How to manufacture a billionaire childhood

0:00 I got something, Sean. I just had the crazi thing happen to me. One of the craziest things that have ever happened to me. Do you wanna hear a story? Does it have to do with those glasses? No, but I am a cool guy, so that's why I decided to wear him. Well I know I can be what I want to

0:17 I put my law in it like a day song on the road, let's travel. One of the craziest things happened. Literally just forty five minutes ago. I was walking down the street In New York City, near my house. And do you know Honey, I shrunk the kids.

0:32 Yeah. The movie from back in the day. Of course. Rick, what's his name? I know his name my first name is Rick. I had to look up his last name. Dad? Yeah, I saw him walking. I saw him walking down the street. And I felt bold and I walked up to him and I said Excuse me, sir, I just like huge fan. I grew up watching your movies.

0:49 And I kid you not. He was like, What's up, man? I appreciate that. Also, I've seen your videos. You uh you're cool. You know, I like MFM. And I was like, Are you kidding me? And uh I go Rick.

1:00 I'm here talking to you now, like if you know MFM, then you know this like is part of the shtick. Like, did you just kill it in the nineties with movies? And he goes. I killed it. I go, d really? Like really good? He goes Do you have a few minutes? I go, Yeah, Rick, I got a few minutes. He goes, Let me show you something.

1:15 Brings me up to his apartment. This beautiful apartment. Overlooking Central Park. Beautiful. Huh.

1:23 I'm like You really did well, huh? And he was like, Yeah, so like, you know, I bought this from Harris and Ford Beautiful apartment. And uh He's like, look, in the nineties VHS were just pieces of plastic and they're twenty five dollars a piece. Of course I killed it.

1:38 And I walk and I'm like walk into his apartment and I'm like, Rick Is that an original Salvador Dali painting? And he goes He points at it, he goes. Ghostbusters. And he just kept walking.

1:52 Hm. So awesome. None of that happened. I did I did see him walk by though. None of that happened. He did walk by me though, and I imagine I imagined that that could have happened though. What a roller coaster promotions you just took me on. That was fantastic. So you even see the guy or the entire thing was fictitious. I saw him. He lives he lives near me. I did see him. And in my head I went through all these things, like you know when someone like insults you and you think of a comeback like thirty seconds later. I like thought of all these things that could have happened if I said hi to him, but I didn't you know I'll I'll never know.

2:31 Ha. Turns out though he uh that was fantastic. Turns out he uh quit acting because his wife passed away and he decided to raise his kids. So you know, he's just a nice old man now. He's in his seventies. I don't know what you're doing to me today, dude. It's Wednesday morning. Give me give me a a break here. Do you ever watch the TV show Dave? Of course, I love it. My favorite show. There's an episode. I don't know if you remember this episode or if you've seen this episode. It's like in one of the later seasons that um

3:00 He Where he's going to be. accidentally fakes his own death. Have you seen this? No, I've only seen season one, but I th that is something he would do. Well, basically h his they have this janky tour bus.

3:12 This is not too big of a spoiler. The tour bus like explodes. And someone was filming and it's like his face on the side of the turbo. So it looks like he died and his ph his phone had died. They just have no signal they're like out somewhere. And so for like you know

3:24 Eight hours or whatever after the tour bus exploded, he He doesn't have any signal. So the whole world thinks that he died and then He logs in, he's like, Oh my God, everybody thinks I died and he's like, I gotta tweet out that I'm okay and his manager's like But just Wait a minute. Cause there's all these like memorials. There's like this outpouring of like people saying how much they love him. Like Drake is in his DMs. It's like, bro, like

3:48 I you know what, I always loved your shit, man. I'll I'll miss you, bro. And he's like kind of reveling in it, but then there's no way out because you know, he's like the f the longer he lets it go, the harder it is to get back to to just like come out and be like, just kidding, guys. I'm here. Uh,'cause then you're seen as like the ultimate asshole, but he can't resist'cause the the idea of What it would be like is too intoxicating for him. I feel like you did something like that to me just now. He's like he tweets or his manager tweets out like you know, Dave R I P and he's like he he's not dead. I just want him to Rest peacefully. Rest in peacefully.

4:27 All right, I have a I have one interesting thing that I could that I could bring up. Let's do it. Billy of the week. We haven't done that in a minute. I have an interesting person. Billy of the quarter, I guess. Billy of the quarter. Ability of

4:40 This week. It's just we don't do it every other week. Have you heard of a guy named Jim Rat Ratcliffe? Sir Jim Ratcliffe. No, I don't know who that person is. Okay, so listen to this. Here's a story of this guy named Jim Jim Ratcliffe. He's really interesting to me. So he's born in Manchester, England, which is sort of like a blue collar. It's kinda like the Boston of America, uh uh of England. It's like, you know, white blue collar, you know, hard working, kinda poor. He uh studies chemical engineering. He becomes a chemical engineer at an oil company, but like things are only going okay. And then He uh has a background in accountant accounting. He studies accounting and chemical eng engineering in college and he gets a job at a PE firm at the age of thirty five. And he's like this is

5:20 pretty amazing. Like, you know, this is a great way to make money. I I like making money. But at the age of forty, he was like, All right. I've worked for another guy for long enough. I wanna try and Do this on my own. He doesn't have a ton of money.

5:32 Uh I think he had uh a home that he owned and he had like A hundred or a hundred fifty grand to his name. And this was uh in the late eighties. And so he partners up with a guy. And they're like okay, we've been buying companies for our employer, our our the

5:47 With a firm that we work for, let's try and do it on our own. And they convince some of their old clients, some of their old LPs, to invest in them and they spend about a year looking for a company. And so with three million pounds in equity, they buy a eighty million dollar eighty million I'm gonna say dollars, but I mean pounds, but eighty million dollar company that is a spin off of BP. Basically BP, uh the oil company owns a chemical division, which basically makes like chemicals. So like the commodity that let's say like your toothpaste has like, you know, fluoride in it. Well someone like has to get the fluoride. Right. Uh whatever it is, the chemicals that make like plastic packaging, whatever. They buy that unit from B P for eighty million dollars, of which three million dollars was equity and the rest was debt. So like a a really heavy uh

6:33 That thing and he mortgages his home. He uses one hundred percent of his money. He has two kids and a wife and they're like my he was like my wife like We've talked about it for six months, like should we do this? Is this like, you know, this can ruin us, this is gonna ruin our careers, this is gonna we're gonna use all of our money, but you know what, we have to take a risk. And so he does that in nineteen ninety, I believe, and by nineteen ninety seven it works. This eighty million dollar company is now worth like a billion and a half. And that's how he makes his initial money. And over the years He's kind of kept that one thing. I think it's called Ineos is the name of the company. It's a chemical company that you probably have never heard of, but to to this day or today, it does about forty billion dollars in revenue, employs

7:12 many tens of thousands of people. It's one of the largest chemical companies in the world at this point. And basically the way that he's grown It's combination of PE and his chemical engineering background. So he understands chemicals, but his whole shtick was finding like spin offs that conglomerates didn't want to own anymore because it was a distraction. He would buy it for uh whatever he would pay for, and he his goal was to double the EBITDA in five years. That's like sort of standard stuff. That's the kind of the boring thing that he did. But now at this point, he's I think the number one or number two or three richest person person in England.

7:46 Amazing. But the more interesting part, in my opinion, is what he has done with his money. So check this out. Do you remember the um two hour marathon with Elud Kipchogi that Nike did like four years ago. Yeah. Recently, right? Well, w someone actually just broke two hours recently, but like four years ago or three years ago, there's this amazing runner named Edu Kipchogi and they set up like the world's perfect setup for him. So they have like a pace car that was like perfectly in front of them.

8:15 that went on pace for an hour fifty nine minutes. They had uh they did it on a F one track, so it was perfectly flat and they let him wear shoes or he decided to wear shoes that weren't technically allowed in sanctioned races, but he was like, you know, this is just a spectacle. Let's do it. And so he broke two hours in the marathon. Well, Jim Ratcliffe is a huge sports nut. He's run fifty marathons, he's gone to the North Pole, the South Pole He's climbed all these mountains. He's like one of these crazy guys, and he was the uh underwriter of that. He paid for the whole thing just cause. He also owns a ton of different sports leagues. So he owns Team Sky Cycling. So this is the team that won the Twitter France eight times. He has he owns one third of Mercedes F one team. He owns one of the best America Cup sailing team. He owns twenty five percent of Manchester United soccer team. He used to own Chelsea, which is, you know, a big soccer team. But the really cool thing. that he's done recently. Have you heard of um a car? I think it's called um

9:07 Uh the Grenadier. Have you seen this car? Google this car and tell me if you've seen this. It looks like a G Wagon. Or uh a defender. Yeah. Yeah, it looks a lot like a G Wagon.

9:17 Okay, so check this out. So In two thousand and sixteen, this guy Jim, he loves defenders. Now the thing about defenders is Land Rover, uh and I think Land Rover is owned by Jaguar. So Jaguar still makes the Land Rover, but the real famous ones are the old ones, the ones from like the eighties and late nineties. Those are really cool. They're really boxy. But

9:40 Although enthusiasts love them and they pay sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for these cars, you can't really buy new parts anymore because Jaguar just quit. manufacturing it. And he is a huge enthusiast of this of the Defender. He loves it. And he's a rich guy. So he was able to get a meeting with someone high up at Jaguar and they go to a bar called the Grenadier Bar, and the Jim is like trying to persuade them, like, hey, You know, I'll even help pay for the tooling. Is there a world where like I think it could be for shits and giggles, it would be fun. Let's re make some of the parts for the defender because the defender, it's the most comfortable off road car. But unlike a lot of new cars, it's still got a little edge on it. You know, it's got like it's like it feels not too luxurious. It feels like a proper off road car.

10:22 And they're like, No, man, this doesn't make sense. We're not gonna do it. So he's like, You know what? Fine. I'm just gonna create a car company. That's what we're gonna do. And so within his chemical business.

10:32 They create this thing called the Grenadier. It's a SUV that you just saw, I think it sells for like eighty or ninety grand. It has a small cult following in America. I think it's pretty big in Europe as well. And he's like, Screw up, we're gonna make a car company just because I love these cars so much, but they don't make them anymore. So I'm gonna make what I think it should be the way it should be done. And so he there's this famous line where Just to give you an idea of what he's like, he said, It's the most comfortable off road vehicle bar nut. And the journalist says, like, yeah, but like those late models, they don't like feet they don't like uh fit the environmental standards of today. Nor are they really that safe.

11:08 And he was like What's wrong with that? And he's like he goes, What's wrong with that? They're effing great cars. Uh and so he starts making these cars and That's where we are now. So these cars have a huge c following in America. A bunch of like my car nerd buddies like'em. They're

11:26 known for being like kind of sparse on the interior. So if you look at the interior, they got these like the switches look like switches from like a tank a little bit. Like it's like a all mechanical stuff. And they're kind of a pain in the ass. And the truth is is that It's a horrible business. Since two thousand and eighteen, he has lost two billion dollars on this car company. Last year the company was uh negative three hundred million dollars in profit. Not going so good. Uh but it's uh it's awesome.

11:56 All right, let's take a quick break. This podcast is called My First Million, and it's probably the question we get asked the most. How do I go from zero to making my first million? And so I did an episode a little while back where I broke down exactly the sort of philosophy and frameworks that I would use. So things like Finding your white belt business. Or identifying your bear on a unicycle. advantage the core way that your two skills can overlap.

12:17 Or why maybe starting a service business is better than starting a software business for your initial businesses to make that first million. And so the team at HubSpot has created a guide that took the stuff I said in that episode They laid it all out for you. You can get it for free in the description below. Just click that link and it's all yours. Alright, back to this episode. What do you love most about this guy?

12:37 I he's got a f you attitude that I really dig. I l really like if you Google him, you'll see that he's wearing a barber wax jacket, which It's sort of like an adventurer's like jacket. It's like what like kinda like rough and tumble blue collar like guys wear it's like work wear and I appreciate that he still has a little bit of edge to him, even though I think he's like the ninetietth richest man in the world. And so I really appreciate that. And I also appreciate that he does shit.

13:06 Just cause. Yeah, there's something great about the um I don't know if s you want to call it side quests or the just because Or the F U attitude, but I think both of us love that. I have this thing that I keep running called the Side Quest Hall of Fame.

13:20 And it started because Palmer Lucky was On Joe Rogan. You know, Palmer created Oculus. We created The leading VR headset. sold it for a few billion to Facebook. Then he created Andril, the leading you know, the first kind of like

13:36 tech company that was doing defense stuff. It's worth like whatever, hundred billion dollars, whatever it's worth right now. And he goes on Rogan and he says Oh, you know what I wanna do next?

13:48 And I'm expecting him to say a company, uh like another startup. And he's like, um I wanna create like a privately funded version of the X files. He's like, I just want to go hunt for aliens.

14:00 And he's like, I'll fund it. And we'll go find'em. We'll figure out what's going on. He's like, I feel like the government's not telling us everything. I was like, Well, that would be an epic use of This person's talent and money.

14:12 And you know, since then he's done uh he did this thing where he like basically brought back the game boy. I own one. I was about to bring that up. He's done N sixty four and Game Boy. Yeah, he's got mod retro and so he's just he just does cool shit. And then you know, he he's kind of like these you know, dresses eclectically, all the stuff and I saw this video recently that It was I thought.

14:31 A more uh endearing side temp. Did you hear the the the video about why he wears the Hawaiian shirts? No. It would someone make fun of him one time and he like was gonna do it out of spite? Well he was like we grew he's like I grew up really poor. And so

14:45 W I didn't have any we didn't have any money for new clothes, so I had to wear my dad's old Hawaiian shirts every day. Like that's just all I had. My wardrobe was like seven of these. And I wore them and I got made fun of, but that's all I had. So I wore them. And he's like and then when I sold my company Uh, you know

15:02 He says something where it's like I got like I got some money and I tried to change like I tried to change and then he's like basically reverted. He was like, Actually I'm just gonna wear the shirts that like I like and I know and like This is what I'm all about. And I don't need the fancy clothes to like validate me as like I've done it. I love that. I just think he he carries that F U energy with him pretty much everywhere. A thing that he has

15:25 Yeah. I don't find him to be um A hard o I don't find him to be insufferable. I find him to be someone who's confident in his opinion. And you could challenge him and he's open to new ideas, but he's very confident. I find him like At a very young age.

15:41 I mean when we talked to him I think he was thirty three and he was like saying, like, here's the thing about defense contractors, they're doing this wrong. That's a very bold thing to say, right? And I appreciate that about him. And I used to s meet these people and I used to think, How do I become like that? But now I think How do I raise children that are that way? How do you raise kids that are that confident at such a young age, but not in an insufferable way, and also in a way where I think they've backed it up by studying whatever they're gonna say.

16:09 Have you ever thought about what do you think has Not a wealthy family, and yet they still were able to like instill the sense of like You can do it and you can figure this out. Well I'm not sure how much it is

16:25 uh watering the plant versus the soil you're gr you grow up in. So for example There's a reason that most successful people on earth. Um typically come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

16:38 You g you go look at yeah, why is um you know sort of Um dyslexia so common amongst successful people. It's like I it is disproportionate. Well, you know, you would expect it to be the proportion of dyslexia in the population, but no, it's a higher percentage. And successful people. Yeah.

16:55 You know, why are uh you know, so so many athletes come from, you know, poor families and single single mother homes and things like this. Like You know, they don't have all the training and the advantages and the best gear and the best anything, right? But like they have the one thing that can't be bought, which is like this sort of insatiable hunger. And so I think that Confidence.

17:13 It's a byproduct of The adventure and adversity you've faced in your life. So you don't just say be confident. Actually the advice to somebody who wants to be confident. Is Go have more adventure and adversity.

17:25 It will make you will get hardened by confidence over time. Because The more adventure you do, where you put yourself in unfamiliar situations, or the more adversity you face. And you come out still surviving. Even if you didn't win. You survived.

17:38 Then the next thing doesn't seem all that scary. You sort of think to yourself, Well, I did all those things. Of course I can go into this new unfamiliar situation and thrive as well. And so I think that the confidence is not so much like You know, his parents told you, but but like you know, the environment. Like if you grow up And you're poor, but you're tinkering or you're nerdy or you have access to certain books. You know, it's it's kind of amazing how these very small things make a difference. There's a story I read uh this morning actually. About Dan Brown.

18:04 You know who Dan Brown is, the author? He wrote the Da Vinci Code and like A bunch of other like thriller adventure books. Right. Where hero goes on a quest, there's sort of a puzzle, they gotta figure it out. Growing up.

18:16 Uh Dan did not find Christmas gifts under his Christmas tree as a child. His father, Richard Brown, a math teacher, instead put a treasure map under the tree. And Dan would have to follow the treasure map to for tra for a trail of clues all over the house and sometimes all over the neighborhood. Until he finally found the present. This sparked a deep love of solving puzzles, cracking codes, and hunting treasures.

18:38 He channel this into Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and other thrillers that have sold more than two hundred million copies. All about cracking ciphers, untangling coded messages. Which is which is the heart of his books. A lesson from this a childhood obsession can be a source of infinite inspiration. If you want to seek a meaningful quest as an adult

18:56 look towards the childhood toys and games that you couldn't get enough of. There there may be clues in there. It's so funny. That's the the That sounds like a cute thing, but there's been so many times and I wonder if there's actually like research that verifies this, but there's been so many times. We had uh Robert Green on MFM a while ago and that was really great. And he said to find the thing that you want to dedicate your life to.

19:17 You have to do something that sounds easy but's really challenging, which is you have to revert back to what you were like as a twelve year old before you had people who put pressure on you before you realized that something was stupid or uncool. And before you got jaded and when you were excitable. Um, and you have to ask yourself, What was that thing? And I've heard people talk about this constantly of like in order to be great as an adult you have to do this challenging thing of pretending to be a kid. And we're weird as a child. Yeah w what would it be for you? So if you think back to that era. What were you doing? You're twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Yeah, let's take this window, eight to kind of fourteen years old.

19:53 Skateboarding a ton. I was skateboarding a ton and I was always um taking apart remote control cars. and building them back to building them in interesting ways to get out doing chores, for example. I spent a whole six months trying to rebuild a remote control car so I had a mop on it because I hated c m sweeping the floor. And I distinctly remember doing that and being obsessed with it or and building modeled airplanes, like assembling things that had clear instructions. I love doing So I mean in a way you're

20:24 You chose to build things instead of doing nine to five instead of doing a job. Yeah. Well, I also loved um I I had a huge passion for selling CDs. Uh I remember I used to make like thirty dollars selling like three dollar, you know, burned CDs. And I love doing that. And for the longest time I thought I was gonna be in the entertainment industry. my hero was Ari Gold from the TV show Entourage. And I went to Belmont University because they had this degree called a music business degree, which I made it through three years. And then I was like, I'm gonna drop out of school. Just give me like the easiest degree I can get, like with the credits that I got. So I didn't get to complete that degree. But the reason I got into media and the reason why I probably enjoy doing this and working in the content game is because I wanted to work with entertainment people, but then I realized that Hollywood is full of idiots and I hated them, but I can build my own little world like that.

21:16 Yeah, I don't know how much of this is um Like horoscopes or whatever, where where you just sort of you try to back test and fit fit anything into it, but I just was in Austin yesterday and I did a podcast with uh Monish Pabri and Monas has this thing where He tells these stories about Buffett and he says uh His his theory is basically that

21:35 A huge percentage of your uh personality is pretty hardwired and baked by the time you're five years old. And you you don't want to spend your whole life fighting your your nature. Uh that's that for kids we do pretty much the opposite thing we're supposed to do.

21:52 So he says, um the human brain, if you just look at brain science, is that there's a golden window. Between I think he says the ages of Eight to eighteen. So it's this ten year window. Where

22:04 A child's brain is developing in such a way that it can h it can specialize and do some incredible things if you specialize during that window. And the people who do, and if you go look at like oh Bill Gates when he was coding or Mark Zuckerberg, when he picked up programming Or Mr. Beast when he started doing YouTube videos at age twelve, like It's often that these people who become the extreme performers

22:26 That they were doing something pretty specialized during this golden window. And he's like in school we tell him to do the exact opposite. I go to school, spend thirty minutes In eight different subjects. Don't you know go an inch deep in each one. Don't care about anything. You know, don't specialize. Become this like super generalist.

22:43 That's the factory model that we have. So he's like it's we're doing them kind of a disservice. He's like, Your job as a parent Is Um You know, by five their nature is is somewhat baked. You observe it. An eight to eighteen if they show an interest or an obsession at anything.

22:58 Feed it. Let them go crazy with it. Let them get obsessed. And lastly, like get them around. as good of a peer group as you can. Those are really the only things you're gonna be able to do, is kind of his opinion. I don't know if I fully agree with that, but I I think it's interesting. And then he tells a story of Buffett. And he's like, you know, when Buffett was a kid, he did all kinds of little hustles, right? Like he would buy a thing and he would sell it, right? So Coke bottles and

23:19 uh pinball games inside of bar barber shops. But one of the things he loved to do was he would go to the race track. He would watch other people betting. And he didn't bet, he was a kid. But he uh would watch other people betting, he would watch the horses, study the track.

23:33 And then what he would do is at the end of the day, he would go collect all of the discarded uh betting slips. That the you know, people go to the horse track, they drink, they watch the thing, they're having a good time, they just Chuck away their their their betting tickets. And he would see that oh, actually this wasn't a this wasn't a losing ticket. that um actually they got a third place payout here they didn't realize it or they got a second place payout here they didn't realize it. He would collect all the and you know eighty, ninety percent of its trash.

23:59 But if even five, ten percent he could make some money, then he would ask his aunt to go cash the tickets for him and she and he that's how he made money. And like It's not that different than what value investing is, right? He would go look at a thousand companies, a thousand tickets, you know. Most of them are rubbish. But when he found one that had like hidden value He would pounce on it and he would make money. And that's essentially how Warren Buffett

24:20 You know, investing for the first, you know, tw whatever, ten, fifteen, twenty years of of his Of his investing career. And he bought his first stock when he was seven and you know so he was doing things in this kinda golden window as well, which I think is interesting, especially, you know, for you and I, we have kids, not at that exact age yet, but Yeah, I think about that stuff. Uh I don't know to what extent you can control it or you want to try to control it, but It does seem like

24:42 It's worth knowing that and looking out for the right signals rather than being blind to it. There's this um I'm not religious, but I grew up going to Catholic school and you gotta read the Bible a lot, and there's this biblical story. Where it's like Someone's by a volcano or some or um I forget what it is, but it's like a loud like earthquake or like a natural disaster. And then um

25:01 They're told like you have to listen to God what God's telling you. And they're like, Well I hear this really loud noise, but it doesn't like I don't hear like a person talking to me and they're like even when things are really loud. the whisper or the God talking to you, it's gonna sound very faint in a whisper. And that's the challenge is you have to like you know, like really pay attention when there's a lot of now loud noise because the most important stuff is just gonna be a really faint whisper.

25:26 And you have to like try and hear it. And I don't really care about the message when it comes to God on that one. But I do think that like one that's what this Thing is because It's like that that whatever you're being told what to do or you feel compelled to, it's a lot of times it's not a yell. It's like this really small whisper that you have to like and that's like quite challenging. It's it's really hard to try and listen to like where you're being drawn to, you know, like or where your energy's pulling you to. It's not a push.

25:53 It's a very, very, very small like faint nudge. Right. Yeah, and there might be false positives along the way. And it's only obvious in hindsight. Like when I was thinking about that, like what was I doing when I was twelve?'Cause I wasn't And I used to actually be like kind of insecure about this. I was like, I wasn't really selling lemonade as a kid.

26:11 And um you know, flipping C Ds and and and sneakers and whatever like The entrepr the pattern I see now that I invest in a lot of founders, I'm like, I didn't really have that. Like the light bulb didn't come on for me, at least in terms of like trying to do business until I was, you know, twenty one. And frankly, like I don't think I'm the best entrepreneur or CEO anyway. So like maybe that's that's true that that was the signal. But there were a couple of

26:34 took more time to think about what the hell was I doing back then? What was I really into? In a way that like Or what was I naturally pretty good at that I didn't maybe pay as much attention to, but now I can think about it.

26:49 And the two that came to mind was I randomly Uh Like entered a uh like an improv class and improv competition when I was like in sixth or seventh grade. And we like made it to like the Texas state finals or whatever for like what we were doing. It was like a duo's improv.

27:05 Which like That's what this is. This is duo improv, what me and you do twice a week. And like That actually did come pretty easily. I did have a lot of fun doing it. I didn't triple down into it because I you know, whatever, life happened. My parents didn't didn't help me and I didn't know to ask for it. But like maybe there was a signal there of like hey

27:23 You kinda like this making things up, thinking on your feet. Riffing off a partner. If there was another way to do that, what would that look like? And you know, th I I don't think I could have predicted podcasting, but it does make a little bit of sense now that I look at the black. I did a podcast the other day and someone asked about you and I was like, In another lifetime, or maybe even this lifetime, Sean's gonna be uh a either like a comedian or Something in show business. So that's it. I I was in a movie or two when I was like a little a little like in six same same era, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, something like that. Um and then the other one that I noticed was

27:52 w I love video games, which is pretty common, you know, boys love video games. But the way I played video games was a little bit weird. So if I said Hm, what was Let's pay attention to the weird. You know, I used to play Madden or NBA two K, but I would basically never play the games. I would only do franchise mode.

28:07 Which is just where you're the general manager, you're building the team, drafting the players, you're basically making bets, you're investing essentially like scouting, investing, simulating to see the result. And I would just simulate like decades in these games without ever playing the actual game. And my sister would make fun of me, like, Are you ever gonna play this game? Like What is this like fantasy roster you're building? But yeah, I don't know. I think I think it's interesting to go look back I I'm not sure again how much of it is like

28:33 force narrative versus reality, but maybe there's something to it. I've I've now heard this enough times where I kinda gotta take it somewhat seriously. And I think it is important because Uh it's like when you are screwing uh a screw into the wall or whatever. And if you start out crooked, right, if you're at the wrong angle. No matter really how hard you push, you it's just constant friction, right? You're just like breaking the wall, breaking the screw, and breaking your own wrist, trying to make it go in. And then if you get things like aligned right, it's like oh just you know, four spins to the right.

29:03 Click. And I feel like a lot of my life was Pushing screws into walls at the wrong angles. you know, trying stupid projects, trying things that weren't really in my nature.

29:14 Trying to be somebody who I wasn't. And man, life got a lot easier and it got a lot more successful when I sort of figured out like, Oh, what am I actually like naturally pretty inclined to doing? Well, do you think you've figured it out? Yeah, I think like What we do is

29:27 Like probably the closest approximation to it. Like if I look at what I do today. I Get to nerd out on topics. Which has always been something that I would do. Like I would always go down these like rabbit holes.

29:39 And then this kind of doet improv type of thing, like being able to riff on topics and being generative with ideas. Um, has always been good. And then the other side of it is investing. I don't want to like play the game, but I like being the GM. I like being the the sort of the the man the franchise mode of doing this. And so I've had way more success Um, you know, investing or even incubating companies with other CEOs as operators now, right? Like I think in our portfolio is probably like

30:04 Forget like angel investing, just like in the companies we own a big chunk of. It's like four companies or so. Where there's four CEOs. And I don't do any of the day to day work and it's performing so much better than You know, back when I used to do my own startup and I was all in on it, right? So it's like it's a better fit for me to do that.

30:22 I didn't know you had four. You're doing shit that you don't even talk about. Well I want to talk about some of them soon. Um and Hopefully I will have some news sometime in the next few months that I can I can come on and and and maybe start to tell these stories. All right, let's take a quick break and I got a question for you. When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they found out, they've already lost the deal to another company that did.

30:47 HubSpot has AEO, which helps you show up in the moments when the right buyers are looking for a company like yours before the first click, before they fill in the form. That is the moment. HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. What did you think of Austin? Austin is a funny place. Um

31:11 I went to my like h um hotel room. And I walked in and housekeeping was in there. But I was surprised. And I came out and I told Ben, I go

31:21 Y'all got white housekeepers here? I had a white house keeper that my wife hired and I was like I bet you she's gonna be a drug addict. And I was right. She was a drug addict. I don't hire these guys anymore.

31:34 Yeah. It's like there's this great stand up bit where um I forget who it was, like Aziz or Vaves Huston, I forget who it was. Like an Indian comic was talking about like How they made it. And they were like, I'm gonna go adopt a white baby. Like just bring a white baby, like events and like stunt on people because it's like yeah. I I adopted a white child.

31:53 So I don't know Austin's a fun place. I is I mean one interesting thing is Because we're um I mean it uh you know, I mean Austin, which is much more populated city and We were just sitting like in a coffee shop, basically working all the time. So many people came up that love the podcast. That was crazy, right? And then they would tell me their story, right? And it's like Oh wow.

32:11 You know, it's almost like you get a lot of ideas for the podcast just talk to these people like this guy came up And he's like, I'm all in on social selling. Social commerce. I know those two words Apart. What like what is it together? What is what does that mean?

32:24 And he's basically like you know Yeah, people who are making You know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. Just making TikTok videos for products, uh um and they're just getting affiliate fees. Just making content. Um and they're not influencers. They're not

32:39 Famous people. But they make like the best way to sell. This soap. This teeth whitener, this um you know, these leggings. Um this hoodie.

32:49 And that they're generating, you know, forty thousand a month, f hundred thousand a month. You know, two hundred thousand a month, four hundred thousand a month. What platforms? On uh TikTok and whatnot. So like there's the l there's like live selling. Uh, like whatnot and and TikTok. And then there's like just short form video. And I I mean I'm not I wasn't like unfamiliar about this concept. We use it in our e-commerce brand.

33:11 But it's amazing just to hear the individual person story. It's like yeah, she worked at this like hair salon. And then she just took the product from the hair salon and started talking about it on TikTok. She doesn't have a following, but the way TikTok works is any video Yeah, it's like America's funding some videos. Any any video gets to have its you know, its day on the for you page. And she realized like wow, if I just get good.

33:33 At kind of like Authentically and I use quotes because it's like obviously not authentic, but like They tend they don't look dressed up. They're not in a fancy place. They're in their bedroom. They look like they're just Talking informally to you, like they're hey, y'all, I just want to tell you about

33:47 Oh my God, this or like Whatever this thing is. And they're just making a killing on it. And so, you know, this guy was like trying to build the the agency around it and a podcast around it. What's an example of product? Soaps, you said, just anything. Anything, dude. Are you tapped into this like wave of what's going on? No, no, no, no. So I don't I I I don't

34:06 have a TikTok and I've seen whatnot, but I I buy a ton of stuff off eBay. So like I know about like Buying you stuff. So I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, right? Like this is all new shit. Uh

34:25 Ebay? What I mean is social comment like it's all like a new product. It's not uh like they're it's just commission based, like they're selling someone else's stuff and they're getting an affiliate fee. They're not selling like three without permission. So it's not like they needed to cut a brand deal. Right. Got it. You just grab the product from the shop. And then you sell it. And then brands start s and then p brands can see if you move product, right? You move weight on your corner. And then they start sending you free shit. to try their stuff. And then you could send you could try to sell their stuff. And if it works, it works, right? Like

34:56 And if your video's good, then the brand puts ads behind it. So like There was a good a really good podcast uh by um our buddy Sean Frank. I think their podcast is called the Operators Podcast, like an e commerce specific podcast. He did one with the CEO of Comfort. Have you heard this brand F R T? I see that guy and I see this other guy named Greg Louvecki, who started a thing called Bloom, which I think is energy drinks. But I'm seeing these guys all over the place and they're using phrases that I've never heard before. Like I knew what UGC was. But like they're using it in way different phrasing and they're also s like implying that they have like tens of thousands of people making this content on their behalf. And this is a totally foreign concept to me.

35:35 And so this company Comfort, as far as I could tell, the total outsider went from something like zero to five hundred million dollars a year in revenue in like five years. And I went to their website, it's just like a fleece A hoodie, I think, right? Yeah, super basic hoodie. But yeah, so so they're they're a good example of this. Um how big did they get to? So the the model is this. The model is

35:56 You have a product. The old way of selling it was the old way, as in the of the last ten years. Well, as you run Facebook ads. And you're on Google Ads. And for both of those ads, you, your team makes the content. You typically will have an ad creative team in house. One, two, ten, fifteen people. Their job is to come up with concepts, they do photo shoots, they do scripts.

36:15 They do static images, give it to the designer, the editor, you make it, you run it, you see what works, you're putting paid ads. That's what's been working. Well There was a new game in town. And if you remember, I kinda hinted at this maybe a a year or two ago where I said, I invest in this company. And it's gone zero to thirty million.

36:33 And uh revenue and like Uh I can't I don't want to say the exact brand so the the the brand blew up. It was uh in a bad way, not the good blow up. Um it was a s supplement brand. It was crushing it.

36:47 Uh the product was all fine. But they got banned off Amazon'cause they were like tr like manipulating like reviews of other Companies or something like that, like of other brands or something. And so Amazon was like, Oh, you guys were the ones who wrote a bad review about them? Boom, shut down. Yeah. Ruin the company. But I and I I think I even told you at the time I go

37:08 I this is growing faster than any e commerce brand I've ever seen and um you know, zero to thirty million in in a couple of months and And I I think I told you I was like, I hope I can come on in a year or two and say the The playbook that they use. Well the playbook is is more or less out now. Now two years later, which is That what e commerce brands do Is you basically

37:28 gift or um you know s called seeding. You seed your product out to Not one, not ten. Not even a hundred, but maybe thousand creators that are out there. And these creators are everyday people, non famous. People. Not micro influencer.

37:44 Not influencer. Person with time on their hands. H has been on TikTok and Reels enough to know

37:51 What type of content could work? And those people will make sometimes just like, you know, one video, but what it what ends up happening is that they realise, Oh, I should just make thirty four thirty to forty videos a month. I should make a video every day. And I'll have

38:05 multiple accounts and I'll post it and I'll you know and so they basically Rapidly test content. And so now you've got Instead of having a in house team of a couple people doing ten to twenty creative assets Uh a month and usually just thinking inside the box'cause it's like

38:21 This is my job. This is what I do. I work at the company. We have a way of doing things. You're just Letting the market the letting the crowd figure this out. You're crowdsourcing your creative, and that's The U U G means user generate content.

38:34 So you're getting In a given month. Three thousand, five thousand different pieces of content. that go out there. Most of which get absolutely no views, but a few of which pop off. And then and then all of them look at you then you tell all the creators who are like, you know, on board, you say look at how this works best. This worked. And then they all start to remix and then the the the hive mind gets smarter.

38:55 Every single month and they keep trying to do it, they keep trying to sort of one up themselves. And brands like uh goalie goalie's a uh a gummy like vitamin brand. I don't know if you've seen their like commission structure for this. They m they started out with apple cider vinegar gummies and grew it to like, you know, whatever, five hundred million or something in revenue. And Very short order.

39:13 What and then they got slapped on the wrist and they kinda tanked and they're coming back, whatever. But like Point is they were pretty aggressive on this model. So what they were doing was As they found good creators who were good at making this content. Um

39:26 They started incentivizing them more than the commission. So there's a default like commission on these platforms, right? Fifteen percent, twenty percent. You said you're commission. What's a platform? TikTok, TikTok shot. Uh oh so so so you find all your influencers on TikTok. Usually, yeah. Wow. And and so you what you do is you go to those TikTok influencers.

39:44 Yeah, sorry, not influences, just TikTok creators. And they get a uh they get a commission. And so I again just to describe the system. It's crowdsourced. It's way higher volume. So you're talking about thousands of pieces of content a month instead of, you know. Maybe a hundred. You don't control it.

39:59 You don't operate it. In many cases, you never even met them. They just pull pull your product and your shop listing and they just decide you just say, I'm if you're an affiliate, use this use this Tag. So that you get paid if you sell product, right? That's the core idea. Now what happens is

40:15 Um on top of that, goalie started going crazy. So they were like, yo, if you do Ten thousand dollars you get fifteen percent commission. If you do Hundred thousand dollars. You get um you know a trip to Miami. You do a million dollars

40:28 You get A million dollars in a month. You get this condo in Miami. You get this Lamborghini. They started giving away crazy sh I'm making up the tears, right? That the math made sense for them. But They have this like w I have this like one sheeter that goalie was giving creators and like the top thing was a condo in Miami, and the next thing was a Lambo and then it goes all the way down to just like uh you get like a bracelet. Um, you know, like you go to Check E Cheese and there's the prize wall.

40:51 And like, you know, you end up with the shitty rubber frog, but like up there is like, you know, the Nerf Blaster. And they w this is basically the model that they were doing. And so there's been several brands that I mean several. hundreds of brands that have aggressively use this strategy and uh

41:07 Yeah, it works. Works very well. What? I'm looking, I just Googled it. It said that they went from zero to four million dollars a month in thirty days. Oh, they got way higher than four million a month. The uh th maybe they did thirty days, but they went way h way past that. Okay, so let me ask you a bunch of questions. This is so fascinating to me. One.

41:24 Is this stuff profitable? So a company like that Like That got however big. So four times twelve is thirty six million. So they they're they were at least doing thirty six million a month. They were probably doing hundreds of millions a month. If you're doing that amount of money, are you actually creating a valuable company? Well you ask two different questions. Is it profitable and is it a value valuable company. Should be profitable. Here's just basic math. Let's say you're giving a twenty percent commission. So a way to think about that is you outlaid no cash up front.

41:55 Okay, so no ad spend. This is they take the risk of making the content. If they sell, then you pay. So you pay out of the revenue, not up front the way that normal ads work, right? I go to Facebook, put ten grand in, I have no guarantee I get anything out. So with this, I only pay When they sell.

42:12 I pay a fixed percentage of the revenue that they sold for. So let's say it's twenty percent. Well, that means my marketing spend is twenty percent of revenue. Now a normal e commerce brand Is spending somewhere. Twenty to fifty percent, depending on their level of aggression, what phase of the business that they're in, et cetera, et cetera.

42:29 Usually at the beginning they'll run forty percent, fifty percent aggressively to go get a big customer base. And then those customers hopefully will repeat by And that's where the profits come from those customers. And then you know, over time you're Ad spend as a percentage of revenue shrinks because you have all this returning revenue coming in. But at the beginning you have no returning revenue. So it's it's it starts out pretty high.

42:49 So is it profitable? Yeah, it should be profitable. I mean It doesn't take a lot of in uh it doesn't take a lot to make something unprofitable, so so but but you should be able to do this profitably. Now, are these companies valuable? That's a different when we say profit. I'm actually saying like Can the owner pay themselves a huge sum? If you're making Yeah. Yes, but it depends on when you are where where you are in your life cycle. Year one

43:11 No. Year two, maybe also no. But also could be yes if you just decide to grow slower, right? So it's like up to you how much you want to prioritize. Taking market land and Like going for the opportunity.

43:25 Well we say like you could have a business, he's put the numbers out there. I forget exactly what he said, but it was something like uh a hundred million dollars a year. And like the two owners can are barely drawing. Seven figures a year. E commerce. Is like saying is like startups where the spectrum of outcomes

43:41 ranges from everything to you know, you can go from loser shirt. to oh my God, this person is rolling in profit. I know people on all ends of that spectrum. There's operational excellence. How are you gonna run? And so there's no like rule. What I'm saying though is that In some cases it's like

43:57 L let's take startups, for example. Startups you're fighting gravity. Almost every startup fails, even the ones by smart people, even the ones by smart people who work hard. Who are like doing you know all the best practices of management, right? They'll still probably fail.

44:10 Because building a billion dollar startup Which is usually a novel idea or disruptive uh company, like the the venture startup game. I'm not talking about like person who starts a barbershop. I'm talking about venture startups. It's such a hard game. The gravity is that you're gonna fail. E commerce is not like that. E commerce is the gravity is you should you should be able to succeed if you're you know

44:28 Smart and hard working. And so same thing here. Now, are these companies valuable? No, not really. Because value is typically based on Defensibility. And

44:36 A buyer of this business doesn't know how long this channel this tactic is gonna last. And if this is what's driving all your growth. Then you're gonna trade at a much lower multiple. This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue. Because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company. And you realize two things.

44:58 One, you've done something great. But you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize. I am all alone. I've outrun my peers. Which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in.

45:15 My company Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs. Who are gonna hold you accountable. Call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way. Because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there. And they're hard to find.

45:33 And if you can find them It's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down, where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working. You're gonna be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying, Shit. I barely grew in business and in life.

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46:18 It seems like you could start off being a nobody company and you sort of have a get rich mentality. I do think you can cr it's better to s Start off. Like thinking my brand should be amazing, my product should be amazing, and that's how I should grow. And I add ads and all these tactics on top of it. But it's I I think that some companies do start off doing these like stupid And they

46:40 And they swap. They they can switch. Like I don't know anything about Ridge, but like there's a world where this was like a silly dumb thing and then he switched it. I'm just hypothetically making this up. It could have switched to like, oh, this actually product is good and we are gonna invest in our brand. I mean, have you seen like original

46:58 Athletic. Have you seen the original Athletic Greens? No, was it lame? This is You know, one of the early days landing pages of

47:08 Athletic Greens. I mean it's like one on one, yeah. Beach body MLM infomercials, right? Dude with six pack, girl eyeing ham. All your vital nutrition in thirty seconds or less, money back guarantee, hundred percent satisfaction, limited time, offer, act now, giant orange arrow, rush my order is the name of the button for buying it. Uh world's number one superfood cocktail, antioxidant, rich with great sweet taste.

47:37 Uh okay, so that's like, you know, an old version of that. That's not even the original version. That's the old version, right? And you go look at it today, right? If I go to like the A G one website. Yeah, it looks great. It looks like you have Hugh Jackman. Drinking from a glass Ваз

47:53 His Daily You know, green nutrients. Right. Crit with clinical trials and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, you know, who knows? Who knows whether if this shit works or not. But Yeah, y yes, you're right. Like you can absolutely

48:08 Start A little bit Janky. A little move fast and break things, a little little uh

48:16 You know, fake it till you make it. And then you can adapt and you could like leg you know, go go go more and more legit over time. You can improve your formula, you can improve your packaging, you can improve your sales methods, you can get off. one hacky sales tactic and get more diversified, right? Like go from there. I mean Moys who did native, I think is one of the best Examples of this.

48:36 I think he's told all this publicly, so I I don't think we're saying anything that's out of school here. Moys is sitting next to you. In a co working space. And he's at some point had this idea of he looked at Etsy. And saw that the number one selling product on there was a natural deodorant.

48:54 I realized, oh wow, that's market validation. Cool. Like that. Um, contacts a woman on there, says, Hey, can I take your natural drill drinks? Can I put my label on there? Um you know, goes outside the office, there's like It was like home made. Uh it was like homemade ammonium, I or I don't I forget the drug or the chemical. Something free, you know, par par what's it called? Parabens and alumni aluminum and parabens. Aluminum free, whatever. And he and it was like a mom and pop thing, and he was like, Let's commercialize this. Yeah. So he was like, I'm gonna put my label on it.

49:25 We've both seen right outside where you guys worked, there was a restaurant or something called Native. That looked exactly the same with the exact same logo. Somehow that ended up to being his name and his logo. Um, you know, he grew the thing with cheap Facebook ads and grew it like crazy and was like fit packing orders himself on the kitchen table. When she was like, Dude, I can't make like ten thousand bars of deodorant in my bathtub anymore.

49:49 He's like, Okay, like can I buy the formula off you and I'll move to like another person and figure that out. He used to put deodorant on his armpits, run around the block. Two two different sticks, two different formulas, run around the block. Have his brother smell each one and be like, which one's better? And like that was his like clinical trial that he was running. So, you know, like

50:07 You do what you gotta do. If somebody asked him, I remember early on, like uh he told the story where somebody said, Like You're starting a deodorant company like Moyes, do you know anything about deodorant? He goes today I know nothing about deodorant, but in six months I'll know everything there is to know about deodorant and that was true. And like you know, ends up

50:24 Selling the company for a hundred million dollars to Procter and Gamble. And now it's in Target. It's like the best selling things that were probably a multi billion dollar company. Multi billions in revenue, right? Like unbelievable Unbelievable like sort of story, right? And there's a even better part where

50:40 Proctor Gammel or someone was in the meeting to buy the company and he was like, Well, how do you expand? He's like, Well Can you put the native logo on a shampoo bottle? And they go, Yeah. I go Okay. That's what you do. Do you think you guys could print it on toothpaste? All right. Um by the way, there's another there's another great y people should go back and listen. They he he was like in the first twenty episodes of this podcast. I'm shocked that he says some of the stuff he says. Moise is very good with words. Oh, he's super entertaining. He tells a story of how when they were trying to sell they didn't own the trademark for native and he's like shit.

51:14 Proctor Gamble is not gonna buy this if I don't have the trademark for my like consumer, you know, good that's gonna be on the shelf of Target someday. And so somebody was squatting on it. And the negotiation story of getting that trademark was great. Like there's just so many great stories in the in in the the formation of native. A lot of people don't realize this, but Moise, now that I think about it, it is sh so Moyes used to have a company called Casker. Or caskers. Uh Which did you know about this?

51:39 Like a spirits brand, but I don't actually know what was it? Was it actually a liquor or was it a D to C shop? What was it? It was basically like they would get r rare whiskeys and I think wines That only had limited runs and they would do drops. So it was sort of like this was like during the guilt group. Or guilt craze where it was like uh you know, crazy good deals, but you only have a limited amount of time to buy it. So I think it was basically like a email list.

52:04 of like wine and alcohol buyers of who like rare stuff and they would w broker deals where they would, you know, sh send out an email uh an email drop of like a rare whiskey. And he sold it. Uh he sold it for Uh I forget how much but he he

52:21 you know, changed his life at the age of thirty. But he has this cool blog post that interestingly it's actually on the hustle, my old uh website, but it used to be on Medium. But the first listen to the first few sentences. The hair of a dog is a sports bar located in lower east side of Manhattan. Like s like most sports bars in New York. It has an ungodly number of televisions, a beer punk table, and three point five stars on Yelp.

52:43 More importantly though, Hair of the Dog has a single dollar price rating, which is really important when your goal is to be drunk by three PM. It was October two thousand and thirteen, my co-founder and I were in negotiations to sell caskers. Any commerce site we founded with just one and a half years ago that sold spirits. Meaning booze, not ghosts, online. Negotiations had already dragged on for a few months and we were days away from our scheduled closing date. And then he goes on to like explain the story of how he sold, but isn't that a beautiful like first couple of sentences? And then he like tells he like gives five lessons about his uh starting casker. He called it Birchbox for men, if you ever heard of that. But uh he's like says be frugal, be relentless. And then he says be experimental, be careful, and he gives like all these cool tidbits about it. Uh last question. Can this work for

53:28 B to B products. Why don't why do people only do this for uh Consumers. I think it I think one of the great arbitrages is that B to B businesses don't do the proven tactics of B to C companies. So B to C companies are out there fighting for their lives with customers and marketing to try to build their brand.

53:46 And B to B companies If they simply borrowed the playbooks from B to C not everything would work. But way more would work than doesn't work. Um, and it's I think it's woefully underused. And usually the the skill sets A lot of people who are in B don't know This'cause they don't come from that world. People in consumer tend to stay in consumer or they go to

54:06 They go to B to B and they are so scarred that they they only bring over like a portion of it. But I I think I think a lot more of it would work. This turned out to be pretty cool. We were supposed to have a guest on. This is a little behind the scenes. We're supposed to have a guest on.

54:19 Something happened last minute. And here we are, and it turned out to be quite fun. That whole thing was live and improvised, unprepared. Here we go. Alright, that's it, that's the part. I feel like I can rule the world of no way

54:31 Be what I want to I'll put my lawn in it like a day's off. On the road, let's travel, never looking at it. Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called The Science of Scaling by Mark Robert. He was the founding CRO of HubSpot, and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart. And he sits down every week with Different sales leaders from cool companies like Clavio and Vanta and OpenAI. And he's asking about their strategies, their tactics, and how they're growing their companies as you know, head of sales or chief revenue officer. If you're looking to scale a company up, if you're a CRO or a head of sales, just looking to level up in your career, I think a podcast like this could be great for you. Listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast.

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