The Pomp Podcast - 358: Shaan Puri on Building Companies & Riding Trends

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Shaan Puri is the Senior Director of Product for Mobile Gaming at Twitch. He previously built Bebo, before ultimately selling the business to Twitch. In this conversation, we discuss startup studios, getting startup reps, how to sell a company, project selection, the issue with dabbling, scaling tech companies, and why anyone can be an entrepreneur if they really focus on it. =============================== Our second sponsor is Choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Sean Puri is the Senior Director of Product for Mobile Gaming at Twitch. He previously built Bebo before ultimately selling the business to Twitch. In this conversation, we discuss startup studios, getting startup reps, how to sell a company, project selection, the issue with dabbling, scaling tech companies, and why anyone can be an entrepreneur if they really focus on it. I really enjoyed this conversation with Sean, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our

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language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Sean. I hope you guys really enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got a special, special treat

for you today. Sean, thanks for doing this, man. What's up? How are you? I'm doing well, man. I'm thriving. So, you know, people always say, you know, how are you doing? And you say good or whatever. So I had this personal trainer I started working with. And whenever he comes over, he's like, how's it going? I'm like, I'm doing good. I'm doing great. But no matter what I say, he one ups it so he'll be like i'm fantastic i'm tremendous i'm thriving so like whatever i say he has like a better word and so now i'm like it's this little game i play with other people who are unsuspecting little you know civilians because they'll just be like you know how's it going i'll be like today is one of the top three days of the week and they'll be like what

but i i like it it breaks up the you know normal small talk yeah look and people love to be around people who are just enjoying life so let's uh let's get into it um let's just start with your background. You've done all kinds of cool stuff and have an absolute wild story as an entrepreneur, but where'd you grow up and kind of how did you get into entrepreneurship? All right. I grew up all over the place. I lived in maybe nine different countries in my life. I finished high school in China, started it in Texas. I lived in Australia, then I moved to Silicon Valley because I was like, that's the Hollywood for startups. Let's go there. My story is pretty cool. It's pretty, I don't know. It's not like some rags to riches story,

but it is interesting. I went to Duke University. I thought I was going to be a doctor. um, I finished all my pre-med requirements and took the MCATs was ready to go to med school. And I had one class credit left and I was like, all right, what do I want to do? So I said, I talked to my friends. I said, you know, isn't it weird? We've never taken a class together and let's take the easiest, most, you know, biggest blow off class that there is on campus. And so we went, there's this website called rate my professor.com where it has like ratings. And, um, and so I go on there, I try to find the biggest blow off class offered on campus. What's the easiest thing I can do? And I see this class called getting rich and it's a five out of

five on ease. It's a five out of five on like, I don't teacher help. And then there's a chili pepper, um, next to her name and the chili pepper means like the teacher's hot. So I was like, okay, this is a winner. Um, so we enroll and this class is basically, you know, it's called getting rich, but it's basically a personal finance class. The teacher herself had graduated 10 years earlier. Um, and she went and got rich doing stuff. You know, she was, she had a degree in Mandarin. All her friends were going to banking law school and they were like, good luck with that Mandarin degree. What are you going to do with that? And this was, you know, 20 years ago. And so she was like, I bet I can get a job in China. So she goes to China. She realizes Chinese companies want to

do business with the West. She becomes the face of those interactions and she makes a killing. She invests that money into the stock market in 1999. She's like, the internet seems cool. She rides the run-up of the.com boom and just happens to luckily pull out before the bust. because she's like, Oh, I want to buy a house. Actually, I'll get into real estate. And then she rides a real estate boom for another five years. And so by 30, she's retired, she's rich, she married the guy of her dreams. And she's like, what I want to do, I want to go back to school. And I want to teach what I wish I had learned the stuff that actually helped me, you know, make it, they should teach this stuff in school. So I ended up taking this class of hers. And it's

basically, one day would be a personal finance class, like what the hell's a mortgage and like what compound, you know, interest does to you over time. And then on the other side, it would just be stories of entrepreneurs and I as I was listening to these which is you know if you're listening to a podcast you probably like stories of entrepreneurs as well I was inspired I was like this guy has lives a sweet life or this girl lives a sweet life they are clearly not that smart like they're not that much smarter than me and what they're telling me is look when I started I didn't know jack shit and so if they didn't know it when they started they didn't know anything when they started I also don't have to know anything when I'm seeing started and also they're

telling me, look, everybody's resume looks like anyway. So if you do want to go get a traditional job later, it's better to have a story that stands out. And so that's a long way of saying I had decided to skip med school. And I took the first dumbest idea I had and started a business, which was I started a cloud kitchen before cloud kitchens were a thing. I didn't think it was, I was just doing it because I didn't have money to get a restaurant. So we created the Chipotle of sushi and I partnered with this food network chef and I tried to create this cloud kitchen for sushi. I was delivery only restaurant. Um, and that took me down this adventure. I did that. I did a biotech thing with this billionaire guy in Australia. So I, um, I come to Silicon Valley

cause I'm like, look, this is where the action is. And, um, I beat this guy, Michael Birch and Michael Birch has made it big. He sold a company called Bebo to AOL for $850 million. He's had all other wins too, that were, you know, tens of, he's built probably four different products to tens of millions of users. And so anyways, the guy made it and he decided he's going to open up his own idea lab. So it's his own little, you know, he built the most like, you know, pimped out penthouse office in San Francisco. I still think it is the best office in San Francisco. He hired up 20 badass engineers and he's like, let's build it. We own everything. No, no external investors will self fund the whole thing. And let's try to find another home run.

And so I was like, Hey, this sounds awesome. My, my whole mindset moving to Silicon Valley was, look, I've done a couple of startups myself, uh, but I want to learn from somebody who's done it before now. And, um, and so I, you know, this guy had, this guy done it before. And I said, how do I pack for, you know, uh, 20 years of learning into the next four years of work. Um, and so that was my mindset and, you know, how do I pack 20 years of learning into four years of work? I thought this idea lab will be great. Cause I'm going to get so many different reps on a whole bunch of different projects and not as an investor, but like as the person building them, um, building them with a team. And so anyways, I did that with him for about five

years. We had a whole bunch of flops. We had a couple of things that actually took off and, you know, got to like number one on the charts, you know, but didn't quite have the longevity that we wanted. Um, and then the last thing was sort of the, the, I guess, most successful one out of it. Um, which was a company, uh, we had actually bought the company Bebo back. So after he sold it to AOL, AOL does nothing with it. He comes to me one day and says, look, it's Bebo's going to just be off, you know, offshed and go into bankruptcy. We have the chance to buy it back if you want to do something with it. So we buy it back for a million bucks. We reinvented as something new as an e-sports platform and ended up selling that last year to Twitch. And so I exited

to Twitch and since then have been at Twitch kind of enjoying that experience, earning out my deal and getting to know something new. And so that's what I do is I, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, built a bunch of stuff that didn't work uh got a couple wins under my belt sold sold the last one to twitch uh also hosts a podcast as well um that i think you're going to be on soon called my first million uh where we just brainstorm business ideas me and sam it started off as an interview show but we quickly realized what people liked more was which when we would shoot the shit and just brainstorm half-baked business ideas that you could use to you know make a million bucks we don't have the time to do it but so we just give away the ideas for free because we already have

our hands full with our own projects. And so, yeah, that thing took off as well and it's doing pretty well. So one thing that's really interesting is the Idea Lab concept is not new, but the way that it was funded and kind of all of the different iterations, what were some of the biggest lessons you learned going through, you know, all the kind of start and stop and failures and successes in that concept? So I learned a lot about the individual ideas and how to make an idea successful or when to kill an idea, which is really hard to actually learn as an entrepreneur. You can only learn that the hard way, but on the idea lab front, I learned that idea labs suck. Like don't do an idea lab. It's a super sexy, tempting thing to do. Like every successful

entrepreneur, like, you know, Kevin Rose, after he sells his company, he starts his own studio. Garrett Camp after, you know, Uber and StumbleUpon starts his own studio, Expa. Mark Pincus after Zynga. Like this is the thing to do, you know, because it makes sense. You still want to create new stuff. Like you're not going to stop wanting to do, have new ideas. You can't turn that switch off in your brain if you're wired that way. But now you got money and now you feel like you kind of know what the hell you're doing. And so you're like, cool, I'll bet on myself. We'll bake up a bunch of different ideas. Cause again, focus is really hard to do. What's not hard as being ADD and starting a bunch of different projects. And so it's this tempting,

really fun thing to do. But ultimately I think quite a bad idea. If success is your metric, if you're trying to enjoy yourself, it's great. If you're trying to be successful, I wouldn't do an idea lab. And I advised a whole bunch of other people who were trying to do their idea labs because they would say, Hey, you know, you seem pretty smart and you've done this for years. Like I want to do mine. And you know, these are some of the successful wealthiest people in the world that are trying to do this and they're failing too. And so I think that the challenge is you get all these good things with a startup studio. You get a bunch of at-bats. That's good. You have the ability to carry over learning. So when one project fails, you don't have to go get

a job, you just start the next project. That's also really good. What you lose though, is the critical thing that makes startups work, which is relentless focus and back against the wall. I have to make this work. I told my whole family, I told the whole world I'm doing this. I got to find a way. And with Idea Lab, it's sort of like, you're doing this project. It's exciting at the beginning. It kind of starts, you know, you build a prototype. Oh, that feels like progress. You get a few users that feels like progress. And then you hit some wall or some plateau where it just doesn't take off right away and um and what ends up happening is as an entrepreneur normally you just power through that wall as an idea lab you're like oh you know fuck that project i'm gonna go do

this how about that other idea we have that's kind of still in that sexy fun early stage and so you end up giving up a little too soon on all these projects or just being distracted and not being like relentless about it talk to me about when you guys sold bibo to twitch um obviously it itself for a million bucks so there was some sort of appreciation in the value you guys created and then the transition from kind of that entrepreneurial mindset and going to work every day trying to build stuff from scratch to now be an executive at you know a pretty impressive company yeah well selling it was interesting and i'll share the story because there's there's two types of sales there's type one which is your instagram like you built the

thing it's taking off twitter wants to buy you zuck is trying to buy you like you know everybody wants you investors are banging down your door they're saying no stay independent and you decide to sell. Um, in that case, you've been, you, you are onto something you're winning. You have a lot of momentum and you're a threat to the industry. That's why you get bought. Um, then there's everybody else. And I have this like, you know, speech I give entrepreneurs privately, which is like, you are not Instagram. Cause if you're talking to me, you're not Instagram. Um, meaning like if you're trying to figure out how do I sell this thing? Um, you're in the, you're in the camp of bit you're selling, you're not getting bought. And so what I always joke is that I sold a failing

company. Now in truth, we weren't failing. We actually had like, you know, decent momentum, but like we weren't a breakout superstar company that just everybody wanted to buy. I'm fucking manufactured that sale. And you know, it was because I realized, look, if, if we keep going down this path, I think winning looks like kind of a middle of the road, medium-sized company. That's not what my investors signed up for. That's not what I signed up for. It's going to be just as hard as building a big company, but we're going to end up at a medium-sized company in the success case. So I was like, look, um, let's sell this baby. Uh, so I was like, look, let's, let's sell this baby. And so I went out and I pitched and I figured out how do you sell a company? And I have

this like whole deal framework of our whole process of like how to sell, you know, a not Instagram company. And we ended up getting a couple offers and decided to go with Twitch, um, which was awesome. Like, you know, we, we sold it for eight figures. Like I can't say the exact thing. Cause you know, I don't want Jeff to get mad at me, uncle Jeff to come down and bring the wrath of Bezos on me. But, um, actually, you know, some stuff got leaked. So that, that, that wasn't my fault, but, um, but basically we sold it for a good outcome, you know, personally life-changing money. Um, and you know, now I got a new experience, which was go to Twitch and now boom, I'm at a 2000 person company. You're the market leader.

It's like the exact opposite of a startup startup. You're small and you're nobody, nobody knows you. And now you're at Twitch and it's like the exact opposite. And I got to, you know, see what that's like for the past year, um, being an exec at a company. And it's very, very different. Give me the 60 second overview of how you sell a company, how you sell a company. Um, you figure out first, everyone wastes their time thinking about why they're so great. And you need to figure out, uh, what story you fit into for the acquirer. So what I did was I thought about each acquirer. I talked to people on the inside to figure out,

hey, what are the big problems you guys have to solve this year? Like, what are the urgent problems you have? What are the either opportunities you need to be chasing or like headaches that like the CEO is worried about? And then I just asked myself, how can I pitch my company as a solution to that problem? It's very much like building a product,

but like most entrepreneurs don't go about it that way. They just start to focus on themselves. here's what we do here's what industry we're in here's how much traction we have or don't have and that's why they get stuck because that's not an easy to understand thing for an acquirer so I went out and I mapped out 40 acquirers I figured out what's what's the angle if I'm them what what's problem does buying Bebo solve for me and then I ranked them on like strongest fit to like weakest fit and I started with the weakest fit and went pitch practice that pitch and got good at actually like answering their questions and figuring out what data they need and how to

organize it because I got some great advice along the way, which was, um, you need to turn your company into a giant buy button, like a one click purchase from Amazon. So like get your docs together, get your data room together, um, clean up your cap table, clean up any messiness you have, um, figure out, you know, your, your three sentence story that they're going to go pitch in their boardroom when they have to go get board approval for this and like work backwards from that. And the last thing is get, uh, what I call your deal doulas. So like, I just had a kid this year. I just learned about the, you know, the process of having a baby. And, you know, a doula is some, you know, somebody who really helps and assists you birth that baby. And you need the same

thing with a deal. You need a deal doula to help you, you know, A, keep your head straight because it's really like, it can be very stressful for people. B, like negotiate, figure out how negotiations need to work. And three, like, you know, they, they open doors and they can kind of back channel for you in a way that really helps you. And so when the CEO or the kind of whoever's your champion at the company who's going to buy you. They need to hear from multiple sources and they need to sort of get reaffirmed because you don't want them to get fired for acquiring your company. So they need to have high certainty that this is a good deal, which is done in two ways. They understand it. Other people tell them this is a good deal and they see that other companies

want to buy you. So you got to get multiple offers. And so that was my trick was get multiple offers, pitch myself as somebody that they, you know, put myself in their terms, how I solved their problem this year and just have people back channeling for you. You've got a number of what some would consider irrational or counter intuitive ideas. I want to go through those and you just kind of spitball at me why you believe these things. The first is real estate is full of rich, dumb people. What is that? It's not that it's full. It is full of it. I got in trouble for this, but I believe it to be true. Real estate has the highest percentage of dumb, rich people. And people took that as an insult. I didn't mean it as an insult. I meant it as a compliment. It

means, hey, you can get rich in this area without having to be a genius. Like, dude, I was trying to create the next Twitter, next YouTube. That's hard to kiss lightning in a bottle. If I had just gone and done multifamily real estate, that does not take the same level of luck and genius that other things take. So that's why I say that. And real estate people get all pissed when I say that, but A, it's true. And B, it's not an insult. It's a way to say, look, if financial gain is your number one thing to do, and you're not, you don't have the ego of trying or the, you know, the creative juices aren't just flowing out of you. Real estate's a great way to go. Dumb, rich people everywhere. It's awesome. Hey, who cares if you're dumb or smart,

if you're rich, right? So project selection is more important than hard work. I actually agree with this, but explain what you mean by that. Yeah. So hard work is this like thing everybody grasps onto. And I had trouble with this because I'm not that hard of a worker. I'm actually quite lazy. And I thought for a while, I believed what society tells you, which is that you have to work really hard to be successful. Sure, it helps, but like, hey, I got successful and I still didn't work that hard. And like, so I definitely proved the sort of counter narrative. And there's plenty of people that are like this. A far more important factor to success is project selection. Most people choose the wrong project. So here's kind of how I think about this. I used to play poker a

lot. And in poker, um, I found that I would crush it at certain games. Like if I played at certain soft tables, like I lived in Australia and it's just dumb tourists playing poker or online, I'd go to the low stakes, you know, the one, $2 limit tables and I could just crush it. But then I would get my ego, you know, I'd want to go heads up for, you know, high limits. And I'd be sitting there with 50 grand at a table trying to beat this guy. Cause he's good. And like, what a dumb thing to do. If my objective is to make money, um, that's a really dumb way to make money. I'm going where I don't have an edge. And so I learned in poker, they always say table selection is one of the critical factors. It's more important than being sort of this genius bluffer. And so in the same

vein for startups or projects you're doing, you want to work on the projects where success is in your favor, not against you. And too many people try really hard things and then try to hard work their way out of it. And that's a terrible idea. I want to go to a waterfall and just get wet. I don't want to go in the desert and find water like uh and I learned that the hard way because I did a bunch of projects that were like going in the desert trying to find water and then I now experience the opposite and I I will tell everybody this because I think it'll save you a lot of pain uh project selection not hard work so I agree with everything you said with one caveat which is if people could select the right project and then work hard it's like it's like

rocket fuel, right? It's a turbo. It's a turbo for sure. And like, um, and what I'll say is it's not an absolute requirement for success, but of course, if you're both in the same, if you're, if two people go into the same project and then one works way harder than the other, they're going to get better results. And, um, and so, yeah, it's for sure additive, but it is misprioritized. If people, people say it, cause it sounds really good to say, it sounds like, like, for example, I'm always wary of things that sound good when you say them. I'm like, is that really true? So like, for example, it's unpopular to say intelligence really matters because it sounds like something that's kind of outside of your control. It sounds

kind of elitist or saying like resources really matter or like whatever your background really matters. And these may or may not be true, but like they don't sound good when you say them. You don't get props on Twitter. You don't get retweets for saying this stuff. But if you say hard work really matters, everybody likes to agree with that. You sound good. It sounds very fair. Everybody's got a fair shot and the harder you work, the better results you get. In my experience, that's not really true. Hard work, it helps. It is additive, but it is by no means the like, you know, the thing that correlates best to success. Much, but there are many other facts, four or five other factors I would put over hard work. Number one, I would say is choosing the

right project. So that's kind of like my little, my cheat code I would always use is anytime you see something, something that is just universally, you'll get a pat on the back for saying should really question if it's true or if people say it because it signals, uh, you know, a good thing for them. Lots of people saying things they think they should be saying, right. It's the, uh, it's the seeking of consensus instead of truth. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, people shouldn't join early stage startups. Yeah. Well, the caveat here is you shouldn't join it from, it's a dumb decision from a financial perspective. Um, uh, I love early stage startups. I, you know, I've turned down a lot more money to do early stage startups. I think you should, if you're really optimizing

for like, let's say financial gain, um, and that's not the main thing to optimize for, but if you are optimized financial gain, you should either start your own company and own the equity because the founder, the founder will get like, you know, a hundred or 50% of the company when they start it. And then the first two employees who are going to be just work just as hard, take just as much risk, uh, pretty much they will be, you know, 3% or less, uh, you know, by the fifth employee, you're getting 0.25, 0.3, 0.4% of the company, which is ridiculous. Uh, but that's the norm. And so joining at an early stage, you do, you work really hard. You just don't get the same upside. So I like to say, if you're thinking about money, which again,

you don't have to think about, but if you are own the, own the company, own the equity yourself, or go work at Fang. Dude, there's people who work at Fang companies that are, you can go out of college and be making 300K a year if you're an engineer. I know people that are making a million dollars a year and they live a very, very lax lifestyle taking none of the risk and headache

that an entrepreneur makes or a early stage startup person does. Now, if you're trying to learn, which is kind of how I thought about it when I was young in my career, I was like, look, I'll earn later. I'm gonna learn now. I'm gonna optimize for learning.

Working at an early stage startup is great. yeah i completely agree with both of those things um the difference between acting like a lion versus a cow and this might be my favorite thing uh that you've said i stole this one so this i can't i can't take full credit for but hey i i steal 90 of my ideas i just you know my job is to find good ideas and share them uh not claim to be the owner so naval actually is the one who said this um but it lined up with what i've experienced which is um most people work uh monday through Friday and they work roughly like a nine to five schedule. And I always, when I was trying to work that way, it never felt right. You know, like I had always done my best work in like extreme bursts

where once I had clarity on something or motivation to do something, like, don't talk to me for like 16 hours. I'm going to just work on this thing like crazy. And then like, I'll go two days. I won't do anything. And you know, my mom thinks like, what are you doing? Like you should go to work. And for creative people and ambitious people, I worked, you're not like a factory worker. You don't just go in Monday through Friday like a robot and work for eight hours straight and get the same output per hour. It's definitely not that way. Not all days are created equal, not all hours, not all weeks are created equal. So if you recognize that, you should say, well, then how should I work? And I think you should work like a lion. So the way a lion works, and this is kind

of the framework of all use that I like, he goes, a lion will sit and they'll wait. They observe the surroundings. They wait to see their prey appear, like, what do I want to eat? And they won't just run around aimlessly, you know, fake hunting. They wait until there's actually prey. Then they sprint and they sprint until they catch their prey and they hunt it down. Then they eat and enjoy. They, you know, they enjoy the fruits of their labor and then they go back to resting and waiting again. And that's not how most people work. What most people do is like a cow. They just stand, stand out there in the field with their neck down and they graze on grass all day, eight hours a day, just slowly chomping up the grass and they don't really make much progress. And so if you're

an ambitious and a creative person, you're in a creative field, like probably most people listening to this are, just say to yourself, I literally say this to myself, like work like a lion. I'm going to work like a lion today. What that means is identify the one thing I'm going to kill today, sprint, hunt it down, kill it, enjoy it, and then rest. All right. So on the podcast, you and Sam Parr sit and basically just come up with idea after idea after idea. I've listened to many episodes, some with people that we have mutual friends that have come on and some with just you guys ideating, what are some of your favorite ideas that you guys have come up with? Sure. So I shortlisted a few. I'll just hop around. I'll just go through them. So we'll do it. We'll do

it fine. I'll go quick and you give me your hot take reaction to each one of these. You can say that's a dumb ass idea, or you can be like, I think there might be something there. Okay. So the first one is, uh, is hooked for romance novels. So, okay. So I'll tell you the quick background. Uh, hooked is a, is a company that, uh, is like, if you ever read goosebumps back in the day, like when you were a kid, I read them. Um, it's basically like kind of scary stories, but they tell it through the phone. So it's like, it's in the text message format. They, the app just like each line of the story is like a text message and you just read it. So hooked has taken off. It's got 50 million readers. They do like 60 million a year in

revenue. Nobody really talks about them. And so it turns out people still like to read. They just do it in new ways. And so I think you should do this for romance novels. So I was surprised to learn that romance is one of the fastest selling categories. It's the biggest selling category in books outside of the Bible, basically. So like, you know, the best selling book is Fifty Shades of gray. But there's also the Twilight series. There's also Danielle Steele, who's got a house on Billionaire's Row here in San Francisco. That house was paid for through romance novels. And so the average reader of romance novels will read like five times as many books as the average person who reads books, as average book reader. And so there's just this carnivorous appetite,

and there's just not enough supply. And so I think you should create a lightweight mobile platform where you subscribe $7.99 a month and you get a regular dose of romance short stories. And actually a listener heard this idea on the podcast and went and did a weekend prototype. So what he did was he took it to an extreme. He created a newsletter instead of a book and no app, just create a newsletter because it's quick, but he did it for erotic stories for black women, black mommy porn basically. And it's told through written stories. And in two weeks, he's built it up. He's doing 10K a month now on this thing with basically no investment. He just ran a few hundred dollars of ads on porn sites to acquire his users. And he's already doing 10K a month as passive income now off this, you know, like, you know, a piece of this idea. but I think this idea is big. And most people who build apps are kind of like dudes who are,

you know, like white dudes who don't read romance novels. And so I like opportunities where it's not going to be as competitive because it's the average builder doesn't know about this opportunity. Yeah. And I also wonder, where's he getting the content from the person who created it? Well, he just hired a, so Wattpad is like a free writing platform where people write stories. So he found a writer on Wattpad, I think, and was like, Hey, I'll pay you like a hundred, a hundred, 200 bucks a month because writers make no money. So it's like very easy to be like, I'll give you a hundred dollars per story or $10 per story or whatever it is. And these are very short stories that are just quick to consume. It's crazy. And I think that the key piece of

that whole thing is one, people definitely still want to read. Two is just a different delivery mechanism, right? One of the things that I keep thinking about is just like books and audio books, where else are people reading content that just, they're going to turn into an audio format right like that's absolutely going to happen in other verticals other than just books people have tried it with articles and all this kind of stuff but like that just feels like a natural progression that'll occur exactly like if you want to think of new ideas if you want to get good at thinking of ideas here's a framework that's real easy um everyone like makes funny because i'm i'm always talking about frameworks i'm like the i want to be like the framework don

but i don't think you could be a don if it's something as lame as frameworks but um it's like a two by two matrix like two by two grid and you just write uh is either an old problem or a new problem. And then it's either an old solution, new solution. And so like old problem, people want to read stories like romance stories, but new solution, I'll deliver it to through your phone through this new packaging on a subscription basis digitally, rather than traditional books. And then there's sometimes there's new problems like, oh, I bought Bitcoin, I need a place to I need a way to store it securely. That's a new problem. And I need I can use an old solution. Actually, I can use you know, like, you know, those guys who do cold storage, like in a vault,

it's like a bank vault. So they took an old solution and applied it to a new space. And so that's just an easy way to look at things old problem new problem old solution new solution and you can't the only square that's invalid is you can't do old problem old solution that's done all the other grid all the other squares are up for grabs so an iteration of this that i told multiple people they should go build is what i call business text which is uh there's tons of newsletters right now and they all summarize the news right they basically just put links and things like that uh somebody should create a text-based service uh you put your number in and then every day at the beginning of the day it texts you and here's all of the headlines that you need to know

around business right and it's got a link and you can click through read the article if you want if not you basically get all of them you can easily put uh some sort of advertising in it and you're off to the races and it probably takes somebody half an hour maybe an hour you know max to go collect headlines and links and kind of format and send the email or text message it's like that's just a super layup one that you get tons of distribution right out of the gate uh and then you can do all kinds of things and monetize with it. I love that one. That's great. That's why you're going to have to be on the podcast because you got the gem. You have the idea switch. Some people don't have it. You have it. I have way too many ideas. The test is like, if someone wants to

be on the podcast, I'm like, show me the notes app in your phone. Like I'll tell you in five minutes if you'll be good on the podcast or not. Absolutely. What other ones do you guys have? Okay. Here's okay. I did kind of a raunchy one. So let me do a very safe, safe for work one. Okay. so beautiful bibles so this this came on a podcast uh one of the episodes we did what came up which was that there are uh tons of christians out there the bible is the best-selling book of all time um there's like 40 million i think met new christians a year and christianity religion people think it's going out of favor but actually there's this resurgence so like you have you know kanye releasing gospel albums bieber you know when all righteous uh there's guys like carl lentz who

are like kind of like celebrity preachers now um that are like kind of cool and like they can do tiktoks and shit um and so um so anyways religious kind of on this upswing but the bible itself the book that sells the most copies still looks kind of like the dusty old brown bible and so there's a few people trying this but i think there's still just plenty of opportunity if you're just a person with good taste and design you should create a beautiful bible here's why um you're just repackaging the existing content and you just need to package it with either photos better cover, different form factor, something like that. Either something that's, you know, easier to take around or just looks good on a coffee table. It doesn't like sort of look like a dusty

old Bible. And religion is like the most, you know, popular free IP in the world. So I have a whole set of religious ideas because where else can you get IP that is like universally known and loved, you know, by, you know, hundreds of millions of people know and love this brand, and you don't have to pay a dollar for the rights. And like, that's just an amazing premise for any business uh just start with that and so one of the man one of my religious uh ideas is beautiful bibles what do you think no no brainer um and and i'd even go a step further as like that entire mechanism of take uh some sort of content that already exists and repackage it and make it look much better uh you could literally go all the way back to uh articles newspapers religion you know

all this kind of stuff i think it's very smart to just tap into a massive market where you don't to pay for the ip all that makes sense um but the other piece of it too is uh you can actually go ahead and uh marry the first idea the second idea right so you could even do a super beautiful designed you know app where you can read it you know there's all kinds of things that you can do off of that and there's plenty of i think that some of the most popular apps in the app store are around religion or bibles um but but i do think that there's another piece of this too which is uh i'm fascinated by the idea of taking a piece of content and then either uh making it more mature or less mature and what i mean by that is uh you know all of these books that are basically

like the picture book of the bible right or the uh if you went you looked at bible sales how many of the bibles being sold are in the like old uh james you know like super hard to read like old english type uh language versus just like i think it's called like new american you know uh language where it's very easy to read uh my guess is actually that more and more the new language and so it's like finding any sort of content that you can you know basically translate into like very simple uh kind of concise language whether that's you know for children or for kind of adolescents it just seems like it's pretty easy to do and the demand's not going anywhere there's some group that's trying to do this on youtube they just took every like story from the bible

and they're just animating it into a youtube series and their youtube channel is like super popular. Their Patreon has like tons of, you know, supporters or whatever. They have like a whole animation team, like a Pixar team, basically. And it's again, genius idea. It's like deliver in a new way, the old content. And again, it's like, this is IP more popular than Pokemon or anything else. And you know, you can get the rights without permission and without a dollar. So that's really cool for somebody who doesn't have a whole lot of resources, but wants to make something big. Look, I think that there's an entire industry of people just reading things that are in written content like literally go find you know information that you know people find valuable whether books

are hard because there's the ip concerns but there's all kinds of content that exists you know everywhere uh and literally you just read it and it's not very you know intelligent heavy in terms of what's needed for you to be able to create the audio content but again going back to all of these books eventually audiobooks exploded every piece of written content is essentially going to at some point have the, um, have the audio version. Like you could do the audio version kind of like, like, so my friend started calm, the meditation app and, you know, calm was like, I remember early days was like just Alex and he, there's, you know, it was a slow slog. People weren't meditating. And then like, as that came more in vogue, they grew, grew, but it still

wasn't taken off. And then they did their sleep stories and sleep stories was like a game changer because a more people wanted to sleep than meditate. And B they had like, they took an old problem, bedtime stories, and did it in a new way. They did bedtime stories for adults driven through an app. And so you could do the same thing. So say you did the audio version of the Bible, like maybe you actually do the same thing they do, which is they go partner with like Matthew McConaughey and they get him to read a story at night. And it's kind of like this cool branded thing. So how many celebrities out there actually, you know, have faith and would love to be paid almost in a masterclass style to record a high quality reading of a religious short story.

And then you could off package those up and offer them to people who want something. It's not just that it's audio, but it's audio done by celebrity. And you're just mashing these things together, remixing them till you get an idea that works. Absolutely. One more. What's one more you got? Okay. Okay. Pick a number between three and 10 and I'll read the number. I'll read that idea off. I have 10 ideas on this list, but I'll let you pick another lucky three. Okay. A no code PE shop. Okay.

So here's this idea, um, private equity, you know, known, known thing, you go buy up companies and you sort of, uh, you either, you know, you have some way to increase revenues through either maybe a rollup or something like that, or you're shedding costs. So this is the shedding cost version. There are a ton of apps or software businesses out there that are like, they're doing like 700 K a year. Um, but then they take like four engineers to, to like maintain and build and they employ people.

And, um, so they're not making any money. And so you can buy these apps for, you know, 2x revenue, because they have no exit, nobody's going to buy this, like, no, no, Apple's not going to go buy this Facebook, Facebook's not trying to buy these companies. So they're, and they can't go raise money, because they're not like in hyper growth mode. So they're kind of in no man's land. So you can go, you can acquire these companies, and you just need a no code backend, basically, where you're able to take everything that they're doing with their developers, and you're going to turn it into a no code platform that can be managed and maintained without having to write code. And so you would lower your, your operational costs and you'll turn these things that are like break even on 700 K a year to like profiting 400 K a year. And I think that any individual could do this and you can create a whole shop that expertise is doing this. Yeah, I think that you're going to continuously see this. I've got a friend who he's from South America and he went in, partnered with a private equity shop and they bought a very specific type of business. I won't kind of reveal their strategy, but a very specific type of business. And then the whole idea was we're going to use technology to replace a bunch of the human

labor. And then on top of that, my buddy really understands how to use the platforms to grow and kind operational efficiency and worked at some large tech companies. And you just start to implement all of those lessons learned and tactics. And next thing you know, the business, not only can you kind of make it more profitable by saving costs, but also you can double or triple the top line revenue simply by like using the internet, right? I mean, like super, super easy stuff. But I think that more and more of these kind of private equity-esque type companies or shops are waking up to this idea of, you know, you don't have to necessarily go buy the technology enabled company.

It may be better to buy the one that has no clue about technology and then just quickly get them onboarded to the technology world and create much value. Yeah, that's exactly right. All right. I took a bunch of questions from online on Twitter beforehand. I'm going to just run through these and you fire off answers. Adam Singer asked to talk through mobile end versus mobile first and how you think about that yeah okay so what he's asking is you know your company should you be thinking we are a you know mobile and company meaning it's mobile and web or mobile and tv or whatever uh or your mobile first company like when facebook went all in on mobile um and you know it's i think there's context to this like not every business necessarily makes sense

this way but like the world has gone mobile first so you need a damn good reason to not be mobile first. If you're Netflix and you're like, look, people truly enjoy to watch a higher percentage of this on TV than on mobile. Mobile is sizable for them. It might be like 20, 30% of their overall watch time, but still majority is TV. So they should be TV first. But if you're a social media app, you should definitely not be TV first. You should be mobile first. So I think the context depends here, but like in most cases, and is a wuss word and is, I can't make a decision. So I'm going to say both because then I'm not pissing anybody off. And in reality, I'm probably going to fail because I don't have the ability to do both at a world-class level.

So be really worried when you, whenever your strategy is this and that, instead of this, not that I would always bet on an entrepreneur who's saying it's this, not that even if they're wrong, cause they'll find out that they're wrong and they'll be able to pivot when it's this and that, they'll never know if they're wrong because everything will just be half-baked execution. And so you never know what was the problem, the execution or the strategy. It's hard to tell. Literally my number one lesson from working at Facebook was this exact framework that you're talking about, which was you have to have a strategy and then you have to have perfect execution of the test or the strategy for that exact reason, right? If it doesn't work,

you never want to be questioning, well, was it the right strategy? We just implemented it correctly because you're lost yeah there's no there's no point to running the test then right were you were you ever there when they did a lockdown when they were like i don't know which years you were there but like when it was like existential threat nobody leaves we're fit we're going to figure this out we're going to shift the whole company in this direction so not necessarily for that so i worked there in 2014 2015 um there was plenty of people who you know kind of had the stories of that uh when i was there we went from i don't know i think i was like maybe right around 4,000, 3,800 employees, something like that. To when I left, I think we had crossed over 12,000.

So like, you know, hyper growth, everything's going crazy. But the thing that a lot of people don't remember about Facebook is that most of the executives have been there for a very, very long period of time, right? And so on the growth side, you know, you've got Javi, Naomi, Alex Schultz, like these people who have been there just for so long. And I think part of what was so fascinating was, uh, they had the muscle memory of doing that and where it would show up is there wasn't necessarily like company wide lockdowns, but they would do like war rooms for product launches. Right. So kind of everyone go in here for two weeks or, you know, that type of stuff. Um, and then, uh, the other thing that a lot of people don't remember is, uh, when they

were doing those lockdowns, a lot of times they would literally stop development of everything at the company and say, like, we're going to fix the data issues that we have. So going forward over the next 30 years like it's built on a good foundation right or there's this existential threat like we're going to address that today we don't care don't make progress on anything else and it goes back to your idea of like it's not just startup entrepreneurs that need to focus like if you want to be really really good you've always got to understand like what's the most important thing and like how focused are we on that thing versus distracted by everything else totally all right uh biggest lessons learned from monkey inferno from marvin uh so monkey

in front of was the Idea Lab. So I talked a little bit about that, some of the things that don't work great. I'll share with you my philosophy around this. So the biggest lesson learned was don't be a dabbler. Okay. So what's a dabbler? So here's the story on this. So let's say you decide to go and you go to the gym and you see your gym has a racquetball court and you're like, oh, let me try this out. That looks fun. Let me see what they're doing. So you go inside and you start playing racquetball and you're like, holy shit, this is fun. I'm smashing this ball against the wall. This is great. Next day you go and you buy a bunch of gear. You got your shorts, your headband, your goggles, whatever. And you're like, I love racquetball now. So you start playing

racquetball for a couple of weeks. And then, you know, a couple of weeks go by and you, you know, the initial fun of smashing the ball around is sort of worn off. And you actually started playing with somebody who has been playing for a while and they're just mopping you up. You know, they're just putting the ball in places you can't hit and you're getting frustrated because it's not, you're not getting the level of progress or victory that you really want as fast as you want it. And so, you know, average person's like, you know what? Fuck racquetball. What am I doing in this box anyways? This is hot. You know, this is a stupid, stupid game. I'm going to go play a different game. I'm going to go play tennis. And so they go, they go outside and they start playing

tennis. Same sort of curve happens. Initially starts out fun. You're doing all right. You feel a sense of progress, but then over time you start to, you know, you hit plateaus and you stop getting better at the same rate you were getting better before. And when you really want to compete, you realize like, oh shit, like I still have a long way to go. And this is not going as fun as it's not as fun as it was the first few days. And so most people, you know, they quit, they say tennis, what is this? You know, I'm out here in the sun all day. This is, this is dumb. I'm done with this. And then they go and they're like, I'm gonna play golf. And then, you know, day one of golf, they're like, fuck, you know, golf doesn't even give you that initial hit. And so, you know,

the, the, there's three, that's the story of a dabbler. And this happens in business all the time where you start a project and you initially have hopes and dreams and it starts off going great and you're excited. But then as you hit plateaus or resistance, which is like what it takes to get to the success, um, you give up and you switch or you change your strategy or you just change everything. And you're not changing because that's actually what it takes to get better. You're changing because you're impatient or you're frustrated. And so this was really easy to do in Idea Lab because it's like, dude, we got a ton of ideas. It's natural to just quit one and do another, focus your attention a little more the next day on the other projects. And so it was

really hard to do that. And there's really three types of people. There's a dabbler who that's the pattern they go down. There's what I'll call the stressor achiever. And this is where most people fall. Most successful people fall here where they're going to fight through, they will persevere, but they're stressed the whole goddamn time. Every time they hit the plateau, they're angry, they're frustrated, but they don't quit, but their journey is painful. And then there's a master. And this is what I've learned from Monkey Inferno in my time at the Idea Lab was how to become a master. A master is you are doing something, you would get excited about the early days, then you hit your plateau, but you're not surprised. You're not angry. You treat it like

an old friend. You're like, ah, I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Hello, plateau. What are you here to teach me? Where do I need to grow to get better? What area of my business is weak that I need to get stronger? Um, what area of my body do I need to change to get better? Um, and so now a master treats the plateau like an old friend, uh, greets it, goes through it, overcomes it and enjoys the whole journey along the way. And so it's kind of a more philosophical personal lesson, but that's what I really learned from the ideal lab was, um, don't be a dabbler. Also don't be a stressor achiever, learn to be a master in, in your adventures, and then you'll enjoy the adventure and you'll, you'll, you'll have the endurance to continue. Australia, what's going on in the

startup scene there? I have no idea. I was there like 10 years ago. Back then it was like every smart person I met was on their way out. Like the brain drain was real. And then there was like two companies that were successful, like Atlassian and now Canva. And everybody always points to those as like, no, look, see, we can do it here. And like, of course you can do it there, but there was a real brain drain at the time. Maybe it's changed, but in Australia, the startup scene was more it was like five to seven years behind it was the same way the tv you know when i was there they would show like the tv station would hype up like oh coming up this week house this new show house md and like house came out in the states like seven eight years ago and they were

like no so house is starting here now and that's how i felt about the startup kind of uh being on the edge of things i didn't feel like they were on the edge and like no knock i love australia you know i'd live there again in a heartbeat but you know in terms of the startup scene it wasn't it wasn't the forefront. Makes sense. Remote workspaces being everyone's going to remote work in some form or fashion, but then people basically going into a space while they're working remote. And so you got a bunch of people in the same space. They just work for different companies remotely. What do you think of remote work? You like it? Well, it's a little bit different. Yeah. On the investing side, obviously it's a little bit easier to do that. And I've

been doing it pretty much um for uh for four or five years now um and so like you know worked all the kinks out it's fine like do you work is this your desk where you work right now uh right now during quarantine yeah but but at one point we had an office right then we didn't have an office um and the way that i kind of look at it is uh it's one of these things where like i actually don't think it's a company specific thing i think it's an individual specific thing so some people like really don't mind at all they actually enjoy it they want the freedom they you know they want kind of all these things. And other people are like, I absolutely hate working remotely. Like I want to go do, you know, go into an office. I want to be around people. I want to like,

you know, sit at a conference room table, like all that kind of stuff. And so to me, it's like less about like, is the company going to be successful or not? Or can they be successful? Like, again, yes, of course they can be, but it's just like, who are the people, I guess. Yeah. That makes sense. I think two things. I think people are missing the big story about the remote stuff. So what most people are thinking about, at least the people I see kind of on Twitter and whatnot is like, oh, how is my job going to work? Am I going to be remote? Am I going to go into these little coworking pods? Are we going to, is our office going to open back up? And they think like, that's the extent of the change that's happening. But what's actually

happening is actually in some ways, much more scary for that person, which is I like, I live in Silicon Valley, right? People here are divas. They're like, you know, making a ton of money and unsatisfied the whole time. And like expenses are really high and all this stuff. and what's going to happen is when you're remote you don't have to pay silicon valley prices for talent anymore so it's not going to be your the problem you're going to have isn't do i prefer working out of my kitchen or do i want to come in three days a week or two days a week or five days a week to the office it's going to be holy shit they just found somebody in canada that's going to work for a third of my price and so most people are going to you know when the talent pool opens

up to global because the default work system is remote either remote only or remote friendly then people who are you know you really have to be a 10xer to get paid like a 10xer and most people think they're a 10xer because they're getting paid like it today but that's just because they happen to be you know an engineer designer or pm that lives in you know the bay area or new york and that's why you're getting paid these like you know high wages but if i can if you're sitting on zoom and so is some guy in pittsburgh or czechoslovakia um yeah sorry you're not going to be making you know half a million bucks a year anymore because i don't have to pay that anymore I'm getting the same output or better, um, for somebody, you know, a faceless, you know,

output person, just think about it. Like they're just going to measure output per zoom end point. And, um, you know, that's going to have, you know, they're going to pay 80 grand for it or a hundred grand for it. So I think companies are the ones who win big in the end with this and not so much the individual, um, employee. Well, it's companies. And then it's also people who are potential employees, but don't currently work at the

company. Right. So if you are anywhere internationally, for sure, a huge win. And then even here in the United States, if you're in the Midwest and certain areas right now, all of a sudden you've got much more opportunity and you probably actually get paid a premium on what you would get paid locally, which is still a significant decrease in cost for the company that was- Exactly.

It's a win-win, right? Company gets it at half the price and I get double my local wage. So they're happy. And so there's that phrase like talent is universal, but opportunity is not or something like that. Um, that's what's, that's, what's going to happen. The talent that is already universally distributed, um, is now going to receive a larger share of opportunity to earn and prove themselves than is happening today. Same thing's going to happen on the funding side where cool. If I'm

doing all my funding over zoom anyways, and I don't just fund Bay area companies, I'm going to fund companies everywhere. So more people get opportunity. Do you think that there ends up being these like pods or, uh, remote workspaces? Probably, but I don't think it's that big of a thing. So maybe I'm just skewed because I like just being on my own. In fact, I just consider myself like a solopreneur now. I don't want any employees. I just want to build my own business and run it with just me and maybe one sidekick who I talk to online. But yeah, I think people will have co-working spaces because not everybody's house is suited for it. And companies will need to make concessions and say, cool, you can go get this space. We have spaces in every city center

that you can go work at and it's co-working like we work or regis or whatever um but i don't think it's like what the question i saw the question on twitter and who's like are groups of kind of friends from different companies going to like form their own little co-office it's like yeah well like in the sitcom friends that will happen where like you know they meet at the perk every day at 3 p.m and like you know they live in new york and these like that's not real like that's a show that's a tv show and that's not real and so you know just think logically most people are not going to like set up this like very perfect scenario where my best friends from different companies get together and we pile up in a co-working space. I don't think so. So the other

thing that I think is definitely going to happen is people are going to start building homes with two offices, right? So like in suburbia somewhere, it's going to be like, hey, you know, three bedroom, three bath, two office, right? And they're not going to just be like, you know, when I was growing up, you'd go to like a friend's house and they would basically call it like a home office, but it's more of like a den. So kind of like, you know, glass little doors or whatever. And you're just like, wait a second, like that's not going to be what this is. I'm talking about a full on office, like maybe be hooked up with some sort of audio video capabilities and actually serve, maybe even be soundproof to some degree. Like you can just start to see, and it's going

to be promoted that way. Yes. I would add to that. Also, I think multifamily real estate is going to look very different. So, you know, today where you have these lobbies where people play shuffleboard and there's like a, you know, whatever, like a movie room or some, some amenity, like they're going to just build coworking spaces into every multi multi-condo apartment rental place, because you're going to have all these people. They're going to be in small apartments that two people trying to work from home. And so a good differentiator will be to take one or two floors of your building and just build out. We work inside. And I know some people, some places already do this, but that will become very much the norm. Just like the way you're talking about

the office thing. Like I'm selling my condo right now in SF. We took our second bedroom and we staged it as an office, not as a bedroom. And like, that would have been crazy, you know, three years ago, but now it's like made sense. People want a big spacious office with a good door and good light, um, more than they wanted a bedroom. You want to know my wildest idea when it comes to the remote work and housing hit me. So, uh, malls absolutely getting decimated. Uh, I think that somebody should go and you'd have to have a lot of capital. You have to be super ambitious and, you know, kind of do all the right things. But, uh, if you think of how the mall is basically set up is, uh, at the, at the ends and kind of in the middle, there's always the

department stores. So you go in, you buy mall with huge acreage, whatever, uh, you turn the department stores into, uh, essentially just apartments. Right. And then all of the interconnectedness of the mall, which used to be retail stores, you basically build like a little village. And so you take like the quote unquote New York experience or like the San Francisco experience and you pack it into like a mall environment and then you use the outsides you can either have some parking or you can actually build like walking paths and all kinds of crazy stuff and what you're doing is you're almost giving like the urban type experience or like a college dorm type experience but I think that in the right city done correctly would be like

incredibly attractive to people who all want to work remotely and also then you get kind of this balance between work life and outdoor experience indoor experience all that kind of stuff. Right. Yeah, totally. And if somebody resonates with that, now's the time because now you'll get the, you'll get a $70 million property, you know, for, for 22 million bucks right now. If you, if you go try to buy up these malls that are dying and all their stores are dying and all that, it's either that or, or they become, you know, Amazon distribution warehouses. Like it's going to be one of the two, like it's going to be an endpoint for e-commerce or it's going to be co-working with Froyo shops in between. absolutely uh what are the pros and cons of my first million success so you guys obviously have i think uh your two plus million downloads in the first year um what is kind of the pros and cons of that success uh well pros is easy uh it's fun to just shoot the shit and then you get like a bunch of people telling you how great you are like that's never bad um so so that's cool and you know, it's a good platform to have the cons would be, um, it's very tempting to think you're

smart when other people think you're smart. And my whole life, I think I actually kind of got smart because I thought I was dumb and I was always trying to learn. And so when you're, uh, when you're on a podcast and you're, you're basically kind of giving answers, you're giving like information and I want to be the, you know, dumbest guy in the room. Um, I want to be somebody who, um, is like learning more than I'm, I'm teaching. Right. So, um, so that's my mindset. So I would say the only con is, um, the only con would be falling for falling for your own bullshit. And, you know, don't, don't start to believe your own bullshit. So like, if I start to think I'm smart and people should look to me for information or advice, like, like they do, then I've lost and

I've stopped growing at that point. Yeah. It's a fantastic answer. What's the one product that doesn't exist that you would hand over your credit card immediately for? That's a great question. Okay. Here's one right now. That's kind of top of mind. So my wife started the e-commerce thing during the last couple of months as like a side thing, and it kind of took off. She basically heard people on the podcast talking about stuff and was like, I could do that. And so it actually worked. And so I haven't talked too much about it. I haven't really told anybody what's happening, but one of the problems we have is like, cool it's outgrown like our whole house of like inventory like our whole house is filled with

inventory and then the next shipment's coming in it's even bigger and so what most people do is they go to a 3pl um which is like a third-party logistics company basically you send them your inventory they fulfill it and they charge you for the storage they charge you for the picking it out when an order comes in and packing it and shipping it um and they have like kind of crappy service because they're trying to do this for a whole bunch of companies they don't really care like you care we care about our customers they don't they don't care it's not their customer and so what would be better is like, I would pay today for a, we work for warehouses. And so I saw this guy, Jay tweet this out and it struck a chord with me because I would say his last name, but it's

like a crazy Indian last name that I don't, I don't know how to say. And so what, what you would want is I would rather hire my own people to go do the pick, pack and ship. But I don't want to lease out a warehouse and buy the forklifts and buy the racks and like, you know, set this whole thing up and like, no, I would rather just say, give me 3,000 square feet. That's what I need right now. Or 10,000 square feet or whatever it is. And I'll expand to 20,000 square feet if I want to. But like, I want to do my own fulfillment. Like I don't mind having my own people there. So it's like our space, we can control it. We could control quality, accuracy, and costs. And so I would hand over my credit card today if there was somebody in the Bay Area that said, we are turnkey,

we work for, for warehouses. What type of e-commerce is she doing? Oh, bro, e-commerce, you can never tell what you're doing. There's 10,000 drop shippers sitting out there ready to knock you off in a second. When people, I have this tweet, which is like, before I do something, I tell the whole world about it. Once something starts to work, I don't tell a soul about it. And so this falls into that category. I'll share all my half-baked ideas I'm not doing, but if I'm doing something that is working, you don't even know it exists. That is a fantastic way to look at it. All right.

Last question I have for you from the audience before we go to wrap up for rapid fire is what are your post Twitch plans? I don't know. It's a good question. So I set this goal for myself that I want to, I want to teach 1% of humanity. So like, I would love to basically take the top 1% of most hungry, ambitious people. and, um, and help them, you know, tap into more of their potential in some way. So like, the reason I say this is, uh, everything in society is set up for the average person,

right? You have to, like, there's so many people. So we set up our school system, our work system, our life philosophies for the average person. And most people follow most people. So like, um, which is crazy because most people hate their job. Most people are fat. Most people, most marriages end in divorce. So like, why the hell would you ever follow what most people do. That's crazy to me. So, you know, for the top 1% of people who are creative and ambitious and want to really make something of their life, I want to create sort of the alternative school system for them. That might just be podcasts and books and, you know, places where you can go self-learn. I might go buy a university campus and start my own, start the

next Stanford. But it's going to be something in the education space and it's going to be something for the top 1% of talented people. I want to reverse the brain drain. They're all going and wasting their time it goes back to project selection and kind of following the herd i don't think you should follow the herd and i don't think you should pick the wrong projects i think you should apply your talents in a way that like works for you and you'll get the most out of your talents um so i want to help that so after twitch i'll probably just start on that and that'll be like my last project i don't want to like build something to sell it i want to build something that like you couldn't buy off me and is the idea that uh those people would eventually like go and

create companies or they could go do anything? Yeah, go do anything. So like, you know, the same philosophies that helped me build businesses would help somebody become an investor. It would help somebody become a musician and be like, Hey, cool. If I'm a musician, like a big part of this is standing out, getting my stuff into customers' hands, building a community, you know, you know, maximizing my revenue opportunities. So like, it doesn't matter whether you want to kind of go in the creative fields, like music, film, you know, that side of things or in the business side, But those would kind of be the two main areas, not really for somebody who's like, you know, if you want to become a doctor, go to go to med school like that's probably the best way. But if you want to be some kind of creator, you know, creating either content, creating, creating businesses, this would be a creator school.

And before I wrap up, I ask everyone the same two questions. First being, what is the most important book you've ever read? I'll give you two. The first most important book I ever read was The Game, which is a book about picking up chicks, basically. Great book, entertaining read. This guy becomes a pickup artist. It's more just entertainment than anything else.

But it helped me because I was an 18-year-old kid in college and I wanted to have a girlfriend and I didn't know how the hell to do it. And I was, when you don't know how to do something, I should just speak from the eye. When I didn't know how to do something, I would kind of like just either, again, follow the herd or like just act in weird ways out of kind of insecurity.

But once I got confidence that, hey, this, if I just do this, this will work. And I'm in, this is in line with my values. Like I was just at ease. I was at peace and I had much better results. But it really teaches you about human psychology. So the same things that that book teaches you about how to approach, you know,

a group of girls in a club is very much how I do cold emails for, you know, outreach to customers and, you know, how I would pitch an investor, how I would get an investor to want to invest in my business and get that attraction and get them excited. That's the same way I would, you know, the same thing I would use to build attraction with an investor and get an investor excited

and want to take action would be the same thing that this guy's saying. This is how you pick up chicks at the club. And so I really liked that book. I thought it taught me a lot about the way human psychology works. And then the second one is this book called Storyworthy that nobody really talks about.

It's probably the best book I've read the last two years. This guy, Matthew Dix, he's a storyteller. There's this thing called the Moth Storytelling Competition. You might know it in New York. I'd never heard of it before, but it's like a talent show or whatever. It's like a kind of a local open mic for storytellers. So this guy's like the 20 time champion of moth or whatever. He's won a whole bunch of these. He's just a third grade teacher, I think, in Connecticut. And that's like his day job. And his night job is he teaches people how to tell great stories. And this book is awesome. It's such a good book for learning how to tell

stories. And most of what we do is telling stories. Like if you're still listening like an hour into this podcast probably because you're entertained by something i said if i didn't get you it's because i didn't tell a good enough story at the beginning and um it's one of those universal skills that i think people should learn and story worthy is an awesome book that i'd never heard about until my friend trevor told me about it now i it's the most gift it's the book i gift the most i sent it in the mail today to two of the other execs at twitch um to be like hey this book is amazing it'll change your life i've never heard of it i'm definitely gonna have to read that now uh i got one more question for you and then we're gonna end you get to ask me one so start

thinking but uh the last question is more fun aliens believer or non-believer it's a good question um no i'm a non-believer i do think i think that's sort of this is a simulation is more likely than um than anything else and if this is a simulation you wouldn't really need to build aliens or maybe you would in some simulations or not um or maybe the aliens are the simulators maybe they're the same yeah you know anything that's kind of foreign a foreign uh you know intelligent body would appear to be an alien to us um so yeah i'm not i don't believe in aliens the way that like you know kind of area what is area 51 or whatever like et like i don't believe in that alien i don't believe in ghosts um but i do think that there's a there's a decent shot

that this is this whole thing's not real where you know you know when you get in a plane and you start to fly up and then your house starts to look like a little ant colony and the roads start to you know, like cars start to look like ants and houses start to look like the colony. And like, you start to realize like, oh shit, we might just be in a Petri dish somewhere. Yeah. Like I believe that a little bit more. I also had this one really delusional thing when I was little that I got paranoid when I was like in fifth grade that I was like, wait, what if, I was like, what if I, you know, what if I'm not like mentally all there? I was like, what if I'm special needs? And then my parents convinced me, like all these things that I believe to be like

normal society are not like school well that's just like a daycare where they put they put me uh and I was like what if like you know I'm drinking orange juice and what if this is not what people what real people actually drink what if this is just what I drink because I'm in part of this like and I got really worried about it and uh then by sixth grade I was like I think I'm okay look and when you're a kid you don't know man you ever go to like uh I had somebody come on the podcast this is actually uh wild uh so I grew up in North Carolina uh and this kid Caleb Presley who works at a barstool sports comes on. Uh, he grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. So people that grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I think Asheville is like the boondocks, right. And vice

versa. And, uh, he said that I think he was 18 years old. The first time he ever heard of, uh, evolution theory. Right. Right. And he was just like, look, man, at every single school I went to, you know, in, in frigging Asheville, North Carolina, like that wasn't a thing that they covered. Right. There is this like whole idea of like, like that sounds crazy. Right. You know, wish you kind of understand the internet and all stuff, but it's like, look, it's just an exposure thing. Right. And so see how many years I was taught like the fricking, uh, photosynthesis cycle. Like, why do I need to know that? Why was that taught to me seven times in my life? Like that's crazy. It's crazy. Everything that gets taught is crazy. Like everything that's taught

that you memorize essentially. And actually you're just, you just, you just look that up whenever you need it. Like memorization is, is, is bogus. Uh, learning about plant cells rather than like nutrition for humans. That's crazy that we do things this way. So I'm not surprised he didn't learn about evolution. I didn't learn about nutrition in school. And that seems like a really important thing for everybody to learn. So one of my favorite videos on the internet is there's a mom who has her phone and she peeks around the corner, her son sitting at the dinner table, but he's like six or seven. Right. And he's kind of like too small to sit at the chair. So he's literally propped up, like standing on it, kind of leaning over the table. And there's an Alexa

and he's got a piece of paper and he's holding his pencil like a six-year-old does. And he goes, Alexa, two plus three, you know, or whatever he says. And Alexa says it back. And all you hear the mom is, boy, she's about to just get them. And I'm like, look, actually that kid's going to be super successful. Yeah. He's got it down. All right. What one question do you have for me to uh to finish this up um okay i didn't prepare for this but i actually have a great question for you all right i i am the master of questions so i i i'm not surprised i have a great question all right so um you are you i didn't i never heard of you until like i don't know 18 months ago two years ago something like that whenever kind of bitcoin started going and then this guy on my

feed and he was branded pomp and i was like that's a cool little personal brand to have and you like seemed to be all in on bitcoin and like crypto and like i kind of i was like okay so like you know who's this person is this like some hedge fund guy is this like and i i still actually don't even know your full story but like you worked at facebook and you seem kind of like you seem like you came out of nowhere and you seem like you created this pop guy um like to what extent like okay first am i wrong what was this like were you always kind of uh a notable person doing notable things. It seemed like you went from a kind of normal, successful, smart person to like a standout. And you, it seemed like you did it off this Bitcoin wave. And it seemed like you

almost consciously branded yourself as Pomp, the Bitcoin kind of like champion and cheerleader on Twitter. Was that conscious? Is my, is my perception of this accurate? I'm just curious. So there's a whole bunch in there. The key pieces were, I have this general belief that like, if somebody can be successful at one thing they can be successful at many things right and it's kind of the repetition to some degree now again look there's also elements that like you win the ovarian lottery like like you know you have extra resources like all that kind of stuff definitely helps but uh i do think that there's like this confidence game there's also just uh if you can tell stories right if you are good at communicating with people like you can replicate it over and

over again. So, um, I was in the army, uh, deployed overseas. Uh, when I came back, like just that one experience alone, you kind of just have this different, like, I was very different when I came back. Cause you just kind of like are forced to grow up, um, built and sold to like pretty small technology companies. Uh, but again, like lording muscle memory, when I got to Facebook, that's when I think I realized like, Oh wait, like I may actually like be good at some of this growth and tech stuff and all that. Um, eventually got hired at Snapchat as the head of growth uh for a short period of time and then like went and started investing full-time and i only went and started investing full-time because like i didn't have an idea of

like what i wanted to do like in terms of there was no company to build yet like i just was like there's nothing worth it so let me just go help other people pretty much right um and in 2017 at the beginning of 17 uh the only thing i could keep thinking about was like when i was at facebook i ran the growth team for facebook pages and so i helped all of these different brands and individuals all stuff build massive audiences right it's like i met the fuck jerry guys like all these guys and and not necessarily that i did the work but just like i understood how the system you were front row at the least yeah yeah so i could just explain to them like hey here's how the algorithm works here's the things that you should do here's the things you shouldn't do like

you know here's how you increase your reach or decrease your reach like all that type of stuff and what i had realized is like i had sat and watched so many people do this with that information i was like why hadn't i never done it for myself and this is like before all this like now like everyone's talking about creators and audience and like all that kind of stuff um and so i looked at the platforms and i was like okay which is the one that i think you could basically do this the fastest on uh and that was twitter um like because retweeting is just the virality yeah and it was the one that had the least amount of algorithmic disruption meaning that like facebook was very obvious like they were taking away reach like all that kind of stuff and twitter

seemed to still like have a pretty long way to go before they got to that point um and also it was like easier to create content for. Right. If you get to sit in my right of face a second. Yeah. Right. And so, uh, I just tried everything and anything in the book, like whatever I could. And that year, um, I went from, I don't know, like low single digit thousands to a hundred thousand or like 110,000 followers. So it was like, okay, like, here we go. So, so, so you said you tried a bunch of things. Uh, what's an example of something you tried that you don't do anymore or that you were trying at that time? So literally, like literally, um, I come from that growth mindset. So it was like, what are all the things that you could possibly

do that could drive people to your profile to hit the follow button? So follow one, follow, like, reply to tweets, tweet 50 times a day, retweet your own tweet because there's different time zones that people may be logging in. I mean, everything in the book that you could possibly think of. And three or four years ago, some of the stuff worked that doesn't work now. Some of this stuff didn't work but actually would work now like it all is just testing how'd you decide your angle uh so it's to me that the angle was twofold that i recognize you for one was a memorable kind of name that like yeah it's easy easy to kind of click onto and the other is you were talking about a topic that was like super relevant and everybody wanted more info from um did you

consciously decide that or that just kind of happened no so this is the craziest part of the whole thing is um for whatever reason i grew up with four younger brothers there's five of us like we're all just like pretty authentic like i'd like to think down to earth like you can go grab a beer with us and i don't care if you're a billionaire or you're a nobody like you know we're just us right um and uh i think that what i started to do was just talk about the things i was interested in and i was trying and i was talking about all kinds of stuff everything from um technology to startups we had invested in to Bitcoin to, you know, whatever. And naturally the thing that most people I think do on Twitter is they fight what's actually working. Like, like they want to talk

about Bitcoin. They want to talk about what they eat. They want to talk about all this stuff. And it becomes like, not obvious. Like what is this account for? Uh, and I knew from Facebook, like, Oh no, no, no, no. Like super focused is actually the best thing. And so in the beginning it was just like, Oh, Bitcoin tweet went viral. Then another Bitcoin tweet went viral like two weeks later and i was like wait a second like okay let me try another bitcoin like okay viral and it was just like the algorithm basically like it was just obviously double and triple down on this uh the name people have been calling me pomp since i was you know in middle school right it was just like these confluence of events that in hindsight like oh yeah i'm just like master genius there

was no master plan like it was just i just knew that like building the twitter audience would be effective and then i think the advantage that i've had is uh because we've invested in so many companies and, and I've just seen like what works and what doesn't work. Uh, I've been able to kind of like pretty intelligently, I think navigate like, okay, once you build a Twitter audience, like now you've got platform risk, like, okay, can you port that audience to an email? Okay. Now that you got that, like, how do you get another platform? Okay. Let's go to audio. Right. And you just kind of like do that. Um, and then all of a sudden you're like, okay, now we're in 2020 and like, everyone's talking about like, Oh, if you have audience, you can

like build businesses. And I'm like, yeah, of course. Like no brainer. Like I've got an audience. So yeah, so basically there was no master plan from how to go, you know, from where I was to today, but it's one of these things where like, when you find yourself in a certain position, like I think generally, if you've just got sound decision-making, like you can make the best of it. And so, yeah. Now what's the best version of how this plays out over the next five years, roughly like what's, what's the best outcome of where this whole thing goes for you now that where does the pop train go? A short answer I don't know is all of these, um, like influencers, celebrity, you know, people with audience, whatever. Historically, they basically

said, give me money and I'll advertise for your business. Or they say, you know, smart people will say, give me money and give me equity now. But I think actually it's going to flip. And what you're going to see is the people with audience are just going to say, I'm just going to build my own company, right? So like the Joe Rogan example, like Joe should have gone to Trigger Girls and said, hey, I'm not advertising Trigger Girls anymore. Let's create an entity. We're going to call it Joe Rogan Girl. I think that's where the world's going and more and more people will figure that out. Pomp's Instant Pot. Got it. It's an instant pot with your face on it. It plays your content while you cook your food. It's excellent. No, I think I stay out of the kitchen. I don't

think the kitchen items are going to be my thing. Awesome, Mish. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about some stuff you're working on? Yeah, just follow me on Twitter. That's where I put out most of my stuff. so it's just twitter slash sean vp so it's s-h-a-a-n-v-p um so so sean vp and then uh subscribe to my first million the podcast if you like kind of what we were doing here just shooting the shit talk about different business ideas that's basically what we do twice a week and uh it's got a good thing going so so if you like that go go subscribe to my first million i'm a big fan you don't even know this but uh i've listened to a lot of the episodes so definitely people go

subscribe uh no brainer for that yeah and i think we got you scheduled on next week maybe something like that yeah we're gonna do it great um all right man thank you so much we'll do this again in the future cool peace out