Brainstorming $10M+ business ideas with Jess Mah

0:00 So you're not afraid to share ideas? Uh no, I'm super afraid to share ideas. Um but that's I mean one of my ideas that I'm actively exploring and here I am sharing it with everyone here. I feel like I could rule the world and know I could be what I want to. I'm putting my all in it like a day song. We should uh address the elephant in the room. Why are we on why are we on a plane? This is my Ty Lopez. Hey guys, I'm just on my jet. Yeah, so this plane Um It's uh Citation C three plus. And I fly planes for fun, so it's been my passion and my hobby.

0:41 I think since even elementary school I was obsessed with airplanes and Um, it was always my goal to be able to afford a fly one. And And then I learned I I earn interviewed a bunch of very wealthy people and I said, How do you afford an airplane? Like how successful do you have to be? And the secret was you don't have to be that successful, you just have to have a big tax bill and good cash flow.

1:05 And it takes success to get to that point, but It takes some success, but a lot less than you think, actually, um, because it's like a house. You could finance it, get you know, put twenty percent down and then you know, the the rest is we'll walk to that in a second. So the the funny thing was we did an episode A normal episode where we're on Zoom. And it was great. Uh you can go see it. It's called like Jess Ma like high school dropout, you know, blah blah blah. We we we YouTube it to make the time look good. But like, you know, I don't know. three hundred, four hundred thousand people have have listened to that interview across all the platforms.

1:36 And I wanted to do a second one and you were like, Hey, I'm in town. If you can kinda meet me here, I was like, All right, let's go, I'll meet you there. And the second thing is You're actually great with tax tax tax. And you're better than my accountant who I pay I pay this guy to be like, Hey, come up with ideas that I can lower my tax bill legally, but how can I do it? What are the ideas? Uh-huh. And he's uh idea poor, you're very idea rich. And so I thought I'm kind of kidding because one of the things we'll talk about at the end is your uh

2:01 You've talked to a lot of rich people and tried to to learn What are the options, what are the possibilities as far as taxes goes? And that's uh Yeah. I wanna learn that from you. Yeah, I mean we'll talk about that as it relates to business ideas, but um as relates to tax ideas, it's actually a pretty similar process. Like I'll just talk to as many people as possible, and I think the mistake people make with taxes is they have their one tax person. And that person worked with their parents and th they've been loyal.

2:27 But actually this is a very bad place to have loyalty. It's really good to talk to like I've talked to dozens of taxcuus. You want to be very promiscuous here. I've talked to dozens of tax attorneys and tax accountants about their ideas and I just keep track of all their ideas and then I talk to all my friends to ask them for their tax ideas and consolidate it. That's so true. There's like this weird loyalty. It's like, yeah, he's been doing my taxes for four years. Like yeah, but nothing has changed and you want to get ideas from everybody. So get let's let's do this plane real quick. So A plane like this. What does it cost roughly? What do you have to put down and what is the tax savings or something like that? Just a mini tax lesson for this plant. Yeah, mini tax lesson. And then we go into more detail on this on the last episode I did with you guys, but

3:06 Uh this is a twelve million dollar plus airplane. And Uh you could put twenty percent down on the airplane. I got this pre owned, so saved a few million bucks and it's Just get it's new. So you put down roughly two million bucks.

3:19 Uh yeah, you put down a about a few million bucks and then you just pay monthly financing on it. But then you get uh you get to write off up to the whole thing. Last year it was sixty percent up front. But now with the the new administration, it looks like accelerated depreciation is back. So if you bought a twelve million dollar airplane financed it, you can write off the whole twelve million dollars off your tax bill, even though you only put in three million bucks. So you're gonna pay the government or you could buy an airplane. Right. So you at least million dollars is going out of your bank account.

3:49 Either way, the mice leaving your ving account, so like it looks lavish, it looks ridiculous, but this is why rich people do these things. Right. And I just wanted it to I think a a lot of people are scared to admit that. They don't wanna share that'cause they want to flex more, they wanna show off. But it's just a practical matter. Right.

4:08 And you use it to like literally be more efficient and go Meet people where otherwise you might not have taken that day trip to go do it. Like you came up I wanna have lunch with you. And so you flew up. We had lunch and he flew out.

4:20 First I felt honored, but secondly. Man, there's probably a lot of people that I think I would have Kind of amazing opportunities or build a relationship with But I don't do it because the logistics are actually like in the way. Of course, this is not accessible to most people, but like if you're in that

4:34 Successful entrepreneur bucket. Um it kinda makes sense logistically as well. It does, yeah. And you know, we've got Starlink on board, so flying uh flying out here is able to make five phone calls and be on Zoom and you know do FaceTime video where I'm like, Yo, what's up? Right. And like it's it's a practical matter of saving money, but it looks really bad. If you're an operating CEO of a company You're going to get shot on by your employees, your customers, your investors, and

5:03 I realized that that would be a problem for me a few years ago, so that's why I stopped being an operating CEO actually. It it was really I had this conflict of like can I do everything I wanna do and I know it's the right thing to do. I know I will I know I will I know I'll create more abundance. Right. You know, I'll create more value for my companies. But at the same time I know I'm gonna get more flack. I'm gonna have more people who wanna rip on me, unfortunately. And I'm sure this video will not help with that at all. But like I defend it. It's like a practical matter. Right. I love that. U unapologetic. So uh enough about the private jet. Cool.

5:37 It's gonna make for a great great shot. First time for the podcast. What I wanna talk to you about is what you're great at, which is Ideas, um and coming up with new ideas for businesses. So The track record here is You've been an operating CEO. You started this company called Intenero when you were really young, right? How how old were you when you started that?

5:53 I was nineteen when I started, I knew absolutely nothing. Yeah, and then I built that company up And then started a bunch of other companies. Several of them are nine figure valuation businesses. I have no unicorns under my belt, so that's a big insecurity of mine right now. I'm gonna be super honest about it. Like I don't have a single unicorn, but if you add them all up, I've got, you know, multiple unicorns. Right. So that became my strategy. I decided I'm really not good at building unicorns. But I'm really good at coming up with

6:20 Smaller businesses. Yeah. I think we just coined something there, by the way. That was all you. Good work. Um but yeah, if if uh I could just reuse less B C money for these companies and just create more of them. And not be directly operating on them, then That

6:39 could add up to being just as valuable, if not more valuable, than if I created one unicorn. Not to mention all my friends who are CEOs of unicorns. Miserable. So miserable and so stressed out. And also they don't have

6:53 the ability to live an amazing lifestyle because of all the stuff you talked about. They're scared of the optics, um And they own a much smaller percentage of these businesses. Like a lot of my unicorn CEO friends, they own like five percent. of a billion dollar company, which is remarkable amount of money. That's a lot. But You know. Yeah, totally. I'm in it for the lifestyle, not the uh You just have to decide what you're in it for. And there's some people who are in it for the impact. That's dope. They they should do that. They should save the world. I'm on the world. I'm glad that they're saving it. Yeah. I personally don't wanna do that with my time. I wanna

7:25 Indulge my curiosities, have fun conversations, and just enjoy my life with my kids. Like, that's kinda what I'm what I like to do. That's my that's my gold standard. Yeah. So Your story is basically Nineteen years old, you start in Denero. You run that company, you grow that company, and then you s you've like you said, you transition from starting and running companies yourself to now you have this like

7:44 Your own hold co where you're you're incubating or creating companies. And you said that in the last four years. You started four companies. Each worth over a hundred million dollars. I've co founded companies and and when I say co found, sometimes I didn't do a whole lot. Maybe I helped with idea, I

8:00 the early team on board, I got some early funding. And then on some of them I'm still really active and on some of them I'm not active and I'm just like a significant shareholder. Right. All right, hey, real quick. If you're liking this episode with Jess, then we got something cool for you. So when the episode ended, we asked her, we were like, Hey, you were talking about how you have this this playbook, this recruiting guide, you have this like content guide, you have these things Would you mind sharing one of those with us? And she actually just sent us like all of them. So uh she wanted the listeners to be able to have them for free. So they're in the show notes below. It's her talent playbook, it's a recruiting guide, I think it's an operations guide for how she runs her companies.

8:37 These are straight from her. They're available in the show notes below. Check'em out. I mean Somebody's giving you free gold. All you gotta do is take out your hands and just accept the gold. All right, back to this episode. I wanna ask you about your idea process,'cause that's amazing to be able to do that. I wanna be able to do that. So Let's talk about that.

8:53 Uh, let's talk about ideas. How do you get ideas to start these companies? And then what are some ideas right now that you're excited about? Yeah, I was talking about process first. So um I love Y Commander. ideas, the request for startups. And

9:08 when I was coming up with my first ideas for businesses like in Denero, that was inspired by that list. And it's a list of a hundred business ideas where they say if you build this, we are more likely to fund you. Right. And I really wanted to get into my combinator and um And then I put together this spreadsheet so I had this matrix of criteria.

9:29 And one of my top criteria was complicated enough. That Other people won't copy me too fast. Mm-hmm. I think that's really important.

9:39 F I'm a first time founder. I need to have more legroom. And then another criteria was I can pseudo bootstrap this, like I can raise some angel money, but I don't need to raise like a hundred million dollars. So like I'm not gonna build Tesla or SpaceX.

9:55 I wanna build something that Two million dollars could get me very far. My other criteria was I wanted recurring revenue. I wanted something that was sticky, like a must have. And so I literally went through every single one of those ideas on the Y Combinator list. And I rank ordered them based on these three criteria and

10:13 Business accounting and tax management. seem to be the better one for my criteria. And so my processes I you know, go online and I scrape these ideas. I've even gone to Reddit to look for ideas. I have one on one lunches and dinners with people like you and I just say, Hey, like what are ideas you're exploring? And then we'll just have a brainstorm.

10:34 But None of the ideas I've actually worked on. came from me sitting In a room with the whiteboard and just like coming up with stuff. Yeah, that's never worked out. I've tried it, by the way, with uh

10:48 No success. Okay. So you you had this thing on your phone. You had like this idea database. Yeah. Three hundred ideas. Uh-huh. And you promised, you said I'll Show some of them today. Yeah. Even though these are the things you might still go do, I think. I might still do some of these. So do you wanna give us a couple of them? Absolutely. Um it's called the Idea Hopper. So actually let me pull it up on my phone real quick. Okay, great. Should we start with the ones we talked about f before? Yeah, you she gave me a teaser of like two or three of them that I was like, Don't tell me more, but yes. Like should we start with a Doge as a service? Okay, yeah, yeah. I like I like this one. So explaining it. Doge as a service for companies. Explain.

11:23 Yeah, I mean most companies have so much waste. You have people who barely show up. Or they're phoning it in and I have friends who say, Oh yeah, like Like I'm you know, my husband Quiet quit his job. He's like working two hours a day and no one's tracking it, so he's available to hang out. Those are the people you want to get rid of. So what if you could create

11:43 A software platform that goes through and tracks who is actually on Slack, who is actually emailing, who is like using their computer. And if not, then They're fired. So doing just a service for companies. So it would be a team of consultants, it'd be a consultants plus AI. How would you do it? I think AI could do a lot of it. I also thought that if you're an enterprise, then it's you could sell this to consulting firms like uh McKinsey or BCT or whoever and say, Hey, you guys can offer this to the CFO. Oh, they're already doing they're already in there. They're already in there and that makes you seem more valuable as a consultant,'cause you could say, Hey, we could

12:19 demonstrate that we'll save you hundreds of millions of dollars, you'll pay us only twenty million dollars. And the CI did all the work. Yeah, that's actually pretty interesting. I I don't think enough Tech teams. build tools for the consultants who have already done the sale. Cause what McKinsey's amazing at is they got this relationship with a Fortune one hundred company.

12:37 They're on retainer, they're getting paid millions of dollars a year. And if you can sell them a tool that either helps them land and expand that contract. Or Save.

12:46 Overhead in actually like executing that contract. That's gonna be pretty valuable. Like if I was like building AI right now, I would not be Try to make something that like I'm gonna not only build the tool, but also figure out all of the go to market. Maybe you could actually just sell this to consultants who already have the goal to market done. Exactly. That

13:04 That's I mean one of my ideas that I'm actively exploring and here I am sharing it with everyone here. So you're not afraid to share ideas or what's your Philosophy around that. Uh no, I'm super afraid to share ideas. Um but put you on the spot, you're gonna be able to get it just gotta be really comfortable, so here I am. Um this is an idea I've been playing around with for a few months and I really like it a lot. Okay, I like it. Um I didn't want to be one of those people who said, Okay, here are my shittiest ideas, now you go to the club. Like I think that'd be just really lame. Totally. All right, what else you got? So don't just as a service, that's one I like. So again, this is the trendy category. Okay. Okay. Um Another idea is

13:41 Uh you know, everyone says Sass is dead. Asians are the new thing. Well what if you could build Vertical agent as a service for an industry. So for example, build

13:54 a library of agents for dental offices or for auto mechanics or for, you know, clothing uh designers or manufacturers or whatever, or distributors. So there are all these industries But where they knew their own very unique Library of agents to automate their tasks. And you can go really deep there. So this is more of a thematic business area. Wh which will be I think we're gonna see thousands of businesses doing this.

14:19 Right. So okay, so somebody's building a tool. And so you're saying you don't even have to build the agent. You're like There's gonna be somebody who builds an agent that's about Picking up a call. Uh and booking an appointment. Let's say. Appointment booking agent. So what you used to have to have a pay of receptionist to do

14:35 Now AI's pretty damn good. It's gonna be able to do that fully. Right. So you have horizontal companies right now that sell the voice agent for any industry. The problem is You still have to do a lot of fine tuning and work for If you're dentist. Right. So what if we You're a company and you

14:51 Look for all these off the shelf tools and make your own agents and plug them all. And and tune it just for dentists. Right. And so it's plug and play, I'm a dental office. I can use your company, and it has like hundred different pieces of AI. already baked into my workflow. Gotcha. Okay, I like it. You should do this for an industry you know about. Like if you're passionate about

15:11 You know, dental offices than do it in dental offices. Um so that's uh shout out to anyone who's passionate about dental offices. You are this was your day. You gotta recognize you. The more boring the better. That's the constellation software model, right? Like So we invest in this company that's uh vertical SAS, which was uh called Shop Genie. Just So we invested in it and I think within a year or two they sold for mid-8 figures. And what they did was they went to auto repair shops and they were like, Hey Guess what? Auto shops need a CRM. So there was always CRMs like HubSpot and others that They work for any type of business. And he's like

15:45 Well, but auto repair shops have Specific things that are, you know, uh for them. So they built a tool that was just for them, and then they went and they got like three thousand, four thousand auto repair shops in like a year. To use them. And by the way, I was very sexy business. Yeah. I was like, dude, how did you get so many shops to use you? And he's like, there's this guy who's like the auto repair influencer. He's like the Kardashian of Auto Repair Shops, and he vouched for us. And then all these people uh you know falling on board. He's like that guy makes like twenty million a year.

16:12 as the like biggest influencer to other auto repair shop owners. It's like really insane. Oh wow. There's a great business idea, yeah. So so what they did was they give him this tool And it was like for booking your appointment and the text message follow up, whatever. And what you're saying is like And vertical SAS has been a thing. Constellation software did it.

16:30 What you're saying is instead of vertical SAS, it's gonna be like Vertical ass. Vertical ass. I love it. All right. So But seriously, and then the more like random the better. Like if you could apply this to like You know, marine shipping or it's uh like resource mining. You know, then uh Constellation We'll be acquiring and rolling out these

16:52 vertical ass companies in the next few years, like that's That's the feature. Marine shipping, cargo ship. idea you were telling me about. Yeah, that was another idea I had on my idea hopper. The idea was in a nutshell. Could we uh oh yeah, it was uh coding for

17:07 uh these cargo ships coating like the paint coating. Uh but to make it more efficient so that these ships could go even a few knots faster. Um and that saves you a ton of money on fuel. And then you don't need to like take these ships out of the water as often to recat them. So this could be like millions, if not tens of millions of dollars. over a decade for your entire fleet of cargo ships. Totally random idea I got this from.

17:31 having dinner with someone who was playing around with this idea or looking at funding something like this. like many years ago and the other person just didn't have the money to proceed with it. So my I like I learned about that just from having dinner with someone. Yeah, that's crazy. And so you when let's say you have an idea like that. Uhhuh. Uh so first it's like where who the heck even thinks about cargo ship coding not me. I mean mostly these ideas the the common theme is I didn't come up with any of these ideas. Right. So you're a good spotter, would you say or wh what are you good at?

18:00 I'm good at initiating conversations with people who are likely to have ideas or have Access to ideas. Like you have good access ideas, so like actually I've sent you an idea before and now that I think about it, like Uh, my buddy James Career has this great phrase. He goes, You want to turn yourself into an API. And what he means by that he goes

18:19 Yeah, like a website has an API which basically says Here's what I can offer you. I I can give you location data. So you you ping me, I give you location data. That's what I'm good at. And by the way, here's Here's what I wanna get from your API, right? Here's the things I'm interested in. I'm interested in acquiring Geospatial data.

18:34 So You kinda have made your API like Hey, I'm always interested in hearing interesting, kinda weird, off the beaten path ideas. So when I hear one I think, Oh, Jess would like this. Yeah. So you've put yourself in my mind and associated yourself with

18:47 She likes to hear Weird, cool. Off the beaten path. You know, ideas that that sh you know, she d she's good at making them happen. And then in return I you know, you're like, What are you what are you good at? It's like what do you offer as your API? It's like

18:59 I have a business And I'm trying to recruit a CEO and I know you've done that a bunch of times. I'm like, Oh, if I go to Jess, she's gonna you know, reduce my error rate and make me go faster at this'cause she's really gonna be helpful in doing that. Or if I have an idea, she's really good at Fleshing it out over a lunch, like riffing on it and then being like super motivated to be like all right what are we gonna do to make this happen? Like let's push the ball forward.

19:20 So I think you've kinda done that in the idea space, which is really well articulated. Yeah. Like I get people calling me all the time saying, Hey Jess, do you have like five minutes to chat? I have this random idea I want to get your thoughts on and would you build this with me, or if I did it, would you fund it? I get those calls all the time. Multiple times a week. And it's like all right, like yeah I'll find time to call you back, but um it's like uh what Warren Buffett did. He just got the word out there, hey, I'm buying businesses. Call me if you're ready to sell and it's a fast, easy process. I'm doing the same thing with ideas.

19:53 Yeah, that's great. My my business partner ban I was just thinking while you were talking, like His API so funny is Two things. One. Ben always knows a guy. So you're like, Do you know anybody

20:04 I know a guy who knows a guy. That's always Ben's thing. Like he always knows a guy who knows a guy. And the second thing is A lot of people will go to bed, they'll just text them when something good happens in their life. And I always am like, why did they did you ask? No, they just Told me.

20:17 And like we just disclosed this big deal or we just did this thing and they haven't announced it. And he's not that close to them. But what I realize is I do the same thing with him because He's somebody that makes you feel Good when you win?

20:29 You don't feel like there's any envy or he's not gonna try to take anything from you. He's like genuinely pumped for you. That's awesome. And because of that, he just gets this wealth of inbound of people who are winning. Which is also great for us for investing because we're like, Oh wow, these guys are doing really well. Do they need more capital? Do they need something? Like maybe we could help them. And that's a superpower. So I think people there's like these underrated superpowers. Like The thing you're describing about I'm good at

20:52 You know, maybe talk having interesting conversations, getting good ideas and making people feel like they should come to me with interesting ideas. That's not even a skill you could learn in school or nobody would even tell you that that's a thing. Yeah. But you're gonna build generational wealth off that. Yeah, that's well said. I think it's equally as important to know what we're bad at. You know, like for me, I realize that I'm not the best Operating CEO.

21:13 Like that's just not my forte. And after I realized that And came to peace with that, then I was able to say, Okay, well I'm gonna come up with ideas and recruit great teams and then empower them. And that's what I'm gonna figure out how to. Exactly. So um let's do more. I want more ideas. I have this other idea.

21:35 The code name is Holy Help. And I came up with this idea because I heard of А нар бізнес that was minting like tens of millions of dollars in EBITDA within thirty six months, and all they did was help One niche.

21:52 Uh uh Like medical provider get access to insurance. And then I did some research, I plugged this into GPT, and I realized There's so many of these other types of people like chiropractors or physical therapists where They can get insurance reimbursement.

22:07 But they're so small they don't have the Um, the scale to negotiate with an insurance company. I'm getting reimbursed. So they just but i is it that they don't have the time or the skill, or like you need to band them together. Both. So if you band them together

22:24 then they can get some reimbursement and then you could create, you know agents as a service to support them, to create more lock in, and then you could help them with their customer acquisition. So it's gotta be the full stack and this other company did that for one of these different verticals. Um, and I heard about that through a friend who heard about the company. And I'm like, oh man, that's a great idea. Could I do something adjacent to that that's not copying them, but similar in some ways. A similar blueprint, but in a different space that needs it. Exactly. So you would go, what would you do for that? So you would uh let's just walk through this. So I wanna hear so you have that idea.

22:58 I got a clue because I was having lunch with a friend and he's like, These guys are making like thirty million in Eva Da I'm like, All right, what question are you asking that friend?'Cause um we were just talking before and I was like, How the hell do you get these I go, What is your info diet? That you are getting These ideas that I don't get to hear about. You're doing something different. You know, uh uh you're not just consuming the same stuff I am,'cause you're getting different ideas. So can we talk about that real quick, the the the info diet? Yeah, I mean none of these come from reading uh a blog post or watching a podcast. All these are from in person conversations. I think a lot of people are lazy. They just wanna come up with stuff. Fistering at their computer.

23:36 Nothing good comes out of doing that. If I mean Kandy, you have to get out of the building. Um, you have to like just talk to people. And when you're talking to him, what are you what are you asking? Like, hey, what's interesting? What have you seen that's that's cool? Yeah, what's the coolest, uh what's the most interesting exotic business idea that's minting cash that you've seen recently. And so I'm not asking them for a business idea. I'm asking them for what's an existing thing you've seen. It's like why what's the key to their success and why does no one know about this? Right. And like Why hasn't anyone copied them yet?

24:08 And you know, why is now the right time for you're filtering as they're as they give you the exotic business that's mint and cash, you're like Was there some sp secret sauce that's not replicable? Maybe they're super influential in a community. Okay, that would take forever to build. Could this be done in another space? Is does this take a hundred million dollars of venture capital or could this be a little bit more. Oh my gosh, now my mouth math is really watering. Right. Like, okay, and what are the other risks here? Like can AI just replace this in thirty six months? That's like the new risk factor. in my like criteria that

24:42 You'll have to ask for it. So you get the clue. You get the clue from the conversation. Conversation Key question. Yeah. And then you get the clue. Then you run it through your filter mentally. Just there. Let's say now you're excited about the idea'cause you're like, um

24:55 Holy health. And you give it a c you give it a codename. Is there Everything has to have a codename. Is that why is that? It makes it real? It makes it feel more psychologically real and like, okay, then I have something to remind me of the rest of the substance of the idea. Cool. And so I'll just like throw the idea into Chat G V T. Before you even tell your coworkers, you're like, I think with AI first. Uh yeah, exactly. I tell everyone before you tell me anything, think with AI as well. Yeah. And so everyone does that and I say, Give me like twenty ideas of potential names for this idea and then I just pick one and this is the code name and then we put it in idea hopper and then CEO of Microsoft went on a podcast, I think Dwarkash's podcast recently had this great line, he goes My new workflow.

25:34 Is Think with AI. And then work with my co workers. Yeah. So he goes, I think people are thinking about like AI is gonna replace your co workers, your your employees just gonna AI's gonna do a task. He's like, but right now the best use case is Me thinking and sparring with AI to get clarity.

25:49 And then I go work with my coworkers after that. Sounds like you're kinda doing a similar thing. Yeah, we definitely do that and what we're trying to do is um have all of our meetings be recorded. So even if it's in person, we're just like turning on granola. And having I have a big one of those uh conference speakerphone things and it's just recording everything and we're gonna feed it in to create digital twins of all of us. Then have like

26:12 Basically thousands of versions of ourselves just brainstorming and sparring with each other. Oh my god, that's it. It's like those little like chess arenas or whatever where they train the AIs to just compete with each other until like the until there's like a winner winning strategy. Yeah, and I actually do the digital twin thing. We're actually doing we're actually training one based off of you as well. So I'm ha we're gonna have it just watch every single video you've been part of. So it knows how to think like you'd be like, Hey, bring Sean into these conversations bring uh Satya, bring Sak, bring Elon, bring like whoever and I want all of them to like help

26:46 Battle test this uh, you know, conversation. That's amazing. So that way I don't need to pay for you. If you just ask a question like Oh, what would Elon do in this situation? Or you know, take your most high agency

27:00 uh badass friend who's not afraid And seems to have like clarity in the moment of a fog of war. If you just have that friend and you've hung out with them enough and you just literally just ask the question. It's like they're in the room. And I know if that works, then an AI that's actually trained on them is gonna be insane. How do you know how you'll do that? How will you create

27:19 Like. What are gonna use to make them be So much public content for my team members. That's why I'm making sure that they record every single interaction in the company with each other. Um and is there a tool to do that, or you're gonna make your own tool or to get the transcripts. Because once you have the transcripts, then you can just feed that into any of these. Um any ma any LM will be able to like It's gonna do a pretty good job. Yeah, you th we should go into more advanced conversation on this, but that's like nine people will

27:47 Dude, it's so annoying. People are using my voice in ads all the time now. And I'm like this is this is wild. Uh like how do I sue you? I don't even know who you are. Right. Second thing is that um But I'm going to. Anybody who's doing I'm assuming you. I'm actively working on that. I'm trying AI to figure out how to do it. Yeah. Uh but then also working on that. Also um What was the other one? Um Oh, writing style. So people will just put in chat G V like, write this in the style of whatever,'cause I've written a lot of content publicly. And it's not.

28:16 It's not me, but it's like It's definitely kinda close to me. It's like, Oh, that's eighteen months away from being better than me, so That's definitely happening. Might as well embrace it. We're almost gonna need like a safe word. That's like Is it human Sean that I'm talking to, or is this AI Sean that I'm talking to? Like we need a code word.

28:31 I know, but that it's like really exciting and um and so yeah, Satya is He's on point here. Um so where was I? So you were telling me about uh Okay, so we're going through your process. So You get excited about the idea. Yeah. You have the code name. And you then have a meeting with your team. Uhhuh. What what are you doing in that meeting? What what are you trying to do to advance that idea forward?

28:53 Yeah, every week we have A R and D te meeting is what we just call it. And we talk about the ideas that we're playing with. And the problem here with holy health,'cause this was a live idea and it still is a live idea. Everything I've Chair today is still live, by the way.

29:10 And Um the problem is we just had too many of these ideas. I mean we have hundreds of these ideas And we try to work on too many at the same time, and the problem is then you don't really advance any idea for it enough. Between Each week meeting

29:26 And then we lose excitement. Right. So now the new rule is we're gonna We're only going to have two and we're going to take them all the way until they're busted. Before you replace and bring in another one. And so like what you do? So you have the meeting, you pitch you pitch the idea, do you have a way of kind of pitching it to your team or what how do you Well what's what's happening in that meeting?

29:44 In that meeting anyone can pitch, so it's not just me. Um, everyone usually has different ideas and um And so yeah, it's like hey, here's uh AI defensible idea. X Y C, here's why it's a Maway idea. So we kinda have a common understanding on what a Maway idea is.

30:01 Which is roughly what. It's roughly an idea that can cash flow That doesn't require a lot of outside funding. We could fund it ourselves. Um and where it's like boring and complicated enough where random people are not gonna copy us that easily or reverse engineer that easily. Um

30:20 that those are Molly ideas and that's what I encourage anyone else to do as well. Okay. Like if you're an auto mechanic expert Then that might be your theme of idea and we have that for like financial services in particular. Right. And so you um And what happened that meeting? You say, All right, what are we gonna do next?

30:38 We say okay, what are we gonna get done to advance this between this week and next week? Um And we just get very specific and it's like all right. Like person A, you're doing these five things, person B, you're doing these five things. And the next step might be like okay, let's just go call

30:53 Like for holy hell. Um, the next step was let's just call some chiropractors and ask them Um if they you know, figure out who accepts insurance and who doesn't and why. And then ask them why don't they plug into these existing companies that Should be that

31:08 doing something similar. So a lot of it's just like what are the questions we're curious about? And psychologically, are you trying to disqualify an idea or are you trying to qualify an idea? Like what's the mindset? Is it I'm trying to figure out is this good or bad, or is it like I'm listing the riskiest assumption, I'm doing it. What what are you trying to do during that f those next f few weeks?

31:27 It's uh it's it's not we're trying to figure it out or or disqualify per se. I think either attitude might be too extreme. It's more like there might be a creative angle here. That no one else has thought through, and so we're not married to this idea. We're holding it very loosely. We just have to figure out like, okay, we might hear an interesting insight from a chiropractor that says, Hey Your idea's okay, but what would make it really good is if you also added in all these AI agents to automate away my receptionist and

31:55 And then you know my customer acquisition is terrible because XYC, like those are the insights we're looking for. Upgraded version of the idea. So we assume the first idea is terrible and it's gonna go through like ten pivots. Right. Like Which is very useful because that's almost always the case. And if you don't have that attitude You basically you hear something really juicy, but you're so locked in.

32:19 It's like somebody was handing you gold. But you were out there just you know, searching for for bronze and it's like w Are you sure? You sure you want that? You You're talking a lot about ideas.

32:30 In Silicon Valley there's this idea there's this phrase which is You know. Ideas are are are worthless. Execution is everything. Do you buy that? I think it's BS. I think it's I think it's some of the worst advice I've ever heard in Silicon Valley. So what's your take?

32:46 My take is that ideas are really frickin' important. And if you have the wrong idea, you'd be a great team and you're screwed and actually I modify my thinking on this'cause I was uh Scout for Sequoia Capital for many years. And they would show us a bunch of these like great ideas with amazing traction.

33:04 Especially in consumer internet. And then they would ask us, would you invest on this memo, yes or no. And so we would vote and then they'd say, Well here's what happened to that company. It ended up being a You know, a Cero, even though it had the best team.

33:19 The idea was still garbage, so it ended up being a zero. And that was like a common theme I noticed. So they would train almost train you on historical memos, basically? Yeah. Oh wow, incredible. But you but If the traction was great.

33:33 But is the is it usually the traction or just the team and the the the thesis was great? I mean the the early traction might have been good and the team looks good, but then if you really think through the long term, like is this idea sticky? After a year or two, will there be copycats like Is it like Is there anything that really holds the consumer in? You know, that's where these ideas would then lose steam. Right.

33:54 And die. And so that kinda helped me think about this a bit differently. And so you're saying uh ideas super important. I'm really important. And the team is really important. They're both really important, but to say oh yeah, like ideas are dime a dozen, like Really

34:10 It's not just the idea, it's like the whole thinking of the business, like Doing the calls to like understand or meeting with the chiropractors in person or the auto mechanic and really figuring out these juicy tidbits that you're not gonna find out. um by sending out a stupid survey or by using chat GPT to tell me, hey, what are the problems that chiropractors have. Like that helps you build an interview script for what you're gonna then

34:32 Uh talk to them about but then you know I you have to show up. So like when I was building in an era. I would go to Yelp. And I would call these CPAs. And I would say, Hey, I'm like a nineteen year old college kid. I know nothing about business.

34:46 I want to do something to help accountants. Can I come to you? buy you lunch and just like ask you some questions just for fifteen minutes and then you show up, they're not gonna kick you out after fifteen minutes. Fifte minutes is gonna turn into two hours. And you have your notepad, your scribbling. Like they love that. They wanna be helpful. Right. And um I did a lot of that personally. Like I just showed up.

35:07 And ask them my questions. And then got all these insights, and we we still do that. I'm still on these calls okay, like even if it's not in person, if you could at least do like hour long plus. you know, uh expert calls. Like we use GLG for this. There's also um like alpha sites. And they charge you a lot. You know, you might be paying eight hundred bucks for a thousand dollars to talk to An expert

35:30 in a very difficult to find area. versus like accountants and chiropractors. Like you could just call someone on the internet. But if you want to find like an expert in titanium mining, how are you gonna find that person? You go to GLG and you pay them a thousand bucks, they'll find the person for you, set up the phone call for you.

35:46 And we do that all the time. Th the way you're talking about ideas and markets it reminds me of uh There's a story of this marketer and the marketer goes to I think a A seminar or something like that. There's other marketers there and he goes Okay. Um

36:00 We are gonna Let's pretend we're opening up a hot dog stand. And um he's like, so I can g he's like I'm a genie. I will give you anything you want to make your hot dog stand the most successful you can make it. Uh So he goes, What do you want? And so first person, what do you want? The guy's like, Uh, I want the best ingredients, best buns. He's like

36:16 Got it. Best bonds. You, what do you want? He's like No, Bun s that's foolish. In the food business location is everything. So location All right, I got you this corner spot. In a high traffic area. Cool. Uh location. You got it. What do you want?

36:29 And it each person had like best branding. Best whatever. And he goes, um I have one thing that I think will beat all of you if we all if we all did the same thing and we all got our wish granted. He goes, All I want is a starving crowd. And um if you're a marketer, like you're gonna spend a lot of time and energy trying to sell something.

36:48 The absolute best decision you can make up front is finding A starving ravenous crowd. And it sounds like you know, when you say ideas really the idea, you know, what's underneath an idea is A customer or set of customers who have like

37:02 A real pain and like a desire to solve that pain. You know, like they are they are hungry and they're hungry for something. And if you just show up with even decent buns and uh hot dogs, like they'll buy it you know, instantaneously. It's okay if it's a little cold. It doesn't matter. Yeah, that's a great story. It's uh it's about like how cute is this problem and ideally Um, one hallmark of a Maui idea is The customer Doesn't have to pay anything. So in holy hell.

37:28 You don't pay to be on our platform. By being part of our platform, you make more money, you get more customers, and we'll take a cut of that. In exchange for helping you grow your business. So you like that model because there's no friction. It's like why would you say no to that? It's like you're just saying no to more business. Yeah, that's like those companies that um They'll negotiate with all vendors on your behalf and like whatever we save

37:52 We'll take twenty percent. You're saving nothing today. If I save you any money, I'll take twenty percent. And it's like okay, go have at it. You you were talking about you had a couple other ideas. You had like a divorce one. What was that like? Yeah, that was like um I had so many friends changing divorced and still do. And

38:07 People say they need an advance on their alimony, or like there's gonna be uh Or their money gets tied up and locked up'cause they're in divorce proceedings and they're really rich, they're really successful, but they can't tap any of their own capital while it's all tied up so what if we could just give them some of their money back and So that was just like a funny. Creative financing around the window of a divorce or the alimony. We called it divorce.fund. Didn't go forward with that one. No, I mean people talk about it and stuff. We still joke about it, but there are other ideas that

38:38 we got more excited about. So let's talk about failures. Because one of the things you said to me before and so many failures. You were like, I like your podcast, but you know, sometimes you listen to people and It just sounds I had this idea, it worked, I'm so great, you know, like that's uh that's a podcast problem. And you were like, I wanna be super honest about things we're trying that are not working or failures that I've had. Where do you want to start?

39:01 Yeah, I mean I would start By saying When I use YouTube and I have all these entrepreneur business podcasts.

39:09 I spent a lot of time flipping through and I think, man, like I'm not doing enough. Like I'm not good enough. even when like I watch your podcast I think that And I think that a lot of people You know, probably share that view. And and and the people you interview, I know a lot of these people. These are my friends. I know what they're secretly struggling with. Yeah.

39:28 And they're not necessarily sharing all of that. And I think that's just important to know. So in my case Looks like I am good at coming up with these things and having success, but Most of the time they're total duds. And one example is we had this idea, we called it cred boost.

39:44 Terrible idea in hindsight. I'm so embarrassed to share this, but I'm gonna share it anyway. And the idea was Um we're gonna help you like improve your credit and repair it and you know, we have a customer acquisition funnel going. And it was high churn, low price point, very high. Regulation by the FTC You know it

40:04 it it got compared to credit repair businesses too much and You know, my idea was for gonna boost your credit, not repair just repair your credit. And it could have made some money, but we just got bored with that. And so I burned a few hundred thousand bucks experimenting with that. And then I put in the wrong team. So I made so many mistakes on that. That was an early incubation that Went nowhere. And this other idea was we're we're going to help

40:28 Veterans. Of the US military. Um find new jobs and we're going to get paid by that tech and the GI Bill. To do that.

40:38 And we could do this all online. So it's virtual, it's scalable. And we're helping veterans. So it felt like it was really good. And uh the veteran all they have to do is say yes. So we launched all these ads.

40:49 All these veterans signed up, they're like, Hell yeah. I could double my salary, make more money. And do this all online from the comfort of my home. And um And our payment mechanism

41:01 What's this thing called? That tech, V E T T E, C. And it had um bipartisan, you know Acceptance. Everyone loved it. But it s got stuck. It got approved by the House and never went up to the the Senate. And the money dried up and we are like all right well get renewed imminently in eighteen

41:19 Months after that. Still not renewed today. Still not renewed. And we're like, Okay, well the hat business died just because of that. And then I try to pivot it. I'm like, Oh, can I get the G I bill to pay for it? But then the G I bill requires in person and then a after that we lost interest. Like I was the only one excited about this still, like, guys, we gotta help the veterans. Right. My team's like We have other ideas that will make more money, just and we wanna make money. Like all right, I'll come back to this when the time's right. So swings and misses for sure. I wanna Show you this. Uh

41:47 I want you to read this. This is from a talk you gave. Oh, this is not just twenty eleven. This is When it hurts, but not just'cause an idea is wrong. Uh-huh. Sometimes it's even when the idea is right. Yeah. And you're running a company. Can you can you read this? I want you to read that. I wrote this to my mom and my dad on Saturday. June fourth, twenty eleven, at five fifty six AM. So I was up all night. I couldn't go to sleep. I was so upset. Subject line. Kind of sad. Um I feel like uh I'm burning mate off, rich on the outside, but completely broken on the inside. There's just a lot of pressure right now because the company is running dry on money in the next nine month nine or so months. And we really need to produce this summer or else we're royally screwed.

42:28 Um this was A bah A year after Why Combinator for me. Anyway, I'm gonna start seeing a therapist or something because this is just no way to live. I have no idea how you handle this entrepreneur job, Jess. Wow. And my mom, she's an entrepreneur, she came here

42:45 Do you remember saying that? I do. I absolutely remember that. I remember the night, I remember how I was just like Very upset. 'Cause I Had all these hopes and expectations on myself.

42:57 And you know, Paul Graham even he was my mentor and he's like, You're gonna be one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, you, Patrick Halston and Sam Altman and I'm still the least successful Today and I still think about that. Often. And uh that weight was on your shoulders. that weight was fully on my shoulders. It still is on my shoulders. And um

43:17 And my mom called me and she said, Hey, like, I love you no matter what, even if you're a total business failure, I'll still love you. And then I just cut all my expenses, cut my burn, moved into a tiny apartment with my business partner and And then just slowly crawled out out of the hole. And then yeah, we grew in and out uh yeah, it's a few hundred employees, profitable, good business, not a unicorn, but Gave me all the training.

43:42 And um spiritual training. Right. pursue entrepreneurship and be comfortable with mistakes and failure. Were you uh at that time I guess like what was the conversation with yourself to like

43:56 'Cause you're like I did these things. I lowered my burn, I Did this, I did this. So those are the actions, but before the action comes some There's some inner monologue. There's some conversation you gotta have with yourself. And I I love the inner monologue because Your li whole life gets dictated by this tiny little voice in your head that nobody hears.

44:13 It's the one telling you how to feel, what to do, where to stand, what to say. And I think Training that and learning how to like kind of Uh improve that inner monologue. Is so important.

44:25 And you it gets better in moments like this, right? That's when it gets that's the muscle building. for that that inner monologue. Do you do you remember kinda what you were telling yourself at that phase? You you wrote this, your mom tells you something, what'd you tell yourself? I distinctly remember what the monologue was that whole evening, which is I am destined for greatness and I am not producing my best work right now. I am not showing up at my best. I'm not playing to win. And I'm

44:49 I'm falling behind and I need to diagnose what went wrong and I need to keep on trying and I will not accept or tolerate failure. That was what was going through my head. No, it's How'd you get yourself into that state? From kind of sad to like kinda kick ass. No, I that was sad though. That was not it was not an empower attitude. I was I was thinking that and uh but because I knew that that was my situation, then it went from

45:17 Like, all right, like I need to do all this, or I'm screwed, and then like all right, I'm really sad and I gotta process my emotions. Right. Just get it out of me and You know, be honest with myself that I'm struggling, I need to ask for help. And I didn't have a great community. Because Back at that time you

45:34 You know, as an entrepreneur. you wanna show off, you wanna posture, you wanna seem like you're better than everyone else. And then after that I realized I could just be honest and I'll still have friends, and I told all my girlfriends. And ends up more people were struggling than I realized. More of my Y combinator batchmates were Also running out of money.

45:53 And if you we look back today, most of the companies from that batch Did not leak it. Most of them went BK and then people took normal jobs or started new companies and then eventually found success. And so yeah, I I still think about that. I still have thoughts like that today. It's not it's a work in progress. Right.

46:11 You know, uh I've I've Done. whatever, six hundred of these episodes. And at a certain point, you know, you'd have to be sort of stupid to not realize like There's a mindset Amongst the com a common mindset that I think

46:22 great entrepreneurs have and I I've distilled it down into this. I think a great entrepreneur's mindset is They're ignorant of the past. Because it's already done. If they live there, they'll die there. Uh if you just c stay stuck on Well it I've been failing for five years.

46:36 then you you will feel like a failure and you won't be able to to win. So you're ignorant of the past. realistic about the present, which is kind of what you said. Like I'm not showing up at my best. I'm not putting in all the effort. I'm not

46:48 doing the obvious things I should be doing right now. Um but I'm also not it's not over. And so if they don't make it worse than it is, they don't make it better than it is. They see it as it actually is. So Ignorant of the past, realistic about the present, and delusional about the future. And you have to have that delusion. Because if you're just realistic and practical about the future, you don't do anything great. Yeah.

47:06 That's really well articulated. I think also going through moments like that I remember then talking to my business partner and we did a full postmortem. We listed out every single strategic and tactical mistake and thing we did wrong. And what we would do different if we went back in time. And I wish I wrote this somewhere because

47:27 It was a long list. I mean, it was like I would do everything different if I could go back in time was the attitude. And even today I was talking to or or yesterday I was talking to one of my colleagues. And The number of

47:43 Bad ideas be Um funded and Experiment with. Um and our process flaws. You know, we we would also do everything different going three years.

47:53 Yeah, you could. But we're talking about this constantly. And that goes back to what we talked about at first Kodawari. So every week What if we take this into our workflow? No matter how good things are.

48:04 Let's still reflect on all the mistakes we made so that we can improve and not repeat that again. It doesn't have to be when times are tough and when you're about to run out of money that you're reflecting on, like Everything. Yeah, yeah. No old mistakes. It's kinda like the it's the no new friends. It's the no old mistakes is what you want. You don't You don't keep making the same mistakes again.

48:21 You said something when you were talking about like I'm not You said I'm not showing up the winning two. You said I'm not playing to win. Yeah. And something while I'm talking to your boyfriend before this, and he goes Uh I asked him, I said what's a What's a jest ism, meaning like p if you talk to people enough, you sort of see their The things they repeat, the things that are like their philosophy that they're like actually operating on.

48:40 And he go he said something like Um Play to win. Don't play not to lose. Explain that. I think that came from this story that I just shared where I one of my problems was I was playing

48:52 Not to lose, so I was in a scarcity mindset. And When I'm running out of money and I'm in scarcity mindset Um, I mean there's research that talks about how your IQ drops by a lot during those periods. And so I'm not gonna think outside of the box.

49:10 And um playing a win means I'm optimistic, I'm delusional about the future of it, right? So I I see a lot of my friends who are just like playing it too safe. They're not They're not trying new things. Um, and so you can't

49:25 Do the same thing you've been doing and expect a completely different outcome. What's an example maybe non business related where In your life, you're playing to w you had the moment where like uh I need to play to win here instead of play not to lose. Personal life like uh for example with the airplane. You know, this is

49:40 A physical manifestation of that attitude. And why it's really fun to share that with everyone today. Um It's easy to say, I'm gonna be frugal, I'm gonna save the money, I'm gonna let it compound, I'm gonna invest it in my other businesses. Or, you know, screw it, I'm playing a win here. This is gonna

49:59 Manifest way more abundance for me. Then if I don't. You had told me something that when we were at lunch that inspired me. I hope you met somebody, I think, who through a great event. And you hired this person, you were like, Hey Here's a budget.

50:12 And I will pay you whatever you're making to your job, I'll pay you that or more, whatever. You're like, I wanna have four events a year. In these four cities. With the most like inspiring fun people. Am I like i that I want to create

50:24 I'm gonna engineer some serendipity, some luck, some fun, some cross pollination of people and ideas. Four times a year in these I in these places. And I remember I've told probably five people this because you need some resources to do it. Yes. Of course, of course. Like Don't if you're in the YouTube comments, don't be that guy who's like, Oh, it must be nice to have money. Great.

50:43 There's a version of this in your life too. You can take people out to dinner, right? It doesn't have to be a a a grand event. But I was like that. is an investment that I don't even have a line item for. Yeah. Right. I kinda know if I did it. probably really good I would A have a lot of fun and B like yeah I I do think good things would happen.

51:00 But you took a almost like intentional business Capital allocation approach. Two The like luck and fun part of your life. Which I think most people leave untouched. Look and fun is just something that either happens or doesn't happen. It's not

51:12 I don't use my business brain for that. I use this other part of my brain. It seemed like you almost used your that same brain for both. Yeah,'cause I wanted to t kill two birds with one stone or three Bridgles on Stone because I wanna have fun, I wanna do more business, meet cool people, but I also had this friend who He did her private equity job and really wanted an excuse to leave.

51:31 And so I was able to present that to her. The vision was four events a year with, you know, the most successful entrepreneurs. And investors I know. And we're launching the first one literally today. That's exactly what I'm flying off to after we're done. And then the

51:47 But it was really expensive and so what She and I decided to do was We would help her find other work. other events. So I'd set her up with my other friends throwing events. Right. She would charge.

52:01 Per event. And she would get peed. based on the revenue coming into the events. So it's all variable versus her being on my payroll. Right. And so for this event what I did is I called a bunch of my friends, I said, Hey, you gotta pay something'cause I have hard costs here. And they peed in and then she only peed herself after there was a profit.

52:20 So you could get creative about this for the ideas. we were talking about earlier and my whole team, bunch of these people are on contract. I found them on Upwork. Yeah. Like You could do this. Yeah, like one's uh product management UIUX thinker, one is uh Financial

52:43 Services guy. One was a entrant of mine, he was at UCLA and he asked me to speak to his entrepreneur club. And then he said, Hey, could I like take you to lunch? I wanna get some advice from you. What should I do after college? I'm like Just intern for me. And I'll teach you the ropes, and then he was so good that now he's full time with us.

53:02 But He's probably one of my best idea sparring partners. And then here this Uh event planning person. I met her from the Burning Man community.

53:13 These people are everywhere around you. They don't necessarily have a fancy specific resume. And they're fun, I love them, we work well together. That's w more important than the resume. Right. I met a friend recently who told me this, uh he said something in passing and he goes I was at this event and then there was this guy who was he was dressed differently, blah blah, and me and my friend, we collect eccentric people. So we went over to them had a chat.

53:35 I kinda paused him, I was like That's kind of a cool thing you just said, like I collect eccentric people. I don't do that. And I was like, but what do I what do I collect? Like if I just put myself in the if I said what am I a collector of?

53:47 So like for me I'm a collector of what I call golden nuggets. It's like I can have this conversation with you and I'm just looking for two, three, four things like I don't need Two hours or ninety minutes of a conversation to be perfect. I need

53:58 Three ideas that spark something, three golden nuggets that will change my way of thinking or acting. Um so I'm a great collector of those. I'm also a collector of like young talent. Like I see somebody who's young who's hustling or is talented in some way. I will like

54:12 kinda really help them out because I want to A stay young myself and be helpful. But B I kinda wanna be able to connect dots between young people and good opportunities or young people in funding or whatever it is. Uh and so I think there's this interesting idea of like figuring out what is it that you collect. Like some dudes collect stamps, some dudes collect bugs. What is it that you collect? So like for you, what do you what would you say you collect?

54:34 I would say I collect interesting people with outside of the box ideas who also like to have fun. That is the key intersection I'm looking for. Exactly. Cause I think you could find interesting people where They're not fun, it's very transactional, they're just in it to make money themselves. But then the problem with

54:52 that is then I can't do any business with them. So that's So then my idea was okay, how do I bring more of these people together? So that we can have more serendipity, oh I'll just create my own event and then Bring them there and then have a bunch of my people also you know, talking to them, getting their ideas and seeing where we could partner on stuff. Right, right. Engineering the serendipity. Our buddy Nick Gray does a like no cost, low cost version of this. So he used to do

55:15 uh Renegade Museum tour so he like he loved museums. So his Venn diagram was like Fun people who are interested in like, you know, going to a museum on a Friday night. And he would host his He wasn't a part of the museum. He would just take people on a tour because he knew the museum better than the tour guides.

55:30 And you take'em on a fun version of the tour. They'd like Have a drink outside after uh beforehand. They would go in and they would like do little fun things at the different stations. So like that was one thing he did. Another way he engineered serendipity is he would throw these like singles events. Where He himself was looking to date somebody?

55:46 But he's like, Well, I could just kinda do that, I can swipe left or right. Or like, is there something I could do more creative? That will not only help me find someone amazing, but maybe even like a bunch of our friends find somebody amazing. And he started hosting these singles events. And again, the it's a pizza budget. It's not like it's super fancy. Doesn't have to be fancy right? Like it does. Uh and I feel like I need to say that'cause we're sitting on this like jet. But like Yeah, I mean most of the stuff we do is like very cheap, cost effective and peace for itself and sometimes makes a profit, you know? So like just but just taking that intensity to engineering some serendipity. I kinda love that. Uh, before we leave, what are you just leave me with what are you currently nerding out about Um, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about

56:23 Like cancer and oncology. I've been thinking a lot about um longevity and you know, we're still funding a lot of the research with Mike Levin. Who's my favorite scientist of all time, he's the bioelectricity. Ninja. And

56:36 Um I've been nerding on Um, I was mentioning to you before we got here, I've been in a bit of a Sa mood this week I had a friend die of cancer a few days ago.

56:48 Um, never smoked a cigarette. in her life and had stage four lung cancer. And um And it's just more examples of this.

56:57 in my life, every year or two I lose a friend like that. And And so it's not necessarily gonna make money. It's not gonna But I'm just like I got in her doubt on it. Right.

57:10 Is there Exciting progress in the cancer oncology stuff right now? Like is there something Is there a new paradigm or a new pathway that's interesting? Yeah, like with Mike, we he talks about how he's been able to use bioelectricity to normalize cancer cells. So everyone right now

57:27 In the field is talking about how do you kill cancer. Right. You think about chemo irradi, it's really painful on the patient, but if you could just normalize cancer And um not have to kill it. That's gonna be a lot more complicated. So it kinda makes it a like a normal non cancerous cell, basically.

57:44 Cancer, but it's more benign, essentially. So that's really cool. Research. He's got a lot of great stuff on longevity making lab. Uh animals live longer. Um I don't think he wants me to talk about it publicly yet, but how insane is the AI Uh AI for medicine and biology. How is that how insane is that gonna be? I think it's gonna be amazing. I think it's also gonna be a lot harder than people think. 'Cause you have AI that's coming up with all these ideas but the bottleneck is still regulatory.

58:13 It's still FDA, it's still getting a clinical trial put together. That's one area where we're gonna see slower progress than everyone is bragging about, whereas You know, with everything else we discussed with digital twins, if we could have the two of us bring some ideas, there's no bottleneck there. Right, right, right. Like the only bottleneck is like spitting up the computer and then us pulling the trigger to fund

58:32 Or fund whatever. But in health and bio, it's people's lives are at stake. It's gonna go slow still, I think, unfortunately. Okay. Well, where should people find you and what should they send you? Yeah, um, if you have any exotic outside of the box business ideas you wanna run by me and

58:53 Um, I'd love to discuss that with you. Uh shoot me a note and I am on LinkedIn. LinkedIn um just search Chasma. And um I post on my blog there. Almost every week, uh partially using ChatG V T to come up with my blog posts. But I still review it. I'm like, hey, write me a blog post that's twenty nine, fifty characters long because the LinkedIn limit's three thousand in my voice about XY C XY C and insert these anecdotal stories. And uh and then like within two minutes I have a blog post. That's amazing. Yeah. But so I post there and these are real live stories to my life.

59:29 And uh just send me a message on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from people. And also the last Pod we did. I mean A bunch of friends. Like people just cold emailed me and I'm like yeah, I'll grab lunch with you. I'll grab dinner with you. And two people I met From the pot or coming to my retreat.

59:46 That's a that's amazing to hear. That's a a point of pride for us is like We want it today. If somebody comes on the podcast They you should get more kind of inbound messages from this than any other podcast you go on. And the second would be that the people who message you are people you would actually want to talk to. That would be the goal, right? That if we're doing that, we've kinda built the right tribe here. So I'm glad to hear you. Great job with that. Real community. So thanks for having me here. Awesome. Cheers. Alright, here we go. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to

1:00:16 I'm putting my law in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back

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