I built a $50M AI app in high school  (and just sold it for...)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/918d14b177b48c07

Zach, we gotta set the table. Zach, how old are you?
I'm nineteen.
You just sold your company. You just sold your company for how much money, Zach?
I feel like I can root
Well I know I can be what I want to
I put my all in it like a day's song. Alright, what's up? Zach.
You're here.
Nineteen years old. The last time you called on this podcast, you were in high school.
You I think we're like between third and fourth period, or on lunch break and you did a podcast recording with us in front of I don't know, quarter million people or something like that.
And now we fast forward, I don't know, a year and change later.
You just sold your company. You just sold your company for how much money, Zach? I can't reveal how much we sold for, unfortunately, but I could tell you that.
Right before selling, we finished twenty twenty five.
having done thirty million dollars in revenue.
And
Now the company's grown
Um, in January we just did five point seven million in revenue.
Five point seven million in January. So if you if you were to multiply by twelve and say like what we could do this year
You're talking about like a you know, fifty million plus uh revenue company, but thirty million last year.
Dude, that's amazing. Like, you know, just the way you say it, you say it so um
Calmly.
And like a grown up, but like can we just take a second, Sam, just to be amazed and just give the kids some some props? Like that is incredible. You're a teenager.
Who built an app with your friends?
He got it to thirty million in in annual revenue.
And um sold your company just now to uh to my fitness pal.
And last time we talked to you, you were on uh like l I think literally your lunch break and you're in high school.
Um
I know that you were applying to college and on the podcast you're like saying, I think I'm gonna go to college
Are you are you like on your lunch break at college now? Is that where you are? Are you at a dorm?
I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I'm miss I've missed like many classes this semester.
I I'm at the University of Miami. I am a freshman.
But
Yeah. And I believe, by the way.
I remember being outraged on Twitter by this. I think I was I was one of your uh your defenders here, where you applied to a bunch of college you wanted to go to and you got rejected, which is insane to be a teenager who's got a c app that's doing tens of millions in revenue and the college admissions office was like
We didn't like your essay. Or what you know, whatever your SAT score doesn't show that you're exceptional. Obviously you were exceptional. Can you tell that story of uh the maybe facing a little bit of rejection and how that felt? Yeah.
I mean right after the podcast that we did last time, yeah, I was submitting everything. I applied to every single Ivy League school.
Stanford, a few others. Stanford was my top choice that I wanted to get into.
And just one by one, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection.
And
I mean I tweeted about it because
I had a four point oh unweighted GPA.
At the time I applied my company.
was doing like I think fifteen million a year
When I applied.
And
I
had on paper what most people need to get in.
But I was just rejected from everywhere, which I felt was pretty surprising.

Wha why do you think that was? Do you know? There's no way to know, really it's a black box, but do you have uh suspicions? There's no way to know.
Well the your your post kinda went viral. Did anything happen from that? Did anybody reach out?
Yeah, to be honest.
It was actually great that I like it might have been better that I got rejected from colleges than gotten into any because I posted it got like forty million views on Twitter.
And I had a ton of really cool people, like the mayor of Miami.
texted me afterwards and we actually met up. That's part of the reason I even decided to go to U Miami.
Was the support from him.
And a bunch of other cool people like Alex O'Henian.
And a bunch of others that had like reached out to support me after that.
That's awesome. Yeah, you kinda needed that. Nobody wants a teen that's too
Perfect and successful. So you kinda needed a little bit of likability, a little bit of rejection, uh in the backstory. So it it I think in the end it's it's a good thing.
Yeah, but I didn't get any sympathy from the post. They were just like all mad at me. Yeah, I don't think that you deserve sympathy. Uh I don't think you deserve it. I I think I think
I think it's it things have worked out as they should.
Are you uh did the University of Miami or any of the um did they ask you for donation already?
The first freshman to have a library that he donates. No, seriously. They have really good processes for identifying uh whales and reaching out to people. Yeah, you you actually should hire one of them. They'll kinda help your onboarding flow. The the the university donation people are are exceptional.
What's your dating life like? Like when you're in college and you're nineteen and you just sell an app for a hundred million dollars and even before that, you own an app that is doing tens of millions in revenue.
Are you by yourself all the time working or are you able to have fun and uh is
Is the world's easiest pickup line actually successful for you?
Yeah.
So
I'd say the first semester.
I had way too much fun. I was doing too many things.
We had thrown a bunch of parties, me and a couple of my other entrepreneurial friends.
who were living in Miami with me at the time. We all moved into this house together.
And so every like every couple of weeks we'd throw a house party
And I'm not gonna lie, it was definitely
Like I had a lot of aura.
throwing these parties and the word got around the college that this is like
The Cali they call me the Cali I guy or Calorie Boy. Those are like my nicknames.
Yeah.
That's that's amazing. Calorie boy. Okay, so uh by the way we didn't say what your app is. So your app
Cal AI is basically a app on your phone where you could take a picture of the meals that you're eating and it kinda uses AI to track and log your calories. So you don't have to type in that you had six ounces of chicken breast with the skin or whatever, you know, you don't have to do all that logging. You just take the picture and it does the thing.
And so that's what you guys had built.
And um for those who haven't seen the first episode, give just the quick origin story. You did the full one before, but just do a quick one here.
Sure.
So I started programming when I was seven years old.
I was obsessed with video games and I wanted to learn how to make my own.
So started building
By the time I was a freshman in high school.
I built my first company.
I built an unblocked gaming website that lets students play games in school.
Unblocked.
It was actually kind of accidental that I stumbled into turning it into a real company. First I just built it for my friends at school.
But it spread really quickly.
And it grew to five million users through mostly me just making TikToks about it.
It was generating sixty thousand dollars a year.
by putting banner ads on the website, and then when I was sixteen
I sold it for one hundred thousand dollars.
After that
I got into the app space, started building
A few small projects.
And then Calia is really the one
That I went all in on and it really took off. It exceeded all expectations.
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And you um just I mean you're not like y you started programming early, but like you're not um Albert Einstein out here. You're you're you're not Mark Zuckerberg, you're not a prodigy in terms of coding, correct? Like what makes you unique, it seems like was the blend of
Good enough at building.
And then
gr you know, good enough or great at marketing and the and just being an entrepreneur and the combination is what's important. I think that's important to call out because
I remember when I was on the come up, I sort of had this misconception that I needed to be
Some I needed to be some sort of nine hundred IQ gigabrain in order to enter a space. And what I didn't really realize was that
You know, if you just kind of
Even if you know nothing today.
If you just give it six months of full focus
You'll be you'll be good enough to be dangerous. And that's kinda all you need at that one of the skills. Then you just gotta stack two others. And it's the combination of the skills that's really valuable, not having to be world class at any one thing. Is that was that your experience or was it different?
Yeah, I would definitely agree with you. I mean, especially now, like coding is just becoming easier and easier.
with AI tools and
I'd say my skills now are
Being under being able to code.
Has really helped me understand how to lead a team.
Like I always think that
The most important thing is the Prieto principle. Learn the twenty percent that gets you the eighty percent of results.
And that's what's necessary to actually hire someone that's smarter than you.
And being able to manage the team.
So I've I've pretty much done that in all these different areas and it's allowed me to build great people around me and put in the systems in place. Your biggest skill is your audacity. I think that uh what Sean left out was maybe the most like one of the more interesting things.
is that uh like when you were starting to build, I think you made a tweet or a video and you said uh in the next three years, I think you were fifteen.
I'm gonna have an app that does fifty or hundred million in revenue. You said some audacious thing.
And then I think you even tweeted that out and so
There's this like interesting combination of audacity to think that somehow you, a young kid
Are good enough to like figure this out.
And then also the tenacity and IQ and get after itness to make it happen.
We found that video of you in your kitchen basically when you're I don't know.
thirteen, fourteen years old saying, I will do this. Man, sort of speaking the words into existence.
Yeah, I mean.
It was honestly pretty crazy, like looking back that I did that. My plan was that I was gonna make a YouTube series out of it.
But I just made that first video saying that I was gonna make a million dollars before graduating high school.
That was my goal.
And
I always I I kinda from a young age always believed in my heart I was going to do it. I just
I wanted it so badly.
That I needed it to be true. And I think self belief has gotten me so far because it's helped me get over
So many part points of life where I could have just
Said like uh like
If no one like
I have to go to college before I'm able to do this. Like I have to take a class. I have to get a degree. Like no way I could do it before. But no, I always believed like I can do it. I can do it before. I want to make a million dollars before I graduate high school per week. Uh so so you said like I always had that, but
I'm gonna I'm gonna question that for a second,'cause I you know, maybe some of it you're born with.
Maybe some of it you just kind of came out of nowhere. It's just aura, natural aura as you would say. But uh but me and Sam, we've both been on our our little motivational uh arc, right? Like I was a big Tony Robbins guy, went to the seminars, I used to listen to the audio tapes and go for walks. And he had this like walking series where you would walk.
He'd be like all right, every four steps you're gonna say this thing, you're gonna believe this. I'm gonna ask you this question, whatever comes to your mind. And it's you know, I got Tony Robbins in my ear. And Sam, I'm sure you had a similar
Um sort of self-brainwashing where you worked on it. You practiced the muscle of self-belief. I'm curious, Zach. I don't know you very well, but I'm curious, did you
Work on the muscle of self belief in any way?
Well, it's honestly a great question. I of course I had doubts. Like in my head, I was like, like shit, like this is a crazy goal. Can I actually do this?
And
I remember there's this one story that
Or when I was really young.
I was in the car with my mom.
And I asked her
Like Mom.
If I'm rich when I'm older, I wanna do this. I said something along those lines.
And then I was like Wait.
And I changed it. I was like, when I'm rich, I'm gonna do this. And I think I've been always conscious about like shifting my language to a when
Not an if, even though I of course I had doubts. I was like, can I really do this?
But yeah, I had those doubts. And the motivation arc.
Dude, I used to be obsessed with motivational content. I still am, but not as much.
But especially it was like the year before I started Cal AI.
I
curated my TikTok for you page, I would only interact with videos.
And so my entire feed
was just David Goggins yelling at me, get back to work, get back to work and all these other people
And that's actually why I started my first app.
Which was a motivational alarm clock.
Where you could choose people.
Basically I identified by watching these TikToks, everyone in the comments was like
This got me so pumped up. I want to make this my alarm clock. How can I do that?
And there was no way to really easily do that. And I was like shit, I want to build an app'cause I want this for myself too. And all these people clearly want it as well.
That lets you set these motivational sounds as your alarm.
And so that was the idea behind Grind Clock. Grind clock. Grind clock. Thus Grindclock was born. So Zach? Dude I would use that now. By the way. So you're rich.
What uh how do you feel? When did the when did the wire hit? It's March fourth, uh Wednesday. When did I think you announced this
Uh a few days ago. Well how's it feel?
We announced it on Monday, but
The sale actually took place in December. We couldn't speak about it until now.
And so the wire hit.
Hit the same day it closed and
Honestly?
Like
I'm just gonna be real.
The excitement hit me like when they first made the offer, like over the phone.
But then I was like, Wait, but it didn't happen yet. We don't have anything signed, so quell the excitement. Quell the excitement.
And then it never felt as good as that did. And how long did the process take? And was it miserable or was it all right? Was it smooth?
It was honestly much faster than it would normally be, and some of that was like the timing. Like part of the reason we didn't share anything until now is because peak season is January.
And February and so we didn't want to really like influence anything with
So so uh real quick, okay, so let's tell the story about the acquisition. And one of the reasons I want to do this is because
The acquisition, the exit part of of it for any entrepreneur is such a huge deal, right? It's like literally it's probably the biggest deal you'll ever make in your life.
Most people don't really talk about how it goes down. They don't talk about how it feels. They don't talk about what they did. They don't talk about the ups, the downs, the techniques that actually really made a difference.
Um, w right before we started this podcast, you were mentioning that you had watched
I made this video a long time ago, actually for Sam's conference. I was you Sam, you were like, You wanna come speak? And I was like, Yeah, I gave a talk called
How to sell a failing company. Now your company wasn't failing, but mine I would say was, meaning it wasn't achieving the goal I had for it.
And there wasn't like you know just
Huge companies knocking at the door every day, s offering me briefcases full of cash. I had to
sell the company, I didn't get bought just passively.
And
I felt like every story I had ever heard about somebody selling was
Everybody was knocking on our door. They wanted us and we picked.
And I was like, Well that shit, that ain't me.
And so I had to run a process and essentially create an auction and it had a good outcome, but nobody really talked about it. I think the line shot is uh
Like a bunch of Silicon Valley like big shots say companies are bought, not sold. And I remember hearing that and I'm like
Oh, so people aren't hollering at me all the time that I'm a loser. And then the reality is that's not the reality. That is the reality. Maybe for some people, but for other people that ain't it. It wasn't it for me. I had to figure out how to sell it and I shared some of the lessons. So you were saying real quick that you you had watched that that was, you know, somewhat helpful uh for you, but can we talk about that? That's why I want to talk about the acquisition because I feel like
It makes a huge difference. Founders get very few reps, you get very few chances to practice doing it. So it's kinda useful to hear stories of how it all went down.
Yeah.
Great point, honestly, on that.
'Cause like
Yeah, going into this was my first time with everything. So
It was honestly scary and stressful and I kept overthinking things.
But hearing stories was helpful. And but by the way, you sold to a company that's owned by private equity, so it's your first time.
It's their you know, they're basically you know, they're they're pros. It's like sitting down with Magnon for your first game, right? This is what they do, whereas this is your first time doing it.
Yeah.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
The process honestly started.
Back in May of twenty twenty five.
It was right before I was g like a few months before going to college.
And so
I kind of was thinking like you know what?
Maybe there's a world where I can be a normal college student and get a normal freshman experience where I don't need to worry about a company
at the same time. So
Let's just let me just talk to some people and
See what they're feeling, see if they're interested. So I I kind of ran a sales cycle at that point. I made a list of
The ten companies that I felt were made the most sense.
And
Out of all of them we were
Extremely undervalued.
To be honest. Explain the details. You make the list, great.
Now what do you do?
You email them, call them, you how how do you uh hey, just wanted to see if you
Maybe we would wanna do something, right? Wha who'd you do? Cope dev, who'd you talk to and and how'd you talk to him?
So I was recommended
That or I heard somewhere.
It's uh you lose leverage if you're just cold outreaching. So I made I tried to get people that I knew to make warm intro.
Kind of saying something along the lines of like
Hey
I think you guys should meet. This is a cool company. I just thought of this. Like as if it was his idea. Right. Not if it was me asking him.
And so he made all those introduction.
Got on calls with a lot of the CEOs of these companies.
And
A lot of them immediately just kind of shut it down, like oh nice meeting you, but we're not interested. Some even in the email were like cool company, we're not interested.
But then a few
We they were interested. We
Did a few calls, just met some of the team.
And
Honestly, I was surprised that like
Only after a couple of meetings.
It was like very quick to get an offer. It wasn't like
I imagine it would be like, I don't know.
talking to the team, getting to know them for a long time, but like
You could just
They just some of them, it's different for everyone, but like a few of the people we were talking to, they were like, This is the information we want to know.
K hop on two call with the team.
Okay, like
This is, you know, number
What do you think? Right.
And you said the offers at the first round were low.
What were you did you just have crazy expectations? Was it was they were they not actually low to you crazy expectations? Or were they actually low? It's like you know
uh you know, one X revenue or something like what what were they offering basically at that time, uh when you thought they were too low?
Less than we would make in a year.
It was like about what we would make in a year in profit.
Okay, wow. So one X profit type of thing. So d
You just
Politely turn'down? What'd you say?
And by the way, did that ignite some
Rage in you? Did you get a little fuel from that?
Well after that
I guess we did kind of I I politely did.
Turn them down.
And
After that, I was kind of like wait.
Is my company just not sellable? And then I was looking at it and I was like, wait, wait, watchers just declared bankruptcy.
All of these companies like
How much money do they really have in the bank?
Are we just not going to be able to sell? Is this just gonna be
A cash flowing business forever.
And I kind of started to accept that idea in my head that
We are just going to be a cash flowing company and like
actually started to m move some things in place, like looking for a potential CEO to bring on so like I could step away and
Move on to something else.
And so like the next few months, that's really what I believed.
And I think what changed was I spoke to another founder who sold his company
And
He told me that will work for him. He basically explained
how bankers work, MA bankers, you go to them.
They create a list of all these companies you've never even heard of before.
And like these companies that are about to go public, they just want to roll up all these smaller companies into them and so they're willing to give you actually fair market value for your company.
Anytime you want this. Dude, your experience is ex very similar to mine, except you were ten years younger. And uh but I think it's a I think it's a similar experience to many entrepreneurs, which is
You build a company.
You have these huge aspirations of selling it.
And I've talked to so many people have done this. You go through your first process
Massive letdown.
You think
Oh, this company like they lowballed the offer and it's like
Pri uh it's equity at a privately held company that's overvalued, so it's basically worth nothing.
Then you go through this process where you got you got your hopes up, then you're defeated. You're defeated for ten days and then you're like
All right, I have to go back to work and like maybe I'm just gonna own this for forever, so I might as well just like
build the company to last for forever. Then months later, years later, sometime later, then you get the second round. You care a little bit less.
And your company is a little bit better because you've just assumed it's gonna last longer. And it's exactly like dating.
The second you don't want to date someone
Or you don't really care.
They start coming to you.
And so that's the ex this is like the exact same process I've gone through. I have probably five to ten friends who have gone through this exact same emotional process.
And uh
And and by the way, yours was actually faster. I think you said like it was like a low stress. You kind of implied it was like oh it went pretty smoothly.
It didn't feel smooth if I had to guess going through this. It felt kind of defeating.
And this is the exact same process, except oftentimes that's like a five year process.
Yeah, like that's exactly what happened.
And I I just resonated with that fact and then actually
And this goes into Sean, what I was saying before, so
Then the second time. So I was just I was set on building the company into like a long term enduring business gonna bootstrap, whatever, like
We' let's just figure out how we make it endure long, long term. Dude, you're just making you're just making a potential buyer like weak at the knees by saying those things.
Yeah, so
Uh, on that note, we were thinking like, Okay, we really want this company to last.
We probably want to think about making it freemium because any company that's been around for 10 years, that's like really big in the app space that I could think of, they're all freemium.
So that's what we started to work towards.
And you know who's really good at freemium?
My fitness pal.
So I wanted to hop on a call with their CEO.
And
squeeze whatever information about freemium I could out of him, pitch it as like catching up
But just try to ask him questions about freemium.
Reached out.
Got on a call.
And they did not answer a single question about freebieum. And it makes sense. I mean, like it would definitely be
Not in their interest at all to help us.
But
Yeah, like they
They
actually spun the conversation from talking about that to okay, maybe something else makes sense. Maybe the company's maybe a partnership or whatever. And that's how things really started.
That's so That's also great. Uh there's a moment that um in Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About the Hard Things, he talks about a few like kind of key moments that happen.
It feels like
When it's happening in your company, it's unique to you.
But then you read these books and you realize oh shit, every company goes through these moments.
And so one of them he calls like the we fo moment, which is the
We're F it's over.
And it's like you you'll hit a moment where you feel like you're just screwed.
And um yeah, but that's common and he what you realize is actually a pretty high survival rate from that moment when you feel like there's no survival.
Uh another one I would say is the no one's coming to save us moment.
And um that's not from Ben, that's but just from this conversation is
All three of us basically had that. It's like oh so I guess
We're not just gonna get a magical offer and it's all just gonna
Work out like I guess I have to actually make this company work.
For me?
Um, and there's no there's nobody coming to save us. All right, cool. And that actually just really strengthens your resolve.
And so some of these things that seem bad in the moment
Are actually exactly the sort of dose of medicine
that a founder needs um when it happens.
Yeah.
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Uh Zach, you talked about um
You so you then the conversation picked up.
Can you give us like you know
Zach's acquisition corner here real quick. Like
Um what do you think
If you're now advising the next year, the next nineteen year old kid who's going through acquisition talks.
What are sort of the do's and don'ts of how to do how to how to have that conversation? Literally like
Do you throw out a number? Do they? How do you react? Um, how do you position yourself or present yourself well, meeting in person versus doing it over the phone you know, like give us some things that you felt
You learned out of this experience.
Yeah.
So
Like Sam said, very similar to girls.
Like you basically want to
Play hard to get kind of. You don't wanna you don't wanna be too interested.
You don't also not want to be you don't not want to be interested at the same time.
So it's kind of like the push and pull.
It's like that what I what I describe it as is um
You could let them know you're interested, but you let them know also know that regardless if they get on board or not, I'm going some places. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
That's a great way to put it.
What helped me the most was that I had
A friend I actually had a couple people that have been through acquisitions.
Who were
I was constantly getting on the phone with them and they were giving me advice throughout the whole process, so
If
you're trying to sell your company and you know someone that's that has gone through an acquisition
Just having them help you through this.
I think it's super valuable just to talk through things.
Like like you said, things are very similar.
U a along any company, even if you think they're not
So
Like
They've seen things that
I'm going through right now and they would give me the right things to say. You um Sean, or um
Have you guys uh Zach, have you seen
Goodwill hunting.
You've seen that Sean, of course.
And uh there's this one scene where Ben Affleck he's like
uh talking to m uh Matt Damon who doesn't want to go work for the uh NSA and get this fancy job.
And Ben Affleck is like
No, F that. You're not doing it for you. You're doing it for me. You're doing it because my favorite part of the day is that second when I honk the horn to pick you up to go to our construction job. I hope that you don't come to the car because you're off doing something amazing and fancy. You owe it to me.
And when Zach was talking about he was like
I just w I just wanna go to college and have a normal experience. There's like all these people that are like, No, F that. You go build this company and you do that for me. You're not doing it for you. He's like he has everything that
you know, it late to my twenties, thirties, uh, that I would have begged to have. You had it at eighteen. It's so funny hearing you go through this experience because I remember when we were talking to you before, you were like, I want to go to college, I wanna do this. And
You're the you're the man. You're the best. But in our head I imagine both Sean and I were like
But you have this gift. You're blowing it. You did what we told you, which was like go for the social life, but you know, this is your
your path. This is what you're good at. This is what you should do. Like don't worry about the classes side of thing.
Did you feel when you were in college
Like
You have two different lives.
Like were they separate? Did the professors all know what the hell's going on? Do they did they put some respect on that name? Did the other kids know what's going on, or did you just sort of have this dual life where
You're trying to be a normal student.
And they treat you like a normal student. They don't really know what's going on.
It was a pretty dual life.
There were times when it was close together.
So as I mentioned, I was living in a house with a bunch of my entrepreneur friends.
And so when we were throwing parties
It was like all the entrepreneurs and then a bunch of college kids, and like we would invite our other entrepreneur friends too.
So like the actual going out aspect, that was very
Cohesive, I would say, which was really interesting actually.
I use the wildest thing to experience.
Zach, I got a question for you.
You um
You had
What is I think pretty normal for a teenager, a college student.
You had a little douchebag arc.
So you uh you you go and you you you're doing this amazing thing. You come on the pod, you're this upstanding guy, you're this
His self belief, work hard, build this app, doing well with his friends, trying to be a good student, good j good grades, all that good stuff. And then
You're like
You launch a course, you release a video where you're standing on a Lamborghini you're humping a Lamborghini, throwing money in the air, and we were like, Oh, what is this? Where did he go? He went he went entertaining on us, what happened? Can he we can we talk about the the douchebag art? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so
The guys that I started the house with, the entrepreneurs
We kind of decided at first the idea was
Let's just get a house, live together.
It's a beautiful city, it's Miami.
And
We're gonna all build our companies side by side and we'll share learnings. And that's gonna be great. We'll all grow very quickly together.
Then we were like, Wait.
We're all super talented individuals. Why don't we and this is a really interesting
thing that we're doing. We're all young
having fun and building companies, let's record it.
Let's make some content out of it.
Then it became a wait.
Hiring videographers.
And editors and
all the back end systems in place actually is gonna be pretty expensive and take some time.
How can we monetize it?
And so
That's when the idea was like, Okay.
Let's make a course to help other people learn how to make apps too.
And
Then we could continue to do what we do.
Make cool content.
And we're at least breaking even. And a lot of people's criticism on that was like, You're already making so much money, why do you need to
make more it's'cause we're business people at heart. We need to we wanna break even.
But then
When we were thinking about angles to like launch this and everything.
We decided to go the super controversial route. Like you said, the Andrew Tate it was like
Sell the dream, sell the lifestyle instead of
Sell the product.
And
It was it was interesting. I don't think it's it's definitely not a real representation of any of our characters. We very intentionally wanted to rage bait people.
But yeah, definitely I mean it worked. It took over the Twitter timeline, but it definitely started a lot of beef with people that
Might have not been great.
Yeah, g looking back now, are you like good move, bad move, what w what what's the
Post game. I think that it makes the story more interesting, but if I were to do something again
I would definitely take a little bit of a different angle. I mean, to be honest, there was no reason to even launch on Twitter given what we were trying to do.
Like the Twitter people was not w were not who we were trying to make videos for.
So that was kind of just like
Our native platforms we decided to take over, but
Yeah, I don't think it was like the right strategy.
What's um what's the first dumb purchase gonna be? Or have you already had your dumb purchases from the cash flow, I guess like uh
You're nineteen years old.
You just sold your company.
I'm you you can't say the number.
But
I'm just gonna s
I think it probably was a number close to a hundred million dollars. That's my guess.
Um, so I I'll just make a guess for you'cause you're not allowed to say anything.
Um
What's the dumb purchase gonna be? You gotta do something dumb. What are you gonna do?
So I
I already had the car, the dream car you just wanted.
That was out of the way.
Um Lamborghini.
Yeah.
The one in the video. Uh green? Yellow. What what'd you do? What what color did you go with? It's matte black. Matte black. Okay, gotcha.
The funny thing is you look like the guys who um walk up to a guy in a Lamborghini and say, Hey, uh you're on TikTok and you have a little m fake microphone and you're like, Hey, what do you do for work? And it's supposed to be an old real estate guy or like a shipping magnate and that but you're also the guy in the car.
It's crazy. It's like uh the Spider Man meme.
Okay, so you got the car already. What do you want to get now? Yeah, I got the You're a long you're a long island kid.
I mean
I didn't get in
Any like crazy watch, yeah. I'm I'm maybe I'd get a watch to be honest.
So I do have one, but
I'm not like a huge collector of anything yet.
However, what I did do, and I wanted to do this for a while.
Is
I kind of threw out where I'm gonna donate everything in my closet.
And last week I went shopping with a stylist and I redid
Everything so a whole new wardrobe.
And honestly, it's been great. I feel like it's it's all that's such a great move.
And by the way, that costs so much less than people think.
Um to to do something like that. I did that when I was twenty four years old. It didn't yeah, I'm I'm
fifteen years later I don't wear any of that stuff anymore. But like it was such a great move. I think at the time
I think I paid something like three grand or something for the stylist to come with me for a day or two. Maybe I found like kind of I don't know. I I literally post on Craigslist originally and got a bunch of applicants.
Um and I just told her I was like, Yo, I don't wanna buy like a
five hundred dollar belt. Like I'm not trying to wear Gucci. Like that's not the goal. Like I just want to look good and have clothes that fit me right. Uh because I don't really know how to do any of that stuff.
Can you help me out? And she was it was amazing. It was such a good process. Like uh I think every young guy who comes in with a little bit of money, it's like one of those purchases that
Sounds a little silly. It's like
Kinda don't want to say you did it, but
Actually is a is a great move.
Yeah, no, I think it's definitely worth it.
So are you are you working at uh My FitnessPal now?
Yes, I am. I'm still the CEO of Cali. How long are you gonna work? Do you have uh an earnout or like a like are you there for two years?
I can't say exactly on this, but
There is a period where I'm staying
Before I leave.
Okay.
Um
Do they bought they bought a hundred percent of the company though?
Like they own it now. You don't have to like
It's not like an investment that you then
It's not an investment. It's actually an acquisition.
Yes.
I looked up the uh My Fitness Pal CEO. Uh it looks like Mike Fisher. He was at um
Etsy, so you know, huge company. And then I think
If I had to gu uh uh my uh West Point like made an article on him, so I assume he graduated from West Point. I think that would be r that's gonna be really cool for you to learn from this guy. I if I had to guess, he's an operator. He's
probably pretty rigid and in a good way.
And uh that's gonna be like you'll probably learn a lot.
Yeah. Yeah. It's been good so far. We catch up like about once a week and it's nice. Can you teach us some of the tactical
Good decisions that made a difference for you.
And actually building the app. We're kinda glossing over the fact that like
You built this app. A lot of people build apps, but your app actually started to work.
and grew and scaled a lot. We talked about this a lot on the first episode about your TikTok strategy, how you basically
You know, with message.
Tons of people have them create content that would be talking about the app in a
organic native way, and then that would lead to awareness and downloads of the app.
Um
But are there like small things like you know, either product decisions or like a marketing hook?
that you stumbled into that kind of changed the way you guys thought about things. Oh, we thought it should be X. And then actually we I remember one day
We realized this other thing was the way to to way to do it. Um, can you tell a story like that? I love those stories.
There were two things here that I would say were crucial to the growth of the business.
As I mentioned the last time I came on, influencer marketing.
Is what started us.
And it took us really far. We got to about two million dollars a month.
Just from influencer marketing.
The thing is after that
We kind of plateaued a little bit.
And
What really got us over the hump, the next step
was running ads performance ads
On Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.
And
So
Invested a lot more time learning and scaling ads.
And that's actually what's fueling most of the growth at this point.
So there's a lot of learnings on that.
How much how much were you spending a month? Can you reveal that or no?
Well, it's scaled over time.
Um, in January we spent maybe
A little over a million? Oh wow.
That's pretty efficient then. And
I saw a post where you said that you bought like a
The four hundred thousand dollar ad with Mr. Beast. It's and the guest or the host was like, uh was that profitable? And you were like
I don't know.
Yeah, so we didn't add with Mr. Beast, we paid him half a million dollars.
For him to put us in one of his videos
It was basically this contestant that was brought on
He was locked in a gym until he like lost a certain number of
We met him when he was filming the video. We met him while he was filming. Oh, my my friend has been locked in this uh gym for you know a hundred days now. He's got two or more to go. And so we went and visited like him in the zoo. This was like
Uh, sixteen months ago. It was like a that's how long they were planning this video.
Yeah, that's it's that was a wild video. I think it was one of their best performing videos. Yeah. Like
In a long time when it came out.
So they were making a second video.
On their second channel, which was like Diddy
maintain his
body weight after the video, or did he just regress?
And
I we were offered to sponsor that video. I knew someone that
Like was on the team and so he helped us sponsor it.
And so they let me fly out to actually see it happen and then they offered me to do one of the takes to come in and talk about the app.
So it was cool. They ended up using that take.
In the video.
I'd say that the results of that
That right away.
Definitely was
a little bit unprofitable.
It's always hard attribution.
Because there's no way like
Most people are going to the app store directly and downloading, not many people are clicking a link, so you don't know exactly how many people went and downloaded.
But looking at the time overlap, looking at promo code usage.
And a few other metrics that we use to determine this stuff.
We probably made
Three hundred fifty thousand dollars, maybe four hundred thousand dollars.
Just from that five hundred thousand dollar promo.
And the rest of it?
Actually
I believe we were profitable long term, and if we're not yet we're going to be because you having the brand name Mr. B saying we were in a video.
We were able to
do way more deals afterwards. We had way more credibility.
With our brand.
And so the profit from those deals it's enabled for us has exceeded.
The total amount. How big's the team?
The team is
About thirty people, a little more than that. And how many hours a week are you spending going to class?
Well first semester.
I took
I think it was four classes.
A week?
So it wasn't that crazy of a schedule. It was like an hour and a half.
What what's your major? What what are you studying? Are you like rocks for jocks type of schedule where you're like I'm gonna have to art history and just I need to pass. Or are you like I'm trying to be a computer science major?
I first joined the business school or I plied into it, but I switched out.
And went undecided because I wanted to do more of
Kind of what Steve Jobs always talked about, how he took like
the calligraphy class that really enabled him to build the Macintosh operating system. So I was taking like
a VR class, which was really cool. It was like all about the metaverse.
a class on a design class to
a business class and the professor there was actually a really awesome guy. Did you know how like
China like raises like super athletes. Like they get like two seven foot people and they like make them breed and like they like set them up to where at the age of twelve the kid has everything they need. This is like you for business. Uh like you already have an exit, running a company.
I'm impressed with your decision making. Um like even just that little thing of like, you know what, like
business would be the kind of maybe obvious choice for you, but saying, I'm gonna go undecided so that I have freedom to take interesting classes that just spark my curiosity, maybe outside of my normal path of things I'm familiar with.
Because long term that's actually gonna help me, maybe. Right. Like
Yeah, I feel like so many of your decisions, um
have been good. In fact probably that's the most
Impressive part about you, right? You're a well spoken guy. You've obviously hustled, you've built a cool app, like all of that's great.
But um
Yeah, the decision making is actually what stands out to me in a way that like
is not common amongst
People in general, but definitely amongst y younger people, right? Like I have I have friends that I have friends that make terrible decisions. And I I see you and I'm like, This guy's kinda consistently making good decisions. Are you a big
Like
mentors guy? Do you have like a a person you call for a lot of questions? Are you just figuring the stuff out on your own? Are you a journaler? Like what what's your what what's helping you here?
Thank you, first of all.
Really means a lot.
I think I definitely had mentors that supported me.
One
My someone who was my co founder with Cal AI Blake Anderson.
He's
He's helped me a lot.
Um with so many things.
Not just
Business life, but personal life too. So
I learned a ton from him and
I'd say that's
That's definitely helped me. He's
The biggest thing is
He's helped me shape a lot of decision making frameworks.
So
How to analyze
when to make certain decisions. Like he kind of taught me
About like what E V is and all of these different principles.
To help me.
Tell us some of those. I I would like to learn what are your what are your frameworks for making good decisions. Like what what comes top of mind.
Sure.
Well, E V is a good one, so like gamblers obviously know this where it's like
The percent chance of winning something and then the prize and you multiply them together.
Um and then it's like
Whatever you have a one hundred percent chance of.
Getting versus the chance of
losing it all versus the prize money you could have.
Whichever is greater.
Like that's
which one you should often pick.
And
So
Using that was very helpful.
For one thinking about okay, selling the company.
And what we think makes sense in terms of
What we're willing to sell for it's
Like what do we think that EV
Is of
Like what's what's the chance of
Us getting to this, what's the chance of it falling apart, what's the chance of this
And so that that was helpful. That's like one good decision making framework.
Yeah, that's a it's a great one, especially for selling. Because you let's say let's just pretend somebody offers you a hundred dollars for your
Your business. So you have a hundred percent chance of the hundred dollars, or maybe not even a hundred, maybe ninety,'cause it might not close. But okay. So yeah, you basically the expected value of that, let's call it, is a hundred dollars. A hundred percent times a hundred dollars.
And then you say, but if we keep going, we could get to what if we could get to five hundred?
Okay.
Great. What if? Sure.
Then you ask the question, Well, what do you think are the chances you could get there?
There's a 10% chance. Okay. So 10% times 500 gives you fifty. So it's a better decision to take the hundred.
Expect a value over the fifty.
Right. Um, or let's say you think it's a twenty percent chance. So now you're even. Okay.
But what's the percent chance it all falls apart goes to zero, right? There's gonna be if you keep running it, you have some risk, ongoing risk of it falling apart.
Even if you think that's a ten percent chance, you have to factor that in. And so once you do that, you get a
more objective way of making a decision versus
Just going on pure emotion.
Or your mood and the moment or fear and greed b based on whatever whatever day the weather is for you.
Yeah, that was a perfect example. And selling for in my opinion, selling for you, that's just such a no brainer. It's a no brainer because the liquid money that you have is gonna compound. I mean to have what you have, I don't know what you have, but
Seven or eight figures, I don't know.
at that young age, it's gonna compound like crazy. And also I think people underestimate the clout that comes with a sale.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah.
That's true. He's like I don't underestimate that. Okay, so w where to from here. So you're just gonna go to college now? You gonna like
Like what what's gonna be the mindset
Going forward now.
I have so many ideas always.
I'm very committed to making sure that Cal AI will endure long term. And so I want to make sure that the transition is super smooth.
Between the companies?
And
I likely in
A few months will
Star
I don't know if I'm gonna be as open with this one as I was with Cali. I was so public about Cali, which I think was great, like so much upside, even though there was downside too, but way more upside. When the next one I'll probably be a little more stealthy.
And
I think I know what I wanna build.
I'm not gonna share just yet.
But
I'm definitely excited to like work on something new. I have a ton of new ideas.
What were the top three ideas that you were interested in?
I'd say
The contenders that
Like they don't really matter that much because
I didn't believe in them enough to want to start them.
But there are
There are many
Good ideas. I mean I just had this idea
Like for other apps while building Cali, I just constantly add like oh this would be a cool million dollar idea. I could see this going super viral.
very easily and it's not hard to build. But at like at this point
It doesn't really make sense for me to spend my time doing it because I'm I'm shooting for like a billion dollar company.
Is my goal.
And
So
Uh one idea that I actually tweeted about.
Two days ago.
is that someone should build a semantic search for your followers on either Instagram or X, wherever you want.
So that you could look through and
This could be helpful for so many reasons. Let's say you're looking to
date someone. Like Instagram, a lot of people don't realize
But like it's one of the
It's it's one of the biggest dating apps. Like so many people are meeting from Instagram today. So being able to semantically search for your type through your followers.
And then going through.
being able to semantically search for the entrepreneurs that follow me.
For the cool people.
I mean my tweet just blew up and
I had so many people follow me.
And I'm like
looking through and I'm like, Oh shit, this really cool person's following me. I had no idea.
And like I didn't get a special notification.
So even being able to be alerted of stuff like that.
That's definitely an easy
Like few million dollar idea that someone could build.
Yeah, I've always wanted that. I would pay for that. Uh
Same thing, I don't go through who follows.
And so I'm like, I don't get alerted if somebody interesting follows me, somebody that I would want to know. And it's a hard thing to exactly say, Well, who who would you want to know about?
Um
I don't know, but it's it it's I I can't give you one rule, but there's
Somebody who could figure if you could figure that one problem out.
There's a lot of people who would be interested in that, whether it's on the search side or the alert side.
Uh I'm I'm a believer in that. Uh what are some other cool ideas? So if there's somebody who's the, you know, sort of seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old version of you.
Are you guiding them to be like build apps?
Is that is that the play you still see as the juiciest? Is it
Um is it or is it specifically around AI? Is it Yeah, what what what are the ideas you would brainstorm for
Kind of the next version of you who's sitting somewhere listening to this episode right now.
So if they are just trying to get started, it's like one of their first projects. They're not trying to swing too big, they're trying to swing to something reasonable, like build a
A million dollar company or make a few million dollars from it.
Then I think
Apps.
Is such a great space to build in right now.
Because there are so many
So many apps that are just possible to build now, especially enabled by AI.
But even without AI
For example, some that have spun up recently, my friend built an app called Quitter.
It is an app that helps
Guys quit porn.
Doesn't really use AI, it just kind of gamifies the process, gives you a streak.
Gives you a roadmap, rewards, and like meditation guides.
And that's been super helpful for a lot of people, and now it's making
Over five million dollars a year. Crazy.
That's awesome. What are some other cool apps that we uh not on our radar, but just people who are doing well, people who are crushing it, people have cool ideas.
Yeah, uh did you guys see Clem? No, how do you spell it?
No.
Okay, so it blew up on Twitter a little bit. It was made by one of my friends.
It's basically an app that
Allows people to get into class action lawsuits.
Where like let's say you drank Pepsi and then there's a Pepsi class action lawsuit, you could sign up so that when it's settled.
You get like ten bucks or fifteen bucks. How do you pr uh how do you spell it? Uh C A
C L
A I M. It actually got taken off the app store, unfortunately, but
They made like a million dollars in their first thirty days of launching. Make them pay is the what was uh when Shad and I were uh like twenty two, there was a app that got released in San Francisco that was amazing. It was called Do Not Pay.
And I don't know. Is that still around? Uh oh yeah, it is. The the it was it was magic. When it got released basically in San Francisco, it was uh famous, like and in New York, I imagine the same way.
Where if you get a
Like getting parking tickets, sometimes you're like I'll just get two parking tickets a month instead of paying for parking and it's gonna like be a better deal.
And it would somehow automatically tell you before you even got back to your car that you got the parking ticket and it's gonna like fight it for you and it was amazing. Well it would
You it would scan the ticket and be like, look, he wrote the number, but it went outside of the box.
That he you know, the box where it was supposed to be in, technically, you don't have to pay now. Right? Or uh he he didn't fill this in or this w the the visibility on that sign is low, so you don't have to pay. And then I think the city like uh banned and it and it went away. But apps like that were amazing. And this is the same thing as claim where it's like just just go
Go and find me money or save me money. Go go ahead and just do that for me.
Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh, they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them.
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What's your framework you used to think of you sort of you used to filter good, bad idea here? Is it
I work backwards from the ad. You know, I think about what the TikTok would be. And if it makes for a juicy TikTok, then it's gonna be a good ad it's gonna be a good app. Or is it
I want an app that makes you money or helps you st uh, you know, stop a problem or start a thing that you uh uh a thing that you want to do. Like I guess walk us through how you think about these.
That's a great question because I think a lot of people
always ask like oh how do you come up with ideas? The first question I always get when I tell someone about Cali eyes
How do you come up with that?
And everyone's trying to think, like, I wanna come up with these
Huge ideas. How can I do it?
I think that a better you like learning how to come up with ideas
That is a skill, but I think the more important skill and the better skill.
Is a framework to validate what is a good idea.
Because you could come up with ideas all the time, but like you need to know, okay, which ones are good, which ones are bad, so you could filter through really quickly.
And
The way that I validate them?
I think it needs to be a little bit different for everyone, like
'Cause it depends on your skill set.
I'd validate.
good or bad ideas that are good or bad for me. Like stuff I'm interested in, stuff I think I could kill and like really
Blow up.
And so for me, I look for ideas that
I know.
Are very marketable.
They can go super viral.
And
I look for things that
I've personally experienced have some first hand experience with
Or I know people that are experiencing it.
So I I know who I'm building for.
Very specifically.
And there are
Um
And I I've seen enough companies where I
Can have an idea like, okay, this company that's adjacent to this one to the idea I have.
The Jason company is doing this much in revenue, so I think I can at least get to here, if not all the way or surpass it.
And so it gives me a good
Quick way of
Thinking like how far can this go?
But
before building that intuition.
You could always analyze the TAM.
Of a space
Um you could analyze the competitive landscape.
And there are a few other metrics that you could look at that just
Help you kind of objectively assess is this something worth pursuing. But what's your checklist now? So for Tam, what's your TAM size
To be honest, tan is one of those things where
I try to I kind of always look
Uh
My gut for this. I'm not like
doing Google research. Okay, what's the I didn't look up what's the Tam of the calorie tracking at before starting Cal A I
But I kind of saw okay.
This other app is making
Two hundred million dollars a year.
So I know that's like the sea like the minimum ceiling, the lowest floor of what we could get to.
And so that's how I validated building one.
But I think a lot of people are detoured by seeing that another app
Or another product is doing it. No, it should be the opposite.
Yeah, exactly.
That's prove it works. And the market is so big.
That
All of these apps can be successful. I mean if a company is still growing
That means that there's still a gap. There's still people
That are under served and can use it.
I hear all the time I was in the entrepreneurship class, people were pitching their ideas.
Everyone was like, Wait, that already exists. That already exists. And it like deters them, but it shouldn't.
Yeah, that's so funny. That is the first thing. Oh, that already exists.
Okay. So we're looking for non existent business ideas. You know, you know how few ideas fall into that. I mean, there are some that are in that category.
But that doesn't describe most. That's a pretty crazy uh mistake that people make. Well, you uh
I I I had a friend who was an out of state person and he was looking at University of Miami, uh, and it was a hundred thousand dollars a year to go.
Are you uh are you spending are you the one are you pay for your own tuition?
I am. I do have a scholarship.
My parents actually paid for my first semester, which was nice, but
Now I am paying.
Going forward if I do want to stay.
I got paid for this one and
After this I'll probably just honestly drop out, so won't be an issue.
That's so funny. It wasn't until I was like thirty three I got off my parents' cell phone bill. Like it was just too much of a pain in the ass. Sean, are you on your parents' family plan still? I think I was till literally last year. Yeah.
It was by the way.
It was exactly as much of a pain in the ass as I thought it would be. I was like four hours in the A T T store with my three kids. It was horrible.
Zach, I got a qu question for you.
We're um
What are you curious about right now? Like what's exciting to you?
You probably are you know, you're young and you're kind of technology forward.
And you hang out with different people that are, you know, kind of
People who do shit that are young
Um so I'm always interested in what the kinda your generation is more is is interested in like
Are there certain types of businesses that you admire? Are there certain technologies that you're playing with, like you mentioned, VR, for example.
Are there
Companies you think are really cool, or there's spaces, you know, white papers you're reading, uh, you know, research you're reading that that's kind of got your interest. Let's let's just play a game of like
What's been interesting to you lately?
Yeah.
I mean something interesting which
Honestly
It's a little bit scary too.
Is that
People like Elon Musk are saying all the time
That we're gonna have so much abundance that
Like it seems like the need for entrepreneurs is kind of going to go away pretty soon.
Mm-hmm. And
that money won't matter anymore, like he's saying you shouldn't save for your retirement.
And so that's like
A super interesting concept.
I already feel like
the world I live in now since when I was like
Maybe ten or eleven.
I feel like it's completely different. A lot of that is just like a lot of the beliefs that I held that I was taught in school.
They're just completely flipped on their head and now I believe the opposite.
But it really seems like
We are going to experience an entirely new world.
Pretty soon.
If these AI labs
reach the goals that they're
setting out to achieve
That's a little scary, but exciting at the same time.
Yeah, so what what do you do?'Cause that's paralyzing, right? I flip flop between um
Oh my God, there's so much opportunity. I'm gonna make so much money.
Then an hour later.
Oh, I'm obsolete.
Then the next one, wait, money's actually obsolete.
Right. Like I'm just flopping between these different extreme
Like where's the puck going? And it's very hard to figure out well, what do I actually do with my time and my my energy and my talent, uh now? Like what what what's gonna matter if you believe that
It is gonna be a whole new world. Okay, so do you just wait? Like what do you do?
Yeah, no, it's honestly a great question.
I was actually at dinner with
Steve Cohen last night.
And
He was he was gonna poet the uh like
fifty billion dollar owner of the Mets, Steve Cohen?
Yes.
It was it was very cool, very nice, great to meet him in person, but the most interesting thing he was saying was that
Right now, she's just trying to figure out how to kind of
invest or extend the timeline of his companies or ones that he's looking at investing in.
Like three years, just survive three years and then figure it out after that. Like
No one knows where the future's heading.
So you just have to figure out how to survive.
In the intermediate period.
And then after that figure out, okay, what do we do next. Did you learn anything else at that dinner? He's a pretty uh
I mean he's kind of he he kinda interesting up there with Elon and a few of these other guys, his insights are probably as uh wide.
We had very interesting discussions on
Kind of where society's heading.
With all this different possibilities and like
The timeline, the chance of it getting there.
It seems like
It may take
Well, what's interesting is a lot of people are thinking about the
The
AI part. Like okay.
We saw the A G I, then overnight everything changes. That's kind of what people are
Assuming but
The software is one problem.
Software is one small problem.
The hardware.
Like building out these humanoid robots that are going to execute these tasks.
That's a whole nother problem. And so there are cool companies like Physical Intelligence that are trying to solve this.
But
That
Is potentially
Just as hard.
And so
Do you are you interested in getting in to some of these like really, really big ideas that require a lot of venture capital and can be tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars
uh companies or do you prefer to stay in the consumer space and um
uh kind of stay w in the same industry that you're into now.
A a bootstrappable thing.
I really enjoy building products for consumers. I just love it's the biggest compliment to me hearing that someone else uses something that I built, especially when they love it. Like with Cal AI
It's it's actually pretty
It every once in a while now someone's like, Oh yeah, I use that when they hear that I built it and it's so awesome to see.
So I definitely want to keep that.
I think that
Whether that's hardware or software, though.
both are cool. I do definitely want to build a company that does have a hardware component to it. Maybe not exclusively hardware.
But something that can be either software or hardware, like both that we sell.
Sean, do you have a
a take on what he was talking about with AI and like
Like
So where do you generally land of when you oscillate from
I'm gonna make a ton of money and money doesn't matter.
Yeah.
Um all right, that's a complicated question.
So I I do think both of the first parts are true of what I said, meaning uh
There's never been more opportunity, and also there's gonna be a ton of creative destruction.
So meaning
Oh my God, there's so much opportunity also.
Man, some of these things I own or operate.
could get wiped out.
I think so. I think both of those are true.
Similarly,
Uh oh my God, I'm all powerful. I can do so much now with AI.
Also, I might be obsolete.
Also that's also both
True if I don't
actually build up skills to use AI well.
If I just think that's a good thing.
Oh, I'm I'll be in my little bubble here.
And I'll just keep doing things the way I've been doing them for the past ten years.
when this like new super weapon came out
That's also a little bit silly, right? That'd be like having an army with like muskets or something like that, and uh, you know, tanks and and whatnot just got got invent.
Um so I think both of those are true.
Now the question that Zach's asking, which is like
So what do you do if kinda AGI is around the corner and that corner is depending on who you believe
One to fifteen years away.
And um
Yeah, and and
So what do you do in that situation?
Well, there's kind of two approaches. One is you join the A GI race, right? So you go and join one of the labs, you try to build something in that space. Another thing you do is you build something that will be be
And like it'll that'll be wind in the sales, right? So there's some companies
That
Every time a model gets smarter, their product gets better.
Right. So they're building tools for lawyers, let's say. And every time the models get smarter, they're just better at build they're better better at building things for lawyers. Like their their tool for lawyers got more useful.
And then there's things that AI can't touch, right? And you're like, Okay, so what are things that
AI is not really gonna touch in the near term.
So this is like, you know.
Real world things. Community.
Religion.
You know, uh gyms. You know, things that are like exercise. Right, like what are gonna be the things that people will do.
are kind of the last man standing in a world where AI gets smarter and smarter, smarter, better at doing digital work.
Um
And so you could go in that direction, right? Like I've famously, uh not famously, but I have a friend who talked to a famous investor.
And he was like, Oh man, AI's gonna be crazy. We're gonna do this and this and this and this. What so what do you think I should do?
He goes, I think you should buy railroads. And he is basically saying, like, not literally railroads, but basically what's something that won't get touched by AI?
Sounds like you don't know what the hell's gonna happen. You should go find something physical.
That's um
That is gonna be like, you know, the l the farthest end away from AI. So you have time.
To adjust to it versus doing something that's just gonna like here today, gone tomorrow type of idea. I think um
I'm like a huge history.
Nerd, Zach, uh as Sean and many listeners listeners know, I love history. I don't know much about AI, though.
And what I've learned through history is that humans have thought the same things about their period of time as every other
person in that particular in a different period of time has thought.
And so there's this like famous story of Winston Churchill, who was the leader of England during World War Two. They thought the Nazis were gonna take over the world. They thought that um
uh the he thought the world was gonna end. He wrote, he's like, uh I think the world actually might end, uh and and this is gonna be bad. And that's where the famous quote he has this famous quote. He goes, If you're going through hell
Keep on walking.
Like you gotta keep on going if you're in the middle of hell. You know, you can't stop walk you can't stop moving.
And generally speaking.
Great smart
people who are titans of industry and world leaders
Every decade think that something bad is gonna happen.
And we've mostly have been fine. There's been a lot of blips in in the in the story, but we've mostly been fine. And I tend to think I tend to be blindly optimistic just because I have faith in human beings that like
It's probably gonna be fine.
Uh it's just gonna be like there it will be maybe a decade or two of uncertainty and perhaps pain for
particular types of people, but in general.
It's probably gonna work out.
Yeah.
I I think that's a very valid take, honestly.
And by the way, if it doesn't end up fine.
Doesn't matter then. Didn't matter for you. It's over at that point. That's why I that's like why I inv I invest my money in Chase Bank because uh of like I'm I done all the bank runs a few years ago that freaked me out and I was like I'm gonna invest all my money in Chase because
If it I don't think it's gonna fail, and if it does, money doesn't matter.
Yeah, yeah. It's all it's all over at that point. I don't I'm not even talking about like the world ending stuff. It's just kinda like what do you do with your time and your talents in a
highly rapidly changing world.
Um
And I again I think you either lean way into it, meaning you join the frontier.
You do something adjacent.
Where the more the frontier work advances
your cause benefits. Yeah, your your your specific utility benefits.
Or you go the exact opposite direction and you say, Well
That stuff's gonna get so abundant, what's gonna be scarce. And you go figure out what will still be scarce.
If that becomes really abundant, if intelligence becomes super abundant, if
The ability to get work done, you know, on a computer becomes super easy that any you know, your AI's gonna do better than you.
Right. If um if if drivers are obsolete'cause the cars drive themselves. Okay, cool. What's what's left? What's still scarce uh you know, at the end of the day and just go in that direction. I think that's a pretty reasonable take.
The things that stay scarce seem to be
A human connection.
Is one that will stay scarce.
And then also
Like
W like entertainment, so like sports games.
Um
Live events.
These are
These are things that will be more scarce.
Especially when like AI is making like
Your feed on Instagram.
Everything you see is just
Hyper dopamine optimized content.
Like
If everything's fake, then real becomes scarce.
Um and truth becomes scarce.
You're right, like with the sports things, because there's already chess bots that play chess better than all the chess players, but we still like to play chess.
Uh and w and watch people play chess.
Well humans play chess specifically. Nobody's watching the AI play chess, but we will watch Magnus Carlson or whoever.
as just like specific example. And the same thing is true for sports, right? Like running.
Well there's
Machines that run way faster than than humans, but people will still
Tune into a human running and not a machine running.
Um or even if it's a car, it's uh you know
It's a car being driven by a human.
And not drone racing, um, which is you know, uh more more more automated.
And so those have been kind of almost proven to be AI proof in a way. And so it's like it's got some immunity. And you're like, oh, okay, they're they're kind of immune to that. Okay.
It seems like owning a sports team.
Um, is probably a good a good type of investment. Whereas owning a call center is probably not an investment you wanna be in anymore. Exactly. A lot a question that we ask a lot of people who make a lot of money overnight.
We say uh
Well, what did you do with it?
What where did you invest your money?
So uh
I'm curious, uh without you don't have to say numbers, you can say percentages. Um do you have a do you have a strategy?
So
My strategy is essentially that I want to take
I I don't like investing in other people, frankly. I like to invest in myself. I don't wanna
Rely on
Someone else
to multiply my money like trusting their CEO to make the right decisions to grow their company.
I want to invest it in myself. So
I am putting most of it.
In
The S P five hundred.
But
Generally.
The strategy is I want to take more outsized risks.
On my own.
Like putting the funds into my ventures.
So that's my plan. I'm gonna take money out and put them into my own as I start things. Okay. So you have one hundred percent of a sum.
What percent are you gonna keep in the S P and what percent are you gonna uh put into your uh own company? So right now I believe it's seventy five or seventy percent, something like that.
In the S P
Something like twenty five percent that's in
The money market or
Oz actually.
And
Then a few percentage points like within those that are like scattered, like a a tiny bit of Bitcoin, a tiny bit of gold. I believe that's it, really just those four.
Places.
And then
I'm gonna be pulling out of
Mostly the
Or I guess everything when I need to invest in my company.
Wait, one hundred percent you're gonna put in your own company?
Not one hundred percent,'cause I think
For the next venture, I will most likely raise money.
Just because
Now this is kind of like my nest egg. I never need to worry about it.
I'm definitely willing to like take risks. But how much? What percent? Like in your head you're thinking
Let's say hypothetically you have ten million dollars, what percent do you want to put in your new company? Yeah, well
I mean, maybe this goes to the E V question a little bit'cause it really depends how confident I am in the idea.
Like that Elon story of
Is that um he he like
She
almost went bankrupt because he split up
His wealth.
And gave half to Tesla, half to SpaceX, and that saved both companies.
So if if that's what it takes at some point and I'm constant, then maybe maybe that's what it will take.
You're a impressive young guy. Is there anything you wanna
Get better like Oh, I suck at this today. I uh I'm I'm really poor at this area, I need to figure this out.
What's what's an area you're trying to grow in?
Mm, that's a great question.
I want to understand the full picture of the world much better.
I'm not someone who really understands economic policy well.
I don't really understand like
GDPs of the world and how that influences things.
And the building
A company like Cali I
It doesn't really influence it.
But if I'm trying to build like a massive company, if I'm trying to build the next meta
Or the next open AI, the next Apple, the next Google. I think it is important to understand the general trends of where the world is heading.
Crazy dude. We're this is like uh
You know, like there's like that story or that video where Obama makes fun of Donald Trump at like uh the press dinner and like there's a meme where it's like
This is when Trump became the villain or this is when he decided to like run for president.
It's so funny, uh, that we get to have you on here because we saw your come up.
We've now are talking to you when you've definitely have made it. If you accomplish nothing further from here on out, you're gonna uh be a a ten out of ten massive success. But
Like we're hearing you where you're at this like fork in a road where it's like, is this gonna be Sean and Sam talking to Elon when he is twenty years old?
Uh because it definitely could be. And you're you're you're saying things where it it definitely indicates where
I'm like this is gonna be a very um cool thing to look back on in twenty years or ten years that we've been able to uh catch you so so early.
Thank you. I'm very ambitious.
That's awesome. Zach, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate you making the time.
Thanks for having me, it's always fun.
Thanks. That's it. That's the part.
I feel like I can root
Well
be what I want to
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