My First Million - Wait, My Intern Became a 21-Year-Old Millionaire??

Starting point is 00:00:00 I remember at one point you're telling me in Slack, you're like, these people just offered be $2 million for this. I'm like, holy shit, you did it. We started the podcast, my first million. You just made your first $2 million. Congrats. Like, I can't believe this worked out. You're like, I'm not going to sell, though.

Starting point is 00:00:15 And I was like, wow, this guy's insane. And I was like, that's an insane story. 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. All right. I can't tell you how many times I hear this. People will DM me every single day

Starting point is 00:00:34 and they'll say, hey, I'm just calling my shot right now. Today, I'm a small boy. In three years from now, I'm going to be on MFM. I'm going to be on my first million. I'm going to make my first million do an XYZ. Every single day I get a message like that.

Starting point is 00:00:49 Here's somebody who actually did it. This is Sean. He was my intern, turned guy who's made millions and millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars, and had a crazy journey in between. you were the guy who I created this podcast with. You were the guy who, the cover art of our podcast, he created it.

Starting point is 00:01:08 The intro song, originally, the original intro song, he created it. I didn't even know how to record audio at the time. This guy did all of it. You went from behind the scenes to now you're on the stage here in my house, and we're going to record this episode. So I've made it. You've made it. That's the teaser.

Starting point is 00:01:24 All right. Let's tell the story. All right. What's up, man? Yeah. What's up? So people don't know this. So you are Ishaan.

Starting point is 00:01:35 I've known you since you were 18 years old. You still are kind of like 18 years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still look like. Yeah, you're 23 now? Yeah. All right. So I'm thinking this episode is kind of like,

Starting point is 00:01:47 your title wasn't intern, but it's going to be good for YouTube. So we're going to be like, intern. My intern became a millionaire. Yeah, I was it glorified. And my type of official title is cheapest stuff. I mean, just like that of like intern. And by the way, I got a good track record with this. I don't know if I'm doing anything,

Starting point is 00:02:02 but I'm good at picking people because I worked with you at age 18. Yeah. Steve Bartlett, 19, maybe 20 years old. There's a guy, another guy named Ashon, who just tweeted out today that he's like, those four months I worked with you were super influential. He went from like, guy just working someplace. Now he's got an eight-figure agency, so that was cool. Danny Miranda worked for a little bit.

Starting point is 00:02:24 People know him in the podcast game now. He was with us for a couple months before he started creating So I feel like those two ishawns and maybe getting people that like sound similar to your name. Yeah, the closer the better actually. All right. So you've had a crazy run. But let's do let's do the history. So how did we meet?

Starting point is 00:02:44 Well, I followed you on Twitter when I was like 12, 13 years old. I was tweeting my whole strategy was let me get my like like profile picture. Before I do that, I'm going to reintrodu the one part, which is. Yeah. One thing that people don't know. is this podcast was started actually, not with me and Sam, me and you.

Starting point is 00:03:03 I hit you up on Twitter DMs. Yes. And I saw that you were doing a podcast editor for somebody else I knew. I think Corey or Angelist or something like that. Yeah, Corey Levy. And so I had this idea. All right, I wanted to do a podcast.

Starting point is 00:03:20 I hit you up. I didn't know how old you were, but I was like, hey, do you want to produce for me? Then we got on a call. I was like, oh, man, this is like a kid somewhere. You were at school. time. And I was like, will you, do you know how audio works? And you're like, yes, I got you. So the, if people see the cover art of the podcast, you made that. The initial like, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:40 20 episodes or whatever, all those intros and all the audio, you made that. Yeah. Then we started doing business experiments together. This was at a time where I was kind of like, I think I want to build an audience. Yeah. And I also want to just launch some businesses. We launched a e-com businesses. We launched a bunch of shit together. And then we went off our own ways. And then you had a crazy journey after that where you made millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars and all the rest.

Starting point is 00:04:03 So we're going to talk about all that. Let's start at the beginning. So I DM'd you, but you actually were on Twitter where you said we were, what, 13 years old? 13 years old. I followed you. I was trying to just get my face like on all these people. Because I'm from Australia, right?

Starting point is 00:04:17 There's no Silicon Valley. There's no like VCs and cool angels and all these people. So I was like, this is my avenue to get to these people. And then let me just like, even if it wasn't like a lot of value add, let me just tweet random shit are you guys. And I was doing that. So if you just go on my Twitter, you'll find tweets of me, you know, tweeting off to Sean random shit.

Starting point is 00:04:37 And you'll respond here and there. But yeah, so I was like when I was, yeah, literally like 13, 14, whatever. And then a couple of years after later, when I was sort of the podcast with Corey is when, yeah, you DM'd me. And I was like, yeah, I already know who you want. Let's do this. I think your name was, I think I found you because your name was also Sean. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:04:53 Right. This is it to be. But yeah. So you talk about the start. So when we were working together, tell me some of the things you remember. Because I remember, everyone's got their own version of history.

Starting point is 00:05:05 Yeah. I remember in my head, like, you know, what we were thinking back then. But I'm curious, and this is our first time catching up in person because you live in Australia. And you're just in town.

Starting point is 00:05:14 And you used to live it where I lived. I was living in Brisbane. You also, like, way back when I lived in Brisbane. Yeah. So what's your version of history? What do you remember? The first thing I was, remember, well, I think the first thing I remember is when we're doing the podcast, like, cover

Starting point is 00:05:27 art and stuff, I sent you over some, like, you know, like, here's version A, version B, blah, blah, blah. And then you're like, hold on a second. You should add your name to the cover art. Yeah. And I thought that was really cool. That gave, like, me a lot of confidence. Like, oh, okay, yeah, I'm like, I'm, you know, a part of this as well. I remember that was, that was a cool thing you did because I think maybe there's some learning there with people that hire. Yeah, you can feel special. Yeah, yeah. You make them feel special. Yeah, yeah, you make a official special, do that. So that was like a really cool thing I remember.

Starting point is 00:05:57 Also, I'm just like the kind of craziness of like, let's start a crystal store today. And then like a few weeks later, let's start this other D2C thing. Like make up, make the store, 72 hours, go off and do it. It was like, it was like some variation of like an incubator. But it's just like, two guys. At this time, I'm working at Twitch. I'm hurting out my deal. We sold the Twitch.

Starting point is 00:06:19 I'm now earning out. And I know, okay, in a year, I get this. this vesting check. Yeah. But in the meantime, like, frankly, I was pretty bored inside of a big company.

Starting point is 00:06:27 I, you know, it's not, I knew that's not my long term. And I was like, you know, on the side here, what can I do to entertain myself? The podcast was one.

Starting point is 00:06:35 Cool thing I'd always wanted to do. And then the other would be like, I would meet somebody and I'm like, oh, this person's killing it at an e-com. Yeah. Yo, he's Sean,

Starting point is 00:06:44 I'm making an e-com store. And I remember for the crystals thing, I was like, I read some article, I saw some magazine. I always try to look outside of, like I don't look at TechCrunch to get tech ideas or like business ideas.

Starting point is 00:06:57 I look at some release. I remember reading like a People magazine and it was like Adele was saying she won't go on stage unless she asked her like Rose Quartz Crystal. And I was like what? That's insane. Like you who believes in this crap?

Starting point is 00:07:11 And I Googled it and I was like after Kim Kardashian got mugged she had like a $4 million dollar ring. She got mugged and it was like, how did you recover? She's like, well my crystals really grounded me. And I was like, and then you see all these celebrities

Starting point is 00:07:21 I'm like, if, again, I just think people are sort of like, I have this tweet that's like, the economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to market to, to sort of like average people. And I was like, if all the celebrities are doing this, then there's got to be a bunch of other people that believe in this. And so I remember calling you and you're like, the best part about you was your game. That's my favorite thing is like, if you hire somebody with no experience, there's a bunch of bad things, like, I'd be like, dude, like, I haven't heard from you in two days.

Starting point is 00:07:51 Where'd you go? Yes. But then on the good side, it'd be like, it doesn't know any better. So I could just be like, hey, we're doing this and it's going to be, we're going to launch it in two days. And you're probably just like, I don't know, is that normal? Maybe that's normal, right? Yeah. Because besides us, like, I've always been working for like internet people.

Starting point is 00:08:09 I have never had like a traditional go to an office. And like, I was, I remember the time, I was like, I'm going to finish uni. Should I go and be a consultant for like some bank or whatever? Yeah, you ask me back. I was like, so, because yeah, I just didn't know what the other, I guess I was just gay because I didn't know what the other world was like. I was like, all right, this is kind of normal and doing this. So, yeah, crazy stuff like just, yeah, creating different e-com stores or different experiments. We did like a newsletter, the good, terrible bad, very bad.

Starting point is 00:08:39 Oh, and then dude, that was like top five before. Me Milk Road, right? Milk Road became a successful newsletter company, but I guess before that, I don't even remember that. We did launch a newsletter. called the no good, very bad, terrible, something something, something newsletter. I don't know why we called it that. But we basically were launching a bunch of experiments. And I remember at the time, one of my takeaways from that is that crystal store, for example,

Starting point is 00:09:06 I didn't even know what winning looked like. So one problem with an experiment, because easy to use this word experiment. But the way of science experiment works is you have a hypothesis. So you're like, I believe this. Then you run the test and either confirms it or doesn't. Yeah. But I was using the word experiment wrong, which was like, I'm just going to try a bunch of shit without actually knowing like, what is the win condition?

Starting point is 00:09:27 Yeah. What is the success or failure condition of this? And so like now that I look, now that I actually have an ecommerce business, like, are ecommerce business now, you know, is doing very well. It's an eight-figure e-commerce business. Now that I know what an e-com business looks like, I can go back and think about our crystal store actually was doing very well. Like, I just didn't know.

Starting point is 00:09:45 So, for example, we were running Facebook ads. and the key metric for all e-commerce businesses is your ROAS, your return on ad spend. And I think we were getting like 1.7. Yeah, well, like the rocks. We were selling these rocks. Like 50, 60. They're going to be rocks.

Starting point is 00:10:00 They're crystals. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I remember like the first few hours, we got that Shopify ding. Yeah, it's amazing. Like that was, I mean, most people start up a store that they don't have sales for like a couple of days or whatever or weeks.

Starting point is 00:10:13 And so, yeah, I think our problem was like, just didn't continue. We didn't continue, exactly, because now that I look back, it was like 1.7 to 2x. And I remember thinking, oh, it's supposed to be 3 or 4x, I think. Because I had heard some idiot saying that somewhere, and I just thought that's what it is. And so I was like, I guess this is bad. Turn it, like, shut it down. Let's do the next thing.

Starting point is 00:10:34 In retrospect, as I, you know, maybe I'm glad I'm not running a crystal store. But at the same time, like, there is a lesson there of, I mean, sticking to it is obviously a, like, you can't win without the stick to itness. But one of the things that makes you stick to it is not just willpower. it's like knowing your win condition. So like you do you even know what to look at? And do you know what winning looks like? Do you know what the benchmark should be so that you can actually assess a successful

Starting point is 00:10:58 versus unsuccessful experiments? That was one of my learning, one of my things I remember from back then. The other one I remember is like with the pod, we kind of like we called our shot a little bit. Like we made this Google Doc of the plan. The one page plan and now I call that my kickoff doc, But it was like before we started it, I wrote this out.

Starting point is 00:11:19 Do you remember that that dot? Yeah, I remember. And it was, well, the first thing that you hopped on was, like, you need your 1,000 true fans. Like, that was the very, very first thing that you're like, if we just got this, you can build a pretty big business just with a thousand people. That was like the first thing I remember. And then you had a few things like, we need to get to 100,000 listeners and get a bunch of other, like, maybe build a business off or like, you know, these ancillary businesses,

Starting point is 00:11:42 adjacent businesses across it. And, I mean, you did all that. That's one thing. You kind of step back and it's like, I'll share the dog. I'll put the dog. And if you're on YouTube, I'm going to put it on the screen.

Starting point is 00:11:51 So you can see literally, like word for word, what we wrote back then. And it's not that it, it wasn't all right in that. It all happened, but it definitely didn't happen on the timeline. I remember thinking,

Starting point is 00:12:02 we're going to hit, let's get to 100,000 downloads per episode. So that's the thing. Like per episode, I want 100,000 downloads by the end of the year. So it was like 12 months. Yeah. Took me three years.

Starting point is 00:12:12 So like, you know, now we do that. But like, you know, it took three years for us to ever hit that mark. So it's kind of this old phrase like, don't confuse a clear view for a short distance.

Starting point is 00:12:23 It's like, I feel like we had a clear view. I just thought things would happen faster. I overestimated kind of like what could be done in one year. But with that one, because it's so fun, I just kept going. And like, sure enough,

Starting point is 00:12:33 like, we, we fit. That was like the right thing they keep going. There's a lot of things, shiny things. And that was like the right one that was making no money, actually costing me money.

Starting point is 00:12:41 Because one of the things I wrote in that doc is, I plan to lose 10, thousand dollars a year doing that. But it'll be worth it because I thought, you know, creates like some serendipity. Yeah. You kind of talked about that too, like contact creating serendipity or like just being online and being like in the mix. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:58 This is like portion. Liking a post or applying to something or putting putting yourself out there. Who cares of someone. Like when you, I mean, it's different for you know. If you post, there's millions of people going to look at it. But like just for like a regular person, when you post like a tweet and it says like 116 impressions, it's going to like, that's all like, that's still like, that's still some people that have looked at it and you don't know who it is.

Starting point is 00:13:16 But, you know, laid it down the line, that could come in a head. When we talk about some of the stuff I'm doing now, I can, I've gotten all my opportunities. Every single one of them has been, like, through Twitter or like through some, like, LinkedIn or some email or thing I've sent. And years later down the track, it's all come.

Starting point is 00:13:32 Well, tell the story about the billionaire. So what, what happened there? That's out on Twitter? Yeah. That was a, that was me just like saying, I need a, I just made this, like, kick-ass investment. And let me, like, I want more people to know about it. So I was like talking to, like, journalists and stuff like that, like, hey, write about the story and no one was really taking the time. But there was one dude that was actually, yeah, on Twitter, he wasn't responding to anything else.

Starting point is 00:13:56 I went on Twitter. I saw he active there. I was just like, I just kept liking his post. I didn't actually say anything. And then, like, he checked out my LinkedIn profile. And we started talking. He's like, okay, yeah, let me write about the story. And it was like, it wasn't like a Forbes or anything.

Starting point is 00:14:08 It was like a pretty small news site that it's so weird that they posted that article a few days later. Billy and I read that article and then res out to you. We'll tell that story. So even that is like, there's this phrase that I read once. I think Mark Suster, a blog post about this called Lines, not Dots. Basically,

Starting point is 00:14:28 the idea is like, a line is just a collection of dots. Like, mathematically, that's what a line is. It's multiple dots all connected. And so what he says is like, you know, he's like, what people think happens is they see on TV that you go in, you meet this investor cold, you blow their socks

Starting point is 00:14:44 off with this pitch, and then they write you this check and say, you know, here you go, son, go go on. And it's like, that's not what happens. Like, that's movies. That's Shark Tank. That's not real. And the real thing is dots. And so he's like, you know, many interactions that stack up that when you look back later is a line.

Starting point is 00:15:01 And he's like, investors invest in lines, not dots. Meaning they're not just going to, like, it's not the very first interaction typically where it's all just going to happen for you. And so it's following the person, like in the post, replying to something. They notice that this person said something smart, not the first time, but the third time.

Starting point is 00:15:16 Yeah. And then after that, they follow you back. And then because of that, they see this other blog post you wrote that you don't even realize that one of your 98 views was this person who's actually legit. And then go, you know, like, and then so those dots stack up. And ultimately, that's how trust gets built. That's how the framework. This is the framework king. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:34 Watch me close, baby. That's what I do. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, I think, you know, what you've done really well. So, all right. So let's get to the part where we break up. So at some point, we break up.

Starting point is 00:15:44 We worked together for a while, like, out of year. I think it was actually a couple of years of, like, knowing each other and, like, doing stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So we get to some point where you're like, you come to me one day, you're like, I want to day trade or something. Like, to be fair, you were actually kind of good at this.

Starting point is 00:16:00 I remember one time we were on a call and I was like telling you like some instructions or something like some action items and then like there's like no feedback. And I was like, yeah, are you listening? Like, what are you doing? What happened? Is this thing on? and you were like, oh, hang on, Bitcoin just crashed to

Starting point is 00:16:17 $3,500. I'm like, this motherfucker's looking at the Bitcoin price while we're supposed to be working on our very important crystal store or whatever we were doing, whatever, you know, scheme we were in at the time. Yeah. And I remember, like, like, two reactions.

Starting point is 00:16:31 One, like, annoyed. Like, dude, this guy's like not paying attention. Two, when Bitcoin crashed, like, you know, he's buying shit I buy? You're like, because you told me, you're like, Bitcoin crash. I'm trying to place an order real quick. It was down like 60%.

Starting point is 00:16:43 on just that day. Everyone in crypto, like, knows that day. It was a very, like, it wasn't in March or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, and like, you just never see it happen. This is like, this is not some old coin. This is like, this is Bitcoin. This is, right.

Starting point is 00:16:55 This is Bitcoin. And so when that happened, I was like, I've seen a few of these and I just wasn't a part of it. And so I was like, I'm so sorry. I know I should be working and listening right now. I was like, I need to act right now. And so, yeah, I mean, I grabbed all the money I had.

Starting point is 00:17:09 It was a couple of thousand dollars. And I, well, I did. didn't just buy Bitcoin. I was like, the degenerate in me, I was like, okay, let me try and maximize the opportunity. So I went on people to know BitMex. I went leverage long on Bitcoin. So I took all my money, did that. And when I went like...

Starting point is 00:17:26 And leverage long means what here in this case? So if you buy $1,000 with a Bitcoin and you buy, you know, 20x leverage, that means you actually buy $20,000 worth. But if it goes down by even a little bit, you'll wipe out. You'll have your experience a thing called liquidation. Right. So getting liquidated is like your worst nightmare. And I remember you were like, what, four or five grand?

Starting point is 00:17:48 Yeah, that was like four grand. That was my collateral. I was 20x or 25x leverage. And when I clicked the button to buy, like, everything went frozen. And I was like, I was thinking, oh, shit, it's just me. Like, I'm kind of freaking out. And I go on Twitter. That's why I was like, not really talking.

Starting point is 00:18:04 I went on Twitter. And everyone else was like, BitMex just froze. And I'm like, okay, it's not just me. It's like the actual exchange. And I was kind of freaking out because I thought, all right, it's gone. I've already clicked by. And when you were looking at the chart, if you look at the one minute chart, it was just going down, like, it went down, down, down, and it just stopped.

Starting point is 00:18:23 So you'd assume that when it, like, unfreezes, it would have just kept going down. Because who knows, this was like a Black Swan event, right? So we don't know what's going on. And so that's why I was, like, frozen for a while because I thought I'm an idiot. I just lost some money. But when it unfroze, I saw I was up like 40,000. I was like, oh, it's like my heartless round thing. And yeah, I think you went on Coinbase, you'd be able to

Starting point is 00:18:49 buy it. When you told me, I was like, I was like, come on man. I was like, but wait, what? What's the price? And I went and bought 25K that day too. Yeah. And so, which is actually an amazing trade. Like, we made more money in that, we made more money in that one minute. Yeah. Then we did like, you know, six months of experiments together, you know, whatever, three months of experiments that we were working on at the time. And there is a lesson there, which was like, you know, the best kind of like ideas don't all just come from your head. Like, you know, you're at the time, like, intern, chief of staff, but you were like, this is a buy.

Starting point is 00:19:21 Right now, I'm going to do this. And by following you, I kind of like got the benefit of that at the time. And, you know, Bitcoin would have traded up to like 70 grand or whatever since then. And then, you know, it's come back down to Earth. But my takeaway from. Still, my takeaway was, uh, does like, does. very few moments where you can make all the money versus like trying to make a little bit of money every single time. I think like I'm not a day trader. I don't think I'd go back to being a day trader

Starting point is 00:19:50 or whatever. But I think all the money is made when there's like a few key decisions that happen maybe once a year or once every few years, once every few months, whatever it is. And you just have to act on it with like, it's a bit degenerate. You have to like, there wasn't a lot of thoughtful planning around I'm going to buy Bitcoin because of this mathematical equation that's four. It was just times like this doesn't happen every, all the time. So let me act on it. In the moment, I was like, this guy's a fucking degenerate, right? I didn't even know exactly how an option trade worked.

Starting point is 00:20:22 I was like, okay, this is crazy. But at the same time, you're right, like, if you go read that Buffett quote where he's like, you know, there are moments or seasons where, you know, the clouds fill the sky and it's about, and it's about to rain. And he says in that moment, let us not come out with spoons, but bathtub. to sort of like make, hey, there's also, you know, Navall has a book that's similar to this, which is he's talking about luck.

Starting point is 00:20:46 He says one of the versions of luck is being able to recognize an opportunity. Yeah. So it's the version of luck. It's like he calls it level two or whatever. He's not the inventor of this. I just heard it from him. But, you know, the original guy who wrote this, he basically says, you know,

Starting point is 00:21:00 it's sort of luck favors the prepared mind. Yeah. So anybody could have seen that price and most people when they see something going down, they get scared. You were like, this is Bitcoin. Bitcoin flash crash, blink decision that this is a good bet for me, like whatever, risk reward adjusted. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:18 And, you know, you were correct in that. Later, I'm going to tell a story. So you come to the States. We fly you out. And I remember we go to a restaurant and we invite my buddy Suu. And we're talking. And so he's like, okay, Sean, like, you know, tell me, like, what, what are you excited about? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:34 And you go, I'm excited about this company called Annie Moka. and you had told me about this company three times at this point and you were like, oh, I love the stock Annie Mocha. I like the stock. It was like, you were like the GameStop guy, right? You're like, I like the stock. And I was like, Annie Mocha, I've never heard of this. Sounds like a yogurt.

Starting point is 00:21:51 And then I was like, why do you like it? And then you had told me something that. I didn't really ask, but I was like, what does it do? And you're like, oh, they're making these like bubble games or something like that. Okay, whatever. Later, when we're at this lunch, I was like, hey, Suli built a mobile gaming company and sold it for whatever, 100 million bucks more. tell them about that, what's that mobile gaming company?

Starting point is 00:22:09 And you started telling him. He's like, okay, interesting. So I had heard it like four times from you, never took action. Because again, I was not at that time listening in probably the way I should have. That's an investment you made millions dollars off up. Yeah. Tell the story of how after we stop working together, you go from intern to multimillionaire in a very short, like how long? Yeah, it's a very foot about time.

Starting point is 00:22:31 So at, so I've known about at Amaka, it was an Australian. the listed company. So it was on the stock market and initially bought like a few thousand dollars worth and it did well. It went up like four X, something like that. So I was like, okay, great. That's, you know, I've done my thing here.

Starting point is 00:22:45 And I was looking at it as an investment so I didn't sell it. And then the Australian Stock Exchange, they came after it. And they were like, oh, you guys are dealing in this weird crypto stuff. We're going to have to deal list you. Well, they weren't crypto initially.

Starting point is 00:22:57 They pivoted to. Yeah, so about the time when I bought, so I bought them initially because they had an announcement and they were like, we're going to do a thing called CryptoKitties, and we're going to work with them. And so I saw that as like, this was before, like, a pretty boring robot company. Now it's like a sexy crypto.

Starting point is 00:23:14 Yeah, it's like a sexy crypto thing. It's like, how do you value a blockchain game? Like, this is like things that are like to value is kind of what I like, because nobody knows what the prices. Right. And so, like, as a degenerate, I like that. And so, yeah, so anyway, it did well. Anyway, none of this episode is financial advice.

Starting point is 00:23:30 This is actually NFA, yeah. Me just laughing at the wheezing. of this story. So let's tell the story. So you buy more. So, yeah, so I bought it. It got delisted. And so I'm like,

Starting point is 00:23:42 holy shit, my money is gone. How much money were in at that point? It wasn't a lot. It was like $25,000. But to you, that was a lot. That was, yeah, that was everything to me. Yeah. So you put everything you have,

Starting point is 00:23:54 which is 25 grand at the time. It gets delist off the stock exchange because the exchange is like, you guys now do crypto. We don't know. We don't like crypto. We don't know what crypto is. Yeah. Now you're liquid stock.

Starting point is 00:24:02 You can't even sell. Yeah. I can't sell it. And so this was like, tell me this, I'm laughing at you. I'm like, dude, I remember you told me this. You're like, dude, I got fucked on animoka. And you're like, it's delisted. I'm like, wow, I thought you'd probably just lose money because the stock goes down.

Starting point is 00:24:17 I didn't think you would lose money because you just can't sell it anymore. Yeah. But you did something even crazy. You doubled down on crazy. So tell. So throughout that year, I did a few things. I weren't about like secondary markets. That's something I didn't, yeah, I wasn't really exposed to before.

Starting point is 00:24:31 I learned about that. I did a lot more research into like, they were doing and I've always been in the and I was the perfect person because I had a Microsoft server when I was a kid. So I'm in high school. So I understood how that if you turn these in game items into something that you could sell

Starting point is 00:24:48 this is a win-win for everyone. So there's that. I was a game around house and I was in Bitcoin way long before 2016. So when you mix all of that together, I was like the perfect person to see the light. I was like, okay, what they're doing is actually something that I want to get more exposed to and, you know, why buy a bunch of different tokens and companies, but I can just buy the, get exposed to the people that I think will be the overall winners here.

Starting point is 00:25:16 And so once I, you know, had that conviction, I was like, okay, well, how do I, I can't market buy the stock, right? So I was like, how do I actually buy this thing now? And this was like a year, it's been the illlisted. So in that time, I was working for you and I'd have another guy. And I had a few other bets that did really, after pay was one of them that ended up being a told me about that one too. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:36 We were talking about buy now, pay later. Yeah. And I had met Max left you from a firm. Yeah. I was like, oh, this was a great startup idea. And you go, oh, we have actually after pay is better. Yeah. And I was like, bro, your little Australian version is not better.

Starting point is 00:25:50 You were like, no, look at these numbers. It's better. And that stock just went. That went crazy from how you. You told me like really early on that one. So I, yeah, yeah. So I did, yeah. So I did really well with that.

Starting point is 00:26:02 I also have a pretty crazy story. there where I followed one of the, like, I didn't have a lot of edge being like a kid from Australia investing in a public stock. So I followed, you know, all the C-suite people on Strava to see where they're at. And one of them was like near the square offices. And they never like, so that's when, you know, they ended up acquiring. So I got like the little edge there. Billions. So that was a little hack. You're like, I don't have satellites to track cars, but you, that's legit. You follow the guy. Yeah. And he was at the square offices. You're like, they might get bought.

Starting point is 00:26:34 So as the guy from afterpay, the C-H-O-O was at, he was in San Francisco, and he was, like, pretty close for Square Office doing his run. And I was like, there might be something. I didn't know what was going to happen. I'm like, I felt like a partnership would happen, but then, you know, Square came out and bought them for like $30 billion or whatever. And, you know, just stopped going to way crazy.

Starting point is 00:26:51 But anyway, I made a bunch of stuff. I met money from doing trades like that. And working for you guys. All right, so how do I buy animal? I want to buy more. And, you know, the way I went to, like, Facebook groups initially. You told me you were like, there's a Facebook group of people just, like, commiserating.

Starting point is 00:27:07 Yeah, we're wailing. Recovering Anaboka stockholders who are just there pitching and moaning. They were very disgruntled. Like, they were talking about, at one point doing like a class action against animo or whatever, like, all this stuff. And so I was like, okay, at the time when they were listed, they were worth like $80 million or $100 million. I was like, okay, I could get a huge discount on that. And so, yeah, I went to Facebook. I got a few people and they're like small trades.

Starting point is 00:27:32 I was like, I need bigger. How do I get people that have the big money? So I got the list of the top shareholders. You can request it publicly in Australia. It might be the same here in the States. But I got the top holders and I was like, let me go through each one of them, which one of them is disgruntled. And there was a few that I still couldn't. Like, the Australian press wanted me to like name these people.

Starting point is 00:27:50 Yeah. I think one of them say public. But they're like pretty big time people that, I mean, they're already rich. Yeah, they're smart money. Yeah, they're smart money. They're already rich. They had this because they invest in some fund. I had some allocation, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 00:28:01 So they were like just willing to get rid of it. They're like, it's delisted. They don't know. They probably don't know that they're in crypto or they're gaming. It's just one of the things in their portfolio. That's, you know. And so, buying it for like what discount?

Starting point is 00:28:13 Like 50%. 80%? It was more like 80% percent discount to what the last. And I remember when you told me, I have the Slack messages what you told me. I'm buying it for, you know, 10 cents on the dollar. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:25 And I'm like, bro, you're just lighting money on fire. Like, you're going crazy. Like, what's going to like, that's a. insane reaction to the bad news bears was I'm going to like double down but it worked

Starting point is 00:28:38 I didn't do I think I like mother like the drill down I I put everything I had is about a hundred K that I just like this this should work at it. Well it's also like if I lose all this money all right I'm in my 20s I'll like you told me this you know you're like I'm 20 years old

Starting point is 00:28:55 yeah I'm just gonna I'll just like get a job and I'll save up again and I'll I'll just, I've got, this is the time to do every, take all these crazy bets. I don't have kids. I don't have anyone that's heads on me. So, yes, I made the bet. I did all the transactions. That itself was like a bit of a crazy thing because they take some time to do private

Starting point is 00:29:16 transfers in Australia, like the documentation for that. The people that were handling the transactions, they were taking a long ass time. So one of them, actually the biggest transaction, after Anamaka, you know, announced their now worth a billion dollars that did a raise. I was like, do I even have these shares? Because it was still taking time to process. I'm like, I put the money in the escrow account. I obviously ended up getting the shares.

Starting point is 00:29:38 But yeah, it was like this whole new world of, all right, I couldn't, like, I wasn't like an angel investor before. I didn't understand how to do this. I had to just like, kind of claw and did they even know you're like, do these guys know they're dealing with like a 20 year old counterparty? And these guys actually know that they had no clue that they were. Yeah, that was, yeah, it was pretty, like, these are like pretty serious legit guys that were. I mean, they thought they were, you know, shoveling dirt onto me. And then, right, I was they're probably laughing. Yeah, their perspective was, let me give dirt to this person.

Starting point is 00:30:07 And I thought I was buying a gold mine. And so I was like, let me, let me do this. But I remember I, and it, a lot of this, there's a lot of luck involved, obviously. And so when I bought it, you know, I thought this was like a very long term play. Like, after five years, there might be something here. But it was only after about three months. So I bought it, the valuation I bought it, that was like 30, 40, 40. million and a few months

Starting point is 00:30:32 afterwards they raised it a billion dollars and I remember getting a call there was like this Hong Kong fund that reached out to me and because I I've always I had to like flex a little bit to people and I put it online that you know I bought this company so you're up 50X yeah I'm up yeah it was worth like I think

Starting point is 00:30:48 $2 million and I was like holy shit let me like let me like I'm not let me like have a think of what to do here because people wanted to buy it and you had a Hong Kong fund that reached out and was like We'll buy all of it. We'll give you $2 million today.

Starting point is 00:31:02 You're 21 years old or something. This was actually right before they actually announced they're raising in a billion dollars. Some fund probably heard they were going to raise it a billion dollars. Then we're trying to get it off me at a like at a discount. So I was like, I think the initial offer was like a million dollars or like whatever. And I remember calling my dad. I was like, holy shit, like this is worth a million dollars. And obviously, like brown parents, you know, this is a million dollars.

Starting point is 00:31:23 You took this to generate. But take the money. Like, what are you doing? Take the money right now. And so, like you said, I was like, just wait a few months, maybe this will be more. I was like, I don't think that like, this is it here. And especially because I was tracking all the numbers,

Starting point is 00:31:40 especially NFT like, like NFT volume sales. And I've been tracking this every single month. And for like, it was like a flat line. It was like someone was dead here. And then in this month, there was a little uptick. So I'm like, these little upticks don't just like start and end here. There's some like praise that goes on here. So I was like, if this is worth a billion dollars now and this,

Starting point is 00:31:59 the hype is just starting now. Let me ride this way. At the peak, Anamoka was worth what? At the peak, they raised, the latest rat was $6 billion. Six billion. So you were buying it effectively like a $20, 30 million dollar valuation. Yeah. It runs up to $6 billion.

Starting point is 00:32:15 I remember at one point you're telling me in Slack, you're like, these people just offered be $2 million for this. Yeah. I'm like, holy shit, you did it. We started the podcast, my first million. You just made your first $2 million. Congrats. Like, I can't believe this worked out.

Starting point is 00:32:28 you're like, I'm not going to sell though. And I was like, wow, this guy's insane. And I was like, that's an insane story. So you held it. What's it at now? Who knows? No one knows. I mean, I was with us.

Starting point is 00:32:43 I met, I met Yad and I met the board. It was a few weeks ago in Sydney. And the real thing here is, I forgot who set up, but they'll like never count your winnings unless it's like cash in bank. It's realized. And so I was like, okay, you have to exit this. And the way to exit it is either I sell it privately. All these unicorns, they're at massive discounts right now.

Starting point is 00:33:04 So it's like, I could do that. I hate like, you know, at its peak, it's worth eight figures. Do I sell now for seven figures and cash it in? That's always like a decision that plays all my mind. Right. Otherwise, you know, they have plans to list and do an IPO. What you told me at the time? Because I was like, dude, this is insane.

Starting point is 00:33:20 I was like, hey, man, listen. Yeah. As your pseudo father figure here, you should sell this. And you were like, I see what you mean, but you were like, what do I need $2 million for? You were like, I don't have something I'm going to go do. I'm not going to change my, I don't want to change my lifestyle.

Starting point is 00:33:35 Like, I like my lifestyle. Yeah. You were like, I'm just going to look to invest it somewhere else. And if I think this is still the best place to invest it, I'm just going to do that. And like, you know, if I lose it, I'm so young that like, whatever, I get the story and I'll just keep going. Like, you know, I'm not. And the way you said it, like, the my meter went from, oh, my God, this guy's insane to like, honestly, I see his perspective.

Starting point is 00:33:58 which is that $2 million bucks changes most people's lives but you're like, I don't think that, that doesn't get me where I'm trying to go. Yeah. And in fact, you know,

Starting point is 00:34:09 if I still believe in this, I just want to see where this goes in for, you know, for a while as crypto can, as NFTs, you were right, like became the thing that year.

Starting point is 00:34:17 Yeah. You know, there was sort of like a peak moment in that where it became worth more than $10 million dollars, right? So it was like, would have played out very well.

Starting point is 00:34:23 Timing is always very, very tricky. Do you look at this as I was trying to try it, I was trying to time a bubble, or do you look at this as I believe in this company and I still believe in this company and that's why I have to stock? Believe in a company and also, I was kind of seeing this as like, there's, there's like a few people that have like these life holds. It's like, you know, you hold these, like this is a lifetime hold. This isn't like you buy in, you sell out, whatever. And so I was convincing myself of that.

Starting point is 00:34:53 It's like, I'll buy this and, you know, when this becomes like the next 10 cent, I'll have a couple of. million dollar stake and that's how and I didn't have to do it. This was like the only investment I had to do. I didn't have to make all these other investments. There's still some like part of me that believes in that. It's like I still see a pathway where like in the next 20, 20, 30 years, whatever, this is like a hundred, 200, 300 billion dollar company or whatever. And it's like, I have, I've got a pretty decent, you know, stake in that. And so yeah, that's what I was like convincing myself of that is a bit less now during times like this. But I still have. some thing here while I'm like, okay.

Starting point is 00:35:32 Is it hard to not just get attached, like, identity-wise to, like, I don't want to be wrong? Yeah. I'd made that mistake before. Like, I think, you know, especially this is such an extreme case. That's one specific thing. You were so right. You were boy genius. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:46 Then it crashes, but you're like, am I now boy idiot or am I boy genius? Is this the moment where I held through the tough times? Or did I just fuck up and I need to learn that lesson? Like, yeah. Really hard. Yeah. How do you deal with that? Well, I think.

Starting point is 00:36:01 Well, I went into, let me just like do something. So I was like, I was still investing some money on behalf of other people. And I was going around and meeting founders and stuff like that. And that's why I'm like, I'm doing something else right now. Well, okay, yeah, you have other bets. Yeah, I've got other bets. So that's what got me through. And I was like, if this goes away, I need to make sure that this is the next big bet.

Starting point is 00:36:22 Right. I don't need to be, like, I don't need to be right on this one. Like, look, you know, if it ends up the way it's going, I've got time to make more bets and be really right on something else. Yeah, and also you had done so much degenerate trading that you don't emotionally mood swing. Yeah, the money is all becomes plain money in a way. Well, aside from Adamaka, I had a bunch of other token investments, especially when Facebook renamed to meta.

Starting point is 00:36:48 Remember, I was buying up all the metaVos coins, Decentraland, Axi, Sandbox. And so I experienced making millions of dollars like liquid cash. So I weren't a lot of lessons there. I also lost a lot of that money when, you know, I didn't manage my risk post-preserve. But I experienced, like, the numbers just became like, you're looking under the screen, I have no attachment to it. There was, like, those days where I'd be up a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Starting point is 00:37:15 I'm like, probably, obviously I spent a lot of it. I was like, all my boys were treated. We went out. When I eat, we all. Yeah, it was like, I was a pretty shy, nerdy, nerdy guy, right? So I didn't really know how to talk to girls. if you want to learn how to talk to girls, get rich. It was like a huge confidence for style.

Starting point is 00:37:34 Yeah, I was, it just gives you the confidence. It's just the confidence for you, which is. Yeah, I think it was a confidence. It was like, even if she rejects me, I'm still, I can go look at my medabascator and feel good about it sounds. Yeah, it was more like, yeah. And also, for me, like having $2 million at a bank felt like a billion dollars to me. Of course, yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:51 I'm like, I'm spending a lot and it's just like, it's not going down. Because I'm like, I don't have kids and have family. I don't have any, I have no obligate. whatsoever. So even a lot, didn't put a big debt. Would you, do anything stupid? So, yeah, I got an apartment. I got a, I got a Tesla. I spent, like, there'll be weekends where I'd get, like, limos out for me. My boy would get, like, I remember, like, my birthday.

Starting point is 00:38:13 We got, like, three limos. We drove down to the Gold Coast, which is, like, you know, what Gold Coast is in Australia. Do I'm so happy to hear this, because when I, like, I don't know what I was paying you back that. It wasn't much. It was like, the very first thing was, it was 30K a year. I think it was like. Yeah, we started 30K. I think it went up after that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, to maybe like 80 to 100, something like that.

Starting point is 00:38:33 That's what I was paying you then. And I remember at the time being like, oh, this is not going to work. This guy's getting like super rich doing these like crazy investments on the side. Like, yeah, it's not going to make sense for him to have a job at some point, which is great. Like my goal wasn't to have you work for me for 20 years. It was like, here's a young entrepreneurial guy. Come get some reps with me. Come like, just get you off the traditional path.

Starting point is 00:38:55 Yeah. And then like, I hope you go do big shit and like, you know, I could be your biggest fan. and all that. That's kind of what's after. And I'm, yeah, I've had my popcorn, you know, watching, watching you do this stuff and being totally entertained the whole way. Yeah, because you definitely like had like a roller coaster. You're kind of like those like Wall Street Betts kids, basically. Like, yeah, I was on Wall Street Betts like since I was in like high school.

Starting point is 00:39:16 Like I was, yeah, I was always on that forum. There's an equivalent in Australia, there's a thing called Hot Copper, which is like the equivalent of Wall Street Betts. And on that I was like the most active person. And my nickname was Mr. Silicon Valley because I was. investing in tech stocks. Right. And I'm like,

Starting point is 00:39:30 if you go on my, like, everyone can look at my profile. It's like, I'm, oh, I'm tweeting about Adamokro. I'm like talking about

Starting point is 00:39:35 an amokro on that platform. And there's another company called Brainship and ended up becoming like a multi-billion dollar because of AI craze and stuff like. I was constantly looking at anything to do with what is like the next 100x stock? Because for me, it's not, you're talking about it's, a billionaire takes you out the lunch and it's like,

Starting point is 00:39:54 what's the next end ofoka? He reads the article and he's like, I got to meet this WIS kit. takes you out, he's like, what's the next one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You shit your pants immediately. You're like, I don't know if I can know. Yeah, because during that time, like, I mean, this was Zep era, right?

Starting point is 00:40:07 So I'm like, everything I'm telling people to invest in, it's going up and up and up and, you know, I'm a genius. Yeah, I'm a genius. And so I was like, oh, shit. But I truly believed I was like, Adamock had just raised it a billion dollars. I was like, you should, you should invest in Amaka. Adamoka is the thing. That is the next thing. And he was like, oh, okay, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 00:40:28 And in the next few days, but inside he's like, God damn, I love that confidence. Yeah, next few days, he ended up becoming like the top 10 shareholder

Starting point is 00:40:34 in the company bought out tens of millions of dollars of stuff. And it obviously, you know, at a market and stop at a billion. You know, so he made,

Starting point is 00:40:39 you know, over nine figures in that. So then that's... Tip you a little bit on the way out or tip the dealer? There's that comment. Fair enough.

Starting point is 00:40:50 Yeah. So, all right, so you go through that crazy journey. One of the things that comes out of that was you were then

Starting point is 00:40:56 on behalf of this guy plus other people you were doing other investments. Yeah. One of them is shuffle. Let's talk about shuffles. So you had flacked me a while back and you were like, hey, crazy story. I think on the pot I was like, can't say who told me this. Right.

Starting point is 00:41:12 Yeah. Now it's all, now it's like way more public. At the time, you were like, hey, there's a company called steak. Yeah. That is making unbelievable amounts of money. You were like, they had like a, whatever, $800 million dividend last year. Like, that's just the profits they took out. You're like, this guy, one of the owners, how old are they?

Starting point is 00:41:30 They're like, and they're like late 20s, mid-20s. Yeah, like 27 years old, about a $50 million house in Australia. Yeah. And another guy bought like, whatever, $100 million house. And it's like, that's how you guys someone's like rich, by the way, when they're, yeah, buying like a look at the real estate. Yeah, that is like, you know, that when they're buying an asset like that, like that. Because people didn't know it.

Starting point is 00:41:47 The articles are basically like mystery, you know, mega millionaire buys 50 million dollar home. And then it was like, they had two. companies, they had like a software company that makes like Gamble Incelsen for, yeah. It's like it makes like the gaming software to go play like the games. And then they have steak, which is the casino, the like basically crypto casino. And they're like, you know, intertwined companies or whatever. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:13 A little Alameda, you know, FTX, you know, I'm getting some vibes here as I describe it out. But either way, like steak has been, you know, it's become like huge. You know, they have Drake playing and then whatever gambling and shit like that. So you meet these guys who are doing. a competitor to that in a way. Yeah. How do you describe Shuffle and tell us about like this crazy space? Because I only know what you told me about the steak thing at the time.

Starting point is 00:42:36 Yeah. And then since a bunch of news has come out like kind of validating what you said, tell me about the space and tell me. Well, at the time, so I was traveling around just Australia meeting other founders. And I was at this dinner. And at that dinner, the guy, there was a guy that was like pretty good friends with the stake co-founders. And he would like say these numbers. this is before the articles and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:42:57 So he would say some insane, bash shit crazy numbers. And I'm like, if these numbers are true, this is the fastest growing tech startup in Australia and history, like this is like, maybe in the world, like this is like very,

Starting point is 00:43:07 I mean, they were founded in 2017 and they're going to do a couple billion dollars in revenue. This is like some kids in their 20s, right? So I initially heard of that. I was like, okay. And already at that time, I remember messaging you about,

Starting point is 00:43:18 I wanted to start like a crypto trading, like let people do, like I want to start a, I titled the document. I want to build like the world's largest. casino. And I remember this stuff. Yeah. And the way that that product is actually like a huge product now. I don't know if you've heard of a roll bit, but they have like a crypto's trading thing. I was looking to do that, but that's like regulatory just like a nightmare. It's like an unlicensed

Starting point is 00:43:41 thing. And so I was like, okay, but I see this gambling stuff. It's huge stake is, you know, they just did a billion dollars in their profit in a single year. How do I get some exposure to that. And this, going back to like how I find these opportunities, I just remembered there was another like hidden uni that lived in a whole different city to me in Australia that posted his research on after pay. And this was like a couple of years ago. And I don't know why. He popped out in my mind again. So I went looking for that article. I found his name and I hit him a message on LinkedIn like, hey, like, you know, what are you doing these days? Let's catch up and whatever.

Starting point is 00:44:19 And yeah, we caught up. And then that's when he started telling me about like these other crypto kids in Australia that have like made it pretty big doing all this degenerate stuff. And they're starting a crypto casino. And it's going to be a competitor to, not just stake, but there's like, that's the thing. The market is so huge. There's, I could, you know, there's a few other competitors that are also doing a billion dollars.

Starting point is 00:44:40 And it's just not really reported on, right? It's kind of like a, yeah, kind of shady industry. So I was like, okay, I, for me, coming from pretty small town in Australia, when you meet other people that are kind of like you, and we all had a success in our own domain, I'm like, if we just come together,

Starting point is 00:44:58 we're going to hit something big. And I just wanted to be around those people. And so it was more like a bet on this group of also ambitious, smart, slightly degenerate or very degenerate or very degenerate. Yeah, like 20, young 20 year olds, basically. Yeah. And these old people are like,

Starting point is 00:45:16 and we've all kind of been through the same thing of making a lot of money, losing a lot of money, so we can kind of like lead at each other in that way. Like, we understand each other in that. By the way, this happens in like, it's happened in Online Pover. I remember like the rise of Online Pover and the kind of poker kids who all made it. They all kind of lived in houses together and figured out how to like each, like beat the game together basically.

Starting point is 00:45:39 Same thing happened with social media. So like the TikTokers or the Viner's who all lived in the same building in Los Angeles. Right. Yeah. collabed with each other, plus traded tips, plus, like, got brand deals for each other, and they all, like, rose up way faster

Starting point is 00:45:52 than the people who were on their own or didn't have the kind of connection. Just was my Juntaugger. Yeah. So, yeah, so that's how I met them, but I was like, we all kind of agreed. A lot of the background of the shuffle team,

Starting point is 00:46:07 they come from, like, the big exchanges, FDX is one of them, BitMex, Crypto.com. That's all their backgrounds. So we all have the hard-heard Stanford of, of the sketch world.

Starting point is 00:46:18 So I was like, we all, and you know, obviously I've traded on all of them. And we all just had like, we all agreed on this macro thesis of every single cycle. There is like this one clear big widow, which is the exchanges, right? Their business model is every bet, every degenerate bet you take, they have a little fee. Right. It's called transaction fee for them. For us, it's called houseage. But it's the same exact thing.

Starting point is 00:46:41 Same model. The same model struck. The legal structure is actually really similar as well. they will like get a license out in satials or or you know FTCHAs in Bahamas crypto casinos and Dutch Caribbean and Curacao. So it was like there's all these similar. What is that? There's like some place that's like they just made it their business, some, some country.

Starting point is 00:46:59 Country right? Yeah. Yeah, Curisar. Yeah, that's the where the hell is Curisau? What is Curisau? It's just a place where you can, I mean, anyone, if you want to get a license to do like an online crypto casino, you could probably spin one up in like six weeks. And that's their model.

Starting point is 00:47:15 They're like, we're open for business for casino for online casinos, basically. And like, that's where everybody goes to get their license. Yeah, like, we're like in the same structure as steak and, you know, all the other guys. We're all under the same license. And there's some risk to that, obviously, like, what happens to our license, how long can you sort of play this game? And you have to sort of calculate what amount of risk you don't take there. But yeah, that's, it's exactly the same as these exchanges that were out, out, you know, in the Stachals or Bahamas. And so we saw that more like, okay, here's a clear difference between exchanges and casinos, though.

Starting point is 00:47:49 Exchanges are raising at tens of billions of dollars and that they've got all the fame. Whereas, you know, if people just understood, if this was more public on how profitable these casinos are and how they're very similar businesses to exchanges, then, you know, there would be some re-rating of valuation for these for these casinos. And so that was like, that's the... But a lot of these investors and funds, they have like a no- vice clause, right? Yeah, they just can't invest in weed. They can't invest in gambling or porn or whatever, even though there's money to be made

Starting point is 00:48:20 there. So I think, like, that's one of the other reasons is like, yeah, some people just either themselves individually morally say that or their fund charter basically prohibits them from doing those things. So they're just like out on. Even if they know it's a great business, I mean, who doesn't think a casino is an amazing business? We raised a seed rat and that was like the hottest.

Starting point is 00:48:38 I don't know. My biggest regrets was not investing. I tried to invest in them. It was like, oh, it's like one entity here, here. And I was like, oh, God, like, if I have other people's money, if it's my own money, fine. But when I have other people's money, I have to like, you know, think twice and just in that time, they're like closed or whatever. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:56 But anyway, like, that's, we all agree that in this like next cycle, whenever it is, could be five years down there. But in the next cycle for crypto, we believe that there will be one, two or three casinos in the top 20 of all the coins. And that's billions of dollars of value that we think that, you know, we could do it. And a big difference with us is like, like, I'm on this podcast right now.

Starting point is 00:49:16 Like, we're not anonymous. Like, we're not like these people that are like, all these crypto casinos, usually they're like very anonymous people. And, um, I mean,

Starting point is 00:49:24 if you're putting your money into a platform, you want to know who's behind it, right? You want to know who these guys are. But how do you, um, like all the, how did you follow all the FTC stuff going on right now?

Starting point is 00:49:33 I'm like really, in this trial. It's like my soap opera right now that I'm paying attention to. It's your Roman Empire. That's my Roman Empire. Exactly. Do you, have you go following it?

Starting point is 00:49:42 And also like, how do you feel about that? How do you think like, because it seems like crypto casino is like risk times risk in that sense of like, I don't know, something between, you know, malpractice to like, you know, the craziness. I think that comes with just that amount of money flowing through something. Yeah. And you said you have people that worked in some of those places. What did they, I guess, what stories have you heard? And I guess, I don't know, like not like is Sean spokesman, you know, like not you professionally, if we can. It's like, my friend, like, how do you think about that stuff?

Starting point is 00:50:14 Yeah. It's like, it's, I mean, being in crypto already, you already, you have like an appetite for speculation. And so anyone that's already in the industry, it's like, you're taking some, you're taking some risk on, okay, there is some like regulatory risk already that one day this license might close down and your business is like, you know, screwed up. And so you have to be kind of smart and calculated about that. Like, okay, what are the other licenses? Can we start building a lab? Like, we have to build our entire platform, like, in a modular way. So if something happens to one license, we can split off, let's say, our casino,

Starting point is 00:50:49 and then put a license to a sportsbook and offer it in a different region. So it's like, we had to move the island. Yeah, yeah. You remember the last? It's like, we moved it. Yeah. So there's some regulatory risk. There's some, like, it's funny.

Starting point is 00:51:01 Like, products have, most startups have product market fit risk. Like, we don't know if anybody wants what we have to offer. Yeah. Because you have no market risk. Then the second tier is technical risk. It's like if we can make a whatever, self-driving car, people are going to want it. There's no market risk, but there's technical risk.

Starting point is 00:51:20 Can you even build a self-driving car? But this, there's no technical risk either, right? It's like, I mean, obviously you have to do technical work, but it's not, that's not the risk in the business. It's all regulatory risk in this. Which is so different than like 99% of the other startups I look at. Yeah. Very few times you do.

Starting point is 00:51:38 just get regulatory. There's also just like actual risk that you have to manage of your book, like limits that you, like, we will sweat sometimes like when we, because we have to start upping the limits. You know, there's some high rolls that come and go like,

Starting point is 00:51:50 I want to do a 10K blackjack hand. I want to do a 25K blackjack hand. And you're just like, okay, holy shit, we have to, you know, if they have a few good runs,

Starting point is 00:51:57 you could be all of a sudden down a couple hundred thousand dollars. And so your revenue is not always guaranteed. That's also like the biggest difference in this, in the, talking about the traction. So you guys launched out on a win. In February of this year, what can you share attraction-wise? So, you know, we're probably going to do a half a billion in volume like this month.

Starting point is 00:52:17 And, you know, this is generating a few million in revenue a month. And hopefully this month will be a few million in profit a month. And, you know, this is also another thing that like these businesses are built to strip out the cash flow. It's like you build the business and then you pay this out. This is not like, you're not praying for some exit. all went into it knowing that no one's going to buy a crypto casino. You build it to make a lot of money and then, you know, strip the, strip the money out and paid out to all the holders of the business.

Starting point is 00:52:48 So that's also like, yeah, it's a very like, yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's a good problem. So, yeah, it's only been a couple months, but, yeah, it's probably 50 million run rates probably where we're at right now. Super impressive. Crazy. Any good stories about, like, I don't know, how did you boot? strap it. Where did you go get your first customers? How did you? Because that was your job.

Starting point is 00:53:10 Yeah. Yeah. So. Because you'd be like, I'm in fucking Asia right now, you know, meeting people. I'm like, what are you doing in Asia? You're like, I'm building the brand. I'm figuring out how to get this thing out the ground. Well, this is like a really, the first thing that I, I don't know why I didn't really know this, but the people that come in play on your site, if they like to gamble, you know, they probably also have some other vices. And like, they're probably not. Some of the are probably, you know, can get very angry, very easy. Because the whole thing is about either you make money or lose money. So when they make money, obviously, they're happy.

Starting point is 00:53:44 When they lose money, you know, right. Especially this, beyond like, I'm going to find out where you live and I'm going to find out, like, when you talk about your first-time customers, like, your first-time customers are pretty rough people that you have to do. So, I mean, the first thing we went to was we're all a bunch of crypto kids that made a bunch of money and we gambled it ourselves. So we already had a lot of other crypto kids that made a bunch of money and, you know, like to gamble. So we went to those guys first and like, hey, come, come, you know, plan our website and test it out.

Starting point is 00:54:15 And we would, you know, there's little tricks and stuff of like stuff with like deposit bonuses and like, yeah, standard kind of standard like sports. We'll play motions and stuff like that. One thing that I think we did that was, oh, that that's pretty interesting that we found out was, okay, we should stop spending so much time trying to get thousands of people who will. deposit like $10, $20 or whatever, because they'll come on, they'll come on your side. And it's good for them to, you know, play. But they will lose $5 and then, you know, spend 48 hours in your support. You know, I'm going to kill you. Where do you guys live?

Starting point is 00:54:48 I need my $5 back versus like, okay, let's let's maybe try and find customers that, you know, not like that. And we got pretty lucky in some parts of Asia, especially Japan, right? Like, they are people who bet really big and they're very respectful. And they're very like, they don't waste any of that time. Like, they will lose money. It's like, it's like, okay, these are the customers we want. Now we know the customers that we want.

Starting point is 00:55:15 And there's good for the business. And, yeah, we started making some pushes there and trying to find, you know, this is a pretty heavy, like affiliate business. You want to find, you want other people to go out and do the work because you can't do Facebook. We can't do Facebook ads. We're prohibited from doing Google. So you can't do PPC. So you have to find really creative ways of trying to acquire customers.

Starting point is 00:55:35 And yeah, that was, yeah. Well, this is why like steak, I think bought or they created kick. Yeah. And they're basically like paying Twitch streamers, you know, gobs of money reportedly like $50 million, $100 million contracts to come play because they're like, oh, these are popular people. One of the things they'll play is we'll give the money to gamble on our platform. They gave Drake like tens of millions of dollars of like, go play,

Starting point is 00:55:58 show people that you're doing a $20 million event and are gambling like $20 million one night. It makes you look like a baller. It creates great content that's going to go viral and get you likes. And all those people are going to see that gambling on stake is fun and Drake does it. Right? That's like they're, is that accurate? That's my perspective.

Starting point is 00:56:15 So steak pioneered that model. Like they're like, we can't bid on these other channels with all these other crypto like other casinos. And so let's try and find other ways. And the streaming model like they pioneered that thing works easily. The thing I'm genius about it also is that instead of like an influencer posting a picture saying, hey, come play on stake, they're playing the product. They're showing you how it works. They're seeing their reaction.

Starting point is 00:56:38 Yeah, you're seeing the reaction in picture with the whole thing. So not only are you educating people about how to play it and how to like this next level in terms of, I guess like play of value as well. Like they will deposit and they'll play, they'll lose. And they're watching the favorite streamer play again. They're like, time for me to also deposit again. So we found out like the affiliates or the influences that are really like they have a Discord channel or they yeah, they have a, you know, they're constantly live streaming. Right. Those people will make the most money.

Starting point is 00:57:06 You told me something you said like we would not like rather than have you have a million followers, we want you to have, you know, 2,000 people like active in a Discord that you talk to all the time. That's more valuable, right? And I think this doesn't just, this isn't just for like casinos. I think like for ecom and they're like there's people that do Facebook groups. And anywhere there's like a concentrated, like you have like those thousand, you know, loyal fans or whatever, those customers are worth. Yeah, all the money.

Starting point is 00:57:35 We did a influencer campaign. We spent $100,000 on influencers. Probably the first like paid influence campaign we'd done. Yeah. So we put out, I was like, let's try. $100,000. And we're going to spread that across these, like, think we did seven influencers, I think. Right.

Starting point is 00:57:51 And so these people who have like, you know, let's call it $250,000 to like, three or four million followers on Instagram. And I should you not. Some of those people who have a lot of followers literally had zero conversion. Zero. Like, dude, I could post on Facebook,

Starting point is 00:58:09 you get one conversion. Like, it's crazy. Some people kicked ass. And as like, what's the difference? I've noticed that, you know,

Starting point is 00:58:14 the Instagram has this one feature, which is like, when, not everybody has it, but like you can broadcast. So, like, I don't know if you've seen this,

Starting point is 00:58:21 but like, Israel has just like almost like, one to many group chat. Oh, yeah, You can send a message and they can only emoji react. They can't like, it's not like your fans can chat back, but it looks like a chat. Right.

Starting point is 00:58:32 And I noticed that the people who have active versions of those where they'll just be like, oh, you know, my favorite mug. Yeah. It'll get like 3,000 like lights there. Right. That's a way better signal for hook actually converts versus like just a generic post or story or follower count. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:49 Which is like, you know, neither here or there. And I think that really moved product, you can tell like the difference in it. It's also just about them being like, very high intent. And so I think about the people that would go into that broadcast channel in the first place, it'd be like a small percentage of like that person's like most loyal, like fans or whatever that are active. And, you know, right.

Starting point is 00:59:07 Yeah. So I think for, like that, that could be applied everywhere. Wherever you can get like, who cares about trying to get, you know, four million impressions. I just want to get, I want my product in front of like the thousand most, I keep using the word degenerate, but like, not to general, like, you know, whatever the thousand people that are, by the way. I used degenerate positively too. When we were hiring, we used to, you know,

Starting point is 00:59:30 companies have like corporate values. Yeah. And it's like integrity. Yeah. And honesty. And like everybody has the same values. It's like, don't know somebody or something.

Starting point is 00:59:38 I don't know. Ours was degeneracy. Yeah. And people were like, why does it say you should be a degenerate to work here? And we were like, what it is. Like that's what we want. We want people who like,

Starting point is 00:59:51 when they work on some, like, there's just two types of people. There's some people that like, you know, they work to live. and some people live to work, right? Like, right? We are the types that when we do a project,

Starting point is 01:00:00 we go all in, we love doing it. We obsess over making something fucking awesome. That's going to take a lot of work. And late nights, we don't want to feel like we're like asking for a favor every time we try to go above and beyond to do something cool. Right.

Starting point is 01:00:13 And but it wasn't about working hours only. That was just one aspect. The other thing we used to say is like, we noticed that the people who were the best earlier in their life had a degenerate, like, obsession with something that wasn't like the thing your parents would reward you for, where the school would reward you for.

Starting point is 01:00:29 Right. So for a lot of people, it was gaming. It's like, oh, yeah, I just spent like an ungodly amount of hours in, in Ultima 4 or like in a runescape or something like that.

Starting point is 01:00:37 That was such a strong signal to us that like, this person is going to be great now with us because they have that switch where once they get really into something, they practice to like to master it and they get obsessed. They want to beat the game. And like, they're not doing it for the, because people told them to do this.

Starting point is 01:00:55 they're doing it because they can't not do it. Yeah. And so we found that people who had early obsessions in life were the best people that we wanted to work with. You also want that in customers or an influencer who's got people that are diehard fans. Like, why do people love Taylor Swift? Like Swifties, they just, they identify in that tribe is what you want. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:13 And I think that like whether people like the idea of a crypto casino or that makes them feel like really crazy or whatever, I think that the marketing lesson about how these guys market themselves is like one of the best like marketing. HACs that created a multi-billion dollar outcome was this one realization that, hey, let's pay these influencers and celebrities to specifically do live streaming on Twitch, which is not the main marketing channel for 99% of other brands. Let's give them money to gamble so that people can watch the sort of thrill of victory and the agony of defeat live in real time.

Starting point is 01:01:47 And that is the best marketing for our product. I respect that. I also think for those guys, I think they're really, they're like one of the most fascinating entrepreneurs to come out of Australia because I think for kick, it's not, it's actually, I think their goal here is all right, they've now, you know, made this $5 to $10 billion like crypto

Starting point is 01:02:05 casino, it's like, where's this, they want to go more now. They, you know, Twitch was valued at $40, 50 billion. I think these guys legitimately just want to go in and, you know, although they want to use the money to beat Twitch. They want to use money to like, this is their next thing to get them to, like, I think they want to leverage, they were already working with all these

Starting point is 01:02:21 streamers, paying them, you know, millions of dollars to gamble. It's like, well, let's actually just also pay you guys million dollars to stream but on our platform it's like I think they saw a sort of gap here

Starting point is 01:02:31 they came at the right time but yeah I don't think it's just for gambling I think these guys truly you know love streaming there's no way that works because streaming

Starting point is 01:02:41 doesn't make that much money yeah yeah there is no way that that works in the sense that you know they would really have to be betting

Starting point is 01:02:50 that they could and you know okay so I don't think it could work but here's the case where Maybe you could. So I remember, so TikTok now is obviously massive. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:59 Do you remember when TikTok came out? So like, yeah, it was musically and then they did like a. Musically. And Musically was doing good, but didn't like make it to like the full mainstream. And it was kind of still seen as this like kitty lip syncing kind of. It wasn't like TikTok today. You can go learn shit. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:15 You can, you know, people make your laugh. You can promote your business. You can sell products. You can do anything. But then I musically was literally like tween girls lip syncing. Right. That's like all it was. there's like more of what the more of what the product was.

Starting point is 01:03:27 So then they rebrand it. It's like they get bought. They rebrand a TikTok, which I remember laughing about the name. Like, what is that name? And they literally spent a billion dollars marketing that app to make sure every teenager has it installed on their phone. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:42 And like, we had a kid who was working for us at the time that was in high school, but he would come and work at our office. I was like, dude, what do your friends think of TikTok? He's like, oh, it's like the joke. He's like, you got to say, like, everybody knows TikTok. He's like, there's not one tiller person in my school that doesn't know TikTok. He's like, we don't think it's cool yet. But like, I got to give him to him.

Starting point is 01:04:01 I'm like, 100% of every kid in my school is aware that there's a TikTok app that they want you to download. Yeah. And like they actually brute force, like, created the network effect. I guess there's a world where Kit could do that. But it's also, I think you're banking on maybe they do something where the friction to buy something on live streaming is lowered. And it, yeah, that's a whole new like avenue. I think they know that the traditional model is not going to ever work and that let's just get all the eyeballs and then maybe they can flick some switch somewhere

Starting point is 01:04:33 and you know like Instagram Reels makes like $10 billion a year. I don't know how. Like you've clicked into the world's greatest ad engine and the Facebook's ad engine is the greatest ad engine. Maybe Google's one or two. But like it's plug. The Reels make that much money because it's plugged into one of the greatest money makers ever. And live streaming is live streaming commerce is like a,

Starting point is 01:04:54 pretty huge thing in Asia. And so if it can somehow work in Western markets, I think, like, there's something, I think, there where they could flick the switch, and then, you know, this is how they go from, we're already worth a couple billion dollars. How do we get to $10, $20, 50? And maybe they don't care about how much they're worth,

Starting point is 01:05:10 but what's like the biggest game? Yeah, what's like the next? They've already won one game. It's like, how do we get to the next? So I think, yeah, that's super, like, I think more people should probably know about those guys. And are you, like, I'm going to be a degenerate forever,

Starting point is 01:05:23 or do like, you know, I'm just going to do this for this period and then I'm going to do something else. Well, I'm just, I really want to be a part of something that could be huge and that could grow really fast. And so I want to do that with shuffle and, yeah, ride this wave. Like, will I do another thing in sports betting or gambling or whatever? I don't know, you know, maybe not. But I, like I mentioned to you earlier before, it's like, you make your nut and go to your noble mission. I think I think I'm Justin Mayer's quote

Starting point is 01:05:56 I love that quote I love that quote not because I think it's right but because so many people when they hear that they're like that's what I'm doing because it's such an easy out to like justify anything that you're doing in the moment because you're like I'm going to do the Noble Mission later and so I love it because it's hilarious

Starting point is 01:06:13 how much people love that quote I don't know if it's good wisdom or bad it was like to tell but what by the way what ideas do you have so do you know MFM you know that's what we do here? I'm going to get out my notes up really quick. Okay. And we might have already talked about some. Just really quickly,

Starting point is 01:06:29 there was, before we been talking about kids that were playing RuneScape and stuff like that, I literally have already one in here. I had incubator around kids who are building businesses within games. I like that. Because I think every... Rob Loss. Yeah, so, I guess

Starting point is 01:06:42 during my era, like, I'm a bit older now, during my era, it was kids that were building Minecraft servers, or I know for the guys that did stake, they were Rooscape kids. They they built a casino in Ruincape first, and then they did their own thing. So it's like Rooscape, Minecraft. I think now it's like Roblox or like maybe

Starting point is 01:07:00 like Fortnite creator maps and stuff like that. Like if you're building businesses within games, every single person I've met that's done that, they're all like super successful millionaires. I 100% agree. I think I tweeted this out, I go, what people think the like winners backgrounds looks like.

Starting point is 01:07:16 Yeah. You know, what the world tells you is like, you know, good grades, it goes to a good school, has good internship. and like, you know, after school activities, runs for student council. It's like, what I've seen is like what the real winners are are like,

Starting point is 01:07:32 the kid, the guy who's running his own gaming server when he's 14. Yeah. Kind of because he just wants to be able to buy games. It's not like even running it as a business, right? Like the sneaker head, like sneaker flippers, basically. You know,

Starting point is 01:07:44 people that are like hardcore gamers that are like, become best in the world at a video game that's like super competitive. Yeah. That type, And like, you know, which requires skills, strategy, communication, like, obsession. Those are pretty translatable skills. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:00 You know, speech and debate is another one. Like, there's these like unorthodox backgrounds. RuneScape is one that's crazy. The RuneScape mafia. Yeah. A number of rich young people I've met that the common denominator is, yeah, we used to be like, I didn't play Roonscape, but they're like, yeah, run, but they're like, yeah, Runecape has like the marketplace or the plaza or something.

Starting point is 01:08:19 Yeah. And they were like, yeah, we used to run the plaza. or the marketplace. And I was like, geez, this is something. I have an idea around that, which is,

Starting point is 01:08:26 I was like, I want to create kind of like the Outcast Conference. So basically what I want to do is be like, these are actual hotbeds of talent that nobody's really talking about. I want to invite like the people who do that.

Starting point is 01:08:38 It's like your point of entry is like, you need to hit one of those criteria. You run in gaming server or like, you're like elite at this like, you know, I found this one thing called Mindsport. It's like someplace you go that you put, it's like Olympics,

Starting point is 01:08:50 but for nerds. So you don't do, you don't run. You play chess and then you play backgammon and then you play like, you play like this like advanced version of chess. Like go, you play go. You play like all these games. And whoever's like the best across these like 10 really hard strategy games is like the mind sport champion.

Starting point is 01:09:08 Yeah. And you know that guy's a free. You know those guys are all going to be amazing. As soon as they decide like, oh, okay, it's time for me to have a career now. Yeah. As long as they just get to like funneling in the right place and don't just go be a McKinsey drone. Like, you know, those people are going to kick ass.

Starting point is 01:09:23 So I'm like, oh, I want to make a thing free for them to attend, but you got to be the best of the best. And I want to just be able to like, curate that talent and be like, I'm going to place my bets on these people now. Like, hey, if any of you ever start a company, just remember this goodwill of me bringing you here, paying for all of this because I want to be your first investor. Like, I genuinely think that's going to be like one of the highest ROI things that I could do. Well, I think a lot of them, so a lot of them get lost to like banking or something like that. And then there's a lot of them as well that they just don't have guidance coming out with the first thing that they do.

Starting point is 01:09:55 And so they fuck around for maybe like a few years. And then like they're like, that's what I'm going to Outcast because like they probably feel like kind of like flying a little bit. I wasn't doing all the shit that the other like achiever kids were doing. But it's like, no, no, no, no, trust me. Let me show you 10 other people that are like you. And then they're like, oh, I see myself in them.

Starting point is 01:10:13 Like, I can do it too. This is the basis of like a lot of sports. Like you see a guy that's from your hometown. and now you start to believe you can do it too. Why do you like Australian entrepreneur so much? Like, what do you care? It's like, because they're from Australia, I'm from Australia.

Starting point is 01:10:27 If they made it, I can make them. Yes. That's cool. But had you never heard of any, you would probably also be, you know, banking somewhere, you know, on that. And also, like, I think a lot of them, when you spend your time where your childhood,

Starting point is 01:10:38 whatever, like in a room, doing all this stuff, you're, whatever, you're making money or, like, you're learning business skills, but then you start lacking in other areas. So then, like, that's setting up, you're setting yourself up for fail. to waste some time, whether it's, then afterwards, you know, you have some girl troubles

Starting point is 01:10:54 or afterwards you don't know how to do something with family or whatever, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, I think that that's why. Oh, that's a great idea. I'm just going to have a kissing thing. I'm not going to have a high girl. It's like, yo, if you haven't had your first kiss, let's just do it now.

Starting point is 01:11:08 And we're going to get that all out of the way. We're going to crush these like lingering for adult in your head. Yeah, but yeah, that was one of them. I mean, what was your idea? The idea was like just like a like a like a, you know, giving these kids like mentorship and like just like incubator. Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:26 Like a little white combinator thing for all these weirdos. What I see? Yeah. There's a, I was just at a conference. I was just really surprised. I mean, something within conferences where I think maybe more people should, uh, make conferences for like cashed up niches. Because especially if you do like the exhibitor model where it's like, oh my God. Like that, you know, and some of these people are the one I just went to.

Starting point is 01:11:49 they're paying a couple hundred thousand dollars for a booth. So maybe that starts off as you do your newsletter. You do like the low effort thing first, the low price, low effort thing of newsletters, whatever, build that audience and then just immediately go into, like I'm surprised you guys haven't done a conference yet

Starting point is 01:12:04 because I feel like that would make like an MFM one. Yeah, like an MFM. Yeah, just a lazy. Yeah. Another one that actually kind of related, I think is kind of boring,

Starting point is 01:12:14 but like a CRM for, again, like cashed up niches. So where right now, looking for a new CRM platform. And, you know, everyone goes to like Salesforce or whatever, but they operate in like 100 different verticals, right? And so who's going to get out 10K a month? It's going to be the one that is still, yeah, built specifically for

Starting point is 01:12:33 eye gaming, which is our niche, whatever. So right now, like, we're making a decision and we're going to go with some other smaller couple. We're not going with Salesforce. We're going with this other one. They're going to get out, you know, 10 grand a month or whatever because they're specifically, they're specifically for eye gaming. Right.

Starting point is 01:12:46 So that's like another one that's a little bit boring, but it's like if you could just find. like some niche. And one of these other cashed up niche. So like one, for example, I think is like farming.

Starting point is 01:12:54 Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, any real estate is another one, right? Yeah. Within that, you could even be like senior living or right.

Starting point is 01:13:02 Age vac. You know, like things like that were, you know that everybody there can spell EBITA. Right? Well, it's like, it's,

Starting point is 01:13:09 I think for anything that where the interactions or the behaviors of your customer is very, it's very high value, but it's also, it's very different to like, maybe like an e-com or whatever, like, or like just a transaction. Like on our one,

Starting point is 01:13:23 it's like you have a bunch of games that you like and you spend, you know, we want to know exactly if you've lost this amount of money in the next few hours, we want to like make some contact with you and stuff like that. We can't really do custom behaviors like that with like a sales force or like whatever else here on platform because it's very tailored to a very broad niche. So anything that has like, so you're saying high value customers and then basically figure out like first

Starting point is 01:13:48 principles, what should this look like for this niche? Yeah, yeah. I think something like that that's pretty good. I like that would be a good idea. I think that's a very like, that's a very good sandbox for somebody that wanted to explore. And we just worked out of this before. It could be someone that does like, so in the gaming biz there's you know, VIP, like VIPs make up your whole type business. We're talking about, there's actually other

Starting point is 01:14:10 verticals as well where VIPs is like your thing. Actually, every single business probably has VIPs that they're just like not interacting with. So maybe like VIP Madden software for ecom, for whatever, you know, even for like retail, businesses or whatever, like, you probably have, yeah, you probably have like the customers that will come in. Let's say I started getting into like the hot, cold exposure therapy stuff. So I started going like, how tech bro of you. I was like, I started going into these places like, you know, three, four times a week.

Starting point is 01:14:39 But, you know, if these guys just would have, know that like I'm paying this much amount of money, right? Come upsell me on something else or do something else. Like, I think that. even like retail businesses, like just if you were to focus less of your time on trying to, you know, broaden like getting, you know, paying on these Facebook ads to get the next thousand customers. What about the 10 that's going to spend like, you know, you know, whatever five, 10 times more on the business. So that's probably, I think some VIP management software

Starting point is 01:15:06 for that guys, that would be. It could sit on top of whatever, whatever niche you choose. It could just sit on top of the current software and just be like, yeah. But this one is all about your VIPs. And we're just going to extract the data that we need. and then give you the actions or the recommendations or the triggers in order for you to like. When should we reach out? What should we give them? What do they like? That could be one.

Starting point is 01:15:29 This is probably not so unique. But I think, I don't know if you've used these, use people like this, but like agencies for content that do, it's like full service of like thumbnails and editors. And I like, I don't know how hard that is to find. Like people that really know their shit about, you know, creating online content because it seems like every. single person wants to, like, you know, be a personality or brand right now. And so people that, I mean, a lot of these are like unique kids that know how to do this.

Starting point is 01:15:57 But it's like exactly how to connect those middle. Yeah, they be the middleman for the unique kids. It was like done for you. So DFI. Yeah. So like people who do this to be income now, honestly, I think they're pretty scammy.

Starting point is 01:16:09 But they're like, hey, we will just hand you an e-commerce business that makes cash flow. Right. And it's like, anytime someone promises you passive income just like run away. Yeah. But like, that's what they're promising. And a lot of people, these companies that are promising this

Starting point is 01:16:22 are making a ton of money. And one of the reasons why is it's tempting instead of just saying, here, we'll teach you Facebook ads, but now you've got to go figure out the rest, what product, what's the supply chain, what's Google ads?

Starting point is 01:16:33 They're like, we're just going to give you the whole thing. Yeah. Turkey. And so, you know, there's a version of that, like, there's video editors and content.

Starting point is 01:16:40 There's, you know, copyrighters. But like, you kind of want the whole thing that sort of like done for you package. Yeah, I think like a full service,

Starting point is 01:16:47 agency for all that sort of stuff might work out. I'm trying to think of what else. Let's see. This one's kind of related to like maybe what you do with Shepard. But so recently we like we started to

Starting point is 01:17:04 had to expand to Japan right? And that is like none of us speak Japanese. We don't know how to scale in that country. And so what we had to do was like first let me research what other companies have done and I remember reading, I think maybe it was like a Chmath video when he was at Facebook and he was like,

Starting point is 01:17:23 we hired some MBAs and they flew over to Japan. They came back and, you know, a few months went by. We weren't growing. We were like, what's going on? We fired those MBAs. We got this like young woman from that was actually living in Japan and within the first month we're seeing growth. And we're like, wait, what, okay, what are you doing that these MBA people have done? She's like, well, you know, on the Facebook profile, like, we don't care about your relationship status. We care about your blood type. And it's just like stuff like that that you would only know localization,

Starting point is 01:17:52 local translation. And to find those people was like, it's pretty hard to do that. So maybe if there's some like agency where, like so we hired uni kids that are that speak native like fluent English so we can communicate with them, but also they're fluent in, you know,

Starting point is 01:18:07 in Japanese and doing that like, you know, growth has been like TEDx or just like, they know the market in terms of. They like, by the, none of them knew anything. about gambling, they don't need to know that. We can teach them that. They need to know,

Starting point is 01:18:19 like, what are the people like? How do you communicate with them? How do we localize all that content, do everything to cater to this market where, and it's in certain market, very important that you are respectful and you appear like you're not, you appear like you're not a foreign company that's trying to attract the customers. You appear like you're born out of that country. Right. So doing that whole process for me was very hard to find like the right people that spoke English, that also was native in Japanese and knew all that. So maybe if there was some like shepherd-like agency to help you, okay, you're expanding into this country, here's like your, you know,

Starting point is 01:18:58 growth assistants that are native to that language and can do all these things. That's cool. I like that. Yeah, there's two crazy things on that. One, if you look at the Facebook growth chart, like one of the key things for Facebook was getting the site translated and localized across, like, and they did a, they had to do some crazy Wikipedia. like shit to get the whole site translated because there's so many different. I mean, the Facebook

Starting point is 01:19:19 site was complex at the time. And so I remember seeing that. That was very impressive to me. Second is there's a subversion of this, which is just to do business in certain places, you have to establish an office. Yeah. Like China. You can't do business there unless you have a local office. You can't do business certain places. You can't pay local people unless you have a thing or whatever. And just that can take like a year. Yeah. And so like I remember with Twitter, when we're at Twitch, it's like, oh yeah, we're trying to put our servers here. We're trying to do this here. We're using,

Starting point is 01:19:49 we had to use Amazon's people to do international expansion. Like Twitch, even as a multi-billion dollar company, didn't have like that expertise in house. Right. And they would be like, yeah, it's going to be 12 months.

Starting point is 01:19:59 And they'd be like, we're finally live in whatever, so-and-so country with our office. And I'm like, what? And they're like, this has been a year of effort. I mean, that's insane.

Starting point is 01:20:08 Like, that seems like, can we turn that to software somehow? Like the way that Stripe Battlist did for company, corporation. Like, is there a Stripe Atlas for the world in that way? I've been a little funny story about the localization stuff.

Starting point is 01:20:19 So, like, everyone probably listening is probably thinking, like, oh, but why don't you just get AI to translate your stuff? And it's not there to the point because we were using just Chattybtee, a bunch of guys that were non-Japanese-speaking brands and Chatsubitia. And, you know, we're talking to, like, very high-value customers, right? And, you know, the AI hasn't really caught up in, like, tone or, like, certain, like, nuances. And so apparently, like, you know, we were talking to a,

Starting point is 01:20:43 VIP like they were a kid, like we were saying, good boy, like stuff like that. And yeah, well, yeah, some people are into that shit. Yeah, these people like,

Starting point is 01:20:52 and then, yeah, definitely, these people definitely were. They were like, they stopped playing with us. They're like, yeah,

Starting point is 01:20:57 like, disrespecting people, blah, so, um, yeah, so getting like native, yeah,

Starting point is 01:21:02 getting like, for, especially languages like that, like, getting, like, native people to know how to speak, um,

Starting point is 01:21:07 yeah, no way. So what, one of the, one of the projects they're working on when I was at like, we were trying to grow like crazy in Brazil. And so I was like, all right, luckily we had a group of people.

Starting point is 01:21:16 Like, there's four people in an office of Brazil that like, no one was even talking to really. They were like, yeah, they were so at arms laid from headquarters. And I was like, hey, I'm here and you guys are like my key people. They're like, oh, awesome. We have so many ideas. Like, can you help us do them? We're like, yeah. Where I was like, what sorts of ideas?

Starting point is 01:21:31 And they were like, well, you know, our, everybody here uses YouTube. And so subscribe is like how you follow people on YouTube. But on Twitch, subscribe is you cost money. So everybody here, they open the Twitch app and they click subscribe to follow someone they find interesting. It says pay $5. Right. They're like dollars.

Starting point is 01:21:49 First of all, five, that's a week of groceries. Yeah. And secondly, this site you have to pay to watch people. Screw this. They don't even know that it's free to watch. Right. It's like, can you just change the text on that button? And I was like, oh, damn, how many more of those are there inside this app?

Starting point is 01:22:03 And another one was like, we were like trying to come up with like his marketing campaigns. We had like marketing, like our marketing experts are coming up with these ideas. I asked the local team, they were like, hey, can you buy the, can you just like, give me your credit card? I'm going to buy five iPhones. I was like, iPhones, why? He's like, in Brazil, an iPhone is like a gold bar. This is like, he's like, we're just going to give these away.

Starting point is 01:22:22 Trust me, you'll get like 20,000 people watching the stream. I'm like, what? He's like, this is a gold bar. Imagine somebody just giving out like golden bars. He just kept saying that. And he did it. And it was just exactly that. It was like, all of a sudden was just number one most watch guy on Twitch that day.

Starting point is 01:22:36 It was the guy giving away one iPhone. And he, he milked different. for like four hours. He's like, I'm not giving it away until we get like 30,000 people in here. Yeah. And he's like and it worked. It was insane. Yeah, stuff like that, that we find out like every week of like, oh shit,

Starting point is 01:22:52 you guys actually do it this way and by us. Have you heard about what Mr. Beast does with this? Is it like the dubbing the video? So first he exploded his growth by just being one of the few American YouTubers to like create his Brazil page, create his Philippines

Starting point is 01:23:07 stuff, create his Indonesia page. He created separate accounts for all those, localized them, hired somebody who speaks the language and like, you know, like when we were over hanging out with the,

Starting point is 01:23:17 some lady walked in speaking of Portuguese, and I was like, like, what the hell's going on? And he's like, oh yeah, she manages like my whole page for Brazil. You know,

Starting point is 01:23:25 like you have to have somebody who speaks the language and knows it. And then what they did was, I was like, so do you dub it? He's like, yeah, we dub it,

Starting point is 01:23:31 but we hire like voice actors. I'm like, but why don't you, you can use AI. I'm like excited to be like, you can. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you can.

Starting point is 01:23:38 But like, is we go and we find the guy who did the Spider-Man voice in Brazil. And he does my dub for like pretty cheap. And then every comment is, holy shit, it's Spider-Man. And like, he's getting crazy engagement because they're like, that's

Starting point is 01:23:53 Spider-Man. And he's like, yeah, it costs me like an extra $5,000. But like, look at what it did to my page. I think they turn that into like an agency where they like, like they do for other people as well. Like it's they do the done for you thing. They're like, yeah, if we did this for growth, we should do this for 20 other YouTubers. And I was like, dude, of all your

Starting point is 01:24:09 businesses like beastables or whatever. Yeah. This is like the most underrated one because I'm like, this is genius. It's selling your sawdust, your byproduct. Yeah. Stuff you already built in the house. You're just making it available for others. Like that's a no.

Starting point is 01:24:22 And you're Mr. Beast. If you just said, hey, every YouTuber like you can use what I use, they'll all sign up. Right. So it's like instant customer acquisition. Peng and they take like, they're like, dude, you don't even have a page in the Philippines. We're going to run. We're going to create it.

Starting point is 01:24:37 We're going to run it for you. We get half or whatever. 30 to 50%. So it's like they don't just take like a monthly fee. They own like, you know, the majority,

Starting point is 01:24:45 like a huge chunk of that channel. I'm like, that's a really good model. Yeah. I wonder if anyone's done like a roll up of YouTube channels and brands or whatever. Like that seems like every niche ends up being like you get rolled out. You get rolled up and do that.

Starting point is 01:24:59 I don't know. I heard of a spotter. No, I haven't noticed. So they're kind of doing it. What they're doing is they go to the creators and they say, we'll buy your back catalog. Right.

Starting point is 01:25:06 So they say, we'll give you $2 million a day. you can invest that in your videos now to make better videos. And they're like, we can just see with AdSense, we'll make our money back in two years. And then after that, like, forever we profit off your back catalog. That's like the equivalent of like Taylor Swift selling. Exact Moss is whatever. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:25:24 So this company is like, I don't know, raise a lot of money. I don't know. The key is underwriting. It's like, I don't know if they correctly underwrite these deals or not. Yeah. But like Mr. B sold a bunch of his back channel, a back catalog, a bunch of other people have. So I think they've either raised that a billion dollar valuation or we're close. I don't do that for YouTube.

Starting point is 01:25:42 I have a friend that I work with who manages speeds, you know, his speed the kit. He manages his IP, I don't what to call it, like, whatever there's a video of speed go vile on YouTube or TikTok, whatever. They will claim it. And then they make revenue off. They'll run ads on it. And I think very quickly, like just speed alone. That's generated like a million dollars so far. And he's like, we should just be doing this for like, not just speed.

Starting point is 01:26:06 like all these different creators. Yeah, they'll put down as a, you know, create like a big business. So that might be also like another like within that because the way that works is if your video, if your IP is being played by somebody else, you can claim it and either they take it down or you get all the ad revenue. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think you should just do, yeah, do a ladder like get to do that. So because they found like they're like just like, like, for people who creators like speed,

Starting point is 01:26:31 like a lot of the eyeballs that is on him is not on his videos. It's, it's. on the millions of clips and compilations and stuff that are, that's going unclaimed. Like, you're just like easy money that you could be claiming and getting. So, yeah, that's probably another thing that people should,

Starting point is 01:26:48 you know, look into and, this is so good. This is great. These are some, these are fun ideas. I'm glad we did this, man. Yeah,

Starting point is 01:26:56 this is awesome. And, uh, yeah. Sean, where should they follow you or go? What can they do? Uh, yeah,

Starting point is 01:27:01 you can follow me, just like Twitter. Um, is Sean, uh, is Sean Hark. but the last few letters of my name's cut off. So this is H-A-Q.

Starting point is 01:27:09 So you're S-H-A-N. I'm I-S-H-A-K-Q. That's my Twitter. Nobody else is what H is in America. H. H. Exactly. But yeah, follow me on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:27:22 If you're all LinkedIn, look me out. Put it in the description. Dude, amazing. I'm proud of you. You know, this has been amazing to... I've done the validation. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'll say it.

Starting point is 01:27:33 I am super impressed. And I just, I'm so glad you kind of, you've taken, you know, the ball, you just run with it. And you're taking just such interesting shots on goal. Yeah. And like, whether any of these work or not right now is pretty secondary. Like, yeah, by the time you're 30, your scoreboard is going to be filled up. You're going to have made all the successes you, whether it was this or that, I don't know which one. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:55 By the time you're 30, you're going to have it all done in terms of like, you know, the achievement side. But you're also just going to have had so much fun. Right. And like, you know, these lessons you're learning about like hiring these kids in Japan because of this. Those are the real lessons of business. And so I'm so glad you're getting them, man. This is so cool to see.

Starting point is 01:28:11 Thanks. I appreciate it. I've got one last question for you. Yeah. I forgot like your one life goal was like, I think it was like you want to educate was a one percent of the world or whatever. What I said at the time was I want to be like for one percent of the world. I want to be their favorite teacher.

Starting point is 01:28:28 Yeah. Like, you know, which was at the time, I think like 60 million people or something like that. I was like if 60 million people thought like, because like for me, I'm like, oh, like, I learned so much from Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss or Naval or these people. Like, I'd love to just be that for people. I think that's like, yeah. I know what they kind of have done for me. That'd be so cool if I was at for other people.

Starting point is 01:28:51 I think that would be like the highest calling for me. Yeah. Yeah. And do you think, so is that, A, is that still the case? And then B, like, do you still want to do that? And B, like, what do you think will be the, what do you think will be the, what do you think will be like the avenue that way you achieve that like is a pod is it because you're already

Starting point is 01:29:06 in the ears of you know all these people whatever those stats are now yeah a very different sort of the stats for it's time yeah but um you'll be podcasting so it's not actually that goal that goal I think was arbitrary like who cares if it's $16

Starting point is 01:29:21 who cares if it's 1% it was ambitious like it's a little headline yeah it sounded good but I'm like I'm only need to say this to myself like I don't I need to believe it for myself what this actually means. And that's not something I, like, needed to die to do. You know, like, I didn't, like, feel like it was do or die to be able to pull that off.

Starting point is 01:29:39 It was something that, like, sounded better than what I really meant. It was also kind of virtuously, like, you know, I don't even have, like, teachers the right word. But I guess the thing that I think about now is almost like the D, I stripped the ambition out of that and just made it really simple, but more true for me, which was, I want to be somebody that if I was, if I was, was 21, I would look up to this person. Like, I'd be like, that is what I want to be. That guy's awesome. And that's a combination of things. So, for example, part of it is making content being out there.

Starting point is 01:30:11 Otherwise, I wouldn't have even known that this guy existed. Part of it is do cool shit. So that like stuff that, like, I respect more I think is cool in some way. Some of it is like, build a cool business. Some of it's like, you know, this outcast conference.

Starting point is 01:30:27 Like, that's cool. I'm like, I like his reasoning behind that. I like that he went and did it. or like, you know, you know, just giving somebody, you know, a bunch of money because you believe in them and like, my version of philanthropy. It's not like donating to the cause

Starting point is 01:30:40 and going and sitting on the board of some nonprofit, but like, if you see somebody who's got a dream, like fund it and like make that happen. So I want to do cool shit that like, I would respect. And the last part is the way you come across. Like I know that my favorite people

Starting point is 01:30:53 were charismatic, storytellers. They were funny. They were likable. They didn't feel like they were bullshitting you. They had moments where they were honest and like they could have just not shared that or they could have said

Starting point is 01:31:04 a sanitized version, but they chose to just be real. So I'm like, those became my like scoreboard is like, would I at age 18 to 24, like, would I have thought this guy's the man? And like, I know even at that time, I was like if I saw someone that was awesome, like Elon Musk, oh, he's amazing. I remember watching some documentary

Starting point is 01:31:22 about him on the plane before he even started like Tesla, I think. It was like a long time ago. And I remember thinking, this guy's awesome, but he had like had four marriages at that point. I was like, that's not winning to me. Yeah. I like that he's an outlier in this one domain, but like, I didn't want to

Starting point is 01:31:41 replicate these other three. So like, you know, to me, I'm like, the thing I would have respected is somebody who's like, they're a really great dad. Like, for example, one of the things I want to do instead of, instead of doing another business or write a check is like, I want to go coach like a high school basketball team like Mighty Ducks style for a year or two years. or two years or something like that. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:01 And I remember if I had, if old me, if young me had heard that some guy was, some rich guy was doing that. Yeah. I would have been like, I don't care if he's not the richest or most successful. That guy's awesome.

Starting point is 01:32:12 Yeah. And so I just kind of want to be the person like, what's that quote like, be who you needed when you were younger. Yeah. Not needed, but like be who you would have admired when you were younger. Right.

Starting point is 01:32:21 And that's the goal. Yeah. Not the like exact goal I had before. Which I don't know if it's better or worse, but like it's more true for me. I know, I remember I think you're saying on some part, you're like, I think you went to LA or something. You met a bunch of like rich people.

Starting point is 01:32:36 And at this point now, I've met a bunch of billionaires and other cool people. And the most part, like a lot of rich people are like miserable. And like we mentioned before, about the kids that stay in their room and build businesses. They lack other components of life. And I see that reflected throughout all these people that are,

Starting point is 01:32:54 yeah, they've made a bunch of money or they've done this one cool thing, but they've neglected every. every other part of their life. And it's like, okay, there's, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, trade. I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to be in those shoes. It's similar to what the, I forgot who it was, but some guy talked to the Instagram said, yeah, and he was like, how old are you? And he was like, I'm 33 and he's like, I would be.

Starting point is 01:33:16 And this guy's worth billions of dollars. He's like, I'll do anything to be 33 again. And like, he would trade, trade all these money. So it's like, I see that a lot more now. And, you know, I'm hopefully maturing. Because before I was like, yeah, I just want to get all this and get the money and stuff like that. But yeah, I think that's something cool. And one thing that one of probably the most important thing, not important, but like effective things that I love working under you was, I mean, I remember maybe it was maybe you're talking to Sully or Sully taught you this was like aggression.

Starting point is 01:33:45 Like just being like aggressive in like getting getting things done and what you want. Like I think most people don't do that. Like they don't follow up or, you know, they don't be annoying. Like, they don't try to be annoying. When I started applying that, I was like, okay, things are moving away, way, way faster. Yeah, I remember probably like, because I used to kind of, you were like my dear diary. It's like, I'm going to come home and I'd be like, I don't even know what time it was your time. I was.

Starting point is 01:34:13 I'd be like, hey, I'm three a.m. And I'd be like, hey, I'm ready to work. And, like, I'd be like, I met this guy or I noticed this thing. And I would, like, kind of like, use you as my sounding board to, like, play some of these lessons back. Yeah. So it's cool to hear what, like, stuck. But yeah, that idea of like intensity is the strategy, meaning like, this guy's not smarter than me.

Starting point is 01:34:31 He's not more knowledgeable to me about this. He's not like, there's no special aura around this person. What is it that's made this person so successful? And what do I, what's the difference between me and them? And I just noticed it was like, oh, he doesn't have these like imaginary walls where it's like, you stop here. Right. He's just like, no, like, okay, we want to do this.

Starting point is 01:34:51 Like, I remember one time we wanted to do a deal, the guy who we want to invest in this company and he was like, that was kind of on the fence. And he was like, what if we just wire him the money? And I was like, two million dollars. And he's like, he's like, yeah, like, well, so wire him the money. He's the honest guy. Like, we met the guy. He's like, not like a crook.

Starting point is 01:35:06 Yeah. Um, he's like, let's just wire him the money. And then like, like, I feel like that'll tip the scale. Once the money's in his bank count, he's not going to like want to, like wire it back. And I was like, this guy's insane. And like, we had another moment like that where we were working on a, one of the founders was like, oh, I really need to raise this round. And they're telling us this urgency.

Starting point is 01:35:22 I really got to do this. We're running out of money. The pitches are not going well. The first few pitches didn't go well. Can you guys help? We're like, yeah, we can help. Right now. Sounded like an emergency.

Starting point is 01:35:34 Oh, well, we got a thing. And we're like, you got a thing? You just said this is like so important. Okay, whenever you can. They get on a call with us. We go through the deck. Before we, we said, send the deck in advance. There's like 40 minutes before the call.

Starting point is 01:35:47 What do most people do? 40 minutes before they call. We'll talk about it in 40 minutes. Yeah. No, no. So he was like, by the time the call happened, he'd already emailed back, like slides 9 through 13 suck, eliminate them, slide four is backwards, put it in slide one, slide one needs to say this. It had already given them the full first round of feedback. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:05 They were like, what the hell? So they were like looking at it and we're like, cool, let's just make these changes right now. And they're like, no, no, we don't want, we want to be respectful of your time. He's like, the thing that's respectful of my time is like showing that you're like full force going for this, not that you're not going to use my time. I'm here to hell, but like, let's do the thing. Yeah. You want to make this awesome? Let's make it awesome.

Starting point is 01:36:24 So they start working on it. And they're like, okay, we know what we need to do next because we need to go pull some data and do whatever. And so we'll check back in with you whenever. And he's like, you know, it was like noon. And he was like, cool, like, let's check in at 6 p.m. today. And they're like, two calls in a day. And even I was like two calls in a day. I've never done that with somebody.

Starting point is 01:36:43 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you ever scheduled two calls in one day with somebody? Like, it never happens. It's not that it's so crazy. not like running into a burning building, but it's kind of the business equivalent of running into it. It's like, whoa, that's unusual. That's like a highly intense way to do this.

Starting point is 01:36:58 And you could tell they were kind of shipped by it. And then they did it. And at 6 p.m., it was like still not exactly where we needed it to be or we realized something. And we're like, cool, nine and tomorrow. Let's do it again. By the third day, we were like, this deck is in great shape, but these guys were like worn out.

Starting point is 01:37:14 Yeah. And so we was like, dude, I'm just getting warmed up. This is great. This is what I live for is find the thing and laser in and go for it. And like, who says we can't meet twice in a day? Who says that they said no to the first proposal? Well, let's, what if, you know, there is some number they'll do this at. What's that number?

Starting point is 01:37:33 And like, you know, he'll just think about it differently. Yeah. That stuff with me. I'm glad that kind of that idea stuck with you. I say it out loud so that somebody out there listening will be realized like, yo, my intensity knob is stuck at six. Yeah. like 10 isn't more hours.

Starting point is 01:37:48 It's just like more focus and it's more intensity at the main issue and not self-limiting and solved by fake imaginary walls that don't exist. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to bring the NG. Nice small boy stuff. There we go. All right. That's it.

Starting point is 01:38:04 That's the pod. 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. Let's travel. Never look. Back, lie.

My First Million - Wait, My Intern Became a 21-Year-Old Millionaire??

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