I'm working at Sundar as a software developer. And this is a good story. I'll share there's a high utility in this story. So I'm working there, and I'm making, I think it's around $40,000 a year at that time,

which this is early 90s, give or take. And Burmian Mama Labs, you know, that was actually pretty good money. So they paid me. And the thing I was doing is that Sundar's software product was like a mainframe product. So they had the character mode terminals that you guys see in the movies now. well, there's still lean frames out there, but most normal people don't have to interact with them. But anyway, but they were in the process of trying to build a graphical user interface,

which is the latest thing back then, that interacted with their mainframe. They wanted to offer like a Windows kind of GUI on top of their mainframe. So my job was to take this character mode screen and create, using this drag-and-drop tool, a GUI equivalent of that particular screen. There were hundreds of screens in the SunGuard product. It was a big kind of multimillion-dollar product.

And I'm like, well, this is stupid easy. And we had consultants on there because they were trying to kind of accelerate the development. And the consultant, I remember this vividly, was making $125 an hour to do this, what I thought of as being relatively wrote work. Right? I'm like two months into the job. So I go to my boss and I'm like, you know, we're paying these guys $125 an hour. And all they're really doing is dragging, dropping based on this character mode screen or whatever.

This is not software development. and by the way, this is so trivial. My brother, who has not graduated high school yet, he works at the Piggly Wiggly, which is a grocery chain down the South, even he could do this like in a day. That's how, why are we paying these people $125 an hour does not make any sense? And so my boss said, bring him in.

So I brought my brother in. He's 17. Still has a graduated high school. Showed him what we're doing. It's like, okay, look at the screen over here. Do this over here. You drag and drop in here. and I'll review your work at the end of the day.

We didn't know what to pay him, so we paid him $5 an hour. So my brother starts working there. I'm there, and we're cranking along, kind of building this new product. I hired all my classmates from undergrad because that team is growing.

We're trying to doing this new product at Semgard. And I continually kind of get impatient. I'm like, okay, well, now I'm at a software company. Now I know the value that I'm creating. It's like, okay, like, what gives? And I'm so I'm constantly kind of going back to them. It's like, what do I have to do? I'm still individual contributor, by the way.

I'm not managing anybody. But I get the way this stuff is working. And so they were actually super, super nice and generous. And so they kind of bumped me and kept bumping me. And it was only there for like, I think it was like 14 months or something like that. And so eventually they were paying me like a quarter million dollars a year in Birmingham, Alabama in the early 90s. And I've only been there a year and a half because I was able to kind of connect the dots on the value being created. And then I sort of got tired of, because I think it was,

just kind of wrong of me to cause they go back to them because they were paying me like really well, right? It's like, okay, well, I sort of hit my ceiling of what's reasonable now for me to ask of this software company to pay me. It's like, okay, well, what do I have to do? It's like, well, I have to get closer to the value creation or whatever. It's like start my own software company. That was the kind of, I had no product idea that's like, oh, this is the thing I need

to do. Like I thought that went into my head is like, oh, in order for me to like do better and kind of get more leverage on my time, I'm going to now. have to leave Sundarred and go do my own thing and figure out like software to build and go do this. And the one thing I do know like how to do is make developers happy. Because I'd hired, you know, I hire all my friends. I like, I know what makes a developer click. And that was the had genesis of my first startup. And the lesson here is that I'm going to have to share this, this one one story. I'm going to regret this because I'm going to share it. It's a good story.

So in one of those kind of discussions with my manager, when I'm going back, it's like, okay, like what else do I have to do? I mean, I didn't have any particular numbers in line. By the way, you're like 27 at this point? 26, 25. Yeah, roughly, yeah, roughly 27. Somewhere in my, yep, 25 or 30.

And so after a point, it was starting to get ridiculous. So he came back like Darmish, do you really think you're going to find that many companies that are going to pay you X amount of, like $200,000 or whatever it was that would have taken in that conversation? and this kind of came to me in the moment and the line I came back with

was, well, as it turns out, this is the very kind of mathematical side of me, it's like, I really don't need to find that many companies that will pay me $200,000 a year. I just need to find one. And I think there's one out there. That's all, and it wasn't on the threat. It was a very, just a very measured, like, logical,

like a Spock-like response, right? Like, that's not the function we're solving for. We're not solving for, you know, what is the local maxima in terms of, how many companies are out there that will pay, you know, and what's the standard distribution? None of that matters. Like, I don't need to find, like, 100 of them.

Like, I'm mobile. I'm willing to go anywhere. It's like, I'm willing to bet money that if I looked, I could find one, right? Like, that's, like, the most nerdy. You agreed with them in a way, right? He's like, do you think you find 100 companies out here that are willing to pay you this?

Like, no. But the good news is I didn't need 100. I need one. And I believe that there's one out there. And that, you know, that applies to dating. That applies to being successful at one bit, you know, making one business work. will do enough to change your life.

And so there's two lessons to draw from that. One is the power of negotiation, which is one of my favorite books, most recommended books, is getting to yes, which from the Harvard negotiation project. That's the one book I think I've read like four times now. I reread it like every few years.

Can you give us a quick insights for anybody who hasn't read the book, like me? What's an insight from there that would make me a better negotiator? Most people, when they think of a negotiation, they think about this kind of adversarial. It's me. It's a zero-sum game. This is what's happening. And as it turns out, most negotiations, both in life and in business, are actually not like that.

And that first-order thinking in terms of like, oh, like, you know, my objective is to get the lowest price and their objective is to get the highest price for the thing I'm trying to buy for them, whether it's a house or whatever. And that's not the way to think about it. The way to think about it is to identify what your actual needs are. What's truly the thing? If you're solving for price, fine, but recognize that. And do your best identify what the other party's needs are, because there is often, very, very often, a path that actually will optimize for both of you,

and that's actually a better path than just try to divide the pie and fighting over price or whatever. There might be something else that's actually more important, right? And so this applies to so many different situations. And I'll give you a tangible example that I think a mistake companies make building their operating system in terms of how they run. It was something that HubSpot has taken to heart

is that we automatically think that what people are solving for is like compensation number one, and autonomy and discretion and scope. And those are all important. As it turns out, the number one on the feature list of what people want is actually flexibility. Like, they would trade a lot of other things in exchange for flexibility, right?

And if you could just get to the bottom of that, if you understand that, then you can sort of trade off other things that might actually have a higher price to you. It's like, but flexibility is like, okay, like we can do that. Yeah, there's a cost to it. But the cost of not provide a flexibility is actually much higher because the calendar density is going to be lower. We're going to have to pay more, all things being equal. But anyway, that's the big lesson from getting to yes. There's a bunch of other ones that it's an easy read too, by the way. It's not a particularly

like dense, heavy read. Even if you're not in business, if you're just in life, it's a book worth reading. When Jeremy Giffin came on the podcast, he said it, he said the same idea. Definitely. he goes, we asked him, what did he learn about negotiating from Chris Barling, who is one of the guys at Tiny? And he said, I used to think negotiating is like this, two people sitting across each other at the table, sort of, I want this, no, I want this, the adversarial thing. He goes, Chris just told me, imagine you're both sitting on the same side of the table and you're looking at the other side of the table and there's the problem. And you're both looking at the problem and saying, oh, okay. So the problem is that you're looking for this and I'm looking for this. And then there's this other thing we haven't even discussed yet. How can we just, how can we together figure out this problem? And fundamentally just taking a different, taking that lens will allow you to be more successful in negotiation. Let's say you're negotiating something that I think is a what I would call a non-commodicized thing. It's hard to figure out the price. It's a unique property. It could be a house somewhere where there's not a hundred house on the streets, just something that's unique and hard to find comparables on, whether it's real. It doesn't matter

what it is. The temptation is to go in as a buyer and say, well, you know, it's got this wrong with it, this is wrong with it, that's wrong with it. I'm going to have to fix that. And it's like it's, you know, and to try to drive the buyer's expectations down. That's actually not the optimal approach. In this. situation, these kinds of situations. And the reason is, the visceral reaction most people have that are sitting on a unique property like that is, oh, like he doesn't actually understand the value. He's poking at holes all, but he doesn't get the fact that this, this, this, and the other thing. What I need to do is find someone that actually appreciates the value of this thing,

and then I'll do better on the price, right? And there's no objective value because there's no comparable. Like, no one really knows what the actual fair value. Now, flipped out on his head, let's say one of that same property, I'm like, this place is, is fantastic. I love it. Let me tell you the things I love about it. Let me tell you why. I am like all in love with this thing that you're selling right now. And you go through that. And it has to be authentic, has to be genuine. I'm not making this up. And then I put my price out there. It's like, you know, here's what it is. Now the seller has to say, okay, well, am I really going to find, like, I don't know what the price is. This person seems relatively

cluelful. He loves this place. Am I going to find someone else that loves it more than Darmesh loves it? Probably not. Like he sold he gets this thing and whatever. So maybe his price is probably what the fair price should be. Right? Like that, he seemed like a reasonable guy. So that's a, it takes people's guards out. And this only works, by the way, when you have one of those kind of rare, it's hard to find comps or whatever.

The price is not really objectively known. It's hard to kind of triangulate to a, like a quote unquote true price. Anyway, that's my. That's great. Our negotiating tip of the day. Okay, great. And so you told me something when we were talking before about this first company. And you said, okay, so I did this company.

And actually, maybe there's more in that first company, but you told me something great that I want to bring up, which is then you did a second company. And this was one that I don't even know if it's on your LinkedIn. You're like, this is my embarrassing company. It's my, things didn't go well. And Sam, the story he told was he was like, I did the first company when I just didn't know,

I didn't know anything about anything. So I'm clueless, blah, blah, blah. We're just making up as we go, super scrappy. And it kind of worked. It worked. Then he's like, I'm going to do the second one. But now I'm so much smarter. Now I actually know what I'm doing.

I have some experience. I'm going to do things the right way this time. I'm going to go raise money. I'm going to hire better people. And I'm going to get a better off. I want to do these other things. I'm going to do it proper. And then I guess that that business, you can tell the story here, but it didn't work.

But you said some great line. You go, just because you were, just because I was ignorant doesn't mean I was wrong. Meaning that first time I did that first business, I was ignorant. I didn't know anything. But it doesn't mean I was wrong. Can you unpack that idea? Let's say there was an objective truth function that says, okay, this was, and this was, in this particular situation, the right decision to make in whatever situation you're in right now,

that objective truth function, if we had run against all the decisions I made in that first startup, I think my hit rate was actually pretty high. And the hit rate of lots of founders, because our natural instincts in that situation actually turned out to be good instincts, like being, like, resourceful, and not kind of spending too quickly or whatever, taking your time, doing all the things that kind of came as natural instinct. And I was not a natural born entrepreneur. It's probably likely why I have the insecurity. But in something like a startup or entrepreneurship, there's a bunch of decisions you're going to make. A lot of them maybe may or may not be optimal, but what was definitely suboptimal in hindsight was second guessing myself on the second

month. It's like, I'm going to do the opposite of what I did my first one because it's like, what a chump I was back then. So I'm going to go, I'm going to do a speed run. I'm going to do it faster. I'm going to write a $500,000 check to myself on day one to fund the thing or whatever. is like, who has time? We don't have time to go through those kind of cycles or whatever. Really quick. I remember a time in high school, I had this like hillbilly friend that had like a huge chest because he was like so strong at bench pressing. And we went to like an exercise class. And the teacher was like, the best way to get strong in your chest is to do incline bench press at a 30 degree angle. A 30 degree is so much better than a 45 degree and so much better than a 10 degree. And my redneck friend who didn't know anything, he just would go down and lift weights. He was like, I must have been doing them at 30 degrees because I'm strong as shit. Like, it's like the same thing.

It doesn't matter like if you know what you're doing or not. It's always to get the end result. What was your, what was the second company? I had no idea that you had a failure under your belt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

I had, so it was a kind of Facebook before Facebook for small business. It was like effectively like a CRM. So I've been working in CRM now for a long, long time built for small businesses. And this was right in like the 2000 time frame. So right as the bubble. was bursting, and the first company was not an internet company. This was. It was a web-based information management tool for small businesses around customer. What was it called? It was called Captivo, C-A-P-T-I-V-O. How much did you raise? And how long did it last before you

shuttered it? So, once again, because I was going to do things differently this time, I wrote the first $500,000 check, and I kept writing checks. I'm like, I have money. Why would I not just fund of myself? Can you say, how much did you, how much did you have and how much of that did you put into this second one. Can you say that? I think I probably put in about two million, I'll say, give or take. I found, I googled Captivo Darmash, and I found a PDF that has a lot of handwriting on it, and it looks like it's a case study for Sloan. And you're trying to make a point, and you said, in 99, I found my second startup called Captivo. This is what it was. It was in many aspects,

similar to Salesforce.com, and about two years in the product development and over a million dollars of capital invested, mostly of my own. Captivo could still not gain any significant traction and ultimately it was sold in the product and it didn't work out. And so this is like the only thing that I can find about Captivo on the internet is a case study that you helped write. By the way, and it's like we sort of take it for granted now, partly why, and it's not like, you know, I'm not trying to hide things. But the internet wasn't as big a deal back then. So yeah, I wasn't blogging or no one was blogging. So it was like, okay, well, why would you just say things? Like, where are you going to save them to?

But so one of the kind of interesting things, as far as kind of closing out that particular chapter, what ended up happening, I'm going to make my third sportsball reference. And this one's a golf one. It was a long put to par. What happened was I took that company Captivo, merged it into my first startup, which I had not sold yet. So I was doing two, a few starts at the same time, which is not something one should do. And then ended up selling the kind of merged entity. So I ended up making my money back for all intents and purposes.

so I didn't really lose anything, but it was a very, very long Pucketapar. I just, yeah. So the big idea so far where at the beginning, you're going to trade time for money. And then at some point in your life, you're going to desperately start trying to trade money back for time.

That's life. I think that's a golden nugget. The second one is, cool, you can either get more hours or increase the value of per hour. And that's where you started taking budget and investing it in books and training and seminar, whatever, whatever you can try to do

to increase your own value. You get the job. job at U.S. Steel, that's where you realize you're either an asset or a liability to this company. You're either overhead or you're the one actually creating value. If you want to be higher leverage, you've got to be closer to where the actual value is created. So then you switch, you do a software company, you do that. The lesson around negotiation. So go back and ask for more and specifically not just ask for more, but what would it take for me to be making more? It's more like the question you asked your boss. Is that right? The actual lesson I drew from that is the power of

to reduce and frame something in a very simple, like, inarguable way, right? Like, the fact that it was so punchy, right? Like, it was just that one sense, I don't need to find a bunch of companies. I just need to find one, and I think I can, right? Like, had that been, like, a five-minute-long conversation, me going back and forth or whatever and trying to make an argument, I don't think it would have worked. What made it work was the fact, and this, I think, is a very, very, it's a, like anything else,

it's a developable skill. And you are actually, Sean, are the master of this is being able to what I call like insight compression, right? And I just made that up. It says, can you take some big idea and kind of boil it down, boil it down to like, it's the essence is still captured and it's just a dense distillation, for lack of a better term, of that idea of that concept, down to something really simple

because the simpler you can make it, the more likely it is to be transmissible to be communicated to be whatever. And this applies to so many, obviously applies to, you know, copywriting and marketing and things like that applies to venture pitches, applies to so many things. By the way, I think one good point to make in this is this isn't just a mindset you had when you were young and broke. You took my power writing course a few years ago. Do this guy's a, you're a founder of a $20, $30 billion public company. He's sitting here in the course learning and seeing, can I learn something about writing? Can I get a little bit better at this one skill?

You were still doing that now, not just when you were 20 years old. It's like, oh, I'm a beginner. I got to like, you know, start to level up. It seemed like you continued doing it. A guy came on the podcast the other day. Mike Posner, he's a musical artist. He talked about he had had his first song go huge. So he thought, oh, that's what I do. I make songs, they blow up.

That's, that's me. I guess it's hard for these other people. It was not hard for me. And so the first song is like, you know, whatever, five times platinum. His second song actually was still like double platinum, but felt like a huge failure. Third song, single platinum. He's like, I'm going downhill. And then the studio shelves them.

And for years, they're like, It's too expensive for you to even produce the music. So we're just going to keep you, you know, you're on the shelf in the music industry. I was like, what were you doing during that time? And I thought he would just say he was depressed eating Cheetos on the couch. He's like, yeah, I was depressed eating Cheetos on the couch. And then I dusted off the Cheeto dust for a minute. He's like, and I enrolled in at Berkeley College for music.

And he's like, I was learning to improve my singing. He's my ability to play instruments. I couldn't play the guitar before that. So I learned to play the guitar. And he's like, yeah, I just figured, okay, this period of my life, I'll just sharpened up my skill. I've become a better artist. And he's like, I would go to these classes with a bunch of college kids. And here I am, you know, Grammy Award winning.

I've been on the charts. I've made millions of dollars as an artist. And there's better singers in here than me. And he's like, it was a real mind fuck. But what I took from that whole story was, damn, that's kind of inspiring. Like this guy used that time to sharpen his skills. I think a lot of adults just stop. I think they just, oh, that's stuff you do when you're young and you just don't need to invest in learning

anymore after that. So talking about the power writing course that you have and then just kind of writing and copywriting generally is that the return on time for developing writing, I have not found the ceiling yet, is that it is just so high. I cannot describe to people. Like if you could do nothing else, let's say you had five hours to invest in the next month or something like that, you could spend it all on learning how to write well. And future you will look back on those five hours and say, boy, that was a great use of five hours, right? or 10-hour whatever the number is. Because that's what I consider it to be just an amplifier of things. It will make you a better thinker, better communicator, better picture, better salesperson, better everything.

We were talking about being close to the action. I don't remember if you talked about this on the pod or if you talked about it just privately. But I had known that you bought chat.com. And we have known that you've been about agents. I think last podcast we talked about. vectors and things like that. I think we mentioned agents, and it seems like that's like a big thing to you right now. And speaking of being close to the action, you bought this thing, chat.com. I think you said on the podcast, it was something like $10 million or maybe you said eight figures,

I forget. And then it comes out like two weeks ago that you sold the domain chat.com to open AI for around eight figures. And I think it said it was like all. Well, we should add one thing. When he came on the pod, you had just bought it. And we were like, what are you going to do with it? You're like, not super sure. I'm going to try some things. But I just think it's a great domain and think it's a great investment.

And you just, you had made a bet, but you didn't have the, it's not like you had it all figured out and it was all de-risked. You made that bet then. Now here's the update. What happened? Okay.

So a couple of things just kind of, so I think the time I went on the pod was, like, within like, 72 hours of when that kind of purchase that happened. So it was just done. it was not distilled, and I actually had a plan for it. I was going to build a chat application on top of the GPT algorithm, similar chat GPT.

And the thesis, and there have been two times where I accidentally competed with OpenEI, which I don't advise anyone to ever do. He's literally on the top of my list of people I'd ever want to compete with is, Sam Altman, just too smart and even more red-blood capitalist than I am, actually. And I mean that in the most positive way.

So my original thought was, it's like, okay, they put this chat GPT thing out there. It's a demo app, right? It's like it's there to demonstrate the power of large language models and the underlying GPT algorithm, but Open AI is a platform company.

And there have been stories about these kinds of thing, which is, oh, someone invents a cool new technology. I think PayPal started that way. They had some payment transfer thing and they had an app that says, oh, here's our encryption technology demonstrated by me sending you money over a Palm Pilot or something like that.

And they're like, oh, well, that encryptory we don't care about. We care about the actual transfer of money part. Is it the story with everybody and I, like they, you know, were doing this thing to sell to software companies? And then someone was like, dude, can you just make this thing so we could show people what we're working on? Yeah, that's what, and even Sam has kind of got on record and said that, right? They had not expected it to kind of go. It's like, this is a way for us to demonstrate the technology and kind of make it accessible so people can try it.

And so it sort of caught them off guard as well, right? Which is like, this was not, it was not expected they were going to get tens of millions. And it was 100 million users within a couple of months. But in the back of my head, I'm like, okay, well, that's great. but they're going to go back to being a platform company, but someone should actually create something that is that any user application that sits on top of LLM like GPT3 at the time.

And then it just still happens. It's one of those, the universe sort of configured itself, and like chat dot.com in a random event became available for sale for the first time in like 30 years. I've never been actually used before. And I'm like, I need to do this. It was like that was kind of thing number one.

It's like I could use it for that. Thing number two, kind of rationalization to myself is that, like, this is the cover charge to get into the AI party that people will take me seriously. It's like, like, no one really knew me in that space because I'm not from that world. You know, didn't go to machine learning school at Stanford or something like that. But that's sort of something that's sort of hard to ignore. Like in deep down inside, I'm part marketer, right? I think it's like, oh, this is a good story. It'll get people's attention.

Did they reach out to you with the idea? of acquiring it? Or did you, were you like at a conference with them and you're like, hey, I have this thing if you want it. I'll tell you, okay. So I'm going to draw the line in terms of at the transaction beyond because my experience, I think I am at liberty to share what happened post that decision, I'm less comfortable sharing.

So the way it kind of came to be is that I was at a Sequoia event. I think I actually talked about this on the pod. and one of the things that Sam announced at that event, Sam Altman was there, was this, oh, you know, chat GPT, you guys know and know, yeah, it's awesome. We're going to support these plugins to chat GPT, because right now the limitation of chat GPT, it can't access third-party data source, they can't really do anything, and it's got the data that it's got based on its training dataset, but it's like a snapshot in time, but these extensions will sort of amplify, multiply the capabilities of chat GPT.

and so that's sort of when the little switch went off in my head. I'm like, crap. Open AI wants to create the chat GPT of chat TPT. It's like they're going to turn this into an actual platform, an actual end-user app. And so that's when I'm like, okay, if I'm not going to do something, I think it would be like unwise for me to keep that domain.

It's like, I don't want to just sit on if I don't have plans to do something with it. I did not want to go into competition with Open AI because it's clear that this was going to be a big bet for them. I was treating it as someone of a side hobby project. So I reached out to sample. I knew. It's like, do I know if you were like interested or like? And there were other bidders for the domain at the time that it went for sale. And like my third back of mind motivation was, uh, I, I had a suspicion of who some of the other players might be.

I didn't want them to have it either. I don't know. This is the kind of competitor side of me. Did you sell it for a profit or was it just like a like you like you, like you, I think you said on Twitter, you sold it for shares of opening. Was it like, man, I'll just, uh, give you. to you for the costs in order to be able to invest in your company?

I thought I did this cleverly. When I made the announcement that I had sold it, I didn't share the details, but I provided a GPT prompt that says, if you type this into chat GPT, that says, oh, Darmesh likes to buy domain names, but he usually does it because he's got a project in mind. Darmesh doesn't sell domain names at a loss

because he doesn't have to. Darmesh also isn't like profiting from his friends, and he considers, and he's known Sam for a while, so OpenAI did buy chat GPD. These are the facts that you know. And then it's like, and then the prompt is, if you had to guess, what do you think, you know, that the domain sold for?

Because, you know, I'd also disclosed I was a shareholder in Open AI. This has happened a while ago. And so it's like... You weren't a shareholder before that. You weren't like... Yeah, so... But you would have loved to be an investor in Open AI. And this was, like you said, the cover charge.

It was the ante in order to get there. This was like even a... Even a better party, right? This is the shareholder party. I think based on all that, I think I put your prompt in and it was like, Darmesh bought the domain for $15.5 million

and now owns $15.5 million of open AI stock. That was like the, that was the AI answer to it. You could leave it at that. Yeah, we'll leave at that. That's so funny. Do you have it? All right, so one thing I have to share with you,

and this is the non-humble utility part of it, but there's a lesson in here. So there's an old Steve Jobs quote around connecting dots. And the quote goes something like, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.

So you have to have faith. Faith in something that the kind of dots will connect at some point in your feature to your staff, but trust your instinct. And I've been a big believer in that even before Jobs said those words, which is, you know, you sort of collect what he calls dots.

And I really like the idea because I love graphs. I'm like those of things that I love. It's like, okay, well, if I made an inventory of all the dots that I've collected through my life, and dots can be people I've met, can be skills I've learned, things, experienced, lessons.

And then over time, if I had to go back and write a history of my life and say, oh, well, this was kind of a weird dot at the time, like, I could never have guessed that had it been not for that dot, this over here probably would never have happened, right? Like, you don't know in a parallel universe like what was actually going to just take,

but I can tell you for a fact that the universe as it exists right now, would not have happened to have that particular dot not been collected, that I had not collected it. And so my big lesson here is that you have to spend some amount of your time. And it's the same kind of lesson, just phrased differently, around investing in those dots that may or may not make sense at the time that you're doing them.

But they feel right. They feel like they could have something. And it doesn't have to all be kind of modatically diabolical and capitalist. Sometimes it's just like, I want to collect this dot because I love this. I believe it. I have convicted. Whatever it is, right? It's like it's you.

It's your time of the planet. It's your money. Whatever it is you're doing, you should be able to kind of collect those dots. but if you kind of trust your instincts, and not all the dots are going to work out, and this is the beauty of these kinds of things, is that you don't need for all of them to work. You just need one or two to work really well, and that's it.

Like, that's literally it, right? I'll use a sports reference. In basketball, there's people who you say have a nose for the ball. They just know where the ball is going to bounce. They know where to be. The ball just sort of always ends up in their hand. They end up in the right spot. You talked about your first job application was to Pizza Hut.

Back when you're just moved to the country. type of thing. But pretty quickly you found yourself in software development in the 90s, which is arguably the best place to be. Then you said in 2000, you started a web internet company. Internet was the next best place to be after that. Then you create HubSpot, which was a cloud SaaS company, which is arguably the next best place to be for that next decade. And now you just sold chat, chat.com to open AI. You own a bunch of open AI and you were talking about AI agents. and I would say that seems like in this decade the best place to be. And so I view you as somebody who has a nose for the ball.

And what I mean by that is like the frontier that you're interested in seems to be the frontier where all of the action and the value and the trillion dollar companies are going to get created, which means if the trillion dollar companies are created, that means the tens of billions of dollars companies are going to be created, the billion dollars, the $100 million and the $10 million companies also. It just means it's the target rich environment. So I think that when you say this is the thing I'm most interested in, we should pay attention. All right. Tell us why agents are the thing we should pay attention to.

Yeah. And I'm kind of bringing it back to the kind of early just as a thank you for the lead in. This is that that was great. Is that, you know, we talk about you, the audience making your first million or your next million if you're further along in the journey. Is that you know, that first one is almost always harder than subsequent ones. And that's not counterintuitive at all. I will say this, though, is that never in my mind has been easier to get to that first million that it's going to be here, like, as we're living our lives right now. And part of that is what agents unlock. So let's talk about agents. We'll talk about what they are. Why is such a massive opportunity and what you, the audience should do about it. Okay, so we'll take a step back to last year. Last year was all about chat. And it's like, and everyone's used chat, GPT, we all get it. We type in a prompt. Something comes back. Awesome. And that's what's a very kind of interactive approach to the use of AI, right? Like you type up, it's like, oh, give me a blog post or do this for me, and it comes back

with a response, and you may do a follow-up. But it's effectively this kind of back-and-forth interaction model with AI. What Asians are, and as a result of that kind of interactive model, the tasks that you assign AI are generally more discreet. That says, okay, do this for me. There's a single artifact, produce a blog post, generate image, whatever happens to be. What agents are, kind of very simply, are it's AI software that can accomplish higher level goals requiring multiple tasks, I mean, multiple steps. So it's not just a one shot, give me a blog post, and it comes back with a blog post. It's like, I want you to do this thing, and that thing may require 10 steps. And each of those things, as we were just talking about earlier, it might need to functionally decompose everything in order to accomplish that higher goal. It has to have memory, has to do all these things in order to kind of make that possible.

but that's what an AI agent is. And right now we're going to talk about agents as it currently stands. My expectation is that agents are the new apps. It's just software, right? So when mobile came along, it's like, oh, there's an app for that. There's an app. It's like not that far of the distant future. Like, everything is going to be.

There's going to be hundreds of thousands of millions of agents, right? The same way that there's lots and lots of apps out there. So think about an agent if it's simpler to do that. It's like it's just an AI app that happens. happens to do really high order or can do high order goals requiring multiple steps. So the thing I think without getting into agent.a.I.

too much. Here's kind of my view of the world in terms of how this is going to shape out. There's lots of debate going around, oh, in order for it to be a true AI agent, it has to be autonomous. You can't have, you know, it's like you just have to be able to give it a goal. I'm more pragmatic than that.

I don't think that's a requirement in order for something to be called an agent. But here's the important. part is that, so if you kind of pull out that thread, the way the world looks soon, is that we will have hybrid teams that consist of humans and consist of AI agents. And the easiest simplest, and therefore in my, I'm going to say this with some conviction because it's better to do it that way, the easiest way to pull that off and the simplest way to describe it is if you think

of the digital agent as a digital team member, because that's the easiest way to get get there from here. It's like, okay, if you just say, I'm just going to hand it over and the agent's going to create the, like, just do all the things. There's going to be no humans. Yeah, that might happen someday, but it's probably not going to happen as a direct jump from where we are today. What's likely going to happen is that individual tasks will get automated and we will start

injecting and having these hybrid teams. In the same way, we had hybrid teams before we had all full-time employees, like, oh, I'm going to hire a freelancer for three months to do this because we don't need them forever or whatever, for whatever reason. You did that. And they're like, that's okay. They don't work in the office. that we had a hybrid from a geographic perspective

and now we're going to have hybrid from a carbon-based life form versus non-carbon-based life form perspective. It's basically like this. It's like, we've got guests coming over. And now my wife decomposes that into, okay, we need to clean the kitchen, we need to clean this area, and we need to get food.

We need to order food. And so she tells me, load the dishwasher. I go load the dishwasher. Then I hand it over to my agent, my dishwasher agent, who then will wash those dishes. And so I'm kind of the,

she decomposes it. I'm a human in the loop. I'm doing one step that ideally we could have another robot that loads the dishwasher, but for now, I do that. But the dishwasher is better at doing the dishes than I even was

and will do it well every single time. I trust that agent to do it. That's what the inside of companies is going to look like. Yes. And it might be that, you know, I think we will have humans

doing the review and approval for a vast majority of tasks, right? So I think the digital team members, for lack of a better term, going to be doing lower level tasks to start with, because that's the things we can trust them with. It's like, okay, well, the stakes are much, much lower. It's like, okay, produce 10 versions of this blog article. It's really super important for my business. But then let me pick the one that's

actually going to go out. And then let's like pick the one that's going to go out because I'm a step in the process, the human doing that, then the post-production maybe is all digital. We don't know, right? Give us an example of an agent you're using that, like, you actually use now, because, you know, on a day-to-day basis or week-to-week basis is actually, you know, live. It's working. It's not just a cool demo. I have a nice simple example. I have an agent that says, so I really like this episode of, let's say, my first million.

And I recall hearing something about X, like some words stuck into my mind. And I want to write a LinkedIn post based on that. But here's what I want to happen. I want to, all I'm going to give it as input, this is the instructions kind of MPC

model, right? It's like, okay, here's what you get from me is a YouTube video. What I want is an output, is a LinkedIn post that's going to do well, by some definition of do well. We have training data on that. Okay. What it's going to do is going to say, okay, first step one, pull the transcript from a YouTube video. Step two, figure out who the players are.

Step three, highlight the things that are quote-worthy, tweet-worthy, remark-worthy, whatever it happens to be. Step four, figure out what the hell Darbache was actually asking about. There was a snippet in there that you made reference to. Click that as well. Put that all into the thing. Now go say, okay, like, what style happens to work well on LinkedIn, specifically? I was like, write me a 200-word prompt

that describes the language in the style, whether it's bullet points, whether it uses emojis, doesn't use them like what works, have an agent that does that, like a style creator thing, whatever. Take all of that and now produce a LinkedIn post and just give it to me. And so you do that. You have a thing that does that?

I have a thing that does that. And by the way, the really fun part about this, it's like Lego bricks, right? So I have an agent that does a YouTube transcript. Raltly straightforward. But it's a better YouTube transcript than the one that you would just get copying off the web because there's an LLM involved.

It's like, I want a YouTube transcript that has chapter headings, which is not going to be in a transcript. That's going to bowl things that are actual quotes or whatever. It's going to format it in a way that's human consumable. Way better transcript than the regular transcript

to get out of YouTube. So like, check this out, Darmesh. Have you seen this? Go to MFMVolt.com. My friend, my friend Greg, is building this. And it's not ready for, you know, the big time, but here we are. Let's do it. So MFMVault.com, you land here.

So what he built basically a site that kind of works like what you described, just for specifically my first million podcast and fans. Okay, so he's like, all right. He was like, I don't just want summaries. I want, he's like, you know, I like MFM because he's got ideas, it's got frameworks, it's got stories. And those are like the big things that he really cared about. So if I just go, like, first he's got just like a bunch of,

and AI is basically extracting those from every episode. It's like searching for frameworks, searching for stories, et cetera. But let me just show you this. If I go to episodes, we'll try this live, see if this works. And I typed Darmesh. And this is our last episode we did in 2023. So it's got the overall summary with chapter titles, like you said here. But check this out.

So if I go to stories, it's like chat spots at $1 sale. Pandora's manual musicians. It's like the 17-year evolution of chat. And if I click that, it'll take me to that moment, but it'll also summarize it. There's also frameworks in here, like an AI immersion week. Basically, the idea here was how I dedicated a full week to just hands-on experimentation with AI tools only. And so it is extracting and categorizing and linking these ideas from the podcast this way.

But to do it, like you said, he's strung together five agents. There's the listen for when there's a new episode. Then that guy says, I found a new episode. Pass it to the transcriber. Transcriber's like, I transcribed it. Pass it to the summarizer. and the extractor passes it to those guys. And he's like, great, turn that into clips.

Pass it to the clip guy. And each one of those is their own agent. And I think that's, and then like you said, it's composable Lego block. So if I want to use a summarizer for something else, well, once that agent exists, he can summarize anything, not just MFF episodes. Yep.

That is the future, Sean. So like a quick one-sentence description, this is the positioning. I'm going to test it on you guys as well, is agent.com. AI is the number one professional network for AI agents. It is also the only professional network for AI agents. It's LinkedIn for agents. Yes. And so some of the question is like why do agents need their own professional network, right? That's a reasonable question to ask.

And the answer is if we imagine that I happen to be right that we're going to have this hybrid world where we have both AI teammates and carbon-based lifeform teammates, well, how are we going to find those people? So we have fiber for humans that we can sell. I need a logo created for whatever. I can go to Upwork. I want to hire someone for the next four months to do whatever skill set or whatever. There needs to be an equivalent of that for AI agents.

I don't know what's out there. I don't know. And here it starts to get really kind of super cool. So imagine a professional network and it has ratings and reviews. It's got their experience. Like, oh, I'm an agent that does this. I've been used 40,000 times. And here are the people that like me.

Darmesh follows me on AASM. right? Because humans can follow agents. Agents can follow other agents. And what's going to happen over time is that agents will be able to hire other agents on the network. Because everyone knows what everyone else can do. They can try other agents out. It's like, oh, I've been given

a budget of $100 to try five different agents to figure out which one is the best for my particular use case. And it can go without human intervention. Just go try best. Like, oh, network like, yeah, I'll pay you this other agent. So over 30 years, I built a lot of software that is what I call Solosoft. right? Like just like software for me for my

public speaking, count the LPMs in a talk, that kind of stuff. And then I found that most of those things can make better with AI. Laffer minutes. I like it. Yeah. I did not invent that term. Stand up comedians use that. That's been around forever. So yeah, I stole that from...

Sam, it's something that funny people like us. We wouldn't expect you to understand that. Dermich, can I ask you a... I'm going to ask you a rude question and then I'm asking you a thoughtful question, but I'm going to start with the rude question. Rude question is this, dude, you're a billionaire and you're super smart and you love all this new tech. Like, why aren't you doing the Elon thing?

Elon's like, cool, I did my zip two. Then I did PayPal. Then I did Tesla. SpaceX. I'm going to keep kind of building new companies, bigger, badder bets. You've been at Hubson for so long. You've been doing CRM for like 30 years. Like, don't you feel like you want to just spread those?

wings, baby, and just fly and just go build your rockets and like, what's your, why aren't you doing like a next grand act? That's my rude question for you. Yeah, no, it's not rude at all. And the answer is actually quite simple and has the added value of being true, is that this sort of is my next big act. So the problem is, okay, so let's say you're playing a video game, pick up your video game of choice. And you've kind of ground it out, you've built the things, you've got the weapons, you're there. Like, you're now in kind of power mode you can do. Now, let's say it's Zelda or something like that, which I love,

one of my favorite games. And now you can just go out exploring and try things and do stuff because you've got all of that. If you're going to play a new game, there's a bunch of stuff you still have, even though, because you have to sort of get right. You're going to have to build a team. I'd have to go find a co-founder.

By the way, I've won the co-founder lottery, right? Like, no one knew it at the time, but that has a massive impact on your outcome. It's like there's so many things I'd have to get right just to be able to kind of do the next thing, I think my odds are doing the next, even something like Agent.A.I, my odds are higher pulling that off

with the infrastructure I already have beneath me in the form of HubSpot. And sometimes I have to squint a little in order to kind of squeeze the thing and make it fit in a HubSpot-Shake box. And I have mechanisms for which I can kind of do that. But I don't feel like I've ever been kept from doing the thing

that would have been my big, bold idea as a result of being a CTO at HubSpot. If I ever, like, if that were the case, yes, I would go like, you know what? It's been a great ride. I wish the company well and will continue to be a cheerleader, but... I don't accept your answer, but I...

Wait, why don't you accept it? Well, let's break it down. He's a logical guy. Let's break it down. So let's say he has things he's excited about, new technologies, new ideas, just potential, potential to create cool shit in the world. All right. So there's two ways of looking at this.

Either HubSpot, HubSpot is the best place to do that, which I would just view like, like, I'm not saying the infrastructure. I'm just saying like the company HubSpot, which has like a specific mission and set of customers it needs to serve and like existing business model and all those things. Like the odds that your creative brain would latch on to an idea that also was like,

should be on Hubstarts right. That just seems like unlikely to me or just like an unnecessary limit that I wouldn't put on. Okay. So then let's say there is an idea that you get excited about your version of SpaceX or whatever it is. neuralink, whatever the idea is. Either, well, HubSpot's not limiting me and I'm getting these benefits. Okay, cool. There's that trade.

So it's kind of like, what would you gain if you actually were out on your own? You would like, there's like all these things like when people have their job and then they try to have a side hustle. There's one great thing when you go and you quit your job to do a startup. Yeah. That you've now quit your job to do a startup. You've now told the world. You've told yourself.

You've told everybody that like, I'm going to make a thing. Because I just gave up a thing. And that means I got to have a new thing now. And I think that the burn the boats thing is probably one of the only assets or advantages a startup in general has or an entrepreneur has is that they just go all in on something. They don't have any meetings about anything else. They don't have any distractions. And they've told the world, I'm going to do this. And I think there's something very powerful about that.

And I think the, if I really wanted to turn the knob and be like, what would be the, and by the way, you don't have to do this. I'm not saying one needs to do this in life. But it's like, let me see what I can. Let me see how fast this car can go. me see what I'm capable of. I just view that you're more likely to see the highest potential version of you outside of HubSpot versus doing side projects while using HubSpot and then talking at inbound and then taking these meetings.

There's got to be the unblended version, the concentrated version had to be more potent than the blended version. So that's my case. Sean's trying to convince a billionaire of a founder of a $35 billion company. Like, hey, what are you going to? The aunt telling the elephant how he should be walking, right? quit your job and actually do something with your life and go in on your side project. Take it as a compliment. It means I view you as a Elon level character, you know?

That's a very high praise. Thank you. I'll say this. I think it needs to be sad. I am a big, big believer in kind of taking that leap of faith, right, and going out and doing the thing. And that's great. And I'll say it's going to sound offensive as I don't mean it to be. But as I kind of write the next chapters of my life as I'm looking out. Like one of the questions I've asked myself is like, okay, it's like what does success look like? Right? Like, okay. So what do I want to reflect back on like of the things that I did? Right? It's, um, and a couple of things I've kind of emerged from that reflection is,

I like to build things. And like that is like the truest thing that there is, I like to build things, right? And so one thing I've kind of managed to do, which doesn't happen. often, so I don't have any direct reports because that would keep me from building things, right? If ever there was a time where it's like, oh, like I can no longer build things as a result of X. Whatever X happens to be, I will break down that wall, whatever it is, Upspot or otherwise. So that's one thing. And I will say this. I mean, I think your point's really well taken, which is most of the time we have these kind of externally imposed rules on us.

For instance, if you're an engineer, it's like, well, you're CTO. You shouldn't be writing code anymore. It's like, and I do not accept that thesis because software is a creative discipline. It's a very hits-driven business. You have to be right a very few number of times. It's like, we don't tell a musician that's really, really good. You can just stop like writing music and doing music and go hire something. We don't tell exceptional writers to stop writing and manage a team of writers.

Like, keep writing. Do your best to minimize the stuff that's not writing time. And that's what I feel like I'm doing. I'm maximizing my build time. And to me, and my personal mission statement is to help millions grow better. Like, that's the simple, like, I want to be able to look back on it and say I had a positive impact on the most number of people, like that multiply out. It's like X amount of impact, whatever that impact is, on Y number of people.

That's my truth function. And this is why I don't do one-on-one meeting because it doesn't scale, right? This is one of the reasons I'm here and not elsewhere. It's not just because I like you guys. It's because I can have an impact. And the reason I chose the topic, it's like, oh, this is what I want to talk about. I was like, oh, you know, what's the best way for me to use this time that if I look back on it or the people that are spending an hour and a half-ish, you know, listening to this?

Like, was that a good use of my time? Did it actually, did Darmesh deliver on the promise of at least marginally increase me in my probability of making my first or next million, right? That's the... You do this a lot. You kind of like are telling the story and you have like these little like bits that are wildly fascinating. One of them being that you have like a personal mission.

Do you have personal values like a company does that you and your family? or just you operate against? We've talked about it. We haven't done it. We have, so the HubSpot values are effectively the founders values, right? That's where the original kind of company values came from. And most companies are actually a reflection of their founders.

What is the most controversial or value that has the biggest tradeoff? Like, not everybody would choose this, but we choose this. What is that for you guys? Right? Not like integrity or, you know, like, whatever, things like that. Yeah, one of one that almost didn't make the cut, not because we don't agree with the value, but there were others is humility, like humbleness, right? And like the common argument that comes back is like, we're supposed to be a winning team, we're aggressive, which we are, right?

And so people often confuse humility with a lack of confidence or a lack of aggression, assertiveness or all these things. That's not it at all, right? The humility is being self-aware, is being able to recognize and not being a know at all. It's like I'm here to learn having that kind of, and that is a large part of what drives host by. And so I kind of, I've thought for that value for a long, long time. The second most controversial one is empathy, which is our second value. And that, it didn't always used to be empathy. We changed it along the way. Sam, what's our values on the pod?

Yeah, that's a good question. The reason I've been asking this is like, well, I've been like, thinking about, like, do I have values? Like, what are my values? Like, it's kind of cool. Is denim a value or a jacket? It's kind of cool to like codify it. But no, like we don't, M of MFM, well, like, we kind of have values. Like we said the, we've had people in the pod who have done like bad stuff and they're like, are you going to like crucify me? And we're like, well, like our default is not to like criticize.

It's like to build people up. But sometimes that might happen. But anyway, we like, so we have a couple. But it's interesting to kind of explicitly say these are the values of X, Y, and Z. And Mark Zuckerberg, I read this cool thing about him or maybe even told me in the pod, Sean, where he was like, A value means you have to sacrifice something. So move fast and break things means we are going to move fast. And because of that, I am okay with breaking stuff.

Like too many people, their values are things that are just obvious that don't involve a sacrifice. That are just platitudes. And by the way, there's not many of these. So for example, move fast and break things, I think is in the pantheon, the Hall of Fame of, like, you know, values. Another one is like Ray Dalio's Bridgewater thing. they have like radical honesty or radical candor, which is like, we are going to uncomfortably be honest with each other. And we just think that that maximizes in the long run,

but in the short run, this is not going to be like anywhere else you've worked because we take that seriously. We take the trade off, which is discomfort for the upside of, you know, being radically honest. So I think that's... One thing I've just because it jumped to my end, and I think it's a useful thing.

So we talk about maximizing, right? And that's a... I love that word. and many of you have likely heard of this notion of like finding the maximum and then the trap that people fall into is finding the local maximum versus the global maximum and just from a layperson's perspective it's like imagine that you're kind of looking at a graph like a normal imagine a bell curve for those listening it's like oh there's a point I which that values the highest right it's top of the hill so to speak in mathematical terms

the kind of local versus global maxa is like okay well that's the highest point but let's say you were to zoom out on that same graph and then there's other bell curve right next to it which is an even higher maxima, it's like, okay, well, if you were just solving based on that chart that you were looking at because you were zoomed in, you didn't actually find a maximum.

You found the local maximum, not the global maximum. That's the, and so here's the, and so that one, that part of it is obvious, the non-obvious part, is that often in order to even see

the global maximum, you actually have to climb the local maximum hill. It can't be an abstract, sit down the sidelines, it's like, oh, I'm going to go, like, wander around.

What you have to do sometimes is you have to make the effort, to climb the smaller hill, you get to the top of the spot. It's like, oh, now I see the landscape and there's that massive mountain over there, which is the thing that I'm actually meant to go do, right? And so part of it,

and this goes back to the kind of connecting dots thesis as well. It's like sometimes you have to do the thing that does not seem like the big bet in order to have the perspective to see what the big best is going to be, right? Sam, have you heard this concept of RAS? Like, instead of SaaS companies, RAS companies, do what this is?

I saw him put that on there. And I was like, is that like a different word, like, Riz? I was like, does this like RAS? Is it going to make fun of it? Is RAS mean like you're going to make fun of me? Like, I'm going to rass you? No, this is a big idea. Darmat's, can you do the do the RAS? Yeah, well, I'll be honest. So we all know SASS, which is software as a service. And we contrast software as a service to software as it used to exist back in, like back in my day. I can say that now. And back in my day, software was shipped in boxes on CDs and things like that and you kind of plugged it into your computer and a load the software up to do whatever you wanted to do. And software as a service was,

oh, you don't actually buy the box, you don't buy the CD or whatever. We just provide the value of the software to you as a service over the internet, over the cloud. Results as a service is like, actually, you don't even access the software. You tell us what it is that you actually want to do. What's the outcome that you're looking for? And we'll just sell you that.

You want the LinkedIn blog post at the end. A good example would be, is like, oh, I could sell you like legal software to kind of analyze a contract in the real estate space that will give you commentary on whether this matches benchmarks or even in the VC world a term sheet or something like that. It's like, oh, here's software that will help you

like power write a real estate contract and do the anywhere. It's like HubSpot. Here's software that you can write blog posts to capture emails and get more customers. Yes, but this thing is like, okay, well, what if you could just skip the intermediate steps? It's like, oh, you run more customers?

What are you willing to pay for customers? And this idea is almost as old as time, right? which is, because we've had, like, in that particular example, we've had lead gen companies forever, right? Which is effectively results as a service. Like, don't worry about phone numbers. Don't worry about this thing called the internet or whatever. Pay us X amount of dollars every time your phone rings.

Well, and it's also a sales technique, which is like, do you want guests to feel great at your home and to be popular? Okay, buy a vacuum to keep your carpet clean. Yes, that's exactly. Yeah, we've had that. Yeah, the copyers. Like, people don't buy, don't want drills. They want holes, right?

Like, that's the drill is a tool. Holes the actual outcome desired. So RAS is kind of the next kind of wave of software, and there will still be software being used by whoever's providing the results of the service. That's how the thing gets accomplished. But the way it might be packaged and sold might end up being RAS. One thing I'm just closing out on the agent front as far as the call to action. So I forget the name of the guy that built the MFM Vault.

Greg. Yeah. Greg. Okay. So what Greg did in terms of like sequencing these things to get. So he effectively built an agent, right? It has multi-steps. Each individual step may call other AI tools. Agent.A.I not only is a professional network for distributing agents and finding agents, discovering agents, reviewing and rating agents, and talking about agents. It also has what's

called an agent builder, which is a platform for building agents without writing code. You've had a good quarter. HubSpot stock, I think, almost hit an all-time high. You sold the business or you sold the domain to Open AI. Came on the podcast. You came on the pod? You're, you know, I don't, I don't care what they say about you, Demmesh. You're doing okay. I'm doing okay.

I'm doing okay. I don't care what they say. You're all right. What I love about you is you have a bunch of things that sound like paradoxes. Like, you're extremely gentle and kind. You're also, like I would say, competitive and aggressive. In other ways, I think you are humble, but then you're also a marketer. and you're like, oh, I can see the marketing value of this

and the practical value of this, but I also, you know, I'd rather be, you know, quiet and low-key. I don't need to brag. And so you have all these, like, contradictory things, which I think makes you interesting. Hey, by the way, is this, you said there's, you go, as soon as I get on a leaderboard, I want to be number one.

Yeah, you're like, but then I don't want to be on list. I'm at the bottom of this leaderboard, by the way. Is this a leaderboard where you're like, I would like to be richer because it would be like, like, like, I think you're, you might try to be cool and be like, no, I'm happy. But like, I think, with every level you are on,

whether you were with $1 billion, you want to get $10, whether you have $10, you want to get to $50. No matter how ripped you get, you want to get a little bit more ripped. Like, is it how much of a motivator is like, you know, it says one on Forbes now.

How do I make it say $10? $10 billion? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's a really good question. I tend not to have explicit goals. Like, goal setting is not something. And I'm not discounting it. I'm not disparaging it at all.

some of the smartest people, you know, have goals that have those kind of like really concrete things that they're shooting for. It's not that I don't do it now. I never really did that, right? It's like, okay, I want to get better. I want, you know, I want to have money. I want to be able to have freedom, make choices.

I want to have the things that I, in this, as I've said this, you know, before. I like to configure the universe to my liking, to the best of my ability. And whatever resources I can kind of accrue to help make that possible, I'll go try to find a way to make that possible, right? So deep down inside my soul, I'm a math and physics guy that's not far enough to be a math and physics guy.

And my truth function is like I said before. It's like, okay, I'm trying to create based on that mission statement. Positive impact for the most number of people, like multiply X by Y. And the marketing is part of that. It's like, okay, well, I'm not going to be able to impact people if I'm not doing some marketing. It's like I can say the most brilliant things in the world. if only 17 people look at them, then the value of X is 17

for that particular unit of work. And that's just not how I operate. I will make sacrifices and other funds in order to solve the truth function to solve for the mission for me personally. That was the balance there. We talked about a bunch of stuff. You had opening remarks.

Do you have a closing remark? Is there a way you want to end it? Did you achieve your mission of saying what you thought would help somebody increase their odds? my ask, my favor is leave a comment and let me know what you thought.

That's where I keep scoring. That's the leaderboard I'm after right now. Sam, it's like I'm number five on the YouTube list. I know comments and engagement actually help the algorithm probably more than likes to, by the way, for the record. Dude, you're the man. We appreciate you doing this. I have a notebook here where I take notes.

I'm not going to turn it. I don't want people to see it. But I have filled three pages of notes. So you're the man. It's all a pleasure to be on. Thanks, thanks for having you. Thanks for indulging my quirks. Dude, you're great, man.

You're fun to hang out with. You are fun to hang out with. You're fun to hang out with. You're fun to talk to. I feel energized when I talk to you. It's good to see, guys. We appreciate you. That's a pod. I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.