My First Million - BREAKING: Shaan Sells the Milk Road - A Conversation With the Buyers

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Episode 397: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talks with Kendall Saville and Michael Wittmeyer about their decision to buy Milk Road, their background in gambling affiliates, gold, and crypto, and much more. ----- Links: * JM Bullion * Milk Road * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (00:00) - Shaan's Intro (04:30) - Why Michael and Kendall are under the radar (13:30) - Stories of hacking SEO (16:00) - Why Shaan decided to sell (43:00) - How Michael and Kendall got into the gold business (56:30) - Why you should compare yourself to your competitors (01:01:30) - How Kendall's first business almost got him arrested (01:05:45) - Life hacks (01:12:30) - Business philosophies (01:30:00) - Creating outlier outcomes ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

When we were getting to know you guys to decide, like, do we want to do this? We want to actually partner with you guys and do a deal together. We would ask you a bunch of questions, like at dinners or at the bar or whatever. And your guys' stories and answers were so entertaining that I was like, these guys need to come on the podcast. I was like, if I had just recorded this dinner, this would have been like one of the best podcast episodes we've ever done, probably the best. What's up, y'all?

Sean here. This is a special episode. My company, The Milk Road, just got acquired. So the news is out. And I can finally talk about it. I've been kind of hinting at it on the podcast for those who were listening.

And yeah, if the news is out, and this episode is me and the dudes who bought it. So you're going to meet these guys and you're going to see who. Why would I sell? Right? Like we started this thing. It grew like crazy.

It was profitable. Like the thing was working. So why sell? And I talked a little bit about that. But the biggest reason, honestly, These guys, these are people that I wanted to be able to work with and get to know better. And there are people that I thought, if I give them, you know, this company and I own, I still own a minority stake in it, that minority stake in five years is going to be worth a lot because I believe in these guys and what they've done.

They've done it before. They've built and sold companies worth, you know, over hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think they're going to do it again here. The episode is a little funny. It starts off a little slow. but then around 15 minutes in, we're done talking about the acquisition. And frankly,

I'm done talking a little bit. And I let these guys shine and they tell stories about, you know, their early projects, like how they, you know, all the different projects they worked on, some that failed spectacularly and some that succeeded.

You know, their philosophy around business and negotiations and stuff like that. It gets really good after that. So definitely stick through, if you like this podcast, like if you like my first million, you will like these guys. I'm going to just, I'll build the characters.

You got Mike who is this like workhorse. So anybody who likes, you know, a grinder, somebody who's scrappy, somebody who can bounce back from defeat, he tells a ton of stories about like basically getting his ass kicked, almost failing and then somehow pulling it off. So Mike is this workhorse of a guy. I've gotten to see him in action with the Milk Road. This guy is like, lives in the details and in the weeds. It's amazing. And then Kendall is the opposite. He's like, how can I work smarter, not harder?

He's the Mr. Shortcut. He is the guy who finds a way to make something happen, right? Like, you know, he's the guy who hacked the Tesla referral program and ended up getting multiple Tesla roadsters. And he's the guy who did the same thing with Uber and Lyft and has like, you know, Uber credits for life and Lyft credits for life. He's just a guy who's going to solve the puzzle and get the shortcut solution. He will find the clever way to get it done.

So these two guys are awesome. And I think you guys were like them. So enjoy this episode. All right. So we should do this. So welcome to the show. I've been telling you guys you got to come on for a couple months now. And I'm glad we're doing this.

So we will, I think we should frame this in a couple ways. We got together because you guys just bought my company. You bought the Milk Road. And so we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about how that happened, how that went down, why you guys decided to do it, good stuff like that. Then we're going to talk a little bit about. you know, what's the plan. But really the thing I thought would be the best out of this conversation.

My sort of secret plan was when we were getting to know you guys to decide, like, do we want to do this? We want to actually partner with you guys and do a deal together. We would ask you a bunch of questions, like at dinners or at the bar or whatever. And your guys' stories and answers were so entertaining that I was like, do these guys need to come on the podcast? I was like, if I had just recorded this dinner, this would have been like one of the best podcast episodes we've ever done, probably the best. And so then I was like, all right, my job here is to somehow recreate that dinner.

Because actually, there's a lot of pressure. I know how good this episode could be if I do my job. And usually with a guest, you know, hey, they just show up, they do whatever they're going to do. But in this case, I've heard the stories myself, so I got to find a way to recreate that. So that's my challenge. You guys, it should be easy.

It's, you know, just you're going to tell your stories. And I think at the end of this, people will know a little bit about what happened with the Milk Road, but also a lot about you guys. Because I became a fan of you during the process of doing the deal. And I think a lot of other people are going to become fans of you guys, too, during this. Because you guys are pretty low-key. And why is that? Why are you guys so under the radar?

And I asked this as a guy who's like, I'm constantly on the stage being like, look at me. You know, I'm great. And then I meet people who are really, really great. And they're not trying to do that. So what's the, is it, don't have time? Is it shy? What's the reason that you don't do that? Let's start with you.

I think it's probably shy. And it's just something that I never thought I needed to do. And then when I met you, I'm like, I'm doing everything all wrong. But we had a hilarious day where I don't know how this happened. But somehow when we were hanging out in San Francisco where I usually don't, the joke on the pot is I don't leave my house. But when I do leave my house, I'll once in a while get bumped into and be like, oh, hey, love the pod. For some reason that day, something was going my way.

And, like, I don't know, six or seven people stopped us in a row. And you guys must have been like, the hell's going? What was your reaction to that? I was like, did you plan this? I could not believe how many people were coming up to you. And, you know, I'm a big fan of the pod. I'm doing this project. I did an MFM search engine.

Like, it was insane. Yeah, that was pretty crazy. Yeah. The guy from the hospital. He's like, I just came from the hospital. I'm looking for Sean. I was like, do you have security cameras? He said he goes, I just came from the hospital.

And then we were like, oh, okay. And then later, somebody was like, why did he come from the hospital? Like, did anybody catch that? And we had no explanation. Because he had like a, you know, like the patient has escaped, you know, sticker on his shirt, basically. But I'm glad you guys are doing it. So let's start with the milk road.

People want to know, you know, the news just came out today. this pod will come out right after that. We sold it. And people want to know how that went down. I can tell it from my perspective, but maybe, I don't know, let's do it from your perspective. How did this all happen? Yeah, for sure.

So Carter, who is our finance, was a big fan. And he shared it with us, Mike and I. And we subscribed to it. And every time we'd open it, we're like, oh, they're doing it so well. This is a while back or like, this is six months ago. Okay. And, you know, every time we read it, it, we talked about it. We talked about the memes, how funny it was, but also how

informative it was. And that's kind of what we're trying to do with Bitfo is just like, make the best content and actually have people read it. I feel like, you know, you could have 10,000 words, but that doesn't mean much to people. It's like, how do we get that 750 words that really punches? And I feel like that's what you guys have done. And, you know, it came to a point where I'm like, we should talk to these guys. But at that point, we hadn't. Yeah. And I think we reached out to you guys. I remember, having a conversation with Ben about growth. And it was like,

Ben, you know those sites that are just like, I don't know, what's the price of Bitcoin? What's the price of Ethereum? I was like, I don't know, go,

I don't know. I was like, I remember telling him. I was like, it's probably just like some 19 year old kid. Like, just offer him like a dollar for every email subscriber.

Let's just see if they'll put it up, put our ad up. And I think that's how we reached out, right? He got in touch with one of you guys about that. Ben reached out to, I don't even know who's somebody. Yeah.

Got back to us. And, you know, It wasn't something we were going to do. It was like offering a dollar per sub or whatever. Turns out you weren't a kid. We're actually 32. We weren't 17.

But we just wanted to meet you guys. So we're like, let's take the meeting. And yeah, about 10 minutes into that. We were messaging on the side. It's like we got to buy this thing. Like we've got to figure out of why. The funny thing is, I don't know if I told you this, but that same day, like, we had just been full force working on Milk Road.

This is the best. It's going to be awesome. Dude, we're just every day. And like, I'm a big like pat on the back, self pat on the back kind of guy. Every day I'd basically tell Ben, this. is amazing. We've launched this thing and only in this many months. We're already growing this fast. It's going to be so good. This many years in. But, you know, it's going to be great. And then one day I just hit Ben with a curveball in Slack. And this is the same day. I go,

I go, how much would you sell this for right now? And he's like, what? Like, do you want to sell it? And I was like, that's not what I said. I said, how much would you sell it for? I know. He's like, uh, maybe this number. And I was like, yeah, I think my number is like, you know, that plus one. And he was like, and he was like, okay, um, what do you would do with that? I was like, let's see if we can sell it. And I was like, I'm very impulsive like that. Like I was wake up one day. That's how I got my dog.

I just woke up one day and I just, hey, get in the car. We're going to go, let's go find a dog. And we were like, Craig's listing in the car to find dogs. And we got a dog that day. And that's kind of what happened with this. And so literally he calls me back later that afternoon. He's like, dude, so weird. I just talked to these guys.

And they mentioned on the call, if you'd ever be interested, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, well, who are they? I never heard of these guys. And then he's like, no, they're legit. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, I googled him and whatever. And like, he's like one of them built like the largest, I don't know how you describe it, like the largest gold website.

Gold e-commerce, precious metals e-commerce. Prestous metal e-commerce site. So basically, J.M. Bullion is the name of it. If you want to go buy, sell gold, silver, whatever, you can go do it there. And I knew that name because my brother-in-law buys from Jane Boeons. So he had been telling me, you know, as he's like stashed away a little like coins in his safe, I'm like, all right, good for you, man. I'm glad to me and screw up his orders.

Yeah, yeah. He gets it every time. And he's like, you know, whatever. He's hoarding gold. So you guys, you'd built that. That was a couple hundred million dollar company. And then you had done the same thing in the sports betting side. Same thing, like roughly $100 million worth of exits.

And I was like, oh, these guys are actually super legit. Okay. Scratch the whole 19-year-old kid to offer him a dollar. Let's see what we can get these guys to offer us. And then that's sort of how the deal. evolve from there. And so that's like how we met. Then actually making a deal,

somebody said this other day, they go, the rule of, they call it the rule of five. They go, and any deal, it's going to fall apart five times. If it's going to get done, it's going to fall apart five times.

And I think we kind of did that. Oh, we did. Maybe three or four times at least along the way. I do have a question about it, which is not just how it all happened, but it's a question I've been wanted to ask and I get to put you guys on the spot here. how could we have negotiated better?

So I asked Ben, I go, what can we ask these guys on the pot? He goes, he goes, yeah, ask him about the deal in negotiation. I go, yeah, I should ask him, could we have gotten more? Because that was my first acquisition. That was the question I asked the CEO, and he was like, you couldn't have got a dollar more. And I was like, that feels good, but it feels like a lie. It's never actually the case. So from your guy's perspective, how did we negotiate?

Give us a grade and tell us how we did. I would say it was a minus. I was going to say a B. A B. Yeah. I mean, I would give everyone almost a B around, you know, the table. I feel like each one of us at one point kind of were like, ah, this isn't going to work. And it wasn't as kind of straightforward as you'd like a deal.

But as you said, both my deals, every time I was like, it's not going to work. You know, for one reason or another, you get to the point of they're over here, I'm over here, and we're not getting anywhere close. Right. And then, you know, you figure it out or you walk away. And, you know, we had those walkaways with you, I think, twice. Yeah. I think you guys did it at one time and we did it another time. Yeah, I said a minus because at the end, like when we made that final, you know, the last little chunk, we were, that was it for us.

We had said we're walking if this doesn't work. We talked about this last night. I think one thing that would have helped a lot. So he has a non-compete on gambling as we talked about. And, you know, one of the times it fell apart was we got into the diligence after we'd already agreed on a number. And there was- You got out I was a degenerate. There was a little more gambling,

gambling sponsor revenue there than we thought. And I think that if that had come out a lot earlier, you guys probably could have guided us better to like, hey, well, for next month, we're going to target this stuff. Yeah, we didn't know that was a problem. We were like, because it's not in front. We don't have a non-compete. So we're like, this is great.

Yeah, that's all right. That's good. We did talk about it at dinner. You did? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

At that dinner, I didn't come out. All right. So let's talk about. you know, how this deal kind of evolves. Why do you buy a business like this? What's the, what's the thinking? What's the rationale? And you guys have been on the seller side.

You've sold your businesses. What's the difference in the mentality there? Mike, you want to take this one? Yeah. So, you know, reason we bought you guys, we felt like everything we were doing was just going to work a lot better on their brand. And so like the SEO play, which is our thing, you know, we're building these content-driven sites that we want to rank in Google for,

you know, money terms in crypto, by Bitcoin. lend Bitcoin, all those sorts of things. We should explain your guys' magic. Your superpower is somebody goes to Google and they say, buy gold online. Best place to buy gold. Best place to bet on whatever. And your guys' whole career basically is rank number one for that.

And you did it with the sports betting and the gold, but before that you did it with poker. Before that, you did it with other stuff. And we'll go into some of those funny stories. second. But that's your guys' secret sauce to which I was like, why do they need a newsletter? The newsletter doesn't do that. That's not the answer. But there is some, I don't know, synergy there for you. Yeah. So it's, you know, just this brand component of like Google has really moved towards rewarding brands that users are actually going to Google and searching for. Like,

Milk Road is being searched hundreds of times a day. And that's such an indicator to Google of, like, humans are interested in this brand. Same with JM. GM's getting thousands of searches a day for Jamboyan. So like when we were building our sites like defyrate.com was the one that we merged into Milk Road. No one's out there really looking for this site. We're just trying to figure out how to get it up in Google. So eventually it will become a brand. So for us it was like, hey, we get to jump forward a year in this journey if we buy this newsletter, buy the website, roll it in, and then, you know, reap these benefits forevermore. You're going to continue to get really amazing backlinks because you do all these awesome interviews. It was, you know, that was my piece. And I think, too, it was really

complimentary. You know, like the newsletter content could go on the website. You know, we'd be able to be in the inbox of our users along with, hey, you know, there's a different segment of our users that are going to go to our website. And so, you know, those type of ways to, you know, reach people

are like really exciting for us. And so that was kind of like why they have the brand. They have a voice. And, you know, they have, you know, a really complimentary, you know. And it was working. during the bare market. Yeah. That's the biggest.

Our business was still growing and generating revenue and profit during the crypto winter, which is hard for, because if you're not like, you know, when Bitcoin's price goes down, there's a lot less people searching. How do I buy Bitcoin right now, you know? And so, or like, you know, defy implodes or whatever. Well, then people aren't looking to borrow or lend at the same rates. So I think that also helped because it was like, oh, this is a business that will work even in the winters.

Yeah. And you had diversified advertisers. So they're not all crypto companies. Yeah. We're like, yeah, this can work even if crypto is dead for a while. And so the question on our side was, do we want to sell? Right? Why sell?

Do we want to sell? And I think, you know, there's probably a three-pronged answer to that. The answer is first, a lot of decisions just get made through like who your nature, your personality. And I've gotten to know my nature a little bit over the last few years. And it is very much a, I'm good at starting things. I'm good at finding something from nothing. but taking the something and just fine-tuning it day after day, making it better. Which is where most of the values created in business is not something that I just get super excited about.

And so that was always hard for me because I could create something, get it off the ground, get it to work. And then as it worked, my interest would fade. And, you know, so that was like a personal thing. I sort of knew that. So I said, if I'm getting a good deal now, but I know it'd be better if I held it for four years, great, but am I really going to have this same energy I have today for years from now? I can't know that that's true for me as an operator.

Whereas I'm at you guys, and I'll go into why I thought you guys would be much better owners of the business was you're like that. Mike is an absolute animal workforce. I actually, like, we've been working together a little bit now, and I see your level of attention to detail is crazy. Like, you are looking at this email, you know, like in the morning. in the afternoon, in the evening, then the feedback, and then do it again the next day. I love it.

I was like, wow, this guy's an animal. And I thought, okay, maybe he's just doing that at the beginning. No, that's just kind of who you are. Yeah. I mean, that was, you know, with JM, same thing. Like myself and the other partner who I ran that with. We were probably like the biggest readers of the Golden Silver Subreddit, like on the planet. Because we just wanted to ingest all this.

What are the people thinking, you know? And that's really, we got so many wins just observing that, implementing those things. I asked you guys some questions before the pod to get to like, I made a Google Doc. And I was like, what do you do like, I don't know, for fun or something like that? Like are you like, and you're one of your things was uphill skiing or something? Yeah. So I've got a buddy that's gotten into backcountry skiing. So that's like instead of, you know, going to the resort, riding the lift up, you're just sort of in nature.

Right. The fun, nice thing everybody likes. Yeah, yeah. You have to, you know, manually get yourself up this hill. So a few years ago. he convinced me to go do one of these things. And it was in, I think we're in Yellowstone Park. We didn't see another human the entire day.

You're truly in the middle of nowhere. Are you hiking basically up a mountain or you crawling? For this, this was fairly tame. So basically it's called a splitboard, what I use. So it looks like a snowboard, but it breaks down the middle and the bindings rotate. So it basically turns into skis. And then you put these things on the bottom called skins, which originally I think used to be seal skin is where it came.

from. Now it's just like some fancy fabric and it'll only slide one way. So you can kind of like slide up the hill with poles. You're like cross country skiing up the hill and then it won't slide backwards. Right. So yeah, you like fight your way up the hill. It takes several hours to do this. It's like a five minute ride down. So there's not a huge payoff there. There's like little children coming down as you're like brutally climbing inch by inch up the hill. And then the cool thing you can do it at resorts too. So our trip this year we were at Whitefish Montana and I was doing this in the resort. and you do get a lot of respect from people coming down the hill when you're like trudging up the hill. So it's a good feeling.

Yeah, no respect for me. Yeah, you're making your life harder. Yeah, you are doing the wrong thing. Sean's riding the lift up and down. Yeah, exactly. I don't even get off. This is, but that was like, to me, when I heard you say that, I was like, checked out completely the way you exercise or like the way you vacation, basically, is the way you work, which is just like, malignical grind. And I love that because that's if, I mean, if you do that at any business, you're going to increase the outcomes.

And so because we still own like a good size chunk of the business. And so, you know, I wanted to know that that was going to be worth something someday. And so that would be the only way that I could bake this deal worth it was, okay, there's the upfront cash and all that good stuff. That's great. But your boy's going to spend that. I'm going to blow through that through, you know, some way. So I need to know that like the what if, what could have been will actually get, played out. And like that way all just my curiosity, I'll know what would have happened if we had

kept out and focused on it. Well, let me just hand it to these guys who are super focused and let's now we get to know. And then also there's, you know, you get the reward of it too, if it ends up working out. So that was one on your side. It's like, that's my super power. Like, this guy is literally willing to climb up the hill. Like with this like, you know, like, he doesn't understand how skiing works and enjoyment works, which is great. And then it's like, all right, so what's this guy Kendall? He's the same way. He also just like this. Absolutely not. Super Grindr.

No. Kendall's Mr. Shortcut. And I love this. So we were talking and I was like, all right, what did you guys do before this? Before this? And I kept digging. Tell the story of, I don't know, let's pick one of them. Let's do the Tesla one, the Tesla hack.

Because once you told me this story, I was like, like, this guy's super clever. He's going to find a way. Like, he's just going to find the shortcuts that we would need to like, you know, make this thing super successful. So tell that story. Yeah. So I had a Tesla. and at the time they had the Tesla referral program. So basically they gave every owner a unique code.

And to get, you know, 5,000 supercharger miles, you actually had to use it. So people were searching for it. And I was like, perfect. You know, that's what I do for a living. I rank in Google. So when you search Tesla referral code, my site was number one. What was it called? Like trussonferralcote.com or something?

No, it was actually fairestimate.com. Okay. I basically made like for just a fun side project, a Lyft versus Uber comparison. So you just put like, I'm going here. You know, what's the difference between the two? Right. And so I just made a slash Tesla on that. And by the way, that itself racked you up.

That was another one of your little shortcuts. You didn't want to ever pay for Uber again, right? Like, or Lyft because you would just get referral credits from that too, right? Exactly. So basically on that site, the way I monetized it was here's my referral code when you sign up for one of the other. and literally had unlimited Uber and Lyft for years. Literally years. And I shared it with some friends.

They'd be like, hey, you know, I want some. Can you put my code for a little bit? Yeah. So I'd, you know, do it for a month for them. And they'd be like, I don't need any more. I am done. And then it would just be like the next friend, the next friend. That's hilarious.

But then, you know, what happens is like these programs are like, okay, this is kind of weird. You know, there's certain codes. Yeah, exactly. So they kind of cut you off after a while. but until then, you kind of can reap the benefit. So you had the Uber Lyft shortcut, which was getting you free Ubers and lifts. Then you were like, oh, Tesla, so you made a slash roadstore slash Tesla like extension, basically.

And you were ranking for when people were looking for Tesla referral code. Exactly. So I sent like hundreds of people to buy cars. And you needed to send like, I think, 56 to get a Tesla Roadster. Was that like the peak prize of the referral program? Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, I'm so waiting for it. Rootster's like what, like 100 grand or something?

It was 250. Yeah, or yeah, 200 or 250 depending on like the model. They never gave it. They never gave it to you? Well, they haven't released it. What do you mean? Oh, the new roads. The newest.

Yeah. So they were like, hey, when we do it, you know, in 2019, you know, we're going to give every, how many everyone? How many do you earn? So I earned like 1.75. I had sent more referrals, but I think Tesla was like, all right, you know, we're going to give you 1.75. And then, you know, what do you do with the 0.715?

file. I don't understand. I think you have to pay the difference between them when they do. I'd be like, no, send it to me without the trunk. I'll take the three-fourth car. I'll take the convertible. Thank you. And then, you know, I did that and I was like, all right, well, hey, dad, you have a Tesla. Do you want a roadster? Sure, son. I want that. And so I put his code and then did it with my brother-in-law. So, you know, we have a lot of roadsters that might be. coming? We'll see. It's like the Oprah thing. You get a rest. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing.

So you did that. You also did other ones too. Let's do some of the other ones. You did, I was asking you, how did you even learn that there's like this like SEO affiliate game, right? So SEO is just people are searching for stuff on Google. If you can get to the top, you're going to get a lot of free

customer traffic. And then affiliate is, well, what do you do with that free customer traffic? They want something. You can pass that kind of qualified lead that high intent customer to the website and they have affiliate programs so you'll get the kickback. That's how you got the Roadster. That's how you got the Uber credits and all that. So how did you even figure out this was a thing? I want to hear that for both of you guys. This is y'all's game. And it's a game I didn't know about until much later in life, but you

guys discovered it kind of early. I want to hear the origin story. How did you guys even get into that? Yeah. So this was like during like the Moneymaker, you know, World Series of Poker was a big thing. and, you know, all of my friends and I were playing poker just around the house. And then online, you know, there was a bunch of poker sites. And I saw one of the poker sites had like a poker chip set and they would give it to you for free. And I was like, well, how does that work? Nothing in life is free. And I figured, oh, they're giving it for free because they're getting like $250 per person they end up sending.

So at that point, I was like, perfect. I've got a lot of friends. And I'm just going to kind of make the difference. I'll give them 50 bucks to deposit and I'll make, you know, the $200 that I get paid from the, you know, casinos and sports books and poker at that point. So you do that with like six friends and ran out of them at that point. Right. You know, it was like, it was great. And then it was like, okay, well, now I need to actually figure out how to do this.

And that's kind of how I got into like, oh, I need to figure out how to create websites. I can do this with just like random people. And you're a teenager at this time. I'm in college, yeah. Oh, you're a college. Okay. Yeah. So I was in college.

Mike was actually a teenager at that time. And, you know, just had to figure it out. And I mean, like my first big break was actually misspelling Paradise Poker. What do you mean? So how did they go down? Yeah. Well, so at the time when you searched in Google, they didn't have autocorrect. So basically, you misspelled Paradise Poker and you'd get misspelled websites with that.

And so I was like, perfect. I'm not a very good speller, so I can come up with a lot of variations. I couldn't tell you to spell paradise. poker right now, actually. And so I came up with a lot of variations and, you know, got them to rank in Google for like every misspelling. Right. And it was crazy because like all of a sudden I just started seeing traffic. I started sending them obviously to the real Paradise poker.

I made a cut of them. And literally my last year of college, it was like paid for. I was basically like parents like I've got this, you know, I've got room, board, you know, education because I'm making free money basically online. Were they like, well, what do you mean? So do they know about this the whole time or not really? I had to kind of like tell them they were like, I was a little worried because I was like poker gambling, you know, they're going to be like, oh, what's my son into? Is he doing this?

But my dad was actually like, he looked at me and he was like pretty proud because he was like, oh, you're kind of like, you know, the picks and shovels of it, right? You're not actually doing it. You're enabling people to do it and the people that choose to do it. Yeah. And you said something real quick like we got to the top of Google. Did you have to do anything interesting to get your misspelled paradise poker? to be the number one, or was it just like, that was your domain name? So it automatically was

going to be number one at that time. Well, the beauty of it was there was just no competition. No one else was actually trying to misspell Paradise Poker on purpose. Maybe they would misspell it once, but I would have it like eight times. So I was the best misspeller of Paradise Poker and literally was number one for most of the keywords. I sent you the thing that's going on right now with the Kia car where the Kia rebranded their logo, it looks like KN instead of Kia. and Google search for KN car is like suddenly spiking because people see it on the road. They're like, oh, that's cool. What is that?

What is the KN car? And I was like, this feels like a Kendall thing. And I was like, Kendall, what would you do with this? What was your answer? So I, you know, I had a buddy in fleet sales. And like that's where they, you know, sell a ton of cars via online. And I would make a deal with someone like that at the dealership. I would say, look, I can get you a lot of traffic.

And so I would create websites that would literally, you know, go for all. the newest cars, right? The, you know, the 20, 23, you know, Kia, whatever it was, but obviously spell it with the KN. Right. And then, you know, make a deal with them. Like, I'm going to send you this. You know, I want 20% of all those leads. And what is your, what would your website look like at that time? Would it be like, hey, this is the KN car. Go ahead and go buy it. Would you be like, you know, would you just make it look like the Kia website? What would you actually do? I think I would just, you know, explain it like, hey, you know, it says KN, but it's actually Kia. And, you know, here's the reasons why this car is really cool. And here's a form to actually

buy this car. And I can get you a great deal on it. Right. And then, you know, obviously send that lead over and, you know, everyone's happy at that point. They actually find the car that they wanted. You know, it wasn't Kia, but, you know, it was the KN car that they had found. How much do you think somebody can make if they did this? What's your range? What's your estimate of how that would play out? If you did a good job of executing that? I think if you did a good job, I mean, the problem now is Google Auto-correct. So Google now, I even did the search as myself, it goes to the actual Kia, like, hey, I know what you're trying to do. Right.

So you'd have to kind of find that like, where doesn't it do that? Is it the app store or is it some like other, you know, place to do that? Right. And I think you could, I mean, when you get like a really good misspelling of really high priced items with a decent margin, you know, you could make hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's awesome. And you kind of had a similar origin story, playing poker and then discontaseless.

covered the poker affiliate game. Yeah, yeah. So I was basically a degenerate gambler when I was 15 or 16. My friends and I would play, you know, poker in home games, just five, ten bucks, whatever. This is when poker was on TV all the time in like 2005. And I just kept losing all my money. So I would have to go to, you know, the local grocery store to the Western Union or whatever, give them the hundred bucks cash. They would send it to, you know, Cambodia or wherever it was going. And then I would just lose that. So I was like, I need to find some other way to reload my poker account. I'm busted. Not I need to stop.

No, I didn't. Exactly. Where am I getting reload faster? That next hit. So then I saw that they had like the refer a friend thing on the website and they would pay you like 75 bucks or whatever to get your buddies to sign up. So I had all my friends sign up same as you. And when I ran out of friends, I was like, same as him. Like I got to figure out a way to get strangers to do this for me and ended up coming across this forum called.

I think it was called Poker Affiliate World back then. It was basically a lot of people who were doing this that would share what was working, what wasn't. It was a very friendly community that I was kind of surprised. Like, I don't know why people are telling me this. Because they're kind of competing, right? Yeah, we were all, like we were competitors and just ended up becoming friends as well. So just learned through doing that, started a website.

I convinced my parents to lend me like a couple hundred bucks to buy a domain and set up, you know, web hosting and everything. And I told you this, or I put in that document that, like, when I've sold my first site, which was probably nine or 12 months after that, it was for $3,200, which was like a billion to me back then. And I got, it was like a check. I cashed it. I took all the cash home and, you know, spread it out on the desk.

Spreading it out is spread out. That's the big new move for sure. And then took the, you know, repaid my parents. And that was like a very sentimental moment for me. That's amazing. Did you have something for your neighbor did something for you? neighbor like lent you some money or something like that um was it like a lemonade stand story something like like that well i like the first thing i did for work but one of my neighbors needed some like landscaping

work done and i will give you 20 bucks or whatever to come over and do it and it was on a saturday and the night before i was you know out with the boys had i had a few sodas and uh was a little hungover that morning and i made it to like 10 a m before i had to tap out i just can't do this right now that was That was the first and probably only job you had. Yeah, I just, you know, random stuff like that. Did that. I had a, I lasted one day on a, another neighbor had a bread company. So they would have to deliver the bread every morning to restaurants.

Right. And my dad was friends with him. So he's like, you know, I'm sure trying to get me to do something. Yeah. You need to go work with Mr. Anzvine for the day. It was like a 4 a.m. wake up call to do that. So it lasted one day at that as well. It's like, just no way.

Shoveled snow for one day. So I had a lot of one day business. Neither of you really had any real jobs that sounded like. I never had a real job. So you never had like a corporate go and like, you know, here's your first day at the new company. You didn't have that. I did not. I basically had like a summer job.

It was like a temp job agency that kind of places you different places. And one of them was like Dell warranties. And then I realized then I was like, I can't work for someone else. Like this is just not me. You know, I want to work for myself. I want to set my own hours and I want to make a lot of money. Like my mom always was said like when you were younger, all you said is like, I want to be a millionaire. I want to make a bunch of money.

And she's like, all right, sure, you know, let's see what happens. But, you know, that was just kind of my general sense of it. And I was like, I need to figure out a way to make it, like to make. You also say something like, I don't like the idea of working really hard and someone else making money off that. Exactly. I'm going to make the money off that. I mean, that's what, you know, like being an employee, right?

Like, you're making the owner's money. And I just like, I couldn't get like around that. I was like, I need to be the owner of the business. Dude, I find it hard sometimes to recruit people. because I'm like, I fundamentally don't want to do this trade of like I get some security and certainty and experience, but you get the upside. You know, like, I get my salary, but you get the upside of my work. I almost find it sometimes hard to even recruit people to work at this point because I'm just like, I don't know, man. I just philosophically don't love this path, but then I also need to hire employees all the time.

So I'm like, you know, it's not very productive. Have you ever have that? Oh, totally. And I feel like actually, it's been actually one of the most rewarding things of my company is like watching the people grow. You know, we would hire them and I'd say like, oh, I just need you to kind of, you know, write a couple pages of content. And then they do a really good job?

It's like, oh, do you want to be the editor of this website? Right. And then, oh, do you want to manage other people? And so, like, you know, the businesses I sold, I made sure the people that I was working with got really great jobs because I feel like, you know, sure I made a lot of the money, but I want to make sure that like your career is set and you are in the best position possible to really, you know, crush it with what you're doing. And what you do after your first sale?

You did a retirement party. Yeah, so I had this idea. I was like, okay, you know what? I did it. I'm done. And you were like 30 something? Yeah, I was like 33, I believe. And, you know, I was telling all my friends like, I'm going to rent out a restaurant and, you know,

we're just going to like celebrate my retirement. And, you know, it'll be great. because, you know, I'm not going to be 65. I'll be like 33 and it'll be great. So we rented out Lazy Bear in San Francisco. And I had all my friends and my family and it was awesome. We then had a party bus. They didn't even really know about your business.

No. I mean, that was another thing for me. I've always been, you know, not one to brag about it. I feel like what I do is kind of just what I do. And there's no reason to kind of be, you know, boastful about it. Yeah. So for actually the first year after I sold the business, I didn't tell anyone.

And then after a year, because I just wanted to live with it. And I just wanted to kind of be comfortable with it myself before I then told other people. And so I had a three-year earnout. So after the three years is when I did my retirement party. So you sat on that news for a long time. I did. Yeah, well, yeah, I sat on it for a year, told people, but then I had two years left with them. Once I was done with that, I was like, it's retirement time.

Like, I'm done. Let's do it. So rented lazy bear, rented a bar. had a party bus and it was awesome but then literally like three months later were you at this party you were supposed to come why did i not come you had some some excuse he's like i was hung over again that spot guys like this guy's almost hung over i don't know what he's talking about no i can't remember why i didn't come but i do remember that when he did sell that one i had left the gambling space so i knew he was doing well but i didn't know like what was really going on and he was in dallas for something

i can't remember what and i went over to their hotel room and him and his wife, Tess, had a ball of champagne. They're like, we're going to open this, celebrate the sale, whatever. I was like, oh, you know, congrats. That's awesome, man. And then I went home. Google it. I booked it up. And I was like, oh, and I texted it.

I was like, all right, I really mean it. It's in the news, right? That one sold for, I think, $45 million, $40 million. It was actually $50 million total. But I kind of sold it twice to the company. Yeah. Which was kind of a weird story. Explain that.

How does that work? So first time you sold it for what? So first time I sold it for like $15 million plus, you know, a bunch of equity. And what happened was, like, at that time, New Jersey was big. And that was, like, the first legal state that had, you know, casino and poker. So we focused on that. We did really well.

Let me explain because I think people won't know the context here. So you go from online poker, then online poker collapses. And now that whole affiliate game is kind of dead because U.S. just shut down online poker. Yep. what most people did was they went offshore or international because it was still illegal in certain places or in certain ways. That's where most people went. You did something different. That was the obvious market.

You went for kind of a non-obvious pivot, which was in the whole United States, one state was going to legalize, I don't know if all gambling or sports betting or which one is. They basically at that point didn't have sports betting, but it was a poker. It was casino. And casinos are like the big players. So that's kind of the one that was really exciting. So gambling was legal in New Jersey and only New Jersey. And I remember at that time, it was like, well, how do you build a business around one state? It's just like it didn't sound big.

And I don't think it sounded big to most people. So most people didn't do that, right? You kind of like found the hack that nobody else was really competing for this. Like what would be the search term people were looking for that you wanted to rank? New Jersey online casino was that was like the big one. And you're right. Like all of my competitors were like, perfect. You know, like, we still have 49 other states.

And the regulators at that time said, if you choose to promote in New Jersey, you could not do anything else. They didn't want, you know, the offshore plus the legal regulated market. And I was like, that's perfect. I want to be, you know, a big fish in a small pond. So I started that business. It was going well, but there was one competitor, Chris Grove. And he was really good at content.

And he had like, you know, his game figured out, I was much more into the kind of revenue side of the business. And so I talked and we both talked for a while and we're like, you know, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing. And like, we were like, we're the only people in this market. If we combine, we basically own this market. Right. And so it was an easy decision.

Then you have pricing power. Exactly. Because otherwise, if you're an affiliate and the company says, oh, instead of giving you $200, I'll give you $20. You're just like, well, you're my revenue stream and you just. just changed the price on me, that's not great. I think that's one of the problems most people in the affiliate game fall into is you're at the whim of your affiliate partners. But if you become kind of like almost more important, you're like, I'm the only acquisition source for customers.

So this price is the one I'm comfortable at. Exactly. And it was crazy because, you know, we were able to get $1,000 per player that we sent through New Jersey Online Casinos. Wow. And so, yeah, it worked out really well for us. Literally the first month we partnered together. We both made way more money than we did a part. And, you know, within two years, containing media, the company that purchased us, you know, came knocking, we're like, we have to buy you. Because we've heard at conferences, we've heard from, you know, people in the industry that you guys are the biggest and we want to own the biggest. Right. So they buy it once. So they buy it once. And at that point, it was just New Jersey. And what I told them,

I was like, we're not going to sell. Like, why would we sell? We have 49 other states that eventually will legalize. And so I came up with the idea that, all right, we'll sell you New Jersey. And any future state, we'll get 50% up. So we'll be kind of 50, 50 partners for every stay. Right. And they said, sure. They didn't really care at that point. I think they were just more focused on New Jersey and being the biggest affiliate in the U.S. market. Right. So it was great. We started running it. You know, I had a three year and as I mentioned, the first year was good. And that's when sports betting actually got legalized. And then the business, you know, started booming in terms of, you know, New Jersey had it. But then a lot of other states were really excited about offering it to their, you know,

to the people in their state. So they started legalizing. And all of a sudden, basically, we had like 10 states coming online. And the company was like, whoa, we cannot give you 50% of this. This is just too much liability. And so we're like, okay, yeah, no problem. We, you know, We just need a big check. Right. And they did. And they were like, we have to come up with the situation that, you know, works for us and works for you. And so, you know, it was part stock and part cash.

So in total is around $50 million. Yeah. That's amazing. And that company is publicly listed, right? Yep. They're publicly listed in the Swedish stock exchange. Swedish stock exchange. Nice.

Did you go ring like the bell in Sweden? I wish. That would have been cool. And so that's kind of like, your. kind of like the big win story. Let's do Mike's big win story. So how does one go from I'm gambling and losing money in poker? I get my friends to sign up for a referral program to I own this company that does like,

I don't know, multiple billions of gold sales every year, right? So it's like, how does that happen? Where does that come from? Yeah. So basically I was in the gambling industry like he was. And when the shit hit the fan, I started. sold. So I made like the wrong call where that was like the 3200. No, so this was this was later on. I sold I was further into it. I sold for 565,000 and I was I think 19 then. So to sell a business

565,000, what was it doing at the time? Like it must have been doing a lot, but the future was too uncertain. It was doing like 30 to 40K a month, but it just, I didn't know what was going to happen from that. So I sold that and then, you know, I'm on top of the world. Yeah. And you're how old? You're like, I'm 19 at this point. Drop out of college. Yeah. I'm going for it. Guys, I figured out. Figured out life. Yeah. So I'm like, all right, I can do this affiliate thing in any space.

So I try a bunch of different plays. I did it in the dating space. I tried to do it like selling business cards online. That was a complete failure. And just really like... Was this where the Smearing Off Ice thing happened? That was around that time. Tell that story.

So when I, you know, around that age, you know, I was out. That was at Penn State. I was having some fun. And there was this trend that was like icing people. So like Smearing off ice. If you presented it to someone, you should have brought one day. You present it to someone, they had to get on a knee and chug it. So like guys I knew at college and high school, they were into this.

By the way, most genius marketing campaign ever. Yeah, it was so good. Someone needs to just redo that. Enough time is past, just replay that same thing. Do a milk, milk chugged. You'll lay in your back and chug a gallon of milk. So there was a website called bros icingbrose.com, where people would send in like their best pictures of this happening.

So there were all these creative ones. Like, there was one I remember where a guy was super hung over in the morning and went and opened his toilet and they had put plastic over the toilet. There was a smeared off ice sitting there. Yeah, like, chug at 7 a.m. So me and my buddies would send these pictures back and forth like we thought it was funny. And then I just somehow ended up reaching out to the guy that ran it. I was like, I think this is cool.

You know, any interest in selling it or, you know, do anything with it. It ended up working on a deal to buy it. And I gave him $25,000 for it. There was no monetization at all. It was just like, I think this is cool. It has a lot of traffic. I can figure something out here. And I'm really excited. I tell my buddy's like, you just bought that site. Right. You're the man. Everybody's like, congrats. Yeah. They're like, we want to get our pictures up, whatever. And literally the next day,

got an email from Smyr and Office's insist. We were infringing their, you know, trademarks or whatever. And like, you have to take all the pictures off the site. And the point of the site was the picture. It didn't work without the pictures. So basically just shut that down after 24 hours and just, you know, wrote it off. Didn't you try to blur it? Wasn't you saying, you were going to play it? I talked to the prior owner because I told him I was, I was just like, you know, any ideas and he's like, well, you could try blurring him out or whatever. I mean, just doesn't seem a little coincidental.

Yeah. Like, do this guy make a phone call? I know. No wonder. But it's a nice loss for me. Nice learning. Okay. So you're the world's trying to humble you.

Are you getting humbled or not really? You're just like Teflon. Very successfully humbling me. Okay. Yeah. It was, it was kind of like a two year period where just I went from everything worked really well to like nothing was working at all. And especially I had left school and my parents very much were against that decision.

So it was a dark time for me. Like, you know, is this going to work? Is it not? Am I going to get egg on my face? Have to go back to college, whatever. So one of the guys I knew from the poker affiliate world, he was doing some affiliate websites in the golden silver space. And there was this company that had just spun up an affiliate program. And at Jeremy Yankee, a guy we know was managing it for him.

So he's like, you guys should look at this, whatever. So I decided to invest in this guy's business, his name was Jonathan. And I was just going to help him build these sites. Let's see if we can turn it into something. And over like maybe six or nine months, we built up some traffic. It was making like five grand a month. It was a side thing for me. I was trying to do other stuff.

And kind of out of nowhere, the company we were sending everybody to just killed their whole affiliate program. So we went from making, you know, five came out to just zero. You know, this looked like another just completely blown. Got iced again. Yeah, got ice again. Just getting iced. Yeah.

And then my partner, like, credit to him. I was, again, was viewing it just like, well, there's nothing to really do here. There's no other affiliate programs. We had actually gone to that company that cut us off and offered to sell them the website. We're like, you know, this thing was sending you, I don't know, 200 buyers a month or whatever it was. You know, just kind of backing into what you were paying us on an affiliate basis. Just give us 40 grand for it. And we'll, you know, you can have lead gen for a long time.

And they just never replied to us. So we had no path to monetizing it. So I was, yeah, I was writing it off. And then my partner is like, we should just sell this stuff ourselves. And that sounded like, you can imagine how much of a nightmare that sounded. If you're an affiliate, because you never talk to customers. You don't like there's no employees really. Like it's a very simple business.

No product. Yeah. You're kind of a middleman. Yeah. You're like in between people and the product. Yeah. So I was like, this is crazy. I don't want to do any of this.

Because like, I'll do all the. It's like, gasps in the affiliate form. It's like, real business? You're going to sell product. So he's like, I'll do all the inventory, shipping, customer phone calls, all that stuff. I'll do it all. Like, you just help get traffic and put some more money in. So I was like, all right, let's give this a try.

And so, yeah, I mean, credit to him, it wouldn't happen if you hadn't pushed so hard. This is Andreas? Or this somebody else? This is Jonathan. So that was the JM, was Jonathan and Mike. Okay. And kind of a funny story on that. Sounds very regal and official.

Great story on that. Jonathan and Mike's gold shop versus JM Bulli. Like, that's a step up. We knew so little about this space when we started that we named it J.M. Boyan using our initials. And we had no idea that, like, one of the largest refiners of gold and silver in the world is Johnson Matthew. And so we actually got a big boost early on because people thought we were their retail arm. Like, it was a nice little accidental win. And we didn't get any cease and desist, so that was nice.

So, yeah, we spin this thing up. It went live, I think October of 2011. And the idea was we're just going to point all. old traffic at the new e-commerce site, J.M. Boyn.com. And it was it was crickets the first few weeks, like zero. I don't think we got an order for three weeks. And I honestly think that was like my mom's friend who she had like told him to go do it or something. But you don't give up at that point. I didn't give up and you know, just kept trying to figure stuff out. How can we make this work? What's that conversation like? You're three or four weeks in. You go to the office. Like does

anybody say anything? Like, hey, guys. Yeah, well, there was no office. So that was easy. It was my partner had all the goals. Yeah, no office. My partner had all the gold in his little desk drawer in his basement. It could all fit in like the tiny little. Okay, so you're in the basement. You're like, no gold is leaving the drawer right now. Yeah, gold staying in the drawer. It was so early that it, I wasn't really worried at that point. You know, you like what we're doing right now. It's early. You know, you're, you know, it takes years to build these things. But we, kind of a funny story on this, we eventually out of nowhere start getting like big orders. And we didn't change anything. So we're very confused as to what's going on here. Big credit. card orders, repeat customers over and over and over. We're like, all right, we've, we've hit it. Like, this is going to work. And so for like two months, this goes on, we're getting like 100, 200, 200,000 revenue a month. Or no, I'm sorry, it wasn't that much. It was probably 30 or 50 grand. And literally on Christmas morning, my partner texts me, he's like, kind of weird. Have you seen

the checking account? It's like, no. And I go and pull it up on my phone, like Christmas morning with my family around. Pull up the checking account. We're like negative $40,000. All of was fraud. Every single order was like credit card chargeback fraud. We just didn't know anything about any of this stuff. So we had so many of those moments along the way where it was really just two kids, you know, figuring out how to run a gold business. And there were a lot of pitfalls that we fell into and fortunately didn't kill us. All right. So you recover from that. Yeah. So I had to put more money in. I was pretty much on the ropes at this point. Right. It was like everything that was going in now. This was it. This was going to work. You're stressing? I'm stressing at this point. Yeah.

And this is where you start uphill skiing and shit. This is right. So really the turning point for that company was I just took a really honest look in the mirror. And I said, here's JM. Here's like the five biggest companies. Like if I look at these various metrics or whatever, how good is their website, how's their pricing, product selection, how fast they ship, customer service, whatever. And I just basically like did a little scorecard for everybody. And I was like, there's no reason anyone would ever buy from us. We're just worse at everything. We have less selection. We didn't even, we were so small we couldn't get a wholesale account.

Right. So we were just buying from the cheapest retailer and marking it up. You know, me and Jonathan were answering the cell phone. That was, our cell phones were the 800 number. Right. If we were available, we'd answer. It was just, again, like, why would someone buy from us? So what I landed on, I was like, the only lever we can really pull here is we're just

going to undercut everyone because this is a commodity. And it's like buying gasoline. If there's a, if there's a store here and a store there and that one's a penny cheaper, you're going to pull in there. So I'm like, let's just cut it and see what happens. Because if we can get volume and make that work and see the top line grow, I know we're going to be able to figure out margin as we go. You know, you're going to get economies of scale. So we did that and that did work. And then we started to see the revenue really grow. So through 2012, we were starting to do like a million plus a month in sales, which back then we were really pumped about. And the problem with this company was it was super capital intensive because you had to stay ahead of the inventory. So like if you were going to be able to ship fast, it had to be, you know, in the drawer when they order. So I did another round. I put, I think, my last 100KM basically.

And then we outgrew that. And I was like, we need someone. No bank's going to give us any money. We put a deck together and sent it to like 60 different, you know, angels or VCs and just zero responses. Absolutely nothing. Not even like a no thank you. So I was thinking like, who could I get to invest in this thing?

And I called him. And so he was our first angel investor. And you knew him personally at the time? Yeah. So because we were competitors in the space. And we went to all the conferences together and we were both around the same age. And, you know, I just like to, you know, go out, have dinners and stuff at conferences. So we were friends.

And he had told me after I sold my gambling business, he's like, you know, whatever you do next, let me know I would like to invest. So I was like, hey, I didn't cash that in. Now what happens? You get the call. What's your, did you even know he was doing this in the meantime? I did. You know, I got it. I was excited about being able to be a part of it.

But I was like, I don't want to be operational. Like, you know, for me, I was just like, I'm trying to do this gambling business, you know. And but I'm excited about Mike. You know, Mike made really good websites. And I was like, if anyone's going to figure it out, it's going to be Mike. And so basically I invested in him. And, you know, it was, I feel like we had a quick negotiation. It was like 24 hours.

Yeah. You did a great deal. I mean, he had all the leverage. It was like we were either going to go under or he was going to write this check. It's always like, so you got an A plus for that. Yeah, it was the A plus. And it was like just speed. It was affiliate.

You know, we always call it like affiliate speed where it was just like, we had kind of had a handshake agreement and then I just wired in the money. Like we probably didn't have documents. Yeah. Yeah. But it was like, I trust you. You put in what like a couple hundred K or? I think 100.

It was 100 and then you, this was another A plus move. He negotiated like another rider of like I get to do another 50 at the same valuation at my option, which he then did a few months later as we were growing. Okay. So you put it 150K. Yep. That ended up being a good return for you. like, what's the multiple on that?

I think it was at what, $20 million? You got like $23 million. That's what you netted out? Yeah, $150K and $1.50,000. I'm not sure about the valuation. No, because in Silicon Valley, it's like, oh, you invest in the seed thing. Oh, is that a $20 million valuation? No, no, no.

You're saying. No, he was in it like, it was maybe a million bucks. Like a million or $2 million. We said it was worth a million. No. Maybe $700K or something was the valuation and, yeah, I sold it for $174. Wow. So you got an amazing.

returned there. He turned 100k-ish into 20 million bucks. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. Yeah, do you do, uh, what do you do? He's a lot of pappy. Yeah. And I'll let you know, we can do another business together. Right. I'll actually

help this time. There you go. Yeah, there you got. That was good. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobble together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best.

HubSpot. Grow better. So you do that. That's amazing. You get the phone call, you do that. You get this more money. But it seems like you're just going to have this problem again. And we did like three months later.

So we get his last 50 or whatever it was. And then we were really, it was starting to grow pretty quick at that point. We were up to probably $4 million a month in revenue and it was starting to hockey sick. So it was like, you know, and what are you doing to get so much traffic? It's SEO, basically.

Yeah. So that's when the SEO really started to kick in. So initially it was like, we're going to price cheaper. We're going to make this appealing to people. And then people started, you know, we get the return customer. customers get the backlinks going. What do you call this exercise you did where you're like, I took an honest look in the mirror and I said, it's kind of like, why would it, I want a date a 10?

Why would a 10 date me? That's exactly that. Right. That's basically what you were saying. It's like they have all these websites they can choose from. Why would they be choosing us? Shouldn't more companies do that? I feel like most companies don't actually do that exercise.

Because it can be painful because the answer often isn't what you want it to be. The mirror doesn't look that. It's not that the world is wrong and dumb. So that's, you know, something I've tried to use over my career and it's been helpful. That's amazing. Yeah, I think more people should do that exercise. And also, when you do that, I think it forces clarity. Where are we going to be great?

You know, what are we going to be great on? And you decided we're going to be great on price first. And then we're going to be great on these other things later. Okay, so you do that. Grows, grows, grows. You do this for eight years. You sell. Hallelujah.

So that's kind of like your big wins. I want to know, give me some stories along the way on either of the big wins, maybe a story of, you know, something you look fondly at in the early days of like, you know, one of those like wins along the way that felt really good. And then maybe a moment that felt bad. I don't know. If you have any stories on either one of those, I'd love to hear them. Yeah. This was kind of a mix of good and bad. But so that first year, I think it was before you were in, we had gotten an order from a guy.

It was for like $20,000, which was a big order for us back then. and he pays us, we ship it, you know, it's delivered, everything's fine, we go on our way, and then we hear from him like a week later that, you know, I was out of town, there's no gold here, you know, I don't know what happened here. And again, we were so naive, we didn't even have like shipping insurance back then. So there was just nothing there. So we dug in pretty far, we're like, you know, UPS has the GPS coordinates on your doorstep, you know, the driver has signed an affidavit that he delivered it there, you know, all this stuff. But this guy just kept digging in harder. And he did this like, there's a site called ripoff report.com.

Okay. Anyone can go on there and file like, hey, this company or person screwed me. And he did that. And we were so early that, like, there were no jambly and reviews anywhere. So when people searched that, that was the number one thing that came up. And it immediately hit us, like probably 30% of our sales just fell off. Because everyone in the gold space, everyone checks. Right. Like they're always worried about getting, you know, rug cold. Yeah. So it was really hurting us. And this guy then went into like this kind of sob story of. That was my kid's college fund. If my kid's not going to be able to go to college, you're going to ruin his life unless you make this right, whatever.

And I was really starting to stress about this. You know, that's not a good feeling. And I don't know this person, but you wouldn't want anyone to feel like that. So as this draws on and we're not finding a conclusion, UPS basically is like, we delivered it. You know, we're washing our hands of this thing. I had caved in. And I was like, I'm going to personally write this guy check for 20 years. And that would have been like the end of my checking account right there.

because I couldn't even sleep at night. I was feeling so much guilt about this. And so I drafted the email that I was going to send to him. And I was like, I'm going to sleep on this one more night just to be sure. And that morning I woke up and UPS had gone with the police to his house. And as soon as the police were there, he found it in his closet. So that one had a happy ending, thankfully. But that was another learning moment for us of like, okay, well, obviously we need to

figure out the delivery and insurance side of this business. Painful. Payful lessons learned, but you got to do it. So I think one would be Facebook Boom and Facebookcom. Okay, so what are these? So at the time, originally, it was the facebook.com. That was, you know, Facebook's domain name.

And, you know, I was in college, so I was part of it. And eventually they dropped the the. And I knew, like, right away, I was like, I'm in a domain squat on things that they're going to type wrong. You know, Paradise Poker, you know, same thing, but I'm going to do it for Facebook. So I got the K is by the M.

So that's why I registered Facebook. Like on the keyboard, the K. Wow, you're a man of science. I didn't even realize the precision that you took to this. And then, you know, people forget Facebook.com. So they, you know, they, you know, end up putting the com and then dot com again. And the crazy thing about it was, I got to see basically Facebook's like growth. crazy hockey sick.

By the way, I just went to faceboom.com. You where it goes? I have no idea. Facebook. It goes to Facebook now. They also figured this out. Yeah, so they might have figured it out one way, but at the time, I actually ended up selling Faceboom.com for like 20K.

You know, someone came. It was like, hey, there's a lot of traffic coming here. You know, at that time, you'd have just like, you know, PPC type ads, just like really basic text link ads. And you'd make like, you know, a 10 cents per click. There was enough traffic where it made it worthwhile. So I sold it to them. And I was like, sweet.

I still have, you know, Facebookcom.com. I'm excited to sell this one. But little did I know, like a big old packet of papers comes from Facebook. And they're like, hey, that's our trademark. Right. Do you want to fight this or do you want to hand it over? And it was a very easy choice to give them the domain name. So at least I got to sell one of them.

That's pretty good. Did you... You got to tell the I-Switch story. What was that one? I almost went blind or at least I thought I was I thought this was going to be a misspelling not twitch.com

I Twitch. So like on my first company you know the regulator said as I mentioned you can't do offshore if you're going to do regulated you have to do regulated and one of my competitors

I think told on me and said I think Kendall's doing both and so I was like hmm so I didn't know any of this and I was at an industry conference, and one of the regulators was like, hey, I'd like to meet you for coffee. I was like, all right, is this something I should be worried about?

He's like, no, no, no, just come. It's like when Chris Hansen's like, hey, pizza's inside. Come on in. You don't go for the pizza. So I just, you know, I walk up there, we sit down, and I think this is going to be like a really friendly conversation. And he's like, so we can do this the hard way or the easy way. And at that time, I'm like stunned.

I'm just kind of like, oh, no, do I run? And so then he's like, you know what? You know, we've had reports that we think you're doing the offshore. And, you know, what are you going to say about this? And at that time, I was like, I'm not going to say anything. You know, I'm not going to incriminate myself. But I, but it was wrong. You know, like these pages were basically algorithmically updated with these offshore ads that I had no control over.

Right. But he didn't know. that because he wasn't really familiar with domain parking pages, etc. But at that time, I was like, I need to talk to my lawyer. Yeah. And then we can talk to you and you have a lawyer. I did not have a lawyer. Yeah. Yeah. In movies, they tell me that I need to say these words. Exactly. So then, I mean, that was a, you know, terrible feeling. But I was like, okay, you know what, I'm going to talk to a lawyer. We'll be able to kind of outline, you know, why, you know, what he thinks is not actually happening. Um, but then I get a email for,

them and they're like we need you to come to New Jersey and I was like oh no they want to arrest me they want to get me in their jurisdiction and they are going to arrest me and at that time I was like I was like talking to my wife Tess like there's something wrong with my eye and she's oh you know it'll be fine and I was like yeah I think it'll be fine but I'm like kind of seeing little specs and it like got worse and worse and at one point I was like I can't read a menu And I went to a specialist, an eye specialist, and he thought I had a detach retina. And he was like, oh, my gosh, we got to get you into surgery and all these other things.

And then so then he kind of looked a little harder. And it was like, no, no, actually. Have you been stressed lately? Very stressed. Very, very stress. And he's like, yeah, you know, we've seen this. It's just a common thing. You're just stressed.

You'll be fine. So to end the story, I had to go to New Jersey, talk to the regulators, and I wanted to bring a lawyer. And they're like, nope, don't bring a lawyer. She sued them for the Twitch they told. Yeah, exactly. You blinded me with your hard way, easy way bullshit at the coffee shop. And they're like, do not bring a lawyer because we'll make it hard on you. And I was like, oh my gosh.

Oh, they told you that. Yes, they told me that. Oh, man, I wouldn't know what to do. Yeah. I wouldn't know, okay, am I? are they just, is this a play? Is this a good cop, bad cop type of, are they pushing me around? Or is this real?

Yeah, I had no idea, but I was just like, all right, no lawyer. Like, I mean, I'm going to listen to them this time, but which is funny because the first time they, you know, hey, everything's all right and just come see us. And I sit there. I'm at the office. I'm looking around. I'm like, okay, I've been arrested yet, which is good. They sit down and they're like, okay, well, talk to us about, you know, being an affiliate.

And then it was like this super cordial conversation. and I ended up saying like, okay, yeah, these few things weren't what they seemed, and here's why. And then they're like, okay, you know, that's fine. But, you know, we just want to learn more about affiliates because they were like, you know, the first regulators in the United States. And they had never really talked to a large affiliate because, you know, we were the only one at that point.

Right. So then they just kind of wanted to, you know, do a fact-finding mission. And it all worked out. I didn't go blind. And, you know, I'm here today. So I feel like it all worked out. You could have either been blinded and in jail. And you ended up.

Not blind or not in jail. Did you like pack a jail bag? What was the prep? I did not, but my wife was in a hotel and I was just like, okay, well, you know, we have enough clothes if we need. That is amazing. You guys are also kind of like life hack, life experimenters. I feel like you get just like finding the clever angles in business. I feel like you do that with life.

I'm like, you don't just do things exactly the way others do them. You're like, well, why don't I just do this, you know, instead? And you've done this. I feel like you do the same thing. with certain, you know, like, I don't know, lifestyle experiments. So tell us about some of those. What are some things that you guys do with your day-to-day life that is maybe just not standard? Not exactly what anybody else is doing because I think for the people listening, and myself included,

I love hearing when people don't just like follow a, you know, a very standard playbook. Because it makes me wonder, oh, what's the thought process behind that? Why do they do that? And nine times out of ten, I don't do it myself. But I like hearing those. Do you guys have any kind of like interesting lifestyle choices or experiments? That's what you do? I think the first one for me was, you know, I was having twins.

And I was telling my wife, like, look, we're having twins. This is insane. She's like, yeah, I know. She's like, they're in me. I have to do the bruns. Actually, I'm having twins. And I was like, we need to get some help. Like, we need experts.

And so what I did was, you know, I talked to an agency and I just kind of, you know, cast my net wide and far. And I was like, I want to find someone that can help us raise these kids. So you took this seriously, like on your to do. list was like, I'm going to do a search. I told it's an expert. You're doing the hard part. I'll do the easy part and just try to find someone that has done this before that can really help us along the way and really like kind of make our lives easier.

And I found this twin expert. She actually lived in New Jersey. And we ended up hiring her for four months, for the baby's first four months. And she basically worked with them like night and day, 18 hours a day with them. And, you know, part of it was training us. You know, with like a dog, you know, they're like, oh, you know, you don't train the dog, you train the person. And it was kind of the same with us. And really, she put them on like an insane schedule where if one was sleeping, the others one was sleeping.

If one was eating, the other one was eating. And now they're like super trained. So after four months, they slept through the night. And, you know, they were just like very schedule oriented. We'd like look at the time. It's like two o'clock. Okay, they need to eat right now. And they were like ready for it.

And they were both just totally ready. Sleep at the same time. At the exact same time, like always. So they really kind of synced up. And that made life so much easier. Because I couldn't imagine. Right. Then it's like one kid.

Yeah, exactly. We basically have like one kid that ends up being too. That's amazing. What about you? Yeah. I mean, I followed him on some of this stuff. So he, after he sold, he, one of the splorges was he hired a chef to like cook for him. And when I heard that, I was like, oh, that sounds really like bougie.

I don't, you know, I don't know. That sounds cool. I don't know. And then he was telling me about it. And I was like, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Like, why would I can eat healthier. You know, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to think about what I'm going to eat, et cetera.

So I ended up finding somebody as well. And then I've come out to see him a few times the last few months. And when we'll be eating, I can like see him looking at me because he's so competitive. I know he wants to know. Like, is this better than what I'm eating at home. And sadly, the answer is yes. But you'll never give him that satisfaction just now. Last night, I finally fessed up.

That's not I pressed up. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, you, you're a foodie. So for you, it's like, oh, you're a foodie. That makes sense. But actually, you're more of like an efficiency guy. And so, you know, people really realize how much mental and physical energy goes into feeding yourself three times a day or feeding, in my case, kids also.

And so we have a chef as well. And it's the same thing. It's like, all right, I just don't have to make decisions. And I eat healthier. And it tastes better because I'm not good at cooking. This person is great at cooking. I was like, any money I could spend on a. a car, a nice, nice whatever, I would way rather do this.

I would rather have one less employee at work and do more myself than, than like, sacrifice on this. For sure. Yeah. And it's like, I think we've both gotten a lot better at, you know, if you have a problem, you can think about how can I fix this problem, like how can I solve the problem tactically or whatever, or you can just think about who can fix this for me. And that path is, you know, we need so much more efficiency for you.

You can focus on your superpower. And, you know, that's obviously been what we've done. And you guys are different from most people who come on the show and also most people I hang out with. Because we're here at San Francisco. It's mostly tech, Silicon Valley. And tech is not like, like here's like we build websites. But anybody who works in tech here would be like, what do you mean? You're making a WordPress site with a referral link.

What do you? That's not like software. You know, it's not a software startup in the same vein that most people consider. And you guys also don't go raise money from venture capitalists. You don't like, you don't do a lot of the shit that like Silicon Valley companies do. What do you guys see as like, what do you like about that? They're like, oh, maybe I should start doing some of that. And what parts are you like, no, my way is different, but I think it's better for these reasons.

Do you guys have any opinions on that? Yeah, for sure. So I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and I just was never exposed to any of that stuff. So I didn't know what I didn't know. So I was just trying to figure out how can I do what I'm trying to do. Actually, meeting you and spending more time out here is open my eyes a lot to that side of the world. I think, you know, for us, the benefits of funding it ourselves are, you know, obvious. We control it. There's no one else that's asking us, you know, do this or do that or where's

this revenue target, et cetera. So we can think really long term about the business. And I love that, you know, we're the decision makers. And we move fast. So it's like, when decision needs to be made, it's like, hey, what do you think? Here's what I think. All right, let's go. I think one thing you probably lose, though, is it's, in my opinion, it's harder to have, like the really big outcome. Like the things we're doing or historically have done, it's hard to be like a $10 billion company from that stuff. And I think going the other path, you know, it's still very, very rare, but it does happen.

Right. You don't hear a lot about they just self-funded this the whole way and then IPOed it for $100 billion. Right. That doesn't really happen. So. And I think, too, you lose time. Like for us, it was always like, we always wanted to operate the business efficiently

and profitably. So things would take time and you'd watch another competitor, you know, raise a bunch of money and do some really exciting things. And you're like, that's really cool. That's not me at this point, but I can see the merits of it. But I think for me, I've always been like, I'm just, again, a control freak. And I was like, I don't want to work for someone else. And I think with VC, it's kind of the same thing, right?

Like, that is part of it. And, you know, with this acquisition, I feel like you're on our team. Like, you know, I don't feel like it's kind of, you know, you're going to be on the board and we're going to be able to make really big decisions together rather than, hey, I invested in you, I just, you know, are we 10 times yet? You know, like that's the thing. Yeah, yeah, totally. And what about, you know, I guess like business philosophy? So I've heard, as we've been talking, some like some of your guys isms, it's like, oh, these are Kendallisms. These are Mikeisms of a sort of like, but I've only worked through for a very short about

of time. So I don't know a lot of them yet. But I'm sure you have them, right? Nobody goes through years and years of building businesses without coming up with some operating philosophy. If like, you know, here's how to work. Here's how to negotiate. Here's how to build. Here's how to like stay the course or whatever. Do you guys have any that stand out to you as like, you know, these are my like, these are kind of my pillar ones.

This is like, I just really believe this and I can kind of tell a story that maybe goes along with that one. And it's a bit of a hard question, but I find these, if you do have an answer, I find this to be really valuable one. Yeah. I mean, for me, I feel like you're going to be right a couple times in your life. and if you think you're going to be right, swing big. You know, for example, with domain or with Bitcoin, I, you know, I saw it.

I was super interested in. I was like, this could be really cool or. What time frame were we talking here? This is 2013. Okay. You know, this could be really cool or it could go to zero, but I have this like inclination that it could be, you know, way bigger and I think it has a chance too. And it kind of brings me back to my dad.

and this is in the 90s, he was a computer programmer. And he was like, telling our family, like, domain names are going to be big. And I was like, oh, that's cool, dad, yeah. And he was like, no, they're going to be big. Every person or company are likely going to want one. And he bought our last name, Seville.com, but didn't really buy anything else at that point. He could have bought, I looked it up, like poker.com, home.com. So he was right, but didn't swing hard.

Exactly. And so when I was looking at Bitcoin, I was like, this is my domain name. So I just started buying Bitcoin. And I was like, I am just going to like, you know, hold it and just see what happens. What, you know, no matter what, I don't want that, you know, I wish I didn't sell. Right. So I'm still holding it today. And you, you bet big at that time.

I shouldn't say you bet big because you don't often have to put 100% of your chips on it. Because it's like, this is one that it can go big. So I don't even need to put, you know, my entire stack in it. I just need to put enough where if this works, it means something. Exactly. Yeah, no, I mean, I really didn't. I probably put a couple hundred thousand dollars in at that point. Yeah.

But I was like, you know, I'll just wait it out. At that point, I think it was around $80 to $90 per Bitcoin. And then now you've seen ups and downs and ups and downs along the way. Did you feel tempted to sell or to, you know, like get out? Exit either because I got a bunch of profit or, oh, man, bad news, bad news, as bad news, Bitcoin's crashing, maybe I should just get out. Not really. I feel like, you know, it was always like, oh, there's going to be a huge tax hit. And, you know, so when it was really high, you know, that's what I feel like. And then as it's

low, I'm like, you can still, you know, I still think it's got a long ways to go. Right. So for me, I'm just like, this is a long hold. And, you know, we'll see when that changes. But, I mean, that's why we started this company. You know, we're really excited about crypto. And we think there's a big future here. So at this point, I'm just going to, you know, know, I might die with it. I remember when, so I discovered about the same time, 2013, 2014. And I won't tell you the whole story, but like, let's just fast forward a little bit. So I buy a little bit of Bitcoin. I'm like, all right, great. I'm in the game, baby. And there was a run where Bitcoin went to, I was buying it like 400. 400 was like my average buy price.

and then Bitcoin runs up to 3,000 at the time. And I go to a wedding and I go to my cousin's wedding and my aunt. So imagine like an Indian auntie. Like, you know, she's just like, not who you, not somebody who I would think would say the word like Bitcoin or Ethereum. She said the word Ethereum actually. So I was like, what the hell? And she was like, oh, yeah, Bitcoin's very good. And I was like, oh, why do you, why do you say that?

And I was like, immediately my face just dropped because I was like, there's no way that she is like the one who's on the trend. And she's like, yeah, it's very good. And I was like, what? And yeah, it goes up. And I was like, that's the whole thinking. She's like, yeah, last month it was this. Now it's this.

And before that, it was even lower. It was like, oh my God, this is like a bubble. And I was like, I had read about this bubble shit. Like I graduated 2010. So I missed the whole dot com bubble by a long shot. I missed 2008 crisis. I was a sophomore in college. I didn't care what was going on in the world.

And so I was like, I think this is one of those bubble things. And I was like, you know what? Maybe I should take some profits. And so I go and I try to sell everything on Coinbase. But Coinbase had limits. Thank God.

How much you could sell at a time. And so I like maxed out the limit for one week. And I think I did it for another week. And I was like, I'm getting exhausted. Like by then the fear had like dissipated or whatever. And then Bitcoin runs up to 20K. And I'm like, oh my God.

on the biggest city and then they crashed it back down and i was like wow i have to really have a bit more of a of a plan as to what i'm going to do with this am i going to hold this forever am i going to hold it to a certain point what is driving my belief in this so that i'm not just at the whim of like oh i hear something and it scares me the taxi driver told me something and it made me bullish or bearish or whatever on it um we're at a point right now where probably sentiment about crypto is like i don't know what the lowest it's been and maybe ever, but definitely Lowe's has been a while,

and for a lot of people, they weren't around for the 14 crash or whatever, this 18 crash. It was like, this is their crash where they're like, oh, crypto turned out to all be a scam, I guess, Ft X is, I don't know, what was wrong with all this?

So that's kind of where people are at. What gives you, what is your belief based on for crypto? Why do you think this is going to be a thing? I feel like digital money, needs to be a thing. Like we were literally trying to wire money into this company and it wouldn't work. And it was just like what? You know, like what do you mean it wouldn't work? What was happening? Well, it was Mike had the real issue. But it took you a week. So we we both used the same exact bank.

We're with city. I'm going to call out. Yeah. Shout out on this. Yeah. And same exact wire instructions. There's just a PDF. We both send them to our, you know, people there said, I want to wire whatever it was into the company. The next day I get the notice. from Mercury, his hits. And I sent mine like four hours before his. And I, the whole day I never saw mine come in. So I'm like, that's weird. They had called me. You know, I did their voice. Yeah, answered all the questions. I had to do the docu sign like text, you know, two off, all this stuff. Wire never goes. So I finally have to reach out to them again. And I'm like, what's going on with this? And they come back to me and say, the wire instructions are wrong. And I'm like, well, the same bank with the same PDF, sent the money. So that was an example where like on crypto,

that would have been a 10-second, you know, transaction. So I agree with him. You know, I'm probably even more into the, you know, don't love the government control over all of the fiat currency stuff. I think we're seeing, you know, we're starting to see and we're probably going to see more of the ramifications of that with, you know, debt, inflation, those sort of things. And, you know, having another option, I think it's nice.

Right. Yeah. So in the same way, like government makes all the rules of where you live. Great. But if you don't like the way that the government makes those rules, you have choice. You can move to a different jurisdiction. You can operate by different rules.

If you don't like the way that the government manages the money system by printing more money or whatever may be, then you could opt into a different monetary system. That's not controlled by the government. That's controlled by a set of source code. And the code, you know, lives and runs on its own. And anybody from anywhere in the world can say, you know what, I don't like my country's monetary system

as my base system. I'm going to opt into this one. That makes a lot of sense to me. Why do you think people have such a, like, what do you think are maybe, let's that, put it this, put it this way. What do you think are the fair criticism? So, if you've heard the phrase steel manning, but like, you know, it's like when you argue the other side in good faith, you say, here's the best argument I could see against it. What would that be for crypto? I think like a big one is there are a lot of scammers in the industry.

And, you know, they're able to do that because they don't have a lot of the checks and balances of the current system. And I think there's a lot of good reasons why that's the case in crypto, but also it allows these people to do these kind of nefarious things. You know, I was telling people recently, I was like, you know, like crypto does look really bad. Like there's no, you know, you can't really argue that fact. But cryptos look really bad, you know, a lot of times. But at other times, it looks really good. You know, there are, by the way, it wasn't Bitcoin that did something bad. Right.

Yeah, exactly. That you have to sort of separate the two, right? Like if somebody runs a real estate scheme and scams their investors and you think you're investing in some property, they're just pocketing the money and running away with it or they, you know, they do something bad to the property, whatever. It's not real estate that was the scam. It was the scammer that was the scam. And I think that's the hard part is that crypto has, it's such a playing field, right? It's a money business. So there's so many people that can scam.

So it almost associates Bitcoin or the underlying thing itself, which, you know, it's a lot. is, you know, it's like a rock. It's not doing anything. It associates that with the scam, even though it was the human being who decided to trick people in order to make that happen, right? Like, that's the, I think that's the hard thing to disentangle. Yep. Do you, what was your reaction to, like, all the shit that was going down, right? We're in the Slack channel talking about, you know, the Daily Edition, and it feels like, you know, bad news bears for, like, you know, 30 days in a row.

Mike, you were living in each of those editions. Yeah. Were you surprised with the FDX thing? What was your reaction? Yeah, I was stunned by that. I mean, you know, I like a lot of people viewed them as, you know, almost like a coinbase. Blue Chip, yeah. This is rock solid, you know, feel good putting your money on there.

I would have recommended them to anyone. So I was really shocked. Same with Genesis. Yeah, we have, I have money on Genesis that I don't know what's going to happen to it, but that one was pretty stunning too. What's been interesting for the Milk Road in our businesses, you know, this has actually been for growth a good thing, right? We cover the news.

And there's certainly been a lot of news. So we're seeing record subs coming in. The reader scores have been really good. People seem to be very interested in following this, despite the fact that it's been very negative. So it's another piece of why we liked your business. It's less correlated in our minds directly to crypto prices. Yeah.

Yeah. That's true. Amazing. Do we leave anything that we should have talked about? We miss any good stories or facts that you guys wanted to cover? I don't think I have anything. Well, where should people find you guys? because I think a lot of people are going to listen to us.

Yeah, these guys are cool. Obviously, Milk Road, but like where do they find you guys personally? I know, Mike, congratulations. Did you tweet for the first time today? Made my first tweet today. First tweet about acquiring the Milk Road. My Twitter handle is Mike Whitmire, which Kendall helped me acquire earlier. Last night, it's like the news is going out to this morning.

And Mike's like, hey, anybody can help me, everybody around to help me figure out how to tweet. I've never really tweeted, let alone a thread. And he's like, is there a button for the thread? Like, what are you doing? Yeah. And it was all I did was just laugh. I provided zero help. I was like, this is hilarious.

And I'm like, you're the expert. I'm not doing anything. No, this is hilarious. Basically, Ben helped me out. But it was like a shit show for both of us. He sends his out this morning. He misspelled Milk Road in the first tweet. He's trying to get that auto correct.

Exactly. I was trying to, you know, figure out a way. But, yeah, I totally misspelled it. And then I deleted the first tweet. Because it was a tweet. The thread is still there. And I didn't realize it for like 20 minutes. And everyone was like, why is wrong with your Twitter profile?

I'm like, I don't know. I think Twitter's messed up. But you at least use Twitter. I do use Twitter more than Mike, but I wouldn't say. They're still not prolific. Mike, I think you should actually make your Twitter bio because you have no picture or you had no picture at a time. So I added a picture. I did a bio.

You should keep the no picture, no tweets, just the thread. And your bio should be, I don't tweet. I do actual work. That should be your whole persona and everybody should follow that. And that's actually you asked earlier about why we don't do that stuff. And something that came to mind for me was, do you remember back in the day in the poker affiliate world where all the like mid-tier to small affiliates had their like blogs?

Yes. Like the personal blogs. So everybody would, like I had like Mike Whitmire.com. Right. You had something, I think. Yep. And we would all, you know, muse about what we were doing our business is this and that, doing these posts, feeling good.

And then we were at one of these conferences. And who was the big jam investor. And he was like the biggest poker affiliate probably in the, world back then and this other guy that was similar neither of those guys did any of that stuff and like every night we're out in the clubs at these guys tables you know hoping they'll give us like their drinks and it was kind of eye-opening for me I'm like there's probably a correlation here maybe I should do what those guys do exactly yeah maybe I should do the work and not do a lot about can you tell any stories because this guy sounds like a legend who who is this person is definitely

a legend what are some of the crazy yeah yeah he's a pretty private guy but he um he has He's got a great story. Also, by the way, we can bleep his name. Yeah, okay. So then they could just be like, you can tell the story without the name. We can tell all the good stories. So a crazy story. He's from, he grew up there, very not well off, very poor.

Had to leave school in eighth grade to like go start making money for his family, whatever. What did you do in the eighth grade? He was like working at a hotel or something like that bar. At a bar. His family. I think his family worked there or dad. Yeah, something like. that. Gotcha. And so I think the first thing he did was he was like the biggest eBay power seller

and he was selling like CDs and stuff on there. He became pretty big, made a bunch of money. And then, you know, was he just early or is he really good? No, he started the same time as us. He was smart. Like he was basically kind of roll up all the smaller affiliates because he had better deals with all the operators. So he'd buy someone and, you know, it'd be a small affiliate and like, oh, I'm making like five times. And for him, it was like, This is two years earnings or one year. He bought my site is how I knew him. We have one super smart buddy who has a dominant position in his game.

I can't say who, although he's that will give one away. But he has the same strategy where he's like, he's like, yeah, now it's unfair. He goes, I just go to them and they quote me some multiple, but I have a better deal with the payment providers or the affiliate partner. So they think they're selling at four times earnings, but it's actually two.

The moment I sign the deal, they'll go into, it'll go to my payment terms, and my payment terms are just superior. And so he's like, I can just buy these all day. And I don't have to like come up with a genius idea to even grow them because like it's baked into just the fact that I have more scale, therefore I have better terms. And therefore, like what they think costs X or drives Y revenue is actually a different nut variable for me. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So that's exactly why he bought my business my poker affiliate business back then. Yeah. And so he was smart in that he was rolling these up. No, but was that where other people not rolling them up back then? He sort of started that.

Yeah. I feel like he was kind of a pioneer in our small industry. He's just like a, if you give him a business and like an Excel sheet in a few weeks to like look at it, he's going to come back with like, here are the three things that this could be doing that would like 10x it. And that's really what he did for us at JM too was I learned so much for him. Like I'm a completely different business person, you know, after 10 years of working with him than I am now. Like what's an example that he did at JM? Maybe that was a one thing he helped me. Yeah, one thing he helped me a lot with. was I especially early on I would really ride the wave of like you know all the credit card chargebacks hit I'm in despair on my deathbed you know we have a first hundred thousand dollar

day like I'm raid IPL it was just this very he used to joke with me he's like if we were publicly traded and you set the stock price it would swing like a thousand percent a day um and one thing you really helped me with was zooming out and thinking like into five to 10 year increments and if you frame stuff like that, nothing really ever seems like that big of a deal. There's very few things that happen to you or your business that are going to materially change your trajectory over five to 10 years. So like an example, to his credit, he put a million into JM shortly after Kendall did his first angel investment. Like a week before it was going to close, we had done all the documents who was ready to go. Our credit card processor throws us out. And that was like half of our revenue.

It was just gone. And it was like a visa thing. It wasn't just them. They're like this is the underlying network. Yeah. They're growing. on too fast, like we need a big cash reserve. We're going to work with these guys. They asked us, they're like, can you send us your financials? We need a P&L and a balance sheet. We didn't even know what a balance sheet was. Like, there was nothing we could send to them.

So unsurprisingly, they threw us out. And I had to go back to him sort of hat in hand to be like, so, yeah, this happened. You know, are we still going to do this or not? And he was just like. Totally understand if you. Yeah. He's like, we really need to. I really need this.

Love it if you would. And he's just like, you know. we're going to figure this out. And he still cut the check. And we did figure it out. And there were probably 10 more of those times along the way that he, you know, just helped me think about things in the longer increments.

Yeah, because with crypto right now, like, I mean, people would have said, oh, impossible to sell milk grow during this time. And with a good deal.

You could sell with anything with a bad deal, but it's possible to get a good deal right now. And I think as a general rule of thumb, that would have been true. But I've always, I hate anything that's like, you know, this like sort of conventional wisdom.

because it's like, dude, I'm in the outlier business. Like, creating a successful startup is an outlier. I'm trying to be like, you know, super happy, super rich, and super fit. That's an outlier. So I don't really need any advice that is about what the general outcomes are. Instead, I need advice on how to create outlier outcomes. And so with this, I was like, okay, well, what would have created an outlier outcome?

Okay, crypto is going, you know, industry gets shook. All the big companies, they, got a freeze. They can't make some flashy acquisition right now. That would be impossible. Okay, so I need basically independently wealthy individuals. That's the first criteria. Second, a lot of people are going to say, oh, bad news in crypto. Maybe I shouldn't do this. Maybe I should see how this is going to play out. And no, I need somebody who's got long-term conviction, thinks in this five to 10 year increments, and believes in the, you know, the fundamentals and understands that there's going to be the ups and actually during the downs is the time to like make acquisitions and do things

like this. Like, this is the time to play offense, right? I feel like everyone on Twitter, there's a lot of Twitter threads about this is the time to build. Yeah. I agree. I'm not on Twitter. I'm doing that.

Yeah. Exactly. The builders aren't reading your thread. Yeah. So, and then that's how we ended up finding, you know, basically the perfect partner at that time to do this. And so I feel like the, the outlier, you know, if you're going to play an outlier game and you're going to, you know, you have to, if you want an outlier game.

outlier outcome. You've got to like play only by real. You only have to think in terms of what creates that, not what's the average outcome, right? Because the average outcome is not the thing you want anyways. So for sure. Yeah. Cool guys. This was amazing. Kendall, you didn't throw up. I did it. I did it. Kendall was really nervous before we started. Yeah, I was. I was like, do we have any booze round? Yeah, but you did great. So that was awesome. What's your Twitter handle? What's your Twitter handle? What should be? At Kendall, Seville. Seville. S-I-L-L-E. Yep. And then Mike, give him a follow. How many followers you got? Are we double digits? I'm over 200. I'm over 200. Yeah, it's a big debt. Mike Whitmire, W-I-T-T-M-E-Y-E-R.

You guys might get recognized now when you walk on the streets. You might get a little hit of that fame. Actually, you know what was funny. Right when we had met the last time before we did the deal, we were walking out of that coffee shop and I was like, oh, see you later. And you went to go get your Uber. There was a guy who was sitting right there the whole time he's waiting. I guess he kept looking at us. He's like, hey, Sean, he's like, you know, love the podcast, man. I'm traveling for Pittsburgh. I'm just here for the day. Can't believe he bumped into you, blah, blah. And I was like, dude, you should have said that when the guy might buy the company was

there. They might have helped a little, just, you know, a little juice to them. We were joking about that after. I'm like, Sean probably just paid all these actors. Yeah, it was a genius. Yeah, I was like, it worked. Like, great job. When we were selling our first company, I did stuff like that where I was like,

I knew that it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, It was to larger company. It was like the big fang company. So it was like Corp Dev was like the who's paying attention to you at that time. And so they would follow me on Twitter or an Instagram, stuff like that. So I would just post like a ticket to like Seattle. One day a trip, anybody around in the evening? And it's like, okay, why would you go to Seattle?

Who's in Seattle? Why would you go for a day? That's got to be a misnesty. They're talking to them. All right, come back and be like, you know, when it rains it pours? And I would just post these cryptic things. Because in my mind, I was like, I'm just planting the seed, baby. I have no idea if this did anything.

But in my head, I was like, I'm really playing everybody off of each other. I thought I was just like, you know, yeah, catch me if you can type of guy. All right, guys, that was awesome. Yeah, we're good. Thank you. Thank you so much. And one thing is Milk Road's hiring. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. We're looking for like, you know, those A players that have done it before because, you know, we want to scale this. and do it as quickly as we can. And I should actually say, I, like when we were looking at this deal, we actually had a higher offer that we turned down. One of the reasons why I told Ben,

I was like, I went to your Twitter feed, and I saw your tweets from back in the day that were like, Cryptopunks, cool. I think Cryptopunks are cool, actually. And I looked at the date. I looked at what the price was then?

Like, what were people thinking then? And you were like ahead of the curve. Then you had another one, this exchange that you had a mess in rain. And I was like, Oh, dude, I've been trying to get into, you know, to rain at that. I tried to invest a point in time. I was like, he was in there early.

And I was like, I feel like if I just hang out with these guys more, I'm going to get more value out of something completely unrelated to Milk Road. Just there's going to be some random. You're going to be like, oh, dude. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Can if I just throw me a roadster? I was like, there's got to be something like that I'm going to get just out of hanging with. Like, I'm a big believer in that.

Like, if you find exceptional people, you don't even. have to have a plan. Like, just hang with them. Find some routine or value exchange where you're going to be in each other's orbit all the time because something good is going to come out of that. And so similarly, if somebody wants to work at the Milk Road, I would say like, cool, it's going to have good pay. It's a cool project. People really love the product. That's all true. But also, like, the same reason I wanted to sell and work with you guys is the same reason really anybody should want to do that. Like, if you heard the stories in this podcast, you're probably like, God, these guys are awesome.

They went through a bunch of shit, but they figure stuff out and they play their own game. Those are the type of people who you want to work with. Even if you're like, someday I want to be more entrepreneurial than I am today, you want to get a job where you're kind of in direct proximity with people who are very much like that because it will change the way your own brain works. For sure. You want to get in shape, hang out with fit people. Yeah.

For sure. Yeah, when we, what was the body fat challenge? Did you win? Last time we hung out, he was at like day. That's how we're going to finish the pod. Yeah, I got to know. So what was the challenge? You were at the end of a challenge.

Yeah, I'm in a group called Entrepreneurs Organization. I'm in a forum with seven other Dallas entrepreneurs. We meet monthly. We do a retreat once a year. In advance of the retreat, everybody sets themselves a fitness goal, and everybody puts in like 500 bucks that if you hit your goal, you get your money back. If you don't, it goes towards funding the retreat. So no win.

It's just not loose. Yeah, just to not lose and avoid the shame. So maybe three months out, everybody sets. their goals and I thought I was like 15% body fat at that time so I was like I'm gonna get to 10 I've never done that before I'm gonna go for it let's do it so I you know slam it down on the table I'm like boys I'm doing it and then uh I start working really hard the next two months and a month out I'm gonna go get a deck so that seat like I think I'm probably 11 somewhere in there like I've got to be really I'm almost there and I had like leaned out in the mirror materially and I go and get the

dex and I was 15 7 so I was nowhere near I thought I was. And then I really, like, killed myself that next month. And I ended up getting down to, like, 12-1. 12-1, okay. But lucky for me, some of the guys didn't schedule decks is. So the body fat guys were like, we're going to consider it acceptable to use those scale things.

And on the scale, I was like, ate something. So I got my 500 back. Okay, wow. Yeah, the good guys were. But the reality is, I did not. I made my goal. Yeah, you were, like, really hardcore about it. Yeah, it's trying.

And you were, like, not eating any of the carbs. It was just, like, really sad. You were just kind of in the corner. Yeah, it was definitely sad. Oh, man, like the chef just made this really cool thing and I can't eat anything of it? Or like, does Mike really do this $500 that much? It's like, no, Mike needs to not lose. Mike does not like to lose at anything.

And he set himself a stupid goal that he has to hit now. Next year, though, I'm going to get it. Yeah. What I would have done is I would have been like, what am I now and just like done like 1% under that? Just like, make sure I went. Mike wants to make his life hard and go up, though. No, last year, I was, I probably weighed like 175 pounds or 80 or something like that.

And everyone at the table did like a weight loss thing. So I just thought that's what these were. It was like one of the, I think it was the first year we did it. And so I was like, well, I want to get down to, you know, 175. They're like, well, what are you now? I'm like, 178. What do you want to do?

It was 40 pounds. It's not my fault. You guys have been slagged. Yeah, you need to write a book called Going uphill. Going uphill. I love that. I feel like that's going to be your book. It'll be the bio.

You know, when you're done working, then you can start tweeting. your uphill about your uphill book. I actually have one last uphill story away. So in Whitefish this year, I mentioned we were doing the, I was doing this in the resort. And they would open it like an hour before the whiffs ran. So only the people going uphill, I guess just because it's safer, there's not a ton of people coming down. So there was one morning. It was like negative 10 wind chill.

They actually never even opened the resort that day. It was too windy. It was just miserable out. So I was like, all right. Perfect. Optimal conditions. optimal condition. So I sued up. You rang. I sued up and get out there. And I had just gotten like, I had never done this in a resort. And I really had only done this maybe five times with my buddy who always

was like the Sherba. He was like, you know, helping me figure stuff out, whatever. So there's this route you have to take up the hill. And I was the first one going. It was like 6 a.m. And I'm just, I'm going straight up that path. I'm like marching, doing well, feeling good. And then there's this one section because I had done it a few times. So I knew. There was this one section that was pretty steep, and there were a few times going up that the skins would like start to slip a little bit. And I was getting really scared because I don't ski. So like if this thing turns around, I'm like, I can't do anything. I'm going to look you out.

And so I'm going straight up this thing, like marching, the winds blast to me, the ice is blasted me. And I'm one step away from the top. And I take the step and it slips and the whole thing just falls apart. And I'm falling backwards downhill doing the somersault thing. like the skis go flying off that whole thing. So then I'm at the bottom and I've been very humbled now because there's like 20, I realize there's like 20 people behind me who just watched that. And I'm gathering all my stuff.

Like they're helping me out. And I look up the hill because they're starting to go. And all of them are zigzagging back and forth. So it's not as steep. And I was going straight line directly up the hill. I'm like, oh, that's why they're not falling. Wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah, there you go.

metaphorable awesome well thanks guys for doing this i i know a little out of your comfort so but i'm glad you guys did it thanks for having us yeah appreciate it cool all right