My First Million - The Acquired Podcast Hosts: How They Started and Grew a Multimillion Dollar Podcast

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

Episode 440: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) are joined by the Acquired podcast (@AcquiredFM) hosts, Ben Gilbert (@gilbert) and David Rosenthal (@djrosent) to talk about scaling to a large podcast, the company they would like to own, the CEO's you don't want to compete against, and the 100+ year history of Nintendo. Plus, a YouTube Premium subscription giveaway! Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Vote for MFM to win a Webby: mfmpod.com/webby Click here to sign up for our event in Austin, TX on Saturday April 29th: mfmpod.com/atx Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter ----- Links: *Acquired podcast *Wait But Why *Marques Brownlee *Nintendo *NVIDIA * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (01:45) - Intro to Acquired (01:58) - What to do when your schtick runs out (10:00) - How to scale to a big podcast (14:05) - How big do you have to be to be at the top of the business category? (23:55) - What commonalities are there between weird companies? (27:40) - How to tell a real from a fake contrarian (34:45) - Nintendo (37:45) - Which company would you most want to own? (40:45) - Who would you least want to compete against? (52:30) - Business ideas (56:40) - Will you ever sell Acquired? (58:20) - Best ways to make money as a podcast ----- 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

What could you get for it, you think? I would not be interested in having any conversations for, you know, less than, on the order of like what you go, like the hustle or morning brew or, you know, stuff like that. Tens of millions. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just think like the value of what we've built, both as a business and revenue and our audience and our durability is, you know, is in that category. All right, what's up?

We got a crossover episode. call me Tim Hardaway. We got the guys from Acquired. Yeah, you like that. You like that. That's good. That's good. That's good.

Yeah, that's for the 5% of listeners who know about basketball. So we got the guys from Acquired are here. We're doing kind of a joint episode, a, the old Alabama wedding, as I like to call it. You know, we're just getting cousins together here because you guys got a podcast that is pretty awesome. I remember when I was working at our previous startup, a guy came to me, it was like, there's a podcast you're going to love. It's called Acquired.

And I go, what is it? He goes, it's like the backstories of these, of all great tech acquisitions, like how it all went down, they go into like all the nerdy details. And then I binged you guys for like six days straight. And so that's how I kind of first got into it a couple of years ago. So welcome to the show, David and Ben.

Thank you. We did a super fun crossover with you a couple of years ago now, but it was just with Sean, Sam, you were off traveling the world doing amazing things. Well, that's what he said. He was like, you'll probably do something amazing. I was like, probably just like a doctor's appointment or something. You guys have totally come up since then.

I mean, you were big back then, but that was like within the first couple months, I think, of you starting this. And it's just been awesome to watch how far you've come. That was kind of an R, even though it was year four or five for us, that was kind of our early days too. because, Sean, you're right, we were mostly about acquisitions at that point, and we talked about the Bebo acquisition as part of the episode. And now we do these like three, four hour entire, you know, history and strategy of a company, regardless of whether there was a transaction. But, yeah, that feels like, I don't know, the funny thing about exponential growth is it feels like a lifetime ago all the time.

I always think about that, like, when you pick a niche and then you kind of are going to run out, but the niche can get you somewhere. So, for example, I was thinking about this with CoffeeZilla, the YouTube guy, who exposes people's scams. And I'm like, and then he did well the other day that was like, he DMed a celebrity to promote some NFT thing. Like, hey, we'll pay you to promote this NFT thing. And like the white paper said like this shit to scam or whatever, but he didn't read

it. Obviously, he just promoted it. And he's like, ha, scammer. And I'm like, but that's kind of entrapment. Like you're running out of people to like to cover here. You have to now create scammers. Like I don't think that. Like Ali G back in the day.

Yeah, exactly. But like, that wasn't his original stink. But I was like, yeah, you're not going to, like, you're trying to be on this YouTube once a week treadmill. And there's not once a week going to be a giant Logan Paul, like celebrity name did this bad thing. And I'm going to be the exposure. It's like, what are you going to do next Tuesday? Because there's not like, this isn't that, that current. But you guys did a good job of switching it up.

People said that to us, Sean. They go, you're going to run out ideas. And I was like, yeah, we might. But then it just kind of like morphed into like us saying a lot of like, it's like people are when I, someone yesterday was like, what's your podcast? guess about. I was like, well, the name's pretty bad. It's definitely a lot about business, but we also make a lot of horrible jokes, too. So people kind of like it for that reason. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot. Your niche earns you the right to exist, but it's in media, but it's your, um, your sort of demeanor and your, the way that you look

at the world that then gives you license to expand from there. So like if David and I, it's called flavor, my friend. It's your flavor. I just think if David and I had started with like, we're a podcast that talks about businesses. It's like cool next. But if you like pitch people on really specifically what their, what you like the job to be done of your show and their life is, then you can sort of like expand and explore from there. Right.

Like Ben should have been, Ben, producer Ben should have been like, you know, you know, Mormons taking over the world. Started with the Mormon community, then expanded from there. I remember talking to the guys from Wait But Why, that great blog. Yeah. Yeah.

And this guy... Wait, guys, is there a team? It's not just Tim. It's Tim. And then it's his childhood friend, Andrew, who does, like, the back end, all the business stuff. They have, like, a really interesting business. They, like, acquire companies that are completely unrelated to Wape, but why.

Like, that's how they make their money. And then they just do WIPAW for fun. Like, that's kind of the model. But I was asking him about content because I was like, you know, I admire WAPAWI, so tell me about this. And I was like, you know, I'm trying to figure this out. I kind of like to talk about this. this and I kind of like to talk about this.

And he's like, you need your like your flagship franchise. And you do your franchise. And then people will love that franchise, but they'll also love you. And you'll earn the right to talk to them about like, oh, you want to talk about like mindset stuff? Cool.

But unless you think mindset is the right place to start, wait, earn the trust on the business side. And then say, by the way, here's my mindset stuff. And then you'll get some percentage of people to cross over and then a new audience there too.

You just keep launching new franchises after that. It's so, It's also like the, we even you guys, you know, you started several years after us, but like, I think you still were. Is that true? When did you guys start? Three years ago. 20, September of 2019, I think. Oh, wow.

You guys earlier than I thought. Yeah, we were 2015. But even in 20, like, it was still kind of earliest enough days in podcasting that like the medium was, the mainstream portion of podcasting meeting was still early enough that people were looking for new stuff. Right. And like that, I think has changed. now in a pretty big way. The way that it started was basically, like, I was in Austin or somewhere. I was living in San Francisco at the time.

And Sean texted me and he was like, hey, I have an idea for a podcast. Here's the pilot. Do you guys want to, does Hustle want to be the publisher? And I listened to it. And I just listened to the intro. And I was like, yep, we're in. Let's just air this exact one next week. And we'll start.

By the way, that was a little bit of a fib. I basically told you, I was like, hey, you know, why don't, I was like, why don't you do podcasts? And Sam was like, I got to hire somebody to do it. I don't know. We were focused on this email thing. I was like, well, I got a podcast. I'm going to do a podcast. Will you be the publisher? He's like, and I was like, I'm already, I knew that to seal the deal I needed to send him a file, but I hadn't recorded yet. So I go, I already did the first episode. Uh, you want to like take a listen to it. And then I like just

ghosted him on Messenger for 24 hours. So I could go record the episode. Then came back. It was like, oh, my bad. Here's the file. So there really wasn't an episode when I first message you, but I was like, I got the vibe that if this is good, if I get like, like a good first 35 seconds. This is done. And so that's what I went and did. Yeah. And we were like,

we're in. And then he did it his way. It was called my first million because it was like first million users, revenue, whatever. And it was great. It was great as it was. But like there was one time like three months in where a guest didn't show up. And he was like, I booked the space.

Do you just want to come and like talk? And I was like, I guess. And we did that. And then it kind of like did well. But like the first episode he did by himself, it got $65,000. downloads and we were like, dude, podcasting is easy. This is going to be awesome.

And then over the next 12 months, it basically went down to like as low as like maybe 10 or 15,000. And then since then it's basically just been a slow grind. Now we're anywhere from 100 to 200,000 per episode if you include the YouTube. Our YouTube is pretty weak. It's like 20 to 50,000, 20 to 100,000. And then the RSS feed, which is like iTunes and all that stuff, that's maybe a or something like that.

Where are you guys at? Because like no one talks about this stuff. Like whenever you Google, I remember we were Googling like, how do we get to 100,000 downloads? But everyone out there was like, here's how you get your first thousand, first 10,000.

I was like, okay, but like, how do we get bigger? We're almost the exact same scale with a very different journey. I mean, every journey is unique on this stuff. So our episodes get about 200,000 downloads, listens, whatever you want to call it. which is interesting because Spotify has become so much more of the market now, uh,

per episode. But unlike you guys, we do like one episode a month, you know, one to two episodes a month. And they're really, really long. So,

uh, we have, with a few exceptions that we can talk about, we've never had like kind of big spike viral, you know, breakout moments. It's been a, you know,

eight year journey from like zero. up to that. We don't really have spikes. There's spiky stuff, but it's not like a true virality moment. Interesting. And you guys, so one thing that's interesting about content media is everybody

measures the number. Nobody measures the quality because the quality is way harder to understand. But clearly there's a difference between 200,000 people listening to an episode of Acquired versus 200,000 views on a TikTok. Okay, we get that because it's kind of short versus long.

But even if it was a podcast about sports versus a podcast about business acquisitions, the type of people that are going to listen to your thing are just inherently more valuable. Have you guys thought about that, seen that? Do you guys feel about it? I mean, that's the whole, that is the whole business. Not that we started or do this for the business side, although it's become a great business.

That is the whole business side. And also on the content side too. We started doing this for us to learn. And then we were like, well, who would, you know, would also want to learn for the people like us. And that's kind of who we make it for. So we struggle with YouTube, with TikTok, with Twitter.

Like, we're not good on any of those other platforms, even though we do atomize content and do it now. Because, like, we don't, it's just not kind of how we designed the show. And to ground it, 40% of acquired listeners are C-level or VP-level executives. 23% are currently founders.

12% were previously founders. And if you break down by job, 17% are engineers, 15% are actively CEOs today, and 12% are product managers. And so, like, the whole business for us, and to David's point, it didn't start as a business, but where we are today is like, I don't really want millions of listeners. I want acquired to like kind of slow its growth, but saturate the niche that we're in because I think it's the most valuable audience in the world. And I don't know exactly what that leads to, but like all the conversations David and I get to have with our listeners because of who they are are like super fascinating. Well, what will it lead to? So like, you know, you do, you can probably make a great living off of just the advertising. But I'm looking at your site. You don't sell anything. What's it going to lead to? Well, we do have merch. That hoodie you're wearing right now. It's pretty dope. Is that merch?

This is Marquez's hoodie, yeah. with David Mell, who's on Marquez's team, is become a good friend and is an acquired listener, and he hooked me up with this. This hoodie rocks. Yeah, I sent a picture to our merch person. I screenshotted. And I had that moment where I was like,

you know that thing we were on a Zoom call? I don't know if you guys do this, but you screenshot, and it makes the really loud-ass sound of like, a screenshot has been taken, and then you got to, like, address it like it was a fart during the call. I was really worried that when I was like,

How come we were doing that thing on every slide of my deck? This is a total digression and we'll come back to it. But Fourth Wall makes the... So Marquez is an investor in Fourth Wall. Walker Williams, the founder. He was the founder of T-Spring. Awesome guy. We've gotten to know him.

We're talking to them now, I think. Yeah, yeah. Merch. Yeah, they are great. And they made this fully custom for Marquez. And it's the best thing. Markes being, what's his name, Brownlee? Is that his name?

KBHD. Yeah. The, the, I mean, I, I, You said it's first named like he's Oprah. Like, you know, I was like, who's the guy? He basically is. I think he's... Oh, it's that guy. Well, he has like 20 million YouTube subscribe.

I mean, I just know him as like the guy who interviews, uh, uh, tech. But he also like has interviewed Tesla, uh, Elon and all these like great guys. I mean, he's cool. Unless they've come on this podcast, they're, I don't know them. That this podcast makes you what brings you in my mind. He's also the craziest thing is like, as if it wasn't enough to operate this like pretty large-scale TV production studio at this point as a, as a YouTuber. He's also like one of the best ultimate frisbee players in the world. Oh, really? Yeah, he's a professional ultimate frisbee player as well.

I can see that. I can see that. That's a very obvious crossover. Do you, so like when, we'll just talk real insider baseball for a second and then we'll move on. But with podcasting, a lot of people ask us how to start it and stuff like that. And I'm like, I don't know how to grow it. It's quite challenging. But what I've really enjoyed getting to know is like Andrew Huberman. I, I, I'm, you know, I'm acquaintances, but not friends, friends with him really. But, like, we'll chat every once in a while. And he's like, I like on Spotify. We've seen each other with our shirts off.

But we, I mean, I wouldn't call each other friends, but like, we've sawned together. This is like, oh, I was probably at a doctor's appointment. But like, your life is just like, I listen to you guys. I'm like, wow. No, bro. Like, he was, he was on our, he was on our pod. So, like, I know him like an hour plus like five text messages exchange. So, like, that's the extent that I know him.

but he I think there if you look at Spotify when he releases an episode it's typically the most popular on the charts and I think they're in the million mark million per episode which is how we like to measure it is there anyone else in the business category that's in the 205 I mean all in is probably 400 maybe 500,000 do you know like how big do you have to be to be some of the biggest of course there's Dave Ramsey he's he's in a whole different category yeah it's funny it depends because like business kind of gets lumped in with all these other like personal finance type categories. But I think in our ilk, invest like the best, and move Dave Ramsey's ass over there. Yeah, yeah. Out of there. You know, and it's all in, too,

like, has been an amazing breakout. They've become more of a mainstream news and political show, too. I mean, they still talk tech and business, but that, I think, is a lot of their audience. And they're huge now. But, yeah, our category, I would say, like, invest like the best,

probably is the most directly comparable in terms of size and audience makeup. Also founders and David Senra, he's part of the Colossus Network with Patrick. Who else? Jason's other show, This Week in Startups that we go on all the time. Logan Bartlett has a much smaller audience

because he's much newer, but like A plus guests and really, I mean, I think he's got the most valuable niche of niche in terms of the people who listen to his. show. Why? Because of VCs? It's like Silicon Valley Insiders, for lack of a better. I mean, it's VCs, it's founders, but I

think like his interviews, I always feel like he pulls out. Most valuable. Small boy stuff right there. Sam, let me ask you a different question that I've actually never asked. So David said something a second ago, which was kind of like, the paraphrase would be, we made the podcast for people like us, or we made the podcast that we would want to listen to.

Is that fair to kind of summarize your position, David? 100%. And I feel like that with this podcast, I started the Milk Road that way, but it quickly transformed into like crypto news, which is actually not what I actually people know this. I've said this. I don't read or consume the news. So it's really funny that we made a news like thing.

It got it big and then sold it. But truthfully, it didn't end up becoming the thing that like I made this for me for people like me out there. Sam, do you subscribe to that? Like, I guess, like, in theory, you could say the best thing to do is to scratch your own niche to build the product you want, be the, you know, make it for people like you. Then you're not guessing. But then in practice, sometimes, you know, the mass market is not where you're at and you go

for that. So, Sam, what's your take on that? I think we, it started, MFF started that way and it is mostly that way. Every once in a while, you know, Sean, we'll be like, we need more views. Let's like, get this guest. And sometimes we give into it. Sometimes we don't. The hustle started.

out because I liked the news. And then about two years in, I was like, I don't care about the news anymore. But this is my job. So I'm going to keep doing it. I don't, I listen to zero business podcasts now. I basically only listen to like crime and fiction and things like that. And so I don't listen to a business podcast anymore. But I think this podcast has mostly stayed of just like, what do I want to do? What does Sean want to do? What do we want to talk about? Yeah. It's mostly stayed that way. But we do like have to fight. Like I was messaging Sean like this. this last night. And I was like, dude, we need to be stricter about our guests because we've had like a bunch of people like who asked to come on and we're like, yeah, they're huge. And then I'm

like, wait, I don't give a shit about this person. I don't like, I wouldn't want to have, like if this person invited me over for dinner, I wouldn't be excited. And so we definitely have to fight that. I would assume, you know, this is, we're realizing that it's the case for us, although it's different because we tell stories. But for you guys are like the reason your audience is here is for you. Right. Like, it's not for your guests. Right. Yeah, I think sometimes though the guests, you know, I basically told Sam, I said there's three to three or four types of guests for the here's the four that I think exists. There's the people that are like us and they're just bringing in a different like flavor, new fresh ideas. So like, for example, when you guys first came on, you guys, you got the stick. You knew what we do on this podcast. I remember you guys came with a bunch of business ideas. You're like, oh, this Airbnb Wi-Fi network that's like, you know. Oh my God. You remember even the idea. Yeah. As soon as I saw your face, that idea came back to me. Right. I got like, some people have photo. graphic memory. I have an idea memory. I can remember any idea. So that was like, you guys got the stick. So you came on. You brought ideas, which is great because the audience

loves that. Steph Smith is a great example of this. She comes on. She brings ideas. People like her. Even though she's not the big name, you know, famous, oh, CEO of X. She does an amazing job. So that's like number one. Number two is basically like they are the big name. So it's somebody who a bunch of people are going to click on and might bring new audience. It's like you're legit famous in some way. You had a pomp on recently. Yeah, well, he would be three, which is internet famous. There's like legit famous. It's like, you know, they're, they've, like, kind of like outside.

Like Paris Hilton or something. Yeah, like they don't have a podcast or they don't have a newsletter. They don't have like an internet community. They're just like famous, famous. Then there's your internet famous. And the last one is personal, like, we want a nerd out with them. And so that would be like. Like Ariel Hawani.

Yeah, we had Ariel Hawani on. Like, I don't know how much of our audience cared about that. But I cared. I wanted to have that conversation. And we've had, you know, Sam was like, oh, this guy can write out. is awesome. He's like this 50 year old like marathon record breaker guy. Like I just want to talk to him. And it's like great, let's do that. So it's kind of like we are going to be so into the conversation and we are sure that this person is interesting to us. It'll be interesting to some

portion of the audience. And so it's like to us, those are the four. And I think the one you get tripped up on the most is just the legit famous person because they don't actually listen to the pod. They may not bring bring the juice. And it's almost like the expectations are high and you almost disappoint because it's like, oh, all right, well, that was kind of a lame conversation with that person. And they don't have any of their own distribution. The nice thing about internet famous is at least they can help distribute the content. But regular famous people, it's like unless they're getting put in people magazine or cast in the latest movie, they actually have no way to reach an audience directly. Yeah. You know who does that for us is Darmesh, the founder of HubSpot. Every time

he comes on, his episodes get really popular. And he's always doing, he is popular and his content is great. And also, he always does some internet marketing stuff where he kills it. He kills it for us every time. That's the best kind of guest that'll come on and promote. Right. And he pays the bills too. So he's the sponsor. He's the guest.

He drives the growth. He does it all. Dimesh. Come on, acquired. The crazy thing we notice about guests recently, just looking at our analytics, and the two things, and both of them are true 100% of the time without fail. one, every single time we set a new episode record, it is an episode that is like just David and I doing Nintendo, LVMH,

Berkshire Hathaway, like our canonical three-hour format. And two, every single time we have a guest on, it is less listened to than our previous episode. Yeah, right. Just last question is, how do you guys prepare for that? Do you just like both read the same book and take notes and then just tell a story? We mostly read different stuff, but we've kind of architected. I mean, this is our differentiation as a show, which is so anti all the rules of podcasting,

but I think is what makes us special, is we have carved out that, like, we can take a month in our lives and do, you know, it's kind of like if you were writing a term paper in college. Like, we can do the research independently, each of us, on a company, on a topic. And then we come together and it's like, I don't know, it's like a thesis defense or something that we do. And the goal is like between the two of us to have basically consumed every piece of content on the company. Like every other podcast that's ever been done, all the big books that have been written, all the talks given by the founder, try and find a bunch of weird stuff like talks given at industry conferences that have low view counts on YouTube. Obviously read all the sources of the Wikipedia page for the companies. It's basically like, no one should be able to DM us after the episode and be like, oh, did you, did you?

Did you see this important piece of information on the company? We want to always be like defensively. No, we have consumed everything about this company. And I think like, I think the magic is that like if we, if the output of that were a term paper, it would be really boring and nobody would read it. But because the output of that is Ben and I as really good friends like talking about it. Like that kind of makes it magical. The phrase we've been noodling on is conversational audio books. Oh, that's cool.

To describe what it is. Are there any odd commonalities that you've seen amongst like the savages that you've done stories on? So for example, Ben Wilson has, you know, he does how to think of over the world and it's historical figures. And he's like, you know, it's weird. John Rockefeller, Edison and Napoleon, a bunch of these other people, they ate really lightly. Like they didn't eat a ton of food because they said that when they over ate, they felt brain fog and for a bunch of different reasons. Are there any strange commonalities that you've found amongst like these conquerors, the world? Well, we talk more about companies than we do about people. Like Ben and David

Center over at Founders. Or companies. Yeah. Or companies. I mean, it's the classic, like, being contrarian and right. And you have to be both contrarian and right. But the people that were studying and the companies that we're studying are such extreme outliers. Like, they're such the, they're four standard deviations from the mean in terms of, like, how did a company do? And so they were, they're sort of like an N of one. Like there's one TSM in the world. There's one LVMH who owns all the most valuable luxury brands except Hermes. And it sort of happens in a unique way every time.

And so I guess the biggest takeaway for me is like, it usually is the founder doing something that like literally everybody else had left for dead. And when I say that, I mean like Bernard Arnault going and buying buying Christian Dior from the French government out of bankruptcy in, when was that? The 80s, David. 80s, yeah. Or, like, literally no one else was bidding on this, like, dead asset. Or the example for starting TSM is, like, zero other people thought that you should

be starting a foundry when you have no chip IP to make other people's chip designs. Like, that was, there was zero other people that thought that was going to be successful. Like, there is no, there is no formula. Every story is unique, but a big, big category is like something that has been left for dead. Like, sometimes it's inventing something new whole cloth, but like really big category is like, oh, this thing is over and done with. Oh, David, Nintendo. Yeah, Nintendo, Google.

The video game crash of 1983, like the market for video games in the United States went from $3 billion to $100 million over the course of two years. Everybody was running screaming from the industry and they thought, oh, video games were a fad and it's over. and then you have Nintendo that comes in, launches the NES, and then within five years has 95% market share and has grown the industry back to a $3 billion industry. It sees like nut job bets. Has that given you guys any confidence to succeed, do you think?

Because Sean and I talked to all these awesome people, and like we'll talk to, there are a handful of people, and I said this a bunch, there's a handful of people who we talk to and we say, oh, you're definitely like significantly smarter than we. we are or you're significant you have this part that's more significant than us and then there's other people who will talk to that are worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and it's like well you're not like 20 times smarter than us even though you're 20 times richer but like you might be

a little bit or sometimes a little bit less and that's given us confidence at least me for sure because I'm like oh you definitely are insecure you question yourself you doubt yourself but you still went through with it's a good question like I know how to be contrarian I'm not sure I know how to be right yet we're halfway there, baby. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, we know how to make, everyone tells you you should make short podcasts that release every single week and you should have guests on to help build your audience. And we do basically none of those things. And everything that has worked for us is doing the exact opposite of those.

And so does that mean keep doing the opposite of every piece of advice everyone gives you because that's the path of success? I don't think so. But if we overfit to the data that we've observed so far, that is what it would look like. And so I'm hesitant to like keep being contrarian for the sense of being contrarian. But I think the important part that comes with this is like having a iterative feedback loop with your customers or in our case with our listeners to understand like what makes you love this and how do we lean harder into that and sort of shut out general advice and pay more attention to like the things our customers are expressing. By the way, I've picked up a little poker tell on people who. How do you tell a real contrarian versus a wannabe contrarian? This is a tell I picked up over time, which is in the tech world, I think because of Peter Thiel, there's this like kind of like real sex appeal to be contrary.

And if you put it your Twitter bio, you're probably not in. Yeah, exactly. Same with polymath. Yeah, polymath's another one of them. Or visionary. As me and Sam have joked about like or like if you're an engineer being like, slagie or like if you're an engineer being like slagie. being like slightly on the spectrum. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's another indicator of success.

It's like, here we go. The one that is, I think, a tell when it comes to being contrarian is how excited are you that you have this contrarian idea? Because that shows people who are contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, meaning they're really excited to tell you how they think everybody else thinks A, but it's actually B. Whereas the real people I've seen that are contrarian, they just see A. and they're almost like, I'm confused why people don't think A.

A is clearly right. They don't spend time trying to convince the whole world of it. Like, you know, if they're asked, they tell the truth. And then when people react at a big way, like, oh, man, I can't believe you think that. And they're like, I can't believe you don't think that. It just seems like the truth to them. And so that's what I've noticed is like, if you watch old videos of like, you know, Peter Thiel talking or like, I think Bologi is somebody who's like this today, they,

they're happy to explain their point of view, and they explain it like, this is just what's going to happen, or this is what I believe to be true, but they don't get high on the idea of being a contrarian. There's a subtle difference. There's a bunch of people I've met in real life that I kind of, I've noticed this on.

It's hard to explain, but you'll see next time you kind of run into somebody who's over eager and over excited about the fact that they have this contrarian opinion, they're kind of just performing socially versus they actually believe that. It reminds me a lot of, it's like we all know this guy or girl who likes the idea of a relationship more than they like their current relationship. And they're very excited to like have this particular lifestyle. And you can sort of tell you're into that new lifestyle you have more than the person you're actually with.

Right. Did you want a boyfriend or did you want Ben? Right. Like, who did you actually want here? Yeah. Let me tell a story. It's interesting though. Like, oh, I was just going to tell one on the thing Sam, you talked about like what are the interesting success patterns?

It reminded me of an experience I had a while back. I went to China when I was maybe 21 years old and got to go to the Alibaba. Like, Alibaba flew out a bunch of entrepreneurs to go, like, meet with, it was supposed to be Jack Ma, but we ended up meeting with this guy, David Way, who's like their, Jack Ma's right-hand man, he was the guy who was running Alibaba at the time. And I didn't even know what Alibaba was. Like, Oli-Baba was a big deal. Like, now I'm like, now I would have taken that really seriously.

I had no idea who they were at the time. And we get there. and somebody asked him this question. They raised their hand. They go, what do you think is the most important things for success for the success of a company? Alibaba is a multi-billion dollar company. You know, what made it successful? And he goes, he goes, models for success are misleading.

They cannot be copied due to the like unique combination of luck, timing, all these other things. But he goes, but what you can ask me is a better question, which is what are the common keys to failure? And he goes, they're always the same. And he goes, we study the things that lead to failure and just tried to avoid those. So he goes, you know, I leaned in. I was like, please blow my mind, sir, go ahead. And he's like, he goes, there's three things that lead to failure. Money plans of technology.

He goes, so our plan was no money, no plans, no technology. And I go, what? This is crazy because it's like a tech company worth like $40 billion. Like, what are you talking about? And he goes, hey, he goes, all right, here we go. Money makes people stupid. And when problems come up, their first instinct becomes throw money at it rather than attacking it with creativity.

So basically way back when Google was, Google was like dominating with AdWords. And so the people at Alibaba were like, we need to make our version of AdWords. And he goes, you know, this is no order. It's like, you know, building this type of ad network is not like super simple. He goes, so Jack Ma cut a check for $250,000 to build this project. And Latim, like, laugh like, you're missing three zeros on the back of this. Like, what are you talking about? 250K?

And he goes, that's how much money it took me to start Alibaba. I had less than that starting the whole company. So if you need more than that for a feature, we're doing it wrong. He's like, they're like, well, how are we supposed to do this? He goes, do exactly what I did with Alibaba. He's like, so he moved 19 people into his apartment where he had started. He's like, that's your office. You're going to work there.

He's like, you need servers to run the ad servers. Cool, go find some. Like go get some used junk servers and like re-rig them, get them, refurbish them, and make them work. And they go, but there's no redundancy. He goes, if you're building where you need redundancy, like we've done this wrong, right? Like, you know, this is,

you need to build this so that it works without redundancy first. And so he did that for, that was the no money. Then he's like, no technology. He's like, everybody wants to call us a tech company. No, we are a service company. We're here to serve our users. If you don't think of yourself like you're in the service industry, you're in the wrong industry.

And then his last one was plan. And it's like, all right, well, dude, How'd you do this? Like, why no plans? Why are plans bad? He goes, he goes, well, you know, you guys are 50 young entrepreneurs who got flown out here to do. I assume in America, you guys have done something good. Otherwise, why would we have picked you?

He goes, how many of you are doing what you initially planned to do? And like, nobody's hand went up. And he was like, exactly. And he goes, plans are fine, but they always change. That's the only thing we know about plans. The mission never waivers. Sometimes you'll need a plan to get others to, believe, but remember, you should not believe that plan. You should follow your gut and adapt

constantly to the circumstances. Don't follow the plan you wrote when you started. Follow your mission, follow your vision, follow the why. If you do that, you will be successful. And I was like, damn. Did you write all this down? Yeah. So many years ago, after that event, I wrote, I tried to write a book in like two weeks, and I wrote half of it. And so this was one of my chapters in that book. And I just found the PDF on my computer when you were talking about. Oh, that's awesome. That's hilarious. That's amazing that you did that because that was years ago.

What a great story. It's so applicable. I love that that's applicable to Alibaba just as much as like I'm thinking about you guys and us and like how we started the conversation. Like, yeah, we had no money. We had, I guess we had technology in that like podcasting and the internet is inherent leverage. But one of us were like, we're building a tech company or we're building a product. It was like, no, it's like we're just making something. And we had no plan.

And like, it's funny. Like, we see a lot. I'm sure you guys do too. People come to us like, oh, how do I start a podcast? How I start a successful podcast? We see, like, big companies come. The, like, offline celebrities that want to start podcast. And it's like, they come with money technology and a plan and are like, it's not how it's

going to work. It's going to suck. You guys probably see this with your episodes. Like, how many of them started doing what they're doing? Like, I don't know. I haven't listened to all the recent ones, but, like, I don't know. Was Nintendo, what were you thinking of Nintendo today? Oh, my God.

Nintendo was making... Wait, wait, wait, real quick. Do either of you know the origin story of Nintendo or have a guess at how old Nintendo is? I think it's really... I remember reading it once. I don't remember off the top of my head, but it was... Is it like Sony where they were like selling rice or something, and then now they're who they are? It's even better.

Yeah. It's a 130-year-old company. Yeah. Started in, what, 1890? 1889, I think. Yeah. And their original business... was making Hanafuda cards,

which is the Japanese version of U.S. playing cards, but U.S. playing cards were illegal to import, like, because people from the U.S. could, it was not legal to be in the country. And, David, I think you at this point, they literally would execute you. Yeah. Well, Nintendo started right after this,

but before the Meiji Restoration, like, Japan went through this multi-hundred-year period of strict isolationism where, like, you would be executed if you are a foreigner, you entered the country. Likewise, if you were a Japanese person and you left the country and came back, you would also be executed. But playing cards are this thing that has product market fit. They're like, how do we make something like playing cards? Universal human need. So it literally started making Hanafuda cards and their distribution channel was through the Yakuza to illegal

casinos. Yeah. Yakuza being like the mafia. The Japanese mafia. Yeah, yeah. They started making these playing cards and like a very small part of the market was like, oh, you have a pack of playing cards in your house. But just like everywhere else in the world, the market is casinos because you use a fresh deck for each can so that there's no cheating. And yeah, so Nintendo was like deeply embedded with the Yakuza. And for like 60 years, this was their business before they started making toys. Wow.

And then what? Some like visionary within the company was like, hey, this new thing is cool. There's this whole crazy family, like, really tragedy of like this cycle of death and just like terrible parenting in the family. He's passed down to four generations of the same family. But actually not the same family because they had no sons and they needed sons so they were marrying their daughters off to people who could take

over the business. Yeah, exactly. And one of these guys was basically just like so pissed off at like the family legacy that this is Roshi Yamuichi who started the modern Nintendo. And he was like, I didn't want to diversify the business. I want to get out of this. And he did a partnership with Disney.

In 1959. Yeah, 1959. Nintendo brought Disney and Disney IP into Japan post World War II. Check us out. I literally have the cards. As toys or as cards? Some acquired fans sent them to me. Oh, wow.

Started with... Yeah, and then they brought toys, and then they started making their own toys, because they had, like, lock on the retail distributors. Yeah. Wow. So it started as cards, and they were like, then they went, said to all these retailers, they were like, oh, you want the Disney products? You're going to take our products, too.

Was that Jiminy Cricket as the Joker? Jimony Cricket as the Joker and Mickey Mouse golfing on this old school card deck. That's amazing. That's like you've got to wear gloves if you're going to touch that or something. That's like a ancient artifact. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days. days ago I totally missed. HubSpot, Grow Better. Can I ask you guys a couple rapid-fire questions about some of the companies that you've discussed? Number one, which company of everyone that you went over would you want to own? Like, what's the one that you envy? Well, those are two different questions.

Which would you want to own the stock of and which do you want, or which do you want to, like, be an investor in, or actually own the company. Yeah, yeah, the second. Actually own. And which one do you envy most? Actually, own, I think, is the NFL. Yeah, for sure. The most, like, durable franchise.

And own is always a funny question, because what's your entry price? Like, do I have to buy stuff at today's prices? But if I think about sort of like durability of the asset and I sort of ignore where things are trading and what market values today, the NFL is seven layers of entrenched in our society and to be an American at this point means to have the NFL in your life

and they also, David, you pointed this out on our episode. Everyone thinks it's really cute to like stack rank all the media franchises. Marvel's worth this and, you know, all the way at the top of the charts, Pokemon's worth this. But like the NFL is worth so much more than any of those. The NFL TV contract alone is 12 billion. a year. The most recent set of rights they parceled up was like $100 billion.

Now it's like $18 or $19 billion a year, I think. Something insane. And they recently signed a 10-year deal. So it's like a $150 billion deal just for the TV rights. The NFL has all the franchises, but is there basically like this top level hold co that owns like the media rights and the franchise fees? It's communist capitalism. They all own it all together. But

the NFL unlike any of the other leagues out there is, there's starting to be a few little cracks in this, but like they negotiate with the TV contracts and now all the streaming and everything unified as a league. So there's no like, you know like how the Yankees have the yes network, like their own TV network? It's none of that in the NFL. It's all together and it's all equal revenue. Have you guys done an episode on MLBAM? Yes. Way back when Disney, what's that actually the first investment before the acquisition. These guys can tell you that this full version, the accurate version. I'll give you the dumb version, which is the major league baseball had

created a tech, like a tech team, basically a tech company inside of Major League Baseball, co-owned by like the teams. And the good job was like, hey, like people are trying to listen to this on the radio. We need to like do digital streaming audio. It was Eichiro, because when Eichiro came over from Japan, they needed to stream. Do you remember that guy, Sam? Itiro Suzuki, the guy who played on the Mariners. It was like a phenomenon.

And so people in Japan wanted to watch or watch wasn't even an option. I think it was listened to the games. So they needed internet streaming audio. And so they built this thing. They started offering it. And then each team would use it. So it was like, oh, each team co-funded it. So they would like cut a check.

And then that developed technology for all of them. But then they ended up spinning it out as a multi-billion dollar company because they're the best at video streaming now. Like they stream, if you want to watch a Game of Thrones, it's MLBAM's video tech that streams Game of Thrones. So that when whatever 10 million people click play as soon as the episode drops, that like the thing doesn't crash, which is kind of kind of, you know, just an amazing. thing. And so that, like, spin out, like, who would have ever thought, like, one of the big

tech companies, you know, unicorn tech companies came out of, like, this baseball co-op co-funded thing. It's that kind of an insane story. And it was in, like, 2004 or something that they started working on it. They had a five-year head start on having the insight that this infrastructure was going to be important over Netflix. Like, everyone thinks, like, oh, Netflix, you know, is in what the ISPs and it's the best in the world that this, like, Bamtech was doing that five years, earlier. Yeah. And it ended up getting acquired by Disney and is a huge part of ESPN streaming, like,

all the ESPN Plus plus Disney Plus. Like, it's crazy. Is there a certain founder, CEO leader who you would rank as the person you'd least want to compete against, whether they're, whether historical or modern? Here's another way of phrasing that I heard that I like. There was somebody who signed with the NFL draft and there was like four QBs that were competing and they're like, well, this guy's got good arm, this guy's good at running, this guy's a great leader, blah, blah, blah. And then this guy asked this question that I loved,

he goes, let's say they all went on vacation and they rented a car and they're walking out to the, to the Jeep. Who do they throw the keys to drive this car? It's like, who's the leader, who's the alpha amongst Alphas amongst these QB? So who's that in the CEO world? I think we got to say Jensen, uh, Jensen along from NVIDIA. Like, he's such a badass. So, like, I don't know anything about NVIDIA because I just know it's a killer stock. So Invidia makes the chips that are in computers and it involves display. You get like an Nvidia. Yeah, is that right?

Yeah. So, Nvidia is in their sort of third major act as a company. Yeah, third act. But loosely defined as like they popularized the idea of a GPU in addition to the CPU. And originally the use case was for video games in the 90s. and I think everyone who ever built PCs remembers like, oh man, I got to get this hot new GPU to slide in the card

because it's better than the integrated graphics thing from Intel. And so that was sort of their market for a while, and it was all about gaming PCs. But then, like, again, five, six, seven years before the rest of the market, Jensen basically made this bet where he saw researchers using the GPUs, the gaming graphics. Yeah, they were like going to best. spy and buying a bunch of

Nvidia graphics cards. To do AI research. And he was like, I think we should lean really heavily into this. And so he spent billions of dollars and thousands of headcount for five years to build up this whole software stack

called CUDA that if AI and ML was going to become a thing, then people were going to use CUDA to develop exclusively on Nvidia's hardware. And so by the time it did become a thing like five years ago, And V-Vidia had this enormous moat around it as being the platform to develop AI on.

And it just so happened that the technology, this like super heavy parallel processing matrix math technology that makes gaming graphics chips work is the very same math that powers what ML is all based on. But other than, so Invidia for the listener, it's, I just looked it up. It's a $650 billion company. So one of the, I don't know, top 20, 30 biggest business in the world. But other than him being correct, what makes this person like a savage or... That they're just like, there's so many points in history. Like, he is a... He's 19 wives.

Let me... No, he actually, like, he's a total family man. He's been married to the same person he met in college. They have two kids. Like, he's... But, like, he's got a giant tattoo of the company's logo on his shoulder. He wears leather jackets. He drives really fast cars.

He's like... He's basically, like, he's basically, like, Like Elon except not like right. And he's Elon except right and like leads with kindness. And but like he, I mean, they're like in each phase of the company, the absolute rational thing to do was like basically shut it down and like, you know, like talk about being left for dead. Like this company was left for dead multiple times. And he's built like just single handedly this dude created the AI revolution that we are

today. Like, Nvidia and Kuda is essentially, like, you can think about it as like the Android plus iOS of AI. Like, no Nvidia, no CUDA, no decision by Jensen to do this. We are not living in the world. We're living in today. Sam, I'll give me a different answer for the thing you're actually looking for, which is, like, who is the most savage person to compete against.

That answer is Bernard Arnault from LVMH. So, rich man in the world today. And he got there not by being the founder. of a business that happened to have product market fit and appreciated wildly, it's because of his deal prowess and the way that he was able to effectively outsmart the rest of the market to hoover up 70 of the history's most important and trusted brands into one umbrella and then find leverage in every single thing he does to expand the empire. Is there anyone who you think is overrated, who's on a pedestal?

and you think, I don't think that person's that great. I think it worked out, but I think they're overrated. It's a very unacquired question. Dave and I are nice people. We are. We don't, well, pick a dead person. One that I like to talk about. Dead person.

Or you can pick anyone, but someone who's like, no, I think one that I like to talk about here is, I don't know the overrated is, right? But, like, I think a lot about it investing about, there's this great Buffett quote, not one of his most well-known ones, but it's something like you want to own a business that, you know, even an idiot could run because someday someone will, you know? And I think about, to me, what that means is, like, you want to own a business, you want to invest in a business that, like, literally you cannot kill it. There's nothing you can do to stop this juggernaut. And to me, that's Airbnb. And we talked about this a lot on the episode we did on Airbnb.

But it's just like the most amazing global network effect of all time. And literally like I don't, you know, this is my opinion. But I don't think there's anything that any manager could do to change the, like, to inflect the trajectory of that ship, you know. So my, I, like, there's a long story. I don't feel like telling me it, but I had a job at Airbnb when I was like 22 and I like dropped into school and moved out and then I got denied, whatever. So I didn't end up working there, but I got to interview with the founders. And then years later, my wife ended up working there. And during work from home for COVID, Brian would give these talks

every Thursday. And we lived in a small apartment. So I like, inevitably would hear it. I think that I agree with you. Once you have a marketplace that's working, it's hard to screw it up. eBay is doing a good job, though. But, you know, if it works, like, it's a good, it's a great thing. It's quite durable. But I would listen to Brian Cheskey give these 30-minute, like, Thursday talks. That guy is bad to the bone. I read a little bit, I read the Walt Disney biography, and he reminded me exactly of him.

He is a, you know, like, I think someone said there's a difference between a missionary and a mercenary. Mercenaries are hired guns who are ruthless, but missionaries, they really care about what they're doing. I sense that with him. That guy, I think, is a bit killer. I think that people think of him as this nice guy, of which I think he is. I think he's way, way more of a killer than people give him credit for it. And he's very wise. He's a really good leader.

But that's cool. I like Airbnb. And I think it's cool that I agree. It probably would be hard to kill. And last question, which person who you covered would kick your ass physically and you'd least want to have a physical confrontation with? I mean, actually, Jensen. Yeah. You think he, you think, you think so?

Well, he's getting up there in age. But like, yeah, no, he like, he lifts. He's just like such a character. Well, I certainly, I mean, we're coming right off of Nintendo, but like, Hiroshi Yamuichi back in the day, not because he was physically intimidating, but like, literally like that man was in bed with the yakuza. Oh, I got it. You do not cross him. Oh, Douglioni. Yeah, for sure.

Like, we sat, David and I walked in. to interview Doug Leone. It's a great story. Doug Leone is the founder of Sequoia. Yeah. Not the founder, but he... A long-time managing partner.

Yeah. Got it. A head honcho at one point of one of the best venture capital firms ever. Through Google and, you know, the true heyday of Sequoia, which, or you could argue that was recently, but amazing era of Sequoia. And so a lot of times, like, with guests, we'll get to, like, spend some time beforehand and get to know them and go out to dinner afterwards and build real relationships. and build real relationship,

and we, like, email or text, and you guys know the drill. And so with Doug, we didn't communicate with him at all beforehand. It was all with some other lovely people at Sequoia. And we walk in and we set up, and someone walks in the room, and they go, okay, are you, are you ready?

And we were like, yep. And they were like, great, we'll go get Doug. Doug walks in. He sits down. He says, hello. Are we starting? And we were like, yeah. So we hit record.

And we finish, so we do the whole episode. Make me laugh. We finish recording. And Doug just goes, great, thank you so much. And he walks, gets up and leaves the room. So every word that I've ever spoken with Doug Leone, except for like two or three, is on the record in the episode that you can listen to in our podcast feed.

Later, his EA did come in and say, hey, Doug wanted to know if you guys had any feedback. He's always looking to get better and sort of like came in and chat it with us. But I was like, wow, that is aggressive. Doug wanted to say thank you, but he doesn't waste breath. So I'll all say. And the assistant just punched in the arm and gave you a raspberry. He said, that's from Doug. He also had, he has, I think, still to this day, the best quote on Acquired that was not uttered by Ben or me quoting somebody else from history.

But the best live quote unacquired, he was talking about after the dot-com crash when Sequoio was like, kind of made this vow that no LP would lose money. Like they wouldn't take a Mulligan fund. They would like work the portfolio companies. They didn't take salaries. Make sure that they have positive returns. And he said, he's like Mike Moritz and I linked arms or it wasn't,

I think it was linked art. He said Mike Moritz and I decided that like we would stand there and we wouldn't flinch and you could burn cigarettes on our arms. And we would like we wouldn't take a mulligan on these funds. They're like, damn. He also has kind of an accent, right? Like he's, uh, doesn't he?

Yeah. Yeah. He's got this. Italian New York vibe. Yeah, that's cool. Are there any more of these, like, tough guys or tough women, like, that are out there now? I mean, when I hear that, it's, I always think, like, oh, that was a different generation. Do they make sure like it was?

Yeah. You got a. You got to hide it now. Well, Elon's top, but he ain't, like, tough, tough. Like, Travis, Caledick, I think, was pretty. Franks Luteman is still like this. Yeah. And he's a giant breed, though.

Like we need more of these. Frank, my badge is not working to get into the office. You still got teeth, don't you? He's like, when you read that guy's book, you're like, all right.

Yeah, this would be a pretty hardcore boss to work under. Yeah. It's totally a lost art though. Like, yeah, I don't think they make them like that anymore, unfortunately.

Yeah. That's crazy. Before we go, do you guys have, have any half-baked business ideas? as you wanted to share with the My First Million audience because that's what they love.

Yeah, I would love to do it. So I've had one that I was, we were actually kicking around together Ben and me for a while but that we're not going to do, which is I think you could actually start a corporate podcast agency. So an agency for companies

to make their own podcast. Internal podcasts or external? Either one. And my, thesis on this is that for companies there is tremendous value to having a podcast

even if nobody listens. If people listen like upside. And basically you should just assume no one will listen because we have like, there's so many great options. Why would I listen to a company's podcast? Right. But it is an excuse to have relationship building

conversations with customers and prospects. Sales and biz dev basically. Yeah. And it's sales enablement. Like once you have a conversation, you have it recorded, you publish it publicly. Even if there's no organic audience, you can still link to that and you can send it to customers as like a lead nurturing thing of, oh, somebody else was in this position too. And they talked about why our product made their life better. Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like sales score should have its own podcast. Yeah. What do they charge for that? What do people charge for that? I know Ben, Ben, Ben Wilson used to look, work at a, is it mission.org, Ben?

or no, it's Caspian, Caspian Studios. And I think they do that for like Snowflicking. Like how does this idea work or not really? What's the verdict on this one? Yes, it works. Yes, the customers are extremely price insensitive. So it's good. The margins are super high.

We actually like combining the two things we just talked about, we made Snowflakes podcast and Frank Slutman was on it all the time. Oh, perfect. So it's a really good business. The one bad thing about it that's coming into effect right now is, when recessions hit, it's the first thing to go, right? It's just like the margins are super good when times are good, but then when times are not good. The email you're being like, hey, can you send me the last 30-day downloads numbers?

And you're like, delete, delete the whole podcast. Get rid of it. They're asking the question. It's exactly like that. Yes. Yeah. What else you got? What else interests are you at the moment?

Ben, you got any? Or at least, what deals are you seeing? Because you guys are investing. Are there any interesting deals that you're seeing or categories that you're seeing that you really like that don't start with the word AI? I mean, actually, no. And I think that's the, I think that is correct. Like, I am one of these people that believes that, uh,

saying AI, we invest in AI is a little bit of a silly thing these days because it's the same thing as 20 years ago saying we invest in software as a VC. It's like, yeah, no shit. Like, I, I think it's just going to be so quickly ubiquitous. that if companies aren't using AI in some capacity, you're starting to get a little bit like... What's a cool AI use case or company that you've seen and invested in or want to invest in, whatever?

Well, and by the way, I think Sean met with James Currier recently, and I think it was James on Twitter, or maybe Sean used told us, you go, I've been pitched by 200 AI companies in the last quarter and I've invested in none because they're all weak or something like that. I haven't, it's interesting. I haven't invested in any either. Or I haven't invested, lots of companies I've invested in have added AI stuff to their products,

but I haven't invested in some net new AI company, in part because I don't think AI is going to be the differentiation. And I don't think it's going to be defensible for the vast majority of companies. I think the value is going to come from and the moat is going to come from the same thing that always creates value and moats, which is like network effects with your customers or like a data mode where someone's already fully locked into your thing and so they don't want to migrate because that would suck and they have processes around using your thing.

And so I sort of, like I believe that an enormous amount of the value from AI will accrue to these foundational models but you actually do have to be using the foundational models in your thing in order to be like table stakes in the next few years because everybody's going to expect all software to just behave magically.

Right. Do you think, and this will be the last question for me, do you think that there's a world where you're going to sell acquired or do one of these Spotify deals or anything like that? Have you been approached? Good question. Yes, but not in like a not in, not recently and not.

in a way that like not since we've become a real business what could you get for it you think like we know call our daddy i think we try to give him five million bucks what they said no i got quivvy oh wow we would say no that we would for sure say no to that um i don't like if uh we could talk about like i i don't uh i would not be interested in having any conversations for, you know, less than, on the order of like what you go, like the hustle or morning brew or, you know, stuff like that. Tens of millions.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just think like the value of what we've built, both as a business and revenue and our audience and our durability is, you know, is in that category. I think it's very much an open question. Like, it's gotten so much bigger than we ever imagined. How much farther can it go?

Right. I'm curious how you guys think about this, too. Would we trust our own underwriting more than an acquirer's underwriting? Because what has happened for us is it has doubled every single year for eight years, basically no matter what we do. Like, we can't make it grow faster or slower than that. We've got a great business. It's running to business here. It's still doubles.

Right. Yeah. It's cash generative. Well, have you guys built any businesses off the back of it? So that's, we. Oh, you think it'd glow, David? No, I'm thinking, can you? garden. So I have a fund on Angel'sist. I manage about $30 million of capital on Angelus between

two funds and four or five SPVs. And while I used to be a professional VC before going full-time on Acquired, and that certainly helps. All of that's because of acquired. And you, so you did that fund. Anything else that you guys have done that you've launched off the back of it because what we found was that a podcast, like you said, it's very hard to make it grow faster than it's kind of like natural word of mouth, virality, interest and like kind of the tam of that market.

Like the Andrew Huberman's are rare. Normally it's a grind. Yeah. And even him, I don't think you can make it grow much faster or slower. Just like good execution is obviously the only thing you control, but like a lot of people can do good execution and their growth rate will be easier,

you know, somewhat. linear. You know, it's not going to like get much fat. The slope doesn't change that much. Do you, but the thing that I think what we found was that you could build businesses off the back of this audience, whether it's a fund or other products or services that can be more valuable than the ad revenue of the podcast itself. Do you guys do that or think about that? Like Sean, well, Sean mentioned a company and they're like, oh, we just did a million in revenue. And it's like, oh, well, I gave a company a plug that I invested in. I was like, hey, I use it for this reason, blah, blah.

I was like, you know, an ad, basically, but it wasn't meant to be an ad. I was just explaining how I use this thing. And they booked a million dollars of ARR off of that, which was, I pretty crazy. Yeah. So that happens to us all the time, which is why all of our sponsor deals

are these like six figure very meaningful. And long term, we do these six-month sponsorships. And most of our sponsors are now, you know, three, four, five seasons. And like, it works. And so the question is, is it more, is the right mode for us to operate in keep doing these big, deep sponsorship deals with companies for cash? Or do we try to start companies or find some company that's at an inflection point and say, you know, let's trade equity or I think we're pretty early in the thinking there because we're like, you know, we would have to, it would have to be really the right type. of company that is a high LTV B2B SaaS business that's reaching founders and, you know,

CEOs and technical founders. And that would have to be the audience. Like, I don't think we're going to launch an energy drink brand and have that make, have that kind of pencil. But I don't know. We're open to the possibility. I think there's also for us, I'm curious how you guys think about it because you are getting into this game.

I at least, I don't want to speak for Ben. I don't want to run a company. I want to tell stories and invest. So I don't really want to build products or manage teams. So I think it's likely that we'll continue going that route. I don't know. Ben has experience actually building things. So he may feel differently.

This lets us benefit from the upside of companies using Acquired as Channel without us have to be involved in the muck of building that company. And maybe at some point that our desire will change there. But how do you guys? I mean, you guys have built companies. you guys are building products. Like how do you think about this? I've thought about it both ways. Like I'm like you a little bit where I have the most fun when I get to just tell,

you know, tell stories, nerd out about stuff, go learn new things and then come back with like, I want to go down rabbit holes and then take that most interesting, you know, one percent of things that I found and share it on this podcast or on my newsletter. And that's what I like to do. That's the sort of highest enjoyment. But I also love money. And so I'm like, okay, cool. And I also like, the thing I study is,

about how people make money and business and create wealth. And so I can't help myself, but like apply some of the things that I learned, right? Like it's very hard to resist the urge to apply the things that you know once you know them. Yeah. And, but then you got to go recruit a team.

Yeah. So I basically played with every form you could do. So I invest both in startups as well as like cash flowing businesses. Like I'll buy, you know, 20, 30% of a cash flowing business that I think I can help through the audience or, or just through like, you know, being an entrepreneur for 15 years and like learning a bunch of stuff. The second thing would be starting a business.

So I started the milk road off of the podcast. I think the podcast helped us get the ball rolling there. And then, you know, I've launched courses or things like that. That just are ways to take the curiosity and say, oh, I learned a bunch of stuff. Could I teach it? And then and I also thought about, you know, so buying businesses, investing in startups, doing, building a startup on my own or not doing any of them, not being operational. at all. I've played with kind of all of them over the past three years in different ways.

Like we sold the Milk Road in part because, okay, that business is working and we got a great offer, but the best part of the offer was, oh, I don't have to operate any business anymore. If I do this, that's appealing to me. Whereas Sam just launched Hampton last week or I think it was last week. We can't. I saw. Congratulations. I feel like you don't have to do sales for the next year based off of like, you know, the, the blitz that you were able to drum up across pod, Twitter, everywhere that you tried to do, right? Like, I mean, you could talk a little more about that, but it seems like you crushed your demand side.

Yeah, so basically in 2022 and 21, I was inspired by Sean. I was like, all right, fine, I'll invest a little while. And so I gave it like a six to 12 month try. And I was like, I hate investing. I totally dislike it. I think maybe I could be pretty good at it. but it's not for me. I don't like taking a minority interest in things.

I personally like owning all of something. And I think of myself a little bit as an artist sometimes with these companies. Like, it's like my, I like to be creative. And that's kind of how I like to express myself. So I prefer that with. And so that's why I launched Tampton was because I was like, this fits my interest. I have a competitive advantage here.

And so when I announced it on the pod, we now have 5,000 people who applied. And we're like, And it costs $8,500 a year to join. And we're being very meticulous and very slow about who we're adding. But that's very likely going to be a very, very large company, I think. We have a CEO, Jordan, who's amazing. But we're not taking any outside capital.

And I prefer, Sean likes to do lots of things. And I know a lot of people like to do that, lots of things. And I know a lot of people who succeed really nicely with that. Me personally, I prefer focus and just doing one thing at a time because I don't, Just my brain, it's really challenging for me to jump from thing to thing, a thing, a thing. Like, an investor needs to. And so I prefer, like, spending five, 10 years on something. And so I intend to start a company, maybe another one in a handful of years, I'm not sure, rather than investing.

I actually think that Sean's way of, like, doing cash flow businesses and owning a portion of them, that's actually the easier way, I think, to make wealth. I just don't find enjoyment on it. I'm a dopamine fiend. and seeing sales come in and making decisions, I get like, it's my alcohol. I like it drunk off of that. How do you think about the business of the pod of my first million?

So the podcast is owned by HubSpot, and we get paid strictly a performance fee. And so when it kicks ass, which it has, we get paid good money as if we have had advertisers. Yeah. And so, but HubSpot's been great. Like, not one time have they ever censored us or said, hey, you made a bad joke. Don't say that. And so it's been pretty good.

There's definitely, I wouldn't say complicated, but it's a new relationship that we're definitely trying to figure out of like what to do. Because frankly, HubSpot's an awesome partner. But at the same time, if Sean and I bounce, they don't have shit. Right. So I think we're both, both sides of that, of that are trying to understand what we can do and how far we can push things. And we're definitely still figuring that out. There are, you have some, and there probably are potentially more monetization options for the pod, right? Like, how does that revenue get split up? Like YouTube ads.

We just don't. We turned off YouTube ads. We can't, like, if somebody wants to sponsor it, we don't, right? So, like, we leave a lot of money on the table in that regard. But you get other benefits, right? So you got to, like, kind of wait those out over time and be like, right? So, yeah, like the benefit, the benefits that we have are basically, we don't. don't do any of the work. So we record and then it goes on the internet. That's a pro and a con

because if we don't like how it's done, then it's like, shit, we don't like that. Let's fix it. But as long as it's working well, it's awesome. We get paid without having to have any expenses. But then the flip side is, shit, we have all these, this advertiser interest and we know it works really well. Let's take more deals. And so I think there's a, there's a world where we do actually come to a compromise and we have more ads. But that's like it's a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Is there. Is there attention at all with you guys wanting to use the pod to do stuff that generates value for yourself that doesn't accrue back to the MFM pod? Like you launching businesses off it or is that all great?

No, they're great with that. And any revenue outside of the pod is 100% ours, events, merch, whatever. But like, let's say that they're like, we're hiring a producer now because Ben's going to go full time on his new thing. Let's say, let's, yeah, congratulations of Ben. let's say that they're moving slow. It's like, hey guys, HubSpot, hurry the hell up. You know, you're going way too slow. I've got five friends right now who get higher.

And so, like, there's tension there for things like that. Yeah. Well, probably all the business activity, all the stuff you guys are launching outside of the pod just brings attention back to the pod. Right? So, like, it also brings credibility, right? Because how many people do you see on YouTube or TikTok or Twitter, wherever that are like, you know, basically these business gurus or like, you know,

advice guys. Right. And you hear the advice guys and you like click their bio and you're like, so what are you done? What do you do? Oh, your career is giving advice. Okay. But where did you get that firsthand knowledge?

Do you have any battle scars? Like, oh, no, you're, you know, you're the bald barber. Oh, great. Like, you know, I'm not sure that I want. I'm not sure that I want that. Right. So, so I think that's also helpful, right? Because if like, bald barber, by the way, chef's kiss.

Oh, thank you. Good job. I'm practicing my improv on the fly. I decided to take a few more. risks of like, just tee up that I'm going to make the joke and see if my brain in that point five seconds could come up with something. And if I fall flat,

you know, two out of three times, that's okay. That's still one, one that I got right. Even a blind squirrel finds it not my friend. You're doing great. Exactly.

So, yeah, basically I think it gives credibility, right? Like during the pod, um, you know, I built the milk road and sold it during like while the pod was live.

So that adds some credibility. During the pod, Sam launches Hampton. it's clearly going to be successful, we're already off to a successful start. It gives the pod credibility. And I think that's why, like, why does All In work really well?

Like, obviously, they have good banter. They have good things to say. But I think a big part of it is, like, they bring a certain gravity to the room. They're participating in the story, yes, it's unfollow. Yeah, like, the easiest way I explain it was all in is billionaires talking about billionaire shit. And my first millionaire,

my first million is millionaires talking about millionaire shit. And I've heard people, like, college kids come out, be like, we're broke guys talking about broke guy shit. And it's like, all right. Fantastic. That's the way to go. But I think it adds credibility because there's a lot of people out there who will create content, tell you about the next big thing.

But they don't invest. They don't have skin in the game. They don't know actually what's going on. Or they tell you, you know, how to be successful and they're, you know, broken depressed. So it's like, you've got to be careful with who you listen to. It's like, I'd rather listen to somebody who's done it before than somebody who hasn't. It's just as simple as that. Yep.

Yeah. which that, I think, is the whole unlock of podcasting that, like, is a problem with the traditional media industry. Like, one of the, it wasn't explicitly in my our minds when we started acquired, but like, I'd gone to business school. I went to Stanford. I did my MBA there. It was a great experience. But, like, the classroom experience, like the professors, not the guests who had come in who had done stuff, but like the professors. who are full-time academics.

And then the cases that we would do just be like, you guys didn't do this shit? Like, why are you telling me about this? Like, I want to hear from the people who did it. Or the journalists that cover the tech industry, it's like, how many people going from being successful founders to entering the journalism industry and writing for a paper? Like zero.

Like Michael Morowitz, by the way. Michael Morowitz, you know, Doug Leone's partner. Moritz, yeah. Sorry, Moritz. He, journalists turned billionaire. And like those always always. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

Those, you know, journalists to VC. Once I went. But the reverse pipeline doesn't exist. So like, I always have to remind myself of this when I'm reading tech coverage. I'm like, okay, the very best ones of these people have immersed themselves in the operator-founder communities to be able to like pick up the Genesequa and read between the lines of what certain things mean. Like Dan Primac is one of these types of people. But, you know, a junior. journalists coming out of journalism school writing and picking up this beat. It's like,

it's hard to say that that's a better way to learn what's going on than listening to people who are industry participants talking about what's going on. I remember once I went to a journalist, somebody who worked at TechCrunch, I went to their apartment in San Francisco. And I just walked in and I looked around and I was like, this is the same apartment as like everybody I know right out of college has. And I was like, and then they have this pen. And then they write on TechCrunch. And then it looks like very different.

But like this is a person who's just a normal, they're a normal person who this is kind like their first gig and they're covering something that they barely like really true. Honestly, they barely understand. That doesn't mean they're not smart. Doesn't mean they don't have good intentions. But like it's that thing where I forget the name of it, but it's like if you read an article about a topic you actually know about. in the newspaper, you're like, oh, this is, oh, okay, I see the limitations of how much stock

I should put into this. But when you read about a topic, you don't know, you're like, this is the truth. Oh, the New York Times is an expert. And it's like, there is a probably also not an expert or something. It's like what it's called. Do you guys remember a few years ago when one of the, I think her name was Jen or something like that, one of the founders of away travel, like there was all these headlines saying like, this woman created a toxic workplace that's horrible. got to get and I was like oh this is a juicy story let's dig in where's the fraud I love and you read the you read the slack messages

that they're publishing and you're like yeah she's running a startup so someone like packed like she like opened up a package and it was horribly done and she said if this keeps or what does she say she goes I'm just going to have to pack these boxes myself because whoever's running this must be brain dead

and I was like okay cool let's scroll where's the good stuff and they're like that's the thing she said the word brain dead I'm like that's the toxic work environment. Like, come on. Give me a break. That ain't nice, but that's not New York Times headline shit. Give me a break. Like, I want to see some. She's not fired for that, right? Something like that. She bounced because of that. I'm like, that's it. She said brain dead.

It was the other woman. Yeah, I forget what her name was. But like, I read that article. I'm like, there's no fraud. Like she didn't, you know, like there's no alcohol involved. What's going on? Give me something good. I want cocaine and hookers. I don't want brain dead. You know what I'm saying? At least like, this is why there's so much value to like what you guys are doing that you're building businesses and talking about them that like we're investing. Ben's a full-time VCI used to be like, we know what's going on in a way that if you're just a journalist, like you can't. It's structurally impossible. Well, podcasts actually have more people from the field that come in and do it because a podcast is easier. You're talking.

You're not writing. There's no barrier. You don't have to like edit and like, you know, make a cool fancy TikTok thing. You don't have to like layer in filters and stuff. It's just you sit down on you talk. That's why you see like Reid Hoffman, we'll do a podcast. The straight up audio medium. Yeah, just like straight audio or even audio with the webcam.

Like, you know, now I think that's getting a little bit easier. But basically the podcast format, I think there's a reason why you see so many like ex-athletes do this. Like, you know, the same thing. Like you have Skip Bayliss who will just go say how this person is, they don't have the clutch gene. It's like, bro, it's not a gene. You know, they, you know, and he'll just like, they'll make fun of people. And then you have JJ Redick, who's an ex-player who's retired. So good.

All man of the three. So, so. He's phenomenal at content. His and his point of view is so much better than there's. And that's why his stock is going up. Like his views are just going up into the right because he's good at this. He pulls real guests. When he pulls real guests, they talk like they don't talk like they're talking to a reporter because they played with JJ or they played against him.

So they actually open up about stuff. But he's also not trying to trap him in these gotcha questions. So there's like some mutual trust there. And then he'll just share like, you know, when you're a player on the road, like, you know, this is the situation. Fans think you're practicing and blah, blah, blah, but actually here's what happens when you go in. He's just saying what's really going on. And so to me, when you see that,

and again, it's because podcasting is a lot easier. If you told them, hey, I need you to write like beautiful, well-written blog posts every other day. It'd be very hard to do. But for him to just, oh, something happened, get on the microphone, give my point of view, they could do it. So, like, you get more credible experts in podcasting than I think on any other,

like, medium. This is probably actually a good use of, is being able to turn the ramblings of people who are industry participants. You run that transcript through and you say, write this as if it was a New York Times article with a strong lead and this many words. It is amazing how I feel like I've transformed in my use of GPT over the last month, where I was using it to try to answer questions, which it's fine at. But of course, that's the first thing you're going to do with a prompt.

But my use case recently has been take lots of stuff and feed it in as the prompt and then ask it to make it better. So like I wrote a LinkedIn post about our most recent acquired episode and I fed it. I've just pasted the whole thing into chat GPT. I was like, can you make this like more exciting and can you make this more likely to go viral? Is that literally all you said? So you basically copy and paste it 500 words. You said here's a LinkedIn post I wrote, make it more exciting. Let me see exactly what the prompt was. So I don't BS on the pod here. Okay. No one can check. Say I. can you please act as my editor and modify this to make it more likely to go viral as a LinkedIn post?

That's so funny. And it indexed way in the other direction. Like it went full of emojis. And you're like, chill the fuck out. Open it eyes. Big capital letters. Discover the secrets. Like a lot of like.

And so I had to tone it down. But I totally used that. And it helped me rephrase a lot of things where I had like awkward phrasing that didn't flow well. It's a very good rewriter. Yeah. That's awesome. I'm going to start doing that. Well, guys, you're awesome, man.

It's a blast. Thank you for coming on. If you're listed to R-Pod, go check out Acquired. If you're listening on Acquired, do as we call it. Should we teach him the gentleman's agreement, Sam? Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the ladies' understanding, right? I feel like the gentleman's agreement and the ladies' understanding has become like,

you know, in wrestling when the rock would take the microphone, he'd raise the people's eyebrow. And you know he's going to hit him with, like, the expected thing. But for some reason, you get excited just to hear him say it. Sam, that's how I feel now with your, this is your catchphrase. Go ahead. This is the gentleman's agreement. And so basically the way it works is, look, you're going to 7-11. You're going to go buy gas, whatever you are. And at the top, when you're about to pay, you see a little jar, and it's for muscle justice fee. And there's all that money in there. And, of course, you don't take that money. You leave a dollar there. No one's going to stop you,

by the way, if you took that money. But that's basically what this podcast is. This podcast is free. us four we just dedicated hours of our of our day to do this but unlike every other podcast this one's not free just like that jar you got to leave a dollar meaning you got to go and subscribe to acquired's podcast on spotify as well as iTunes and do the same with my first million on our YouTube page and you click you click subscribe it's called the gentleman's agreement because we're not there all right we're just shaking our hands ladies what is it called the ladies understanding the gentleman's agreement we're not there to help you guys out it's just honesty so everyone's doing it. Don't be left out. You have to do this. That's our, that's our agreement.

We create the content. You click subscribe. I love it. You guys are innovating. And there's real value. Like it's not, you know, for our audience, if you go and subscribe to my first million, you're going to get smarter. You're going to get more ideas. Like, this benefits you. So it's not, you know, you're not just pulling money out of your wallet here. You're doing something that's going to make your life more fun. And that's the gentleman's agreement and that's the lady's understanding. David, you want to take us home? What were you saying? Oh, I was going to ask, I could keep jamming with you guys for another hour. I was going to ask you said Spotify.

Do you like, where do you like people to subscribe? Spotify, YouTube. You said that. Well, you said earlier that Spotify is your main thing. So once we started doing the gentleman's agreement, our YouTube channel went through the roof. So we went from like 150,000 subscribers to cost to 200 in like a month or eight weeks or something like that. We should do a every pod giveaway of YouTube premium to someone in the comments. So go to our YouTube

Go to this episode on YouTube And just type in Premium And we will pick somebody We will pay for your YouTube premium So that you can listen to this pod ad Ad free in the background You can lock your phone and walk around

And you can enjoy that sweet sweet 1499 a month That we're going to be paying for you for the year So one year of YouTube premium In every episode Call it now Oh, I love it That is brilliant

A reminder to go comment because I am a YouTube premium subscriber, but I want you guys to put the bill. Well, thanks for doing this, guys. We appreciate you. And we'll have you back on. And thank you for everything. Likewise.

See you guys. Catch you guys next time.