My First Million - Greatest Hits of 2021 (Vol. 2)

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

On this episode, we bring you some of the best and most popular moments from My First Million in 2021. This episode specifically highlights some of our best guest moments. Let us know how you like the episode and if we should do greatest hits in the future!  _____ * 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: (00:40) - Rob Dyrdek masters time (12:45) - How Hasan Minhaj prepares for his shows (17:50) - Steph Smith talks about one-person companies making millions (29:05) - Jack Abraham talks about frameworks for billion dollar companies ----- Links: * Episode 224 with Rob Dyrdek * Episode 244 with Hasan Minhaj * Episode 248 with Steph Smith * Episode 225 with Jack Abraham ----- 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

Hey guys, welcome to My First Million. This is producer Ben here with another best of episode. On this one, we compiled some of the best guest moments in the past. On this first clip, we have the one that only the world famous Rob Deerdeck. Rob is a famous skateboarder, celebrity, TV show, actor, host, and producer. And now he's a really great entrepreneur with a number of different businesses. In this clip, he's explaining exactly how he manages his time and how he has managed to become, as he says, human optimization. I've mastered time energy and capacity, right? So I live this extraordinarily balanced life by design

where I only dedicate 30% of my time to podcasts and my shooting television and building my businesses. I spend 30% sleeping, 10% on my health, never compromised and then 30% with my family. How much is 30% for you? Are you looking at 30% of a 40 hour work week or 30% of your waking? He's saying of my entire life, all hours. It's like eight hours, basically, right? No, all life. The 24 hours in a day, I sleep 30%, so seven hours, right? Like I work seven hours.

I'm with my family seven hours, and I spend three hours on my health. On average, right, when you look at the overall balance. And then I could show you this because I track it every day and it pumps all of it into this beautiful dashboard. because what I've done over time, because to give you an idea, I shot 250 episodes of television this year. It's exactly 4% of my total time. That's how highly optimized it's become, right? Because you basically have a certain level of human capacity.

And in order to scale it, you either hire or automated. So I live this deeply automated life that hires people in to add capacity. And at the end of the day, I just live super balanced and happy. That's it. So give us an example. What software are you using to track all that time? Yeah. That dashboard.

I created it. I created a, I had a programmer write me a script that goes inside Google, the Google calendar. It's an app on your phone or it's just on like a spreadsheet, basically? It's inside Google calendar and then it pops, it populates a Google spreadsheet, right? And then the beauty of it is, is I qualitative data and quantitative data is what I live my life off of. Right. So every day for the last five years, I ask.

wrote down how I feel about my life, work, and health zero to ten. And so I could show you by the qualitative numbers, how I'm living a higher quality and happier life. And the result of that is based off the optimization that I've done on my quantitative stuff. My quantitative stuff is, did I get up before five? Did I brain train? Did I get in the gym? Did I meditate? Did I have a clean diet? Did I not drink? I could show you by my quantitative numbers that I have done all of those, almost every single day of this entire year, about 87% of those quantitative things that have just driven those qualitative numbers, how I feel about my life, my work, and my health, higher and higher. So by the numbers, I could tell you what a high quality life that I'm

living compared to just five years ago. You're saying some of the amazing things. I've got to Yeah. I've been to each one. All right. So you just said something, did I brain train? What's that mean? I use the luminosity app, right? Like where it's just adding flexibility and just letting your mind do all of these things that are different than just getting in and reading your emails and, you know, just going through your rhythm is really what I do that for. And you wake up at five, what's the morning routine like? Sounds like you're pretty. Yeah, look, I'll get up. I have to get up before five, but depending on what time I go to bed, I'll get up at, um, at first. four or four thirty two right and then to me uh you know always have that that coffee pre-made so i can get up and get cooking um and then i track all my numbers from the previous day fill in all my time if i missed any time to make sure that all my dad is there on your phone or on your computer on the

computer right and then um and then i try to just like organize and knock out sort of my more executional work before the kids get up and all that um then at six o'clock i brain train 630. I meditate. When I jump out of meditation, I sent, actually at 515, I bring my wife a coffee and I send her an email of every single thing that I'm doing that day, what it means to me with a love quote on top, right? Again, this is. What do you mean what it means to me? Like each thing you're doing with me? Just like, you know, just like, why you're doing it. Yeah. In my, in my, one of the, one of the pulls of our relationship was like, I do so much stuff that she would be, it'd be, I'd just be

talking to someone. It'd be the first time she ever heard of it. And so she would just like, I would do so much stuff in a day. She just would feel disconnected. So I just started giving her an email every day of like what I'm doing, what it means with a nice love quote. Right. And that then settled down the energy of feeling disconnected from everything that I'm doing. Bring her a coffee at 515. God bless her.

She started doing 530 calls for her business, which means she's going to be tired earlier. That means we can go to bed by 930, right, which is another sort of blessing. And this is happening in L.A., right? Yeah. Okay. And then, you know, I pop out of meditation at seven, wake the kids up, get them both down to breakfast at 7.30. My trainer, doctor, comes to the house, 7.30 to 8.30 training and then take the kids to school at 8.30, right? And then the day, depending on what the week is, you know, sometimes I go to breakfast dates with my wife.

Sometimes it's, you know, on Mondays, you know, I basically run a flat organization, right? So I have, you know, 10 core divisions that are ran by an executive. And I just spend Monday fully organizing from when I get up four o'clock into my chief of staff for an hour, into my president and COO for an hour and then half hours for every single person that runs that division so that we can just be highly organized and then plan the rest of the week, which of course is inside Thursday night, date nights and Friday night, sushi night. with my wife and picking my kids up and all of, you know, I design balance and then I only work within the structure of balance. And then depending on how I feel, depending on how my wife feels,

then I'll even adjust that to lean in to making sure that my family is feeling priority above business always. You, you're like, you're like, you know, like people make fun of Silicon Valley people because it'll like, here's my calendar. I've got to adjust it like this, this and this. but I'm sitting here looking at you. I think it looks like you're wearing a black blazer with a black sweater and you got these slick AirPods in. You are more Silicon Valley techie in tune with this than like the stereotypes of it. And I love it.

I think this is awesome. I mean, look, I am human optimization and optimized to be what, though? To just be happy. You know what I mean? Like at the end of the day, that's why you're playing the game. And you've got to figure out yourself to understand what truly means. makes you happy because your goal is to not be happy in pockets. Your goal is to be happy every single hour of every single day of your life. And that's really what I've accomplished. And I'll

tell you something. If you think about how you live, right, you can live in two places that'll get you nowhere. It's dwelling and being negative, right? Or it's being hopeful and like wishing, right? Either of get you nowhere. But where life is lived is you're either problem solving, you're either creating the future or you're experiencing the present, right? And the truth is, whatever you're experiencing the present is based off of the decisions you've made in the past. And it's your choice to create whatever your reality is that you're going to eventually experience. Or God forbid, something hits you rather than dwelling on it or hoping it didn't happen. If you problem solve and handle it, you're not going to, you can basically live a life with no negative thoughts.

If you learn to live in a state of either experiencing, creating, or problem solving in your entire life, right? but it's on you to understand what that is to be able to live in that state. I'm flabbergasted, Sean. For this next clip, we're going to be listening to the world famous comedian Hassan Minhaj and he explains how he prepares for his shows. What's the system you've developed to get on stage and have that switch flipped? When you came on, within two seconds, it's like, this guy's in a state of mind. He's in a state, as we say, of like, he's here to perform.

He knows what he's here to do. there's no like tiptoeing into it. So I was wondering, what do you do the five, ten minutes before or an hour before? I don't know what your kind of like warm up routine is. Routine, yeah. Yeah.

I think you're ready. The listeners want to know this? I'm sure. I don't know. This is your personal curiosity. I want to know it. And my trainer has this great phrase. He goes, who are my customers?

The people that love what I do. Because he's like, people always ask, oh, who are your customers is some demographic, some like marketing intellectual answers. He's like easiest way in the world is the people who love who your customers are the people who love what you do. So just do what you do. Yeah. You will naturally attract the people who love that.

You will repel the people who aren't interested. Yeah. And you will never have to guess what the heck people want because you just do what you want. And so that's the approach I take to the pod. Yeah. No, I love it, man. I love talking shop like this. For me, it's actually, it's the three hours before.

So what I try to do before any show, I try to make sure that like I exercise in some capacity because and I don't know if you feel this way maybe it's within our community it's so funny to go back to what you're talking about where you're like oh it seems like a guy who works really hard

because it's funny I was doing Mark Merrin's podcast and Marin said the same thing about me he's like yeah you seem like really put together and he's like why aren't you unraveling like the way other comics are right and I'm like yeah I'm just philosophically not from that camp I'm not from the tortured artist camp I'm more from the place of like I'm creating from a place a passion and love.

And actually, real talk, it's about emptying the tank. I just want to put it all out on the court. Right. You know, and this court happens to be the stage, right? And I want to do my best. I want to be like,

I put everything into picking out this outfit. I put everything into picking out these jokes, these tags, the stage design, the lighting design. Like, this is it. And I want to know when I go to sleep here at night, when I put my head down on the pillow, I did everything I could.

Right. Like living a life without, regret and only you can answer that is the best right everybody's talking about chasing happiness to me it's about chasing satisfaction like that self-satisfaction and you know what it is right you know what it is right and you know when you sold out you know you got a good result but you kind of didn't do it the right way yeah that sticks with you and some people just like let that stick with them yeah other people say all right even if i won i'm not going to win on those terms again yeah if i lost i can lose on these terms and be good at night yep and and i'm sure there's listeners

to the pod that spend their time retweeting the right things and quote tweeting and dunking on VC people and you know they they say the right things they'll regurgitate the right opinions but they know when they put their head down at night hey you're supposed to train you jerked off instead you're supposed to do this you didn't but only you can answer that right so you can signal all you want for me what that stage represents is like no I'm putting myself in a high level look of accountability in front of 3,400 people I'm putting it all out here right even and if you don't think I think I'm good, if you think I'm corny, if you think I'm whatever, hey, it is what it is, but I stood here. Right. And I did it.

I did it. I did it. So you're saying three hours before. Three hours before, what I do is I like to do some form of exercise, and I try to get out of my head. It's a workout workout or you're just trying to break a sweat. What do you, what's the- Yeah. Trying to do on tour, it's just about body maintenance. So I'll do running.

I'll do some pull-ups, some core stuff, just stuff to get my body going and start breaking a sweat. And what I'd love about, like right around a minute 30 to 45 is I'll get out of my head and into my body. And so much of life right now, is getting out of your head. And it's funny, I called you randomly. I was appreciate you picking up the phone the other day. We had a long conversation.

We can get into that later. But so much of, I think, what you do and what you put out in the world, and I call it like tech, Twitter talk. It's all in your head. Intellectual. It's all just heady, anxiety-induced. stuff, Ethereum's up,

Solana's this, it's like, it's all head shit. It's not a body feeling thing. Like grounding yourself two feet on the ground. I'm here in this moment. What do I do? And so much of performance, and to be great at it, the best Chappelle, the best performers, they're not in their head, they're in their body.

They're really there. Somebody screams, somebody says something, somebody heckles, they're in their body. When you watch Steph Curry play, when I watch Devin Booker, play these guys are so in their body right luca's the best at this he's in his body he's in the he's in flow right and so lucca's like a kid and kids do this well yeah kids do this pretty naturally i love that the older you get the more heavy you get which is you gotta yeah you got to fight that right and so that's a great way to get out of my head get into my body then i'll probably

i eat something yep um i take a shower and then i put i put on the outfit and for me it's like being on stage uniform and putting on that it feels like a uniformed And like for me it feels like I want to feel like a show like from the watch to the jacket to the pants I'm like there's a level of confidence that you have when you move into a room and you're like, hey, from from my heels all the way up to my head. I'm wearing my armor right like I'm coming correct. Right and you just carry yourself with a little bop. You're like no, I feel better about myself. My shit isn't slouching. There's no stains on my stuff. You know what I mean? Like the moment I saw you today, you walked in. You're wearing your tech pants. I could tell you wash. I them a few times but there's some stains on the backside you know what I'm saying but that feeling of like no man when I'm coming in here I'm gonna be fresher than Sean yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm just gonna be fresh yeah that already gives me a

feeling of like confidence I know what I'm doing you know and and by the way the opener Marcella like Marcella was just like dressed to the nines you know it's a feeling then I get to the show I finish eating I'll meditate so meditation for 10 to 15 minutes allow me to just again get out of my head and drop into my body. And something simple, just head space. Like I'm not getting too crazy about it. And what I love about head space specifically is so much of it

is just basic breathing, establishing a level of intention. I'll meditate and then I'll pray. And for me, like prayer is really important because it's gotta be about something bigger than just myself and my corporal being. I'm like, what am I doing this for? And just establishing an intention. And for me, the intention is like love.

Let me give joy to people. Right. And I want the seed of everything that I'm doing to come from that not be like not be petty energy Angry energy I'm gonna prove you wrong energy like I'm in the laughter business right like I'm here to make you feel joy, right? And that warm feeling so establishing an attention there I get to the I'll get to the venue about an hour before I have a double shot of espresso

I'll let my bowels do with They do. You always get those jitters. Like, you got to pee. You got to do what you got to do. And then about like 30 to 45 minutes before, I like to be loose just with the staff. Right. Let them know, like, hey, what's up?

How are you? Door guy. Security guy. Openers. Right. You know what I mean? Another way to get out of your head, by the way. Yeah.

Just to be with others. Be there. Yeah. Yeah. And then about a half an hour before, I'll go to my green room. I usually write it down. I'll write down, it'll just be on hotel, notepad paper. Hey, what are a couple new tags that I'm working on tonight?

Right. Just move the ball forward a little bit. Remind myself, y'all, I'm going to do this. For example, last night, one of the things I talk about act, one of the show is fertility. And a new joke that I did was like, you know what it's like being infertile as a man? I felt like Woody and Toy Story when his arm got ripped off. That was just one line. And I was like, hey, make sure you do the Woody Toy Storyline.

Right. You know? And every show, I try to add a few of these extra moments. And you add that up over the course of like a year, two years, three years, you start to see what works and what doesn't work. And I'll have a thousand, three thousand different variations of that, right? And then I get on stage. And by the time I get on stage, there's just this feeling of like,

now it's just pure play. Whatever happens, happens. Right. And when I'm on stage, what I try to do is I try to remember, when I'm opening in front of my crowd, they're like really hot. And one of the things I try to remember is don't yell, don't scream.

Try to actually bring them to you. Like set the tempo of the game. Don't get like too excited or too hot. Like you can whip them up, but then like sit down at the stool, bring them to you. For this next clip, we have longtime guest, Steph Smith, and she talks about companies with only one employee

that are able to make millions of dollars. So let's talk about companies of one. So you have a list of like 10 or seven companies that are run by one person that are shockingly big. Let's go through some of them and talk about them. Yeah. So I think you called out two before. So I'm going to just call out those two quickly.

You called out built with before, which is the site that basically can tell what a site is built with. Is it built with WordPress or Squarespace or what plugins is it, is a site using? And that one at the time when you found it was, I think, doing around 14 million. And then you've also covered Nomad List and Remote OK by Peter Levels. And those two, I think, together are doing around a million a year. And those two, I think, are both completely solo founders.

I know Peter certainly is. But there are a couple others. So have you heard of UGMunk? Well, hold on. So Bill With, so people know. Billwith is like maybe one of the most impressive ones here, but not V, but one of. BuiltWith is like, it's like a, I think they have a plug-in as well. but it's a website. You go to builtwit.com, you enter in the hustle.com.

Let's say you see something on our website that you like and you want to copy and you're like, how'd they build that? What plugins do they use? Whatever. You use Built With and they make money because what do they do? I think they like sell people's data or something. I'm not sure, actually. Let me look this up because I know they get a crazy amount of traffic. Look, they've got plans on their site. So they've got a basic plan. I don't know what you get with it, but it's $295. Oh, I know what you get. You get basically, I believe you sign up and it tells you people's,

so it crawls all these websites and it tells you what type of features they have on their website and what type of plugins. And I think you pay money and it'll say we have the emails or contact information of all types of people who use blank plugin. And you sell a plugin that is complementary to that. Therefore, pay money and you could now target them and advertise against them or things like that. Yeah, they charge, so their basic plan is $3,000 a year, their pro is $5,000, their team is $10,000. There's a cool little trick they have on their pricing page.

If you go to it and you hover over, they have like technologies, keywords, and they have these little gifs that they're actually like showing what you would get with the product. I've never actually seen that before. So that's a cute little hack. And it's built by basically one guy in Australia. All right, so what are some of the other companies? Okay, so I was going to call it UGMunk. So this one's not as big. I actually don't know exactly how much they're making,

but it's a really simple e-commerce store. They started just selling really nice t-shirts, which sounds like, okay, like there's enough t-shirt stores out there. But this guy, Jeff Sheldon, he focused on just really high-quality shirts. And then now he's moved into almost like productivity stuff. If you, are you in the dock?

I'm looking at UGMunk. So when I go to UGMunk, I see like a pen holder and I see like a, a to-do list. It's like cute, well-designed, like pen holders, which doesn't sound neat, but honestly, it looks pretty sick. Yeah, it looks surprisingly sick.

If you go to, let me, if you click in the dock where it says, look at this, if you click that, that is his setup. And he's like one of those builders who I think has built a little Twitter following as well. And he just has this beautiful desk setup, which is like the perfect ad. And I, I can't say it. Oh, I've seen this. It looks awesome. I never thought I'd want to go and buy like a $100 to do list, but I think I'm going to buy one. Yeah, I, it's just like cute, easy to use like mid-century modern stuff. Yeah, I'm on board. How much revenue does he do?

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure he does several million a year. He gets over 200,000 page views a month, and he's been going at this for several years. So I know he makes enough to have left his full-time job several years ago, and he's grown a lot since then. So I'd probably say a couple mill. Wow. That's crazy. All right. That's a good fine.

It's just one guy. He's the only employee. I think so. I mean, he probably has some staff now that he's been growing, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a big team. All right. What's next? All right. Card is actually one guy. He might have contractors, but Card C-A-R-R-D. I've built sites with Card. People probably recognize Card. They've almost certainly been on a site built by Card.

And it's built by this guy, AJ, and it's doing $1 million a year AR. I think he actually just raised money now. So I think he's kind of going for... Did he really just raise money? I would love to invest in this. Yeah, he raised money earlier this year. He was like big in the Indie Hacker community. And then I think he posted on Indie Hacker's this year. Like, look, I'm going to raise money. I'm going to, you know, really go for it. But he, it's kind of crazy. 2.5 million sites have been built on card.

And yeah, he hit like a million AR. So it's a free platform for building simply, for building simple, fully responsive one-page websites that can do anything. I actually think, so there was this company called, you remember about me? No, what is that? About.comme.

So go to about. Dot me. That's the URL. You don't remember that. I'm just a little bit older than you, which is like, then that few years probably makes a difference. Because about dot me, when I was just getting started, was considered like the preeminent builder in this space. And they made it, it was a one page website where you can explain stuff about you. And it was started by this guy named Tony Conrad, I believe his name is.

And he's this cool looking dude who is also an investor now. And he sold it after only two years to AOL for like $40 million. and it was bootstrapped. You see about. Dot me. You see how it's like basically the same thing. Yeah, it reminds me of, you've heard of unsplash, right?

I love unsplash. So, or sorry, I'm not thinking of unsplash. I'm talking about Unfold. Unfold is this app that basically for Instagramers, it adds different, like it allows you to kind of piece together pictures for your Instagram story, but they also started these like one pagers

where basically because all these Instagramers they're like, oh, I need my link in bio. Lincoln Bio is also a site like that. But Unfold was sold to, use Squarespace, I think, like last year or something. I don't know for how much, though. Man, I think that these one-page website builders are actually really cool. So there's this other business I almost invested in. I think it's called the MediaKits.com or dot co. I believe it's just called Media Kit. And all they did was built a really slick website builder where you could

create your media kit and send it to people. So, and whether you're the hustle or you're just an Instagram person, you just had the hustle.com slash media kit or like, you know, Steph Smith. it.com slash media kit. And it was that your media kit was on there. And that sounds like not that important, but it's kind of like DocSend. So DocSend, if you don't know what Docsend is. Docsend is basically all it is is PowerPoint in the cloud, but email gated. So you have to enter your email. And then you get all types of information. So you use it when you are creating a pitch deck and you want to send it to investors. So you know who has it and who views it and how long they've used it. And it's basically that. So anyway, card.

is pretty badass. That actually might be one of the highest potential businesses you have here, I think. Yeah. And I mean, he actually runs card as a subscription business. So that's one million ARR. And I think it's probably way past that today. I think you're going to like the next one, though. Go to this next episode.net. I think it's actually next dash episode.comnet. It's the, it's such an old site. I think the guy's been running it for 15 years. And if you just open it up, you'll get a sense of how the UI hasn't caught up to where we're. we are today, but it's amazing because this guy's been running it for 15 years. Guess how much traffic this thing gets? I'm looking at it on similar web. This is crazy. So what is this called?

So next dash episode.net. What is this? Yeah. It's a site where basically, like, there's no way I would think that a site like this would still exist, but people use it that basically helps you track your TV shows. And it's a little bit of a community. So I think I've never used it. But, you know, people watch The Bachelor. They hang out on this site and they find other people who watch The Bachelor and they talk about it, but it's kind of crazy how much traffic this site gets. This is awesome. And so here's why I know this is a big business. So if you go to similar web and you look at the traffic, the estimated monthly traffic is 3.6 million uniques a month. That's decent. That's not like the best, but it's like really good, particularly for one person.

But if you go to traffic source, it says that 80% is coming from direct traffic, which basically means that there's a lot of people that are just typing in this URL and going there on a consistent basis. And if you do that, you probably can have a huge business. And it looks like they have got a premium, which is only $2 a month. But how big is this? So I don't know exactly how big it is, but he's been running it for 15 years. And I know he's definitely, I found him on Hacker News, one of those posts that was like, hey, like, who's a solopreneur who's doing this thing on their own? And he's like, I've worked on this entirely on my own for the last 15 years. So what? This is crazy. Good find. I can't wait so what's this person's name do you know let me send you here he is I found him

nicolay yeah wow this is a good find how much revenue you think he does on this I don't know about today but I'm assuming like if he's getting that many million page reviews and he's been working on it for 15 years I'd say like maybe a million a year what do you think yeah I would agree with that and it's probably mostly all profit Yeah. Well, I mean, he's literally the only one who works on it. And there's no pause. In one of the posts on Hacker News, he's like, yeah, I started it for myself because I couldn't find such a tool back in the day. And basically, he's like avoided hiring other people because he doesn't want to like scale through hiring.

All right. What else do we got? There's a ton on here. There's some, there's one called Hostify by a guy named Riley who basically, you know, has scaled that to like a million a month and a year or two. there's some good stories from back in the day where apparently SurveyMonkey was doing $19 million in revenue with 12 employees. So not a one-person thing, but plenty of fish is another example where they were doing apparently $10 million. And the guy was by himself. He might have even been part-time.

So that's kind of a crazy story from back in the day, too. How do you know this about SurveyMonkey? So it was posted. It was actually you posted about Built With a while ago, I think. And then I went through all of the comments of you basically, you were like, can anyone tell me something more efficient than that? And this guy named Tripp posted, yeah, SurveyMonkey was doing 19 million with 12 employees. And you asked him if this was documented and basically someone else commented and was like, yeah, Tripp's too modest to say this,

but he actually invested in Survey Monkey in 2009. So he probably knows the numbers. Wow, this is amazing. I've heard this. I've heard rumors about Survey Monkey doing this. This is crazy. This is so cool. Okay, from million-dollar businesses, we're moving to billion-dollar businesses. On this next clip, we have Jack Abraham. He's the founder of multiple great startups, and he's currently leading tons of successful investments at Atomic. In this clip, he tells us the frameworks that he uses to recognize opportunities for

billion-dollar companies. Go to the patterns. I'd be curious to what those are. Okay, cool. Yeah, so some patterns that I think are kind of true. tried and true that are really interesting to think about. One pattern is if you take things that rich people have access to or rich companies have access to and you figure out how to democratize them.

So you make them more accessible, distributable, cheaper and accessible to everyone, that is a winning formula for creating a really good company. And part of the reason for that, from a philosophical perspective, this is actually something I learned from Mark Andreessen. He has this belief that human desire is infinite, which is an interesting concept. And if you believe that, then people with a lot of resources and companies with a lot of resources are willing to spend on the outer limit of human desire. So they're poking around, they're figuring out all of these things of what's the next thing on the human desire bubble that could be done. discover and they might discover something and if something there really takes hold that you can then take and give to everyone everyone might want that and it might be ready for everyone like what

like Uber was a classic example this right people had private drivers now everybody can push a button have a private driver driver pick them up yeah private driver with Uber private chef with door dash private shopper with Instacart those are all you know, really good examples. You could even argue, you know, second home, Airbnb. It's kind of like having access to a second home in a much cheaper way. So I think that that's a really, really interesting pattern

that people can look into that. Yeah, that's a good framework. Is an interesting one and is pretty tried and true. And so what's an idea in that space? So what are some other things that you've seen that either very wealthy people or very wealthy companies have that the rest of us don't. What are some other examples in there that, you know, haven't looked into it, but might be, might be interesting.

Hmm. Well, I think that there seems to be some kind of a renaissance happening in fintech, partially because the wealthy seem to have access to financial planning, financial resources around planning, access to the markets. You know, there's this whole 99% versus the 1% and people have kind of figured that out. And I think that's why you're seeing this boom of new companies. If you can give the 99% what the 1% has access to and the ability to generate wealth, I think that that's actually really interesting.

I think there are a lot of interesting startup ideas that are being formed there. We're starting one or two that we think can help empower people in that area, for example. So that would be, you know, one example of an area that... Are you going to do anything in the well? We're in a wealth advisor space? We are kind of tangentially doing things there. I think that there's probably a lot more to do there. Wealth advisory is a compounded issue

where even the wealthy when they have access to wealth advisory, it's not great. It's not great. Have you heard of AdPAR, Sean? No. So I bet you have, Jack, right? Adipar, yeah. Atapar, sorry.

And so Atapar was started by Joe Lansdale, I think, right? I only know, like, you know, the Wikipedia version, but basically it's a, it's kind of like mint.com, but for really wealthy people. I actually, but like billionaire wealthy people. I actually don't know what features necessarily it has that something a little bit. Jack, what's it have that's more robust, do you know? Sorry, can you repeat that? What does Atapar have that's more robust? robust. It basically has tracking of like everything, every fund, everywhere in the world, every

wealth manager, all of your assets. But they tend to work more with wealth managers instead of individuals. But Joe and that company has like a big vision for where that can go. And you might be able to work with it as an individual now. But that's kind of along the lines. So I could disrupt that. So I work with some of these folks. And they send me like the jankiest stuff ever. And their login, so like Morgan Stanley, the login to like look at your investments, it's horrible. And I was like, you guys, this is just absolutely awful. Like I'm just using spreadsheets on my own. This is really bad.

You know, I've heard of this Adaparte thing. And they're like, well, you know, you can't use that unless you're worth $500 million or like a billion dollars. It's really, really expense. Like it's crazy high. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Just like, give me a mint.com login or something. And you guys like become the admin and just like, let's share this. You can just tell me because this is dog shit.

And so I think that I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in that space. But to go back to your point about distribution, I think selling to those people can be quite challenging because they're very old school and they're very conservative. But I was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that has been interesting to you lately because I know you're being a little cryptic because you like to be stealth until you go live. So I was trying to, I'm trying to get something out of you. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space. I would encourage people to look into it. I think that there is a lot that can be done there. I think there's dissatisfaction amongst everyone, basically in that space.

It's pretty universal. A lot of room for improvement. Cool. So that's one pattern for great ideas. So what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democratized? And if a few people have that desire and they've pushed out to that limit, other people would want it if you can make it accessible, cheaper, and more available to them. That's an amazing one.

I think there's tons of great ideas there. What's another framework or sort of pattern you've seen for great ideas? Yeah, so one that I think is pretty interesting. That's also I would put in like the tried and true bucket is if you take something that people consistently do and they have to do and they feel like they have to do it, but it takes a lot of steps and or time and you dramatically simplify it. and you make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing that they feel like they have to do. So some good examples of this would be, for example, booking online travel. You know, it used to be so hard to do.

You'd have to go to so many different sites. The kayak founders had the vision of let's just pull it all into kayak.com. You go to one site, you see it all in one place. They made it really easy. And I think you said this once, which was anytime there's somebody has 14 tabs open to do this, to do one task, that's a business opportunity. Is that right? That's a business opportunity.

Yeah. I mean, just watch for that. If you ever see that, people are doing a lot of research. There are tons of tabs open. It's really arduous. That's an opportunity. Another example of that that we kind of found with Hems and hers and other telemedicine companies that we've started is going to the doctor's office.

You know, people need to go to the doctor's office. Think of that process. You're calling the doctor's office. You're scheduling an appointment. You're whipping out your calendar. You're putting it on your calendar. You're going to the waiting room. You're sitting there.

You're getting prescribed something. You're going to Walgreens. You're waiting in line for half an hour. Going around the store. Going home. This is a big process. And as a result, the next generation kind of doesn't even really engage with the health care system.

Close to nine out of ten of them don't even know who their doctor is or they haven't even gone. So, you know, telemedicine takes that process and makes it a five-minute process where you can do it on your phone and go through and get treated for whatever condition that you have. I think another interesting example of that is selling your house. People need to sell their house, right? And it's a really hard, long, arduous process fraught with a lot of anxiety and things like that. Open Door came along and said, hey, come to this website, tell us what your house is, and we'll make you an offer to buy it. And you can sell it right now.

And not everyone has to do that, and not everyone does do that, but enough people do it that created a really, really big company that's doing really well. So those are some interesting. And you guys are doing that now with Open Store, right? Which I got to say, is a truly great idea. I remember when I first sent it, I texted my friend and I said, I didn't even say how great this idea is. I just only said, why are we not doing this?

Because I was like, this is that good of an idea, selling your company, selling your e-commerce store in this case. takes so much effort, so much work. And the data is all there, right? Like I'm assuming, I don't actually know how it works, I'm assuming it's sort of like Clearbank or whatever, where you can plug into their Shopify, you can plug into their Facebook ad account,

you can plug into their bank or whatever. And with those three sources of data, you can get a basically like a health score and a value of this shop and make them an offer. And they don't have to go. Most of them don't even know, like at least with a house, it's painful,

but you kind of know what you're supposed to do to do it. Yeah, nine out of ten friends I talk to who have an e-commerce store. Don't even know what you would do if you wanted to sell. They don't even know who's door do I knock on? What do I need to have ready? And so therefore, I'm just not going to do it. And it's like the open door thing where not everybody's going to do this, but sure, if open door captures, I don't know what they modeled out, but, you know, 1%, 3%, 5% of all house sales,

like multibillion dollar company. Same thing for open store. So I'm super, super bullish to the point where I was like, what am I doing with my life, that I'm not doing this idea. This makes total sense. Oh, man. Well, thanks for saying that. Don't worry. I'm not going to copy you. Keith and I are having a ton of fun, ton of fun building out that company here in Miami.

That's been a blast, building a great team, a huge team. And yeah, it solves this pain point in a market where it's really hard to sell your company. And all you need to do is come to a website. We give you a price and you can sell your company. And it's really interesting. We have an amazing data science team. We're hiring really aggressively. If anyone wants to join,

anyone who joins that team, it's such an unbelievable team. I think it's going to create this almost Miami Mafia, so to speak, around here of amazing people. I think it's an exceptional opportunity and scaling really quickly. So that's been a lot of fun. Thanks for saying that.

Okay, that's it. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time.