My First Million - MFM Mini-Camp, Lessons from Selling a Company, and Storytelling Wins

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Episode 405: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about what happens when Shaan leaves the house and meets up with other founders, the power of storytelling, the things you learn when you sell a company and how to hire a researcher. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. ----- Links: * Alpha Paw * Genius Litter * 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: (04:20) - Shaan leaves the house and meets cool people (13:15) - When Ramon pretended to be an electrician (18:30) - Power of storytelling (21:25) - Age and perception (28:25) - Frame break (30:10) - Things you learn when you sell a company (46:05) - How to hire a researcher ----- 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

So I had a crazy, amazing weekend, and I want to tell you about it. Go for it. I want to hear about it. All right. So we've done these before, but I'll explain kind of how they work for people who are listening. So about once a year, maybe twice a year, we do these kind of like friend slash founder weekend hangout type things. And by the way, sorry, you should have been there. I don't know why the invite got lost in the mail.

Don't worry about that. Oh, I'm worried about it. You're lucky I couldn't. You're lucky I couldn't have made it, but I'm worried about it. I was going to text you while we were doing it. And I was like, wait, why isn't Sam here? And I was like, Ben, do we, did Sam say no? Or did we not tell Sam?

And then he was like, I don't know, this whole thing got screwed up. Because we, whatever, we bumped it back twice and then this happened. Anyway, so once twice a year, go somewhere, rent an Airbnb, four to five kind of founder friends and hang out. And the idea. This one was different. This one was an intimate birthday thing as opposed to the last time we did it. It was like a 20 person one. Maybe.

Yeah. I don't even remember. It's got bumped back twice. So at this point, who knows? But basically it was like, all right, start the new year. Let's all get together, hang out and do whatever. And so we, we go to San Diego. We rent an Airbnb from Mark Jenny, who you've talked about on the pod before,

just to explain what he's doing. He founded a company called RV Share, which was like, Airbnb for renting RVs and grew that, sold that for, I think, $100 million. Part of it. I think he's sold it. Yeah, he sold private equity. To KKR, I believe. I think he's actually sold twice.

So he sold one chunk the first time, second chunk recently. And I think he still owns a piece of it. But anyways, RV share really successful business. He's got a crazy story where I think he was like homeless at one point in time and made the whole thing happen. We'll have him on shortly. Very inspirational person. he now has an a luxury Airbnb portfolio worth about $50 million.

And so he's got, I don't know, 20 something properties. And he goes for the over the top kind of like destination experience, you know, maybe like party type of houses. So this house. Like family parties. Family or like buddies going for a golf trip, you know, type of thing where it's like, like his one of his most successful properties that is in Scottsdale, Arizona. and we're like Scottsdale.

Why? He's like, oh, people, guys go there for golf trips. And so, you know, eight buddies get together

and they rent my place and it's great. And they all have money. And so the price isn't as big of an issue or whatever. So this one is in San Diego. And the backyard, I think this guy must have put somewhere between one and two million dollars into the backyard.

So he, um, you go outside. There's a basketball court. There's a pickleball court. There's a wiffle ball field with a fence, like a full baseball diamond, basically there is golf course there is like pool sauna everything you could think of it is like a

boy uh you know boy paradise basically a little boy paradise it's so it's perfect for us right that's all we were doing you go inside the house you know there's like a full poker table with the poker set with the perfect chairs there's pool table there's all kinds of good stuff anyways so we get there and um a couple really cool things happen uh one mark came over for dinner uh he's like you know, host a dinner for us there. And he was telling us his story, which is kind of crazy,

but I kind of want to save that bit for the podcast. I've asked him to come on tons of times, by the way. He turns me down, and I'm good friends at Mark, and he turns me down. He's like,

oh, no, I'm with my family all summer. And whatever he turned to down. He just had a baby. So I'm like, I appreciate that. I appreciate it. I think he'll do it.

He's definitely, he listens to the pod. So, you know, instead of listening one day for that hour, just come on and talk. It's no extra time for you, Mark. And so then the next, the next, so we kind of hang out, first day is just straight sports male bonding, sweaty male bonding,

let's call it. And we're just playing every sport that's there. And in between, we sort of talk business or whatever. Second day, we, I tweeted out, I go, who's in San Diego? And a bunch of people replied, Ben goes through, curates and it's just like, all right, these 15 people seem cool. I'm going to invite them over to the house. So they come over to the house. And I just want to set the scene of this kind of like party. First of all, first of all, this whole segment should be called Sean leaves the house because I'm explaining how cool this was.

This is probably a monthly occurrence for you. To me, I was like, dude, I left the house. I met all these cool people. It was amazing because I never leave my house. And so this time I was out of my house. I met a bunch of cool people. But you still didn't leave the state. I didn't leave the state.

No, I barely got on a flight. So, so here's the scene. In the room, there is two guys who own NFT projects that have probably done 200 plus million in sales. Wow. They're both under the age of 23, 24 maybe. So that's kind of crazy. One of them didn't even have a public identity until like, you know, a month ago. So that was, people know Frank from, from Degods.

So Degods was the number one project on Solana. It's like the board apes of Solana. and yeah, he basically, he just kind of said, hey, here's my real identity, whatever. So he can now show up to parties and say what he does, whereas before he couldn't do that. Okay, second thing, so that was one group. Then there was the D to C crew.

These are people who have built products that, like, created a product. One guy created this thing called gel blasters. Think like a Nerf gun or a BB gun, but just with like gel pellets. I love that. It went from like zero to, I don't know if I'm allowed to say the number, but tens of millions and revenue in a year. And then like has a crazy story.

I'm going to get him on the pod too to come tell this story. But has a crazy story of sort of getting screwed over by one of the big toy companies. They pretended to buy his company for like 100 million bucks. And then he like does the diligence with them, shows them all the design files, the CAD files, the everything, the specs of the product. They fall out and then three months later launched like an identical product. to compete with them and like steal his influencer marketing plan everything.

This is a kind of crazy story there. Other people in the room. Remember the mini katana guy we talked about? Oh, he came. He came. So he's there and he's showing me like how they basically do eight figures in revenue without a single dollar on ads. And it's not out of pride.

Like he just can't advertise because it's like, Facebook's like, you know, this is a weapon. You can't advertise swords on Facebook. So he had to get creative and was just like, okay, how do I make organic content? That's so good that I can sell tens of millions of dollars worth of the sword.

And I thought that was pretty remarkable. Really super nice guy that came over. And he's like, dude, I was listening to the podcast while driving. And I heard you guys talking about a katana store. And I was like, he's like, I almost drove off the road. I was like, are they talking about me? Who are they talking about? He's like, that was a surreal moment.

All right. So he's there. A guy you know, a former CIA operative came, who I think you interviewed for the pod, you did a pod with him, and then we couldn't release it. Yeah. And we don't even need to say more because that already sounds juicy as a mother effort, right? We couldn't release it because he said a bunch of classified stuff. And so this person, I don't even know what I can say now, but basically, this is me speaking, not him. But it's almost as if they convince people in other countries to become treasonous.

Spies. Yeah. Spies is by the treaseless. If you've watched Jack Ryan, this was like the real life Jack Ryan. And we asked him all about that. And then he left the government and he created a business. And so there was a good overlap. So I'm going to tell you one.

Don't say his name though, by the way. Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to do it. So I was like, I was like, so how do you do it? How do you convince somebody? You're just this like, you know, American. person coming into their country, if you go into Afghanistan or wherever, Yemen or someplace, how do you convince them to work for the U.S. government to help us? And he's like, well,

like two years of rapport building and then it's manipulation, right? Like you were trying to. And I was like, so how would you do that? I feel like you couldn't do that. And he's like, remember earlier when we were grabbing a drink, you said, you really want X? And I was like, no. It's like in passing, I must have said. something, he's like, for about a year, I will basically talk to this person and I'll find out their every want, their every need, there's every problem, and I'm keeping a file. And I'm keeping this file for years before I flipped them. And I was like, wow. And this person's really charming. I don't want to talk anymore. He's very charming and he's very likable. And when he tells

great stories, when he tells a story, you're captivated. He's got an it factor. And so when I was with them, I was like, oh, yeah, I understand why I would, I would commit this thing. in order to like you know please you right so he told one story amazing i called four people over you got to hear this you got to hear this come here tell another one he's like um and i'm like shit i just yeah you ruined you're like hey you're funny tell a joke then he tells another banger and i'm like everybody's like oh wow to the last three people who didn't hear the first one get over here get over here get over here hey you got another one and he's like oh you know the thing is he's, you know, blah, blah, he's kind of hemming and hung, and I was like, look, if this story's

shit, no problem, you're already, you already won. This is just a bonus lap. If it's terrible, I have no problem with you. I already think you're amazing. I just depressurized the moment for a second. And I was like, you know, just try to give us one more. He gives us one more. And I was like, wow, this is a, you know, my friend Jason Hitchcock has this thing. He says, he goes, you say one interesting thing. I say, huh, interesting. Two interesting things. I say, those are interesting. Three interesting things. I say, you are interesting. And that's what happened by the third. I was like, you are interesting. That's how I felt. So that guy was kind of amazing. And by the way, I'll say, this kind of sucks to talk about because I can't reveal it a lot. But you and I have a

friend and this person is related to a bunch of like seals and CIA people. And it just so happens that there's this weird community of like these ex-CIA NSA seals, all these like, you know, abbreviated. Yeah. And, well, they get out and they go and they start businesses because, like, I think I say have a pension, so they have a little bit of money. Like, they have some of their basic needs covered and then they go and start businesses and we're, they're in our world.

Very successful. And they're very successful. And it's, I love hanging out with these guys, you know. And they're like proper heroes. And then they're like talking to me about like internet and KAC. And I'm like, yeah. But what about ISIS? Like, tell me, tell me the story about that.

Like, tell me that time you will. 18 ISIS people. You know what I mean? It's like they're heroes. It's fun talking to these guys. Yeah. And then let's see who else. So then our buddy Ramon is there. Ramon's there with his son and Ramon's telling us amazing stories. Has he ever told you the contractor story? The best thing I've ever heard. Yeah, you want to retell it? Yeah. Can I retell it here? I don't know when the next time he's going to be on. But he's like, and he's officially, he's an American now. Ramon's an American. So that was the big thing. He's officially an American.

We go out to, before he arrives, we go out, we get him a cake from like the Safeway there or whatever. And we're like, hey, can you write a message on here? Like, now it's closed for the day. I was like, bro, you got to write a message. And, you know, convince the guy, he writes a message. Welcome to America. Miss spells welcome.

So it just says, well, oh, him to America. Like, sounds like the most non-American thing ever. And he, and I was like, you know, so you got your citizenship. That's amazing. what happened afterwards. And his son, Victor, was like, oh, man, in the car afterwards, everybody who was calling,

he would just answer, hello, fellow American. So that was amazing. So he's, at the dinner party, we're like, you know, tell us a story.

No, we were like, what's an icebreaker for a group like this? It was like, what's the, what's the weirdest way you tried to make a buck?

Like, what's the weirdest way? you try to make money. Because otherwise in this type of scenario, if you kind of say, oh, so what do you do? People just go into their script. And it's kind of, the whole thing is just kind of pretentious because it's a roomful of successful people and everybody starts kind of one-uping each other in this weird way. So instead you want to like nag the whole group. So this is the neg the whole group question. What's the weirdest way you tried to make a buck? And Ramon's like, you know, he's got like 10 of these and we're like, dude, this is the thing about Ramon.

He's very quiet. But when you start getting them to tell story, it's like a vending machine, like an endless vending machine of stories you've never heard of, even though you've known the guy for 10 years. So he's like, yeah, back in the day, I was like, okay, I want to start a construction. What is it? He's like, I'm going to start a painting business. He's like, I need money. I'm 18 years old. I'll paint walls.

And so he puts up a thing that's like, I'll paint walls. But, you know, being the hustler that he is, he's like, I'll, you know what? How can I widen the top of this funnel? Let me just say painting, handyman, I'll fix anything. Whatever you got, I'm a general, I'm a general contract. tractor. I'll do generally anything. And so he's 18. He puts up his listing on the, like, the Dutch Craigslist like that. And he gets an inquiry next day. This says, hey, I need a electrician for some electrical work. And he's like, great, be there tomorrow morning. And he's like,

he's like, I go to the store, like Home Depot type store. And I'm looking at like these vests. I'm like, which one looks more like an electrician? It's like, basically, he's like Halloween. He's like trying to find a costume. And he's like, I go there the next day. And he's like, I go there the next day. and the guy's like, cool, yes, and we need like, you know,

40 amps here, and we're going to do, we're going to run a line under the circuit over here. He's like, dude, he's saying words, like forget about knowing how to do it.

I don't even understand the words he's saying, and he's like writing it down. He's writing notes. He's wearing the vest. And he's saying, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Yeah, okay, tell me more. And he's like just, the guy just keeps going. It's like a very complicated job. He's like, I hoped it was like,

I was like, dude, what did you think was going to happen? And he's like, I hoped it was like light bulbs. Like, he's like, electrical electricity. Yeah, I don't know. Light bulbs. And he's like, once I got there, I was like, oh, shit.

But I'm writing, I don't know what to say. I don't want to do. So I'm like, okay, maybe I can figure it out. You know, open up the thing. There's just a thousand wires. I'm like, okay, there's no way. I know what to do here. And so he's like, um, yeah, listen, man.

I think he tells him this the next day or something. Yeah, the next day. He goes home. Yeah, he goes home and he thinks about it and he reflects. And he's like, I got to. come clean to this guy. Like, I don't know how to do. I don't know anything. I don't know what to do. And he's like reviewing his notes. He's like, I don't know what

any of this means. Yes, he goes back. He's like, hey, got to tell you, man, I've never done electrical. He's like, I just needed money. I thought I could figure it out and slept on it. Turns out I have no idea how to do this. And the guy was like, what the fuck? And he was also like, you know

what, kid? Like, he's like, I'm an entrepreneur. he's like, I respect the hustle. I expect that you were honest. And he's like, everyone was like, you know, when you're honest and you're young, like, good things happen. And the guy, he's like gave me a great lesson. He's like, you know what? Like instead of telling me like, don't ever do this again, he was like, actually, you know, what you should do is you don't need to know how to do electrical work.

You got the job. Now you need to find somebody who does know electric work and subcontracted out and keep a margin. And so you shouldn't be here anyways. He should be doing that. And he's like, oh. And he started at actual general contracting business doing that from there. And the guy, like, helped him out, basically gave him a job and helped him out. And that eventually, he did that for a couple of years.

And he actually made maybe, for sure, hundreds of thousands. I think he made close to a million dollars. I think his first million was running that business. And then he immigrated to America. And he created a Brazilian music festival. I have no idea why. And he lost all of it. And then he created more internet business and made it all again.

And then lost it all again and then made it all again. And so he's done that a bunch of times. He's a very fascinating guy. Yeah, even his current business, so he has his business called Alpha Paw. And he sells, like, great dog products, so dog ramps, things like that. And even that, like, went up, up, up, up.

And then, like, you know, when COVID happened, shipping costs went through the roof. So, like, a container for shipping used to cost $3,000. Then it started costing $20,000. So, like, a six-act increase. And when you have a huge product, you need a lot, it takes up a lot of space. So you need a lot of containers.

So his unit cost blew up. That was really tough. But he's so resilient. So like he's like, all right, what's the pivot? And he pivoted to, he's like, dogs having trouble? Cats. And so he's like, all right. And he made this kitty litter product called genius litter.

And now he just got a deal where he's now in PetSmart nationwide, which is amazing. And now he's like back, back, you know, and now it's like, dude, I need. So if you're listening to this, you know the gentleman's agreement to go smash subscribe. But also, if you have a cat or you don't have a cat, you got a dog, it doesn't matter what you got. Go to PetSmart and buy this guy's genius letter. So his business, you know, thrives because this guy deserves the best guy I know. So, um, you know, so just amazing stories one after another of each person about like bouncing back. So there was a bunch of like, I don't know, takeaways I had from this.

Number one, storytelling wins. There was a bunch of people at this event that were all equally impressive. But it was the ones who understood how to tell a story that. stood out and that everybody loved made a bunch of connections people started helping them out they're like oh you should try xyz oh you got to meet blah blah blah blah blah and it was the people that didn't understand how to tell their story they only told facts and it was just sort of like i am you know whatever i'm steve this what i do blah blah blah everything's been great all right thanks steve see you know like you yeah you need some of that sizzle yeah you they didn't have that sizzle and so the

sizz the storytelling sizzle was so important and so obvious. And then there's nuances. Like there were some people that were storytellers that every story was how awesome they were. And you could just see it was like just repelling people. Like here's how awesome I am. And then slowly but surely,

okay, great, got one of those stories. I'm going to go get a drink now. See ya. And it was the person who could tell a story that was like slightly making fun of themselves. Even the CIA guy. He goes, oh,

I have a rule. I only tell CIA stories where I look like an idiot. I never tell CIA stories where, I beat the bad guys. I fought five guys. And then everybody clapped. He's like, I'll never tell a story like that. And so I was like, that's a great rule in general for people. So I think that was like one big takeaway. Second takeaway is I should probably leave the house a little more often. This was dope. And I used to do this all the time. And then I kind of got a little cocky and was just sort of like, yeah, I got a great network. You know, I don't really need to like put in like this. But when I was in my 20s, I used to do this all the time. And this was just a reminder of how much. much value you can get by talking to other people in the game or like, you know, I think this podcast serves as that for people too, where you hear these stories, you get inspired, you get ideas, growth hacks, and, and it's surprising how helpful people are. You know what I describe that is you, when you're around certain people, you realize that

the world is malleable and you see all types of people who are bending the world to the reality that they want. And then you feel like, oh, yeah, that's cool. I could do that too. It doesn't matter. You're like, I don't care if you're selling if you're in the C, CIA, if you're selling genius litter, it doesn't matter. It's just cool to see people who are kicking their dent into the universe. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And second thing I would say is there was a huge difference in life phase attitude. All right, what does that mean? So we at this event, so we had Ramon's son and his friend, shout out to Jude, he came. So he's a fun kid too. Super fun kid, super chatty, chatty, Kathy. And by the way, the next day, he was like, he's

holding up the gel blaster gun thing. He's like, so they said they make this for, whatever, make up numbers. They make this for $3 and they sell it for $9. I was like, dude, he's already picking it up. This guy's like 10 or 11. He's like, that's a really big like, you know, margin. And I was like, wow, you know margin? That's, that's really impressive. So, so anyways, we had people that were 10 or 11. We had the guys who were kind of like 20 to 25, the NFT boys and some of the DTC guys. We had guys like us who were in our 30s and we were like, all right, yeah, And I'll tell you the differences in how each one was approaching it in a second. We had guys in their 40s, so that's like, you know, Marne, that sort of thing.

And then we had, then I went and met up with a guy in his 70s, a husband and wife in their 70s. So I saw all those life phases. I want you to guess what do you think was the like notable, like, differences in those ages in terms of like what they cared about, what they thought about? What were the differences? Have you ever heard the story of like there's like an old bowl and a young bull? And they see a bunch of cows and the young bull goes, let's hurry up and get down there and have sex with all them cows. And the old bull's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can walk. We could walk down there and we can take our time.

And that's kind of the difference. I imagine. The 22-year-olds were like, let's do everything. The 30-year-olds were a little bit wiser. The 40-year-olds were like, hey, let's just pick and choose our battles a little bit more wisely. And like, let's enjoy the process. The seven-year-olds were more so like none of it matters. Yeah, exactly.

That's exactly right. So the teens or preteens, they were basically just like, you want to play? What are we going to play? You guys want to play this while we play this? It's like we were on the pickleball court. And then in between points, they're running and kicking the soccer ball. And then right afterwards, like, you want to play Monopoly? You want to do this?

And like, till the last minute of the last second of the day, it was like, you want to play? And I thought that was like, you know, just an awesome energy to be around. The other part of it was like, they, only. Also, we're doing Khan Academy a bunch. And I was like, wow, they really, like, want to learn this stuff. Yeah, you learn. Cool. You know, that's kind of amazing.

That just kind of blew me away. So they were all about play. Then you had your guys in your 20s that were the, I got it all figured out guys. And I remember being that guy. And it's like, they actually do have a lot of life figured out. They're way ahead of the curve. But the problem is they think they're at the end of the curve. They think they got it all figured out.

And so you listen to the stories and they're saying things and you're like, you know what? Four out of the ten things you just said were totally wrong, but you know what? It doesn't matter. The fact that you believe all ten is going to work. And I just love that you think all ten are right. I love that. That's a good way to summarize it.

Yeah. But they were a lot of fun. And their thing was just sort of like, we're going huge. Like, of course this is going to work. This is going to be massive. We got it figured out. And not in a cocky way. Just like they had only known.

own winning. And I thought that was awesome. Because as you get older, you start to take L's. You take health L's. You see friends take L's. You make big expensive mistakes. You take those L's. And that sort of humbles you a little bit. And so this was pre-humbling. And I loved it. I loved that energy. Because, you know, even at first I was like, man, these guys are delusional. And then I was like, how do I, hey, pass the delusion, please. I'd like to sip on some of that. that's a lot of fun actually. I forgot how useful that can be. All right, guys in their 30s like us,

weird middle state. It's like I have a lot of self-belief, but I now know how expensive it is to go down the wrong path, whereas the guys in their 20s don't know how expensive it is to go down the wrong path. They don't even know,

they don't even think about the path. They're like, I'm just pathin, bro. I'm just on the path. I don't even think about the fact that I could be doing five other things. I'm doing this and this makes completely, complete sense to me.

Whereas the 30s, we're like, you could do this. to that and they're almost paralysis by analysis. Yeah. They've accomplished too much to just do something stupid. Like the guys in their 20s who created this NFT project, they were able to just do something stupid and it paid off.

They created this, you know, a gel blaster nerf gun because it just was stupid and they thought it was cool. And like that was enough justification to do it. Oh, that looks fun. Do it. Whereas the guys in 30s, like, that looks fun. But let's spreadsheet this out real quick and just see. Well, you know, let's back of the envelope.

Yeah, like when you have something to lose, it changes a little bit. Right. And so they back of the envelope themselves to death. But, you know, they're still, at least they're still thinking,

the difference was when you compare to the 40s, the 40s were like, we know what we're doing. When I hear about what all these other guys are doing, I'm half amused and half of it exhausts me and I want to go take a nap. Like, you're just confusing me with all these things that, honestly,

like I don't feel like I need to know any of this stuff. I'm perfectly happy not being in NFTs and not knowing how to do TikTok videos to sell mini swords. Like that's cool. But man, I just want to go relax right now. And the second thing was they were like, one of them, he just like found out he was high blood pressure. So he had a blood pressure monitor with him. And he was like, just took his blood pressure. And we were like, I was like, dude, I never take my blood pressure to put me in. And so we took our blood pressure like four times a day just for fun. But I was like, you know, they were like, like you said, they wanted to enjoy the journey. So they were like, yeah, yeah, we could talk

business, but like, let's go play some pickleball. That'd be fine. Yeah, and I think as you get older, you, you, you respect all the different ways that you can get there, but you know your lane. You know, they knew their lane. They go, I know my lane, and I know if I just do this all the time for an, I know what compounding looks like. And everybody else looks very scatterbrained in comparison, but the know their laneers, and I don't mean that in a discouraging way, like they were, they were definitely learning

and they've, they've made adjustments, but they weren't seeking the next hit. They were just like, I found a hit and I enjoy this hit. And I want to also think about life and marriage and kids and health. And that was a way bigger part of their life. Like their own mortality was more on their mind than proving themselves, like the 20s and 30s. And the older I get and the more experienced I get, I understand compounding better. That was a really hard thing for me to understand in my early 20s and late 20s. And then once I like start seeing it work a little bit, you start understanding it.

And you go, oh, wow. So if I just do this all the time for 10 years, like, look at the, I'll be in a better place than I will be if I start a bunch of different things. And so you understand compounding a little bit better. So you know, well, if I just stay in my lane, I can respect everyone else's what they're doing. That's neat. And I think that's cool and I can learn. But if I just do this mostly the same, I'm going to get to where I want to go. Yeah.

So that was the 40s. And then the 70s were basically like some combination of I want to contribute. So they were like pitching me a project that was like a philanthropic. thing. And I was like, philanthropy. Oh, okay. That's what this is. This is a different conversation than everybody else is all the other conversations I've been having all weekend. And the second thing was they were just happy we came over to their house. It's like when we were leaving, I was like, man, it's going to be really quiet once we leave here. Like, is this a, oh man, that's kind of, huh? Who was the person? Can you say? I don't want to say their name just because I'm going to like,

you know, tell, maybe I don't know what I'm going to say about them. So I don't want to say their name, but like kind of like a successful entrepreneurial couple in San Diego. And so I was like, you know, I went to their house and I was like, they were really nice, really cool hostess. But also, what's that? Fat house. I sat by fat house. Yeah, like nice. Yeah, nice house.

But also when you see a house at night, by the way, it's like you don't actually see the house because you can't see anything around it and you can't see like, you know, you only see like a part of it. It's just very different when you see a house at night versus during the day. But I just felt like the things that matter to them were their grandkids, their kids marrying the right person. figuring out how to like contribute and also just like their house not being so quiet. There's like any liveliness in the house. It was like a win. It didn't even really matter what we talked about or what came out of it. Like I feel like us being there was a cool fun change of pace.

And I was like, yeah, I guess when I'm in my 70s, I'm also going to want that a lot because I'll probably be kind of like at home kind of bored a bunch. You know? And so that was like also kind of a wake up call for me. It was like, oh, wow. Yeah, this life thing does go pretty fast here. Dude, so it sounds like a sick weekend. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. That's badass. Yeah, I have to talk to Ramon and I want to learn all about it

or from his perspective, but it sounds like a sick weekend. Yeah, that should happen every six months. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think we should do that again. And also the, it was cool that like even the house we were in was kind of like a business. It was like this luxury Airbnb itself is a business. And it just kind of breaks your frame a little bit. I think that's a pretty important thing. Like, how often can you break your frame?

And an experience like this, twice a year, I think twice a year you'll end up breaking your frame because you'll just meet a bunch of other people that do life and think about life in a different way than you. I actually want to ask you about like a frame breaking experience. Before I get into that, I have to remind people that they owe us, they're in debt to us. If you just heard Sean's story, he just went and spent the weekend creating these things to tell you about. And then you, like, did all this work to do it. And we do that every week, three,

two to three times a week. You're in debt to us. So you owe us. This is the gentleman's agreement part where you have to go to YouTube, even if you're on iTunes or you're on podcast or you're on Spotify. You go to iTunes right now, My First Million, click subscribe. And that's our gentleman's agreement. And we'll be even. And we'll be actually more than even because we're going to keep doing this. And we're working for you once you subscribe. It's like a, it's the most fair trade. Because once you subscribe, we get in the algorithm, yada, yada, yada. But this is the gentleman's agreement part. We can't check that you're doing this. That's why it's called the gentleman's agreement is we just hope that you are. So please do that.

Can't argue with that. You can't argue with that. They spend literally one second to click subscribe and we spend 30 hours a week coming up this content. It's a very fair trade. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets are dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better. I want to ask you about a frame-breaking thing. Now that your, how long has it been since the Milk Road acquisition? Two months, maybe a month and a half, something like that. So you're still early into it. This February 1st is technically my last day at HubSpot. That's two years.

And so now I'm two years into it. And I wanted to ask you, and I have a list here, but I wanted to ask you, because I know that the guys running the Milk Road now or the owners are, like, recruiting interesting people because people like message me. They go, hey, this person's recruiting me. Should I join Milk Road? So, like, I'm getting all these, like, as your reference check. What have you learned so far about what it's like to be the founder of a company that's now owned by someone else? Is there anything interesting that you've learned? I have a list of a few things that are interesting to me, but is there anything you've learned? I feel like you got a more interesting answer than me, so you go.

Well, I'll say a few things. And these are a bit frame-breaking. And so the reason I'm bringing this up is because I think someone once said, like, or at least this attitude exists a lot in Silicon Valley, where they're like, what's your exit plan? And then everyone's like, fuck exit plans. Don't have an exit plan. You're not building things to sell. Great things get bought.

They don't get sold or something like that. And I actually think that's nonsense. I actually think if you want, you can build a company. where you're like, I'm going to exit in like four or six years or two years and I'm going to make like tens of millions or hundreds of millions, whatever. Like, you can build a company like that and I think it could be really successful. And so a couple frame-breaking things that I had. The first one, building something from scratch is a very, very rare skill.

And one or two, focused entrepreneurs with close to no money, can probably do more in six months than a 50-person team with millions of dollars in 12 months inside of a large organization. And that was actually really challenging to me. I remember HubSpot said they wanted to buy us. And I'm like, Doc, just launch your own thing. Like, I don't know. Why would you do? You know what I mean? And being at HubSpot now for two years, I see it's really hard. The reason it's really hard is the creative types who are bold enough to go and build something, they either aren't working at that company because they're out doing their own thing, or they're just stuck in this political game where they want to impress their boss. And it's not because a company's bad.

it's just this is the natural thing. They don't want to embarrass themselves. They don't have a significant amount of upside to see the wind. They don't get the dopamine rush of the sale coming into Shopify. And it's actually really, really, really hard to build something from scratch. And so it's worth it to them just to buy something that's already working. Do you agree with that? 100%.

And you could see it. When an acquisition happens, the velocity of progress slows down like molasses. It is, it's kind of remarkable. Now, that doesn't mean it fails, but the velocity definitely slows down. Other things go better. But the velocity and the pace and the sort of like, yeah, the aggression and productivity, I think go down. And that's what I describe as anxiety goes way down.

As an entrepreneur, your anxiety goes way down. Your frustration way up. That's the tradeoff that you're going to make. However, this is another thing where I made this mistake, where I would dismiss big companies and I would call them idiots. That's actually, in my experience. not true and talking to a lot of people, sometimes it's false. They are idiots. But sometimes operating, like if you're around good operators, just like a good employee at a big company,

they can be significantly better operators. And a lot of the things that we make fun of, bureaucracy, meetings, things like that, that creates redundancy. And if you do it correct, redundancy creates predictability. And predictability creates value. And that's why your anxiety goes down. And so a lot of that big company, stuff, a lot of it's bullshit. A lot of it's really necessary, and the people inside those companies can actually operate things really, really well. Do you agree with that?

I agree that that's true. I wouldn't say that that's the main value. The main value that I saw inside of a big company was that when you're big, you have usually two things. One is distribution. So you could take something that doesn't have a lot of distribution and give it more distribution or you can simply say, I don't really need to innovate. Let all these other people innovate. And I'll just follow because I have size. And so when I have size, I don't need speed,

right? And so it's like a sumo wrestler versus a, you know, a sprinter or like a, you know, a lightweight, you know, a lightweight wrestler or something like that. And so you basically trade that distribution and size for speed. I think that's the first thing. And very hard to have both. And And, you know, when you're at a startup, the mistakes are very expensive. But when you're at a startup, the mistakes are not expensive. Like, I don't know how many things you do to the hustle that were like dumb or stupid or whatever. And it's like, roll it back. You know, at the beginning, especially, you know, whatever.

I don't have any customers anyways. I don't have much revenue to lose anyways. I don't have a reputation to be burned. The press is not watching me. Twitter doesn't care what I do. Whereas when you're big, then your every move matters. and every mistake is quite expensive. And so you have to be a little more careful.

And so careful is not a bug. It's a feature when it's a big company. And so I started to appreciate that. They're not slow because they're stupid. They're slow, actually, because they're smart because they don't need to go fast because they got size. And mistakes are expensive, so they don't try to make too many mistakes

and, you know, by going too fast. And that brings me to my second to last point, which is a lot of cool shit. that you and I like to make. You and I are zero to one people, like, by definition, we're not the best at one to whatever. But a lot of the cool shit is completely illogical or really stupid. And a lot of the best stuff starts that way. This podcast, you called it my first million. Pretty horrible name. My thing was called The Hustle. Pretty bad name. And it was just a newsletter that's kind of like not like when I pitch it to bigger companies, they go, this is stupid.

This will never be big. And the reason why it, it's, existed anyway was because I was beholdent to no one. We just said, math, whatever, screw it. We're just going to do it. When you're launching something within a big company, you have to have logic. You have to have to have reasoning. You have to make a point because you have to justify it for someone to fund it. Whereas when you're a nobody, just two guys, you say, math, screw up. We're just going to do this. We're going to have an anti-Black Friday sale where we charge more this Friday as opposed to less and just because we want to because this is funny. It's completely illogical and illogical stuff works.

Not all the time. And sometimes. When I was hanging out with the 70-year-old person, I was explaining. I said, yeah, I'm thinking about what I want to do next. And, you know, I really want to pick a good project. And I want to pick the right way to spend my time. And he goes, picking is hard. And he goes, and the hard thing about picking is that today, she might look like a pimply,

chubby person here. But 12 months from now, as you take that idea, you start dating it, and then you kind of pivot over here, you change one thing, get a new wardrobe, all of a sudden she's 120 pounds, she's got her Ph.D. And she just got word in the mail. She's inheriting $72 million. And he's like, he gave me this analogy. And he goes, that's the problem with picking is that the The best things don't always look like the best things up front. This goes back to a Peter Thiel saying, which is the best ideas are things that sound like bad ideas but are actually good ideas.

And why? Because those things have the least competition. Those things are the least done. Those things have the highest up cycle because of the most green field. Things that are obviously good ideas are super competitive. Things that are actually bad ideas doesn't matter how hard you work. They're bad ideas. So the sweet spot is something that sounds like a bad idea, but is actually.

actually a good idea. And that's, you know, this guy put it in a, you know, a different kind of analogy that I, I appreciated. And I guess I'm glad I didn't, you know, say who, because, you know, people get mad about that analogy, but I thought it was hilarious. And I understood what he meant, which is, you know, when you started, when you started the hustle, you were like, oh, great, it's this conference. And I was like, you know, conference, okay, immediately, like, a lot of work, you know, seasonal, doesn't get that big. Who cares? If your product can get rained out, it's kind of not good. Yeah, yeah.

You have $200 tickets to your conference. Like, all right, Sam, good luck, you know. And then you kind of fumbled in and you were like, oh, okay, conference is working, but conference ain't where it's at. But I've been using content to drive ticket sales. Maybe I should just do this content thing through a newsletter. And even that was still sort of pimply and didn't really a newsletter. I mean, dude, people over here make it flying cars and Uber and you're doing a newsletter.

Like, get some ambition, bro. like, you know, that can't be big possibly, right? Like, aren't newsletters just like a personal thing people send out to their 50 friends? And you kind of figured it out as you go. And then now people are like, yeah, how many freaking, I want to build the next hustle, you know, hustle for X, you know, how many people pitch you that, myself included, Milk Road was a hustle copy. After I made fun of you for the, for doing a newsletter back of the day, I was like,

you know, I didn't invest in your thing because I was like, I don't think that's going to get huge, right? And I was like, but you knew something. you figured something out along the way that was not obvious up front. And by the way, the hustle is very close to crossing 3 million subscribers. And that brings me to my last point, which is planning is something that I had never done. Like, when people were talking about OKRs, which is like a framework for running your company, they would put it on a quarterly scale.

And I'm like, yeah, how about a weekly? How about a weekly one? So we could like every single day, we're going to create something new. And that's really important for starting out. And I don't think you should plan too much. Right. You call it worry about A, B, Z, which is, I actually came up. We both separately had like the same thing where I'm like, I carry about steps one and steps

two. And then like I'll worry about step. I think about step 10 as inspiration, but I don't worry about three, four, and five. And so that's important when starting stuff. But I don't know when that point is, maybe 10 million, 100 million in revenue. I don't know what it is. But planning is needed. it's necessary and it's incredibly important.

And that's what big companies do really well or they try to do it well. And as I'm growing, my new thing, I'm trying to like bake this in of like planning and not worrying about like looking like, like, you know, I could have like a quarterly plan. It's okay. I could even have like a six month plan. I remember when we were selling the hustle, we sold me around four years old and they wanted like a five year projection. And I'm like, what?

Like that's not even like, I can't even. comprehend five years. I don't even know if I'm going to be interested in this. Yeah. Forma these nuts. What are you talking about? You want me to write down a lie? Yeah. My lies are verbal. There's no paper trail. You're trying to get me to write this down. Dude, it was ridiculous. And now I understand, like, it's actually okay to, like, kind of have some of these plans.

So anyway, that's my list of things that I've learned, like, being, like, seeing the buyer's perspective just a little bit. And I was just curious if you had any insights. might be too early yet. Well, let me tell you the different things that they've done. So first, they hired a bunch of people. We were running the thing with basically three or four people and then one one freelancer, right? Like, it was very, very lean.

They, you know, basically one dude wrote the email every day and then me or Ben edited it. And that was like, that's how the whole product, the whole product was basically created by that. Now there's like a second writer. There's an editor. There's a head of content. It's like, who are all these people? What are they doing? Is the content getting better?

I'm not sure, right? Like, but they've hired up people, which, like you said, builds redundancy. Because if the main guy got sick, which happened a couple times, it was like, you know, red alert. You know, if we got a fact wrong, it's like, I didn't have time to check it. You know, like, you know, we didn't have those things in place. And so, you know, I think they've basically taken, I would just say in general, they took a longer term view. They were like, okay, we're going to be doing this for a number of years. So what do we need to get to this point?

two years from now and let's start taking those steps today where I was like, all right, next month, what would be sweet? Yeah, you're like, well, because you're like, sort of planning exercise. You're in survival mode. I had a, even if it was a survival mode because it was like, okay, we got the business working, it would be like, I just wanted every day to be a new adventure. And like, that's not how these people think when they are like long term oriented. They want each day to not be an adventure.

They want each day to be like, you know, it's the difference between, you know, um, you know, people who go for these like long hikes and, uh, you know, a sprinter. And like, you know, it was just more of a sprinter. And so literally our goal planning, we would say like, what's the minimum thing that would feel like a win? We call it a good win. That was good. And then what's the F yeah, win where we would be like, F yeah, dude, we did ABC, right? That happened. And that's, and that would create our goal. And then we would shoot for the Fiat and we'd make sure we don't miss the good. Um, and like, that's what we did every single month. And it was a little bit more, And if we didn't hit it, it was a problem.

Like, I immediately was like soul searching, like, everybody stop. And let's figure out where we've gone wrong. I'm ready to change anything and everything, which is not always the right approach. Sometimes it is, right? Like, these things serve you and then sometimes they hurt you. And so I would say these guys, they put more money into growth. They hired more people and they don't panic. There's the three differences between us.

And I think their approach has some bad things. And I think it has some great things. and we'll see how it all plays out now. I think I read somewhere where someone was like, I was reading some like thing about masculinity and like the difference between a man and a boy and like a real man doesn't let like lots of different or doesn't let like shallow input change his emotions

and change his plans. And I remember when I was running my company, I would always get emotional. I'm like, no man, if I got to be a man, I got to like be calm and I can't panic. And I used to think like, oh no, it was cool to be like Mark Zuckerberg and go go in and see, oh, this isn't right, you're fucking fired. It's like, no, real men don't do that.

You know, they could, like, they don't panic and they don't freak out. And that kind of changed my perspective on that a little bit. Yeah, my trainer, he's been teaching me this. He's like, okay, so like, you know, you're doing a set. So you're your bench, your bench pressing or whatever. And let's say you picked a weight that the first, you know, three reps, four reps are easy. The next four reps are getting harder. And then the last three, four reps, let's say you're going to,

12. The last four reps, you're like, you know, it's kind of shaky and you want to spot, but more than anything, I don't know for you, but for me, it was always like, get to the end. It's like, I don't want to quit. I don't want to quit. I want to get there, but like, I would start rushing. And when you rush, your form changes. And when you rush, you don't actually have that time under tension that actually builds the muscle. Look at you. Wow. Time under tension. Yeah. We're tutin. And so he's a classic, classic, classic muscle building words. I like it.

Don't make me say glycogen. So he's like, he's like, those last four reps, you're trying to get them done. But that's where all the games are in that last bit. And so that's where I want you to show poise

and actually slow it down. Like don't just like do normal speed. Go even slower than your normal pace was to maximize what you get out of it. And so then that became, it's like, okay, when you feel that sizzle, when you feel that burn,

that's the reaction is not, panic and rush, it's poised. So I took that. I was like, okay, that's the lesson in the gym, but the gym is just the metaphor for life. So now I'm doing that same thing everywhere. As soon as I feel that sizzle and that burn and I just want to get out of it, I want to get done with it. I'm like, no, no, no, now's the time to be poised and slow it down. And so that's been working wonders in the business world because it's like, just when everybody thinks shit's hitting the fan, I'm like, all right, this is the time where we, where we, where we go pull, we lock in and we calmly address the situation versus trying to overreact and react to a stimulus.

This, my friend, is called growth, Sean. You are experiencing growth. Congratulations. You're doing it right in front of all of our eyes and in our ears. You are showing growth. What topic you want to do next? We're in a weird middle. We got five minutes. Yeah. Let's do, do you have anything little? Let me see if I got some little. By the way, while you're looking, you have to tell me what to do for my researcher. Now I have 400 applicants. I've narrowed it down to 200 and I'm like, I don't know what to do with these people. You have to tell me how to like. You should just tell them to do, basically just give them the assignment, which is, I'll tell you what to do. Okay, I'll tell you how to do this. Okay. So what I would do is the best way to work together, the best way to know if you want to work with them is to just do a

project rather than interview them. You don't want to interview 400 or even 20 people. That would just take way too much time. So you give them all the assignment. The assignment is, hey, every week, here's the things that we do. I want you to surface interesting nuggets that I might find interesting. I did that. All 400 people did that, dude. Okay, so who are the best 25 from that? And did you do it for like two or three, like have them do it for like two weeks?

Be like, you know, hey, do this for two weeks. If you do it, I'm going to pay you, you know, I'll pay you $250. If you get through all the things, there might be a lot of money. I don't know, do the math. But like, do something so they're not working totally for free. or cut the bottom like 200 people right away. And then just be like, hey, do this. Because I think it's easy to do once.

And it's really hard to do for three weeks straight. A lot of people could do a great MFM podcast once. I don't know how many of them could do this podcast 100 times, 100 episodes a year. And that's what we do. And so you kind of need a researcher who's able to, who has some inflow of information that they can steadily be curating good stuff. And then the second thing is give them a couple of research topics.

So it be like the way I do it is sometimes I give them an assignment to bring me interesting nuggets, but then I bring nuggets and I say, hey, take this story and I want you to research. Here's what I want. And I basically gave them a format. So my format for them is I want you to come up with the frame. So the frame is the framing of the topic. How will I just bring this up out of the blue on MFM? Right. So let's say there's some interesting growth hack.

The frame might be, you know, here's three of my favorite growth. that I've seen in the past year, right? Because just talking about this one randomly doesn't work. Or let's say it's a growth hack, but actually, let me give the example. The nugget was, I bought a car from an anonymous account on Twitter. So that's a cool frame. That's like a hook for a good story.

But we changed it to the guy mafia. So I bought it from Card Dealership Guy. But you know what? There are all these guys. And actually, maybe there's a bigger topic here that's called the Guy mafia and people like that frame, right? So I teach them. I'm like, you got to hit me with you.

hit me with a possible frame, then you got to have the supporting, like, evidence, like, what are the four or five interesting bullet points, talking points that I could say about this thing that would make you say, oh, that's cool, that's interesting. And then what's the take or the takeaway? And the take or the takeaway, and let's say for the guy mafia was, it was first, it was, here's why this works. But then I was like, no, no, a better take would be, here's what I think people should be doing. You should be doing this with a girl anonymous account, because I think it will get more followers. You should be doing it in. And, all these other categories and then don't monetize with a newsletter or a paid

paid community sell the monetized by selling the actual thing like selling me the car and so that was the take and so i teased i'm like here's a little excel table and for every story you got to fill out the frame the talking points and the take and um i see if they're doing good at that i need most people by the way are very bad at that that's okay i'm like our skill is we need to be able to do that but them doing it poorly is still super helpful because you're like no no that's a shitty frame. The frame's got to be this. And that's still better than a blank page. I need you to send me all this. Yeah, I will. Yeah, I need help with this. It's been very challenging. Yeah, these are the tricks of the trade that other people are. We're giving these out for free now.

I remember once, remember the TV show, the P. Diddy one where he's trying to find a rapper. Yeah, and he's like, I need you to go to Brooklyn and get me some milk. And he like makes them walk across the bridge. You know what I'm talking about? He like makes him walk across to get a bucket cupcake, like five miles. Because that's how he started his career. He was. was a runner at a record label and he had to go get shit. But he had this thing where he was in the studio and he's like, he's like, sing it. And then they sang it. He's like, sing it again.

They're like, wow, wasn't that good. He goes, no, we need to make a double. They're like, what's a double? He's like, a double is you say the same exact thing. And we layer the two audio tracks and makes your voice sound more full and powerful. And it just sounds better. And he turned to the camera. He's like, I shouldn't be saying all this shit on camera.

And I remember literally, like, I was in seventh grade when that show came out. And I was like, I just heard a trick of the trade. And I've never forgot that, even though I'm not a rapper. I never used it. But literally, I was like, make space in the brain. He just kind of made it sound like he just gave me an insider tactic. And I literally, like, still remember this now. I'm 34 years old.

And I still remember this. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. I just heard it. That's good. All right. Let's get out of here.