Five +$10M Ideas (from a guy who's done it 3 times)

0:00 All right. We have Sheel today here, who is by my Call the most interesting man in tech. And that is a big claim, and I'm aware

0:09 Of the power of my words, but I did not stutter. I feel like I can root Well be what I want to I think I've told you this before, but

0:23 I think of all people, I feel like you live in this Beautiful blend of you've you do things that make you successful, but then you do a lot of things that just seem like a lot of fun and they're random and You're letting you know life kind of bounce you in whatever direction it's gonna take you. And it's kind of inspiring. And Sam, I know it's inspiring for you because Sam is a perfect Square.

0:45 And he just likes to be a perfect square and he doesn't know what to do with this crazy blob shape like you, Sam, is that right? Yeah, I mean he's inspiring to me. Like he just does the silliest stuff. But let's just say so Sheil, here's like I'll brag on your behalf. So basically you have what a three hundred and twenty million dollar V C fund. You've built a business called Thistle to a hundred million in revenue, and you've built another business that sold domains. I think you've sold half a billion dollars in domains. You've done all this amazing stuff, but then you do like The silliest things like You did like an online version of The Bachelor. You d you're in a Justin Bieber music video. Like you do ridiculous. Got married sponsored by Taco Bell in the Metaverse. A wedding in the metaverse with Taco Bell somehow. I don't know. Don't even know what that is. I didn't know about that. That's awesome. What was that? Oh that's a long story, but yeah, Taco Bell sponsored my wedding. We had a series

1:32 I figured like If you're gonna have a wedding Um it's a great excuse to bring your friends together. And so I was like and it's it's an excuse for all your friends to come together. Is as many times you do it, they're all gonna come. So we had

1:44 Six weddings and Nine wedding related events over the course of a year. One of which was sponsored by Taco Bell. Because we entered a contest and my Amazing wife, let me do this.

1:58 Yeah. Make sense. I I don't even know what to make of all this. I went back and I listened because you've been on the podcast way back when I first started it because you were a friend of mine in San Francisco and I wanted to have interesting people on the podcast. So back in twenty nineteen You're probably in the first twenty episodes. And I actually went back and listened to it this morning because I forgot all of it. I I I don't remember any of this. So I'm gonna repeat a couple of the stories. I actually wanna start You brought some ideas, opportunities you see, things like that. I want to get to those, but I want to start with maybe the relatable side hustle. Can you

2:34 Talk about one of the way one of the early ways you made money, which was this Story about The iPod Mini. I don't even know if you remember the full full story here, but Uh can you tell this iPod Mini Hustle story?

2:47 Yeah. I was like a new graduate, college graduate. I was working a job. They gave me an iPod mini, which is um the iPod had come out, it was white. And then the mini came out it was smaller and it was available in four colors. Uh blue, yellow Pink and green.

3:03 And Right after I got it. My headphones got stuck in a bike I was riding. And broke. And Apple was not selling

3:13 those headphones. Like those iconic headphones that I wanted. Apple wasn't selling them. So I had this idea of like, let me make these headphones and I'll Make them in m in the colors matching the i iPod mini. And so I went to China for the first time in my life.

3:28 Just to like figure this out and I I like it. I went for this reason, yeah. I w I just I was working a full time job I took a two week vacation. And I was like, Let me spend those two weeks in China. And

3:41 I like where in China? China's a big place. You were just like I'm just gonna go, I'll find a guy. What what was the plan? Okay, so I I went to Hong Kong actually originally. Like I looked up trade shows. There was this big consumer electronics train show. So I was like, I'm just gonna go to this trade show and then I'll figure it out. And I hadn't booked anything else. So like I went to this trade show. There were

4:01 Thousands of Uh Boots. And so like I just went around Having no idea about anything. Just like

4:09 Went to these boots, found ones that made headphones. Their English was very poor. I have my Chinese is negligible. So it was A lot of like they pull out a calculator and I'm like, this is what I want. And then like I had some sketch drawing that I had made of what I was looking for. And then they're like entering a number into a calculator. They're like that's

4:31 You know. Five dollars and I'm like No, no, no, no, no. That's like Eighty three cents.

4:39 And then I actually went and visited their factories. In like southern China, Guanzhou, and Shenzhen. And it was awesome. Like it was a really cool way for me to get into Business. How much time passed between your headphone breaking and you're like oh I should

4:55 Sell headphones and I'm in China. Uh I think it was like a couple of months. So you have a job. You decide to go You're you're like I'm just gonna kinda fund this off my savings or did you place the initial

5:10 Big initial order? What how did you do it? Uh the initial ord it was cheap. It was yeah, ten thousand headphones. And I think Yeah, I mean For me at the time it was a lot of money, like it was my first job.

5:21 Um, but I think it was like A total outlay of twenty thousand dollars. Gotcha. And so do you you make these headphones, which by the way, seems like an insane oversight by Apple to not sell the headphones. Uh, you're saying they were iconic at the time. And you have to market these. How are you gonna sell Like a thousand or ten thousand pairs of headphones.

5:42 So there were like now there's a very w a playbook. quantitative marketing, all this stuff. At that time on the internet, there wasn't a playbook to follow. So I started out like Going after blogs. There were a lot of

5:55 When I was like I'll give you a giveaway for your for your readers. Uh that was that was one technique. And then One that was pretty awesome is Facebook had just come out.

6:06 And at this time. Facebook was limited to college campuses. And the way that they monetized Facebook at that time was You could set up a flyer. So like I went to Cartigamellan. I could pay ten dollars a day.

6:18 To have the sidebar at Carnegie Mellon. And it was basically for like a flyer, like if I was throwing a party I could advertise on Facebook. And so what I did was I went back to my high school friends who went to the biggest colleges. So like

6:31 University of Michigan, Ohio State, like those Penn State, those kind of colleges where they had like thirty or forty thousand Students. And I said, Give me your Facebook ID. Um, and they gave me their Facebook login. I paid them something.

6:43 And I was able to market to those audiences for still ten dollars a day. Like I you want the biggest audience you can for that ten dollars a day. And so we we we didn't know. In Michigan we did like the colors of Michigan, like blue and yellow, stuff like that. Um, and it was a cool it was a cool little business.

6:59 Dude, that's a that's amazing that Facebook used to let you do that. Just to like m market to your whole campus for ten bucks a day is insane. How much did it end up making Yeah, so um how much money did you make? I wanna say net. was probably like eighty thousand dollars. Do you plan anything? So like one of the parts of this episode is that like you're pretty spontaneous and

7:22 But but but you have uh, you know, a three hundred million dollar fund, you have a hundred million dollar year company, who knows what that's worth? But at least probably a one hundred million dollars like pretty like Epic success. But You also do the really random things Spur of the moment type of decision making.

7:40 Yeah, I just like I I think I've always chosen like the more adventurous path, I would say. And then I think something I get from my grandfather. My my mom's dad was like He was just always bored and always coming up with new ideas. He would

7:55 at the time it was different. He would like read about something in the newspaper and be like, I should start something. So like In India when T V were coming out like Growing up, like there's only like one T V station and then expanded from there. And

8:08 He was like, Oh, T Vs are gonna be big and he started a T V manufacturing company, knowing nothing about anything. Like he just was like, I'll just learn how to make TVs. And then he set up a manufacturing company. It was hard to get us uh a a phone in India. So he created this like

8:23 Payphone company. That Allowed people to just use payphones. A and like He would just read about something in the newspaper.

8:31 And like me as a kid He would actually like mail me Like Clips in the newspaper. And

8:38 He'd be like, Should we start this company together? I'm like fifteen years old. And he's like giving me an idea. And he had some good ones. Um, one of the ones I remember like I just took this up recently, he passed away many years ago, but He had this idea for like he looked up ancestry.com. Great business. And he was like

8:55 In India, people love their ancestry. Why don't we start one for India? And that that was An idea he had for me. Good idea. Wow. Did anybody do that, by the way? Is there now an Anchorage? I actually don't know. Is that still up for grant? Still probably a good idea. For my my grandfather who now passed away many years ago. Yeah, that's wild. Sam on the first episode he did, he talked about the domain business. It's kind of a longer story, so we probably won't do it again, but Uh the the short version of it is

9:20 You were selling Uh you were not selling, you were the auctionee auctioneer. For people who wanted to buy new domain like uh uh level domains top level domains. So like dot photo, dot app, dot blog, whatever. And so Amazon and Google and rich guys would come and they would try to bid and you guys were the the auction to do that and you would take four percent of the auction. You sold like I don't know, five hundred million dollars worth of top level domains. But one of the things he talks about, he's like, yeah, so my co-founder was this expert in auction theory. And I met him on a train in India.

9:51 He has he was just he just had these little things he threw out, like, Yeah, I was just happened to be on a train in India, met this guy, ended up starting a company with him. Was he an American in India or an Indian? He's German. That's ridiculous. What year was that? I met him in two thousand six. When Darmesh came on the podcast, Darmesh, the founder of HubSpot, he we talked about um

10:11 The Steve Jobs speech that he gave at Stanford, that's pretty famous. A lot of people know it's now. It talks about like you can't You can't connect the dots. You know, looking forward, you can only connect the dots of your life looking backwards. And the famous example is he talks about like how he used to love studying calligraphy and fonts, and he got really into that. He took courses on it. And then only later when he started Apple computers, he made sure that the first set of Apple computers had these like beautiful fonts. And no other computer company cared about that, but he did. He connected those two dots.

10:38 his passion for X and his passion for Y and they both came together. And um Darmesh pointed out, he's like, you know, I think a lot of people look at that and they just sort of shrug like Well, I guess I just can't connect the dots, like, you know, so don't even try. He's like, No, what that means is your job is to be a dot collector. And you yeah, the dots will connect later, but like you gotta be a dot collector. And so when I say that like I guess like what are some examples for you of of dot collecting in your life where at the time you didn't really fully realize it, but

11:05 You chose more adventurous path or you followed your curiosity and then good things later ended up happening. I think there's a lot of that. Um, and I I I love that idea of being a doc collector. Um I think there's a lot of like just Saying yes to stuff.

11:20 So one I'll just say I'll say yes to a lot of crazy ideas that people throw at me. Investing, of course, you have to be discerning. Um when I'm investing other people's capital and and so for the fund I think we're we're very discerning. But

11:33 Uh for ideas for myself or like People invite me to speak at a conference in some random country. Latvia I've been to like Latvia, Saudi Arabia, like all these countries that people don't go to. Um just because somebody invited me and I think that I've learned a lot by doing those things.

11:48 One of the crazier things I did is I lived in India on a dollar a day. It's like a Mr. Beast video. Yeah. It's funny. And I I did it for a year.

12:00 So like I moved to India, I was twenty four years old. And I lived for one year I'm Around a dollar a day. What if I can do in India?

12:12 Is that like a like is that like a McDonald's value meal? Like I don't know the like the or Yeah, maybe like a McDonald's value meal. Per day. And so I think like what I learned from that, I think it was like Supremely influential in my life. And I learned one, like I don't need a lot of money to be happy. Like I was so happy. In that time.

12:32 And like I went from I was a management consultant in the United States Like making a six figure salary and I moved to India on a dollar a day. And I I reel I like I had a convertible Here

12:44 In India I had like a bicycle. And Even the bicycle was like a big deal for me to buy. Uh And I just had so much fun. And there there's this concept in India called Jugad, which is a a Hindi word. It means like

12:59 There's no perfect Word for it, but kinda means like creative problem solving. And I think like I really learned a lot. of creative problem solving during that year. Like just

13:10 Reusing things. I learned like the importance of community resourcefulness. Wait, so you spent three hundred and sixty five dollars in one year. That was it. Yeah. Does that include rent? And what type of program is this?

13:23 Um, it w the program no longer exists. It was called IndyCore and it was like a volunteer program. And part of it was like They want uh I wanted so I was working for Kiva, a nonprofit uh microfinance. Institution. And I I wanted to live like my borrowers.

13:38 And so the people that we were lending money to We're living On a dollar a day. So I was like I'm gonna do it too. So did you just have a midlife crisis when you were twenty-five? Like why did you do this in the first place? What was the why? Yeah, the why It's kinda

13:51 silly in hindsight, but actually I watched a movie Hindi movie called Rangabasanti. Where they're like the w India isn't just gonna change, you have to change it. And I was thinking, like, I grew up in America, but I have a lot of affinities to India. I wanna change India.

14:06 So I had this like Lofty ambition and then I don't think I did anything for India. Like I did a lot for myself. But I don't think I accomplished anything for India. Yeah.

14:16 Dude, I I was trying to convince Sean uh like three weeks ago. I think we're it was like live like don't spend any money for a week or something like way less significant than what you did. And I got like a hard No. I didn't watch that movie, dude. I I wasn't inspired. In hindsight it was stupid, like I got

14:37 I got super sick. I got typhoid. And I could have Yeah, besides that, no, overall. It was An amazing experience. And actually like I have so many so many of my close friends today are from that time.

14:50 There's there's another good uh dot collector story, I think, for you. You correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you were one of the first investors in Flexport, is that right? Yeah. And But you didn't just like

15:02 It wasn't just like a traditional V C move where somebody cold pitches you and then you write this check'cause you're like Yeah, I totally see the future of freight forwarding. No, it wasn't that. There was some You did something. You just said yes to something before that. I don't know the full story, but I I I I uh I know that it wasn't just a a cold pitch that walked into your office. And by the way, j just Just so we have context, what's the what's Flexport value ish now and what was it when you invest it? Like how big of a r of a deal is this? Yeah. So um

15:31 I actually don't know the most recent, but it's in the several billions of dollars. And when I invest it, it was a ten million dollar valuation. Um something like ten million to three billion, let's call it. Yeah. Um

15:43 And I sold Some of my shares Uh, and the ones that I sold, it was more than a hundred X return. Wow. Okay. All right, go ahead. Sorry. And um Okay, so Flexport

15:57 Uh it's a digital freight forwarding companies w one way to think about it. If you have a bunch of stuff in China and need to get it here. There's a bunch of steps required in between and they'll help you do those steps. Like when you're wanted your iPhone, uh your your iPod mini, uh headphones to get here. They gotta get onto a container, get onto a boat, get from the boat to the port, port to the truck, truck to your warehouse. How does all that go through customs, all those other stuff. Exactly. Exactly. And so It just made sense to me that this needed to be digital. It's a real pain in the ass if you if you don't use Flexport or something like it. Um, and so I met Ryan at a party.

16:31 And we bonded over some really funny things, which were um He I think He's a really hacky guy. Like he just figures stuff out. He started the company by himself. Uh

16:42 non technical like outsource team. originally and then eventually he built he built up a lot of stuff internally. But Um We were Buying.

16:52 Uber credits. In our name. So I did that. You do that too? Was it was your guy did you?

16:59 No. No, no. We we were like I was advertising Google AdWords For my referral code. And at times at that time I would buy free rides from this guy in India who is probably doing what we're doing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I would buy like a thousand dollars of Uber credit for like one hundred dollars or something like that. Okay, so we we were effectively doing the same thing.

17:22 Like just advertising for our name. And we kinda bonded over that and became friends and then When he what he had he had done some previous businesses in the import export space. And so I was like, dude, whatever you would whatever you start, I'm gonna be investing in it. And and it obviously turned out great.

17:38 That's amazing. What isn't it crazy, by the way, how like so uh you know, I don't know what Ryan's worth, but like You know, if you have a multi billion dollar company, you're in the vicinity of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of net worth. So you're like it's like you're a big shot. And just eight years prior, you're selling Uber credit. Like and that's a pretty common story, I think. For sure. For sure, Silicon Valley, it's like so many people that you meet. I I guess like I I've lived in San Francisco for twelve years now. And I this is like a common story. There's a bunch of people I met early on.

18:11 Who are just like hustling And then eventually started something that became big. That's so funny. Um Sean. I think that's actually like you talked about the surface area or like all the dot collecting. I think part of it is being in San Francisco, like I moved here in twenty twelve.

18:27 And there were just a lot of interesting things happening. Like if you were out meeting people You met people doing interesting things. The way you're saying you live Is different than what you probably advise the companies who you invest in to live. Just like saying yes to a variety of things which like if I wanted to like Yeah.

18:43 paint this in a bad way, I'd be like, well, you're AD D and you can't focus and like you're s you're missing out on like year eight, nine, ten, and year twenty, where all like a lot of the compounding like growth comes from. Um, how do you balance like those two things of Being focused, which is like what every V C will ever Tell A founder versus saying yes to

19:06 Speaking in Latvia or going to China to start a new Totally company. It's it's such a good question and I I think the way I think about it is I'm probably more of your zero to one guy. than I am, you're like one to a hundred.

19:19 And so like I've started a lot of things and then mostly found other people to actually run them over time. And like some of the things I started got to exit and and and were successful. But If you wanna have like huge success, multi billion dollar companies, which is like what we're hopefully investing in.

19:36 you need to be really focused. And so I would not invest in most of the companies that I would start. Like if I if I were Running a V C fund. These companies aren't V C fund.

19:48 V C type opportunities. What's the story of Thistle,'cause I remember we went out to dinner once, many years ago, and you're like You started this like you helped start I don't know what your role was, but you helped start some local

20:04 food delivery business. And at the time, there was just a bunch of them going out of business. Sprig was going out of business and it was like it was like look like a bloodbath. And you were like, No, we're kind of approaching it like not the venture funded way. I started ordering from it. I started eating it all the time. I love thistle. And and Sam just said it's now a hundred million a year. business. What is can you tell what is the origin of this this business. Yeah. So the origin is Myself and my roommate in San Francisco at the time. We were we felt like we were just like

20:33 Making unhealthy choices. And like Eating the f fastest thing possible to get back to work or whatever. And the idea was like what if there was healthy food in your fridge already? You would just

20:44 That would be the most Healthy thing you could eat. And and con most convenient thing you could eat. And at the time, as you said, there were these companies, Sprig, Montree, Spoon Rocket were were the most popular ones in the Bay Area. where you could order and for like ten or fifteen bucks

20:59 In twenty minutes, or even ten minutes. Food up at your door. And we were like, should we invest in these companies? Should we start one of these companies? I ended up driving for Sprig. I was like let me sign up to be a driver. There he goes again. So funny. Yeah, and for those of you people who don't know, Sprig is talking about all of our friend Gagan and it was one of the innovators before DoorDash or I think before DoorDash or whatever. As like due diligence. Yeah, I like signed up to be a driver.

21:26 And To like dr yeah, diligence. And I was like, Okay, so There are a bunch of problems with this model. I don't know if this is gonna be a massive business.

21:35 And the problems are One, they're wasting a ton of food. Like You cannot predict how much food you need on any given day. And they were like, Yeah, we have this Aon model, like we're gonna um predict if there's a giants game, it's this, if this it's actually like kind of impossible to predict.

21:50 So Wasting like a third of their food. Drivers all are driving at the same time. It's like lunchtime. Or dinner time. That's When it's all happening.

22:00 And then Routes aren't optimized. So like you're kind of driving one place, then you go and then you have to go somewhere else across the city. So we were like, can we solve this? And so we set out to solve it and the idea was A subscription service.

22:14 And the idea was you have to order by Friday your meals for the week. And there are people Like it doesn't work for me. Like I'm I might be I don't know what I'm doing tonight for dinner, but like somebody might invite me to something I'll go. But a lot of people are more structured in life and the idea was

22:30 For those people, we can give them a meal plan and it's kind of like A pro like a private chef might be. And um do it at an affordable price point. And it's been great. Like the business is awesome. This will not co.

22:43 If you're on the east coast or west coast, you can check it out. Is it bootstrapped, or do you guys fun raise funding? We did ultimately raise funding. And we've raised a few rounds of funding, but not that much money over time. But it's gonna be it's a good outcome for you personally. Yeah, it should be.

22:56 Um, you know, look, I think food businesses are tough, low multiple businesses. And so I don't know what it's gonna be. I haven't like Yeah, I haven't like assigned any value to that equity, but Hopefully it's gonna turn into something else. Still just in San Francisco. I remember at one point you had said it was like doing twenty million a year in just San Francisco. Is it did it branch out into like a hundred other cities now or what? So yeah, so it's

23:19 All along the West Coast. And The North East as well. Yeah, I see it out where I live. I live out uh right outside of New York and I and I see Do I see billboards?

23:30 Uh you might see billboards, you see a lot of bags. One one kind of like fun thing is a lot of celebrities Use'em. And um You'll see like

23:42 videos of celebrities on the internet like carrying the thistle bag, which is kinda cool, like This mega famous person is carrying something that I helped create. You know, you sent us a a list of like four, five, six ideas. And interestingly, Sean, a few of'em are in your wheelhouse involving schools. A few of'em are in a thing or two that I know about.

24:03 And I think it'd be interesting since you see so many ideas with the fund and you've been well connected in Silicon Valley for I don't know, twenty years now, if you could list out some of the interesting opportunities that you're kinda seeing I have some that are like Maybe venture scale ideas and then a lot most of my ideas are not venture scale, but I could talk about a few of them. One is

24:23 I just got back from Florida. My parents um moved to Florida. They moved to a Indian retirement community. And it's called Shanti Nikathan. And It's not that well executed, but the idea is

24:36 Indian th they like this guy created a Huge plot. Where he put up like a hundred homes and then there's a community center. Where they have Indian food, they have like movie nights, stuff like that. It's really fun for old for Indian people, for Indian retirees. Do you have to be Indian to go, or is it just like everyone who lives there is Indian, yeah. But like can I go and join? Yeah, you can go check it out anytime, yeah.

24:58 Eat the food. And so the idea it's a good idea, but it's not that well executed. And I've I've just been thinking Like there are a lot of retirement communities out there and most of them are aligned to a single affinity, which is golf.

25:12 And so like most retirement Communities are built around golf. Which is great for people who love golf. But there's so many other affinities out there. that should have their own retirement community.

25:23 And You know, people are living longer than they did. So like people were still retiring in sixty five. But they have like not only are they living longer They're living longer, healthier lives.

25:34 So like my parents are still like relatively healthy. I expect them to live another twenty, thirty years. And You can build these communities where people like Do

25:43 Whatever their affinity is. And so I think there's an opportunity here in building In like building A roadmap for an affinity and then like stamping it for other affinities over time. Sean, don't you know someone in the in the in this in the Yeah. So I've looked at this because I found it fascinating, uh, for the same reasons that that she was saying. Well, first they're good businesses, right? Because you're basically taking raw land.

26:07 And then you're like You just do the math. You're like, Okay, cool, we're gonna sell Let's call it fifty plots or seventy five plots or a hundred plots. And the numbers get pretty big pretty fast when you're buying these at a you know a raw estate and you're able to sell them. But they also one of the things that some of them are doing is they blend together the like different health spans. So for example, you can start there when you're just retired.

26:29 But then you need some assistance. And then there's like assisted Area. And then there's like you need a lot of assistance and then you're at the kind of like the the the full full service uh model, but you don't have to move you don't have to like move very far, right? You're just like the community's still there. Yeah, you're you're still in the same community. You don't have to like, you know, do this like big cross country move. It's not the scary thing. You just sort of

26:51 As your body you know, goes down that gradient, you just sort of move down a different level of service to the community. And so that's super profitable when you do that. And the LTV of the customers, I mean, imagine right, your twenty, thirty years. in one of these communities it's really high. And I know it because my parents kinda had the same reaction that Sheil's parents had, which is

27:11 Yeah, that'd be I mean, that'd be great. I don't play golf. But if there was a place that had the food we like, with people that we get along with that speak the language, you know, that we have, have the same cultural values. And I was like, Well, that's gonna exist for every every race, but also not just race. Like what are other things that people bond over or is like the central pillar of their life? And how do you build communities around that? That seems just seems very lucrative to me. Totally.

27:35 For the for the one my parents did. There was a waiting list. So my parents prepaid. They put a hundred percent of the money down and didn't get the home for five years. And uh on these things that you when I think of an old home, I think of like uh like a hospital looking center where but these are like a plot of land where you buy a house.

27:54 Yeah, they bought a townhouse. Got it. And You pay like a monthly fee. Yeah, you pay monthly fee. You get food.

28:03 Um which is you know, for Indian people especially, I think a really big deal. And then they have like They have a bunch of community events. Like they they play like cards. They've there's a community center. They have movies, Indian movies going on, they have concerts. Actually I I talked about our weddings. My parents

28:17 One one of the events that they had was a A showcase of all of our wedding video. And then like I called in, like we called in and did QA. That's hilarious. Yeah,'cause I feel like, you know, th this is like the country club model, but it's just for What what else is there besides a bougie country club? Like what are the other ways that people could get together in a clubhouse and have uh you know, that that that would add a lot to their lives because

28:43 It's pretty lonely. If you're older, you're living somewhere, you don't know other people, you and the effort it would take to go make new friends or drive to places just for certain events versus having it. almost like resort style for you. It just makes a lot of sense. And we have a friend who came on the pod, Craig Fuller, who did this with uh airline or um Uh flying enthusiasts. So basically He bought a plot of land, he developed homes on it, he pre-sold a bunch of'em and basically the center of the

29:10 property is in instead of a golf course, it's an airplane hangar. So If you own like a Cessna or something like that, you could keep it there and you could live there, so You know it's like I wanna go fly this morning, I'm just gonna walk in a runway in the middle of the neighborhood, basically. That's so cool. Yeah, so I think you can do this for a bunch of different affinities. Like I've talked to Chi my Chinese friends and like their parents pay a lot of mahjong and like there's stuff like that that I think You could just build this around every affinity over time. So I think there's something there. And I like these businesses that are

29:39 high dollar value, meaning you're not gonna be able to become a billionaire, but you can make tens of millions of dollars doing this. Definitely. And very high likelihood of success. Like you don't need Like She'll told you the idea. You don't need a stroke of genius now. Any and like fifty people could go do this and they would You know, it's just a matter of execution at this point. Like if you just do do the basic things.

29:59 Like with all these retire like the what do they call it? The the silver tsunami? Like is there uh Is there a shortage of of space? I think so. I think like the reason my parents Pre-bought it. Was

30:12 They like the other Indian communities they couldn't get in. Like the prices had increased so much. Or there just weren't there weren't availability. So like They pre bought into a new one. So I think that's a good thing. It's actually a status symbol. You can't you can't get into the community, or you're just barred if your kid's not a doctor. Dude, how much is a nursing home, by the way? Should I be budgeting for like I was uh starts worrying about No, I'm worried about it for my parents. I was dude, listen to this. So two Are you gonna put your parents in a nursing home?

30:42 I don't know. But before Indians could never do Sometimes I think they like that, don't they? Like they want I don't know. I thought it was like enjoyable. I don't fucking know. But so I was I was being with a like at a financial advisor like three years ago and and it was like twenty years in the future, I was like, What's that two hundred and fifty thousand dollar a year? Uh spend

31:02 Oh, you're gonna have kids, right? I was like, Yeah, but I'm not gonna have triplets. He was like, Well, well, you're gonna have one kid and I assume that they're gonna go to like a school that's in like the eighty five percentile of cost. And so in twenty years, if you have have kids in two years, it's gonna be two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. And I was like Dude, don't make up this bullshit. He goes, I didn't make it up. I just took the trailing like twenty years of growth for like a Harvard or whatever ninety ninety percentile cost school is, and I just applied that for the next twenty years. And that's just how I came up with it. And I was like baffled. maybe a hundred and fifty thousand a years. I it was six figures.

31:37 And now that I'm realizing with old people homes or nursing homes I'm pretty sure that some of'em are ten and twenty thousand dollars a month today. That's right. That's how much it costs. Which is it's S insane, I guess. Uh so like what am I gonna have to pay if my parents eventually want to do this? You know, is that are we talking like half a million dollars a year?

31:58 It's not that high, uh, but you know, the you can the like There's a range. So you can do a three thousand dollar a a month bed, you could do an eight thousand dollar a month bed, you could do fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, depending on if you want to go basically the Ritz Carlton of the Is twenty thousand the fanciest. I I I don't um there's no upper end to anything in life, right? You can spend an infinite amount of money if you if you decide to. Um, but I would say like you like nice places can be yeah, ten, fifteen thousand dollars a month. But also some of these are covered by insurance. Some of these are not. Some of this out of pocket, right? There's a whole bunch of different factors. I know that in also different cultures, like I said, shame on you, just kind of joking, but in Indian culture, it kinda is like that. Like there's an expectation culturally that either the parents move in with you or they're gonna have their own house and you're gonna have in home care for them. So there's all these different ways that you can do care for elders.

32:46 It could be that they're in a uh you know, a a nursing home or a a senior facility. Or could be that you're paying for somebody to come to their house every day and help them manage day to day life at their house, which is obviously gonna be a different cost. Um, you know, my grandparents, for example, they have their own house. And they have basically round the clock somebody come like like a kind of a nurse that basically lives in their house that just helps them with everyday things to just function in their own home because that's what was comfortable for them. That's cool.

33:14 I think for all those. Any diff any of those different types of things, like being in the same place with the community makes sense because like Your grandparents may not need that one person full time. They might, but like other people might want a fractional one.

33:28 And It's so much easier if that person, like, lives in the community or like comes to the community and can serve many people at once. A bunch of people have tried this for like Young twenty somethings after college. It's like an after college community, blah, blah, blah. But this is way better because people are gonna be in these for like thirty plus years. Exactly. And they have money actually versus that twenty something. Yeah, they might spend one or two years after after college doing this in a big city, but then they're gonna kinda graduate out of it. So you're gonna have this crazy churn all the time. I like your model better. All right, well what's another opportunity? What's another idea you got? Go to the Yelp one.

34:00 Okay, so the idea is Yep, for professional services. So And then I I I originally had this idea, I think Before Sam before Sam put out Sam's list, but

34:12 The idea is Why is it so hard to know like which insurance brokers are good, which lawyers, which financial planners, which accountants? Like How do I know who's good and is gonna serve my needs? And like there should be a site for that and it's easily monetizable.

34:28 So I can give you guys an update. So Sean, uh ten or eight months ago I created this thing called Samsus. Samsus.co. Um And it was like Yelp for accountants. And Um I just did it because I needed an accountant. And I found an accountant, by the way, on the website. So it worked. Um

34:44 We it it's it hasn't like taken off. This year it did ninety nine thousand dollars in revenue and a little bit of profit, and we have someone who's working on it. But what we're changing over is making it s we're we're adding like a financial advisor category. But I completely agree with you of like having these review sites for professional services is necessary. Everyone is begging us, by the way. If anyone wants to do this, go for it. Everyone's begging us for SAMS list, but for agencies.

35:13 Um, I don't know anything about agencies, uh so I don't like I don't know anything about that space. But That is one thing that people have been begging uh us for is to have an agency category. But I think that's just because I have a lot of agency owners who follow me on Twitter. No, but I I think if you look on Twitter, like people are constantly posting like, hey, I need help with this. Can can anyone recommend an agency? I I feel like like we have A website designer that I really like.

35:37 And I feel like Once every couple weeks. I'm recommending him to somebody. And like there should be a place where you could just search and find

35:45 Like I'm looking for an agency. I'm willing to spend X X to Y And Yeah, it it should be a site that that does everything. And

35:55 Maybe Sam's list is that. It's fucking hard to pull these off, by the way. It's hard. Here's why they're hard. Like what we found was like we had a lot of like mom and pop accountants on the website. And like you're basically imagine like so what Sean did with Milk Road and what I did uh what I did with the hustle was we'd have advertisers, but the ideal situation is you have advertisers who are spending tens or hundreds of thousands, or once the hustle got to a certain size, sometimes they're spending millions of dollars a year. But when you're working with like a mama pop account accountant, I'm basically selling packages for like five hundred dollars. And you're like the mob, like knocking on their door, like hey, you got my money. You know what I mean? And it like you know, like the client hasn't paid yet, so I don't have the money yet, but I promise I'll get it to you next week. Like it becomes a little bit of a game like that. And so if you're gonna do it, the ideal situation is that you're doing it. Accountants are basically a lot of them are like mob and pop organizations. It's it's a pretty bad uh group to sell to.

36:51 But like for it whatever organization or industry you want to do this for, it has to be where they're already spending a lot of money and it's bigger companies who can write bigger checks. Otherwise they're just gonna end up like Yelp. Have you guys ever known like the the joke in San Francisco when we lived there Was Yelp is where you go to learn how to do sales because it's such a hard sales job. And all they they would hire anyone with a pulse and they would be like all right, here's forty grand a year and then you get commission, but if you hit your own target earnings, you're gonna make two hundred grand a year, you're gonna be so rich. And they find out that they're having to go like get an ice cream stop shop to give them like nine hundred dollars. And wasn't it more like threats than sales even? It was like oh This review's really hurting you, wouldn't you?

37:29 Don't you just wish that would go away? Yeah. I might be able to make that go away. I I never found any evidence of that actually happening, though. Like People have been like Provide me evidence. And I don't think I don't think there's actual evidence of that happening.

37:44 There is with the better business burea, by the way, but but not with the Elk, from what I can tell. What where did that come from? I came from business owners complaining about it. Who else would put that story out there? Well So people have said like, okay, if there's any proof of Yelp saying

38:02 Pay me money and you'll get a better review or that review will get Not send it to me and then nobody has ever sent it. Fair enough, fair enough. All right, what are what are the other what's this pearly whites one? You got my attention? Okay, so this is my wife's idea. There's something called the dry bar.

38:16 Where you could just go. Gotta blow dry. Of your hair. It's like kind of like an in and out. thing twenty minutes and and you get your blow dry.

38:24 Um My wife feels like She would like to get her teeth cleaned more than the twice a year. that you're able to with a dentist on insurance.

38:34 And so the idea is You go to a place And all they do is clean your teeth. They don't do any they don't do x rays, they don't do anything else. You're in and out twenty minutes. Hundred bucks, hundred twenty bucks, something like that. And she would do that like every couple of months.

38:50 And that's the idea. So she likes getting her teeth cleaned. She likes getting teeth cleaned with I I think is weird. Like I don't But she does. And I I I could see people doing it like, Oh, I'm Going to an event, like I'm gonna get my hair done, I'm gonna get my teeth done. Teeth cleaned.

39:06 Well, I like the unbundling of like the dental checkup, right? It's like what's the What is the one part that people kind of would want the most or need the most often that if you separate it out of your normal dental kind of cycles, there might be just like a market for people who just want this. I kinda buy that, but I I thought it would be teeth whitening, not cleaning. That's part of it also. And and actually like you probably make more money on the whitening side. But what you could do is actually like

39:31 You standardize and like have a really nice looking space. And dentists would franchise this. And they'd be like, Oh, I'm a dentist. I can open one of these. You need to have dental hygienists and and a dentist in some states you need to have a dentist there.

39:45 Um, but it doesn't have to be like they don't have to be doing the work. They just have to be there. Right. Dude, I went to my dentist and he had this Fine. But like it stood out because everything in the dentist office looked like a dentist office. It just looked like mom and poppy.

40:00 And then there was one sign that looked really nice. And this one sign was basically advertising Kind of what you're describing. It was like a Twenty minute. Teeth whitening. for like eighty five bucks or whatever it was. Some some dollar amount.

40:13 And I was like, What is this? Is this yours? And he's like, Oh actually Yeah there's like this company that made this service that then we can then sell to our customers and they provide like the marketing and the name of this and they're trying to popularize this. But we just get incremental revenue because we're able to upsell this essentially. And I was like, Oh, that's it's basically like the Hunt Brothers pizza model.

40:36 What they did for gas stations. They're like, Hey, here's a here's a pizza shop inside your gas station. Somebody's doing this for dental offices where they're putting in this like Teeth whitening upsell program. And i I was like, it's kinda wor I get I get it. It it works'cause otherwise You know the dentist offers like you know

40:54 fifteen hundred services if you really wanted to, you could go and ask them about it. What's it called? I don't remember the name of this one, but I it I don't think it was I don't know how popular this is, but I remember just thinking, oh, this makes sense. I could see why. It's a win for the dentist. It's a win for this company. And I can see why consumers would be when you're just sitting there trapped in the chair, literally like strapped into the chair, it's the first thing you see in front of you. You stare at that thing for fifteen minutes and you're looking at this before and after photo and you're like, Yeah, cool, add that on. I'll take that. I'll take the whites.

41:26 Speaking of Hunt Brothers, another idea. And this is uh One of my best friends is doing this and I I invested but um It's called Pizzeria Luna. And the idea is

41:35 When people go to hotels They Most often order pizza. Like mid range hotels, people order pizza. Constantly dominators coming in.

41:45 The idea was What if we gave you the ability to sell a high quality pizza? And originally it was like We'll give you the oven. And the pizza that's like hand tossed made in Italy, actually.

41:57 Shipped over from Italy. Tastes amazing. And uh and so a lot of hotels use Pizzeria Dolina. And then we have the table tents and all that other stuff. Dude, this is a great idea.

42:09 It's just Hunt Hunt Brothers. But for hotels. And Italian.

42:14 Is it working? It's working, yeah. It's been pretty successful. It's still fairly early. But um It's it's doing really well. And what's the hard part about this? Because like um, you know, the Hunt Brothers thing, I think they started out doing wholesale ingredients, so they already had like a ton of infrastructure.

42:30 in place where they were already selling, you know, does and all that stuff to Yeah. you know, pizza shops all around the the place and that's why they were able to like just take the next logical step and create their own brand and then provide those same ingredients to the To the um

42:44 The gas station owners. Is this really hard to spin up or was this actually like, you know? Pretty doable. I mean, it it's complicated. Like my friend is on a plane to Italy all the time. Like he wanted to make sure it was like Super high quality, something the hotels felt really proud to offer. Wait, but why I don't think I could tell if this pizza's from Italy.

43:03 That's it. Like w would my taste buds know the difference between a Kentucky and you're like, Yeah, this is not cheap pizza. It's not like Italy, like is that you don't have like um You know how like Florida has like Hollywood, Florida? Like it's a small town. Yeah. Italy, Wisconsin. Yeah. No, it turns out like the the ingredients like it just does taste better.

43:28 Like they know how to do it there. It's actually it so y what you're probably thinking is like Isn't it expensive to bring it over here? It's actually not. It's kind of worth it. And they have the experience and know how It's actually made like near

43:39 Naples. Which is where pizza comes from. Dude, my dad, I remember when we were a kid, he saw this pizza place and the sign just said hand toss pizza and there was like a guy in the window tossing. And my dad wouldn't shut up about the hand tossed pizza for like, you know, a year. And uh these things just work. I don't know why. There's something to it. If it says world's greatest cup of coffee, I buy it every single time. Oh, totally. That shit always works on me. Do you guys know the Grey Goose story? Yeah. The taller bottles.

44:05 The taller bottles, but also so the so the guy who started Grey Goose started it, by the way, when he was in his like seventies. He was like in his he was like seventy years old and decided to start a startup. Was he successful? So he all before that. He had created um Jaegermeister. Not created, but he had brought Jaegermeister to the US and made it popular. So like the Jaegermeister story was He's out one night.

44:26 Alright, he was like part of the family alcohol business, his wife's his his wife's parents business. And then they get in a fight, they kick him out. And he's like, All right, fuck this, I gotta do something. And he's out one night. He sees people, he sees a German like group of friends sipping This like weird cough syrup looking thing and it was Jägermeister and it was like a after dinner type of thing.

44:48 And he's like, What is that? He inquires about it, he figures it out. And he decides I'm gonna become the US importer of this thing called Jägermeister. But to make it popular what he did was He created the Jaeger Bomb and got like Jaegerettes, the girls who would go around bars pouring the stuff down college kids' throats, and he made it the party drink.

45:07 So Yeager becomes this like Big drink. He's successful. Now he's in his seventies and he's like, All right. I'm gonna start a new one. I'm gonna start a vodka company. And he basically says, I'm gonna do two things differently. First he goes we need to source the vodka.

45:20 And I go, Great, we're on our next flight out to Moscow. And he goes, No, we're not doing Russian vodka. That's where vodka comes from. He goes. Go to France? And find me vodka. They go, there's no vodka in France. He goes go to France and find me vodka because

45:34 If I told you this is French vodka, it just makes that dirty Russian vodka look like crap. And so they're like, but what if it's not better? He goes, I said it's French vodka. That means it's better. And so he sends one group there and he tells the other group, he goes, Go f go to the um bar right now. And buy the most expensive vodka that there is. Bring all the bottles here. And they bring all the bottles and he's basically like he lines them all up.

45:58 And he goes, Cool. Whatever the t what's the most expensive vodka? It was like absolute at the time. He's like, Cool, uh we're gonna be thirty percent more expensive than whatever the most expensive one is. And um what uh that's their bottle? Okay, it's this fat bottle. We're gonna be a tall bottle. And then he got the he commissioned somebody to make it and they did the frosted glass and he's like, That's it. That looks expensive as hell.

46:20 And he created Grey Goose off of this very simple concept. It was like either Italian or French. Vodka. put in this expensive tall A frosted glass bottle. It's so tall it wouldn't even fit on the shelves. So you had to put it on the top shelf. Because if you put it on the middle shelf it wouldn't fit. It was too tall. So it had to become top shelf like vodka by

46:39 By de by default, because it was so tall. Isn't that amazing? It's interesting'cause it's basically like a commodity. Like it's all it's all pretty much the same. It's hard for people to distinguish. Uh I have a friend who started a vodka brand.

46:53 Um And The bottle. Cost more than the And it was like a premium brand.

47:02 Yeah. Dude, it seems like a it seems like um Like a horrible business to be in. It seems like really challenging. Alcohol in particular is tough because of the regulatory environment. It's different state by state what you can sell and you have to get licensed and all this stuff. It it is challenging. Nice.

47:20 Um do wanna do another one? Yeah, what else yeah, what else you excited about, Shield, that you think somebody could go do? I think something I want in my life is like a school for AI tools. So like Maybe you could franchise it, um, but

47:34 For me, like right now, I would pay a few hundred bucks to go to a class like half a day just to become a better photographer, iPhone photographer. And like show me how to edit things and like make fun funny things on the internet. Memes or whatever. Same thing for video.

47:48 And I think the same is true for many other products that you can use like AI or software for. So it's like a software school. Um in person. Coupement ventures for you like Just other to other tools that are useful in your life. Exactly. Yeah.

48:02 It's for the right. It can be for adults. I think start for start with adults. And then also kids. Sean, he was telling me before this, he was like uh you know, I'm trying to hire this person to teach me how to do like video editing and use AI and I was like Two things. One, Sean actually hired an AI like tutor.

48:20 Which is actually pretty amazing. And then also you went on this big rant. It's probably the greatest. In terms of like Eke Guy of like what the world wants, what Sean's good at, what he's passionate about, and like what the world's willing to pay for, like him creating like uh you know another full sale university, it it's quite aligned. Oh yeah, I had this idea well, first I did I did an AI tutor, mostly just because

48:46 I've realized that Coaches are just an absolute life hack. Once you get some money, it's like A luxury that doesn't actually cost that much. But adds a lot of value to your life. And so now anytime I want want to do something, my first stop is

49:01 Who's a coach I can hire? That will speed up my learning curve, be a forcing function because they're gonna show up and it's gonna like force me to actually stick to this hobby. Um And yeah, get better faster. How do you find him?

49:14 Uh with this I just tweeted it out. And I was like, Hey, who could I I'm willing to pay five hundred dollars an hour for somebody who's gonna Um, you learn all the new stuff that's going on in AI. And then I want to sit with you for ninety minutes every Wednesday. And I want you to um Tell me what's going on, but also like

49:31 Like teach like tr like I'm hands on keyboard. struggling trying to do the thing'cause that way I'll like actually learn how to do it. And um it's been kind of amazing, to be honest. Still doing it? Uh, we're still doing it kinda shifted a little bit, like other friends wanted to join. So I invited a couple other friends and so it's kind of a group thing now.

49:49 And um Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So uh that's that's been great on the AI side. But just in general, I'm a big like I I'm it's ic it's iconical now. How

50:02 How my first answer to everything is to get a coach. And um, but whatever, I'm gonna keep doing it till it doesn't work and it's w it's worked at everything. Did we hired a we hired an organizational coach to come and teach us how to like organize a closet. Like I'm so on board with Oh my God. We pay so much to our organizer. We don't have a coach, we just have an organizer who comes in. And

50:23 She is doing so well. She reach she last time she was here, which was like Two weeks ago, which is because you're all the time organizing something. Um She was like oh my client from San Francisco is Flying me. I'm gonna go

50:36 Organized their new place in Switzerland. So she's like this thing going, or like It's an incredible business. I I mean it's not like a huge business, but She's she's got people under her and stuff now. Is it just like magic? Like is your house just like incredible now? I think it's fine. My wife loves it, so we do.

50:53 I have a friend that just bought a home. They moved in. It's huge house, like eight thousand square feet. They paid this service twenty five thousand dollars. To be there before like to map out where everything like it was like you know, like starting from scratch. To like be there to map it all out, to buy the storage supplies and then to put the labels and to come up with the strategy. It was twenty five grand. That's a lot. It's it's a lot.

51:15 I think we paid I I don't remember I don't know how much we paid total because I don't see it because if I saw it it would drive me crazy. But I do remember The kitchen was a couple thousand dollars. Do you uh do you have the like Indian uh frugality gene? Or are you like

51:32 Okay. You're not a good spender. I'm not a good spender. And it's like my lifestyle hasn't changed that my net worth has increased. quite dramatically over the past decade. And my my lifestyle hasn't changed. I'm always looking for a deal.

51:46 Like anything I buy, I'm going to slick deals first. I've like Got the credit card points thing down, like all this stuff that shouldn't I shouldn't be doing is like Stupid optimization, but for me it's kind of a game and I love it.

51:59 What are the Give us a quick credit card tip. What do you what's your credit card stack? Uh, because I don't want to do the research, but I might just piggyback off you. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. So um I use the US Bank smartly card. It's four percent on everything. And if you just want a single card, that's the card to go off of. You as smartly, that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah.

52:18 It's four percent at everything. By the way. I use it on my taxes. So Yeah. Wait, what?

52:25 I pay one point eight two percent to the government to use my credit card and then I get four percent back from US Bank. It's just like I'm getting two percent back on my taxes. I could use that for like Facebook ad spend. I could use it for anything. Yeah, exactly. Is there like a limit or is it unlimited? Just your credit limit.

52:42 Um. Yeah, It's called US Bank Smartly. And you have to have You have to have a hundred thousand dollars with US Bank.

52:52 But what I did is I just have a brokerage account with a single stock. And that's my hundred thousand dollars at US Bank. It's a great deal. Like they they're losing money on me for sure. Dude, on one hand I'm like, This is sick, I gotta do this. And then on the other hand I'm like, I Just like you know, I don't know. Setting it out. Dude, four percent is pretty legit. I went through a lot of hoops to get two point six from Bank of America.

53:15 And uh so now you're just shitting on that. But this is this is way better. This is way better. I also you also tweet all types of stuff. Like the other day you're like does Robin Hood give like four percent? Yeah, so Robin Hood Robin Hood has a card that gives three percent cash back on everything. And then right now they have a promo where it's like four percent or five percent. It was five percent if you Put twenty five thousand dollars into a Robin Hood brokerage. Dude, it's kind of actually interesting because if you are a really big company or you're spending a lot

53:43 Couldn't the difference between zero percent and four percent like have a meaningful impact on your margin? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean if you're buying Facebook ads for b like Could be really massive for you. Yeah.

53:55 Even just my taxes, getting two percent back on my taxes is, you know, many thousands of dollars is pretty sweet. That's crazy. It's like free money. I know a guy who um Well, I I I could say it actually. His name's um David Hauser. He did a podcast, so uh it's public. But he sold his company Grasshopper for I think a hundred and twenty five million dollars and he uh he's like you know, famously he's m he's a friend of mine. He's like famously frugal and like, you know, whatever. And he was like

54:22 convinced American Express to let him pay his tax bill, which on a hundred million dollar sale, I I don't know what that would be, thirty six to forty million dollar something. And he was like, I now have unlimited basically like unlimited flying like for the next he's like for the next four he's like for the next like thirty years. I ball out on on flying and I don't have to pay for a thing. Uh and and and he paid with his You know, forty million dollar tax bill on Amex. The one thing, um

54:49 Speaking of miles, so like One thing I don't want to do is accumulate a lot of miles. I already have more miles than I need. And like people are like, Oh Well, you're getting four percent, but I'm actually getting five percent because I get miles and miles are worth Two point three cents to me because

55:03 But the and then I look into it and they're like, How is it worth that much to you and you're you're like Flying on some random time of the day. On a business class flight, but it's that's not the flight I wanna take. Just give me cash back and I'll I'll I'll buy my own shit. Right. Also don't miles inflate at some like insane inflation rate plus You don't actually use all your miles. So even exactly. In theory, every point is worth X. You're never going to use a hundred percent of your points. So you have to discount back off that. Exactly. So for me cashback is king.

55:30 Dude, I know a guy in Hampton, by the way, who ha who is a two person company and he spends ten million a year on Facebook ads or something and he's like, I got all these miles and so I just I was like, Hey book a fight for me and I'll just send you the money. And I got you know, I uh I bought four first class tickets to Europe and I got probably a thirty percent discount because of it. It was like awesome significant savings for me. Do you have any other good uh financial

55:55 wins or hacks. So you got the four percent cash back card. Is there anything else that like is a needle mover? Actually I've started using Robin Hood for a lot of stuff. So Robin Hood had this thing where and they they continue to have it. Where Um That's dangerous.

56:08 I don't think it's dangerous. Robin's a big company. They're they're Making lots of money. I I'm I'm I'm a Robin Hood bull. And They just

56:16 thing where you could move your tr assets over And they would match one percent. So It's pretty amazing if you have Let's say ten million dollars of assets in

56:28 Stock somewhere. You move it over, you get a hundred thousand dollars. Free money. How long does it have to stay there? I think it's two years.

56:36 But I've been very happy with the service. And and I I I just did the transfer, ACAS transfer from Schwab. Schwab called me like Red Alert and they were like We'll give you fifteen thousand dollars right now in your account. You don't have to do anything.

56:49 You just we're just gonna give you fifteen thousand dollars. You just don't move your money. And I was like, Yeah, but I'm getting a lot more from Schw from uh Robinhood. So I I moved it and I've been very happy. And then I I have a lot of other I now use other products on them and they have a great margin rate. It's like five percent. It's great. Do you um are you like a stock picker? What do you do with your personal portfolio? Are you just like boring index funds? Do you do anything interesting? I want to not be a stock picker. I wanna be boring index funds, but inevitably

57:16 Like I get excited about an idea and I invest in it. And it's been very good for me. I've I've like been fortunate to outperform the market pretty significantly. What was your big best pick? I bought Uh like my biggest position was NVIDIA in twenty seventeen.

57:31 No shit. And what was that based on? Wha what was the idea there? It was um I I did a lot of research, got excited, and I thought there were two theses. Like I actually It was more based on crypto than it was AI. And I was wrong. Like it we we moved away from GPUs and moved into A6 for for crypto.

57:49 But It ended up being Right anyway. Yeah, so that was uh in twenty seventeen the stock uh was ranged. Thirty something X from that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like it's it's a thirty X. Hundred fifty today back then it was five bucks. Thirty X is wild. Did you keep it in the whole time?

58:07 Yeah, I've kept it the whole time. I haven't actually bought any more. Or sold any. Um So yeah, I I have and it was it was like my biggest position in twenty seventeen. And you're you're basically like a fintech expert, right? Your fund is fin tech, you've invested in a bunch of fintech things. What's your position on crypto? Are you like

58:25 Yeah. Are you a big Bitcoin bull? Do you believe in all the altcoins? Like what's your where where do you stand? Because I haven't heard you talk about it much. Yeah, I don't talk about that much. I I um Bitcoin is so Actually Looking at my assets, it's probably Bitcoin number one.

58:41 NVIDIA number two and then like The house that I live in, number three. No way, really? Yeah. And so w w uh tell say more. Well what got you into Bitcoin or crypto at the beginning and is it is it just Bitcoin or do you also believe in ETH and Solana and other things? Uh I only have Bitcoin and ETH. I have some of the others, but like not a meaningful amount.

59:02 I actually have a tweet. Where I I was like Like anti Bitcoin. And Bitcoin was like Sixty cents or something. You know, I was like, this is never gonna work. Here's why governments are never gonna allow it, blah, blah, blah. And then I finally bought in around three hundred dollars.

59:16 And the idea was I still like What people believed then, what people told me was like It's gonna be a fast and efficient way to to move money. And that isn't What happened at all? Right. And so In some ways I was right. It doesn't it doesn't matter that I was right. I lost a lot of money by not doing it earlier.

59:32 And I think as a store of value, like the more successful it gets, the more successful it's gonna get. Right. And so that's it. And more and more people are put putting money in. So I I've

59:42 Put money. Now For me personally, for my For me personally, that makes sense. For my fund, I want to invest in things that like actual people are gonna be able to use. And

59:52 Like have real impact on the world. And I haven't found that many use cases. We have made a couple of investments in stablecoins. I think there's something there. I was gonna ask you the nerdy question. There's a Uh a lot of people are paying attention to stablecoins right now. Uh I think what Fart coin is? That's an unstable coin for sure. But

1:00:14 People who don't know a stablecoin is basically it's a digital token. So it has the benefits of being like able to be transferred online easily and programmable and things like that. But it's just pegged to the dollar. So for you put a dollar in a bank account and then one Digital dollar is created, and that's the idea. Is that in order for the digital dollar to be created, an actual US dollar has to be put in a bank account somewhere. Um and so there's companies like Circle and others, Tether, who who are are supposedly doing this. And

1:00:43 I guess uh It's kind of like a lot of people believe it's like stablecoins is taking off now. There's some charts, I think that all in podcasts have been talking about this recently. Um A cr a stablecoin didn't a stablecoin business get bought or a tech business that that was got bought for over a billion by Stripe. billion dollars by stripe. So w what's is there anything actually going on here, or is this just all a lot of hot air?

1:01:04 I think there's something real here. I think like They're Transferring money internationally. Is challenging. And there's something called SWIFT, which is how banks do it. It's basically like a messaging protocol.

1:01:14 Um I I think stablecoins can make things easier. I think still at the end of the day, I think about people people are overhyping stable coins because at the end of the day in on ramp and an off ramp to get money. And They aren't that. Like I I had this issue

1:01:29 I I had a wedding in India and um I needed to pay a lot of vendors in cash. There was a lot of cash. And I was like, hey, I tweeted it. Can somebody help me get a lot of cash in Mexico?

1:01:40 And The reality is there's a reason why it was so difficult. And the reason is like Money laundering. And actually

1:01:48 Also, even what I was doing was illegal because or what what my vendors were doing. They wanted cash because they don't want to pay taxes. And so the reason it's hard Is'cause the government doesn't want you to do you want to scur taxes. And I had this convalidated thing actually, you guys might appreciate. I convinced my bank

1:02:04 To let me normally you can withdraw a certain amount of money per day. I convinced my bank Schwab to let me do four thousand dollars per account per day. And I opened Six bank accounts at Schwab. And I was able to go to an ATM and withdraw four thousand dollars of cash per account per day.

1:02:20 And I was there for the week prior that basically paid for one of my wedding. Dude, you know what the takeaway from from this all by the way is it's like that's the second time that you've said something where you went to like a major institution. And negotiate it. Yeah, like when I hear about like You you went to Schwab. I'm like Is Schwab a person that you can go to? Like I don't understand. You know what I mean? It's like it's like getting like Google AdWords help. Or gett it's like it's like if I had a Gmail issue, it's like just hey, Google, yeah, yeah, I need you to fix this. Like I didn't even realize that you could call Schwab or call Bank of America and like

1:02:52 Yeah, I know you guys don't offer this, but But uh you know, you can you you got to. Yeah, I think if you explain your situation to them sometimes. Actually one thing I do is like I know pretty quickly if I've got a good agent or a bad agent.

1:03:04 And then if I have a bad agent, I hang up and call a guy. Like You know somebody who's like going like I just told them my story, like told them what I needed. And And then like somebody walked me through the process and I I got it done.

1:03:17 And so I think you could do that all the time. And then speaking of negotiation or like talking through something. I think something a lot of people should do is realise like You can negotiate at Macy's. Like I I did this with my wife. My wife, um, she bought a Wedding dress. Uh uh

1:03:33 Post wedding dress. At Macy's. Like it was for for one of our weddings. We were we were at Macy's and I was like, I wanna teach you to negotiate. I want you to get a better deal on the stress. It was like

1:03:44 I don't know, four hundred dollar dress or something. And I was like, Can you get a better deal? And she did. She got like twenty percent off just by asking at Macy's Like a person at Macy's. And she saved like a hundred bucks or something.

1:03:57 Yeah. I mean I'll do things like Like I'll be like, Hey, um Like I don't I won't know if they had a sale recently, but I'll be like, I think you had a sale recently. Like can you like you you had like a you know, like for example, like I went and got something at Brooks Brothers the other day and I know that one time of year they do like a forty percent off sale. And I went like three months after that sale. But I was just like, Hey, can you um Can you match that?

1:04:21 And If you I always find I always prefer to go to women. Well, like the with the workers with the that who are women, I have way more success because they're just like easier to like get along with and like You know, you like do like a little fake flirt. But that works like way better for me is is for with retail just like talking to a woman and being like

1:04:40 Hey, how are you doing today, you know? Look, I know this a little obnoxious, but can I get that sale discount? Or what? Yeah. And always they have like they have a bunch of QR codes or like uh barcodes and they just scan a QR code or barcode. And it's like, Oh, he was twenty percent off. And like all you need to do is ask. My buddy Dan, his mom was like the master at this. If we're like when we were in college, we would go try to like you know buy stuff for our dorm rooms or our apartment.

1:05:03 And she would just while we're checking out, she'd be like, and give the boys a discount. Give the these college boys, give these boys a discount. And then they would be like, What? Uh for what? And then a discount. Yeah, she would just be like, come on, give the give the boys a discount. They need it. And then she would just tell them, like, give the boys a discount. And then sure enough, twenty, thirty, forty percent off would just happen like that. And I would never even think to do it, but she would just say it like Like it's a done deal. Like, oh, it's happening. Not like do you think it'd be possible? Is there any way we would really appreciate it? She was just like, Oh, and then throw that in. Put the discount on top of it. Whatever you got, like give give the words. Exactly. I think it's something like I want my kids to learn. Like if I have kids in the future, hopefully I will.

1:05:49 Um, like I want them to learn these sort of things and it's like It's also like somebody posted like what job do you wish you had? I wish I had a sales job. Growing up. And like the people that are sell selling you like Dead Sea cosmetics or something, like they're just coming up to you or like

1:06:05 Cell phone accessories. They're like, Hey, what phone do you have? And then they try to sell you something. Um I feel like those are really useful things that I wish I wish I knew. Dead sea guy at the mall. Oh my God. An un unbelievable skill set. Just an incredible skill set. Is that a scent or a lotion? I think it's like a body scrub.

1:06:25 Yeah. And it's it's gotta be like a ninety eight percent profit margin sort of Yeah. Didn't your dad sell like door to door or something? Yeah, my dad sold Encyclopedias Door to Door when he just moved here from India. It's actually a great story. He like He um

1:06:41 He was very poor in India. Yeah. To come to the United States, like he he we studied IT in India. Great university and then like to come to America. he needed to raise money. So he like raised money from the community to pay for his

1:06:54 Flight over And You had to have three hundred dollars. uh to stay in America. Like on your passport, they stamped that he had three hundred dollars. He came with exactly three hundred dollars in his pocket. And so he raised a bunch of money and he had to pay them back and he had the stipend as a master's student and then a PhD student.

1:07:09 And he decided to Work as an encyclopedia salesman. Indian guy. Thick Indian accent at that time. He was in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

1:07:18 Door to door. Sign encyclopedias. And he became the best encyclopedia salesman in the country. Did he really? Like Yeah, he really did. And he heard that. Have you asked him about it? Like what was the secret? What was the pitch?

1:07:29 I think it was just like working day and night, I think was the pitch. And um crazy enough, so he he made enough money To buy an apartment Yeah. Like a condo in India. Like a one bedroom condo.

1:07:42 In India. And that's still The condo that like my uncle lived in. And still like we still go and stay in that condo that my dad bought with his earnings From

1:07:53 Working as an encyclopedia salesman. Dude you actually have a bunch of good tweets about your dad? Like I feel like I kinda know about him. Like apparently Did that video did you see the video recently? Well, first of all, he quoted Robert Mugabe, who is like uh a dictator in Africa. Like the dad, like at Sheil's wedding, he like gave a speech. And he quoted Robert Mugabe, who I think was like the dictator of Zimbabwe. Like he's like quote. It was about treating everyone well. It was like quote. But like he was clearly on like brainy quotes that he typed in like quote on love, and like it was by like a killer dictator. And my dad was like Robert Mugabe, very very famous for his quips. And I'm like, I think Robert Mugabe was famous for something else.

1:08:39 His dad on a cruise. Like he's like, We lost my dad, but we found him dancing or something like that. He's like dancing with this other couple. And then and then so we we went on a cruise, family cruise. Couple of weeks ago. It was awesome. I I was very skeptical of going on a cruise. We went with eight eight family members. It was it was super awesome. But anyway. We we go to this tasting menu restaurant.

1:08:59 And My dad Shows up Вица. the tasting menu rest. And then I filmed him like the the people like were like pretty mad at him.

1:09:10 Yeah, I saw that I love you. He like covered it with a napkin. He's like, Oh yeah, no, no problem, no problem. And they're like, No, sir, we can see it. It's still there. Like you put something for their eyes and it doesn't it just doesn't appear anymore. Exactly. That's hilarious. Um dude, thank you for doing this. Well, this was fun hanging with you as it always is. And I recommend if you want to hear Sheel's story, go back and listen to the episode. I think it's episode eighteen. Um I think it's called like the Yeah, the guy who who you know, made millions on w uh selling wacky domains. Um, because you told your story kind of like in order there. And it's a great it's a great episode. I went yeah, for me to go back and re listen to my voice.

1:09:51 Like anybody knows. If you're listening to your own voice on a recording, that's painful. And so for the fact that I went through an hour episode this morning, that means the episode's pretty good. And they're going to be able to get it before you guys made it so big. Yeah. You were there. You were the cause. And you gotta give uh Shield a follow. on Twitter. You are a great follower. Like

1:10:08 You just do the like It's just the small things in life. Like you just tweeted out apparently do you have a couch that's like a square? Yeah. I was it's a nine foot by nine foot couch. I love it. My wife hates it, by the way. But I love you just tweeted out a photo of your couch and I'm just like, who on earth would buy this? And then I'm somehow convinced that it's the right decision to do it. I've always been curious. They go to the furniture stores and they have the the pit. It looks like a pizza because it's like a nine square

1:10:34 thing you have to like hop on like a small child and just like crawl around the couch because your feet aren't gonna touch the ground. And you did. You bought it. I love it. It's it's so fun when you have people over it. But it's also modular, so you can turn it into other things. Thanks for doing this, man. You're the best. We appreciate you. All right, that's uh

1:10:54 I feel like I can rule the world a no way Be what I want to I put my law in it like my day song On the road less travel never looking back

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