The Pomp Podcast - #925 Paul DeJoe On Selling $50 Million of a Coffee Alternative

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Paul DeJoe is the Co-Founder & COO of MUD\WTR, a subscription-based alternative to drinking coffee. In this conversation, we discuss their integration with Pipe by using their recurring revenue to finance the future growth of their business in a non-dilutive way. We also talk about holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet and why Paul hopes to change peoples morning coffee routine through their market-disrupting product. ======================= Today's Episode is brought to you by Pipe. Crypto is all about giving the power back to the people and our sponsor, Pipe, is doing that in a big way. Pipe is the world’s first trading platform that allows you to trade recurring revenue streams for up-front capital. And with Pipe’s new API, companies with recurring revenue can build seamless, embedded financing options into their platforms. One of the most interesting uses for Pipe’s new API right now is Compass Mining’s “Mine Now, Pay Later” which powers payment plans on bitcoin mining hardware so more miners can start or scale with a smaller up-front investment. Whether you’re looking for mining hardware or scaling any business with recurring revenue, check out Pipe to access growth capital with: No loans. No dilution. No restrictive covenants or warrants. Just growth on your terms And right now, Pomp Podcast listeners can access tens of thousands of dollars even millions fee-free for 12 months. Whether you are a bitcoin mining company looking to enable financing for your customers or a SaaS, DTC, or any business that has recurring revenue, sign up at http://pipe.com/pomp to start trading today.

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. Now let's kick this thing off. Paul DeJoe is the co-founder and COO of Mudwater. In this conversation, we talk about using their recurring revenue to actually finance the future growth of their business in a non-dilutive way using Pipe. We also talk about the fact that he holds Bitcoin on their balance sheet and that he's a prolific angel investor. I really enjoy talking to operators like Paul because it gives you an insight

not only into how they build their own businesses, but how they think about evaluating founders and businesses that they invest in. I really enjoyed this conversation with Paul. I hope you guys enjoy this one as well. Before we get into it though, I first wanna talk about our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Pipe.

Crypto is all about giving the power back to the people and our sponsor Pipe is doing that in a big way. Pipe is the world's first trading platform that allows you to trade recurring revenue streams for upfront capital. And with Pipe's new API, companies with recurring revenue can build seamless embedded financing options

into their platforms. One of the most interesting uses for Pipe's new API right now is Compass Minings, mine now, pay later, which powers payment plans on Bitcoin mining hardware so more miners can start or scale with a smaller upfront investment. Whether you're looking for mining hardware

or scaling any business with recurring revenue. Check out Pipe to access growth capital with no loans, no dilution, no restrictive covenants or warrants, just growth on your terms. And right now, Pomp podcast listeners can access tens of thousands of dollars, even millions, fee-free for 12 months.

Whether you are a Bitcoin mining company looking to enable financing for your customers or a SaaS, DTC, or any business that has recurring revenue, Sign up at Pipe.com slash Pomp. Again, Pipe.com slash Pomp to start trading today. is only. Paul DeJoe, who's going to be joining us. Now, Paul has a very interesting background. He's the co-founder and COO of Mudwater. He is a Bitcoin investor, angel investor. He has an Uber rating of 4.96, which if somebody is telling me their Uber rating, there's a story there. We're going to figure out what happened with the 0.04, what's going on. He studied finance,

Drexel university. He said, uh, shout out to a home Lex Friedman, AKA the monotone magic mic. That's pretty good. And, uh, I believe that he played hockey and baseball at Newman university. It's a pro hockey in Italy and Belgium. Uh, and he was voted the friendliest kid at Canfield middle school. It's a three way tie between him and two other friendly kids. He has three failed startups, two failed special ops tryouts, and he has won spirit of the YMCA award from Youngstown, Ohio. Ladies and gentlemen, Paul DeJoe. Paul, how are you? What up boys? How you doing? I know that you think that this is all hilarious because I don't think anyone's ever given me enough background information to know that they won the spirit of the YMCA award. How do you win that

when you're younger i don't know just a friendly guy i guess um well we know that because you were also voted in a three-way tie at canfield middle school for the friendliest kid of the year yeah gotta keep it light yeah i mean i want to hear about the uber rating yeah what's going on with the 4.96 uber rating my my the only um uh challenge i had there with not getting a perfect score was my friend threw up one time in the back of it otherwise i'd have a perfect score that um it's not even your fault no it wasn't even on me that that scares me because i just checked mine and mine's at 4.58 and i've never thrown up in a car that seems pretty low for uh for uber i'm a nice guy i don't i'm not i'm not checking mine yeah i i feel like that's like

alarmingly low i've been with you two fools and ubers i'm definitely not checking mine All right. So let's start maybe with, uh, uh, to have a little bit of fun first. So you have two failed special ops tryouts. Uh, was this for, um, the army special forces or like what, what was the, uh, the thought process here? No, um, there's a, there's actually a spec ops unit. That's a reserve unit in Tucson, Arizona. And, um, which you probably know about. And I thought, you know, that's really exciting. You have to keep a day job, but you get to like get called when you're needed. And I just fell in love with the pararescue mission in Credo. So yeah, I was in the pipeline there for like four years, but you know, two times I failed the swim time. Swimming got you. See,

this is, people don't know this about a lot of these special operations, either tryouts or actual like training programs is that you could be the baddest of the baddest running, lifting, shooting, moving, communicate. And then they just toss you in the water and they're like, good luck. And it's not just like swim to the end of the pool. It's like, let us tie your hands and your feet together and then flip over underneath the water a couple of times and then Bob up and down. Oh, and by the way, uh, we're going to do that until you pass out and then we're going to resuscitate you and do it again. Right? Yeah. I mean, I was good at the water con. I actually like that. It's just like swimming a mile was so boring that I never trained for it. My swim time

for the mile was, would just, I thought I was going to do it, uh, twice and it just didn't work either time. So they told me don't come back. I said, all right. All right. Hey, what allowed for mud water, which give us kind of a quick overview of, uh, of mud water as a business. Yeah. So we branded as a coffee alternative. It was never really intended to be a business. My friend and co-founder Shane was drinking this concoction on his own for a couple of years. He He was in the Silicon Valley startup space where it's hustle culture, hustle culture. And he's also a fine artist and painting. And he went over to India on an art residency, fell in love with chai, came back to the States

and was experimenting with mushrooms and adaptogens. Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan were talking about these things. And so he made his own concoction. And then just decided one night after he took mushrooms that he was going to throw a website up and send it to me. and it was beautiful. And so I was like, let's do this, man. I want to help out. And we started it. The testimonials were insane. I had enough money in my bank to invest in a house. It was going to be my first house, but I decided to put it in the mud. And then we went out and

raised a million dollars in the first year and we're four years in to the company almost. And um, if 161,000 monthly subscribers, it's crazy. And so when you think about this, uh, I wonder if, um, the chai was the value. Like, so I went to India in 2015 maybe. Uh, and I gotta say when I was in India, they have coffee shops, they have American, you know, kind of all the brands, etc but we went a couple of times and i think we were in a place called jaipur which is uh not exactly like the the tourist destination of india but but we went there uh it's probably my favorite place in india that we went and there was people on the side of the road selling what was the equivalent of like a little plastic bag and some of them had water and then some of them had

mud water right i mean it's basically what it looks like and it was chai and i gotta tell you when we drank that stuff you're wired for like 17 000 days in a row like like i don't know what was in there but you drink it and you're just on another planet and not like from like a hallucinogenic standpoint just like that whether it's the caffeine the end like whatever's in that thing was next level and i literally remember talking to my brother who was with me at the time and we're like dude we should bring this to the u.s like this would be dope and so you guys literally took that general concept and have figured out how to do that with mud water yeah we added some um adaptogenic mushrooms to it some turmeric some cacao so um the flavor profiles um you know kind

of our own concoction but it uh it has our own unique signature on it and uh yeah it was never intended to be a business it was just something that we were drinking to get off coffee to kind of reduce anxiety or have a more um kind of steady energy flow and um when we first when we started seeing testimonials from giving it to our friends and then originally like just selling it to like the first 30 customers the testimonials were insane and it was like these were people that were trying to get off coffee because they didn't like the crash or they were drinking too much but they all kind of cited the same thing they were dreaming again they were they had sustained energy across the day they didn't really have a crash and then it was like then when we were like wow

maybe this really is a business so and so is that the thought process is that this is better than coffee but you still have like the energy and and like like basically forget mud water for a second like what is the pitch of chai versus coffee i drink a lot of coffee i drink two of these a day pretty much which like i'm probably gonna die in like two years but uh what's the uh general thought process of drinking chai instead of coffee so we all have this gene variant called the CYP182 gene, and it determines how we metabolize caffeine. About half of the country metabolizes it twice as slow. And so you have 70% of our customers that come to our site are trying to drink less caffeine. And so our pitch is that you don't crash in the afternoon. And if

you just monitor your sleep cycle, your sleep score on and off coffee, you'll see a dramatic difference. And so you'll get into that REM cycle sleep. You won't have as much caffeine to metabolize throughout the day or later at night. And so we really don't need to like pitch a whole lot. It's like, try it, um, uh, track your sleep. If you feel better, great. If you don't, you know, we'll support your morning ritual, whatever it is. So if you think about this, the average milligrams, I think of a cup of coffee is what, like 120 milligrams. So you're between a hundred and 200, depending on where you get it in size, but a Starbucks like pipe place or something's like 120 to 200. Yeah. Okay. And so a shot of espresso, uh, if I remember correctly is like

80 or 90, something like somewhere in that range. Yeah. You guys don't know about the science of coffee. Like I know. Cause I went and I looked, cause I wanted to understand how much caffeine am I drinking? And then I got real nervous when they were like, Oh, you should never drink more than like 400 milligrams of coffee in a given day. And so I was like, all right, well, this is basically two coffees plus time you know times two if i drink two of them a day oh shit like i'm pushing up against 400 milligrams uh and so the hard part is if you start to not drink as much coffee you crack like you're just like yo this sucks and so you're basically addicted right to some degree and so the promise of uh kind of uh chai tea but also of mud water is like hey you

don't have that variation and i'm assuming that it has a huge impact because if you drink coffee later in the day, that's really where you start screwing up your sleep. Is that the thought process? Yeah. It depends on that gene variant too. Um, I think, you know, a good, what else we saw, which was, uh, was, um, we didn't anticipate was there's still a black tea leaf in chai, which has a little caffeine. And so normally people that were getting off coffee, they'd have this crash or this migraine from withdrawal, but, um, moving into mud allowed them to still get that little bit of caffeine. So to your point, yeah, 120 to 200 milligrams of caffeine mud is about a seventh that, uh, so we have like around between 15 and 30 milligrams in

a, in a serving. So it's much less. And, uh, if you transition to that, you know, you're not getting the withdrawal symptoms. You're taking down caffeine quite a bit and you're getting more sustained energy. All right. We got to talk about other stuff. I'm about to buy some mud water right No, I'll let you know how this goes because I'm interested in this now. If we start thinking about the business itself, what metrics can you share with us about the business in terms of how big is this? How do I think about employees, locations? What can you share? Yeah. We're kind of an open book. We're about to be four years old in May. First year, full year in revenue, we did 3 million. Second year, we did 17. Last year, we did 47. This year,

we're projecting to do uh 74 um we have 161 000 active monthly subscribers uh 21 of those are on bulk plans so people try this once they're like cool i want a year subscription to this uh right now um we've got uh yeah hqs in venice california but we're a distributed team of 22 ftes we use quite a few contractors um that are kind of like family for us but yeah the the full-time team is 22. All right. So if we think about this, basically what you've figured out is you've figured out how to take the idea of coffee and kind of a daily habit. You transition it to something that's more healthy. And then you've overlaid that with a subscription business that either people are buying it weekly, monthly, or annually. Is that, is that kind of a fair

categorization? Pretty close. Yeah. Or you can get a man one-off whenever you want. Okay. And you went, you said 3 million in the first year, 17 million in the second, 47 in the third, uh, last year, third year. And then this year you think you guys are going to do 75 million, give or take. Yeah. Around that. Where are the customers coming from? Is it, are you guys just like ballers at online marketing or like, like that's pretty big growth for a subscription business like this? Yeah. Um, I think we are pretty good at, um, digital acquisition. We're 99% B2C, but you know, this message just really kind of resonated with a we, we intentionally branded it as a coffee alternative and nobody else was really saying

that. And so it enabled, enabled us to kind of be anchored in a lot of customers' minds of, oh, it's actually not a tea. They would, if we said we were a chai, I don't think we would have generated that many customers, but we specifically said we were a coffee alternative and we had kind of had this zero to one product market fit thing happening where a lot of people that coming, we're coming to our site, heard this coffee alternative idea for the first time from us. And they were like, Oh, I need, uh, less coffee in my life. And so we got lucky in a lot of ways and, and kind of hitting product market fit in the messaging just really resonated with a lot of our digital, uh, ads. Yeah. It's super smart positioning, right? If you really think

about like something like this, uh, the positioning may be one of the most important things because the way you position is what people are going to go tell their friends. And it's like, Oh, I stopped drinking coffee. I drink mud water. And of course that's going to spread like wildfire. did you guys raise money or how have you guys funded the business totally yeah we um we did a safe note in the first year for like a million then we did a um a seed round and then an a round and then we're also augmenting that fundraising with um debt financing for pipe yeah which is a service what was the total amount of like equity capital you think you raised ballpark yeah we did about 14 million in equity so 14 million raised in equity you know 75 million

in revenue in the first four years that's pretty damn good right to uh kind of from a capital efficiency standpoint um so the folks over at pipe they introduced me to you uh and we're going to be doing these kind of highlights of businesses that use uh pipe i've known uh harry hearst the ceo for quite a while and i'm fascinated by this idea so you raised 14 million in equity capital uh but you also are getting access to non-dilutive capital via pipe and my understanding of this is given that you guys have that subscription revenue that means that you can project out you know hey here's what we're going to do this year with whatever the historical churn has been etc and they'll essentially advance you that capital uh securing it with your future cash flows on that

subscription model. Is that accurate? Spot on. Okay. And so how have you guys thought about how much do you take there? Do you think about like a ratio or like, how do you think about kind of managing, uh, selling a future, uh, cashflow for the capital upfront and what you're able to do with it? Yeah. I mean, the great thing about pipe is they, they kind of really are this partner that's programmatic they they know how to de-risk the cost and the amount that we should have because they need paid back too so they're not going to extend overextend themselves and um the way we thought about it was okay um where's our low cash mark going to be if we're projecting out um you know a month 12 uh 12 months out and um we don't want to really want to go near that

And then we do want to augment pipe with some more equity too. And so there's this balance of, let's not get close to our low cash mark. Let's always kind of have 12 to 18 months of runway. And then let's look at a weighted average cost of capital. Equity is really expensive. Debt has this interest component. And so it's really a balance of those two things. Got it. And so when you think about the use of that capital, is it all just pouring into marketing? So you basically say, hey, look, our future cash flow, we're going to go ahead and essentially pull on that, accelerate it up to the future or accelerate it to now. We're going to grab that money. We're going to use that for marketing, which then just drives more revenue growth in the future. it's not all marketing i think when you get it all in the same pool a lot of it does go to marketing but i think what we're excited when anytime we raise we're not really raising for marketing we're raising for innovation pipeline um i think what was really exciting about pipe was when you're a growing business you have these other challenges which is um you know supply chain and ordering bigger and bigger and ingredient pos and you don't want to go into your cap table because it's to, to, to use cash or dilute yourself because the product is de-risk.

You don't want to raise equity to go make a bigger purchase order. And so that was, that's what pipe was used for originally was like, we were growing, but we didn't feel like it was worth diluting ourselves because we felt like we had de-risked the business and we had product market fit and pipe came along and like, okay, we can handle these larger POs and grow without dipping into our cap table yeah what is the rate uh of the capital like so if you get a hundred dollars worth of uh future cash flow what is it like you get you basically get like 90 to 94 today something like that yeah they have this thing called a bid price and so it's basically saying like for every dollar we're going to give you 95 or 96 cents and then uh recommendation if you use

pipe is you do want to model this out and use like the xirr function in excel so you can see the actual APR. The, uh, APR ends up being like around 8.2 to 9%. And, but you literally click a button in pipe and it goes into your account the next day. So you're talking about like how much of an asset you avoid going to raise elsewhere. There's no covenants, there's no extra fees. There's no, um, um, there's nothing funny behind it. You click a button and it's done. We've done it three times and it's so seamless. Yeah. I, um, uh, I've got the, uh, the daily newsletter and uh i piped it i guess is uh is the terminology that we're supposed to uh to use these days like you can uber somewhere you can pipe the revenue which i see harry tweeting about

all the time but uh when i did that i used it um and i bought bitcoin uh thankfully before uh one of the major run-ups um and part of it frankly was i was doing it because i wanted to just see hey how does this work and it'll be kind of a cool thing to do uh two was i want to buy more Bitcoin. Um, but, but I think I was blown away by just how simple it was. Right. And usually in these situations when it's like a newer type product, I usually I'm like, all right, I know who the team is. God forbid I get stuck or, or, you know, don't have the best experience. I can reach out to them. They can kind of, you know, white glove service, help me through. I don't have to ask them for anything. Like it was just, just worked. Right. And I remember just being

like, damn, who the hell's on the other side of this? Right. Like, like, like are they, are they get me. Right. Um, but, uh, you know, as I got to know more about the business, like it was pretty cool to see, like, there's like legit people and organizations on the other side who are buying this and they just have a different time duration, right. They can say, Hey, look, we'll just wait for that capital to come in and we'll take the, uh, the difference. Yeah. This is not like an unprecedented, um, marketplace experience. Like toll roads are very famous for the, the, um, reliability of the fixed income payments and their funding pension funds or that, um, that trade off of uh what what happens in toll roads who you sell those um payments to is as a relationship that's

that's actually not unprecedented it's pretty pretty simple and seamless got it and then i guess the only other thing is just like as you guys think about the world kind of evolving like what are some of the things that you're seeing either in terms of trends of your customers uh or in uh in the way that you run the business like you know you're distributed so like that seems to be a thing that's become much more popular now, but are there other things that you're like, man, we were not doing this two years ago, but we are doing it now. And this has been really big or our customers are doing something different. We, you know, we think about our team a lot. Um, it's just like our biggest, our best asset. And one of the challenges that

you have from being remote is that, um, we also have like very independent, um, like, uh, knowledge workers that work really hard and you do have to kind of monitor them for burnout. You have to like make sure they're taking breaks and they're taking time because the work-life balance starts to get blurry. And so we started implementing just like really progressive benefits within the company. So like we have every other Friday off, we have this kind of unlimited vacation policy. We have bonuses around health and wellness. So like if you've meditated or journaled 66 days in a row out of the quarter, we pay you a bonus. And so that was a big thing that we kind of caught earlier and we're still continuing continuing to tweak those things because when

you have like a players that just they're really excited to work you do have to find time to in areas where you can pull them off the the project or make sure they're taking breaks and so we're constantly looking at burnout as a concern especially in a remote first culture and when you have a players like that so that's something that kind of caught us off guard was like well we you really have to do our job and in taking care of our best assets and making sure that I'm getting enough, uh, uh, break from the company. Got it. And then, uh, the thing that most people will be very interested to hear about is, uh,

you guys have Bitcoin on your balance sheet, but is it only Bitcoin? Do you have zero cash on the balance sheet or what is going on with the mud water balance sheet over here? I tweeted that earlier and I was like, yeah. And I was like, wait, we do have some other things on our balance. and uh i when i said only bitcoin we don't have other we don't have a theory or anything else we just got it so the only digital currency on the balance sheet is bitcoin all right and how why did you guys do that what's the thought process there well i don't have a reason i don't

have a good reason not to and i'm close to my thousand hours in and i'm like show me a different alternative like i'm not that excited that i have to think about hedging for 25 inflation and supply chain or, um, but you know, you don't have an option. You're kind of desperate a little bit. And then at the same time, the principles and fundamentals are there. So for me, it was an easy decision. Um, I wish I could buy more. I had to agree in our series a docs that I wouldn't buy anymore though. So I'm kind of capped, uh, but on a percentage basis, or like literally they didn't want you to go buy anymore. It just said that no more. And, uh, but I think everybody's kind of coming around to it. You saw pipes deal with compass, which I think is brilliant. Um,

So, yeah, we've been exploring buying miners as a way to be a 35% APY. And you have to, like, you're just straight up losing money with what sits in your treasury if you're not outpacing inflation. So we did it as a hedge. We did it as I did it because I'm, you know, a fan of it. I understand it. I appreciate it. I'm bullish on it. So, yeah, I did enough work to say, I think this is de-risked and you should do it. So pull the trigger a couple of years ago. So I don't want to get you in trouble here. So you just tell me, say, Pop, shut the hell up. If I ask a question, I'm not supposed to. But in the Series A docs, you had to agree no more buying Bitcoin. But my big brain, I think I just heard, is that there's nothing that says you can't buy Bitcoin miners and earn Bitcoin. Is that right? i'd listen i i just you know just trying to figure out how the world works you know i just sit here ask stupid questions and uh and get smarter every day joe john what uh what questions do you guys have my question would just be around uh future growth right i think everyone sees the headline numbers that you mentioned previously which was going from three million dollars in revenue to potentially uh projected 74 million dollars this year how do you get in your mind

to 150 to 300 to 500 million dollars in revenue like what are the steps to get there for you guys yeah innovation pipeline is for sure something that um we're excited about um we just launched our second hero skew which was a uh a rest blend and when we did that we saw kind of our aov climb. We saw our attention climb and it's just kind of speaking to, I think the customer base that's really starting to resonate with our brand and our authenticity, how we select ingredients. And we were really excited about two more Hero SKUs over the next coming years. So that's one. And then I think intelligent segmentation on how we do acquisitions. So we're 99% B2C. We just launched on Amazon a couple of weeks ago. We're not in international shipping yet. We're not in

a Whole Foods or a Target or a Wegmans. And I think those locations are inevitable. We're growing our retail locations with cafes very slowly and methodically. So I think between innovation pipeline, intelligent segmentation of new customer markets, Amazon, and then big box retailers, we'll get there. Paul, on the back of that, how did you guys go from $3 million? Like, was it all brick and mortar? Like, how do you basically take a business that seemed bootstrap at the time to projecting $74 million in sales in three, four years? Yeah. Um, you know, we get this question a lot and I, there is definitely this element of, I think charisma with the brand is like, we weren't trying to make this a company. And so a lot of the first messaging was like,

we didn't really expect much of it. And it allowed us to be kind of raw and authentic. Like in our first unboxing experience, we had a sticker that said, fuck your coffee. and that was photographed like i think a hundred thousand times and we ran an instagram ad that shane filmed at his kitchen table in five minutes before he was going to work one day before he quit that job and uh it's just said we're not mad at coffee we're just disappointed in that single ad of a spinning tin or empty glass sorry glass jar with mud in it generated four million dollars in revenue for us within um like 18 months and so it has a common it has something to do with product market fit we we weren't really we didn't see us like competing

with anyone in this coffee alternative um framing and then a lot of our messaging and copy was just like really resonating with people and it was shareable our unboxing experience was also something we invested a lot in and that was where you saw a lot of these photos and videos and people kind of shifting to you know showing their own personal brand through what they were consuming And when the packaging looks good and when the unboxing looks good and it's kind of cheeky messaging, you get a lot of free advertising from people sharing it. So that's I think that's a lot of the reason we were able to see an early spike in revenue. Yeah, it's creating that experience that they want to share with others. Yeah. Yeah.

I officially just bought my Mudwater. I will say though, I paid full price. One, two is I would screenshot, but it's got my email, my order number. I don't want to, uh, uh, docs myself here. Uh, but I got 30 serving starter kit. Uh, and then, um, uh, it comes with a frother. What, explain this real quick. Then I'm just going to be super self-serving to myself. Uh, what, what's going on with this frother? Yeah. What is this thing and how does this work? This was like a, um, thing that we, we when we first were drinking mud we were just stirring it up and or shaking it and then a customer introduced us to this concept they're like i just use this and it's it helps displace

the ingredients better so all of our ingredients are 100 natural there's no like gums or binding agents and so you you do get a little sediment at the bottom which we like but a lot of customers were like um yeah it's better if you use something like this and we looked at it and we and then we ran a test when with some earlier cohorts, the people that had a frother for free versus the people that didn't, um, were, we retained them 10% more. And so this pays for itself. This should be free. And so we started including them in the starter kits. Got it. That makes a ton of sense. And, uh, this is why I love our audience is someone just said, uh, do you need a mattress? if i'm gonna be buying your coffee alternative maybe you need to buy a mattress because one of

our sponsors is eight sleep what we talked to we talked a little bit earlier about like the impact of uh caffeine on sleep but like what what do you do uh from a sleep perspective do you have like are you a health nut you've got like some special uh sleep schedule or like routine or what's going on there um i'm by the way i i'm an eight sleep customer and the thing is he already need here didn't need one he already got one insane um it's like cheating and uh but i i love getting up at 4 a.m i just naturally have these cortisol spikes at weird times and one's at 4 a.m so i'm up at 4 a.m every day without an alarm um i love to do a workout have some mud and then um hit the eight sleep no later than than 10 p.m where i'm screwed um but that's my routine got it okay and when you

do this, uh, 4am, are you like working out at home or do you like go to the gym? Like what's going on there? I usually, I usually, that's usually when I do my best work. So I'll walk the dog and then, um, I need like an hour and a half of nobody asking me for anything. And that's when I'll do the four or five things that are most important for the day. Then I hit the gym. Yeah. Usually, usually boxing or something like that. I am, uh, Mateo, uh, CEO of eight sleep. he and i have talked a number of times about uh my entire life i would wake up and go work out like that was the first thing i did and there's a lot of studies that are coming out now that suggest actually the thing you should do is you should do your highest quality cognitive work when you wake

up because that's when you're kind of uh most awake most alert you know intelligent etc and then go work out so you still do it in the morning but to your point you know whether it's an hour and a half, two, three hours, whatever, uh, actually getting the work done may be a better use of your time and kind of more product, uh, productive than just go work out first and then do the work. I definitely recommend that at least trying it. Um, it's a great feeling that kind of feel like you're done with, with the hardest things with your day at 7 30 AM, and then you can go enjoy a workout. And then there's always fires that happen every day. It's just natural at a startup. Your default situation is failure and fires. So get the hardest things done that

you need to get done early in the morning so that you can be proactive and be there for your team if a fire comes up. Yeah, I think that's right. By the way, your team is already part of my favorite teams we've ever interacted with because after I said that I paid full price, now these smart asses are sending me discount codes saying, well, tell everyone else they can use code pump for 25% off. Like thanks fellas and ladies. It would have been nice if you had given me the discount code, but what are they saying here? They said, if you, you, uh, they said, uh, there's a 25% discount off of mud water if they use code pump for the next 72 hours. So anyone who's listening, watching, whatever, if you go use, uh, the code pump on mud waters website, you get 25%

off the next 72 hours. So I may be going broke cause I'm going to be spending a ton of money on mud water, but you all can say 25%. You're welcome. Don't, uh, don't say we never did anything for you guys. Um, all right. I think, uh, Paul, the only other thing that, uh, I would love to know about is just like, what's your future outlook of Bitcoin? Like, obviously you're bullish. Your investors literally making you not buy more. Um, like how do you think this all plays out over the coming years yeah i stopped like thinking about price and just um really thinking about infrastructure i think brad gerstner like hit it spot on which is like you know he follows where the engineers are going it was uh google then it was facebook now it's you know the crypto

industry and and and uh even mining and so when you see that infrastructure when you see the fundamentals when you see hash rate climbing when you see um lightning network growing when you see the applications of where you can start to use this when you see nation states adopting it to me it's just kind of a matter of time before um you see the spice the uh price spike from the fundamentals being checked off but um i'm just a fan of it um it's just really fun to to to explore and so um i remain bullish on it but mostly for the fundamentals and i really don't try to speculate on price too much because i have in the past and it's not a fun place to be yeah i uh i used to do uh my like periodic price prediction and uh the problem is that you're right a couple

of times and then you think you're a genius and then when you're wrong then you're just like all right i'm back to just i have no clue what's going to happen but uh my 30 year time horizon hopefully i'll still be alive in 30 40 years uh will outlast most of the short-term speculators and that probably is going to be a pretty good position to be in. Yeah, man. All right. Where can we send people to find you, uh, find you on the internet? Um, you know, if you're a startup and, or have a startup idea, I love helping startups and founders. It's kind of like my, I don't know, I find a lot of purpose in it. So if you've got an idea that you want to have, uh, de-risked or I can help in any way, just email me. It's Paul at mudwater, M U D W T R.com. All right, man. I love somebody

who comes on, gets me to buy coffee alternative and then shows his email for deal flow. Like you are an expert at the internet, my friend. Um, and you two got anything else? No, thanks for coming on. I'm excited to try mud water. Are you going to buy some? Yeah. I'm going to use the code now that I got the discount. Yeah. This is nonsense. All right, buddy. Sounds good. We appreciate you coming on. Thank you. And we'll definitely do this again in the future. Well, man, good to see you guys. Thank you. All right. Bye. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.

I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum

with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode. Thank you.