My First Million - Brainstorming $10M+ business ideas with Jess Mah

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Steal Jess' Billion-Dollar Startup Playbook [for free]: https://clickhubspot.com/jhm Episode 702: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) boards the private jet of Jess Mah ( https://x.com/jessicamah ) to brainstorm business ideas and talk about her process for vetting which ideas to jump on.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Buying a jet (5:37) Barn full of horses (8:44) Business ideas matrix (11:06) Idea: DOGE as a service (13:30) Idea: Vertical agents (16:52) Idea: Cargo ship coating (21:26) Idea: Holy Health (25:07) Building a team with digital twins (28:46) Jess’s 0 - 1 framework (31:09) Worst advice from Silicon Valley (35:44) Find a starving crowd (37:55) Idea: Divorce.fund (38:36) Failures: Credboost (46:08) Ignorant of past, realistic of present, delulu of the future (49:58) Engineering serendipity (56:12) AI for medicine — Links: • Mahway - https://mahway.com/  • YC’s Request for Startups - https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — 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 HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

So you're not afraid to share ideas? No, I'm super afraid to share ideas. But that's, I mean, one of my ideas that I'm actively exploring, and here I am sharing it with everyone here. 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 a road, let's travel, never looking back.

We should address the elephant in the room. Why are we on a plane? So we're just flexing on everybody now. This is my Ty Lopez. Hey, guys, I'm just on my jet. So it's not that. Yeah, so this plane, it's Cotation C.J3 Plus, and I fly planes for fun. So it's been my passion and my hobby.

I think since even elementary school, I was obsessed with airplanes. And it was always my goal to be able to afford a fly one. And then I learned, I interviewed a bunch of very wealthy people. And I said, how do you afford an airplane? Like, how successful do you have to be? and the secret was you don't have to be that successful. You just have to have a big tax bill and good cash flow. Which takes success to get to that point.

It takes some success, but... Less than you think. A lot less than you think, actually, because it's like a house. You could finance it, get, you know, put 20% down, and then, you know, the rest is... We'll walk that a second. So the funny thing was we did an episode,

a normal episode where we're on Zoom, and it was great. You can go see it. It's called, like, Jess Ma, like, high school dropout, you know, blah, blah, blah. We, we YouTubeed it to make the title good. But, like, you know, I don't know, 300, 400,000 people have listened to that interview across all the platforms. And I wanted to do a second one, and you were like, hey, I'm in town.

If you can kind of meet me here. I was like, all right, let's go. I'll meet you there. And the second thing is, you're actually great with tax tax. And you're better than my accountant who I pay. I pay this guy to be like, hey, come up with ideas that I can lower my tax bill legally, but how can I do it? What are the ideas? And he's an idea poor.

idea rich. And so I thought, okay, it's kind of fitting because one of the things we'll talk about at the end is you're, you've talked to a lot of rich people and tried to learn what are the options, what are the possibilities as far as taxes goes. And that's, I want to learn that from you. Yeah, I mean, we'll talk about that as relates to business ideas, but as relates to tax ideas, it's actually a pretty similar process. Like, I'll just talk to as many people as possible. And I think the mistake people make with taxes is they have their one tax person. And that person worked with their parents and they've been loyal, but actually this is a very bad place to have loyalty. It's really good to talk to, like, I've talked to dozens of text. You want to be very

promiscuous here. I've talked to dozens of tax attorneys and tax accountants about their ideas, and I just keep track of all their ideas. And then I talked to all my friends to ask them for their tax ideas and consolidate it. That's so true. There's like this weird loyalty. It's like, yeah, he's been doing my taxes for four years. It's like, yeah, but nothing has changed and you want a good idea for everybody. So let's do this point real quick. So, a plane like this, what does it cost roughly? What do you have to put down? And what is the tax savings or something?

There's just a mini tax lesson for this plane. Yeah, mini tax lesson. And then we go into more detail on this on the last episode I did with you guys. But this is a $12 million plus airplane. And you could put 20% down on the airplane. I got this pre-owned, so saved a few million bucks. And it's just good as new. So you put down roughly $2 million.

Yeah, you put down about a few million bucks. And then you just pay monthly financing on it. But then you get to write off up to the whole thing. Last year it was 60% up front. But now with the new administration, it looks like accelerated depreciation is back. So if you bought a $12 million airplane, financed it, you can write off the whole $12 million off your tax bill, even though you only put in $3 million bucks. So you're going to pay the government or you could buy an airplane.

So it looks ridiculous. Either way, $3 million is going out of your bank account. Either way, the money's leaving your bank account. So like it looks lavish. it looks ridiculous, but this is why rich people do these things. Right. And I just wanted it to bunk that. A lot of people are scared to admit that.

They don't want to share that because they want to flex more. They want to show off. But it's just a practical matter. Right. And you use it to like literally be more efficient and go meet people where otherwise you might not have taken that day trip to go do it. Like you came up. You're like, I want to have lunch with you.

And so you flew up. We had lunch and you flew out. And I was like, wow. First I felt honored. But secondly, man, there's probably a lot of people that I think I would have kind of amazing opportunities or build a relationship with, but I don't do it because the logistics are actually like in the way. Of course, this is not accessible to most people, but like if you're in that successful

entrepreneur bucket, it kind of makes sense logistically as well. It does, yeah. And, you know, we've got Starlink on board. So flying out here is able to make five phone calls and be on Zoom and, you know, do FaceTime video where I'm like, yeah, what's up? Right. And like, it's a practical matter of saving money. but it looks really bad.

If you're an operating CEO of a company, you're going to get chat on by your employees, your customers, your investors, and I realized that that would be a problem for me a few years ago. So that's why I stopped being an operating CEO, actually. It was really, I had this conflict of, like, can I do everything I want to do? And I know it's the right thing to do.

I know I will. I know I'll create more abundance. Right. You know, I'll create more value for my companies. but at the same time, I know I'm going to get more flack. I'm going to have more people who want to rip on me, unfortunately. And I'm sure this video will not help with that at all. But I defend it.

It's like a practical matter. Right. I love that. Unapologetic. So enough about the private jet. It's cool. It's going to make for a great job. First time for the podcast.

What I want to talk to you about is what you're great at, which is ideas and coming up with new ideas for businesses. So the track record here is you've been an operating CEO. You started this company called Inonera. when you were really young, right? How old were you when you started that? I was 19 when I started it. I knew absolutely nothing.

Yeah, and then I built that company up and then started a bunch of other companies. Several of them are nine-figure valuation businesses. I have no unicorns under my belt, so that's a big insecurity of mine right now. I'm going to be super honest about it. That's interesting. I don't have a single unicorn,

but if you add them all up, I've got multiple unicorns. Right. So that became my strategy. I decided I'm really not good at building unicorns, but I'm really good at coming up with smaller businesses. A barn full of horses.

Yeah, a barn full of horses where I create more. I think we just coined something there, by the way. That was all you. Good work. But yeah, if I could just raise less VC money for these companies and just create more of them and not be directly operating in them, then that could add up to being just as valuable,

if not more valuable, than if I created one unicorn, not to mention all my friends who are CEOs of unicorns. Miserable? So miserable and so. so stressed out. And also, they don't have the ability to live an amazing lifestyle because of all the stuff we talked about. They're scared of the optics. And they own a much smaller percentage of these businesses. Like a lot of my unicorn CEO friends, they own like 5% of a billion dollar

company, which is remarkable amount of money. That's a lot. But, you know. Yeah, totally. I'm in it for the lifestyle. Not the, uh, you just have to decide what you're in it for. Just be honest about that. And there's other people who are in it for the impact. That's dope. They should do that. save the world. I'm on the world. I'm glad that they're saving it. Yeah. I personally don't want to do that with my time. I want to indulge my curiosities, have fun conversations, and just enjoy my life with my kids. That's totally what I like to do. That's my gold standard. Yeah. So your story is basically 19 years old. You start in De Niro. You run that company. You grow that company. And then you've, like you said, you transitioned from starting and running companies yourself to now you have this

like your own holdco where you're incubating or creating companies. And you said that in the last four years, You've started four companies each worth over $100 million. I've co-founded companies. And when I say co-found, sometimes I didn't do a whole lot. Maybe I helped with idea. I got the early team on board. I got some early funding. And then on some of them, I'm still really active.

And on some of them, I'm not active. And I'm just like a significant shareholder. Right. All right. Hey, real quick, if you're liking this episode with Jess, then we got something cool for you. So when the episode ended, we asked her, we were like, hey, you were talking about how you have this playbook, this recruiting. guide, you have this like content guide. You have these things. Would you mind sharing one of those with us? And she actually just sent us like all of them. So she wanted the listeners to be able to have

them for free. So they're in the show notes below. It's her talent playbook. It's her recruiting guide. I think it's an operations guide for how she runs her companies. These are straight from her. They're available in the show notes below. Check them out. I mean, somebody's giving you free gold. All you got to do is take out your hands and just accept the gold. All right, back to this episode. I want to ask you about your idea process because that's, amazing to be able to do that. I want to be able to do that. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about ideas. How do you get ideas to start these companies? And then what are some ideas right now that you're excited about? Yeah, I'll talk about a process first. So I love

Y Combinator ideas, the request for startups. And when I was coming up with my first ideas for businesses, like Indanaro, that was inspired by that list. And it's a list of a hundred business ideas where they say, if you build this, we are more likely to find. fund to you. Right. And I really wanted to get into my combinator. And then I put together this spreadsheet. So I had this matrix of criteria. And one of my top criteria was complicated enough that other people won't copy me too fast. I think that's really important. If I'm a first time founder, I need to have more leg room. And then another criteria was I can pseudo bootstrap this. Like, I can raise some angel money, but I don't need to raise, like, $100 million.

So, like, I'm not going to build Tesla or SpaceX. I want to build something that $2 million could get me very far. My other criteria was I wanted recurring revenue. I wanted something that was sticky, like a must have. And so I literally went through every single one of those ideas on the Y Combinator list, and I rank ordered them based on these three criteria. And business accounting and tax management seemed to be the best. better one for my criteria. And so my processes, I, you know, go online and I scrape these ideas.

I've even gone to Reddit to look for ideas. I have one-on-one lunches and dinners with people like you. And I just say, hey, like, what are ideas you're exploring? And then we'll just have a brainstorm. But none of the ideas I've actually worked on came from me sitting in a room with the whiteboard and just like coming up with stuff. Yourself. Yeah, that's never worked out. I've tried it, by the way, with no success. Okay. So you had this thing on your phone. You had like this idea database.

Yeah. There's like 300 ideas. Uh-huh. And you promise, you said I'll show some of them today. Yeah. Even though these are the things you might still go do, I think. I might still do some of these. So do you want to give us a couple of them?

Absolutely. It's called the idea hopper. So actually, let me pull it up on my phone. Okay. Great. Should we start with the, once we talked about before? Yeah. She gave me a teaser of like two or three of them that.

I was like, don't tell me more, but yes. Like, should we start with a do. As a Service idea. I like this one. Yeah, it's very trendy right now. Doge as a service for companies. Explain. Yeah, I mean, most companies have so much waste.

You have people who barely show up or they're phoning it in. And I have friends who say, oh, yeah, like, like, I've, you know, my husband quiet quit his job. He's, like, working two hours a day and no one's tracking it. So he's available to hang out. Those are the people you want to get rid of. So what if you could create a software platform that goes through and tracks who, is actually on Slack, who is actually emailing, who is like using their computer? And if not, then they're fired. So Doge's a service for companies. And so it would be a team of consultants.

It'd be a consultant. It'd be a consultants plus AI. How would you do it? I think AI could do a lot of it. I also thought that if you're an enterprise, then it's, you could sell this to consulting firms like McKinsey or BCC or whoever and say, hey, you guys can offer this to the CFO. Oh, they're already doing, they're already in there. They're already in there. And that, makes you seem more valuable as a consultant because you could say, hey, we could demonstrate that we'll save you hundreds of millions of dollars. You'll pay us only $20 million. And this AI did all the work. That's actually pretty interesting. I don't think enough tech teams build tools for the consultants who have already done the sale. Because what McKinsey's amazing at is they got this relationship with a Fortune 100

company. They're on retainer. They're getting paid millions of dollars a year. And if you can sell them a tool that either helps them land and expand that contract or just save overhead. in actually like executing that contract, that's going to be pretty valuable. Like if I was like building AI right now, I would not be trying to make something that like I'm going to not only build the tool, but also figure out all of the go-to-market. Maybe you could actually just sell this to consultants who already have the go-to-market done. Exactly. That's, I mean, one of my ideas that I'm actively exploring and here I am sharing it with

everyone here. So you're not afraid to share ideas or what's your philosophy around that? No, I'm super afraid to share ideas. But you just got me really comfortable. So here I am. This is an idea I've been playing around with for a few months, and I really like it a lot. Okay, I like it. I didn't want to be one of those people who said, okay, here are my shittiest ideas.

Now you go do them. Like, I think that'd be just really lame. Totally. All right, what else you got? So goes as a service. That's one. So again, this is the trendy category. Okay.

Okay. Another idea is, you know, everyone says SaaS is dead. Asians are the new thing. well, what if you could build vertical agent as a service for an industry? So, for example, build a library of agents for dental offices or for auto mechanics or for clothing designers or manufacturers or whatever or distributors. So there are all these industries, but where they need their own very unique library of agents to automate their tasks. And you can go really deep there. So this is more of a thematic business area. which will be, I think we're going to see thousands of businesses doing this. Right. So, okay, so somebody's building a tool. And so you're saying you don't even have to build the agent.

You're like, there's going to be somebody who builds an agent that's about picking up a call and booking an appointment, let's say, appointment booking agent. So what you used to have to have pay a receptionist to do, now AI is pretty damn good. It's going to be able to do that fully. Right. So you have horizontal companies right now that sell the voice agent for any industry.

The problem is you still have to do a lot of fine tuning and work for if you're a dentist. Right. So what if you're a company and you look for all these off-the-shelf tools and make your own agents and plug them all in and tune it just for dentists? Right. And so it's plug and play. I'm a dental office. I can use your company and it has like 100 different pieces of AI already baked into my workflow. That's the idea in a nutshell. Okay, I like that. And you should do this for an industry you know about. Like if you're passionate about, you know, dental offices, then do it in dental offices. So that's a-

Shout out to anyone who's passionate about dental. You are, this was your day. You got to. I know, but the more, the more boring, the better. That's the Constellation Software model, right? So we invested in this company that's vertical SaaS, which was called Shop Jeannie. They just, so we invested in it. And I think within a year or two, they sold for mid-eight figures.

And what they did was they went to auto repair shops. And they were like, hey, guess what? Auto repair shops need to CRM. So there was always CRMs, like HubSpot and others, that they work for any type of business. He's like, well, but auto repair shops have specific things that are, you know, for them. So they built a tool that was just for them. And then they went and they got like 3,000, 4,000 auto repair shops in like a year to use them. And by the way, he was- Very sexy business.

Yeah, I was like, dude, how did you get so many shops to use you? And he's like, there's this guy who's like the auto repair influencer. He's like the Kardashian of auto repair shops. And he vouched for us. And then all these people, you know, followed on board. He's like, that guy makes like $20 million a year as the like biggest influencer to other auto-repair. shop owners. It's like really insane. Oh, wow.

Such a great business idea, yeah. So what they did was they give them this tool and it was like for booking your appointment and the text message follow-ups or whatever. And what you're saying is like and vertical SaaS has been a thing. Constellation Software did it. What you're saying is instead of vertical SaaS, it's going to be like

vertical ass. Agent says the service. Vertical ass. I love it. All right. But seriously. And then the more like random, the better. Like if you could apply this to like, you know, marine shipping or to. like resource mining, you know, then Constellation will be acquiring and ruling up these vertical ass companies in the next few years. Like that's, that's the future. What was the marine

shipping cargo ship idea you were telling me about? Yeah, that was another idea I had on my idea hopper. The idea was in a nutshell. Could we, oh yeah, it was coding for these cargo ships. Coding like the paint coating. Uh-huh, but to make it more efficient so that these ships could go even a few knots faster. And that saves you a ton of money on fuel. And then you don't need to take these ships out of the water as often to recode them. So this could be like millions, if not tens of millions of dollars over a decade for your entire fleet of cargo ships.

Totally random idea. I got this from having dinner with someone who was playing around with this idea or looking at funding something like this many years ago. And the other person just didn't have the money to proceed with it. Right. So my, like, I learned about that just from having dinner with someone. Yeah, that's crazy. And so you, let's say you have an idea like that.

Uh-huh. So first is like, who the heck even thinks about cargo ship coding? Definitely not me. I mean, mostly these ideas, the common theme is I didn't come up with any of these ideas. Right. So you're a good spotter, would you say? Or what are you good at? I'm good at initiating conversations with people who are likely to have ideas or have access to ideas.

Like, you have good access to ideas. So, like, actually, I've sent you an idea before. And now that I think about it, like my buddy James career has this great phrase. He goes, you want to turn yourself into an API. And what he means by that, he goes, you know, like a website has an API, which basically says, here's what I can offer you. I can give you location data. So you ping me, I give you location data.

That's what I'm good at. And by the way, here's what I want to get from your API, right? Here's the things I'm interested in. I'm interested in acquiring geospatial data. So you kind of have made your API like, hey, I'm always interested in hearing interesting, kind of weird off the beaten path ideas. So when I hear one, I think, oh, Jess would like this. Yeah.

So you've put yourself in my mind and associated yourself with, she likes to hear weird, cool, off the beaten path, you know, ideas that, you know, she's good at making them happen. And then in return, you know, you're like, what are you good at? It's like, what do you offer as your API is like, I have a business and I'm trying to recruit a CEO. And I know you've done that a bunch of times. I'm like, oh, if I go to Jess, she's going to, you know, reduce my error rate and make me go faster at this because she's really going to be helpful in doing that. Or if I have a new idea, she's really good at flushing it out over a lunch,

like riffing on it and then being like super motivated to be like, all right, what are we going to do to make this happen? Like, let's push the ball forward. So I think you've kind of done that in the idea space, which is powerful. That's really well articulated. Yeah. Like I get people calling me all the time saying, hey, Jess, you have like five minutes to chat. I have this random idea I want to get your thoughts on.

And would you build this with me or if I did it? Would you fund it? I get those calls all the time, multiple times a week. And it's like, all right, like, yeah, I'll find time to call you back. But it's like what Warren Buffett did. He just got the word out there. Hey, I'm buying businesses. Call me if you're ready to sell.

And it's a fast, easy process. I'm doing the same thing with ideas. Yeah, that's great. My business partner, Ben, I was just thinking while you were talking, like, his API is so funny is two things. One, Ben always knows a guy. So you're like, do you know anybody? He's like, I know a guy who knows a guy.

That's always Ben's thing. Like, he always knows a guy who knows a guy. And the second thing is, a lot of people will go to Ben, they'll just text them when something good happens in their life. And I always am like, why did they, did you ask? He's like, no, no, they just told me. And like, we just closed this big deal or we just did this thing. And they haven't announced it. And he's not that close to them.

But what I realize is I do the same thing with him because he's somebody that makes you feel good when you win. You don't feel like there's any envy or he's not going to try to take anything from you. He's like genuinely pumped for you. That's awesome. And because of that, he just gets this wealth of inbound of people who are winning. which is also great for us for investing because we're like, oh, wow, these guys are doing really well. Do they need more capital?

Do they need something? Like, maybe we could help them. And that's a superpower. So I think people, there's like these underrated superpowers. Like the thing you're describing about, I'm good at, you know, maybe having interesting conversations, getting good ideas and making people feel like they should come to me with interesting ideas. That's not even a skill you could learn in school or nobody would even tell you that that's a thing.

Yeah. But you're going to build generational wealth off that. Yeah, that's well said. I think it's equally as important to know what we're bad at. You know, like for me, I realize that I'm not the best operating CEO. Like, that's just not my forte. And after I realized that and came to peace with that, then I was able to say, okay, well, I'm going to come up with ideas and recruit great teams and then empower them.

And that's what I'm going to figure out how to do for the Wari on and be great at. Exactly. So let's see more. I want more ideas. Yeah, okay. So I have this other idea. The code name. is holy health. And I came up with this idea because I heard of another business that was

minting like tens of millions of dollars in EBITDA within 36 months. And all they did was help one niche of a like medical provider get access to insurance. And then I did some research. I plugged this into GPT. And I realized there's so many of these other types of people like chiropractors or physical therapists where they can get. insurance reimbursement, but they're so small, they don't have the scale to negotiate with an insurance company on getting reimbursed. So they just charge all cash. Technically they could. Technically they could. But is it that they don't have the time or the skill or like you need to ban them together? Both. So if you ban them together, then they can get some reimbursement and then you could create,

you know, agents as a service to support them to create more lock-in and then you could help them with their customer acquisition. So it's got to be the full stack. And this other company did that for one of these different verticals. And I heard about that through a friend who heard about the company. And I'm like, oh, man, that's a great idea. Could I do something adjacent to that? That's not copying them, but similar in some ways.

Similar blueprint, but in a different space that needs it. Exactly. So you would go, what would you do for that? So you would, let's just walk through this. So I want to hear, so you have that idea. I heard about this. I got a clue because I was having lunch with a friend. And he's like, these guys are making like 30 million in EBITDA.

I'm like, all right. And what question are you asking that friend? because we were just talking before, and I was like, how the hell do you get this? I go, what is your info diet that you are getting these ideas that I don't get to hear about? You're doing something different. You're not just consuming the same stuff I am because you're getting different ideas. So can we talk about that real quick, the info diet? Yeah, I mean, none of these come from reading a blog post or watching a podcast.

All these are from in-person conversations. I think a lot of people are lazy. They just want to come up with stuff by stirring out their computer. nothing good comes out of doing that. If I'm in Canada, you have to get out of the building. You have to like just talk to people. And when you're talking to them, what are you asking? Like, hey, what's interesting? What have you seen?

That's cool? Yeah, what's the coolest? What's the most interesting, exotic business idea that's minting cash that you've seen recently? And so I'm not asking them for a business idea. I'm asking them for what's an existing thing you've seen? Right. It's like, what's the key to their success? And why does no one know about this?

Right. And, like, why hasn't anyone copied them yet? And, you know, why is now the right time for this? Right. So you're filtering as they give you the exotic business as minting cash. You're like, was there some secret sauce that's not replicable? Maybe they're super influential in a community. Okay, that would take forever to build. Could this be done in another space?

Does this take $100 million of venture capital? Yeah, how much did they start? And then they're like, oh, yeah, like, these guys should bootstraffed. Right. Like, oh, my gosh, now my math is really watering. Right. Like, okay, and what are the other risks here? Like, can AI just replace this in 36 months?

That's like the new risk factor in my, like, criteria that you all have to ask now. So you get the clue. You get the clue from the conversation, conversation, key question. And then you get the clue. Then you run it through your filter mentally, just there. Let's say now you're excited about the idea because you're like, holy health. And you give it a code name. Everything has to have a code name.

Why is that? It makes it real. It makes it feel more psychologically real. and like, okay, then I have something to remind me of the rest of the substance of the idea. Cool. And so I'll just, like, throw the idea into chat, CBT. Before you even tell your coworkers, you're like,

I think with AI first. Yeah, exactly. I tell everyone, before you tell me anything, think with AI as well. Yeah. And so everyone does that, and I say, give me like 20 ideas of potential names for this idea, and then I just pick one.

And this is the code name, and then we put it in the Idea Hopper and then... Did you see the CEO of Microsoft went on a podcast? I think Duar Cash's podcast recently. He had this great line. He goes, my new workflow is think with AI and then work with my coworkers.

So he goes, I think people are thinking about like AI is going to replace your coworkers, your employees just going to, AI is going to do a task. He's like, but right now the best use case is me thinking and sparring with AI to get clarity and then I go work with my coworkers after that. Sounds like you're kind of doing a similar thing. Yeah, we definitely do that. And what we're trying to do is have all of our meetings be recorded. So even if it's in person, we're just like turning on granola.

and having, I have a big one of those conference speakerphone things, and it's just recording everything, and we're gonna feed it in to create digital twins of all of us, then have like, basically thousands of versions of ourselves just brainstorming and sparring with each other to refine ideas even further. It's like those little like chess arenas or whatever, where they train the AI to just compete with each other

until like there's like a winner or winning strategy. Yeah, and I actually... How are you going to do the digital twin thing? We're actually doing, we're actually training one based off of you as well. So we're gonna have it just, watch every single video you've been part of. So it knows how to think like you. Be like, hey, bring Sean into these conversations, bring, Satya, bring, suck, bring, Elon, bring, like, whoever.

And I want all of them to, like, help battle test this, you know, conversation. That's amazing. And so that way I don't need to pay for you. You know that's useful when, if you just ask your question, like, oh, what would Elon do in this situation? Or, you know, take your most high-agency, badass friend who's not afraid. and seems to have clarity in the moment of a fog of war, if you just have that friend and you've hung out with them enough, and you literally just ask the question,

it's like they're in the room. And I know if that works, then an AI that's actually trained on them is going to be insane. Do you know how you'll do that? How will you create? Like, what are you going to use to make them be? Well, for you, there's so much public content for my team members. That's why I'm making sure that they record every single interaction

in the company with each other. Is there a tool to do that, or are you going to make your own tool? You know a lot to get the transcripts. Because once you have the transcripts, then you can just speed that into any of these. So any LM will be able to like kind of... It's going to do a pretty good job. Yeah, we could go into more advanced conversation on this,

but that's like 90%. People will do this so annoying. People are using my voice in ads all the time now, and I'm like, this is wild. Like, how do I sue you? I don't even know who you are. Right. Second thing is that, but I'm going to.

Anybody who's doing, I'm suing you. I'm actively working on that. I'm trying AI to figure out how to find I will see people for you. Yeah. But then also. Also, what was the other one? Oh, writing style.

So people will just put in chat with you, be like, write this in the style, whatever, because I've written a lot of content publicly. And it's, it's not me, but it's definitely kind of close to me. It's like, oh, that's 18 months away for being better than me. So that's definitely happening. You might as well embrace it. We're almost going to need like a safe word that's like, is it human Sean that I'm talking to? Or is this AI Sean that I'm talking to?

Like, we need a code word. I know. but it's like really exciting. And so yeah, Satya's he's on point here. So where was it? So you were telling me about okay, so we're going through your process. So you get excited about the idea.

Yeah. You have the clue. You have the code name. And you then have a meeting with your team. What are you doing in that meeting? What are you trying to do to advance that idea forward? Yeah, every week we have a R&D team meeting is what we just call it. And we talk about the ideas that we're playing with.

and the problem here with holy health, because this was a live idea, and it still is a live idea. Everything I've shared today is still alive, by the way. And the problem is we just had too many of these ideas. I mean, we have hundreds of these ideas, and we try to work on too many at the same time, and the problem is then you don't really advance any idea forward enough

between each week meeting, and then we lose excitement. Right. So now the new rule is we're only going to have two, and we're going to take them all the way until they're busted before you replace and bring in another one. And so what do you do?

So you have the meeting, you pitch the idea, do you have a way of kind of pitching it to your team? Or how do you, what's happening in that meeting? In that meeting, anyone can pitch.

So it's not just me. Everyone usually has different ideas. And so yeah, it's like, hey, here's a AI defensible idea, XYC. Here's why it's a Maui idea. So we kind of have a common understanding

on what a Maui idea is. Which is roughly what? It's roughly an idea that can cash flow. That doesn't require a lot of outside funding. We could fund it ourselves. And where it's like boring and complicated enough where

random people are not going to copy us that easily or reverse engineer that easily. Those are Maui ideas and that's what I encourage anyone else to do as well. If you're an auto mechanic expert, then that might be your theme of idea and we have that for like financial services in particular.

Right. And so you, what do you, where do you leave that meeting? You say, all right, what are we going to do next? We say,

okay, what are we going to get done to advance this between this week and next week? And we just get very specific. And it's like, all right, like person A, you're doing these five things.

Person B, you're doing these five things. And the next step might be like, okay, let's just go call, like for Holy Health. The next step was, let's just call some chiropractors

and ask them, if they, you know, figure out who accepts insurance and who doesn't and why. And then ask them, why don't they plug into these existing companies that should be that doing something similar? So a lot of it's just like, what are the questions we're curious about? And psychologically, are you trying to disqualify an idea or are you trying to qualify an idea? Like, what's the mindset? Is it I'm trying to figure out, is this good or bad? Or is it like I'm listing the riskiest assumption I'm doing it? What are you trying to do during those next few weeks?

It's not we're trying to figure it out or disqualify it, for say. I think either attitude might be too extreme. It's more like there might be a creative angle here that no one else is thought through. And so we're not married to this idea. We're holding it very loosely. We just have to figure out like, okay, you might hear an interesting insight from a chiropractor that says, hey, your idea is okay. But what would make it really good is if you also added in all these AI agents to automate away my receptionist.

and then, you know, my customer acquisition is terrible because X, Y, C, like, those are the insights we're looking for to then manufacture an upgraded version of the idea. So we assume the first idea is terrible, and it's going to go through like 10 pivots. Right. Like, which is very useful because that's almost always the case. And if you don't have that attitude, you basically, you hear something really juicy, but you're so locked in. It's like somebody was handing you gold, but you were out there just, you know, searching for bronze. And it's like, are you sure? You're sure you want that?

I was going to ask you, you know, you're talking a lot about ideas. In Silicon Valley, there's this phrase, which is, you know, ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Do you buy that? I think it's BS. I think it's some of the worst advice I've ever heard in Silicon Valley. So what's your take? My take is that ideas are really freaking important.

And if you have the wrong idea, you could be a great team and you're screwed. And actually I modified my thinking on this because I was a scout for Sequoia Capital for many years. And they would show us a bunch of these great ideas with amazing traction, especially in consumer internet. And then they would ask us, would you invest on this memo, yes or no? And so we would vote. And then they'd say, well, here's what happened to that company. It ended up being a zero. Even though I had the best team, the idea was still garbage.

So it ended up being a zero. And that was like a common theme I noticed. So they would almost train you on historical memos basically? Yeah. Oh, wow. That's incredible. But if the traction was great, is it usually the traction was great or just the team and the thesis was great? I mean, the early traction might have been good and the team looks good.

But then if you really think through the long term, like, is this idea sticky after a year or two? Will there be copycats? Like, is it like, is there anything that really holds the consumer in? You know, that's where these. ideas would then lose steam and die. And so that kind of helped me think about this a bit differently. And so you're saying ideas super important. Ideas are really important. And the team is really important. They're both really important. But to say, oh yeah, like ideas are dime a dozen. Like really, it's not just the idea. It's like the whole thinking of the business, like doing the calls

to like understand or meeting with the chiropractors in person or the auto mechanic and really figuring out these juicy tidbits that you're not going to find out. out by sending out a stupid survey or by using chat GPT to tell me, hey, what are the problems that chiropractors have? Like, that helps you build an interview script for what you're going to then talk to them about. But then, you know, you have to show up. So like when I was building in an arrow, I would go to Yelp and I would call these CPAs and I would say, hey, I'm like a 19 year old college kid. I know nothing about business. I want to do something to help accountants. Could I come to you, buy you lunch, and just like ask you some questions?

just for 15 minutes and then you show up, they're not going to kick you out after 15 minutes. 15 minutes is going to turn into two hours. And you have your notepad, you're scribbling. Like, they love that. They want to be helpful. Right. And I did a lot of that personally.

Like, I just showed up and asked them my questions and then got all these insights and we still do that. I'm still on these calls, okay? Like, even if it's not in person, if you could at least do like hour long plus, you know, expert calls, like we use GLG for this. There's also

alpha sites and they charge you a lot. You know, you might be paying $800 for $1,000 to talk to an expert in a very difficult to find area versus like accountants and chiropractors. Like, you could just call someone on the internet, but if you want to find like an expert in titanium mining,

how are you going to find that person? You go to GLG and you pay them a thousand bucks, they'll find the person for you, set up the phone call for you. And we do that all the time. The way you're talking about ideas and markets It reminds me of, there's a story of this marketer. And the marketer goes to, I think, a seminar or something like that. There's other marketers there.

And he goes, okay, we are going to, let's pretend we're opening up a hot dog stand. And he's like, so I can get, he's like, I'm a genie. I will give you anything you want to make your hot dog stand the most successful you can make. So he goes, what do you want? And so first person, what do you want? The guy's like, I want the best ingredients, best buns. He's like, got it. Best buns.

You, what do you want? He's like, no, no, no, buns. That's foolish. in the food business location is everything. So location. I got you this corner spot in a high traffic area. Cool. Location, you got it.

What do you want? And each person had like your best branding, whatever. And he goes, I have one thing that I think will beat all of you. If we all did the same thing, and we all got our wish granted. He goes,

all I want is a starving crowd. And if you're a marketer, like you're going to spend a lot of time and energy trying to sell something, the absolute best decision you can make up front is finding a starving, ravenous crowd. And it sounds like, you know, when you say ideas, really the idea, you know, what's underneath an idea is a customer

or a set of customers who have, like, a real pain and like a desire to solve that pain. You know, like, they are hungry. And they're hungry for something. And if you just show up with even decent buns and the hot dogs, like, they'll buy it, you know, instantaneously. It's okay if it's a little cold. It doesn't matter.

Yeah, that's a great story. It's about, like, how cute is this problem? And ideally, one hallmark of a Maui idea is the customer doesn't have to pay anything. So in Holy Health, you don't pay to be on our platform. By being part of our platform, you make more money. You get more customers. And we'll take a cut of that in exchange for helping you grow your business. So you like that model because there's no friction.

I love that model. It's like, why would you say no to that? It's like you're just saying no to more business. Yeah, that's like those companies that they'll, no, with all vendors on your behalf and like whatever we save we'll take 20%. You're saving nothing today. If I save you any money, I'll take 20%. And it's like, okay, have that it. You were talking about you had a couple other ideas. You had like a divorce one. Oh, yeah. That was like, I had so many friends who are divorced and still do. And people say they

need an advance on their alimony or like there's going to be or their money gets tied up and locked up because they're in divorce proceedings and they're really rich. They're really successful. but they can't tap any of their own capital while it's all tied up. So what if we could just give them some of their money back? And so that was just like a funny random. So like a creative financing around either the window of a divorce or the alimony. We called it divorce. Dot fund.

Didn't go forward to that one? No, I mean, people talk about it. We still joke about it. But there are other ideas that we got more excited about. So let's talk about failures. Because one of the things you said to me before this. So many failures. You were like, I like your podcast, but you know, sometimes you listen to people.

and it just sounds like it's, I had this idea, it worked, I'm so great. You know, like that's a podcast problem. And you were like, I want to be super honest about things we were trying that are not working or failures I've had. Where do you want to start? I mean, I would start by saying

when I use YouTube and I have all these entrepreneur business podcasts, I spend a lot of time flipping through and I think, man, like, I'm not doing enough. Like, I'm not good enough. Even when like I watch your podcast, I think that. And I think that a lot of people, you know, probably share that view. And the people you interview, I know a lot of these people, these are my friends. I know what they're

secretly struggling with. Yeah. And they're not necessarily sharing all of that. And I think that's just important to know. So in my case, looks like I am good at coming up with these things and having success, but most of the time, they're total duds. And one example is we had this idea, we called it Cred Boost. Terrible idea in hindsight. I'm so embarrassed to share this, but I'm going share it anyway. And the idea was, we're going to help you, like, improve your credit and repair it. And, you know, we had the customer acquisition funnel going. And it was high churn, low price point, very high regulation by the FTC. You know, it got compared to credit repair businesses too much. And, you know, my idea was we're going to boost your credit, not repair, just repair your credit.

And it could have made some money, but we just got bored with that. And so I burned a few hundred thousand bucks experimenting with that and then I put in the wrong team so I made so many mistakes on that that was an early incubation that went nowhere and this other idea was we're going to help veterans of the U.S. military find new jobs and we're going to get paid by vet tech and the GI Bill to do that and we could do this all online so it's virtual it's scalable and we're helping veterans so it felt like this really good idea yeah and the veterans And all they have to do is say yes. So we launched all these ads. All these veterans signed up. They're like, hell yeah. I could double my salary, make more money and do this all online from the comfort of my home. And our payment mechanism was this thing called VetTech, V-E-T-T-E-C. And it had bipartisan acceptance. Everyone loved it. But it got stuck. It got approved by the House and never went up to the Senate. And the money, dried up and we were like, all right, well, we get renewed imminently and 18 months after that,

still not renewed today, still not renewed. And we're like, okay, well, the hep business died just because of that. And then I try to pivot it. I'm like, oh, can I get the GI Bill to pay for it? But then the GI Bill requires in person and then after that we lost interest. Like, I was the only one excited about this still. Like, guys, we got to help the veterans. My team's like, we have other ideas that will make more money, Jess, and we want to make money. Like, all right, I'll come back to this one of the times, right? So swings and misses for sure. I want to show you. this. I want you to read this. This is from a talk you gave. Oh, man. 2011. This is when it hurts, but not just because an idea is wrong. Sometimes it's even when the idea is right. Yeah.

And you're running a company. Can you read this? I want you to read that. I wrote this to my mom and my dad on Saturday, June 4th, 2011 at 5.56 a.m. So I was up all night. I couldn't go to sleep. I was so upset. Subject line. Kind of sad. I feel like I'm not. I'm not. I feel like I'm not. I'm Bernie Madoff reached on the outside but completely broken on the inside. There's just a lot of pressure right now because the company is running dry on money in the next nine or so months and we really need to produce this summer or else we're royally screwed. This was about a year after Y Combinator for me. Anyway, I want to start seeing a therapist or something because this is just no way to live. I have no idea how you handle this entrepreneur job, Jess. Wow. And my mom, she's an entrepreneur. She came here.

Do you remember sending that? I do. I absolutely remember that. I remember the night. I remember how I was just like very upset. Because I had all these hoops and expectations on myself. And, you know, Paul Graham, even, he was my mentor and he's like, you're going to be one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. You, Patrick Hollison and Sam Altman. And I'm still the least successful today. And I still think about that often. And that weight was on your shoulders. That weight was totally on my shoulders. It's still. is on my shoulders. And my mom called me and she said, hey, like, I love you no matter what, even if you're a total business failure, I'll still love you. And then I just cut all my expenses, cut my burn, moved into a tiny apartment with my business partner and, and then just slowly crawled out out of the hole. And then, yeah, we grew in and narrowed to, you know, a few hundred

employees, profitable, good business, not a unicorn. But it gave me all the training and spiritual training to pursue entrepreneurship and be comfortable with mistakes and failure. Were you at that time, I guess like, what was the conversation with yourself to like, because you're like, I did these things. I lowered my burn. I did this. I did this. So those are the actions. But before the action comes, there's some inner monologue. There's some conversation you've got to have with yourself. And I love the inner monologue because your whole life gets dictated by this tiny little voice in your head that nobody hears. It's the one telling you, how to feel, what to do, where to stand, what to say.

And I think training that and learning how to like kind of improve that inner monologue is so important. And it gets better in moments like this, right? That's when it gets, that's the muscle building for that, that inner monologue. Do you, do you remember kind of what you were telling yourself at that phase? You wrote this. Your mom tells you something. What did you tell yourself?

I distinctly remember what the monologue was that whole evening, which is I am destined for greatness and I am not producing my best work right now. I am not showing up at my best. I'm not playing to win. And I'm falling behind and I need to diagnose what went wrong and I need to keep on trying and I will not accept or tolerate failure.

That was what was going through my head. Were you listening to a song at that time? Where did that come from? That was fire. How did you get yourself into that state from kind of sad to like kind of kick ass? No, that was sad though. That was not an empowered attitude.

I was thinking of that. And but because I knew that that was my situation, then it went from like, all right, like, I need to do all this or I'm screwed. And then like, all right, I'm really sad and I got to process my emotions. Right. Just get it out of me and, you know, be honest with myself that I'm struggling. I need to ask for help. And I didn't have a great community. Because back at that time, you, you know, as an entrepreneur, you want to show off. You want to posture. You want to seem like you're better than everyone else. And then after that, I realized I could just be honest. and I'll still have friends. And I told all my girlfriends and ends up more people were struggling than I realized. More of my Ycombinator batch mates were also running out of money. And if we look back today, most of the companies from that batch did not make it. Most of them went BK and then people took normal jobs or started new companies and then eventually found success.

And so, yeah, I still think about that. I still have thoughts like that today. It's a work in progress. Right. You know, I've done whatever 600 of these episodes. And at a certain point, you'd have to be sort of stupid to not realize like there's a mindset amongst a common mindset that I think great entrepreneurs have. And I've distilled it down into this.

I think a great entrepreneur's mindset is they're ignorant of the past because it's already done. If they live there, they'll die there. If you just stay stuck on, well, I've been failing for five years. Then you will feel like a failure and you won't be able to win. So you're ignorant of the past, realistic about the present, which is kind of what you said. Like, I'm not showing up at my best. I'm not putting in all the effort. I'm not doing the obvious things that I should be doing right now.

But I'm also not, it's not over. And so if they don't make it worse than it is, they don't make it better than it is. To see it as it actually is. So ignorant of the past, realistic about the present, and delusional about the future. You have to have that delusion because if you're just realistic and practical about the future, you don't do anything great. Yeah. That's really well articulated. I think also going through moments like that,

I remember then talking to my business partner and we did a full post-mortem. We listed out every single strategic and tactical mistaken thing we did wrong and what we would do different if we went back in time. And I wish I wrote this somewhere because it was a long list. I mean, it was like I would do everything different

if I could go back in time was the attitude. And even today, I was talking to, or yesterday I was talking to one of my colleagues, and the number of bad ideas we funded and experimented with and our process flaws, you know, we would also do everything different going three years back if we could, but we're talking about this constantly.

And that goes back to what we talked about at first, Cotewari. So every week, what if we bake this into our workflow? No matter how good things are, let's still reflect on all the mistakes we made so that we can improve and not repeat that again. It doesn't have to be one time sort of tough

and when you're about to run out of money that you're reflecting on like everything. Yeah, yeah. No old mistakes. It's kind of like the no new friends. It's the no old mistakes is what you want. You don't want to keep making those same mistakes again. You said something when you were talking about like,

I'm not, you said, I'm not showing up the way to you. You said, I'm not playing to win. Yeah. That's something while I was talking to your boyfriend before this. And he goes, I asked him, I said, what's a, what's a Jess-ism? Meaning, like, if you talk to people enough, you sort of see the things they repeat,

the things that are like their philosophy that they're like actually operating on. And he said something like play to win, don't play not to lose. Explain that. I think that came from this story that I just shared where I, one of my problems was I was playing not to lose. So I was in a scarcity mindset. And when I'm running out of money and I'm in scarcity mindset, I mean, there's research that talks about how your IQ drops by a lot during this period. And so I'm not going to think outside of the box. And playing a win means I'm optimistic.

I'm delusional about the future of it, right? So I see a lot of my friends who are just like playing it too safe. They're not trying new things. And so you can't do the same thing you've been doing and expect a completely different outcome. Right. Well, it's an example, maybe non-business related where in your life you're playing to, you had the moment where like,

I need to play to win here instead of play not to lose. personal life, like, for example, with the airplane, you know, this is a physical manifestation of that attitude and why it's really fun to share that with everyone today. It's easy to say, I'm going to be frugal, I'm going to save the money, I'm going to let it compound, I'm going to invest it in my other businesses, or, you know, screw it, I'm playing a win here. This is going to manifest way more abundance for me than if I don't. You had told me something that when we were at lunch that inspired me. You met somebody, I think, who, through a great event.

And you hired this person. You were like, hey, here's a budget. And I will pay you, whatever you're making your job, I'll pay you that or more, whatever. You're like, I want to have four events a year in these four cities with the most, like, inspiring, fun people in my, like, that I want to create,

I want to engineer some serendipity, some luck, some fun, some cross-pollination of people and ideas four times a year in these places. And I remember I've told probably five people this, because you need some resources to do it. Yes, of course, of course. Like, don't, if you're in the YouTube comments,

don't be that guy who's like, oh, it must be nice to have money. Great. There's a version of this in your life, too. You can take people out to dinner. It doesn't have to be a grand event. But I was like, that is an investment that I don't even have a line item for. Yeah. Right?

I kind of know if I did it probably really good. I would, A, have a lot of fun and be like, yeah, I do think good things would happen. But you took an almost like intentional business capital allocation approach to the luck and fun part of your life, which I think most people leave on touch. Luck and fun is just something that either happens or doesn't happen. I don't use my business brain for that.

I use this other part of my brain. It seemed like you almost used that same brain for both. Yeah, because I wanted to kill two birds with one stone or three birds with one stone because I want to have fun. I want to do more business, meet cool people. But I also had this friend who hated her private equity job and really wanted an excuse to leave.

And so I was able to present that to her. The vision was four events a year with, you know, the most successful entrepreneurs and investors I know. And we're launching the first one literally today. That's exactly what I'm flying off to after we're done. And then the vision is we'll do a summer thing, a fall thing, et cetera. But it was really expensive. And so what she and I decided to do was we would help her find other work, other events. So I'd set her up with my other friends throwing events. She would charge per event and she would get paid. based on the revenue coming in to the events.

So it's all variable versus her being on my payroll. Right. And so for this event, what I did is I called a bunch of my friends. I said, hey, you got to pay something because I have hard costs here. And they paid in, and then she only paid herself after the risk of profit. So you could get creative about this. For the ideas, we were talking about earlier and my whole team, a bunch of these people are on contract. I found them on Upwork.

Yeah. Okay. Like, you could do this. What type of person? Like, what skill set do they have that you found out? You said like Fiverr Upwork. Yeah, like one's product management, UIUX thinker. One is a financial services guy.

One was an intern of mine. He was at UCLA and he asked me to speak to his entrepreneur club. And then he said, hey, could I like take you to lunch? I want to get some advice from you. What should I do after college? I'm like, just intern for me and I'll teach you the ropes. And then he was so good that now he's full time with us. but he's probably one of my best idea sparring partners.

And then here, this event planning person, I met her from the Burning Man community. These people are everywhere around you. They don't necessarily have a fancy specific resume. And they're fun. I love them. We work well together. That's more important than the resume.

Right. I met a friend recently who told me this. He said something in passing. He goes, I was at this event. And then there was this guy who was dressed differently, blah, blah. And me and my friend, we collect eccentric people. So we went over to him and had a chat. I kind of paused him.

I was like, that's kind of a cool thing you just said. Like, I collect eccentric people. I don't do that. And I was like, but what do I collect? Like if I just put myself in, if I said, what am I a collector of? So like, for me, I'm a collector of what I call golden nuggets. It's like, I can have this conversation with you. And I'm just looking for two, three, four things.

Like, I don't need two hours or 90 minutes of a conversation to be perfect. I need three ideas that spark something, three golden nuggets that will change my way of thinking or acting. So I'm a great collector of those. I'm also a collector of like young talent. Like I see somebody who's young who's hustling or is talented in some way. I will like kind of really help them out because I want to a stay young myself and be helpful. But be, I kind of want to be able to connect dots between young people and good opportunities or young people in funding or whatever it is. And so I think there's this interesting idea of like figuring out what is it that you collect. Like some dudes collect stamps. Some dudes collect bugs. What is it that you

collect. So like for you, what do you, what would you say you collect? I would say I collect interesting people with outside of the box ideas who also like to have fun. That is the key intersection I'm looking for. That's your Venn diagram. Exactly. Because I think you could find interesting people where they're not fun. It's very transactional. They're just in it to make money themselves. But then the problem with that is then I can't do any business with them. So that's, so then my idea is, okay, how do I bring more of these people together so that we can have more serendipity? Oh, I'll just create my own event and then bring them there and then have a bunch of my people also, you know, talking to them, getting their ideas and seeing where we could partner on stuff.

Right, right. Engineering and the serendipity. Our buddy Nick Gray does a like no cost, low cost version of this. So he used to do a renegade museum tour. So he loved museums. So his Venn diagram was like fun people who are interested in like, you know, going to a museum on a Friday night. And he would host his, he wasn't a part of the museum. He would just take people on a tour because he knew the museum better than the tour guides. And he would take him on a fun version of the tour.

They'd, like, have a drink outside beforehand. They would go in and they would, like, do little fun things at the different stations. So, like, that was one thing he did. Another way he engineers serendipities, he would throw these, like, singles events where he himself was looking to date somebody. But he's like, well, I could just kind of do that. I can swipe left or right. Or, like, is there something I could do more creative that will not only help me find someone amazing, but maybe even, like, a bunch of our friends find somebody amazing.

And he started hosting these singles events. And again, it's a pizza budget. It's not like it's super fancy. It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be fancy. Right. And I feel like I need to say that because we're sitting on this like jet. Yeah. I mean, most of the stuff we do is like very cheap, cost effective and peace for itself and sometimes makes a profit, you know?

So like just taking that intensity to engineering some serendipity. I kind of love that. Before we leave, what do you just leave me with what are you currently nerding out about? I've been spending a lot of time thinking about like cancer and oncology. I've been thinking a lot about longevity and, you know, we're still funding a lot of the research with Mike Levin. who's my favorite scientist of all time. He's the bioelectricity ninja. And I've been nerding out on this a bit more

because I was mentioning to you before we got here, I've been in a bit of a sad mood this week. I had a friend die of cancer a few days ago, never smoked a cigarette in her life, and had stage four lung cancer. And it's just more examples of this in my life. Every year or two, I lose her first.

friend like that. And so it's not necessarily going to make money. It's not going to improve my lifestyle, but I'm just like, I got a nerd out on it. Right. Is there exciting progress in the cancer oncology stuff right now? Like, is there something, is there a new paradigm or a new pathway that's interesting? Yeah. Like with Mike, he talks about how he's been able to use bioelectricity to normalize cancer cells. So everyone right now in the field is talking about how do you kill a right? You think about chemo radiation. It's really painful on the patient. But if you could just normalize cancer and not have to kill it, that's going to be a lot more comfortable. So it kind of makes it like a normal non-cancerous cell, basically? It's still going to be cancer, but it's more benign, essentially. So that's really cool research. He's got a lot of great stuff on longevity, making lab animals live longer. I don't think he wants me to talk about it publicly yet, but... How insane is the AI for? medicine and biology. How is that,

how is insane is that going to be? I think it's going to be amazing. I think it's also going to be a lot harder than people think because you have AI that's coming up with all these ideas, but the bottleneck is still regulatory. It's still FDA.

It's still getting a clinical trial put together. That's one area where we're going to see slower progress than everyone is bragging about, whereas, you know, with everything else we discussed

with digital twins, if we could have the two of us brings from ideas, there's no bottleneck there. Right, right, right. Like the only bottleneck is like spitting up the computer and then us pulling the trigger to fund ads or fund whatever. But in health and bio, it's people's lives are at stake. It's going to go slow still,

I think, unfortunately. Okay. Well, where should people find you and what should they send you? Yeah. If you have any exotic outside of the box business ideas, you want to run by me. And I'd love to discuss that with you. Shoot me a note. And I am on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, um, just search Jess Ma. And I post on my blog there almost every week, partially using Chash UBT to come up with my blog posts. But I still review it. I'm like, hey, write me a blog post.

That's 2950 characters long because the LinkedIn limits 3,000. In my voice about X, Y, C, X, Y, C, and insert these anecdotal stories. And then, like, within two minutes, I have a blog post. That's amazing. Yeah. But so I post there, and these are real live stories in my life. and just send me a message on LinkedIn would love to hear from people.

And also the last pod we did, I made a bunch of friends. Like people just called email to me and I'm like, yeah, I'll grab lunch with you. I'll grab dinner with you. And two people I met from the pot are coming to my retreat. That's amazing to hear.

That's a point of pride for us is like we wanted today, if somebody comes on the podcast, you should get more kind of inbound messages from this than any other podcast you go on. And the second would be that the people who message you are people you would actually want to talk to. That would be the goal, right?

If we're doing that, we've kind of built the right tribe here. Yeah, you've got a great job with that. Real community, so thanks for having me here. Awesome. Well, cheers. Cheers. All right, here we go. 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 a road, let's travel, never looking back.