My First Million - I chose to be broke for a year

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Want the 4 money rules that changed my life? Get it here: https://clickhubspot.com/fws Episode 783: Shaan Puri ( ⁠https://x.com/ShaanVP⁠ ) gets interviewed by his former intern about quitting a $120K/yr job in his 20s to become strategically broke and the other counter-intuitive decisions that made him successful.  Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:56) Quitting a $120k job to be broke and live with 3 friends (Don’t linger on bad decisions) (10:26) Fear is what holds people back more so than anything else (13:17) How to get what you (actually) want. (16:37) Most people are not serious (28:21) Who is the most important voice in your life? (34:05) Why I decided to sell my company to Twitch & Amazon. (40:18) The biggest waste of time is doing something that needn’t been done at all (Elon) (41:52)  “You can’t run an A/B test on life” (Act Accordingly) (52:37) There are no bonus points for making things harder for yourself (location) (58:23) The best people are 'down' (Buffett) — Links: • The Biography Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/@thebiographypod  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

The biggest risk you have is spending your life trying to do a really good job at the wrong thing. Yeah. Mediocrity is the real risk. For any person with high potential, because it'll sap you. Sap your will. Sap your time. Sap your resources. Slap your energy.

Sap your belief in yourself. This is Sean Pruy. He sold his company to Amazon and Twitch for millions and he now runs one of the most successful business podcasts in the world with millions of listeners. I know this because I spent 10 years doing things only for like, oh, if this worked, it'd be amazing. The work has to be the win. Yeah. The win can't be some future hypothetical payoff.

Because you enjoy it, you do it all the time. Because you do it all the time, you get really good at it. Because you get really good at it, you do get the results. Right. That's the flywheel. In this episode, we talk about what it takes to be successful, how to work smarter, not harder, and how to live a good life. I think hard work is over it's probably maybe the fourth or fifth most important variable. You know, I think the very first one is...

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road. All right, today's a special episode because I'm the guest of today's episode. Normally, we have guests on and we ask them all about their life, their philosophies, how they work, how they did it, how they made it. But this time, I'm the guest because my former intern, Walter, uh, created his own podcast. He used to work for me when he was, I don't know, 18, 19, 20 years old. He was in college.

And he's gone on to create a cool podcast. And he asked me to come on. And so I went on. I'm one of the first episodes of his thing. And I watched it. And I was like, this is actually. a really good interview. And the reason why is because it's a lot of information about before we ever made any money. So, you know, how I was thinking when I was in my early 20s, the ups,

the downs, the indecisions, the uncertainty. Do I go this way or this way? And how I thought about it, I think it's going to help a lot of people, specifically people who are, you know, you haven't quite made it yet. Maybe you're young. Maybe you just haven't, it hasn't all clicked for you yet. I think there's some very useful philosophies in here. So I hope you enjoy this is an episode where I got interviewed by my former intern, Walter. great life seemingly. So why did you end up moving? And what was that year of being strategically broke right?

Yeah, strategically broke. That's what I called it. Yeah. I think most of we would just call it unemployed. But why not? I put a luxury brand on it. So basically what happened is I graduate from college and I get a great job. I got a job paying me $120,000 a year to go work in a boring industry that I knew nothing

about, didn't really care about, kind of stumbled into a, a job that I thought was too good of money to pass up. Yeah. So I go and I work for this guy and, sure enough, I'm like pretty bored. Actually, I'm like, oh, you know what? Like, I can do this job, but I'm fairly bored. And it was a fork in the road because before I took that job,

me and my friends had had this business idea. The idea was to create a sushi restaurant chain called Sabi sushi. It was supposed to be the Chipotle of sushi. So the way you have Subway for sandwiches and Chipotle for burritos, The idea was we were going to do that for sushi. Okay. And we win this business plan competition. So on one hand, we get $25,000 of prize money that the three of us are going to live on.

Or I could take this job for $120,000. So I take the job. Within a month, I'm like, this is lame. I just looked at my life and I was like, this is, I made a lame choice. Yeah. The good thing about me is I don't really make great decisions, but I make great reversals of decisions. Like once I realize that I've made the wrong decision, I'm not one to linger in it. Right.

Mostly because I just can't like tolerate it anymore. Like if I was dating somebody, I remember I was dating this girl and realized like, all right, she ain't the one. I like just called her and broke up with the record. Oh, you know, 10 minutes later after thinking about it. I was like, what am I supposed to do? If I go hang out with her now, this will be unbearable now that I've, I know what I can't unsee what I've seen. I can't unknow what I know.

And so I'm pretty quick to cut things off when they're not working. So I quit my job after a month and a half. And I tell him, hey, I'm going to go work on my sushi restaurant. He's like, what? Okay. So I fly back and I meet up with my friends. And so we got 25 grand, three people. So we're basically $8,000 each for a year.

For to live for a year. And I was like, I don't know how much, I don't even know how much life costs. I'm a college kid, right? When you're in college, everything's just provided for you, right? Like, you swipe this thing and you get meals. Yeah, things just like happen. Like my parents, paid for the, for the dorm or something, you pay up front.

I just didn't understand. Like, you don't know what it's like to pay rent and bills and laundry and all that stuff. So I, um, I like how I threw laundry in there. It's like $1.25 a week or something. So I don't really know even how much $8,000 is, but I know it's low, right? Because all of my friends got good jobs and nobody's making $8,000 a year. So I just said, okay, I'm either going to every day wake up and feel worried and shitty about money or I'm going to commit and say, I'm going to try to spend this year,

strategically broke. So instead of being, I looked at my friends, like investment bankers, and they were money rich, time poor. Yeah. And that's what I was when I had took that job. I was money rich, time poor.

So I was like, okay, if I'm going to be money poor, I'm going to make a choice to be rich in other areas. So it's like I need freedom and flexibility of my schedule. So I'm going to be time rich. I'm going to be adventure rich. Like I'm going to travel with my friends. We're going to do fun stuff. Yep.

I'm going to be learning rich. So it's like, how do I learn if I'm, making 10 times less, 12 times less here, I got to be learning 12 times more than I would on the job there. Right. Now, the good news is that's not that hard of a bar. You don't learn that much on your like entry level jobs, you know, or if you learn to me, you learn kind of the same task. Yeah. You're not learning like a wide breadth of stuff, right? Whereas with the business that we were doing, I'm learning about sushi and restaurant operations and how margins work and what a P&L is and I'm learning to pitch investors. Then we're negotiating a lease and I'm figuring out

how real estate works. I'm looking at learning, learning how I remember, we went to the city, like the city area, and we were looking up liquor licenses. And while I was there, I learned that if you have a liquor license, your lease is on file. So then I found the, I found where we were negotiating. I found one place with the liquor license. I knew how much they were paying. So then I went back to the negotiation. I was like, we're only going to pay this.

She's like, no way. We could never do that. Like, you are doing that in these four locations. So I know you could do that for us. She was blown away. So we were just learning all these little things, a little like core skills. So sales, marketing, brand building, design. We were editing videos.

We were doing whatever it took. We were blogging. We were doing just random stuff, but high action. Yeah. And we just decided to have a shit ton of action and do DIY, just do it all ourselves, hiring, firing, learn as many lessons as I could. And so that year strategically broke was about learning how little you need to live on, like sleeping on air mattress.

I put a photo. So you see this. Yeah, yeah. We could put one up there. Yeah. It was like, we didn't even have garbage. It's just hammered a garbage bag onto the wall like with a nail. It was like just hanging there.

You know, we would just drink out of this gatorade cooler that we had gotten for free from some gym. You know, and then to make some side money, I would like coach basketball at this like school for autistic children. And I would tutor kids and tutor college students nearby in stats. And I was like, cool, I'm learning and then teaching them. And I'm making, you know, 25, 30 bucks an hour. But I only were, I calculated like the minimum amount I need to earn in order. in order to have max freedom. Which, like, now that I look back,

that was actually a very smart thing to do, even though I was very dumb at the time. And Darmesh, who came on our podcast, a billionaire founder of HubSpot, he said the same thing about his first business. He goes, I did all this random stuff in my first business, not knowing anything.

Then in my second business, I thought, well, now I know the proper ways to do things. And he, like, screwed up that second business. He's like, dude, the first business was more successful than the second. And he realized, he goes, just because I was ignorant doesn't mean I was wrong. Right.

So just because you don't know what you're doing, you're making it up as you go, it doesn't mean you're wrong on all of them, right? And you might actually got a bunch of things right. And I think one thing I got right was realizing that money was some sort of tool for freedom. And instead of trying to just stack as many dollars in the bank count when you're young, the better thing to do is optimize for freedom, optimized for learning, optimize for adventure and fun.

And just calculate the minimum amount of money you need to be able to do that. And I'll still do that with my companies. I'll calculate the minimum amount of funding we need just to get to that next, like get to that thousand customers who love us. Or there's a lot of things I could be doing right now to make more money, but I don't do them because I'm not trying to optimize for that. I'm saying what's the amount I need where I feel really good, but I get the most time I can have with my kids and on my projects

and working out and doing fun stuff I like to do. Yeah. And I think that principle has like really stuck with me. I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how build a money-making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that

and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, get rich quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth, things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started.

And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document and making it available to all you guys.

All right, back to this episode. I love that so much. I think you mentioned a point where like you reverse decisions very easily. I think that's a very hard thing to do. I think most people consider like that there are two-way doors. And I think they actually aren't that many because of how hard most people, myself included, have it to actually reverse that decision. So figuring that out early on.

What do you mean by that? Like, yeah. Have you found it hard to reverse decisions? Yeah, definitely. I think so like, you know, if you commit to something or. Give me an example. So I think, you know, moving, moving to places, right? Like, so I lived in San Francisco.

for a month a year ago. I know that I want to move out of Europe. I even know it now, deep down the side, but because I've got family, oh, these are the reasons I tell myself, right? Because I've got family at home. My friends are there. You know, it's hard to get a visa.

Things like this to keep me sort of from moving. Now that I've got a place in the Netherlands, you know, I'm renting like, you know, it's all of these reasons to not go that are really just excuses. Yeah. So I think maybe I'm just speaking for myself here, but I think it's harder to reverse those decisions.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it is. I just wonder why. Like, in your case, I don't think you're... It's a therapy session. Yeah, it doesn't seem like you're trying to reverse a decision. It seems like you have... Yeah, you've...

I think you probably have made the decision where you want to be, but you probably have just like some fears holding it back. Like, I don't know what the fears are, but like maybe it's fear of leaving family behind or how you're going to afford to live in a really expensive city or not knowing any, but I don't know what it is, but it's almost always fear. Right.

Like, if you just ask why often enough, you'll end up with like, I'm afraid. We try not to say we're afraid, but we are. Adults have all these code words for fear, like stress. Like, you're allowed to say I'm stressed out. Yeah. Or that's really stressful. Right.

But if you say, I'm afraid, it's like, what you're doing? You're growing bad. You're baby. What's going on? But of course, stress is just the code word for fear. Right. What are you stressed out about things going wrong? Things not happening.

Okay, then what? Yeah. Then people won't like me. What? Then why? You're just ultimately your, You're afraid. You're afraid of rejection. You're afraid of embarrassment. You're afraid of humiliation. You're afraid of failure. It's one of those things. It's always underneath it.

And so I think, you know, that fear is what holds people back more so than anything else. I think that's also why people don't reverse decisions, right? Because they're afraid of looking stupid or like, you know, what if I quit this job and the other thing's not better? Right. What if I break up with this girl, but there's nobody else or the next person's not better. Yeah. Or then I'm alone and that's going to suck. And I don't want to feel that. I'd rather live in pain than go towards an unknown. You know, take a known pain versus an unknown. Yeah. I think people get trapped up in those too much.

I'm happy that that's not one of my, like, weaknesses. Yeah. I got my own, but that's not one of it, for me at least. No, I love that. Yeah, I think Tim Ferriss has said, like, people would rather live in discomfort than uncertainty. Exactly. Which I think is exactly what we just described. I think.

And I'm the opposite, by the way. Like, there might be others, which is just like, discomfort sucks. Like, oh, no. But if this sucks, take me out of pain. Yeah. I'm not saying I'm tougher. I'm saying I'm actually less tough. Like, I have less tolerance for pain.

And so then I just make a decision. All right. Maybe the uncertainty is less pain and I go there. But you're just honest about it. And that's hard. I think what's really interesting as well is with you moving to San Francisco, and this is something the more I talk to people like yourself who I think have made it. Because, you know, you've set out in life just like, what do I want out of life?

And you're sort of just going for that. Like, I love that. I think the benefit of moving to a place like San Francisco is the proximity you get with other people and the blueprints you're seeing. Like I think that's a big reason I want to do this, right? Like selfishly, the reason I want to talk to you is like you seem to have figured out in the way you want to. And I just want to steal and learn from you. And I think you've mentioned that proximity is something that can do that for you, right?

It can give you these blueprints. Yeah. So talk to me a little about that, about that. And I also want to hear you talk about a story about one of your classmates. You said this before whose father, you know, had a great job, but, you know, never saw. saw his daughter. Tell me about like how can we learn from other people. And, you know, under the idea of figuring out what you want to do in life, you know,

like what do you actually, what do you notice? Like, what do you get energy from? Like, how do you pick up on that? Well, I think what you're talking about is this phrase, proximity is power. Yeah. And I got this from Tony Robbins. I went to a Tony Robbins event. He said that.

It clicked for me. And he was talking about for himself. He's like, we all heard these phrases like, you know, you are the average of the five people he spent the most time with. Very true, by the way. Like you, let's say you hang out with a bunch of people who are super into working out. Yeah. It doesn't matter if you didn't work out before.

You're going to end up working out, right? Or you're not going to end up hanging out with them that much, right? Like, it is very hard to resist that flow. It's like in the, it's like in a biological cell, osmosis. It's like the water will just cross the membrane. It'll just go. It'll flow in that direction. So I like that.

I like pull, not push. Push is hard. Push takes energy. I got to motivate myself. to go work out every day. I got to convince myself to go do this. Or I'm pulled into it because all the people I like and respect do this. We hang out all the time.

This is what their normal schedule looks like. It's almost easier for me to just do it versus like resist everything. So that same principle is just true no matter what your pursuit is. When I wanted to get good at playing poker, I looked around and the people who got good at playing poker, they all lived in a house with five other people who were equally obsessed with playing poker. Some were better, some were a little worse. But they just immersed themselves amongst five people,

literally lived in a house with them. And then that's all they did. They eat, sleep and breathe poker. They would talk poker over dinner. They would review hands. They would do all of that all the time. And they got better way faster than people who are not. It's like you can learn Spanish on duolingo.

Right. You can learn Spanish with a tutor. Or you can go move to Mexico and you can live there for three months. Like which one is going to work better? Total immersion. Yeah. And so proximity. getting near the thing you want

is ironically an easier way to get what you want. It's like the easiest decision you can make. It's like, you know, to move the needle the furthest in your progress bar is just get around other people who already are doing the thing you want or have the thing you want or also chasing the thing you want. That's that principle.

That's why I moved to San Francisco. I wanted to do startups. I was living in Australia at the time. Not many startups. There's not a lot of startups there. And I asked the guy, I was like, hey, who's the most impressive founder you've met? They're like, this guy.

But cool, can I meet him? Nah, he doesn't live here anymore. That happened three times. Hey, where are all those guys? Where'd they move to? They moved to San Francisco, of course. That's where the people who are serious about startups go. Right.

Oh, what the hell am I doing here? Right. And it feels weird to move. I got to break a lease. I got to, I don't know anyone there. Where am I going to go? It's unknowns, right? But it's like, all right, well, am I serious about this or not?

Yeah. And like, I decided to be serious about it. Like, yeah, I want to do that. Okay. So I literally changed my phone number to a, like a San Francisco area code. just to mentally commit. And I started telling people, I'm moving to San Francisco. I had no plans yet.

I didn't know anything. I moved to San Francisco. I started job hunting only in San Francisco. I started looking at places, assigned a lease. I found a place to live. And then I just flew here on a one-way ticket. And I said, this is where I want to be in order to make that happen. So I think that's the kind of proximity's power idea.

Principle, yeah. I think you touched on something else as well as where, you know, if you want to go to San Francisco, like, you know, your boss telling you, like, that's where all the serious people are who are interested in startups who actually want to do it. And you telling yourself, like, or asking yourself that question, like, am I serious about this? Yeah. Like, I think that's very underrated.

Most people are not serious. No. This is actually, like, a really important point. Yeah. Most people are not serious. I'll tell you two stories around this. Um, at that Tony Robbins event, they play this little game. They do these little, like, kind of like warmups before Tony comes out.

Mm-hmm. Trying to get the crowd active, get you vibe to so that you're ready to go. So sometimes it's like, uh, they'll hit a beach ball around. People are bouncing it. Sometimes it's music, whatever. So they have this guy come out and he's like, we're going to play a game of Simon Says. And just to set the scene, we're in an arena.

There's 10,000 people in this arena. It's like a basketball, an actual basketball arena. He has full. So 10,000 people all are going to play Simon says. And he's Simon. So he says, stand up. And he's like, the winner is going to come up on stage and get something special. All right, cool.

Winner out of 10,000 people. So he starts, does the first one. He's like, all right, everybody. you know, stand up. Every stand's up. He's like, you're off. He's like, he keeps going. And he's just eliminating like tons of people really quickly.

And by the, you know, within 10 minutes, it's down to like the last five people. And he's like, come up on stage. And he says, he gets the winner. And he's basically like, all right, the final five. And he's like, you're the five out of 10,000 people who are at the end here. Yeah. And he's like, did you think that you were going to win?

And they were like, you know, I didn't, their honest answer was like, you know, I didn't, I didn't know if I was going to win, but I was definitely going to try. I really wanted to win. I really wanted to win. Yeah, I thought I was going to win. No, I wouldn't have imagined it, but you know, here, here I am. One guy was like that, right? Before of them were like, yeah, I actually like, I really wanted to win. And so I was like, he asked a question. Then he goes to the audience. He goes, raise your hand if you actually believed you were going to win. Almost nobody raises her hand. Maybe 50 people. 10,000. Yeah. Nothing. And he goes, you know, the five people on stage, it looks like you're competing with 10,000 people. You're not.

You were actually only competing with these 50. You had a 1 in 10 chance of getting on stage, not a 1 in 10,000. And I remember that it really stuck with me. By the way, there's like loser YouTube comment type of people who are like, but actually, forget it. It's a story. It's a point.

Shut up. The point is a lot of life is like that. Things seem really. really hard, really unlikely, really challenging. But most people are not serious. Most people are not trying to seriously do anything. And if you are serious, you're already in that final, like, you know, five out of 50 type of format.

And you've got a one in ten chance. And so, like, your odds are much better than you think. I give you a second story that supports this. We've become friends with Jimmy Donaldson, who's Mr. Beast on YouTube. And Jimmy, like, when you're hanging out with him, he meets a lot of people, in fact, just like at his headquarters at a studio, all these YouTubers just come like almost like a mecca, like a pilgrimage to just like honor him. They just come just to see him, right?

And they come and they're always, Jimmy, you know, like, hey, you got a few minutes. I just love to talk to you about my channel. Just give me any advice. Yeah. How to grow my channel. Any advice on how I could be successful on YouTube. Please, Jimmy, please tell me how I can be successful on YouTube. And it's so funny because, first of all, all of his videos are public.

You can see what he does. So everything's doing is visible for you. Every single video is public. Yeah. But okay, beyond that. And by the way, that's from the beginning of time. Like you can see all of his videos. Yeah, 10 years ago.

Yeah, 10 years ago. You can see his videos. And so we said, well, and he says the same thing to him every time. And he goes, here's what you want to be, you want to win? Yeah. You want to be successful on YouTube? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, here's what you're going to do.

You're going to make 100 videos. They're like 100 videos? Yeah, you're going to make 100 videos. One at a time, right? Make a video. Then when you make the next video, pick one thing you're going to do better. A better intro. A better caption.

A better outro. better music, better pacing, better editing, better whatever. One thing every time for 100 videos. Just do that. And when you're done with the 100, come talk to me. I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do next. Like, okay, great. I'm like, Jimmy, does anybody ever come back to you?

What do you tell them when they come back? He's like, they never come back. What do you mean? He's like, well, he's like, nobody's willing to do 100 videos. Right. They all want to be Mr. Beast. They don't want to. They don't want to be Jimmy who started doing videos when he was 12.

Yeah. And at 13, nobody watched, 14, nobody watched, 15, nobody watched, 15, nobody watched. 16, is anyone ever going to watch? 17, still nobody watching. 18. Oh, my God, a couple of people watch. 19. Finally, somebody watched.

Seven years through hell, right? So it's like, nobody's willing to do even 100 videos, let alone seven years. And he's like, and by the way, for the very few people, the kind of that one percent of people who are serious and do it, he's like, by the time they get to 100, they don't need me. Dude, they're flying. They forgot about all about me. They are so full of stuff to do. they have so much momentum.

Yep. Because they made 100 videos and they tried to make one thing better every single time. That idea, that rule of 100, it applies to basically

any pursuit, not just YouTube. And the funny thing is nobody's serious. So nobody does it. And so like, you know, you just, all you have to,

like, if you just decide, I'm serious about this, I will be serious. I'm a serious person, not like, not like other people how they're not going to approach this.

They're not going to take this very simple idea seriously. You're already ahead of the game. Yeah. You're only committing with us 50 people. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data?

That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. Pull from examples from how you did this, right? So I think proximity is one thing where,

If you're just seeing more lifestyles or activities that people are doing in and around the subject that you find interesting, you'll be able to follow more blueprints and sort of figure out what you're actually going to do 100 times over. But in someone's like daily regular life, like what things can people do or what things did you do to sort of figure out how can I lean more into my inner nerd? Well, one thing is other people are very good at spotting it before you are. I remember Naval who's like one of my favorite people to learn from, follow, whatever. He says a great story. He's like, when I was a kid, I want to. I wanted to be a physicist.

I thought, like, in the apex of, like, awesome people, physicists were on top. Physicists, scientists, inventors. And he's like, that's what I'm going to be. And he was telling everybody he's going to be that. And his mom was like, nah, you're going to be a business person. He's like, what are you talking about? Like, business is cool, but like, I want to be a physicist. She's like, no, you're naturally a business guy.

And he's like, what? I never talked about business. Like, I've never told you that. What do you mean? And she goes, well, you're always talking about it just you never say, I want to be a guy, but you're always thinking about business. He's like, when you used to walk by that restaurant, you would always point out things that they're doing that they should be doing to make more revenue or be more profitable or

like how they should change their menu. You're always doing that. You're always trying to figure out how to fix a business or how to improve a business. It like comes very naturally to you. And she's like, does physics come naturally to you? And he's like, no. He's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, brutal. Like I want it because I think they're so cool.

Yeah. But he wasn't naturally as inclined. And then when he's, so he realized that. And he's like, leaned into business more. So I've seen this many, many times where other people, if you just talk to other people who know you well, you can ask them a couple of questions that I think are good at sussing this out. One such question is, what's my superpower?

Like, what do you seek that comes easy to me, naturally to me, that is harder for other people? Is there anything like that that you've seen? Podcasting? Yeah, so like, you know, telling stories, podcasting, whatever it is. another thing that you might do is you might say where is it that you might ask yourself where do I spend time doing things that for me feel fun

but to others would feel like a grind so it's play to you work to others for me it's like I'll be up at 11, 12 at night and I'll be Google searching and randomly reading like today it was literally before we got here I was reading the annual report from the state of Nevada about the the revenues and expect of the casinos on the Las Vegas trip for 2024 compared to 2020.

Yeah. Like, who's doing that for fun? Yeah, nobody's doing that for fun. I was doing that for fun. I was really curious. I was like, are we in a recession? I wonder there's like this thing where the Vegas strippers know first. Do they know first?

Well, I should probably be able to check Vegas revenues last year versus this year. And that might be a leading indicator. Oh, wow. This is cool. This is a PDF. Download a PDF searching through the things. Making my notes. For what?

Dude, nobody asked me the question. You know, like the teacher didn't call on me. This wasn't my project, my assigned assignment. but I'd always been like that. I have always been doing things like that. And before, I didn't really notice that that was a thing. I didn't really see how that could be special or useful. It just seemed like, I don't know,

I just go on these random little business rabbit hole, these little detours. But then when I did the podcast and the podcast is us shooting the shit about business, suddenly I had this like giant library in my head of little factoid and stories and nuggets and this knowledge that was very, very useful in the podcast. So I found a fit for it.

Yeah. Later. And so I think other people are good mirrors. I think looking at what you do in your 5 to 9, like you have your 9 to 5, that's your job. What's your 5 to 9? What do you do? And specifically in your 5 to 9, what do you do beyond what's rational?

Right? A normal person. It's got to either look like a work or grind to other people. Or it's got to look like, oh, like, yeah, I like video games too. But you're like practicing your aim on this aim simulation for four hours a day. Yeah. Like, that's different. That's, you know, now you're in this other territory.

Or, like, you're not just like, you know, for example, I used to play this game NBA 2K. You ever played TK? Yeah, of course. I never played the, I never actually played the games. I just went to the franchise mode. And I started simulating. I'm the GM and I'm scouting players and I'm building this franchise.

And like, I was literally like, since I was a kid, sixth grade, fifth grade, I was doing this. And it's like, well, guess what that is? That's being a manager. Like, I was literally like, building, yeah. Being a CEO. It's like, I'm like, upping the concessions prices.

And I'm scouting these, like, the guys. I'm making these trades. And I got more joy out of the management of the franchise than playing the game. So, like, you know, you start to notice these oddities about yourself. But instead of pointing at them or hiding them or trying to like fix them because they're broken, saying, oh, interesting. Like, what superpower does that give me? Where does that let me thrive?

In what scenario would this be extremely useful or valuable? Yeah. You know? Yeah. Well, it turns out the one you're in right now. I'll give you another example. My wife. Yeah.

My wife's kind of OCD and R2 crafty. Since the kid, loved arts and crafts. Also, OCD drives me nuts. Like, that wire is out and crooked. Like, she needs to, she can't do this podcast. She has to get up and go fix that wire, right? So she, um, she started like, for herself, she started like, kind of like as a just like,

boredom, girly thing to do, like bedazzling her, you know, phone when she was in high school or whatever. And she, but she got really good at it, right? She, like, leaned in. She didn't, like, shy away from it. She got curious about it. She started buying Sarasie. Crystal. She started trying to arrange them perfectly.

She started seeing if other people do this, how she can make a better design. Suddenly, celebrities started hitting her up when she's in college. She's a freshman in college. Celebrities are hitting her up, asking for them to make custom things for their parties in Hollywood and whatever. And she's making thousands of dollars a month as a college student. That wasn't an option if you had asked people. That's her pushed out.

Yeah. Right? So that is, it didn't even seem like a thing. In fact, it seemed like this like kind of useless waste of time. But for her, it wasn't. It looked like a grind to others. but it was fun for her. So she found a way to make that useful over time.

That's an amazing story. I love that so much. I think that kind of goes back to what you mentioned earlier on in terms of just leaning into your own curiosities. And I think you said this somewhere where the only voice that actually matters is the one inside your head. And talk to me a little bit about how do you block that out when you're going through life?

You know, you have this sushi restaurant. You're picking things up. You're working at this job in Australia before that. How do you pick things up as you're going along when you're going along and when you're super unclear on that aspect. And how do you sort of focus on that inner, in a voice and really be true to yourself? Like, I think that takes time.

Yeah. I don't think most people are, at least took me time. I don't think most people could do that right away. Yeah. You know, you got to ask yourself a question. Who's the most important voice in my life? Is it my mom?

Is it my teachers? Is it my boss? Is it society? Is it the media? Um, whose voice do I care about? Who's number one? Yeah. And in reality, the voice that is most, you know, shaping you is the little voice in your head, the one nobody else can hear.

It is the director of your life's movie. It's the one that tells you where to stand, what to say, what to do next, how to react in this situation. That's what the director does. And you have a little director in your head right now. And so once you realize that, you say, okay, I want to, like, I want Spielberg up there, right? Like, I want Scorsese. I want Tarantino. Like, I want this to be a great move.

Yeah. You know, like, and what type of movie? Is this going to be like a tragedy? It's going to be a thriller. Is this going to be like a romantic comedy? Like what kind of movie I'm trying to have right now? And how do I tune that voice in my head? So that's what I meant by that comment.

And that's, I think, what works when you go internal is like you, you decide that, look, my opinion of myself matters more than anyone else's opinion of me. Easier said than none for sure. But if it's true, that's something that's worth that. That's a weak muscle that's worth working on, you know? Do I believe that the most valuable opinion of my life is my own opinion? All right. Well, what is my opinion on?

What do I admire? What do I think is not cool? How do I develop that taste for how I want to be and then practice doing it? And like notice those moments where other voices say X, but my voice says why. I'm going to go with Y. I'm going to do it here. It might be uncomfortable, but I'm going to do it. And that's me getting stronger.

That's me becoming that dude for whom that is the default. Right. And like, you know, you just do that over a number of years. Did you remember anything specifically, like any moments in time? There was a lot of resistance in what that inner voice was saying and what the outside voices were telling you? Definitely quitting to go to a sushi restaurant thing. I remember that was...

Were your parents not on board with that? Or was, I mean, all your friends were getting a high-paying jobs? I mean, everybody thought it was like a little bit silly, but, you know, didn't really care. It's not their life. So they're like, whatever. Right. Yeah, do it, huh? You know, like, just a friend at a party.

Like, yeah, put your foot in there. Like, you know, whatever. You just want to see somebody like, like, you know, wreck themselves. You want their own entertainment. Of the people who cared, like my parents, my dad, to his credit was very, it was a great dad moment. He was like, I think you should do it.

I'm like, you think the sushi thing's a good idea? He's like, I think it's a terrible idea. Why do you think I should do it? He goes, because look at you. Like, you're so switched on now. Yeah. And he's like, you know, I've seen you your whole life. You never used to be this way.

You never used to just wake up. You never used to just like have this, like, this drive, this motivation, this like burst of energy, like, look at you. You're like working all the time now. Used to be lazy. You know, you're really excited about this. I could see you developing your speaking skills. Like, I can see you developing skills. I can see you like really switched on. You seem energized. And he had this great phrase. He goes, a lot of times in life, we want to have the right direction first. Wouldn't it be nice if we knew exactly which way to go? But life is not like that. It's like you're standing on a beach. It's foggy outside.

You want to get to paradise, but you don't know where it is. You can't see. see, you can't see through the fog. So he's like, you have two options. Either you just stand there and wait for the fog to magically clear and then suddenly you could see is paradise that way or that way. Or you take your little crappy boat and you start paddling and as you get out there, you might see it. You might see it's oh, it's not this way. It's actually that way. He's like, and guess what? Once you're in motion, it's a lot easier to change direction. Yeah. Like people think it's really hard to change direction. No, you have momentum. You can actually shift course very easily if you see a better place to go. So he said, you know, sometimes life is about motion, not direction.

And he goes, I don't think this is the right direction per se. Like, I don't think you're going to create the next Chipotle. But you're getting in that book. I don't think you should be going into the restaurant industry. But I can see so much motion that I'm sure you'll figure out the direction. Like at some point. At some point. It's better off than standing out on the beach. And he was totally right. That was like a really wise thing for him to do. Yeah. That's a beautiful phrase. I think most people probably, I think I think actually in life, the scariest thing is standing there and then realizing like 80, 90 years later, like, shit, I didn't move at all. Yeah, yeah, I just sat down, actually, and like, you know, I stayed here.

Yeah, so I enjoyed the send. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell me about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank, and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form, and it was open only during business hours.

And I hit send, and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes. And then they told me, I got to visit. my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money, I can pay invoices, I can reimburse the team, all from one clean dashboard.

That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N.A and evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. When you were selling your company, when you were selling Bibo, was that, like, you know, that was sort of a little bit of a change, not a big change in direction, right? How did you go about in that process? I imagine that would be quite hard. You know, you're making a pretty big decision to try and sell this company.

You know, maybe you realize you don't want to be doing this specific project anymore. Sort of when you're working on a project and you're starting to feel like, okay, it's time to change direction to get to that path. Like, what was that process like for you? And what sort of things happened to make you come to that realization? Well, I was lucky I have a very good friend. My buddy, Suu. He, we were out at a casino down here in South Side of, so you go to as like Chinese casino, basically.

It's like a bunch of like degeneration playing like Paigau or something. And then there was us. And we're playing. And then you're like, whatever. This is, we're done. We go to the like buffet area or whatever. We're just sitting at the buffet like 1 a.m. And he said to me something.

He was like, he just said like I forgot how we got there but he goes I don't get what you're doing I was like what you mean you're like it's pretty clear he's a very good friend like he knows you know exactly what I'm doing

I talk to you about this all the time he's like no I just I just don't get it yeah I'm like what do you mean he's like I still get the whole thing I was like what what you know not just like at one part of our strategy like the whole thing and on the surface what I had looked really great

which is kind of one of those like inner voice versus external perception we had probably the nicest office in San Francisco because my main funder, like the guy who basically was funding the lab, was like a billionaire. So you had like the nicest office in San Francisco. We had a private chef. We had a masseuse on Fridays.

We had a bar built into the office. We had everything that you would want. It was designed by this guy Ken Folk who's like this fancy guy. So if you walked in, you'd be like, wow, these guys are super successful. This is going great. Who wouldn't want to work here is paradise? All my coworkers were super smart. So I had a great team, great office, great team.

Well, you must be constrained or not, you know, letting your, you know, your wings fly. No, no, no, total freedom. Well, you must not have the resources of the funding, your strap, right? No, no, no. Blank check. Fund as much as you want. What's the problem?

And so I'm like, what do you mean? You don't get it? I have paradise. Yeah. Well, what don't you get? And he's like, well, like, you've been there for six years. And the project you're working right now, it just seems like it's not like going to hit in the way you want it to hit.

It's also not going to fail where you'd be like, this is an obvious failure. It's like, okay. And he's like, I just, like, I just. don't get while you're working on something that's okay. And so we, as we started talking, he was basically just like, you know, I think you, you came into this wanting one thing, and now you're so far in, you're doing this other thing. And I don't think you would be doing that thing had you not already be doing it. So what do you mean?

He said, in physics is this concept of inertia. Like the object in motion will stay in motion unless there's a force to resist it. He was that force that night. And I had just been this objected emotion staying in motion. And he goes, inertia's a bitch, dude. Like, you know, you will keep doing it because you're already doing it. Thought experiment. If the lab closed tomorrow, would you, is this business idea so good that you would

tomorrow pick up the phone, call these same people you're working with and say, let's do this same thing. Yeah. Of course we're going to keep doing this. This is the best thing we could be doing. It's perfect for us. It's the juiciest opportunity. I don't want to be doing anything else.

Yeah. And I was like, no way. Right? I would call the same people. Like I like the people, but we would definitely not work on this. So then why are you doing it? Because you're already doing it. It's like, oh, this is silly, right?

And so, and you know, this is not a perfect test. Like, you know, you might always be like this is, it's not saying this is the best opportunity out of all the trillions of possible things I could be doing in my life. That's a little overwhelming. But if you know, like, no, I would probably say no and I'd probably try to find something else. Then you know you're doing the wrong thing. Right.

And so I realized I was doing the wrong thing. So how did we get to sell the company? So the next day, I told you I'm quick at cutting this off. Next day I go and I talk to my co-founder, I say, I think we should call it. I was like, I think we should try to sell the company. And if you can't sell it, I think we should end the company. He's like, end the company. What are you talking about?

I'm like, I just think we should be doing something else. What? I don't know, something else. I need to shake it up. I was like, I didn't know anything more. I just knew I needed to shake it up. A long time had gone by, six years. I gave it like a long run.

We had done 10 different products. Some of them were doing good. Some of them were doing bad. But like, I had like a lot. of time trying this model with these people and this space. And I told him, I said, this idea that we're doing, we're only here because we just pivoted, pivoted, pivoted. I don't think this is the idea I would do tomorrow if I wasn't already doing it.

Right. So I don't feel right about it. And I don't want to just pivot again for the 11th time. Like, I'd rather just get a clean slate. I went to the investor and I said, hey, give me 45 days to try to sell this company. I said, give me 30 days to try to sell this company. Or you could just like have it. I'll walk away.

You could take all my equity. you could decide what you want to do with it. It's like, okay. And then we ended up selling the company 45 days later, which was like absurd. Like you don't sell, you don't sell a company. Well, there was still diligence afterwards,

but like 45 days to a signed definitive agreement is pretty, pretty fast. But kind of once I had that intention, you know, I really went for it. I think that's, you know, I think Steve Jobs famously asks himself every day, like looks himself in the mirror and says, do I want to,

this is my last day, would I still be doing? And if there's enough days in a row, where he said no, like he'd make a change. It's sort of similar to the questions slowly asked you, like, what are you doing? Yeah, yeah. Would you be doing this if you weren't or were doing this?

Yeah. I think that's just like a very simple way of looking at it. Yeah. You know, and I think if that answer is not a, I think it should be a hell yes as the ideal. And maybe you say, maybe you're just a couple tweaks away. Like, yeah, it would be a hell yes, but I hate my commute or it would be a hell yes,

but I want to stretch my wings and start growing this other way too. Right. That's fine. Those are tweaks. Whatever the answer. answer is, it's the answer. But, you know, I think asking the question is the more important thing. You know, Elon has this thing about like, how do you do it? What's your engineering process? How do you build such rockets and electric cars and giant super GPU clusters, blah, blah, blah.

And one of his core principles is the biggest waste of time is doing something well that needn't have been done at all. And I think that's true for everybody's life. Like, you know, the biggest risk you have is spending your life trying to do a really good job at the wrong thing. Yeah. Thing you don't even want to be doing or you shouldn't be doing it the first place. Yeah. That's sort of bringing me to this thing where, you know, being okay or having this place in life, right, where you've got this business where it's okay. It's kind of like not where you'd want it to be, but it's not the end of the world.

Like that's potentially more dangerous than anything else. Like I talked to Ben Wilson about this. You know, you'd rather blame out than burnout. You'd rather go all in, go for the thing you really want to do than burning out. How did you, you know, you've talked a little bit about it. Mediocrity is the real. Yeah. Yeah.

For any person. with high potential, failure is not the risk. The risk is you get stuck in something that's just okay for too long because it'll sap you, sap your will, sap your time, sap your resources, slap your energy, sap your belief in yourself over time. Failing, it's a bit of a quick and painful thing, but it's over and you bounce back. And it keeps your most precious ass at your time still at your disposal. It's the thing that's just okay that is going to take all your time away.

Yeah. You don't want that. Yeah. No, it's again to your point. Like for Inush, like you know, usually, The thing that is mediocre, you're in it just because you're doing it. Yeah, or put differently, some, I forgot who said this, whatever, someone said, uh, for anybody who's sufficiently smart,

the biggest cost is opportunity cost. Right. So once you know that, that your biggest cost is not your taxes or your expenses. It's your opportunity cost. Um, then you got to think about that. Yeah. Yeah. When you're, when you're choosing to do a project now, you know,

you're optimizing it for a lot of, a lot more different things than earlier on. What sort of tradeoffs to your point? like opportunity costs, like, what do you look at now? And yeah. I have a very simple rule now. Am I doing this for a result or am I doing this because I like doing it? So I no longer will do something for an X for some future payoff. Not saying I don't want to make money in the future or that those things can't happen.

It's that am I doing it? Am I suffering today for some better future? Or am I doing today where the reward is doing it? Reward is doing the thing. Yeah. Right. The work has to be the win. Yeah.

The win can't be some future hypothetical payoff of some work that I wouldn't have otherwise wanted to do. Yeah. Because if you do it that way, then you win win, right? You for sure win by doing it. And you might win double, triple 10x from some result. But if you do it the other way where you're just doing things opportunities, and I know this because I spent 10 years doing things only for like, oh, if this worked, it'd be amazing.

But then when it doesn't work, which most of the time, things don't work, it's like, damn, That's kind of a waste totally, but like... But it feels like that. I wasn't, you know, I was basically not enjoying myself to the extent that I could have been. Again, the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost, I could have just been working on something that the work itself was super rewarding. The act of doing it was the reward and not the future payoff. Do you think if you had to focus on that earlier on, you still would have gotten to the point where you are now?

Well, like, say, you're doing the sushi restaurant and it ends up not working out, but then you pick something else. consistently each time we're like, I don't care what any else things like, this is just a project I'm doing because it seems curious, but it might not make any money or things like that. Do you still think you'd be in this position? Yeah, I think I'd be further ahead. Yeah?

Yeah. That's awesome. Just because you would have figured out. I never know, right? It's impossible to say. You don't have the, the, you can't run the AB test on my. But. Maybe for a good, maybe that's the way it's supposed to be.

Yeah, I just, I mean, I think I still would be the guy I am today. I think I would just be, I think I would have found the things that are more, enjoyable to me. Earlier. Which would have made, it's a fly wheel, right? Because you enjoy it,

you do it all the time. Because you do it all the time, you get really good at it. Because you get really good at it, you do get the results. Right. That's the flywheel. So, you know,

but if you don't really enjoy the thing, then you only work on it to the extent that you have the motivation or willpower to do it or energy that you force yourself to do it. Then you only get so good at it. And because you're only so, so good at it, you know, you get a so-so result.

Yeah. There's no flywheel. There's no flywheel. So I'm a believer in that flywheel And I think if I just started doing that When I was, you know I did it at points of time Not like I did it none

I didn't do it zero But if I had been all in on that I think it would have been yeah further ahead Yeah You've written a blog about not working hard Like that's actually working hard is overrated Do you think applying that principle back I know we can't A-B test life

Like just looking back Do you think if you had applied that principle You would have found those things quicker Like the things that were you pushed out? There's a few different ideas. Yeah. Working hard is overrated. That doesn't mean it's useless.

Right. All right. Okay. It's a big different. So overrated means when successful people talk and like, what's the key? Like hard work. Why do they say that? Sounds good.

Sounds good. It also sounds like we all had an equal shot. I just worked harder. Right. It's a decision that you made. Yeah, my dad was a billionaire. But like it was hard work. They got me there.

Right? Like you can use hard work. It gives you a lot of air cover. Yeah. It's the can't disagree. Who can disagree with that? Yeah. Me, basically.

I'm the only guy to disagree with that. So I think hard work is overage. It's probably maybe the fourth or fifth most important variable. You know, I think the very first one is project selection. And choosing what you work on is far more important than how hard you work. I know this because I've worked in the restaurant industry. In picking the restaurant industry, it doesn't matter how hard you work. You're quite limited in like, you know, your results or your outcomes and what your life is going to be like.

Right. So what you work on matters a lot. Who you work with matters a ton. Then I would say there's like, you know, sort of the third, fourth, fifth, right? Timing, luck. There's other other variables of which hard work is one of those. So maybe it's three, maybe it's four, maybe it's five. That's what I've seen.

Yeah, that's awesome. I do think, by the way, the one thing hard work's good at is it's good at developing skill. Right. And it's good about being serious. So like when you're in your 20s, it's easy to throw hours at the problem. You don't have good judgment. So whatever. Spend more time.

Yeah. as you get, as you have less time, because you get older, you have more, you have kids, you have less energy, whatever, your judgment's got to make up for your lack of time that you're willing to throw out the problem now. So I think early on, like I wouldn't have, it's not like I would have just like done nothing. That's not what I would, that's not what I mean by like, you know, hard work is overrated. I would have just been really intentional for project selection, about people selection, who I work with.

And then lastly, like, you know, I would work hard and I'd focus on the skill building part of working hard because most projects fail, but the skills stick with you. Right. Like my sushi thing failed, but randomly while we were doing that, we were blogging and making like video content. Like I learned I after effects. I learned I movie. I learned Photoshop just enough to be dangerous.

I'm not great at it. But those served me really well when I went to Silicon Valley and I could actually like mock things up myself, send it to the designer. Yeah. Like the skill stuck with me, the project had left me behind. Yeah. So I think skill building is really important. And also in that case, you can apply the skills to things that you would have been more

naturally interested in doing anyway, right? Like I think, you know, you mentioned those skills. built up. If I pick a better project, I still got that skill. Exactly. And you did this, you did this exact same thing when you applied to Monkey Inferno. Like, you probably applied a lot of those skills in the way you actually got that job. Totally, totally.

And like, you know, I think, so I think that's the, I forgot somebody said this. I think it was, who's the said the, the skill, the mash. Oh, Derek Sivers said this. He goes, I think skills are the most valuable thing because they can't be inherited. They can't be bought. They can't be taken away from you. Yeah. Like, it can only be earned.

And Seinfeld kind of says the same thing. Basically, like, skill is really the thing worth having. Yeah. All the things. Like, the skill is the thing. Like, what could you choose? You want the skills. Yeah, like, what could you choose?

You can choose, like, more resources. You can choose whatever. You can choose achievements, but, like, skill is the thing. It's the mastery of a thing. It's the thing you really want. Yeah. It's the key that unlocks infinite number of doors. Right.

Right. I think there's also something to be said for going that extra mile and trying to acquire the skills. Like, there's such a service area of luck that increases when you do that. like, you know, you can open up an ability to do something else. You didn't even know it was an option just because you've unlocked this skill and interest. Totally. We have this company we invested in. I don't know if I should say the name.

Maybe I won't say the name. Yeah. The founder used to work in like a e-commerce, DDC brands. Small DEC brands you've never heard of. Just kind of like there's like two worlds. Like tech, Silicon Valley where you raise millions in venture capital and you hire the best people and you go for a billion dollar outcome. And then those, like, e-commerce dudes who, like, basically, you're on Alibaba. And then you have, like, your mom is your warehouse at the beginning.

And you're, like, drop shipping. And you're trying to figure out, like, Google ads and Facebook ads and TikTok. So, like, usually those two worlds are very separate. Right. This guy hop from one to the other. Like, you know, like, is this how COVID started? Like, from the bat to, like, humans or whatever. That's what he did.

So what he did was he developed in e-com, this, like, marketing skill around paid ads. When he went to, when he started this ventures, ventureback company. That's a B2B software company. Most of the guys in there are like a somewhere between a zero out of 10 to a six out of 10 at paid ads. Like you know who love, like people who are great at paid ads. There are people who are like, you know, affiliate marketers and e-com people. They are dialed in. They know how to do that. Yep. So he took that and he did it there. He took that skill and he transferred it. Like just today, they raised basically like 300, 400, 400 million dollar valuation within two years.

And the reason why they're growing so fast is because he cut his teeth doing e-com, you know, like digital ads, Google Facebook ads. And he took that over here and he's like, this is like shooting fish in a barrel. Like now I have the super sticky product with a high price point, you know, instead of selling a widget for 20 bucks in e-com, I'm selling a $20,000 recurring revenue contract. Yeah. But it's the same thing.

And nobody here knows how to do paid ads at the level I do. Right. So this is great. Right. And so, you know, that skill can like, once you apply. to a better project can be a huge multiplier. Right. Do you think project selection as a skill is also something that builds over time? If you're intentional about it, yeah.

Like, of course. Most people don't, right? I don't think most people really even know the word project selection, to be honest. Like, how many times have you even said that to yourself? Yeah. Probably zero. People think about industries. They think about careers.

Like, just atomic unit is a project. That's the thing you're going to do. And I think picking projects and picking partners. both have this huge, like, change in, like, your outcome. And very few people know anything about how to pick good partners. Very people know anything about how to pick good projects. But you can, of course, do those well. Those are skills.

And pay attention to it and learn. If you're intentional about it. Yeah. I want to talk about two things that are really interesting. One, well, interesting to me. I hope they're interesting. On the project selection side of things, I, you once called me when I went to go work with you again, instead of taking a sales job to go help you guys with clips for MFF

and things like that. And it didn't end up panning out. But, you know, the decision I had at the time was like, hey, go go do the sales job, you know, earn like 12 grand a month, which, you know, I'm like 22. I'm 21. I'm like, that's insane amount of money. But I don't need that money. And you said something to me that I still remember to this day.

I was outside because I'm eight, nine hours ahead and it was dark. And you said, you know, do you just want to be another sales guy? And I heard that I was like, no, you know, like, I don't want to be that. Just spitting on you. Yeah. It's like, how dare you? I spit on you through slack. Yeah.

I felt it. I felt it. You know, because of that, like, I don't know if we'd ever even be here now because of that decision, right? So there's so many things downstream of that project selection that I think are so important. How do you lean? Was that right, by the way? Did that work out for you? Yeah, dude, I'm happy with that?

I'm loving it. Like, you know, I still don't know exactly where I'm going, but I'm in such a better spot. Your gut tells you I've moved in the right direction. 100%. It doesn't mean it has to have played out yet. Right. But still rowing. Right?

You know, like, your gut is very. very strong at telling you that. Yeah. I feel like I would have been at that beach had I said no and like stayed on that job. And now I'm like, you know, out here doing things. I'm blessed enough to be able to talk to you guys here, right? So that's not something that I would have happened otherwise. That's cool.

Yeah. So I appreciate that. You mentioned, you know, project selection is really important. But the other most important thing is who you're doing things with. Yeah. Right. That was the mistake you made. I offered you a role.

Yeah. I was like, you should come work with me. You're going to learn a lot more. You can do a little shit. Yeah. You went on your own, which is always. You could probably, I would say, built a wider set of skills. Right.

Because when you're on your own, you've got to do everything. Right. But you didn't opt into a network. Right. This is the other thing I've been learning a lot. Yeah. Not to hijack your question. No, it's great.

We just did a podcast with James Creer. Did you know him? Yeah. Network of FX. Maybe explain to... Sure. James is like a Silicon Valley OG. He runs this fund called NFX, like a $1.2 billion dollar fund. Has sold, has built multiple companies sold them.

basically like never lost it all for investors in 30 years. Yep. So it's like, all right, great. He's somebody I learned a lot from. And he's like somebody I consider like a mentor to me. And he, he's big on networks. Everything he talks about is networks, networks.

It's like, too, it's like, it's like, dude, James, I get it. Like, you know, hey, can you pass the cheese? He's like, is it part of the network? It's like, all right, dude, just give me the cheese. So he talks about this like with very simple example is like, you know, where you choose to go to college. That's a network you're joining. Right. You're not just joining a college, you're joining the alumni.

Harvard Alumni Network and some networks are really powerful and some networks are pretty weak. When you move to San Francisco, you're joining the San Francisco network and you'll start to network in there and you'll connect with a bunch of nodes. And some of those nodes will lead to more opportunities.

And so you might say, I don't want to move in San Francisco. The rent is $2,000 more. But being in that network is worth much more than that rent, right? Or the taxes. He talks about how like moving away just for taxes is the worst reason. Because, yeah, you saved 10%.

well, you lost out on a 10x, 10x more money you would have made just by staying in the, like, the white hot center of the tech and AI network is so much more valuable. If you're good. Yeah. If you're bad, you're not going to get any value out of it. But if you're good, you should be in good networks. Yeah. And so I think this is something that people, I did wrong.

I think other people do it wrong, which I think you did it wrong in this situation, which is if you have a chance to opt into a better network, it's almost always worth more than the incremental dollar, especially the earlier in your career, because you're going to have more time for that to compound. Right. Right. Like the actual network value to compound. And so I think that that's a mistake that I probably made early on

that I didn't really recognize. And as I've talked to James, I recognize that more and more, how valuable that is. Yeah. I mean, to our early conversation, it's probably a mistake I'm making now, even just being in Europe still. Not an offense to Europe, but, you know, it is much worse.

Let's stay on this a little bit, actually, before going into, to find, like, co-founders and things like that, because that's, like, a little bit more. By the way, we should say one thing. Yeah. You can win anywhere. Right. You can win on your own.

You can win in any industry. You can win in the restaurant industry. You can win it. Anytime we're knocking at these, it's not because that thing is so fatally flawed. It's just you want to make things easier, not harder. You want to increase your probabilities of success, not decrease them. Yeah. That's what do we mean, whether it's better or worse.

Yeah. It's generally just like either it's more fun, it's easier or it increases your probability. Of course, there's always outliers and exceptions and you can be one of them and more power to you. But it's those tradeoffs, right? And it's to a point earlier way, like if you're surrounded by five people, go to the gym, chances are you're going to get ripped. Increase your odds. It's not a guarantee.

And you could have, of course, done it surrounded by other people. But why not increase your odds? Why not make things easier on yourself? There's no bonus points for doing everything the hard way. 100%. For making your odds worse. You know, like why? Good for you, but.

Yeah, yeah, what's the point? Yeah. What other things being in a network and just in general, I think being in a network as well and self-selecting for that, it's like a function where, you know, if you're all, Even a small bad example, maybe, like if there's a subreddit for a specific basketball team and you join that and you're very active then, you're self-selecting for a community, sort of the same thing on Twitter or what content you're listening to and following as well as which city you go to. What are some like other examples of that outside of like moving proximity-wise that you can they can self-select to?

I mean, you just named it. Your info diet? Right. I know a lot of people that aren't on Twitter. You opt out of that network or they're not on TikTok, whatever. These are networks you're opting into. Within them, there's sub-networks, right? Sub-clusters.

So your info diet, right? Like the same way, you know, there's these economic studies, right? Your income will end up being roughly the average of the five people you hang out with the most. Well, it's the same thing for ideas or thoughts, right? Like you're going to average in. You're going to dollar cost average into the thoughts of that network that you're in. Right. So whether it's the content you consume, if you consume the same content as everybody else,

you're probably going to have the same thoughts as everybody else. If you hang out with the same people, you're going to end up with the same people. Right. Like, you want to make some changes or you want to have a differentiation of some kind, you should probably differentiate your info diet. You should probably differentiate, you know, the people who hang out with or what you do with your free time. Like those are the simplest, you know,

those are the things that are upstream of a bunch of the results people want downstream. Right. To the network selection. Yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah. That's a tough one. Why is that?

I feel like there's, back to your point earlier of like what your role, like you're going in this direction, inertia, you know, you're only doing it because you're doing it. Like if you're really honest with yourself, like which networks do you want to select into? And I think probably, you know, if you stop, bad example of me, right? You stop listening to TikTok. You stop watching TikTok, right? And everyone you know is telling you like, hey, Sean, I just saw this new TikTok.

You're like, oh, I don't watch TikTok, man. I don't know about that. Like, I think that plays into lots of other aspects of your life where you have to be very intentional about it. because otherwise you're going to get overwhelmed then sort of not make that decision. So I think it's, it plays into your life in more ways than one might think.

Like, even your info diet. Yeah, yeah, it's true. I mean, and look, if you love the thing, do it, right? But it's like, if you don't, or you're just like, you're open-minded. Yeah. Maybe you like reading books more, right? Maybe you like doing certain other things, right?

Like, maybe you just pick up a different hobby that opts you into a different network. Yeah. Right, like, I know a lot of people that do jihitsu. And jih Tjitsu, it's exercise. but it's different than the elliptical. You're going to work out a different way. You're going to develop a skill.

You're going to be a part of a community. You're going to build your toughness. You're going to learn the mental resilience. You're going to learn about leverage. You're going to learn so many things out of that same hour of exercise. Yeah. So some people will try that because it's going to get you a different result than maybe, you know, that hour on the elliptical at, you know, level seven. In yourself.

Just do you and yourself. Yeah, just you and yourself. Exactly. Yeah. Let's talk about the final thing in terms of network. You've mentioned. project selection we've talked about is very important, but also people selection and partner selection.

You've often talked about Warren Buffett's sort of framework for it, and you've got a good one for it as well in terms of choosing who to work with and potentially even just doing project with, right? So if you've got company A and B that are the exact same, but they've got different people working there, like how do you figure out what types of people you want to be around? Talk to me about your selection framework for that. Yeah.

Okay, so Buffett has a great one on this, which is, you know, you select for energy. intelligence and integrity, right? Those are the three legs of the stool. Right. If they have the energy and intelligence, but no integrity, right? They're a smart crook. And the stool falls over, right?

If you have the energy and the integrity but no intelligence, you're not going to really get anywhere, right? So you get the idea. I learned for myself, there's a fourth thing that really, really mattered, which is that having somebody who's down, and I don't know a better word for this. I just called it down because that's the way I would describe them. Like, it's great.

He's down. And down meant a couple of different. things. They're down to try it. So they'll take a half-baked idea and be like, yeah, let's give it a shot. I need that. And I think great things come from being around people who are down. Right.

I think they're down for adventure. So like when we could choose a safe path or a more interesting story path, they're down for that and they'll lean that way with me. Yeah. I think they're down to like buckle down and just grind and just do something that's hard for a while. Like they're not going to run away from pain or difficulty. So down means a bunch of different things to me and that's the best way I can explain it is having somebody who's down.

For me, that's almost the sort of the highest priority bit. Everything else is sort of secondary to that. Yeah. You've talked about when you met Ben, you know, your ultimate partner right now where he had a SaaS that was doing, I think, a million dollars year in profit. He had, you know, objectively great position.

And he sort of took, he was down enough to go on this random side project with you. Is there anything you can tell, you know, talks to us about Ben and sort of, bring those three aspects you just mentioned to life. Yeah, Ben's the most down, right? Like, he's, you said it perfectly. He had a business doing a million dollars

and he had a business doing a profit at the time. And I was like, hey, you want to spend your time doing like this random unknown thing with me that I think, I think it's going to be pretty fun. I think it could be interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I'm down. All right. Okay, cool.

I don't really know exactly what it is. I have this rough idea. You down with that? Yeah, I'm down. Like, I'm down to not, I don't need it all figured out. Right. Okay, cool. We ended up doing this thing that for 90 days.

Gaves was like really intense. Like this is full on. I'm down, right? And he just carried on. Then we switched. We did the next thing. The next thing. And we've done probably five or six different things together,

maybe more seven at this point. Every single one of them has been super fun. Every one of them has worked. It's a pleasure to work with them. And that's a big reason why. Yeah. That's so amazing. Let's go and start wrapping this up a little bit in terms of your story.

Let's talk about 2025. On the podcast, you guys have talked about this thing called Misoggi. Can you explain what that is? And then tell me, do you have one for 20, 25. Yeah, yeah, sure. Masogi, I think, is this concept. Jesse Yitzler came on the podcast and talked about it. It's, uh, every year

be a little, be intentional with your time. So it's very easy for one year to blend into the next. Time flies. Time flies because you're in a routine. And that routine is often filled. inertia. Yeah, inertia. It's just filled with Zoom calls and errands and, you know, weekly standups with your, with,

random people. So that's going to happen by default. If you want anything else to happen, you got to do something about it. I agree with him. And he has this like intense like way of planning out your year. We did a podcast with me. You can go see it on YouTube. Jesse Isler,

I'd have a big 2025. And one of the central things is this idea of a Mosew, one grand challenge for the year, a year defining thing that you will do. Yeah. That is both hard and rewarding and memorable for you and meaningful to you. And so for some people that's like, do an Iron Man or climb Everest or whatever their thing is.

So that's the idea. That's the concept. Mine this year is too. It doesn't sound like Everest, but it is important to me. I wanted to learn how to jam out on the piano. So I was like, I want to learn a new skill. I want to learn the piano. More specifically, I want to be able to jam out,

meaning I want to be able to play the songs I want. I want to be able to play in like a dad band with other people. Like, I just think that would be a really fun aspect of my life to work in. And I want my life to be fun. And I want it to be interesting. and I thought, look, I'm never going to just have the time magically to do this. But I was like, yeah, well, yeah, that was the year that I learned how to play the piano. And I could do that for the rest of my life.

It's a year defining. I could be 80 years old. I could be playing the piano. And so I thought, oh, yeah, that'll be year to find it. That'll be the year I decided to do that. And I made it happen. Yeah. It's going well?

Yeah, it's going great so far. I'm doing my thing. That's amazing. I think I want to wrap it up by saying there's, I've recently reread Paul Graham's, how to do great work. And he says, you know, it's similar to his phrasing for finding startup it is. Like, don't look for it. Just do things you're naturally interested in and, you know, do something where at the end of it, you'd say, that was pretty cool. I did that. Right. I think that's a great way to choose your Misogi as well. Like, you know.

I think he says, like, let interestingness be the filter. Yes. So is it interesting to you? And if it's interesting to you, then it's worth doing. You'll, you'll be excited while you're doing it. It'll be worth doing just because it was interesting. Yeah. But also interesting in this, like, what's interesting to you is not interesting universally. Right. So he talks about like, it's also a good strategy because nobody can. can copy your taste profile. So if it's interesting to you, that's not going to be interesting to everybody.

So it's already going to self-select out a bunch of other, filter out a bunch of other people. And secondly, if it's interesting to you, you're going to do it all the time. Same, same, that fly wheel I talked about.

You're going to do it all the time. Rule of 100. Therefore, you're going to get good at it. When you're good at it, you're going to get a good result. Yeah. So it's like,

that's why he says, let that be the guide. Yeah. Because that will lead you to the most interesting place you can. And if the first one doesn't work, it'll be, You'll have so much fun doing it. You'll just keep doing that.

It'll eventually land in a good spot. Yeah. Yeah. In and of itself, it'll still be fun. Right. Yeah. I love it. I think that's it.

I had a couple of hot fire ones, but I think honestly, like, leaving it on this, such a high note, I think this, if I were to listen to this, I'm going to keep listening to this on repeat. I think people are going to be jacked up and, you know, ready to change their life after after hearing that.

All right. Let's do it. Awesome. All right. Thanks, Sean. Appreciate it, I appreciate it, man. I feel like I can rule the world. All right, my whole in it like no days off.

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