I run a $180M+ company...here's how I'm using AI on a daily basis

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/5234bede124548ee

All right, we should talk about AI.
Because you used to tweet about like boring steady eddy
cash flow businesses. And I feel like for this one
You just ripped off your clothes and you're streaking through the pool right now. So what what is your take on AI?
I feel like I could root
Well

But I want to
I am for the first time in
A while I'm waking up grinning every single morning, just like stoked to get to work. I was saying to a friend I was like, This is like somebody just invented a new internet or something, like that's how big this feels. And he goes,
No, no, no, no.
Someone just invented fire.
Right. Like it's it's freaking crazy. And the best quote that I've heard on this is
It's like we've discovered a new continent.
with ten billion people on it.
And they're all geniuses.
And willing to work for free.
Right.
And so everyone's talking about this, you know, agents, right? Agents is like a meme right now. And what we're really talking about is digital employees.
And digital people.
And when you shift your mindset like that, you go
Holy crap. Like not only is this an incredibly exciting time to be an entrepreneur.
But the implications are gonna be
Absolutely crazy. Like
You know that saying there's decades, what is it? Uh what is it? There
There's where nothing happens.
And then there's days where decades happen. And I feel like right now
Decades are happening, you know.
Like crazy. And here's here's the way I'd put it. So
If we just
paused AI, we shut down all the AI labs, and all we focused on was just roll out of what already exists.
I think probably
Between self driving cars and AI agents, twenty percent of all current jobs
Are gone.
Can you explain examples of the way that
You're using it now to save.
uh make yourself more productive, both personally and in a business level, or is this mostly like theoretical where you're like, it's almost there.
Well, it's a bit of everything. So I'd say like we're in the AOL dial up phase right now.
But like AOL dial up, it's still pretty freaking cool if you've never used the internet. You know, basic stuff that everybody should be doing. Like I'm an agent that
Preps me for every meeting.
So thirty minutes before every meeting, I get a text and it says, Hey, you're meeting Sean and Sam. You were emailing them about this topic. You're going to invest in their company. And here's two bio on them. It goes to LinkedIn and you know, just summarizes it. So
Something very basic that otherwise a human would do. Previously my assistant would do that.
I have it monitor my stock portfolio.
I have it. Tell me about local events for the first one. So how how did you set that up? How did you w what tool are you using to do the meeting prep? Thirty minutes before you get a text saying, Hey, you have this meeting with these people about this.
So you guys know Zapier? It's basically Zapier for AI agents. So Zapier
It's freaking amazing.
Andrew, you introduced me to someone who worked at Lindy.
And her name was Lindy.
And I was like,
Wait, you
I don't understand that. We got twenty five minutes into the conversation before I realized it was just a woman named Lindy who worked at this company called Lindy. Basically they they founded the company and they were like, Oh, like your name is an awesome name for a company
Let's just call it that, but it's also super confusing'cause she runs the sales team.

Yeah, I was like, Wait, so you're Are you smarter child?
M most people it'd be like a quick two second thing. It's like oh Lydia, yeah, that's cool, how funny.
And then they move on and get into the sales demo, whereas Sam for twenty five minutes is like
Hold on.
You're
Or this is would not let it go for twenty minutes. So yeah, like so think about think about Lindy like Zapier.
Except you can build AI in between. So Zapier might be
When I
Press this button on my phone.
go to the internet and do this act action or whatever, but it can't think.
Lindy can add thinking in between. So for example, you can make a Lindy that
Looks at your calendar. So the way it would work in this instance is
Look at my calendar.
An hour before any event starts.
go on perplexity.
Go to LinkedIn.
And I want you to write me a bio and then I want you to look in my email inbox and tell me what we're talking about. So that's like
pretty basic. And what we're really talking about at this point is
removing admin work, right? So the agent that I have built is basically
By cobbling it together with duct tape and dental floss.
It's basically doing a lot of stuff my assistant would otherwise do.
And my assistant's amazing, but the problem with
A human is the
You'll give them direction and you'll say, I want you to send me these meeting briefings, or I want you to write my calendar like this.
And over time there's drift.
They get busy, you give them more projects.
And it just doesn't happen. And so now all those things that
Let's be real are not really
worthy of her time.
are now just being totally automated. So that's like
the basic level and I can name some of the other tools I'm using to do this.
But that that's where I'm at. So
I use Lindy to build these things.
When it's something I want that's custom. Are you an investor in Lindy?
No, I'm not an investor in Lindy. I'm just like a power user and I'm obsessed with it. Like here's an example. So
There's some restaurants in in town where they still require you to call in to make a reservation. They're not on open table.
I made a Lindy bot.
Where I can type in, hey, make me a rezzo around five to seven PM tonight.
this restaurant and it will call
And an AI voice will talk to them, book the rezo.
put it on my calendar and invite the people I asked it to invite.
And if the person says
Are you AI? It'll explain that it, yeah, it works for me. And if it asked for allergies, it knows my allergies. Like
Pretty cool.
And then other tools so
I use this one called Howie.ai.
And it's basically like a you C C it.
And you just say, Howie, can you find time for me and Sam to go get a coffee?
And it'll
You know, book all that stuff.
I use fixer.
F
Y X E R
It's this British startup. It basically reads every single email that comes into your Gmail.
It sorts it based on whether you need to respond to it or not.
And then it drafts.
responses. So let's say Sean said
Hey, do you want to get coffee?
it'll draft a rejection or an acceptance of that in my language and it gets better over time.
So those those are like three tools that I'm using.
That are
Awesome right now.
And they're really just replacing basic admin.
This is crazy. I'm looking at this right now.
Sean, where's this land with you? Do you use any of this stuff?
And does this make you fearful of somewhere?
No, not really. I think everything just evolves, right? Like ultimately
I've you know, this diagram that's always stuck with me is like a K shaped future. So what's a K shaped future?
So if you imagine the letter K
And you say, All right, this is where we are now. That's the first line And then it's basically like
There's a fork in the road with the K, right? It's
If you
learn how to use these tools, you're gonna accelerate and go up at a fa way faster pace than you would have otherwise.
And if you don't, if you just stick your head in the sand and pretend that these tools don't exist and that your job is always safe and that your business is gonna run with all humans doing all jobs.
then you're gonna go down because you're gonna get out competed by companies that are gonna do something different.
I personally use it less for my personal and more for my business. So basically in my business, I almost have like a
My own Eval.
So, Sam, you know what a Eval is?
No.
It's just like
When a new model comes out, like when Llama
drops their new model, they always post with pride like
Oh, here's how we do on the benchmarking test, the evaluation test. And it's like some number, you don't really know what it's based off of.
It's just this like abstract like oh we're a seventy three and the last model from GPT was a seventy one. So we're the best model now.
And is there a standard? Like is an eval like a a a third party standard?
I have my own little eval, which is
In my businesses, I basically picked a few tasks that I'm like today, humans in my companies do these tasks.
And about every sort of three to six months.
We go back and we run through it again. We say take the latest model.
Take the latest product everyone's excited about.
And see, like
What's the real deal, Holyfield? Can we actually automate
That task. Can it actually be offloaded from the human being yet?
And there's basically like a spectrum. There's like
Can't do it at all.
There's
You can do it.
But you wouldn't actually do it.
It's not good enough. Like the person, you know, the
Oh, you wanted to use AI photography for your brand, but every model has nine fingers, you know, two mouths. It's like all right, well, I'm I'm not actually gonna put that on my website. So like
Cool in theory, but not in practice. Then there's
You could do it if there's a human on top of it. So you could train a human to like be in the loop to t tweak it to work with it to make it better.
And then there's
Oh, we don't just we just don't need a human doing this anymore.
And so what I've done is basically figured out all right.
Here's like ten tasks.
that are real tasks that we do that have a real cost and a real human doing it in my companies.
And I will know for myself.
As we get closer to AGI,'cause those I'll just go from zero out of ten, which is where we started.
To like
Three out of ten. Six out of ten.
eight out of ten. Once eight out of those ten tasks are like, yep, we just set up an agent and like we don't need to have a person doing those anymore.
That's when I know, Oh my God, this like
we've had like real, real breakthroughs because it matter because that's the real test for me versus
I don't know exactly how these evals work, but it's like a
It's like an abstract thing, or it'll be like, you know.
They can pass the LSAT. So it's like that's cool, but I don't need it to pass the LSAT. If the opportunity is AI agents in my business,
Then I'm gonna test it on.
What can these AI agents do in my business? So what was the what's the example of one of these things?
that you would want to automate. The simple example I gave is like e commerce pro so photography. So every month we pay photographers to do shoots, real cost somewhere between let's say five thousand and ten thousand dollars.
All in.
For e commerce photography, and you have basically like product photography, or you can have models in it, whatever, right? So there's like a little bit of a range there. So just product.
Or models.
And so I wanna know like when can I get rid of that ten K a month?
So when can I basically just
Show it my product in a on a blank.
And be like cool, put this on models.
Or we have other ones where it's like photos and videos. So I you know, you've seen these models where you you give it a static image.
And it turns it into a video.
And you see the demo on Twitter and it's amazing. It's just a girl posing and then she starts like strutting.
With it turns into AI video and it looks awesome.
Cool, but then like you do it in practice.
And
Yes, she starts strutting, but then her face starts morphing like she's like being eaten by lava. It's like Oh yeah I'm not gonna put that on my website like that would
be a a bad thing, right? To do that. Did you see the uh AI meme of Mark Zuckerberg staring at Bezos' wife's boobs?
He like leads in extra hard to like smell him.

Do you watch that video? It's literally his eyes, they dart back down from microseconds.
Yeah. And some guys made videos of him like
Not stopping and just continually going in. It was
Uh.
Um
That's pretty badass. What are we saying?
Like another example would be in e commerce, you have inventory forecasting. This seems like a data problem, right? How much inventory should I order? When should I order? And
Let's say let's pretend you have five colors of a product. Which colors should I be ordering?
Well, it looks like an AI problem. You got a whole bunch of historical data.
You have real time sales data that's coming in.
And then you should be able to forecast. And like
Today we employ two human beings.
To do that forecasting? They're not
perfect at it. It's very difficult problem to solve.
Can AI make them smarter and do it better? Can I go from two humans to one human plus AI?
Or can I replace the two humans that just have AI give us more accurate demand forecasting? And this is a problem that every physical products brand in the world has this problem.
Whether it's Hershey's chocolate bars or it's North Face Jackets. Like it doesn't matter. Everybody's trying to figure this out. How do we order the right amount of inventory and not be stuck with too much inventory?
It feels like we're talking about solar power. You remember like five, ten years ago, everyone would be like, Whoa.
I mean solar's really cool and all, but I mean like
It's still not cost competitive, but if you look at the graph, it just keeps going. Cost goes down, down, down, down, down. And if you just
Project it.
And you look at the rate of progress
With these tools, like we've been exploring for AeroPress doing the same thing because we spent a lot of money on big expensive photo shoots, and usually it's just
an aeropress sitting there really well lit with nice coffee in it. So we've been looking at flare and some of these other tools and
I've been pretty blown away with where I can get to, and I agree there's definitely like a last mile problem.
But it'll be there in the next six to twelve months, I think. And when it does
I think it
It's really cool for your business, but it also represents
Competition.
'Cause it just becomes infinitely easier to compete in all businesses, and we'll talk about this more, but like
I think that's what's crazy about all this stuff. By the way, the most solved one of these is meeting meeting minutes. Like I don't know, Andrew, if you're used to this, but I used to invite my assistant into our meetings and say, Hey, can you take notes?
jot down any action items or follow ups that we're gonna need to do.
That's completely gone off her plate, which for her, it basically freed up, you know, four hours of time for my assistant a day on average, let's say.
And if now she's got four hours back that she can spend doing the other things because I'm using Fathom and Fathom just
Sits in my meeting, records all the notes, perfect transcript.
With highlights, with a summary, with action items.
Ready to go, twenty four seven, never misses a beat.
And not only did it replace the him, it's way better than sh my my assistant could do it,'cause she'd be trying to keep up and it's just was not gonna be good enough.
The level of accountability you can get too, right? Like I I hate that feeling where it's like
Oh, I did a board meeting with this CEO six months ago, and I swear to God, I swear to God, they promised me this one thing. And then they're like, no, no, I don't remember that. And being able to pull that up.
I just did a um
Really a really cool thing actually, me and my girlfriend did a relationship off site.
Which sounds really lame and nerdy. Patribul actually was the one that gave me the idea.
But we basically would talk about
Hey, what are what are like our big strategic goals for the year for our relationship, for family, for life in general and stuff. And we recorded the entire thing with Otter, which is like similar tool to Fathom. And I was blown away. Like we just chatted for three hours and it was able to spit out here's all the action items, here's all the things that need to come out of this.
Then we're able to put it into
Claude and it built a plan for us. Very cool.
I was
giving you a hard time. It does sound nerdy. And also I do the exact same thing. We have relationship meetings as well. You you have the local news business, the the newsletter. Sean and I both owned newsletters.
When I did it.
A I didn't exist and I felt like
You know, uh hiring writers was actually the hardest part.
Like who could write in my voice now, I would hate to be in the newsletter business because I see this stuff and I'm like
It's almost
Ready to roll.
But it's definitely ready to roll as an editor.
Are you using this for your newsletter now, for the local news newsletter?
I'm not right now, but that's what I'm working on. So like the pieces that I'm the more advanced stuff I'm doing are like
I've got a social media manager agent.
I've got a marketer agent, I've got a tax advisor and investment analyst.
And and I mean these are these are roles I previously would have hired for.
where I didn't either didn't renew someone's contract or I didn't make a new hire for them. So it's already replacing people that I would have hired otherwise.
Wait, wait, can can you explain a couple of these? Explain the tax advisor one.
And then explain the social media one.
So
Social media is very simple. It's like I post on X all the time and I'm lazy. I don't like cross-posting on LinkedIn.
I often forget I'll tweet about something and then not include it in my newsletter.
And so what I've done is I built a Lindy bot a Lindy bot that looks at my Twitter, all my other channels.
And then once a week
It summarizes all the stuff I've been talking about and asks me.
Hey, what do you want to include in the newsletter? And then it can give me a first draft. And it's trained on
my previous writing
So it can write and it's, you know, it's not perfect, but it's like eighty percent of the way there. And if I didn't care about my my personal brand, like, you know, many people just want like a quick and dirty newsletter, it would be totally sendable.
And it's completely engaging if you prompt it right.
Like you can even say like
Give me a subject line that will force the person to open the email.
Right.
And it it's really good.
What about the accounting thing?
The accounting thing is freaking like blew my mind. So
Basically I exported
I use zero for all my accounting.
And for my personal like financials and my personal holding company, it's like a rat's nest. Like I have like two hundred, three hundred random investments, all sorts of weird assets and stuff in there. And so I exported
All all of it is a CSV out of zero.
I trained a Claude project on it and I started asking it questions.
Did you upload like a book?
Like a Warren Buffett book or like what did you
No, no. This is like basically to replace like right now. So I have a I have a woman who runs my family office, and I might ask her.
Hey, how much should we spend on software last week? It'll be let's say it's a Saturday and I'm kind of bored and doing a deep dive. I'll email her on Saturday and I've got to wait until Tuesday to get a r an answer.
And so I was like, Oh, I just wanna be able to query
What?
And so I was like, Hey, I want you to rank
The top twenty five things I spend money on.
Yeah.
I want you to look at my structure and I want you to tell me if there's any ways that I could save on tax. And so one, it was crazy. I actually saved a hundred thousand dollars a year of cash taxes.
By moving an investment from one hold code to another.
Thanks, Claude.
Right. So it is
very quickly tax advisor, investment analyst.
I can get it to write a deal, I can get it to draft legal documents, like these I mean, everyone's doing this, but like it is
Getting
It's getting so good that I don't hire people. Let's put it that way.
Weren't you hiring for like an AI
back office person. Like what what you have some role I saw that you put up there. What was that?
Yeah, so the woman who runs my family office, she's got a uh family situation, so she's got a transition out of the role.
And so me and my president were like okay, what do we what do we really want out of this role?
And when we thought about it, we were like, we actually just want someone who's like an AI nerd.
to automate away all the accounting and bookkeeping and stuff that nobody enjoys doing. You would go came up with that?
So Yeah, that's right, exactly. I hired him right out of office. Um but anyway, we yeah, we're hiring like an AI first
CFO basically, somebody where
Their job is basically just to build automations, financial automations. You guys probably have someone who works for you who just basically manages Zapier.
And like Zapier the problem with Zapier is that it's awesome when it works, but like for some reason shit breaks all the time, which I don't understand how like I don't understand enough about technology to know like why's the shit break all the time?
And then the systems were so complicated that if that person left, it was like
Oh fuck. What's the stuff that we gotta go uncover because they've automated so much shit.
Where it's like
We just rely solely on this one person and it becomes actually an issue where it's kind of all automated, but it's sort of duct tape together and the duct tape comes on done and there's so much duct tape that I gotta go and figure it's like
When your Lego breaks, you gotta like dude, I gotta like fucking rebuild this whole shit. I don't know where this one little fucking piece goes.
Totally. I've had the same experience. Like anytime I got really into no code like four years ago or whatever, and you know, we build all these automations where
Oh, it'll go to this one place and then a zap year automation will move the data into Airtable and then
you manipulate it in XYZ way. And I think the difference here is that like
Claude will just figure it out, right? So if you say like
Hey, it's not working.
It'll just sort it out or tell you how to fix it. Whereas before I had that exact same problem and totally agree. Usually the automations just cause problems. How are you guys using it at Hampton right now?
I mean it's basically just like glor it's like glorified Zapier, basically. So like it connects Airtable to HubSpot to this website.
update these records in HubSpot. Like it's basically all backend operational stuff.
Which I think is underutilizing it.'Cause like what I would do if I was you is I would get a um
Claude has this thing called, I forget what it's called, model context protocol or whatever. And you can basically build a database of all your members and then just have a way to query it where you can say, Hey, we need a speaker for this event in LA.
who would be good or or who's got a business in this space and just have like a live database of people.
In an L L M. That'd be sweet.
So so what I'm working on though, like the next
Piece here is actually
Like Sean, I'm basically lining up
Well who are you know, what are the roles
That we can
you know, not need in the future. And most of this is not firing people. It's actually just not hiring people we would otherwise would. But
If you graph this out, you can see that we're all gonna have
virtual employees very, very soon. And that's what's crazy. Like I was watching an interview with
Dario Amade from uh Anthropic yesterday at Davos.
And he basically said in the next
Twelve months.
You will have AI co workers.
In Slack.
Now if you just project that out right now it's text, right? These are not people.
But pretty quick it'll be someone on Slack that you're messaging, hey
Can you make some new product images? Hey, do you mind checking out the AdSense? Do you can you write a report?
And
I think that within twenty four to thirty six months these will be four K
video people that are indistinguishable from a human.
that you'll talk to on Zoom. Now I know that sounds crazy.
But I really believe that's what's coming.
And I think if you just think about the the implications in terms of business motes
And businesses that are gonna gonna be disrupted. It's just
Staggering. Do your guys' parents
Use it or like your ten year old cousins.
Like uh how how My mom uses it.
In what way?
Well, my mom's you know, she her first language was Hindi, right? So she speaks English. She speaks it well, but she if she needs to write, it's kinda stresses her out. She's like, Oh, I gotta write something, gotta write an email, I gotta write a letter, respond to something, write a note to the doctor.
And she's like kinda slow with writing and she feels a little bit insecure that like her
writing is gonna be like well formatted, well gram you know, grammar's correct and uh clear.
And so she was early on chat GPT to just be like
Oh great. I can just tell it what I wanted to write and then it just writes a beautiful email for me and then I choose what she does is she has to like
kind of mess it up a little bit to make it back get it back to real.
But my mom has been using it in that way, but that's kind of all she used it, but
I think what you're getting at is like
Even though for us a lot of these things we're saying right now seem obvious, the you're you're kinda right. I think if
If I know where you're going with this question, which is like
You know, my sister, my mom, like how much has it crossed the chasm?
Like my sister uses it in her schools to create curriculums.
So uh she has it do curriculums and lesson plans and gives that to her teachers to um
to work off of, which is something like either they would do
Kind of either
procrastinated or or you know, half or she would have to do herself.
And so I think that was a big win for her, but
Yeah, it's
It's kinda like you find your one use case of chat GPT or you're you know, and you go there. Another one, like my mom was giving it like her Kaiser like
data test results. So like you know, you go, you get blood work done, or you get a you get some procedure done.
You get this ris result in your app.
And you have to wait for this doctor to call you to tell you what the heck this means. It's kind of a scary gap of time and
We just upload all of the screenshots into Chat GPT. We're like, What does this mean? And it gives us
Beautiful, perfect bedside manner.
Explanations.
More patient, more thorough than the doctor. You can ask follow up questions at your own leisure.
I mean that that's been another one that was like
Pretty
It was just like night and day. It's like, Okay, I'll never not do this anymore.
This is so much better, I will never not do this.
Andrew, you had on here that software is gonna be a worse business over the next ten years. What's your like premise here of it being a worse business?
Let me zoom out a bit.
So
In a free market.
The amount of competition basically defines how good a business is.
Right. So you know, everybody loves to shit on restaurants.
But if you own the only restaurant in town, let's say that there was one restaurant license given out.
In every major city.
And you own that restaurant?
So you have excess demand, you have no competition.
That would be a phenomenal business. You could have forty, fifty, sixty percent margins.
Basically, as long as people don't riot, you can charge whatever you want and the food can be bad, right? So
I think that same thing applies to
software businesses and startups, right? So
If I remember, you know
Fifteen years ago I started a uh productivity software company.
And it was a terrible business because every single week
New VC back companies like Asana, Monday.com, et cetera, would come out and compete with us.
And drive us into the ground. And where there's been
A lot of wealth generated in software.
is in vertical markets. So what does that mean? Like that's like um
Weird niche.
businesses where
Nobody is competing. So for example, like funeral home management software.
golf course management software.
random like dam and infrastructure software. And these are great businesses because
Not no like amazing developer wakes up and no amazing designer wakes up and is like I'm gonna go and build this software.
And so basically you're the only game in town, you can charge whatever you want.
And nobody switches off of you.
And so
The last thirty years that's been the best business ever. You might have heard of Constellation Software.
They built like a seventy billion dollar Behemoth public company and all they do is buy businesses like this. Don't they buy like a hundred a year?
About a hundred year, they increase the prices on a schedule
They hold them. They don't really, you know, do anything crazy or improve them in in any particular way. And they're buying like three million dollar a year software companies.
Three three to ten, sometimes bigger, but they have a formula.
And so
I believe let's let's just take funeral home software, right? So let's say that there's
one developer who built
funeral home software and he's had no major competition for ten years.
With tools like Replet.
You can literally go in.
Like and you can reproduce software very, very easily, right?
If if your software is like highly algorithmic and complicated, yeah, maybe not.
But something basic like funeral home management, where it's like case management basically.
Is
incredibly easy to replicate in 10 or 20 minutes and replet. And so
My belief is basically that as more and more people
don't need to learn how to code and can build software. Software will become more and more commoditized. There'll be way more competition and it'll be a way harder world for software businesses.
And I think that
Ultimately it just comes down to time.
For us
all of our software businesses we've bought, we've generally bought them in a way where
We've de risked, we've paid ourselves back.
Yeah.
We have some sort of unique competitive advantage or cost.
Like for example.
We own a a framework.
uh hosting company for a framework.
And
A lot of people have standardized and built software on that framework.
they're gonna keep hosting with us because we support that framework and nobody else does.
Right.
There's there's things like that. Personally
When I'm underwriting software deals now.
I am being incredibly conservative and honestly I'm what much more focused on communities and social networks as a result.
We still look at software when there's like a hardware component or there's some kind of lock in.
But I'm much less enamored with software right now because of this.
Do you guys think I'm like out to lunch on this?
Am I totally
Overthinking this or say the thought out loud. What's the specific thought?
Right.
It's pretty wild implication that
We may have
Mass disruption in terms of jobs.
And mass disruption in terms of every business that we know.
that we think of as a good business.
may not be a good business in and it's not a long term, right? This is not 10 years. We're talking about a two year time horizon.
So let's take the business side of it, right?
the business side of your argument was basically
software for the last thirty years has been an incredible business to be a
creator of or an owner of of whether you're buying or building software businesses.
And you're saying I think that's going to change because
If it becomes so easy for anybody to build software that they need.
then they're not gonna be buying five thousand dollars a year or fifty thousand dollar a year software anymore. And so maybe this one thing, vertical software, VMS, right?
Or other categories like that where it's like
More of a simple CRUD database.
with a a user interface on top of it.
that those are going to become less valuable. I totally agree with you that those are less less appealing than they were before. I don't think it goes to zero because in reality,
It's sort of like any time you've actually built software.
It's the last 10% that takes you, you know, you can get ninety percent of the way there. You feel like you're almost there, but then the last 10% will take you as much time as the first ninety. It's just like a rule you see over and over and over again.
And it's the same thing with products, which is that
To actually make something work.
And solve all your problems that you need.
that you're used to your current software solving.
It will take
Time, effort, love, care and
Whether it's just might just be somebody else building software that's a competitor to you, or you know, if is somebody in your own company gonna build that. I think it's
less likely that that becomes like a major disruption to all of software.
Because like you were saying, like
Some software like social networks or communities
The value is not the app, the value is the people and the connections and the habits that they formed. So you have
Software where there's already habits, those will be safe. Software where the value is the people or the data, those will be safe.
Software where the value is in the enterprise relationship.
the service that's on top of it or the like
fine tuning and tailoring and the CYA, which is that
If I buy enterprise software, I don't need to save forty percent on this bill.
As much as I need to not get fired for being like, Yeah, we home brewed our entire
CRM and like the security wasn't very good, right? Because we didn't I made this in fucking Claude instead of
It being software I bought from a vendor that's been doing this for fifteen years and is actually like
solve the security vulnerabilities.
And so I think that enterprise software will be safe. So I think a lot of software will be more safe than
Software just as a category goes to zero.
Yeah, I would I would generally agree with that, although I think it's gonna be a lot easier to offer
Incredible sport, incredible sales, et cetera. On the other side of it, you get the the market expands, right? Because
It's not just that, oh, there's gonna be more competition in this fixed pie. It's that
Now a whole bunch of software that really wouldn't have made sense to build.
Because
coders didn't understand the problem, so they weren't working on it or
You would have need too much funding to build it. It's not really worth it. So all this new software is gonna get created.
that was not really feasible or wasn't really easily accessible before. Like I'll give you like a s a stupid example. I went on Replit the other day.
And replit's amazing because it's literally chat GPT, except for when you tell it something.
it makes a website for you or makes an app for you.
And so
I had this like, you know, first world selfish problem, which was that
I like to log my meals. I take photos of my meals when I when I eat them.
to be able to send to my coach.
But then my entire camera role is just shitty pieces of chicken and my kids. It's like beautiful pictures of my kids and then ugly pictures of chicken.
And I'm like all right, this is kind of annoying that that's there. So I I just told Reptil, I said, make an app.
That when I open up the app, instantaneously the camera is on. I don't wanna like
type in stuff or just like open the camera, take the photo.
Show me a thumbs up or a thumbs down where I can rate my own meal.
And then save it in a calendar view where I can see like a streak of if you know if I've been doing l roughly good, make it green. If I've been doing bad, make those red.
And can it make it an app that it gets approved in the app store?
So that was so immediately rep was like hey
I can't make iOS apps yet.
But I can make it as a website, you could add it to your home screen.
And you could use it on your phone, but it'll just be a website you open up. I was like
Alright, deal.
And then it made that up for me. And it's like, you know, it's not perfect. Like I ran into some walls where the replicate's like
Hey, I don't know why it's not working. I'm like, Yo, it actually is working. It's like you're you're just being crazy. But like, you know, okay, you get through the craziness and it's not exactly good enough, I would say.
I I'm using it every day and telling you guys how amazing this this tool is.
But
Nine months from now, pretty sure I'm gonna be able to just do that. Right. So like
I
can be a software creator without knowing how to code. That's already a big big deal. Because of that.
Any idea I have, I can make come to fruition. So a whole bunch of new ideas are gonna come into the market that didn't exist.
And
I could do it for like other problems that weren't gonna get solved maybe through like
You know, if you look at software today
It's like a uh l lowest common denominator. Like I need to serve the most customers who are willing to pay. So I'm gonna like
Shave off all the edges and make some product that's
what I think most people want.
Even if it's not what I personally want, right, or what me and a cluster of people like me really want.
And so I think the overall market for software gets bigger because
can create way way more stuff. So so that's the other counterpoint to like software being bad. It's phenomenal for consumers, right? As a consumer, I'm so excited
It's more if you're buying these businesses and you're underwriting 10 years of returns, continued profit margins, all that kind of stuff. I think it's it just got a lot harder because
Before
It was like
Look, there's only so many co programmers out there, right? There's only so many competent Mac OS, iOS, whatever programmers.
And I'm with you in terms of like
where Replet is at right now, where it's like, yeah, you gotta, you gotta fiddle a lot to get it to a point where it's shippable. I've built a lot of stuff that is ninety percent that I can't
put out into the world because it's not there yet.
But I think it's a little bit like stock photos.
Two years ago
You know, stock photos generated by AI were terrible.
Now I would not want to be in the stock photo business because
It's perfect and it's only getting better.
I will say one other thing.
Like
The same thing happened with
media, right? So like before
Only people who can make media were media companies.
You would there was limited T V channels, newspapers.
If you own one of them, it was amazing. If you didn't, it was right.
And you're right that like owning those legacy media businesses
kind of sucks in the world of social media.
Where
Anybody can create content.
And so
those businesses went down, but then suddenly new businesses, which are social media based
Emerge and the set of social media based businesses
Are way bigger.
than the set of legacy media businesses. And and if you're if you're interested in whatever weird niche, you don't have to rely on the Wall Street Journal to write about it.
Right. So I think it nets out way ahead. I don't know if you guys heard Larry Ellison yesterday when he was like going off about AI. Like people are like, Well, what are you excited about AI? And he like did this little rant, which I don't know how
well versed Larry Ellison is in like
What's actually like possible with AI versus like Masasan, you know, showing a picture of a golden goose laying eggs and being like, that's why I'm investing.
But he was like with AI, he's what here's what's gonna happen in the next few years. He was like
you're going to be able to do early detection of cancer.
Then the AI is going to sequence
what cancer you have, it's going to be able to design a personalized vaccine for your cancer and cure you of cancer.
So why am I investing$100 billion? Because I want that.
And I want a hundred other things like that.
And it was just like a very compelling like rant he did outside. Did he deliver it in that type of compelling way? Well, nobody's me, but yeah, he did his he did the Larry Ellison version of it.
The B plus.
But he did do like he was like uh that like he done he was able to dumb it down.
He was basically like he wanted it was like he was shaking somebody and be like, Do you hear what I'm saying? Like, do you know what this is? Like
Get this in your little head. It's not about an investment for a data center.
It's
We're gonna cure cancer with this shit.
Okay.
And it's gonna save your like your mom's life. Like you were that's what we're gonna do with this thing. Okay. That's that's why we're doing this. Let's not
get caught up in Project Stargate and the politics and the
The investment amount and and then the infrastructure, like okay, all that's a means to that end is kind of the way he was saying it.
Dude, this shit's so exciting. He also I think he's obsessed with living forever. I think he's one of these guys who's like into that and there's it is
you know, the tenth richest guy in the world, so he can kinda throw his weight behind a lot of that stuff. And I think that's pretty badass. And that's probably a huge motivator. Andrew, can we do one more? You had this great thing in your notes that I don't
I want I want to hear you explain.
You said AI hedge. Basically you were looking for investments.
given that you think okay software might not be the best place to be investing.
Where are you investing and what what what is all the stuff I see here down below, uh down below your AI hedge notes? Sure.
So
I feel like you know, there's a bunch of different scenarios here, including that this scaling slows down and it's a mo moderate disruption. We've got a couple of years of some people being unemployed and then they rescill.
They go do different things, like you said, the economy gets bigger, whatever.
There's another possibility that there's what's called an AI fast takeoff, which is like
Masa's graph of like the singularity happens, and you know, it's crazy.
And if that happens, it's like
Does capitalism matter?
Does the free market matter? Does the AI basically just become this like communist overlord that al al allocates assets and stuff?
But I've been thinking about, you know, what do you want to own in a world where that happens?
So you can go out and you can try and buy secondary in Claude or Anthropic or OpenAI. Those are very expensive. You can buy NVIDIA at thirty times earnings or ASML at thirty times earnings. Some of these
Or or uh T S M C, but there's the Taiwan risk, all the other stuff.
And so
I've been trying to find
Stocks that I can buy.
that are actually affordable but capture AI opside. And I found a really interesting one.
I love stuff that's miscategorized and misunderstood.
by public market investors. Public market investors are very
Simple
in the way that they think about companies. They have a series of boxes and they filter you through the boxes.
And
There's just saying you want to look like a duck and quack like a duck in the public market. They do not like complexity. And so if you say the wrong keyword.
Their brain turns off and they just say, I'm not gonna invest, right? And so let's let's a couple of those examples are
Uh cannabis, right? They just put you in a box. Biotech, oh high risk.
And Bitcoin is another one. There's all these crappy Bitcoin mining companies.
Dude, when we sold the company to HubSpot, one of the reasons we went into the year with millions and millions of dollars booked of advertising.
And we were probably gonna do twenty million dollars that next year.
And they were like
Yeah, just cancel all those contracts and give the money away, give the money back, and we're not gonna do advertising anymore. And I was like, But you could scale this to like a lot to tens of millions or whatever. And they're like, Yeah, we make billions of dollars a year.
And also
We would ha just have to report that and that's a little too complicated and people won't understand it, so
Like the decision.
Of them to not
Do that.
was worth more than the tens of millions of dollars of advertising revenue they could have made, which is wild.
Have you ever met one of those like really ADHD young entrepreneurs who's pitching you on their business and they're like, Oh, we do this, but we also do this. And also I've got a company that does this.
Right. And and we all the older statesmen we always are like uh
you know, young Padawan, just focus and don't, you know, don't do that. Or or if you're gonna do that, don't tell me about all this other stuff. Cause it just confuses me.
I feel like public market investors are like that.
So here's the business I found. It's called
Iris energy.
The ticker is I Ren I R E N
And basically it's these two Australian guys
Who were infrastructure bankers.
And their thesis supposedly was
that compute is gonna be a big deal in the next ten to twenty years.
So presciently they went out, they secured a whole bunch of huge data center properties that were right next to mostly renewable energies. So they'd find a power plant that's like a hydroelectric dam or something like that, and they would literally just buy a massive data center right next to it and build one. So for example, where I live in BC.
They have one in Prince George, right next to like a big hydro dam.
And currently
The best use.
For these data centers they built so far.
has been mining bitcoin.
So they've been doing that and they're not Bitcoin bullets. They're not like MicroStrategy or someone like that.
They don't hold the Bitcoin. They just mine it. They've got their GPUs and whatever.
And they sell immediately.
And right now they're making somewhere in the range of five hundred million dollars of eBa
Annually doing that.
Now the stock trades at about a two point four billion dollar
Valuation.
So you can buy it actually quite cheaply based on the Bitcoin thesis.
Right.
And
Bitcoin would have to drop by about, I believe, um
guessing based on some assumptions, but I think it would have to drop about seventy percent.
before they get to break even on mining these Bitcoin.
So
Here's what's interesting about this business. So
It's totally misunderstood by the public market because everybody thinks, oh, they're Bitcoin bulls, they're mining Bitcoin, there's all this risk or whatever.
What's actually interesting here is
They're gonna flip, I hope.
Or they've kind of publicly communicated to some degree that they're gonna try and flip these data centers over to compute.
So all these huge companies like you know, uh Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and whatever, they all need
data centers and they need the data centers to be centralized in one place. You can't have 10 computers here or 10 GPUs here and 10 GPUs somewhere else. You for training, you need them all to be in a massive supercluster.
So
The other interesting thing is
You can't just go and build these superclusters. You can't go build these data centers anywhere. It takes a long time to get permitting and approval.
And it takes a long time to build.
And so basically there's a finite amount of this stuff to the point where you guys have probably heard like Bill Gurley talking about like trying to buy nuclear power plants and all sorts of crazy stuff. So
Basically
If they flip
This business over
To
doing inference and to working with hyperscalers on training.
This could be a massively
a massive boost to the business and it could, you know, five, ten, twenty X, I don't know.
But very significant if they sign some deals with hyperscalers, which I know that they're actively working on. They've communicated as much.
So
Basically, if you believe in a fast takeoff
It's a very interesting uh way to kind of buy something with relatively low downside and very significant upside.
instead of buying NVIDIA or Microsoft, obviously
You sound like you're uh Leonardo DiCaprio in uh Yeah, exactly. Do your own research. This is not investment advice. I do own the stock, but I think it's interesting.
How much of this stock did you buy?
I only bought like a million dollars, but I look at it as like
A small it's a very small position. It's like buying fire insurance.
Yeah, what is this, a position for ants? Just a million dollars, Andrew?
Well, Andrew, I know that was not financial advice, but I do appreciate the advice that you just gave me financially. The last public stock we talked about, I think was Weight Watchers and like
There was definitely a correlation from when the episode air and when the stock uh I don't know if it was causation, but there was definitely correlation.
Uh I wonder if that's gonna happen here.
You said the downside is like you have this Bitcoin mining
Free cash flow.
priced very fairly, right? You said like three X free cash flow basically is the the price.
And then the upside is if they make this AI switch. One question. You said they
It sounds like they're not huge superclusters. So Oh no, they're they are huge. So they have a massive they have a massive site in Texas.
that they're working on building. Now here's the probably the reason why it's trading lower is
These profits do not just go to investors. They are almost all being pounded back into building out these data centers. So if for some reason
Compute stops mattering, or you know, we move to distributed inference or something like that. There's definitely a downside scenario, which is why I'd say.
think about this cautiously. Don't put your entire portfolio in it. But I look at it as it's like a good one to five percent position.
I need to look into it. That's not how I roll, obviously.
But
It was compelling and I
I'm fascinated by their entrepreneurial story. I'm amazed how this was just launched in two thousand eighteen and how fast they grew. How much financing did they raise? I don't know how much they've raised, but I do know that they have no debt, which is quite impressive for a business like this.
They have they have a lot of uh a lot of interest in retail like a lot of retail buyers in the public market and so they've been
Every time they need to expand, they do what's called an at the market raise. So they basically just issue stock into the market and then they raise
Capital do it that way.
Um, but th I mean the way they die would be
Big amounts of debt, so they're avoiding that, I think. Well, I forget what that online stock market club is that like Bill Ackman and all these billionaires are part of where they have gotta pitch their stock and they have to make a compelling argument and it's like really hard to get into. This is like
If that and Beavis and Butthead had a baby, that's what this is right now. Have you ever been to sound?
It's a song conference, right? That's what you're talking about?
No.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. It's is it online or d or uh in person.
I've always wanted to go, but it

An ordeal to go. Maybe this was your audition tape.
Yeah, there you go. What do you think of it, Sean?
I mean I I don't know anything about this company. I've never heard of Irene until uh Andrew talked about it five minutes ago, but
I like the I mean
Problem is
Andrew's very persuasive.
There's also the problem with me.
I can talk myself into anything. That doesn't mean it was a good idea. And I I have done that to myself many times. You have to be careful.
uh I apply basically a discount factor. It's like a charisma discount. So
The more persuasive somebody is about everything, the more I have to discount
To some degree, that doesn't mean I just like throw it away, right?
Uh, but I have to be careful not to get overly excited.
And then the opposite is true in the other s case. Like uh when somebody's got like the David Blaine deadpan delivery of everything.
And then they're saying something that sounds exciting.
I'm like, wait, if that sounds exciting coming from you, that means it must be ten times more exciting than you're actually giving it. There's actually like an amplifier there. So you g gotta be a little bit careful. This is why whenever I read Mocking Gladwell books, I have to be like, wait.
This is just a theory.
This is just a theory. Like this is not a fact necessarily. That's pretty funny. What did you call? The uh charisma.
The what? The charisma discount, yeah.
That's pretty awesome. Yeah, like our friend Jack Smith, whenever he tells me something.
He'll be like Yeah.
That's pretty cool.
I I think I like this.
Do you love this?
Yeah, I think I love it.
That I'm like, all right, I'm in. There's some people who pretty good means it's incredible.
And there's other people who are like, Oh, it's the fucking best, and that just means it's just another thing that they're that they're doing. You know, it it doesn't mean anything, right? You have to like
Uh yeah.
An audio mixer has to turn some people's levels down and turn some other people's levels up on their microphone, you know?
Are you guys tracking those stock stock uh you guys did that like investment episode maybe like six months ago and Yeah, TKO versus Ferrari. Uh TKO won, I believe, Sean.
I I think it's up like nineteen percent, I think, since we did that episode. So you know, that one did pretty well, but
I mean it was funny that we did a a stock picking episode just stock stockalooza.
And like
We just didn't just say the word NVIDIA and then stop the recording,'cause that would have been that would have been sufficient and like it was pretty obvious and in our face, but like
When you try to be smart and make good content, that doesn't mean you're necessarily actually making the best advice. This is what this is my fear of all YouTube doctors, by the way.
And I I like your man, I like it, T, I like all the I like them, but also
They're content creators now first.
And so you h again is you have to apply the discount factor, which is that
Their job is every week to come up with new things to say. That doesn't mean that ever I'm not saying they're wrong either. It's just that
The best advice w might have been
You know, five minutes long said once and never s you know, and and or just repeated fifteen times. Would it probably be
more helpful.
than listening to the three hour podcast about how like, you know
getting U V B rays in your ears in the mornings is gonna help you, right? Like
Those might not be the things that actually will help anybody at this point, but that doesn't make for good content. And so whenever somebody's primary job is content, and I say this as somebody whose primary job is content,
You have to like
Remember that.
Before you before you, you know, get totally hooked and listen to everything that they say. This is the thing I remember in twenty
13 or something, I'd sold a business. I was sitting on like seven or eight million dollars of cash, and I was like, Okay, I need to invest this.
And I read this Tony Robbins book. I'm not a big Tony Robbins person, but he had that money I think it was called Money.
Mastering the game or something. And it basically the whole book is just like by index finds. I have this disease, and I think most entrepreneurs do, where they say, Well, that's the obvious thing. That's for the normies. I'm gonna go find door number three.
And I look back, like I read
Chip war, which is like all about semiconductors. I knew that NVIDIA was an amazing business, TSMC was an amazing business.
I saw Facebook trading at five times earnings, but it's like I have a really hard time going through door number one.
And I think going forward, I want to be more
I just wanna do
the thing that makes sense and is obvious and then forget about it and stop trying to be clever.
This is actually an instance of me trying to be clever.
What did you want to invest in? And then you look back and you're like
Ooh, dodged a bullet on that one.
Oh.
Where was the obvious thing?
The wrong answer.
Yeah.
'Cause it won't be the right answer a hundred percent of the time. NVIDIA was a g it's uh yeah, NVIDIA Facebook. You look back and you think
I should have known better, but where was it the opposite?
I don't think I've ever really messed up on the one that's
obvious that slaps me in the face and I I don't
Like
I'm actually really decisive when I see that, but it's interesting. It mostly happens for pr for me in private businesses.
I think that's where
My decision making is usually the strongest.
Because
I usually do what's obvious and will work for sure.
But in public markets it's very easy to get excited. Have you had one, Sean, where you're like
I almost
It did this and
God, I'm thankful I didn't.
Well, I've had a pl a bunch of those, but is it specifically aware it was like an obvious kind of seem pretty straightforward, but it was a mistake? Oh, I have one.
So so my first designer was this guy named Adam Saint.
And he's just the best.
The best dude. Like he was
One of our designers, but also like a great friend.
And he went off, he left after a couple of years at Meta Lab and he started this company called Bench.
And so he comes to me and he's like, Hey
We're doing, you know, basically AI accounting ten years early.
And
I loved him, I loved his co founder, I love the idea.
But I looked at it and I was like, Oh, it's a services business for accounting and low margin and this is gonna be hard.
So I didn't invest.
And for the next ten years I felt like an idiot.
Because over and over and over again I'd see these big series A, series B
Bane Capital buys them for you know huge amount of money or whatever.
But it turned out
that when Bain invested, I don't think they got any money off the table, nor would I as a shareholder
And it I I think a lot of people saw this, but he just posted a uh big
post on LinkedIn about how the business basically went to zero and shut down overnight.
And was a total disaster. And that's an example of one where I was like
Man, I wish
I was so badly wanted to be part of that business and I would kick myself for years. And then in the end, I'm like really glad that I didn't invest in it.
Well I first want to cosign what Andrew said. I think
You know, I have meddled in the overthinking Olympics many times and I
And more than anything, the reminder is to do exactly what Andrew's saying, which is like
Stop trying to be clever.
And just simply ask like what's the obvious here? What's the obvious move here? What's the obvious answer here? And if there's not an obvious answer, just move on. Like you don't have to do anything.
Uh no action is required in most situations.
And I'm struggling to come up with a time, just like Andrew. I'm struggling to come up with a time where there was a obvious
Thing staring at me.
That
I did and it turned out wrong. Which almost just reinforces even more how hard that is. Whereas
The opposite if you said, Hey
Tell me a time where you
Kinda thought you got a little cute.
You tried to be clever.
And it didn't work out.
Your buddy texted you at eleven o'clock at night and said, Hey, round's closing tomorrow and these ten cool people are in and it's this really cool founder.
I can't even blame anyone. It's even simpler than that. It's
I was a believer in cryp early. Sam, I was probably talking to you about crypto early for a long time.
And then one year a year last year, the year before something like that, where crypto had a dip, I was like
How much tax loss harvest?
So clever.
You know what I could do? I could sell this shit. I could buy it right back.
I still own the thing and I booked this
Beautiful tax loss.
Oh my God. I am
Nine hundred IQ.
And I just um I am the guy. And so then I sell the thing.
And I book the loss and I tell my accountant, I say
Don't worry about this one. I advised myself on this. I got it.
And they're like, Okay, great, we'll make sure we have the that booked for the year and I'm like, Cool.
And then I'm like, I should buy back in. I was like
You know, but I did just read this report. I think it's gonna go a little lower first. Let me just wait. Just let it look a little bit lower.
And the stupid
Goddamn tax decision.
ended up costing me uh what probably saved me maybe I don't know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes.
cost me millions of dollars in gains because I didn't just do the thing, the o the obvious thing was
Sell the thing, book the loss, buy it right back.
You're exactly where you were five minutes ago with I with additional tax losses.
The getting cute or clever was thinking.
You know, the knife's still falling. Let me let it fall a little further. And then it fell a little bit further and I just
Patted myself.
And I said, I'm so smart. I knew it was gonna go down. It's gonna go down a little bit more. I was actually reading this article the other day.
And I saw this guy on Twitter who's got a picture of a fucking cartoon and you know, he said something pretty smart. Let me just hold on for a second. Let me just wait till it goes down a little bit more.
And then it went right back up.
Way past where I bought and I ended up buying in at a much higher price. I would have been better off doing nothing. It's like um
You know, Ross Albricht was in jail uh just got freed.
Which is I know a big day for you, Sam. Um Big Day.
And so
I'm trying to I've got to shave my legs for our first date. He's walking out of prison, by the way, holding a plant.
Which I love. I don't know what he's just got a small house plant that he he had, I guess. I don't know what that is.
But
You know, everyone's like, Oh my God, you know, I'm so glad he's free, must have been so tough, blah, blah, blah. And then somebody goes, Well, government did do him a favor because
He was basically forced to not sell his bitcoin.
from twenty eleven or whatever when he was running, you know, Silk Road and Bitcoin was like, you know, in the dollar range.
To now it's a hundred thousand dollars. And it's like Yeah, they also did give him a gift by not letting him sell.
Wait, is that so he still o he owns some still? I thought that Tim Draper bought it.
No, that's what they seized. Presumably, they didn't seize all of the bitcoin that this guy had, right? Like he could have had Bitcoin in multiple wallets, he could have had personal Bitcoin, like
They seized what they got from the Silk Road. That doesn't mean they had all of his crypto wallets necessarily. You know how people say uh uh like buying a home is forced savings.
He uh he just had prison was his four savings.
Uh yeah, twenty four hour lockdown, force savings, my friend. For example, I had the opportunity to invest in Coinbase, not super early, but like let's say series A or B, somewhere there.
And I remember doing the math and being like, Okay, I believe in Bitcoin. Should I invest in Coinbase, the exchange, or buy Bitcoin? And again.
tried to outsmart my the answer should have been just put do a little bit of both and let it ride.
And in the end I I did this analysis that showed me that you should just own the underlying asset.
Bitcoin, it's gonna grow faster than this exchange, where it's just gonna have multiple competitors that are exchanges, et cetera, et cetera.
And actually I was right, Bitcoin overperformed, but the p thing I didn't factor in was that
I would have made more money had I just
A done both, but B coinbase, you couldn't sell your share. So like Bitcoin price went down, you couldn't panic sell.
And so the forced savings of just being a Coinbase stockholder will turned out to be more beneficial than being liquid.
with Bitcoin where you were
Now at the mercy of your own brain.
And um there's been, you know, tons of examples like this. I have a good one. I talked about those a little bit, but Meta Lab.
back in twenty, I guess it was twenty twelve or twenty thirteen.
We design slack.
And at the time Slack was actually a failed gaming startup.
And Stuart Butterfield was basically trying to do something with the remains of it.
And try to build a chat tool.
And so
He comes to me, he's like, Hey, I've only got eighty thousand dollars budget for this.
And I was like Well
we normally, you know, this would cost quite a bit more
Um but we really, really want to work.
with you, we're like big fans. And so he's like hey, uh what if we did some stock?
And I'm like no no no like you know we don't like Meta Lab would go broke if we just took stock, we don't do that.
Whatever. And so I said no. And my thinking was
Well, I want to get as much cash as possible so I can invest it in my own businesses. And if you think about what I was investing in at that time, it was my productivity software where I lost 10 million dollars.
So I instead put it into this money losing productivity software.
I could have made a hundred million dollars or something crazy'cause it was at like
A twenty million valuation at that time and it sold for
twenty eight billion dollars, I think, to Salesforce. That that's a good one where it's like
Maybe maybe obvious actually that's maybe not that obvious.
But
It's still it's still a brutal one.
My most recent one is uh Justin Mayer's TrueMet.
Was raising for it at a I forget what it was.
Reasonable valuation.
Justin's my friend.
I think Justin's amazing.
He I thought he had too much going on and I was like, No way are you gonna focus on this, I pass.
And he just told me
How things are going. And I'm like
Shit.
Like that was so obvious. You're a winner. I should have just said yes, I'm in.
in my uh my econ business, my I brought in a friend into the business.
gave him equity, he he knew e-comm a much better than I did. I thought, okay, my rate of learning is gonna go up with this guy. And I was so excited for this like value add.
From this guy and his value add was like
He's super good at a bunch of things. One of the things he's really great at is marketing.
So I'm like okay, he's gonna be so helpful with marketing.
And so we closed the deal, we signed the docs and I set up the first session. I'm like, Oh, I can't wait for this guy to come in and just
spill the beans on all the secrets that I don't know and make and they solve all of our marketing problems. This is gonna be amazing.
And he comes in and he has that first first session and uh
Instead of spilling the beans, he just opens up a Google Doc.
And he's like, Okay, what's the best product that you sell? And we're like
This one he's like.
Cool, what's the best photo of that product?
What do you mean? He's like just like what's the best picture you have about that product? And we're like
And he puts in the Google Doc.
And he's like, Okay, if um
You know, like what do people say like why do people buy this?
And we're like, Well I mean the bike is great. He's like, Yeah, but like
What like why do they buy it? Like what do they say?
And he writes down the capture and then he like goes and sets up a Facebook ad of that product with that picture with that line of like what people say.
And he's like, Cool, let this run for like the next three months. And so then he so that becomes a top performing ad. It took him five seconds.
And I'm like, okay, that was cool, but like surely there's more.
And so
Nine months go by.
And I hit him up and I'm like, dude
You're my great friend.
And I was so excited for you to be in this thing, but like honestly, I feel a little disappointed. Like I feel like you could have done more. I feel like the expectation was you're gonna do more.
You know, like
And he's like, Oh, I did so much. And I was like, Wait, what do you mean? Like, what did you do? Like, where's the list of like what what do you mean? What when you're saying you did so much, I'm saying you didn't do enough. What's the gap?
And he was like
Oh, I I stopped you from doing all the dumb things.
He's like I didn't do extra things. He's like, Remember when you got really excited about influencer marketing?
I was like, Oh yeah, that was awesome. I read this article and I met this guy who was crushing with influence marketing. I wanted to
Go all in on influencer marketing. He's like, Yeah, I remember I just told you like
Hey, Facebook's working. Like just keep that going. Like don't
Have you run into a wall with Facebook? No.
All right, then let's just keep doing that. Don't get distracted.
And he's like
That's what I did. Like the second thing you wanted to expand your products and like actually I just stopped you from doing that. And then you had this genius idea to go subscription.
And I told you really like, hey, like this thing's working. So let's just keep doing the obvious thing here and just keep it going.
And basically he laid out like four or five things that were all just simply like
him taking the knife out of my hand as I'm a toddler and preventing me from stabbing myself.
And he was like
Those were all super important moments that like this business would have gone a different way. And I was like, I don't know if you just Jedi mind tricked me into
believing that you added a ton of value or
You actually just said something very, very insightful to me. And I I landed of I think he's actually very, very insightful and that that is
One of the best ways to help someone is to just simply prevent them from hurting themselves.
Rather than
solve their problems for them or give them some new tool that they've never seen before will solve all their problems. Well this is why I love investing in private markets, right? To Sam's point about houses being forced savings.
With a a private business, there's so many of our businesses that I've owned where if I could press a red button, like a sell button.
Just just any given day because I read something or I'm paranoid or whatever.
I would have way, way less wealth because I would have panicked over and over and over again. And when I look at my
public market track record. I've actually had the right call.
Over and over and over again, but then sold way too quick. Like I bought Chipotle stock when they had that.
health crisis. I doubled and then I just sold.
Right. I could have made way more money. Same with meta, all these other things. So
I think that
having a psychological lock in
creates uh a really positive
thing for people like us who are impulsive.
There was a guy at the event we just threw.
And it was like everybody was giving their claim to fame. It's like, okay, this guy built this thing, he's been spent twenty years building this, it's he's been grinding every day.
And he built this empire. And then this guy
He's building this this empire. Jimmy's building this YouTube empire and then this chocolate empire on top of it. And everybody's just like
Go, go, go, go, go, try to figure it out. And then there was one guy there
And it was like
Yeah, he's one of the most successful investors in the world. He invested in all five of Elon's companies at the first round and didn't sell.
And it was like
That's one way to do it. It's like identify the best operator in the world or one of somebody who you think is just like absolutely brilliant and obsessed.
Invest in all their things. Don't try to
Judge.
Rockets are gonna fail, but this is gonna work.
Just invest in the jockey. Was it was it on Antonio?
No, I can't say the name, but um
One of the wealthier people there in a room of
uh the wealthiest people in America, some of and
Someone was like, What do you do? He goes,
I'm like the CEO of my kids right now. Like I dedicate my life to my children and um like you guys work sixteen hours a day on making money. I work sixteen hours a day on making my kids like happy and healthy and making sure they're well loved and all this other stuff, and I was like
You're the greatest person I've ever met.
Yeah, and he had that like
Simple.
It's not the right way to describe it, but like a s uh a simpleton mindset. Like the the midwit thing, but like where it was like
This seems simpler, I'll go that route.
Whereas many other people
refuse to sit still and
Stay the course.
What's the cora
Pascal, all of man's misery arises from an inability to sit quietly in a room.
You know?
This guy did not suffer from that.
Mm-hmm.
Guys, this is awesome.
I could keep going. Great.
I just I'm happy you're well, Andrew.
Yeah. Yeah, it's great to see you guys. I gotta come back soon. That was fun.
Alright, thank you. That's it, that's the part.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.
I put my lawn in it like my day song. On the roadless travel, never looking back.