The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Entre CEO Michael Marra Interview

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Entre CEO Michael Marra Interview JoinEntre.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The chrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming here with another podcast. We certainly appreciate you turning, tuning, turning or tuning, turning your tune to in. It's always good. Don't turn the tune to out always tune the turn to in what am i talking about i have no idea but it sounded funny at the time maybe you'll laugh i don't know if you don't well there's that why the hell do you listen to the show anyway i don't know anyway guys anyway guys uh what are we doing we're doing a podcast we've done like 700 of them go see them on the cvpn.com go to youtube.com for just chris voss hit the bell notification to see the video interview of all the great people we have including the brilliant gentleman we have on

today go to goodreads.com for just chris voss you can see all the wonderful books reading from all the great authors and also go to facebook.com for just chris voss you can see all the wonderful books we're reading from all the great authors. And also go to Facebook.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. You can search the Chris Voss Show, of course, on Facebook and LinkedIn. There's a whole mess of different groups on there that you can follow as well. Today, we have a most brilliant gentleman. I've been a part of their social network here for quite some time. And I invited him on to talk about what they're doing over there and how it's working. And this episode is brought to you by IFI Audio and their new NEO IDSD. The NEO is the new wave of digital sound listening for your desktop, music, gaming, and bleeding-edge Bluetooth, even MQA audio file decoding. We're using it in the studio right now.

I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. His name is Michael Mara. He's a four-time founder and current CEO of Entra. He's from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has a civil and environmental engineering degree from the University of Dayton. After he left his job as a civil engineer, he jumped into entrepreneurship,

real estate, and marketing, which led him to Miami. ENTRE allows entrepreneurs to easily connect, learn, and build businesses all in one place. The entrepreneur community consists of over 35,000 entrepreneurs from over 60 different countries. He has hosted and spoken at 300 plus events for entrepreneurs online in Pittsburgh, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, LA, San Diego, Washington, DC, and Miami. Welcome to the show. How are you, Michael? I'm doing great, Chris. It's great to be here and thanks so much for having me on. Thank you for coming on. So I've been a part of your network for a while. Give people the plug so people can look at your network and check this out.

Yeah, for sure. So as you said, it's ENTRE, just like entrepreneur. Our site is just joinantra.com and anyone can sign up for free. And what we've been doing for the last few years now is just giving people that place that's actually built and designed specifically for entrepreneurs in mind. And I struggled a lot just meeting other like-minded people as I got into all of this stuff five years ago. And I was shocked that there wasn't a place online for this. And as I look deeper into it and how many entrepreneurs there are now, and the word entrepreneur means a lot of different things, but a lot of people subscribe to that belief in that lifestyle and that mindset. And when you look at the numbers and how many people

well over 500 million, I there's not a lot of data on it, I think it's actually close to one to 2 billion people would identify as some sort of entrepreneur in the world. And there's a huge, huge gap here, where entrepreneurs are using all of these different social platforms, but none of them are actually designed and built for them specifically in mind. So that's how that's our approach. You know, we're doing this to create access for people, no matter where they are, how much money they have, they can get access to being an entrepreneur and to entrepreneurship and get started, whether that's an online business, a startup, a tech company, a small business. We have all forms of entrepreneurs. We have

all different types of people and a lot of people within the ecosystem, you know, willing to help out and contribute as well from investors to freelancers, developers, lawyers, accountants, and that sort of thing as well. Awesome. The, um, so would you, would you define yourself then as a social network? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, uh, generally, um, it's, you know, it's the first thing that we're doing, right? The platform itself and where we're, we want to go with this is, is, is much larger than just a social network in the, I guess, in the, in the current, like definition of what a social network is, right? Because we want to get heavily into education, we want to get heavily into software, and a lot of different

things that vertically integrate into entrepreneurship that entrepreneurs are using on a daily basis. So over time, it will evolve much beyond just a social platform, but into education and other things and tools and resources as well. But yes, right now, we're extremely focused on creating the best possible networking, social, and community for entrepreneurs of all types. So what it almost be like, it, you know, LinkedIn is really one of the only companies that's kind of a business sort of class thing. So this is like, kind of like a, what's starting out as a LinkedIn for just for entrepreneurs, you don't have to have all those people that have other jobs. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and that's a great way of putting it. That's how I describe it a lot. You know, to people and

it's, you know, LinkedIn for entrepreneurs, LinkedIn for you know, the future of work, LinkedIn for the next generation of business, LinkedIn for millennials and Gen Z. We've used kind of all of those terms to describe it, because if you look at how much the economy is changing right now, from a work standpoint, and how people are working, it's it's it's drastically changing. People don't want the nine to five lifestyle, they don't want the corporate professional setting, they want to be able to work whenever they want, where they want, how they want, they want it to be flexible, they want to work from their home or travel. This was happening even pre COVID. COVID accelerated a lot of this, but everything that we were doing was going in the direction of the future of work from the beginning.

This accelerated a lot. And this made what we're doing even more important now than ever, because so many people have no idea how to make money online. And that's going to be one of the main ways that people are going to have to make money in the near term and into the future. They're going to have to figure out how to use technology, they're gonna have to figure out how to make money online, or they're going to struggle, unless they have kind of a craft or a certain skill set that is needed in their local community but um you know we're very much forward thinking and thinking about how people are going to be working in the future and building the platform to connect and

help people manage that yeah it's it's uh you know more and there's going to be more entrepreneurs going to come in this because the layoffs and everything else, people are going to be starting their own companies and trying to figure out what to do. There's more entrepreneurs working at home. There's more people, you know, utilizing the WeWork sort of context where they're working from offices and stuff, but they're really just road warriors and doing stuff around the world um so uh give us some breakdowns of some of the features of uh the entree network for those who haven't done that what do you have the ability to do over there yeah so it's a the the general app it's a it's a free mobile and web app right where can go on, you can create a profile, similar to other platforms, you can post content, short form and long form. Right now, it's just text and images. But soon,

we will have the ability so you can post videos as well. You can also post events. So if you're hosting an event, you can post an event, you can list it all that soon. Soon we'll actually allow people to do ticketing through our platform so they can actually charge for their tickets and actually host their event on Entra as well. You'll be able to, you can, right now you can post jobs for free or gigs. Um, so one of the reasons why very few entrepreneurs use LinkedIn or even their job features is because it actually costs a lot of money to post a job on LinkedIn. So it's not feasible for people in the early stages, which is why they have to use other platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and whatnot. But those platforms don't have a social component to them. So people struggle finding co-founders.

You can post co-founder positions. You can post internship positions. You can post advisory positions. And you can also post it where it's just equity and no salary. So people are aware of that because that's how a lot of startups, you know, work in the early days too. So that and then soon we're rolling out some more networking features, you know, like rooms and one-on-one networking and different things like that. So that's like the content side of things and whatnot. We have a very intuitive search. You can filter people by title, industry, and location, which you can't really do on any

other platform, all for free. And you can also, you know, come to our events. We do a lot of free events. We do some paid events. And, you know, part of our pro subscription is you get access to all of our events for free. And then we have over 75 deals with partners, software like G Suite, Brex, TopTal, Zendesk, Freshworks that offer a discount for our network too. and pro members get access to that as well. Besides that, we have in-app messaging. So you can do direct messages. You can do group messages all within the all within Entra as well. And then we're constantly just kind of listening to our users, right, and iterating as we go, because there's a lot of stuff that we have in the works that we want to do. But we don't want to get too ahead of ourselves. We already have a very sophisticated platform, and it's just continuing to make sure everything's performing at a high level

and that we're adding the features that the community wants. Yeah. Well, it's good that you guys are listening to your community and building it out and stuff. I like how you guys are also – you have the mobile apps in place. You've got, you know, you're on iPhone and Android. So that's great to have. And the web for that matter. Yeah, it's one of those things where I want, and it goes to the core of what we're doing is access, right?

Previously, and it's changing a lot, but it's still a fact that if you look at the majority of capital raised and exits and money, it's all coming from a small part of the country, meaning Silicon Valley for the same for the Bay Area. It's just like the majority of all the cash that's coming in tech is from a 50 mile radius. So what we want to do is give entrepreneurship back to the people, right? We want to create this platform where no matter where you are, you can have that Silicon Valley network, right? Or you can get access to that, find the people you need to find, because not everyone has the ability to move out to Silicon Valley or now Austin or Miami and these places, you know, because it's just not affordable. It just doesn't make sense. Or people have families and stuff. And they're limited with their network. They don't know who to talk to to ask questions. So that's really what it's about. Right. And entrepreneurship, as as you know, too, is, is oftentimes very lonely and people don't have friends and family to talk to about shit and it's, it's, it's tough. So, um, you know, that, that's a huge problem that, you know, inherently we're solving as well

at the same time. Yeah, definitely. Most definitely. Um, anything else more we should know about entre? Yeah. I mean, well, uh, you know well, you know, there's a lot coming. I'll put it that way. We have, you know, there's going to be a lot of ways that our users will actually be able to make money with Entra for content. We're going to be rolling out, you know, communities within Entra soon. And people will also be able to do a lot of, you know, like I mentioned, the paid kind of events thing. They'll be able to do paid calls within Entra too. So there's going to be several ways

where literally people will be able to make money with our app and platform and literally be entrepreneurs with just our app and create a sustainable lifestyle for them just by using our platform. And at the end of the day, there's no other business model that we want than that. So it's at the core of what we're doing. We decided to do our current fundraise. Instead of doing it with VCs and stuff, we're doing it as an equity crowdfunding round too because there's no one we want to make money and become rich off of our success than our early adopters and our users. So that's a huge part of it.

That's pretty interesting. Do they get a share of the first round or first couple rounds as saf round, is determined at evaluation, this is basically it stands for simple agreement for future equity. So they have the right to future equity at whatever that price is then. So, yes, they would. They would like at a later date get actual equity in the company. It's the same thing that like Y Combinator does and many other, you know, angel investors and early stage companies, VCs, and also like accelerators do is like kind of this new thing called a safe. But yeah, I mean, it's something that we want it to be very public, we don't want to make the same old rich white people from Silicon Valley more wealthy. Because,

you know, a small, if you really look at it, the same, you know, maybe 1000 couple 1000 people from this small part of the world have made the vast, vast majority of the money in tech for the last 30 years. It's pretty insane. So we want last 30 years it's pretty insane so we want to change that like i said we want to kind of give it back to the people and give it to the people who are building this with us because there's no one else that we want to make money uh than our own users so uh we want to take it a little bit differently than other uh tech companies that's pretty cool that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. So what was interesting is I met you guys, you through Clubhouse,

the app that seems to be getting popular on iPhone. Unfortunately, it's only on iPhone, which I really hate. Yeah. What do you think of Clubhouse and what it's doing? And what I was curious,, is, is, is, is it converting well for you? Cause you guys, I think are running, you're running a club or a room over there. And I know that's probably a great way to draw people over to what you're doing. I'm on there, of course, trying to draw people over to what I'm doing on my side. How's

it working out for you? Yeah. I mean, uh, what, what they've done is, is pretty incredible. Um, when I got on there, uh, back in the fall, I was like, this is the future of social networking. Like I was telling you before we started, we were planning to build in similar features, networking events, features into our platform. But when I saw this, I was like, wow, they're doing this differently. And this is the future of social networking. This is on-demand, instant networking, conversations. And it's really, really cool how they built it out. And, you know, it's been fascinating.

I've made a lot of connections, obviously you and many other know, many other entrepreneurs and investors and stuff. It's been really, really cool. You know, and yeah, we, we've gotten, you know, users and, you know, things from it that, you know, it's not our intention to just go on there and, you know, market the crap out of it, but yeah, it's been great. I mean, I've, I've been able to build a solid following on there. I think we have one of the biggest clubs on there too future war club and i think it's great and you know they're they're doing really really interesting things and they're they're taking um audio the audio experience to a whole new level that i think is going to be really valuable especially for performers, people in entertainment and musicians. I think that industry specifically is going to benefit massively from Clubhouse. You know, and they've done everything

right up to this point, you know, but they're the classic Silicon Valley company, right? They raised like $10 million when they had 1500 users, no one else would have been able to do that they created a FOMO effect by getting celebrities and high level people in there early, which you're not going to be able to do unless you have that network and those connections. So, you know, and the timing, perfect, couldn't have been better. So, you know, they had a lot of things going their way. The founders are brilliant. They've been in social networking for a long time. They know the game, and they're doing it right. I'm a huge fan of everything that they're doing. It's a great club to go into or rooms that you guys are running to go into

because you can talk to entrepreneurs and network with them. I think people have always struggled with being lonely the last decade or so. We just become more separated as a people. Intimacy seems to be an all-time low. You know, we have all of our issues, I guess, personally or something. I don't know. For sure. But it may be social media.

You can say, you know, with Twitter and Facebook and all these social things we do, it's made us more lonely because we don't spend time with each other. And even when we do, we're looking at our phone, you know, from the beginning of social media and, and, you know, Twitter really started rocking. I remember starting to go into restaurants and seeing for the first time people, whole families together, looking at their phone. And I'm like, is that's a real messed up way to raise a family. But I don't know.

Yeah. I've never had to deal with it. And it is, no, it's very fascinating. That's a real messed up way to raise a family, but I don't know. I've never had to deal with it. It's very fascinating. I saw this happening three years ago when I started all of this. It was very concerning for me then, which is why we built out our community and network through events, in-person events. That's how we were doing seven to 10 events a month across 12 different cities. And that's how we built out most of our partnerships

with coworking spaces and Microsoft and all this stuff. And it was incredible bringing people physically together. And that was always a huge component of what we were doing. We were always building technology and we're a technology first company because you can scale a lot faster building a digital and virtual platform however we've we we really really value the human connection element of networking and social networking and entrepreneurship and it it you know know, it sucks with COVID because, you know, everything got much, much worse. But when things open back up, we 100% will be getting back into bringing people together in the physical world. You know, there's a, there's, there's a lot of power and energy that you can get from people when you're in an audio only room.

You can get more energy when I can actually see you and you can see my expressions and everything through video chats. You can get 10 times that at least when we are physically in the same room. So it creates relationships and connection on a much deeper level that I want to get back to. And when we were doing events, the amount of like the in depth conversations people would have, we would people would talk all night, we would do events for three hours, and then have to do an after party at a bar or a club because people wanted to keep networking. We'd have to push people out of the room because they're having such amazing conversations. You don't get that with a lot of other things.

And I think entrepreneurship and this like mindset and the ideation that comes from it and conversations that it sparks and you're seeing it on clubhouse. But you know they're they're not specifically just focused on entrepreneurship we are right so it's going to be a little bit different um and not everyone loves just talking people like writing and other forms of content as well so we want to give people that ability to express themselves in whatever way and medium they want. It's pretty interesting. You can almost call this the Zoom sort of era where we started doing giant Zoom and everything remotely. I think it's going to be hard for a lot of companies to

get employees back to work in an office again. For um and i think what clubhouse does well is the audio uh you know someone mentioned to me well you know this is great for people who don't want to put on their makeup or dress up you know you can i mean sometimes i fall sleepless in the clubhouse uh and you know just they're in bed snoring no one wants to see that on the zoom video um but i can consume that way and i can interact that way i think i was running my little goof off room that we were doing it in the evenings uh just networking and having fun talking to people i think i was doing it just laying in bed talking to people and and so you don't have to worry about what you look like on on a thing what's also nice is that's that's very interesting is people don't judge you by how you look.

I mean, one of my challenges I've had with YouTube or something is I don't do well on YouTube if I put my face on there because all the 10 to 15 year olds go, you're a fat old guy. You know, I get a lot of fat shaming and just ugly comments i mean even my fingers will show up on a video and they'll be like you have fat fingers you must be a fat guy you know a lot of judging and so and and people do that i mean even in business people people judge you and their value of how you look um totally you know instagram and tiktok didn't help that. They made it much worse because that's what made people famous on those platforms is just their looks and nothing else. And what Clubhouse did was give it back to the people who actually knew what they were talking about and had real thought leadership and could express themselves very well through their voice. And that's why I don't discount everyone is different. Some people are better at writing, some people are better at images, some people are better at video, some people are better at talking. And whatever way you do it best, that's how you should create content and and that's how what you know how we

are approaching this it's like we're not just an audio platform not just video we're not just text we're not just this it's like we're we're entrepreneurship and express yourself any way you want yeah it's it's uh it's cool because the people value you based on your information, based upon what you share verbally. And so they're not looking at you going, he's an old person, he's a young person, he's fat, is he good looking, you know, vice versa to a she, et cetera. You know, and, you know, people can look at your avatar, but for the most part, they have to look at your bio and your basis and stuff. It'll be interesting to see how a lot of networks like yours and everybody else looks at what Clubhouse is doing and tries to find ways to integrate it. You know, unless Zuckerberg decides to buy it out or something like that. I don't think he'd be able to, even if you – I'm sure he may have even tried.

I'm sure several people have actually tried already yeah i think they um i think the only acquisitions that would actually go through would be um and i think which would be really interesting acquisitions actually would be uh spotify apple or amazon uh for the podcasting play and the audio play. Google could try, but they won't let them, they won't be able to because of YouTube and other things. I think, especially with the new, you know, legislation in place and everything,

like they're going to be very stringent on tech companies. So, you know, we'll see what i i think i think they have a really good chance of being a very large company i mean they already got valued at a billion dollars they already have it seems like well over three million users at this point and they're growing really fast if i was them i would just be a twitter and to be a standalone companies companies networks go to hell but you know it depends on what the – I was talking about this about somebody, and I can't remember who, but it might have been you. But, no, I don't think it was you.

I think it was somebody else in a podcast room. But I was talking with somebody, and I said, you know, I would just go standalone. And they were talking about how, well, you know, it depends on what their exit is and what they want to do for their exit. You know, I mean, maybe they want to sell and stuff. I don't know. I think it has the potential of putting twitter even further on its heels which it will be after if keeping donald trump and and the crazies off its website for sure that that thing was a walking dead network before uh the trump era um i don't see it coming back i mean the only reason to go over there is for politics and the

politics are pretty much dead i mean you don't wake up in the morning go what did biden tweet today that has the world turned upside down on twitter um there'll still be coverage over there and it'll be kind of cute for news but i mean the one of the problems i was having with twitter up until recently was um when i would post on there unless i talked about politics just wasn't getting any traction no retweets i could weird i could give away gold on a tweet i could be like i'm gonna give away like 10 000 bricks of gold and that thing would not get retweeted over there but but politics yeah and i think people probably so burn out after the last five years. They don't want it anyway. But like I said, it was a dead platform before five years ago, as far as I was concerned.

I was ignored as a stupid turd, and I have like 200,000 multiple accounts. It's a weird platform. I never liked it. And then until two years ago, I realized there's a lot of tech people and VCs and stuff on there. And I started using it again. And it's been working pretty well lately for that. But you've got to stay kind of in your own little niche on there.

And if you go out of that, it's weird. It's just very strange. And I look at it more for news than anything, which for better, for worse, whatever. But they're they're also rolling out uh i don't know if you've seen twitter spaces or come across it yet but i i've been in it it's literally the exact same thing as clubhouse um i don't know how well it would do i think maybe people with big twitter phones will will find value in it but uh clubhouse is gonna have a storm of people coming after them yeah everyone's rolling

out these audio rooms right now discord put it out facebook has them but their video now they're testing them on instagram already they're going to be rolling them out everywhere right every platform is going to have them i think clubhouse is a really really good chance of you know weathering the storm because they have a tight knit community and it is only audio. That's their advantage right now is that they are only audio. Right. And I think it will be interesting to see. But yeah,

to the point about politics too, I mean, we in our community guidelines, you know, we don't let any of that stuff happen. We want to create a safe place. Yeah. We want to create a safe space for entrepreneurship,

business, personal development, health and wellness. If it's not one of those things, we, create a safe place yeah we want to create a safe space for entrepreneurship business personal development health and wellness if it's not one of those things we you know we have the right to remove it from the platform so uh we want this to be something where you can come on and never have to worry about seeing any bs or politics or religion or this or that. It's like only business, good stuff, personal development, you know, everything forward thinking and whatnot. There's a lot of noise out there on the internet. And we're trying to consolidate all of that and curate a great experience for specifically entrepreneurs and everyone kind of in this i don't even know what we call it but it's more of like uh it's almost like an awakening that's

happening a new renaissance of like hey let's get like let's actually do like good stuff like let's innovate let's create let's you know be our own you know individuals and become entrepreneurs and you know not have to worry about you know uh getting a degree in a career and slaving away in retirement and it's the whole you know the whole way of of working and living is changing so much um so yeah i know that was kind of a little ramble there but i think it's important for definitely informative yeah definitely informative the uh you know i and like i say i don't see much of a future for twitter i really don't i could be wrong and i guess i think they're scrambling right now yeah i think they're scrambling they just acquired

breaker they just acquired another newsletter company so it seems like they're going to try to quickly figure out a different way to monetize and stuff uh maybe from podcasting from rooms and or from letting people do newsletters the problem with twitter always has been and i forget who quoted this who said it twitter is a clown car that crashed into success both ev jack, Jack, and not both. I think all three of them both have Jack. And who's the other with the Bonzo clown name? I forget his name. It doesn't matter.

I know you thought about it. They're all a bunch of fucking idiots. Fucking idiots who crashed that car into success. And if it wasn't for developers and people like me who use it it for social media we showed them how to make that platform work they fought every different advancement of that platform and and it's still to this day i mean to this day trying to get trump off there finally the attorney stepped in well jack was sucking down fucking cucumber shakes and in uh in in wherever he's at, on some damn island.

Fuck him. I'm sorry, Jack. Fuck you. They're still running the suspension system over there in the medieval way that they used to do in 2009 when I called up Fred Wilson. I said, Fred, you got to talk to these guys in a board meeting. Get this shit fixed, man. They're wrecking their reputation

you know i probably it's like 75 of the planet's been suspended by twitter at this point if i was on their board i would do like a huge investigation in into all their suspension their suspension program it's just it's so abusive and then you see like you know these monsters that are still on they're doing their thing and you know they finally kick Trump off when they know they're going to get some regulations. LinkedIn is the same way. LinkedIn has been very poorly managed since Microsoft took over. They're just asleep at the wheel. All of them, man.

All of them. And at the core, they don't care about their users at all. Yeah. They do not give a shit about anyone. And that's what's going to change in this new era of social networking right and clubhouse is doing a good job of it we're really focused on this and we're looking to do what like tony shea and zappos and jeff bezos and jack ma all talk about with e-commerce which is make the customer happy. Elon Musk talks about all the time.

They're just, he's just building the best car that people freaking love the most and providing the best customer experience for them. Best customer support ever. There's no customer user support user. Like, like there, there's nothing like that on social media. You don't know who works there.

You can't reach out to them. They have terrible support. You have to do this, like, ticketing BS. You can never get in touch with them. You're never going to talk to anyone on the phone or in the chat. You don't know anyone from the company to talk to. You never met them. They don't do events. There's no relationship that they have. So that we want people to feel like they can reach out to us. We're going to be there. They can find us. They can come talk to us. They'll be at our

events. I'll be in rooms throughout the platform. They can share what we're doing. So I, and I think that's really cool how Clubhouse has done it. And we want to take some of the things that they've done really well and implement it and add in our own little flavor to it. But I think the future of social networking looks much more supportive than it does right now. And the relationship between the user and the platform should be much better. Yeah, there needs to be a lot of changes.

I'm calling out for a lot of stuff to be changed. I want, of course, Jack and Zuck to resign over what we've put up with over the last five years in the interference with the election and Miramar too with Facebook. Zuck needs to step down over Miramar. The, these guys are involved in all this stuff. Anyway, I don't want to get into all that. LinkedIn sadly was a great, innovative, exciting, growing network. And then Microsoft bought it. And every, every, every one of these social networks that gets owned by a big company,

whether it's LinkedIn, once Microsoft bought bought it or whether it's google plus which they never have been able to get anything really going that google plus about the best closest thing google got to it but anytime you're owned by a giant conglomerate no one works as hard they're not as hungry they're not entrepreneurs they're you know they know their fat checks are coming whether they do well or not and then uh same thing with MySpace. You know, MySpace one was bought up by Rupert Murdoch's company. Totally. Yeah, that thing just went in the shit.

The big one that I don't know why people don't talk about enough is Skype. Microsoft destroyed Skype. destroyed skype and stripe could have literally could have been no joke today if they did it right uh at least a 500 billion dollar company all day because zoom shouldn't have existed google shouldn't have existed right every slack shouldn't have existed everything skype had it all they had slack and zoom there and i don't know what they did but they they lost it and they didn't innovate they didn't add anything they did no marketing they didn't make it cool they didn't do anything else for the last 10 years, 20 years on the product. And they missed a huge, massive opportunity with it. And they could have been doing the education stuff now.

It could have been unreal large. Like it could have, it literally could have spun off and been almost worth as much as Microsoft is if they would have done it right. It's insane. Yeah. Same thing with Twitter. I mean, they own messaging before anyone did, text messaging. Twitter messed up so bad. Periscope, too.

They destroyed their live streaming. The fact that they made a separate app was the dumbest decision i've ever seen in my life yeah they were so early and they could have just they should have built it into twitter got rid of periscope and pumped live streaming before anyone else and they could have done it really well it was uh what was the app that really launched all that 2014 or 15 it was periscope and meerkat were the first two meerkats the one those are the first two big ones i was on periscope in 2016 and i was like this is it like i just made money live doing like just talking to people i was like holy shit like and then when twitter acquired them i was like oh my god they're just going to integrate into twitter and it's going to be huge and i'm going to buy twitter stock and i'm like how did

they miss that like it's mind-blowing to me how dumb some of these it's twitter twitter has always been the clown car that crashed into success let's fucking tattoo that on jack's forehead yeah between him evan biz stone that's the clown name I was looking for. Those three idiots. I just, I don't even know why those guys are billionaires. If you know the backstory, if you've read the backstory, I think there's a book or two out on it. But at the time I became aware of it early on because I was hearing about the fights and the board meetings and shit. And, um, and, you know, just dragging them through everything. They didn't want to do retweets. They didn't want hashtags to be around. They had to be dragged everywhere.

And then finally they just stabbed the back of developers. And once they did that, you know, Ev came out at that big conference and basically gave a fuck you to developers. It was over. And, you know, he tried to beg the devs back. But between devs and consultants like me and everything else, we just took all our little business over to Facebook with its pages and its advertising, and they really won the advertising award.

I can't ever find any reason that anybody would want to. Facebook and Google own advertising. There's nothing else now. Twitter blew it. I've tried advertising on Twitter with me and my clients this is it's worthless unless you're like coca-cola and you don't give a shit about ri because you're just doing brand reputation advertising yeah that's about it yeah they they blew they blew the whole enchilada really when you think about it so um you know now there's so much stuff but i think we might be turning another page when I think about it with what you're doing, with what Clubhouse is doing.

You know, people are kind of reaching that point like they did with MySpace where they're going, yeah, we're sick of this. We want a new toy. And there's going to be a lot of innovations coming out, of course, to address the way we're going to work. Those came out in 2008 2009 a lot of vcs are getting ready for lots of new change and stuff and and how our whole new world and our way of business is going to operate so i think you guys are poised for that and and uh it'll be definitely interesting yeah i i'm excited about it i mean the the future of social networking is is gonna look different than it does right now and i actually i i think there's gonna be a massive we're going through uh i i don't even know how

to describe it but i just have this feeling we're going through one of the biggest transitions literally throughout history right now at this point in time. So many industries are getting completely flipped on their heads and turned over and completely disrupted from education to finance to energy to social networking within tech, which is, you know, its own new thing, right? And, you know, I think with what we're doing at Entre, we have a very good opportunity to be one of the major players in this and in the future. And, you know, it's all now just about execution, right? So, you know, I'm a big, big believer in, you know, entrepreneurship and freelancing and kind of this new creator economy and i'm i'm super laser focused on understanding gen z because i think there's some game changers and i think

they just don't put up with any bullshit they just spot it from a mile away yeah you're doing anything shady they know it instantly and um you know it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out. But I think these influencers, Gen Z, they can make their own trends. I mean, if you look at some of these big influencers, they're able to do things that would take massive corporations 10 years ago to be able to do. They're able to do with one post and one video online. So it's really, really powerful what's happening. And I think we're giving people, I think we're giving the power back to the people rather than to the corporations. And that's what I'm excited about. Yeah. And I like what you guys are doing with Entree where it's about entrepreneurs.

I mean, for long, you know, I always feel kind of lonely when I go over to LinkedIn because, like, everyone has a real job. It's like, you know, I'm an engineer with General Motors and you're just like, I don't know how I talk to you. Like, we're like two different worlds, man. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? But if you want a job, LinkedIn is the place to go. Right. It still is. It probably will be for the next however long. Right. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you can't go to LinkedIn. You're not going to go to LinkedIn to start a business. Right. You have to come to Entra. That's what we're built for. Right. So if you want a job, there's LinkedIn. If you want to be an entrepreneur, there's Entra. Right. And I think that's how a lot of it's going to, you know, play out. And I, you know, we're going to show people how to do, you know, how to leverage LinkedIn and other social platforms on Entra too, because as an entrepreneur, you need to leverage other channels to grow your

business as well. So it's not like, you know, a one or the other, it's like, you know, it's both, right? It's, you know, come to Entra to like, you know, have this safe space, and also leverage other platforms that you like, and can get reach on and you can leverage to grow your business. But, you know, this is the place for entrepreneurs to come to hang out and to be their home. There you go. There you go, guys. Check it out. Give us the dot com so people can look you up on that interweb.

Sure. It's just join entre.com. There you go, guys. Well, thanks for spending some time with me, Michael. I certainly appreciate it and getting people over to check out your website. Yeah, Chris, it's been a pleasure, man. Really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, to see the video interview that we have here with Michael. Be sure to check out his social network that he has. You can either go to the website or you can go download the apps on iPhone and Android. Also go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss to see everything we're reading over there. Find us on Facebook, The Chris Voss Show,

and also on LinkedIn under The Chris Voss Show as well. And you can find us on Clubhouse at Chris Voss. You can find me over there. If you can get in. I got like five ass this morning. Damn it. Right. So I'm like, no,

I don't. And, and I, the one who already gave out somebody doesn't use an iPhone. So maybe they should call you and have you guys pay. I have a couple. So if you, you need some,

I can, I can hook you up. I don't want anybody knowing I have a couple, so if you need some, I can hook you up. I don't want anybody knowing I have invites. Entra's free, and we're rolling out rooms soon. There you go. Hit me up if they want to test out a similar. Check out Entra, guys. You can get in.

There's not some club line out front that you gotta you know work the bouncer or some crap uh i just i just i had to borrow a stupid iphone to get on there and i'm not happy about it but whatever uh so anyway check out antra and all that good stuff and i'm over there you can see me follow me on antra too i think it's under uh i think i'm under let me see if i can pull this up here real quick uh looks like i've got some other stuff going on on uh i think i'm under let me see if i can pull this up here real quick uh looks like i've got some other stuff going on on the website but i'm on there just follow chris foss chris foss is on there as well uh thanks to my audience for tuning in we certainly appreciate it wear your mask stay safe and we'll see you guys next time