My First Million - The Reddit Revolt, Turpentine, & Shaan's Latest Business Venture

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

* Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ * Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant Episode 464: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about the Reddit revolt, the Turpentine network of business and technology podcasts, and how Shaan invested his Milk Road money. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That ----- Show Notes: (00:50) - Reddit Revolt (30:00) - Turpentine (41:15) - What Shaan did with his Milk Road money (47:00) - Shaan’s newest acquisition ------ Links: * Reddark * Spezless * Turpentine * Aging Media Network * Shepherd * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ 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 that was the other thing that sparked drama. Now you got leaked phone calls. You got the CEO calling a guy crazy. He said, she said. And so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing. As the thing on Reddit, small things could turn into big things. That's like part of the beauty of Reddit. And that's what was happening here.

Dude. First of all, your energy is getting me sight. This is a great story. Well, just wait because I have a little more for you here. All right? Ready? This is the part. That's the background. Okay. Now let me give you some foreground, right? Let me give you a little future play here. Some foreplay?

Let me give you a little foreplay. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road. We're here. Dude, have you seen this Reddit revolt that's happening? Are you aware of this? I am aware of it. And is it going to matter? Really? So basically what happened is there's this app called Apollo, right? Apollo? Yep. Here's kind of the, I would say, the zoomed out version of the story. So what's happening today is if you go to Reddit right now, the whole site is down.

So they broke all of Reddit. What they were trying to do was just a bunch of subreddit. So these communities on Reddit were trying to protest some new Reddit policies. So it started with a few of them that said, you know what? We disagree with this policy. change that's going on, you know, we're going to do this 48-hour blackout. We're going to go private. We're going to go dark.

And they called it Reddit. This subredits going dark. And more and more started joining to the point where 7,000 subreddits, including some of the biggest ones on there, like R-slash funny and R-slash-picks and stuff like that. And I believe that's 30% of Reddit. That's what I read. Yeah. It's basically, it's a huge amount.

Like, you know, there's this couple of cool websites that you can go to. In fact, we should go to one of them right now. So go to this site. So it's reddark. So reddark.untone.uk. Very strange site, but you can see in real time, this thing's almost like this tool is even almost broken because so many are going dark at the same time. And Ben, if you can share your screen. So it says 7,240 out of 7,806.

That's like 90% or something. 740 out of 7806, 93% of subreddits have gone dark, which is just an insane number. And if you do it, if you click the large thing, there's like a live feed, it'll be like, Animals with Jobs has just gone private, 5,000 members. Music hoarder has gone private, 5,000 members. Krusty Windows has gone private.

And you just see like in real time. And I've been watching this since yesterday. It's crazy. When I opened this up yesterday, it was at 2000. And now it's basically all of them. It's 7,000 out of 7,200 out of 7,800. So almost every subreddit has decided to join this protest. And so you say, well, what's the policy?

What's so bad? And what happened is Reddit wants to IPO. So Reddit wants to go public in the future. Reddit is not currently profitable. They make about, I don't know, somewhere between $400,500 million a year, roughly. And they're still not profitable. and these apps that other people had made, called third-party apps,

were just used to, like, you could browse Reddit and they built, like, special features into them that made them maybe easier to use for certain types of people, power users or moderators, things like that.

So that's why people loved Apollo is because they had some power user features that were great for moderators. And the Reddit made the mistake of not, they thought they were picking on Apollo, but in fact, they were pissing off moderators. And that was a really,

really big issue. I'll tell you why in a second. So Reddit goes and says, hey, look, we can't keep giving these third-party apps full access to Reddit. This has a couple problems. First, they're hitting our servers with a bunch of requests. That costs us, what the CEO said was tens of millions per year in server requests. The second thing is those server requests are now serving Reddit content onto someone else's app. So that person could monetize their app and Reddit doesn't get a piece of that.

So they were like, all right, we want to cut costs, we want to increase revenue. and they had a third problem, which was they didn't want their data going to all these different places because basically OpenAI and ChatGPT had the scraped Reddit. Reddit was like one of the key sources to make ChatGPT so good. And Reddit kind of was asleep when they did the first scrape. But now they're like, oh, no, no, no, no. If any other AI company wants our data,

you're going to pay us a huge amount of money for it. So to do that, they needed to basically paywall the data. They needed the data only to live inside their own walls. So they up their API pricing. They basically said, server request you do, it's now going to be whatever, 10 cents and a fake number. But the result was that a app like Apollo, which is made by this, basically this one dude who made it, you know, as a passion project out of college, he would have to pay 20 something million dollars a year just to

maintain Apollo. And so he's like, dude, that's unfeasible. He's like, I have 50,000 paying users. They pay me 10 bucks a year. So he's like, I make 500K on this. Now I have to, my costs are going to, in 30 days, my costs are going to go to two million a month. And he's like, that obviously kills my app. And it kills not just my app, all of all the third-party apps. And Reddit's answer was basically like, shrug? Like, you know, all right, well, sucks to be you. And then the way that they kind of responded.

Well, so wait, hold on. I want to ask you a question about how the word got out. But first, we had to get background here, which is even though, so I just looked it up, Reddit is like the ninth most popular website in America. And even it's like, you know, it's like when someone says, No one who knows says they use it. Well, it's like, you know, no one goes to that restaurant anymore. It's too crowded.

It's kind of like that. So Reddit is basically a, I don't even know how to describe, but basically 100,000 plus forums all on one website. And the reason why this matters is because each forum, which is called a subreddit, and there's basically a subreddit on any topic you can ever imagine. In most viral news in America or viral memes, start at Reddit.

And it's subreddits are forums that are owned by volunteers. So someone comes up with one and they create it. And then they run it. And then they run it. And I didn't realize how much autonomy they are giving. And the reason why this is important is now like this has happened before. Apparently Reddit fired one woman named Victoria like eight years ago. And she was a community moderator and everyone loved her.

And so all these other subreddit forum leaders like did the same thing. But where they shut it down a little bit. Now, by the way, the result of that was the CEO got fired. They got two, back then, they got 200,000 people to sign a petition saying Ellen Powell needs to get fired. And so she stepped down like, I don't know, a week later or days later after that happened. So they, you know, they do wield a lot of power. They yield a ton of power. So, but here's what's crazy.

A, Reddit doesn't make that much money for how large it is. It's, if you look at the top 30 websites in America, I bet you, I don't know. research us, but I would make a bet that it's on the very, very low end of revenue or even value created per user. Per user. And part of it's because people are anonymous and Redditors are typically horrible with clicking ads and things like that. And the other part of it is that they're kind in a weird way. This guy, Steve Huffman and Alexis O'Henny, and they created this company, Reddit, and it's amazing. And their users own the platform a little bit. And that's what we're seeing here, is these people basically set their channels or set their subredits to private so you can't access

them. So that's what's happening. My question to you is, when this guy will call him Apollo, when Apollo guy announced that he was going to shut down his app, how did he get word out that it happened? And how did all these people rally around this? Well, again, the people that use his app were power users. And so when he said, hey, guys, you know, here's what's going on. And it actually happened in multiple steps. So the reason this got so much heat is because it happened in multiple stages. He said, they announced that they were going to update their pricing. He's like, hey, we're going have to keep an eye out for this, but I'm optimistic. Like, I'm sure Reddit's not going to, they're not going to, like, just do something

that doesn't make any sense. And Reddit's like, for sure, for sure. We're obviously going to take this and take everybody's needs into account. But we will have to update the pricing. And he's like, you know what? That's reasonable. I can't wait to hear back what you guys have in mind. That was like post one.

And he shared that. But where do you share that? He shared it on subreddit, on Reddit, and maybe in the Apollo subreddit plus some others. And so, like the mods subreddit. Because, again, a lot of moderators like Apollo, because it helps them do their job faster. Because these guys Do subreddit owners

make money? No, they make nothing. So Reddit has this huge fleet like of the moderators that are in the dark one

I think right now, there's 28 million moderators, I think that was the number that are that are like participating in this. Some insane number.

Let me see. I had a subreddit. It was called like apartment hacks and I was like trying to get people and it very quickly got like a thousand people

but I quit working on it. Sorry, I got the number on 28,000 moderators on the 7,000 and subreddits that are participating in the blackout, basically. So these moderators, basically, they're constantly fighting spam. So when you have a site that's as popular as Reddit,

there's a huge amount of people that are trying to get you to buy their crap, that are trying to get you to subscribe to their only fans, that are trying to get you to click this link and install this virus, or just doing clickbait, like just making it where they post something super outrageous just to get clicks and engagement, upvotes, and a big battle in the comments. but then it kind of turns off people who were there for like, you know, they wanted the entertainment without it getting ruined,

without the party getting ruined. And so the moderators were the people that were keeping this house party working, where it's like, yeah, we want people to come here and have fun. But no, dude, you can't bring 17 kegs in here. No, you can't just come here and flyer your own party inside my house. Like, no, no, you can't do all that crap. And they're fighting this constantly. And they do it as a giant unpaid thing.

Now, what they pointed out during this protest very reasonably was that Dude, Reddit is one of the only networks that's all run by unpaid volunteer moderators. So, for example, Facebook has a huge moderation program. They spent about $200 or $300 million a year just on content moderation. Twitter spends a bunch of money in content moderation. And so content moderation can be a very big cost center. And so the moderators are like, hey, you're trying to save $10 million by shutting off these third-party apps? Have you thought about what happens when we stopped doing all this free work?

And like now you have to pay for content moderation or this whole site goes to shit. Like, what's going to happen then? Maybe you should listen to us. And so that's the, that's where this has escalated to. But just to finish the story. So he goes, he says up front, okay, Reddit announces change. It's going to affect us. But hopefully it's all good.

And some people in the comments are like, dude, you're being naive. These corporations are like just like Twitter killed all the third party clients. Reddit's going to do the same. These guys want to go public. They're going to want to own all. they're going to want to own the user experience for all users of Reddit they're going to kill you. And he's like, no, no, no, no.

They said, like, you know, they said they're going to be fair. A couple months later it comes out and they're like, here's the pricing. It kills you. And it takes into effect in 30 days. And he's like, what? Like, first of all, ridiculous pricing. Second of all, 30 days.

Like, I couldn't possibly try to like change my app to maybe make less request to your server or like, I couldn't do anything in 30 days. Like, you're just going to kill my whole business. And I took yearly. subscription. So I'm not only in my app going to die, I'm going to refund like 250K to people who paid for a year subscription because my app's no longer going to work. So he was at a world of trouble. So he contacts Reddit and he does a call with the team from Reddit and he records the call. And after the call, they come out. You can, you're allowed to do that in some states,

but not in every state. Did he do it the right way? Do it in Neckbeard Nation? It's all good. Maybe it's all legal. You're the little guy fighting the big guy. You can do whatever you want. And so he, at first, he doesn't do anything with it. Then Reddit comes out and says, this guy's crazy. He's making outlandish claims. He tried to extort us for, he asked for $10 million in order to like keep supporting the app. We can't do business with this crazy guy.

And they basically like kind of like just, you know, slandered him a little bit. And he's like, what do you talk about? That's not what I said? And what did I say? That was so outrageous. And he's like, here's the recording. People can listen to it themselves and decide. Oh, man.

Did you listen to it? I haven't listened to the whole thing, but there's a part in there where he's like, look, like, okay. Did he sound reasonable? Yeah, he sounds reasonable. And he's basically like, look, you know, obviously I'd love to just keep going independent. But you guys are saying it's too expensive if you want to raise pricing.

That makes it untenable for me. But people like this app and they're going to be upset when this app goes down. He's like, you know, you guys bought Alien Blue back in the day and you made that the Reddit app. Like, have you considered just buying this app so that you can, like, you don't have to pay for all these. It's not some external part. you that owns it. You guys could own it. But at least it lives on and like it's a win-win solution potentially for all of us. And so he was like, you know, um, he said something like you're saying this costs you, this will cost me 20 million a year. You're saying this cost you tens of millions a

year. Like you could buy the whole thing for 10 million dollars and that's, you know, six months of my operating costs and, you know, like, it could work out that way. And, um, Steve Huffman on the call is like, look like, I don't, I don't appreciate the threat type of thing. He says something about like, that's a threat. And he goes, What's a threat? What do you mean? Because the guy said something like he goes, you know,

if you don't want all this noise about this, like you could just do this. And he kind of took it as a threat like, oh, you're threatening, you're going to make a bunch of noise. If we don't pay you $10 million. He goes,

no, no, no, I'm saying, um, we have like that you're saying I'm making too many API calls. So if you don't want all this server noise for the API request, you could just own it and just use your internal systems to do it instead.

And he's like, oh, Like, okay, my bad. I didn't realize you're talking about API requests. Like, I apologize. I didn't mean to, like, say that you were threatening us. And he was like, okay, no problem. Like, I just want to, like, glad we're clear on that.

Then later he comes out and says he threatened us. He's like, dude, even on the call, you apologize saying, saying, sorry, I misunderstood you. And then you took that out of context and tried to make me sound like a guy who's trying to profit out of this. Or like trying to make unreasonable requests. So anyways, that caught. So that was the other thing that sparked drama. Now you got leaked phone calls. you got the CEO calling a guy crazy.

He said, she said. And so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing. As the thing on Reddit, small things could turn into big things. That's like part of the beauty of Reddit. And that's what was happening here. Dude, first of all, your energy is getting me sight. This is a great story. Well, just wait, because I have a little more for you here.

All right? This is the part. That's the background. Okay. Now let me give you some foreground. Right? Let me give you a little future play here. Some four play? Let me give you a little four play.

So Reddit may have forgot, but this is how Reddit started. So Reddit started because the popular forum site of the day, Dig, made this big update and everybody hated it. And Dig said, screw you guys, this is better. And they said, see ya. And they went to this little site called Reddit and Reddit blew up. And that's how Reddit became what it is, is that the dig fumbled the ball. release this anti, you know, this, this anti-user update.

And they were sticking it to the man. Yeah. They stuck it to the man. Well, who's to say that doesn't happen again? So I have a little proposal. Somebody should run with this idea. I bought this domain. And I think somebody should do this.

If no, you know, this is what I would do if I was a little, little younger and hungry than I am today. So here's what I think somebody should do. I think now is the perfect time. The younger you, the equally conniving, just a little bit more ambitious you. My T-levels were a little higher back then. I'm a mellowed-out dad now. My daughter paints my toenails.

I can't be doing all this kind of stuff. Yeah, if you woke up at 10 a.m. this morning and you wear a hoodie all the time. You know, this is for you. Netbeard Nation, this is the callout. But I did. Okay. So I want you to just check out this little website here. So, Sam, I don't know if you know what the CEO, Steve's handle is on Reddit.

Do you know what his username is? I used to. Yeah. If you said it, I would remember it. dark something? Spez. So SPES. SPEZ.

And so, I don't know, I just woke up this morning, 6 a.m. and I just looked at GoDaddy. And I just saw that spezzlis.com was available. I thought, huh, one cent for spezzlis.com. So I bought it. And I said, what's spezzless? I think it's Reddit without Spez. Would you like Reddit without Steve?

Well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a Reddit as very, very, very, very similar looking to this website, but with one difference. there's no steep there's no corporation that's gonna dude the tagline needs to be same same same but different

same same but different exactly right same but different exactly so here's then threw this up while we were talking because I gave him a rant this morning I was like dude here's what someone

should do it I think he just bought he told me right before we went on there he goes I'm gonna buy the domain I'm gonna put it up so he goes it says I love Reddit

I just don't like don't like Spazz so I'm gonna create a new Reddit it's called Spezless it's Reddit without Steve here's the master plan he'll be very very very very similar website to Reddit.

It's going to be a nonprofit. And any revenue that it makes will get funneled back into the communities or moderators. Because this blackout, like this 48-hour protest that they said, it's cool. It's going to get headlines. But Reddit really doesn't care. They're going to lose about $3 million by being down for two days. And then they're just going to move on with life. And the protesters made a big error, which is they said how long they would protest for.

They said, the pain will stop at 48 hours. So all Reddit has to do is just ignore it for 48 hours. They're going to keep doing what they want. So when your, when your voice doesn't work, you got to exit. And here's a little, little exit boat for you. It's basically Reddit without the bullshit. And there's a little email sign of box. So if a million people sign up, then, who knows?

Maybe we can create something here. And so, you know, why do this as a nonprofit? Your voice is already rich. We don't need to, we don't need to make a profit on this. We just create this for fun because it's fun to see something burned down. I don't even have a problem with Steve Fuffin, by the way. I think he's, you know, it seems like a smart guy. I think he's fair in his opinion.

But also, this is the internet. And in the internet, you really got to know who you're pissed off. And I think he's pissed off too many people with this move. I can't believe that nobody's making the alternative to this. The people that are trying to make alternatives, they're all trying to do it so different. You don't want to do different. And he needs to look almost exactly the same. Change the shade of red by like two hex, you know, like little hex color over to the right.

And then it needs to be the same site with the same. structure. Everything is the same, except for who decides what happens, so how the money flows. And if you just change that, you could do this as a nonprofit thing, and I think it would be very entertaining. In lieu of your morning cup of coffee this morning, you had a cup of rage, and I, and I dig it. Dude, first of all, a few beautiful things. Neckbeard Nation. That was nice, right? That's our new. That's our fan base. So we hired this woman to help us with some T-shirts, if she's listening. Dude, this lady, by the way. Hilarious. hilarious thing you did.

So, listen to this, this woman, this woman sent me this beautiful, beautiful. What does she do? So you get something in the mail? I get this thing in the mail, and it's like this beautiful, like, 10 or 20-page outline. It's clever.

It says what she's going to do for us to make T-shirts. Is it beautiful? It looks like a giant PowerPoint deck that we just printed out because she knows, like, he might not click the links. Let me just print the PowerPoint out on white and black, you know, paper and just put it in an envelope for him. It's beautiful, like when you see,

like a neck beard guy doing very neck beard thing where you're like, I'm just happy this exists. This is a beautiful display. In that sense, it's a beautiful. It wasn't physically beautiful, but it was very, it was very clever. And she said, you can reach me at my first thought at gmail.com or something like that. Or you can DM, right? Yeah, THOT thought, which stands for that hoe over there. Or she said, you can just DM me on my first thought.

And so I talked to her and I was like, this is awesome. Let's do something. We'll work together. It worked. I email her with you on the line and I go, I think I said, dear thought. Or, dear thought. And she was like, great. I mean, by the way, you should look up what thought means.

And I was like, I know what it means. I thought that you, you said it first. Yeah, you said it first to me. That was your Twitter handle. I don't, I'm not trying to disrespect you. You said it. Not me. I'm just playing the game here.

You don't know. By the way, the funniest thing is you go, all right, thought, let's do this. Yes. And she was like, I don't think you know what thought means. Otherwise, you wouldn't have called me that. She goes, LMAO at being addressed as my first thought in your email, Urban Dictionary Below for your amusement. Yeah, and I immediately replied. I was like, I'm sorry.

I thought, I thought this was a schick. You're right. I'll call you your real name. My apologies. So we didn't get off to the doctor A great start right away. All right, thought, let's do this. So, dear thought, we're gonna.

This is why we only have four female listeners because of this type of behavior. I was trying to relate. I was trying to like show that I read. Yeah, it didn't work out well. Yeah, it's like when you hear someone call their friend, they're like, oh, Nikki, and you're like, what up, Nikki?

And they're like, it's Nicholas. And you're like, oh, okay, just because, He, Nicholas, got it. I was in L.A. this weekend, and I went to, like, the L.A. Tech Week thing. We went to this event, and there was, like, 300 people. And I'm not exaggerating. I had 30 people of, like, the 300 people come up to me and, like, say, like, hey, love MFM. I'm a total man.

And so two episodes ago or one episodes ago, Sean came up with this idea of this total man. We got a lot of flack for it. I don't know if you saw it, but people loved it in general. And I had literally 20 or 30 people, like in a row come up, be like, dude, I'm the total man. By the way, you're doing it wrong. It's not total man with like a space in between because then it's like, yo, I'm the total man.

It's, I'm a total man. It's like one word. It's like, it's a thing. You're a, it's a different type of noun. You got, you know, mammals. You got humans and you got total man. It's just like a separate species. Yeah, get rid of the space.

It's cleaner. I got you. Yeah, we're going to get rid of it. And so total man, that, that's a hit. I think neckbeard nation, with you being the mayor, I mean, you being the president, that's our new, that's the new thing. We did it. We got a new thing.

Yeah. Totally agree. Question, which side are you on? I think I'm team reddit on this one, but they screwed up. They shouldn't have done it this way in the first place. You know, they're a venture capital company. They've got hundreds of employees, probably thousands at this point. They fumbled the bag here.

on the PR press or PR front, which they did, but like letting this get out of hand the way it has in the first place. I mean, you've got to pay the bills. What are they doing? Letting people bill, build this stuff on their land. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah, I get where they're coming from.

I think they, like many tech companies, fumbled the communication and execution. But I'm also horrid at that. So, you know, I would have done this twice as bad if I was in their position. because I'm always like, I'm a very much rip the bandit off type of person and also like, because I'm very far on the spectrum of not easily offended, like it takes a lot to make me feel like mad or upset,

I severely underestimate how easily I can make other people mad or upset. And so I get their position. I think, you know, most likely, unless, unless Bezlus becomes a thing, they're just going to be like, cool, nice protest. We hear you. we'll take you into account in the future. Continue using Reddit.

You know, life will just go on and nothing bad will happen from this unless literally somebody seizes the narrative. That's the thing. There's a narrative right now and somebody could come in

and they could surf that momentum on the narrative. That's hard, though. We are the thing. That's hard. Uber had the same thing. Do you remember when it was trending delete Uber?

Like, I think these things come and go. Like this happened in the crypto world. Crypto world is like the most like ruthless. It's like just like night fighting in the streets. And so OpenC had some policy issue or some change. Do you remember what it was?

It was like fee change or something. Why did people get mad at OpenC when they... I forget what it was. They changed something. They changed something of royalties. Yeah, they changed like the royalty take rate or something. Worst podcasting etiquette ever to ask the guy in the room who's sitting like 10 feet behind you with no mic or headphones to ask in his opinion.

Have you seen Joe Rogan? If Joe Rogan does it, anyone can do it. So basically, OpenC, which was the big NFT marketplace, by far the dominant and 100% market share type of thing, change something in their policy. People didn't like it. And literally, like in like a 48-hour period, somebody spun up a competitor. They did what was called a vampire attack, which was they, in crypto, you could do this thing

where you could be like, okay, who are all the wallets that use OpenC? I can find them. They're all public. That I can air drop them tokens that say, if you come over to our platform and claim them, create your account here, you get free token. And people are like, token might be worse something. And so they just like, they basically like vampire tech, they just suck the blood out of one network to another.

And this happened several times in crypto where they've basically tried to do this. Now, it's not always 100% successful, but to go from you didn't even exist to like a million to two million users with like a shot at, hey, if you deliver a dope user experience, you know, this can work. You know, that's like better than nothing. And so in crypto, this has happened a couple times. A couple of the like defy tools have had this happen where. oh, we don't like your policy.

We're going to fork your source code, rename it. And we're going to incentivize all the major players on yours to come over here and get like a bonus token. If they come claim their thing here, which builds the momentum and the narrative. Well, I don't, I mean, like your energy, I don't know how to like one up you here. You know, like they say when you're like supposed to like meet people, you're supposed to match their energy. To like make them feel comfortable. I don't know what to say. I don't want to.

I feel like we're going to. a monster truck rally like Sunday Sunday Sunday. Like, your grave digger right now. I'm just in the stands trying to keep up with earplugs. You know what I mean? Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, that's so on point. How do you even remember or know that? That's like their radio ads, right?

Yeah. Monster jam. Have you been to a Monster Truck rally in the last 700 days? Is the Pope Catholic? Of course I have. Yeah, I've got to Monster Truck all the time. I've gone like five or six times. You backflips now.

I'm not going to go see a big-ass truck to go backflip. All right, let me talk to you about something that you actually are know more than me about, I think, because you're friends with them. Yeah. And then I want to talk about... That's a lot of stuff. Okay. And then I want to talk about the second thing about Milk Road and nothing. And we'll leave time for that.

So, turpentine. Is that what was called a turpeteen? I think time. Yeah. So basically, there's a guy named Eric Tornberg. He's been in the game for a while. He's just done a bunch of stuff on the internet, including founding a company called On Deck.

He launched this new thing called Turpentine. It was very nice. He gave us a little shout out. But basically, what I believe it to be is just a podcast network for business content, particularly some type of like startup-be related stuff. So there's like one on media. Yeah, tech.

There's one on media. I think there's one on FinTech, a few other things. And he announced it. Have you seen this? What am I missing here? I've seen this. So Eric Tornberg's behind this. Eric's awesome guy.

Did he talk to you about this before he did it? Because I feel like if I was going to do something like this, you're my phone a friend, right? No, he didn't talk to me. You're my phone a friend on that. I've never talked to him. Oh, you never talk. So you don't know each other that well. Okay, gotcha.

He's in our friend group, I guess. Okay, so I'm curious what your take is on this because I think you know a lot about this. I have a strong opinion, but I want you to explain it. I mean, I think you said it. Well, he's trying to create, like what I was. say the easiest analog is like the ringer. So the ringer was started by Bill Simmons. So kind of like famous notable guy in the sports journalism landscape.

Basically was like, I'm going to create a network of sports podcasts. I'll have my show. I have this guy do NBA. I'll have this guy do NFL. I have this guy do, you know, pop culture. I'll have this guy do, whatever. And so they created a network of podcasts, ended up selling it to Spotify for a few hundred million dollars, 200 something million dollars.

And really that was mostly because Bill had the number one sports podcast. And he's like very influential. And Spotify had a strategy. there. So Eric's trying to do that for tech. So he's like, how do I be the ringer? How do I be bar stool, but for the tech industry? Can I basically create like intellectual, entertaining, but also highly intellectual conversations about things that people care about in tech? And then he's looking for shows. So like basically, if we were, you know, not the badasses that we were, we could be like, hey, let's join Terpentine. We're going to get their back office. We're going to

get them helping us sell ads. We're going to get like, you know, help with production and we'll get cross-promoted amongst, you know, their network. It's very similar to like Workweek, which we've talked about on here before. Workweek's doing this kind of with like newsletters. And Turpentine is trying to do this with podcast plus newsletters plus other things. That's kind of a thing. He says his tagline is, where experts talk. So it's a network podcast covering tech, business culture, and trends that are driving the future. And he's got, I think, three or four four shows right now, it looks like maybe five, three that he's doing, and then a couple that other people are doing. But they're all very, like, fancy, fancy, like, the cognitive revolution,

you know, media empires, moment of Zen. And so they're kind of like, I would say, highbrow compared to what most podcasts are. Yeah. So here's my opinion. I don't think anyone that you mentioned or anyone out there is really doing it perfectly. But this is beautifully done. You go to his website. Wow, I thought you were going to be anti. You're pretty anti-most media things. No, I, oh, no, it's going to come.

It's going to come. Oh, you're doing that sandwich thing? Yeah. My bad. I stopped you with the bread. Yeah. Yeah. Sandwiches always have, it's not, it's not.

Love your logo. Hate everything else. Like a sandwich is not meat cheese bread. It's bread meat, cheese bread. Okay? It begins and ends with that. No, I do like it. So here's the thing about these companies.

I think if he doesn't raise money, I think it's awesome. I think so long as he doesn't raise money, I think this could be really, really cool. I think owning this outright is amazing. I think that's really cool. I think when I go to his website, I think he borderline, like if it was done a little bit the other way, it would be really dushy. But the way that he's done it, it's actually quite awesome. Like, for example, he quotes Pablo Picasso.

And, you know, that could go either way. That can go either way. He went the right way. I think when you go to the website, I think the name is nice. It's all, like, pretty slick. It's upscale. It actually looks really good. I think that if you did that a little bit differently, it would not work.

But he's done, like, what's the quote for Pablo Picasso on there? Do you see it? Yeah. It says, when art critics to get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. Cool.

I think that's cool. I think it's cool. And it's got a nice little picture of Pablo. I think it's awesome. Yeah. So on my next company, I'm going to get a quote from Benny Blanco. What's it going to say?

I don't know. He got Pablo Picasso. I'm going to get Benny Blanco on the side. We can do Bugs Bunny next too. I mean, I think it's good, man. I think it's good branding. So my opinion is,

I think it's cool if you own it. I think it's cool. So I don't know if you know this. You probably don't because who cares. But business insiders writer, the writers are on strike. Do you know that? Yes. Well, a lot of, like, isn't Hollywood also on strike right now?

I think they're totally unrelated other than maybe they inspired each other. I think there was like a contract up and insider formed a union or something like that. And they are protesting. And they're doing this thing called a digital pick line, I guess it's called, where a digital picket line where they're like telling all the customers like not to click on business insider links now, which is crazy. I mean, someone who follows a business insider journalist is probably not also someone reading business insider. I would imagine.

So I don't know if that's going to go well. But if you have to, so if you're going to start a media company, I think you have to be incredibly careful not to hire folks who will unionize. I think that is actually an existential crisis. to a lot of media companies right now. And I think that that's like a real. So here's the takeaways. I think A, it's awesome. So you're going to do this.

I think it's cool. I think you should own the whole thing. B, look out for union types. C, him going B2B, that's 100% the way to go. And I want to give you an example. Is this B2B? I don't think this is B2B. What makes you say this is B2B?

I think he just has, I think he has probably, he's probably going for like high-end customers more so than B-to-B, right? Yeah, but your ad sales, people can spend that nicely to Salesforce. Like, it's not like true crime. You know what I mean? It's borderline. It's kissing cousins with the B2B, real B2B. It's close.

But let me give you an example of a real B2B1. B2Bish. Be to Bish. Yeah. It's bish. By the way, did you see that guy who's getting in trouble? His name's George Santos. He's like clearly, I think he's like from South America,

but he was, I'm going to butcher it, but he was some type of elected official out of long, Island and he's getting in trouble because he did a bunch of fraud-ish stuff. But one thing that's funny is he told everyone he was Jewish. And he goes, well, I didn't say I was Jewish. I said I was Jew-ish. Like I'm friends with the Jews. I was Jewish.

Like, you know, like I'm buddies with them. Have you not seen? All time. All time excuse. He like stole $500,000. So he's actually a crook, but like the funniest part, he goes, I'm Jew-ish. And you look at him and he's like from Brazil or something. Like what?

So that's pretty funny. But anyway, I think that instead of going B2B-ish, you got to go all the way. Have you heard of aging media? No. Okay, so type in aging media. It started by this guy named John. John's a member of Hampton, but everything I'm actually about to say, I just kind of stole from a similar web.

But I have heard some rumors about them. But basically, if you go to aging media, what's the, You've been on his Hampton application where he had to write his revenue, profits, names of all his children, and social security number. You may have some info on this. I just click SimilarWeb on their site. No info. So I know you ain't getting shit from SimilarWeb right now. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So here's why. I'm going to explain it to you. You got to be a pro. No, listen. Aging media is their like corporate website. So what's it say? They have like their brands like senior housing news, hospice news, skilled nursing news.

skilled nursing news, that sort of thing. Those have. So what's the, what's the meta tag on there? Is it like nursing home professional? Yeah, media for the senior care industry. Yeah. So click like one of their websites and you can go to similar web. Each website only has something like 50,000 visits, I believe.

It's like not a lot. But they're doing something like $12 or $11 million a year in revenue and like three or $4 million a year in profit. And this is a B2B. the hardcore B2B site. They make their money for Lee Jen. So basically I imagine they'll do like a webinar or something. And if you like are in the nursing home industry,

you give them information. They also have ads. And I think, I don't know if they have podcasts, but they do have newsletters on their site. This is a hardcore B2B. This is, yeah. And I love it.

I love it. I love this. You just did this guy, such a disservice by sicking four, four to 40 copycats on them. If I'm talking about how good of a business business is on here. Well, no, so look, I'm doing this podcast. Are like, if Sam or Sean say the N-word, I don't mean the N-word.

I mean newsletters. If they say that this is a good newsletter business, the instant copycats, bro. They saw what you did with the hustle. They saw what I did with Bill Crowd. They're instantly looking for a new newsletter to clone. I apologize on behalf of whoever this guy is. I de-endom. I end them on in Hampton.

I go, hey, don't tell me anything, but just can I talk about your company? And I said, here's what? I see on similar web. He didn't know what he was saying yes to. No, I got permission. I go, here's what I see on similar web. This is what I'm going to say. Are you cool with it? And he gave me a thumbs up, like literally a thumbs up emoji. That's how I roll. I get that emoji. We're good. That's a hardcore B2B media company. So anyway, my point with this turpentine thing, I think it's cool. I like it. I think it's cool. I hope he pulls it off. I've thought about doing this idea actually the past. I ruled it out for a bunch of reasons, but that doesn't

I mean, it doesn't mean somebody else can't do it. I think it would be great to do. It takes a lot of energy, and I'm totally with you that I hope he didn't raise money. In his tweet thing announcing it, he didn't say, like, so happy to have Mark Andresen investing in this. So I think there is, I think there's probably a good chance he raised money, but he didn't raise. Okay, he didn't raise money. So I hope he is taking it that way. Well, you probably learned from his other company on deck.

Like, that's another company where I think they raised a hundred plus million. I forget. but I think the valuation was $500 million, so I don't know how much they raised, but I imagine it was in the nine figures. That's another company where it's like, that could be cool if you don't raise money. Basically, screwing up your cap table

is like one of the only mistakes in business that you can't really make up for. Speaking of screwing up your money, can I tell you what I did post Milk Road with the money that we made? Well, I do know that you sent me a text. I would have to go look at when that came, and you said, I've sold all my equities.

I think it's going to go. I think the market's going down. And since then, it's double. It's about doubled. Yeah. A lot of the island. So I know you did that with your money. So what else did you do with it?

So I tell you about my next best decision? Yeah. What else did you do besides not make money off your money? For the record, for the record. I've actually, I would be about even from where I was with my equities on that. Because I kept, well, I kept a portion of it, but I also. the stuff I sold has not doubled. You just look at HubSpot stock

because you're like, I got HubSpot. So you're like, HubSpot is the market. HubSpot is not the market, exactly. So I'll tell you that. So let me tell you about what I did. So we got this money. So we sell Milk Road, now this cash hitting a bank account.

Got a couple options. So it's like, do we just buy treasury bills, make 4% on that? What bank did you use? What bank did I use? What do you mean? Use them. Chase or one of the other ones that got screwed up.

There's no upside in answer this question. Did you use one of the ones? We were using one of the ones that got screwed up? No, no, no. I didn't use Silicon Valley Bank. No. So money's sitting there. I was like, could buy treasury bills.

No, that's too boring. Could do what Sam does. I could just index into the stock market. That's reasonable. But like, you know, I think it seems like we're coming off of a 13-year-bull bull market. Don't really need to put this, the full amount in right now.

Let me just kind of wait and see what happens there. Is there something that can do better than the 8% that I might be able to get on that? I thought, well, should I just invest in a new company? We start. I don't know. Maybe if we have a great idea, we'll do that. But let me just let me not do that. And so I started doing this process where I was like, can I, I work backwards for basically

like, can I get 30% a year compounding? And 30% of year sounds like a high number, but we have a few friends who have done it. And the way that they've done it has been through buying private companies. So they buy businesses and they own them. Andrew Wilkinson, I think, is the one that most people who listen to this pod will know because he's been on a bunch of times and talked about this, how they built tiny from a few million dollars into, you know, $500 million by doing this sort of 30, 40% compounding over time. Did you read the tiny annual report? We'll have to talk about it next time. Yeah, I read his annual letter.

Yeah. So, and we have a few other friends that have been doing this as well. that are less public about it. So I said, okay, well, let me do that. I said, but I don't want to buy these companies and operate them. So I thought, what if I bought 30% stakes? So it's sort of like, can I buy a minority position in companies so that they keep running them, but I give them capital.

So basically, like the founder oftentimes was like not taking a lot off the table or they were kind of always worried like, should I put this in my pocket and spend this? Well, I don't know. What if the company needs it? Even if we're profitable. They were kind of worried about that. So I say, here, let me give us some money. And then could I help them grow?

And so I went through this exercise. I don't think I've told you about any of these. But I talked to about 25 companies in the last, I want to say, six months. Dude, every company that you talk to DMs me and they say something of a variety of, I was talking to Sean and now we're not talking anymore. But they like message me to like talk to you and I just ignore it. Yeah, you're like the wingman who refuses to wing. So you don't have to tell me which companies.

I already know probably half of them. My funnel was this. I was just doing a review of this. I thought it was kind of interesting. So talked to about 24 companies, I think. Got serious. Like, did diligence. I always say, talk to means like I was interested.

Obviously, we looked at it a little bit more than that. But talked to was like, oh, this could be interesting. You could kind of squint and see a possibility. Then got into kind of like more serious talks, either negotiated numbers or diligence with about nine. got to a LOI stage with three or four and ended up doing one deal in the last, I want to say,

six months post-sale. And so this ranged from everything from, so newsletter businesses, only fans businesses, journal apps, virtual events, bookkeeping companies, merch companies, and then a bunch of random stuff

that I know nothing about that were like, oh, that sounds interesting, like some company that, like, It does something called laser peening on machines to make the parts last longer. And their clients are like Boeing and stuff like that. Or autism clinics that seem to make a ton of money. But I'm like, okay, I don't really know how I would add any value to this.

And in each one, I was like, all right, can I find a good operator where I can acquire minority stake of the business at a good deal? And I can help them grow. And ideally, they're the category winner for what they do. And so that was kind of like my process. I want to, before I tell you about the deal that we ended up doing, I want to hear. Any thoughts or questions on my approach here? Because there's a bunch of learnings. Yeah, there's no way you're going to get 30% for that long, right?

Do you actually think that's possible? What do you mean for that long? That long means what? I mean, I don't know anything about markets. I haven't read like a Warren Buffett biography, but like what's he compounded at every year? Oh, yeah. He's been at 20% for like 50 years or something like that. Okay, but if you got it for 10 years that you don't.

He's putting billions and billions of dollars to work. And that's very different. Right. Okay. I think that's smart. Do you think you're going to enjoy this? I think you'll enjoy it, right? I'm not sure. So this was a test basically to see, like, is this fun to do? It's definitely fun on the learning side. Now that we made the first acquisition or the first I kind of, I would say not an acquisition, like kind of minority investment. And it's different than startups. Like we've done startup investing. Startup investing is very, very different. Startup investing is you look at a business, you're trying to figure out, is this, are these three dudes in this bedroom going to be able to build like a multi-billion dollar company? right? Like, is this husband and wife couple going to be able to pull off this

this gargantuan exit? And like kind of right now, they have usually nothing, just an idea, product, maybe a little bit of traction. It's way more of a lottery. It's a lottery. And you put in $100,000 and then you do that with 40 companies. And you know that 38 of the companies are going to be kind of like just a write-off or cost of doing business. And two or three of those 30-40 companies are going to be your winners, but hopefully they're winning at 100 X or 1,000 X or more returns. And so, It's very lottery-like, and you spend very little time with them. So you're not like, they don't want you advising them.

You answer questions when they call. You can proactively nudge them a little bit, but you're mostly hands off. I would say is angel investing. Whereas if you buy 15, 20, 25, 30% of a business, you're a little more involved. You know, you're a little more active. These businesses are not like all or nothing businesses. They're like, oh, there's already a good business. It's profitable.

And it's already growing. So the question is, can we accelerate the growth? So like the one business we bought is, I don't know, super profitable. It makes millions of dollars a year in profits. It's, you know, more than 50% margins. And, you know, we were able to buy a piece of that. And I think that that's just so different than every startup investment I had ever done. You know, it's probably not going to become a multi-billion dollar business.

I would almost guarantee that. But it doesn't need to. It's not supposed to. It's a cash flow business. And so... Isn't it funny how you have mocked me for like the last. eight years about my slow and steady approach. And now you're, you know, look, you're still, at first it was like laughing at 8%. I'm going for 10x every year or whatever. Right. Now you're,

it's coming down. Now 30% is really attractive, which I agree. That is really attractive. Before you know it, you're going to say, no, dude, that's not true. Even in a startup fund, even when you have your winners that become billion dollar companies, the overall fund, like a great fund, is doing 30% IRA. Or are 20% IRA. Look, I'm just saying you're getting more boring. It's still the same. You're getting more boring.

No, it's no, no, no. I reject that. I reject that premise. I would say that. You used to make a live streaming app and now you're looking at a company that sells parts to Boeing. But cash flow is always interesting. It's always been interesting. And now it's more interesting than it was in the past.

I really didn't have a lot of exposure to these types of business. I lived in San Francisco. You say cash flow and people think you're talking about like, like a leaky faucet. Like nobody knows what the hell the hell that means. And so once I started doing this podcast, we got a lot more exposure to,

like most of the people who listen to this podcast are entrepreneurs all around the world. And so when they reach out about their business, it's like, oh, this guy in Minnesota with this, you know, marketing agency that does this per year or this person sells parts and this person does whatever. You know,

they're rolling up bookkeeping services. And so you learn about different types of businesses more through this. And so I've been getting my like MBA on on non- Silicon Valley businesses for the past two years. Look, the cool thing is that, you know, we research stuff. And like, if I really dive deep into a topic, I'll research it for eight hours. And that's not enough to make an investment, but it's enough that I say to myself,

oh, wow, this space is really intriguing. You know, I could see myself doing this. You're doing that, but instead of eight hours, you're doing weeks. And so it's oddly in the similar vein a bit. Of course, you have to do more due diligence and actually look at the numbers. get to know the people. But yeah, it's like getting use to the space. So the most interesting thing is what happened between the

four deals that we signed LOIs on and the one that we closed? And I'll try to do this without giving away any info about the companies that we didn't do the deal with. I can talk about the one we did, but I can't talk about the one we didn't. But the things I, the reasons that, the mistakes that we were making along the way, here's trap number one that we

already experienced. I can fix him. Like the classic girlfriend mistake. Like, yeah, he, you know, he sucks, but maybe I could fix him. It's basically like, maybe I can fix this business. And when you do this minority investing, you're not the majority. You're not going to be able to fix anything.

And so that was, you know, trap number one was getting really far down the road with the business that I thought had a ton of potential before finally realizing I'm not going to be the one to fix it. And fixing it is the wrong approach to going into a business like this. That was mistake one. mistake two was I can totally I can totally see this working

but working at a small scale and so you have to remember basically like as you play the game it's kind of like this is how I felt about your Airbnb which is like you do one Airbnb that's you basically can't do one Airbnb you can only do one as a test to see if you want to do a bunch

one Airbnb is like a bunch of headache without the size of the prize being big enough and so we had looked at one business that was like yeah this is what I have by the way Yeah, yeah. We all make this mistake. But I think you were at least looking at it the right way where you were like, maybe I could do a bunch of these. You talk to people that had 50 of these in their portfolio. And you have to do one to know if you want to do 50. And so we got really far down the road with this one that like, if it all worked, it's like, dude, we could be making $200,000 a year off this. It's like, wait, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? Like, yeah, it's a great deal. And it's highly likely to work. But it's highly likely to be very small and like not worth the mind share of even doing this. And so we pulled out on that one. The one that we did was basically a company. People probably know. So it was in a cat.

So this one was not company. Are you going to name it? Yeah, yeah, I can name it now. It's official. So we first looked at the category. So I was super bullish on companies that let you hire internationally. So specifically like how to hire the Philipsians and Latam. And you know this.

Why were you interested in that? What insight did you have? Like kind of scar tissue. Like, dude, you came to my office. I remember you, you came to my office in San Francisco when I was doing Bebo and you were like, what's your burn rate? Which, again, is like a question. Nobody asked somebody else out loud.

it's like, you know, that's asking somebody that's asking a woman their weight. Like, ask a founder their burn rate and see how they feel. Yeah, in my head, I was like, that's bubbly. You had a bubbly burn, man. And I was like, three million a year. And that's what we were, we were basically a startup that was burning three million a year, pre-product market fit because that's what it called. We had, we basically had a team of engineers.

So we had like, you know, 10 to 12. 10 to 12 engineers. It's like 250,000 a month? I think we were doing like 240,000 a month in burn. So you get like. And that's net burns. Does that mean no, does that assume no revenue? We had revenue from one of our projects, but like, no, I was just saying like the overall bill.

So we basically, you hire 10 people that are 200,000 each. You're doing $2 million plus you pay rent, plus you have your cloud bills, plus you have whatever else. And so that was really expensive. And those were all Silicon Valley engineers. And they were below markets. So those people, if they were working for us for $200K,000, they could have been making $400,500,000 at Facebook. but they wanted to be a part of a startup. So I did that, and it was very stressful to have a very high burn rate for a company.

Like, I just didn't like it, but I didn't know any better at the time. And then afterwards, as I got a little more savvy, like with our e-com biz, we'll do probably somewhere like a little under 20 million this year in revenue. We're profitable because 65% of our team is overseas. So we have our data analysis person, Argentina, our designer, India, are customer service, Philippines, are the person who's running our whole wholesale channel, like built it from scratch.

It did not exist. And now it's like a new revenue unit in the Philippines. And we did the same thing with Milk Road. We were probable Milk Road from day one. Like, I remember coming to your office at the hustle and you had like, I don't know, 15 people running around there in San Francisco. And like, that's a bunch of San Francisco issues. They have to go home and pay $6,000 rent.

So you've got to pay them money. And for us, we had one person in the U.S. For Milk Road and we had everybody else in the Philippines. And so it was a, Again, lean, mean, profitable machine. And I was like, oh, not just is this cost savings. Like, if you hire some of the Philippines, they're basically 10 times cheaper than the U.S. So, like, you know, you can hire somebody in the Philippines for $1,000 a month, so $12,000 in a year.

That same person, the U.S. will cost you 80 to $120K. And these are skilled people. Like in Latam, like, the guy we have doing our data stuff, he's like, you know, got his MBA. Like, these are highly educated, highly, you know, he's like a wizard with like, you know, power BI and Looker and all these data tools that I couldn't even start to use. Do you get to know? Yeah, of course. I'm talking to them all the time.

One good thing is, especially with the Philippines, this sounds terrible, but I'm going to say it anyways because it's honest. I hate managing people and I love hiring people to the Philippines because they need so little management. Why does that sound horrible? What did I miss there? Because I think what people want is for you to be like, I'm a good manager and I talk to my people. And I'm like, dude, it's fucking great. I only talk, like, for example, my assistant,

I only talked to her on Fridays. People are like, well, that's kind of mean. Or like, it's great. They don't want one-on-ones in like career trajectory coaching. And they don't want like, like the same thing. Like in San Francisco, I had, let's say, I have eight direct reports. That's eight weekly one-on-ones I had to do.

Well, dude, I've had. That's essentially eight hours out of the 160 hours a week that, you know, that I have that I'm like, you know, I'm spending doing basically like touchy-y-feely stuff, which is fine. I understand it, but it's really nice when you don't have to do that because it's not the baseline expectation. There's a bunch of roles where you don't want someone who's entirely ambitious. Like with an assistant, it's like you don't want someone that's like, no, I don't want to give you all these other opportunities.

I want you to be great at this thing and not bail. Like I don't, this is what I need. This is the tool that I need and I want you to be that. I don't want to have to promote you tons and tons of times. I've hired a couple of people for like our hold co, basically. and they're cool. They live in San Francisco. They're awesome.

They're super motivated to work with me. I'm like, great, what do you want? I want to be you. And I'm like, wait, what? And then I'm like, cool. Like, you know, someday they're like, yeah, but I'm also spinning up my own news that are my own podcast, my own investment arm. Like, I'm like, okay, well, like, that's great.

You could do that. But that makes for kind of a shitty person to hire onto my team because, like, part of being on this team is being down for our mission, not like your own mission, necessarily. And I totally get if you want to go to your own mission, but you got to go do. that on your own. You don't get, you don't get to have both, you know, at the same exact time. You can do one and get mentored for a bit and then go do your own, but you can't do it

do it at the exact same time. And so it has been very nice to have people that are just like, they, like literally like our management style is they log in, they say, login in, here's what I'm doing today. If you have any adjustments needed, you say something. If not, you just don't say anything. At the end, they say, logging off. Here's what I got done today. Here's everything I did. Here's the files. Here's the info. Logging off. So how much are you spending now on these folks? I mean, dude, I have like, in my own companies, probably almost 15 to 20 people that are international now. And so what's the average salary?

It ranges. So, like, on the low end, 800, I think about it in monthly because that's like when I push payroll. That's what it says. So, like, you know, 800 a month would be the low end. And that's, I go say, most common. So that's customer support, personal assistant, things like that can be that low. And then the higher. roles will be like 2,500 to 3,000.

And then there's one guy who's just amazing. And I've promoted him up twice now. And now he gets paid like a U.S. employee because he makes the impact of somebody who's driving a ton of growth. So I'm like, oh, great. Like you keep getting rewarded. You're at some point you break through where you're, if you're driving growth, you get rewarded for driving growth.

And you also, I got an email. You have a course on this now, too. I have a course on the personal assistant side. Yeah, I just created. It's not even a course, actually. It's just, uh, I don't like I don't go and teach it. It's just a. system. It's like, you know, basically the best hire I made this year was I hired my personal assistant.

And I had thought, okay, personal assistant is, uh, you know, personal assistant's like for rich people for like mega, it's like for Jeff Bezos. It's like mega busy, mega rich. And, uh, and I also was like, I don't want to have to tell somebody what to do all the time. Like, that sounds like its own pain in the ass to come up with shit to do. And then I heard a few friends talk about theirs and I was like, maybe I'm wrong. Let me open my mind to the possibility that I'm wrong about this. Three people tell me, Three people that I trust tell me that it's been a huge game changer for them. Let me send it to me. I want to use it.

I want to use that. So I basically created the whole thing last week. And I was like, here's my system. So for example, like, here's my email system. Like, I used to be terrible with email. And now my email system is like super organized on top of shit. Here's exactly what I do. Here's the exact scope of work.

Here's how it works. I just texted Ben. I go, I said, send it to me. Yeah. And so, and we have, by the way, there's like a funny offer we did with it. But I'll explain the company that we ended up investing in. So I looked at all the ways you could do this. I've done all of them.

So you can hire direct. If you want to hire somebody internationally, you can basically have three options. You hire direct. So you hire somebody on like a job board, upwork, online job, something like that. Upside, it's basically free. You just pay the software subscription like in our 99 bucks a month. So, you know, you pay $1,000 for the year to be to be a pro member on there. Downside, you have to do all the hiring, vetting, training, sifting through candidates yourself.

Like you put up, hey, I need a customer support person or a personal assistant. You're going to get 200 applications. like good luck trying to find somebody good. You could also go on the high end and use like a managed service. So this is things like growth assistant or Athena. They're great. They do the vetting for you. But there's this huge upcharge.

So those guys charge you $3,000 a month for somebody that actually costs $800 a month. So you're paying $3X the price or more every single month forever. How big are those companies? How big's Athena? I heard they're huge. They're big. And they're big because this is like a huge ARR thing for them. And people don't really know about it.

People don't really realize like you didn't have to pay triple the price every single month. And so that's like, you know, one path. But they're good at what they do. I've tried them. I've tried a bunch of these. The one I like the best was the one we ended up investing in, which is Shepard. So people have probably heard of Shepard before, I think the URL, support Shepard. What I like Shepard was it's kind of best of both.

So they do the like filtering, screening, background checks, all that stuff. So basically, you just say, I want a personal assistant. present you three great candidates. So they present you five great candidates for you. And they're, filtered, they're checked, and they're basically like, these are the best of the best. So they save you a shit ton of time, which is like, as any business owner, you kind of need that. And the other side, you don't have to pay the monthly upcharge. So they'll say, great, here's, you know, you can make the hire directly. And all you pay is the one time finder's fee for us having found you the candidate. And so it ends up being, you know, 10 to 20 times cheaper than these other ones in the long run because you just

paid, you know, the one-time finder's fee. So I like that model the best. I was like, long-term, I think this is the most sustainable. Because if I'm making in my business, like I did, 15 hires internationally, I don't want to be paying like this bloated cost every month from there on out. Nor do I want to do that, all that work myself. So that was the business we ended up investing in. I'm super excited about it. The branding on their website, so it's supportshepard.com. Yeah. You have to be one of the testimonials. You need a testy on there. But it looks good. It's cute branding.

So Marshall House is the guy who started it. Marshall, I've known on Marshall since 2012, maybe. He's the type of guy who, whenever he does something, it's awesome. It looks cool. So, like, if you follow him on Instagram, on Twitter. He's got showmanship. He's got showmanship. He's got the juice.

He's got the juice. So whenever, like, for example, I think he just bought a new house, and I'm, like, following the bill of the house. He also, like, he likes cars. So I saw him like redecorate his garage. He owns like a boutique hotel. He did this like e-commerce thing that was like super simple. And actually it was like a really good like a successful business.

That was just like it was like a phone case. And like, you know, it was just that. And like when COVID came out, they came out with this little like hook thing, like your captain hook. I was like, you can use this to open doors without having to touch the knob like a peasant. I was like, dude, this guy's great. He just makes these like simple little businesses. And he runs all. The reason he did this is he ran his.

his business is using international hiring as his workforce. So then he partnered with this guy in the Philippines, opened up an office on the ground there with a bunch of recruiters to do all the vetting locally on the ground. Is he going to the Philippines? His business partner lives there and has the office open there. So that's like how you, you got to commit if you're going to do these types of things.

And so he basically partnered with the guy who was doing that. And that's how they created Shepard. And it started off just like, you know, solving their own itch. But turns out like a lot of people have this itch. And so, myself included. So if he, I file, I'm not used it, but I will, I will use it. I would like to use it. I'm literally, I just texted Ben, I'm really actually want your course.

I want to figure out how you do this because I want this and maybe I'll use these guys. But if his business is going so well, why would he sell a portion to you? Like my head is, I'm greedy. I'm like, get the fuck out of here. Because, I mean, obviously, we're going to drive him a little bit or a lot of bit of traffic. The pod will. Is that the only reason why? He would do this?

Yeah. Basically, they don't spend any money on marketing at all. And so the way that it spreads is just word of mouth, people coming back. And the other one is like entrepreneurs who have an audience saying the word. So they first did this with Nick, Huber. And Nick has drove them a ton of business because Nick uses it for all of his businesses. And so when he talks about it, they get a bunch of traffic. So I think he saw the success of that.

and basically, you know, we have a large audience now, like through Twitter, through this pod, through other things. And so there's obviously a benefit of, I don't know, like the brand association, like, as well as, like, you know, the ability to reach, you know, reach a large audience that I think was appealing to him. But I bought in. I didn't get free shares, right? Like, I bought into the equity pool.

But I agree with you. When you have a really good business, you're always hesitant. It has to be, like, the right fit. And so I think the other benefit was he listens to the pod. And so you've seen, you know, if you listen to the. this, you know how we think, and you can agree, be like, this person's great or this person's an idiot. You know if you want to, if you would want to do business with them, if you've listened with pod regularly. You have a very good idea. There's no hiding our personalities on this.

Do they have an MFM, like, coupon code? Is it a coupon coupon? So if you go to my website, if you go to Sean Puri.com slash remote assistant, basically here's what I got them to do, which is better than a coupon thing. So I was like, all right, if you want to do the personal assistant thing the way I did, I was all right, here's my system. It's $250. You get the whole, like, all the templates, all the thing or whatever. but I was like, I only want to make money from people who don't take action. And so here's how it works. Basically, if you just buy the course and you don't actually hire an assistant, I keep her money.

But if you actually go to Shepard and you hire your assistant, then Shepard will give you two X the money back. So basically you pay $250. You'll get $500 if you actually take the action and go hire. And I was like, that's kind of a no brainer offer. I was like, Marshall, we got to do this. Like do this where if people want their own assistant and they actually go like take the action and go forward with it, pay them back not just.

what they paid for the system, pay them double. Because, like, I bet a bunch of people are just not going to take action, but who cares? I want the people who will take action to be rewarded for doing so. And so that's a pretty sweet deal. Basically, it's like a, you essentially get my system for free, plus you make an extra $250 if you actually go forward with it and make your hire. So first, I want, if you're into this shit, I have no stake in this, by the way, but go to support Shepard.

I do want them to sign up because here's what I want. I want you to report back, and I want to hear if this whole influencer buys companies thing actually is good. I want it. So I want the results to be reported back in like a month. And so I am curious to see, like, what the demand is. I bet it's going to be quite good. Number two, what I'm curious to see is if you like this.

I don't know if you're going to like it or not. I can see it going 50-50 either way. So far, how do you feel? I mean, look, if this deal works, then there's the greatest thing on the room. Well, this one is a no-brose. But that's not the hard part. This is already a successful company. I'm already religious about hiring internationally anyways, personally in my own businesses.

It's like, I didn't have to be convinced that this is a good idea. Like, I already knew this a good idea. The question was, am I going to start my own of these? Or should I invest in one that's already working that I like, that I use? And it's like, okay, cool. Let me just do the second one. That seems like way less work, you know, to do that. So I think this one is kind of a no-brainer in that it's kind of a proven business.

I am a genuine believer in it. And whether we actually drive extra traffic to them or not, I think it's sort of like, I don't know, like obviously for them, they want that, and I would like that too. But for me, it was already a working business. What percentage, are you, is that too much to ask or to review? Yeah, I don't close that here because I think, you know,

it's their business. I don't want to give that away too much. But, you know, it's a good chunk. I think, do you think they'll ever sell the company, or do you make your money just through dividends? Yeah, just dividends. Like, it's a profitable business. It just pays out dividends.

Like I got our first dividend check yesterday. It's awesome. You did? You got one already? Yeah, it was fantastic. This is going to be your Seas Candy maybe. I mean, if this works out, that's exciting. I'm curious to see if you're going to like this because on one hand, I can actually see you loving this because you get to spend time seeing how things work and you get to use your skill set, which is content to tell people about it.

Like this same thing that we just did, I'm actually interested. I want to keep talking about this just because I want to hear the story behind it. I think that's interesting. And so it's kind of a win-win in that regard. win in that regard. But I'm curious if you're going to enjoy all the due diligence. Like when I talked to Andrew Wilkinson, he actually, I don't think does a lot of the due diligence. He's got a team to do that. If you are able to pull that off, I think you'll be in a win situation. So as long as you like doing that. Yeah, I'm going to try it with two or three.

This one I knew was a slam dunk because I'm just like just a total believer in it. What's going to be interesting is what happens with ones that aren't like perfectly in my zone of like, I get it, I used it, I believe in it. it like it's like this one was like bullseye i don't expect every business to be exactly bull's so the question is what happens when it's not exactly is it still fun do i still believe do i say am still willing to talk about it like this one i'm willing to talk about because i'm like i literally wouldn't have my econ business work the way it does or milk road worked the way it did if i didn't use this strategy so i'm like i could talk about that now what happens when it's like one

degree separated from that am i still going to want to to tell a story on it maybe it's not even that interesting of a story and i'm not going to do it like i'm not going to come on this podcast and bore everybody with a story that's not that great. So I can't commit to that yet. But I don't know. If somebody wants me to buy a minority's taking their business, hit me up. Let's see. Let's see what happens.

I'm going to try two or three of these and see how it goes. Was there anything that you learned looking at the 24 other than what you said about the like Fix Me shit? Like was there anything, any other revelations? Not necessarily about what they had wrong with them or, but maybe what they had right with them, any commonalities between the winners. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I would say that the businesses that I was most interested in were ones that had a clear sales model, I would say.

So they knew how they were going to get their customers now and in the future. And I don't want to say moat because it's like you're just trying to be Warren Buffett. Like it's not like it's not that they had a moat, but they had either recurring revenue. or they had something that was like, they're actually the category leader, they're the go-to leader, and that there's some reason why they're not just going to get copied

into oblivion by everybody else. Maybe they have operational advantage. Maybe they... What's Shepherds? I mean, I think branding is actually... That separates them here. I think they look cool. Is there anything else?

Yeah, I think Shepard's real advantage is that they picked a business model that's actually more customer-friendly, like I said. So, like, if your two other options are spend a bunch of time, have a bunch of uncertainty, hire somebody unvetted, and you save a little bit of money,

or pay a 3X monthly upcharge. You're kind of nuts to do the 3X monthly upcharge for a long period of time, especially if you're going to hire multiple roles eventually in your company. Like, it's just not a sustainable path. So to me, support Shepard's choice on the business model,

separated them from the current competitors. Now, somebody else could try to do it, but what are they going to have to do? They're going to go set up boots on the ground in the Philippines and in LADAM and really be good at, you know, recruiting recruiters who are they going to recruit the talent to actually deliver on these roles and hire high quality people because they don't really like the money's not made in your first hire.

The money's made when you're like, you see the light and you come back to them for your next six hires. Like what I did with e-com is like, I started with customer support and I was like, cool, I need somebody could do inventory forecasting. People in the U.S. really expensive for that, you know, 140K for that role here. Could I find somebody overseas that could do inventory forecasting? Can I find somebody that could do can run our Amazon ads? can I find somebody you could do wholesale as a channel? Like, can I find people that do influencer?

Like, you start to be like, oh, wait, this isn't just about what it used to be, which was like VAs equals low-cost labor. Now it's like, dude, they're pretty talented people that could do these things. They got three or four years of experience doing that at another company. And so you're able to just pluck from the remote talent pool versus just your local talent pool. Dude, I'm excited to see how this turns out. At Hampton, do you guys have any overseas people yet or no? Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Sure. We have like the guy who made our website is overseas and he's on staff. We have our accounting folks who like they're called fuel finance. They're overseas. If you go to, like we have this whole backend thing built where people can log in. It was built by a guy in Hong Kong. Yeah, we have a ton of overseas. And Marshall's a member. And so we're going to actually thinking about starting to use them for some data analytics stuff. So yeah. The funny thing, a lot of overseas stuff. When I was using, uh, for our ecom thing. A lot of ecom people use agencies. I'll hire an agency and then they like, they're like, great, let's add. Can you add these three people to Slack and all of the. And you can tell by their names. Yeah. And I'm just like, so like, for example, design pickle, I think is like a $10 million

of your business to basically like design, unlimited designer on demand. We tried them out for a little bit. Every single designers in the Philippines. Then I hired this email marketing guy. I was like, oh, yeah, just do our email, email marketing and flows. He's based in Colorado. every employee is in the Philippines. I was like, okay, that's another one.

I hired a website, a web dev shop. Owners in the U.S., entire team is in India. Another one that did the entire thing in Ukraine. And it's like, it's so funny that people are basically, this is now a business model is basically like, owner in the U.S. does sales, fulfillment all done by it. And they're good.

I'm not even saying this like a bad thing. Like they're talented, but I'm like, wow, this is a whole business blueprint, a template that they could use to basically like make the margins, work. When are you going? When are you going?

To the Philippines? Yeah, when's Neckbeard Nation going to the Philippines? We should host the next live pod there. Do we have a following there? I have no idea. Unfortunately, I don't think we do. I don't think they give a shit. Dude, you got to go there.

I've been to the Philippines. It's awesome. Very hot. Tonight and I've never been. I'll go. Tonight and tomorrow, I'm taking a 15-hour road trip in my Tesla. My first time doing it. We're going to see if I love it or hate it.

So I'm going to report back on Wednesday. 15 hour, you said? It normally takes 12, but you add three hours for charging. I did a charging road trip. It's horrible. Where are you going from? Where are you going to? What's the distance?

Austin to St. Louis. Okay. I'm going to visit my family. Would you get the X or the Y? Which one are you doing? X, long distance, 350 miles. Is it a new one? Because the thing I screwed up was the one I rented on Turro was like five years old.

And it just needed charging every 90 minutes. It was an awful experience. Well, how fast you go? I mean, it's like highway, right? So you're going like whatever, 75 miles an hour. I mean, I speed usually. I mean, I'll go 85 or 90. So we'll see what's going to happen.

It crushes the battery. Absolutely crushed the battery. At least that one that I had, it absolutely crushed it. We did a seven-hour ride in 14 hours because we had to charge so many times. And by the way, you know the charging thing? It's not like, you can't just like charge. There's like certain chargers that are fast and some that are slow, you know this? Like, don't you just use the thing on the screen?

that tells you what to do? The screen tells you where the charges are. But I'm saying some of the charging stations and some of the spots are fast chargers and some are slow. Like there's a, like it's like a gas pump where one will fill it up in twice the speed as the other. So make sure when you do it, you know that.

So you go only to the fast chargers and none of the slow ones are like, you'd have to be like, I wanted to go watch a movie so that I could do this slow charge. No, I use, there's this app called A Better Route. I think it's called this guy has built this whole thing just on routing out people's electric charges.

And so I'm going to use that. But my wife's flying. And I was like, I'm driving. I want to drive. I want to see what it's like. And so I'm driving. And I'm going to report back on Wednesday to see how it feels. I did it.

So I'm going to leave tonight. So I'll get a few hours in. And then tomorrow, that way I can, like, I plan my life around this pod because I was like, we record 11 my time. I can't arrive that morning. Otherwise, I'll be like tired. I won't have better research. Right.

So I have to plan it. So I get there Tuesday night, but I need a full night's rest so I can like wake up and like research and shit. Do you plan your life around this pod? Yeah, for to an extent, right? Like, you know, this is, this is the one unmissable appointment on my calendar. Everything else is flexible. This is the one non-flexible thing. It's no days off. I think, I mean, we've recorded on, like, Christmas. So I guess we can't really say that right now. Well, wasn't there like an issue?

Yeah, we had a sound issue. But we were like, no days off. People were like, you missed the last Now was like a technical air, but we've done like whatever the most recent holiday is. We were recording whatever. I think we've done Christmas Eve before. We always record. Big thanks to everybody who listens. This is a fun thing for us to do. Thank you for listening.

Yeah, this is like one of the, one of the dope parts of our life. And I think it's attracted a bunch of like, I mean, neck beard nation, right? So it's attracted a bunch of people whose brain is weird in the way our brain is weird. And I think that's a lot of fun. I want to end with this. So I was at this, I'll tell you a very, very, very quick story. I was at this LA Tech meetup. First of all, our fans, or that sounds weird, but our listeners, they come in all shapes and sizes, man.

All colors. I like, I love it. What does that mean? What are you trying to say there? Dude, like I had this guy that looked like he was seven feet tall guy, like basketball player. And I thought he was like a famous guy. And he comes up and he goes, total man. And he gave me like, you know, like the black guy handshake.

I'm like, whatever that is. If you're a seven foot black guy, you are a total man. Like, you didn't even need to say it, bro. We know. Yeah. You gave me like that type of a handshake. You know what I'm saying? And then I had this like 55 year old woman who was with her kid at the airport say,

what's up. And I just want to say, first of all, if you're a fan, thank you. And second of all, I can tell, like, walking by if someone listens or not, because if they're wearing, like, Lulu Lemon ABC pants or, like, if they look like they go to, like, Columbia, like, university and they, like, make eye contact with you in a particular way, I can tell. And I would love for you to come and say, what's up, so long as it's, like, a quick, What's up?

Total Man. Like you can say something by the thing. Here's the etiquette. You come over. You fist pound, not handshake or hug. So let's do NUCs. That's the way we do it.

We're not trying to get a little too much. I'm not trying to be palm to pomp with anybody. And so give me the Nucks. You can say, you can reference it. You can no small boy stuff. Total Man. You could use any of the isms that you want. That just means I know you.

And I'm like, I'll give you the head nod back. Like, yep, you're one of us. Take the selfie together. And then we kind of, you know, we keep the show rolling from there. But here's the shick that I need to announce to people. And we got with us in every episode because oftentimes, if they see me with my wife, they'll say what's up. They see me with like my in-laws or up to eat with friends.

They won't say what's up. And every once in a while, they will. And it makes me feel so cool. Oh, my God. So the more people I'm with, the more I need you to be over the. top with it. Yes. My wife doesn't listen to this podcast.

She never heard a single episode. So she doesn't think this is cool. She thinks this is me playing video games up in the bedroom right now. So only when she sees someone come up in person and then even, you know, I was with her mom there. And they were like, wow, what? My dad was there. And he's like, my dad literally goes, he must have thought you're someone else. We are famous enough.

And like our friends and family actually understand. And so if you see us out there, please come and say hi. Yeah, give us one. Particularly if we're with friends, you have to do it. That will make my day. As long as it's the short thing. I was out to eat. And like three different guys when I was out to eat, I was with my coworkers said what's up.

And I played it off like, oh, man, I can't go anywhere. You know what I mean? And in my head, I'm like, I hope there's a fourth. I hope there's a fourth. And my co-workers were like, does this happen all the time? I'm like, I got to say the most embarrassing version of this. So when we were selling the Milk Road, I went to meet up with the guy who bought it, Kendall, at a coffee shop. And we're at the coffee shop for a bit.

And I see someone kind of like looking. Like, I think they recognize me, but I'm not sure. And I'm like, come over. Just come over right now. Because he doesn't listen to the podcast. And I'm trying to do this deal. And I'm like, I think it would help if he felt like I'm a big deal. I was like, I think that'd be a little nice little nudge.

Yeah, yes. The guy doesn't come over, right? So we go outside, we say, I say bye, he starts walking away. And the guy comes over and he's like, Sean? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, hey, man, big fan. Kendall, come back. I literally go.

I was like, oh, Kendall. I want you to be my house. I was like, hey, have you met Kendall? And he guys like, no. And I was like, Kendall, yeah. This guy just, he listens to the pot. I just wanted you to. And it didn't even make sense

and I was like I forced it so bad dude So bad Validate me Please How do you take a cool moment And make it the most lame

Was me being like Hey wait You didn't hear that he recognized me Come here Have you guys met? He's like no of course not Oh my God I said that before

I'm like hey say what you said again But do in front of my in-laws So I just This is a public service announcement. If you think you know us or if you think it's us, even if you only think it's kind of us, just take a chance and say what's up. And feel free to be over at the top. Like, you know, it's awesome. We love it. It makes me feel good and it more so makes me look cool, which is what I care about more than anything. So anyway, that's awesome. That's the pod. Good episode.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days on. Roll less travel never looking back