Being the CEO is the worst job ever

0:00All right, let's roll. Elon Musk sues OpenAI you see the headlines in the articles? I saw the headlines, yes so for anyone who hasn't been caught up to speed with this Elon Musk pretty much said hey, when I originally created OpenAI with Sam Altman and who's the third guy, Brock something? Brock Lesnar Brock Lesnar's the wrestler I don't know there's also Ilya the other one that did the coup to get Sam out. Either way, their mission was to build this for humanity and create a better product and help people. He's pretty much saying now it's just a vehicle for Microsoft. If you look at the board of directors and who's in place, none of them are really in place to keep going with the initial vision.

0:59Keep in mind, Elon put quite a bit of money in the early days. He's a co-founder. Yeah, when OpenAI was created. I don't know if other people put in money. But what's interesting about the lawsuit is, A, he's in the AI space himself with Tesla and Grok. I don't really count Grok. It's not that it's not using AI because it is. But Tesla's really doing some cool stuff with AI like the Robots. I'm assuming you saw the clip of it bouncing around on Twitter or walking. It's not walking too smoothly, but it's kind of cool. It's a lot better than it was a couple years ago. Yeah, and they'll iterate on it pretty quickly.

1:33But what's interesting is he's suing, and you know he doesn't give a shit about the money. It's not about what he put in. I think this is the principle. Yes. And I don't think he wants his money back. He wants OpenAI to keep going with its original mission. This is a philosophical thing. Yes, and that's what I actually think is going to make this suit much more difficult than most cases because it's not easy to settle. He's just going to keep it going because he has the money to keep it going. Yes, and he doesn't care for the cash. Usually you settle because you just want it to end. He doesn't care.

2:07That's why I think it's going to affect AI. It's interesting. I think Tesla, to me, is not just a car company. It's an AI company. It's the robots they have going on. It's way more than that. I don't think he's doing this to be anti-competitive. He's doing this because he just feels like this is the right thing to do. Yes, but to go back to your comment on Tesla, I agree with you. I don't think Tesla's a car company. I think they're a technology company. Amazing technology in their cars. Crap cars. Forget about the speed and the acceleration. A lot of electric cars have that. I know he's trying to build a car that goes zero to 60 in one second.

2:43No one's done that yet. If he does it, hats off to him. But it's a crap car. I miss my Tesla. Dude, the seats are so uncomfortable. I'm not particular about these things. You know, like, Neil is particular about some things. I'm particular about some things. I don't care about my car so much. Like, I'm just like this. You know why I liked it? I consider it a good car because the technology was good. Yes, that's what I said. It's a technology company. But if you look at little basic things like seats, dude, we were going from Vegas to LA for one of your events last year. And I was in Mike's Tesla Model X.

3:15That's a big SUV, right? Yeah. With the wings. Yeah. The back seat, it's like an L. You can't just recline the back. Yeah. The bench, the part that you sit on also goes up when you recline the back. I'm like, what the heck is this? This is just so uncomfortable. It's not a comfortable car. It is for long journeys. It's trade-offs. You know what I mean? No, it's an uncomfortable car for long journeys. It's not a comfortable car. I thought you were saying it's not an uncomfortable car. No, no, I'm saying it is an uncomfortable car in general, right? Yeah. But my point is, the Thomas Sowell quote is, there are no solutions, only trade-offs, right?

3:49So the trade-off I'm making is like, I'm sitting in a crap seat, right? But I get all this technology and I can do all these things that I can't do with other cars. My car right now, it's electric. I like it. It's really fast and everything. It accelerates quickly. More comfortable, right? It's comfortable and it feels nice, but I do miss the tech. The built quality is better. The doors don't always align. They align right on a Porsche versus Tesla's having issues. I miss the tech. We have different definitions and that's okay. But going back to this Elon thing, first I was like, whatever. But it's like, no, there's stuff you can learn from people.

4:23A, some people will sue you just on the principle of things. Two, the mission of a company is very important. Some people take that very seriously. And I do agree that when you think about OpenAI, Microsoft took a 50 % stake, 51 % or 49 %? I think it's 49%. So not control. But then the people they have on the board now, one guy, Brett Taylor, I believe. Ex-Salesforce CEO? Yeah, ex-Salesforce. Or president, I don't think he's CEO. I think he worked at Google before. Yeah, he was supposed to be the CEO of Salesforce. I think it's a really strong board, but at the end of the day, it's like, are they veering away from it?

4:56Because OpenAI has a venture arm too. I don't know if you know that. I didn't know that. Yeah, so there's a lot of different stuff going on right now. Maybe Elon's just trying to set it straight and say, hey guys, just focus on the mission. Oh yeah, Burt Taylor, by the way, was a CEO of Salesforce. I think he was co-CEO with Benioff. It was something like that. So yeah, that's that. But you know, so we've both been in lawsuits. And typically when you're in lawsuits in business, people just want cash. It's really simple. Almost all lawsuits are cash-based. Give me my money and walk away. This is maybe merit, ethics-based, whatever you want to end up calling it, mission or purpose-driven.

5:31And for that reason, I see this going a very long way. I don't think he gives a crap about how – I don't know how much money he put into it, but let's call it less than$100 million. He does not care for$100 million. He's made that apparent. You know, when advertisers on Twitter or X said, you know, like, hey, we're pulling out. He's like, Effie, you're going to throw me money? He's like, I don't need it. I don't care. He's one of the world's richest people out there, depending on the price of Tesla for the day. Yeah. So, I mean, here's the other, the flip side of it is, okay, well, also Microsoft and OpenAI have a big war chest and Sam's also pretty well off too.

6:09For sure. I don't think it's a money thing because forget net worth. earth, Microsoft spits off so much EBITDA on an annual basis that they have, in essence, unlimited money. But the problem isn't cash. Elon has enough cash. Microsoft has enough cash. It's not like this lawsuit is going to cost them$10 billion or even$5 billion or anything like that. Legal fees can be expensive, but they're nowhere near there. Maybe they each spend millions of dollars, maybe well into the millions, but I doubt it even gets to$50 million or$100. That's just too high. This message is brought to you by single grain.

6:44A single grain is a marketing agency ran by yours. Truly single grain does paid media, SEO, creative conversion rate optimization as worked with a handful of companies, just such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, to startups, venture backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to single grain.com. Again, it's single grain grain, like wheat, and we'll see you on the other side. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency.

7:20Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Speaking of which, you had a tweet earlier that I saw today about CEO being the worst job. And I actually, I reposted it. I don't know if you saw that. I did not see it, but thank you for reposting. I repost it because I agree it's a terrible job. And you're the CEO. I said Darmesh and Neil had the best setup as co-founders and it's enviable. No direct reports and you get to focus on what you want to focus on. Yeah, I have no direct reports. You're right of that. My title is the CMO, but Salo, who's the VP of Marketing, really does run marketing.

7:56I'll give him advice on strategy two to three times a month and I create a lot of my own content so he doesn't have to do a lot of that. but I don't have to run any division. I don't have direct reports. I still work at least 60, 70 hour weeks. I believe it. So the good thing about Neil is he's never ever cared about titles before, ever. And so it's good to have humility. A lot of people care about titles, they care about status. Neil doesn't care about that stuff. He's just like, I want to work on what I want to work on, which is like strategy. I want to work on marketing and that's all I want to do.

8:30And it's funny because a lot of people said, if you're going to work that many hours and if you really believed in the vision of the company because people started leaving comments and messaging me, they're like, why wouldn't you be the CEO unless you really don't believe in it? And I'm like, no, it has nothing to do with that. I'm a terrible manager. I do well on small teams, but I think I'm an amazing individual contributor and executor and I perform the best when I'm just doing stuff on my own. And I always saw that as a negative or a downfall, But I think you mentioned last time we were recording how Mark Zuckerberg talks about one of his great strengths is being amazing individual contributor, right?

9:11More so he doesn't believe in delegation. He believes in being involved as much as possible. Got it. So that's different than what I'm doing. I do like being involved where I want to be. I am a terrible manager, so I hate the concept of CEO. So here, and I think you have an answer for this, but a typical CEO's job is to recruit. It's to make sure that there's cash in the bank, right? like financing, whatever, if it's closing sales or closing funding, right? So I don't deal too much with recruiting, but I do help with recruiting and I vet people that I want to vet for certain roles. I deal with the cash in the bank and then vision.

9:45Going back to the cash in the bank really quickly, the CFO mainly deals with that. But you watch your money like a hawk. My finance team was like, Neil Bulk's whenever he sees a cost over$2 ,500. I was like, that's because he's good. He was like, we should be like Neil. We should be like Neil. Yeah, because he'll send me a bill for like$200. I'm like, what is this$200? It's not this. And he started going. Yeah, and I dive into it. And then I'm like, what was the last time bill for$100 a year? But I don't watch the money that carefully because most expenses don't come to me. But when I see them, I nitpick all of them.

10:21You look at the big stuff. I look at the big stuff. I actually look at the small stuff too when I can see it or when they do share it with me. But by the way, Neil's OCD everyone. Yeah, but when you said they think about money in the bank, I actually don't really look at our bank account. I looked at our bank account for the first time in the last... Actually, you're right. I look at the bank account probably two to three times a day. Yeah, that's like your... So Neil used to look at his analytics every day and now the new analytics is his bank account. I'm like, oh yeah, because I get a notification.

10:52I can't just log into my bank account because I have multiple factor authentication. And yeah, you're right. I look at our bank account multiple times. Oh yeah. And then vision, vision. I am deeply involved in the vision. And this is interesting because usually it's the CEO's job, but I think because Neil's so involved, he talks so much to his executives that you're constantly driving the vision in every day and it goes through them. That's how I see it. Tell me if I'm wrong. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast.

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13:02If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into a d*** with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. You're right. They execute on what I think is best. And a lot of times what I think is best doesn't work out to be best. And then they say, I told you so. And then I'm like, you're right. I should have listened. And then I go back to their way. But then if I have ideas, I still go and do it. And I don't care.

13:38I look at everything as like a big experiment bucket. Yeah. And I spend a lot of my money on experimentation. If it doesn't work out, I don't care. I just keep trying. So if I were to ask you, what's the 10-year vision for the company? What would you say? Be a global ad agency. Okay, there you go. And when I say global, we get enterprise contracts, but we don't really get enterprise contracts. And I mean really get it. Some of our competitors are getting$100 million contracts. I'm not talking about managing$100 million in ad spend. We do way more than that. We even have clients who spend more than$100 million in ad spend.

14:10I'm talking about getting a contract. where organization pays you$100 million a year for the work. Not pass through where you're spending a lot of that on media or anything. Actual revenue. Actual revenue, right? We are not true enterprise where we're getting nine-figure contracts. We can get eight-figure contracts. We can get seven-figure contracts. We've never gotten a nine-figure per year contract. And if you look at some of the big ad agencies, they have massive contracts like that, even like$50 million annual contracts and stuff like that. We're not at that level yet, but that's the goal within the tenure.

14:45And the plan is starting to slow down. You're already doing a lot of, you're moving in a direction, right? Like you're taking action on it because there's a lot of global expansion happening right now. And so that vision actually works because people, A, you're talking about it. Two, you're actually doing it. Yes. And I'm heavily involved in M &A and I probably talked to my CEO. He made a joke because I was leaving to Qatar over last weekend and I'm back now. But when I was leaving, it was a Friday. I was leaving on a Sunday. And I'm like, oh, cool. I'll talk to you when I get back. And he laughed.

15:18He's like, you'll probably call me tomorrow, which was a Saturday. And I'm like, I'm going to try not to. And I did not call him on Saturday. You called him on Sunday? I called him on Sunday, though. Oh, and then people, that's a whole other conversation. Well, what about work-life balance, Neil? I don't have work-life balance. I just work. And most of my executives work. And we have that culture. but I do try to tell them to have some sort of a balance. The big thing that I try to tell my executives, cause in bad economies like this, a lot of stuff just doesn't go the way we want. And people get frustrated.

15:48They're like, man, take one step forward. We get two steps backwards, keep getting kicked. And I tell them like, dude, the business is still growing. It's really healthy. I'm like, don't take this crap home. You know, you gotta just keep it at work. And my CEO of Funny Enough works from home cause we do virtual working. And I was like, dude, you just got to keep it, keep it at work and just don't take it home. And it's okay. We're self-funded. We don't have investors. We do fine. Like one foot in front of the other. That's all it is every single day. And here's the problem with being a CEO, right?

16:20Like as, as angry, we don't, we have a couple more minutes here, but like, if you're super angry, you can't show it. Right. You have to, you have to be like an even keel all the time. And even if you think the company is about to like implode or something like that, you still have to keep a straight face. Right. Because the moment people think that your mind is screwed up, they're all screwed up. So you got to keep it going no matter what. You have to be leading by example all the time. And you have to be, Frank Sloopman said this, the guy that stepped down from Snowflake, and their stock dropped like 20%.

16:48Yeah, I saw that. He was an ex-ServiceNow CEO. Yeah, he's like, you got to push the pace no matter what. Every single day, you got to drive the vision forward. And as exhausting as it is, too bad. That's your job. And it's hard, but it is what it is. Yeah. Well, that's it for this episode. If you want to attend our in-person event, go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Agency.