Long-Lasting Companies, Pandemic Monitoring & Deepfake Businesses

21:35Okay. If you made a grid of customers that are easy to acquire or hard to acquire on one side, and then customers that are not that valuable and super valuable on the other axes. One box that interests me there is hard to acquire, super valuable. And the reason why is because those companies can become very, very defensible, very, very valuable, right? Your value as a company or even as a person is just based on how easy are you to replace. You want to be irreplaceable. That's how you can actually make more money in the long term. So what's in that quadrant? like a fucking plane manufacturer or something like that?

22:16Something that sells to government. So you go get government contracts, not easy, might be boring to do. Long-term, expensive government contracts. It might take you years to get to the point where you can get one. But when you get one, very valuable and very defensible. And so I was thinking about this because I invested in this drones company called Valancy. Long time ago, I invested many years ago. I have no idea how they're doing. I was a small investor. I don't even get the updates. But at the time, they were doing pretty well. I was like, okay, cool. This valuation is a little bit rich for where you're at, but why do you think this is the right valuation?

22:51And it was like, well, they're about to get this government contract that's$100 million a year contract. One customer will now become worth more than all their customers combined because... And what's the term length of that contract? I think it was like a... There was a couple that they were up for. I think they were like sort of three and five year deals. And once you get one government contract, you're sort of de-risked and you've done all the clearance and all that stuff. You basically have to get your company to a spot where you could get a government contract. And once you have one, being able to get the next one becomes more likely because you're sort of in the trusted vendor circle.

23:22So I was like, oh, that's pretty valuable. I was just thinking about one the other day, you know, with this whole COVID pandemic, somebody out there has got to be selling some kind of pandemic modeling software or detection software to every government in every country of the world. And this is also have like a network effect, where as soon as you're the provider of this product to one government, it's actually something that all governments would then choose you for because the more governments you get, the more compelling your case becomes. And so I wonder who's building what Palantir did for, I think, national security type stuff.

24:00Somebody's got to be doing for biosecurity. So who is creating the pandemic monitoring, detection, modeling, awareness program that you can then go sell to every single government on earth as an indefinite ongoing contract. Hey, these things happen once every 100 years. We have the Spanish flu. We got COVID. All right. I'm just going to go. I'll be your provider because, hey, they're devastating when they happen. And I can be this for you for the next 100 years. I think that's a 100-year company that is probably quite defensive and quite valuable if you can do it. I'll talk to some of my friends who work at Palatir.

24:35I'm like, hey, what'd you guys do today? And they're like, oh, I just stopped a terrorist attack in France. How about you? I wrote a blog post. You know what I mean? I sent out five tweets Tuesday today. Yeah. Where I put my five favorite tweets in my newsletter. It's cool. It's like those... Have you worked at those... There's all these net worth calculators where you're like, where will I be in 50 years? And you're like, well, if you were to start in 1884, this is where you'd be. If you were starting in 1995, this is where you'd be. And you can see, well, because this 30 years actually had slow growth.

25:06This 10 years had fast growth. and you can see all the different scenarios. You're like, so if we take the average, it's this, but if this happens, this. So you're kind of like talking about like that, but with like potential illnesses. Who have you researched out there? I haven't researched any of this, but I'm sure there already exist these sort of like, you know, like because people have been worried about these sort of like viral things, but obviously they were insufficient, right? So like whatever existed obviously sucked because we didn't detect it. We didn't have any plan for it. And we had no idea how fast the thing was spreading.

25:38Like literally the best pandemic model I saw was made as a side project by Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram for fun on the side where he's like, oh, look, I can break down by state the R-naught, the viral coefficient basically of this virus based off of this public data I'm getting about hospitals and hospitalizations. And I can use that to kind of show which states are flattening the curve versus which states are about to go exponential. And, you know, they should really consider doing something. And it's like, somebody's got to be doing this. This got to be the easiest sales pitch of all time right now.

26:11That's kind of what I guess what I really mean. It's like, if you're sitting at MIT or one of these places, just be like, wear a sign that says, I went to MIT and then go walk into the government building, open up the fanciest like MATLAB, you know, like model you could find and be like, you need to pay for this and just see what happens. I think I feel like they can get, you can get pretty far right now with this pitch of like, hey, we'll help you with the... We'll help you keep track of these viruses. Do you remember about two years ago, you and I were both interested in people who are trying to detect fires, forest fires.

26:44Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah. We did this on the pod, right? There was probably one or two kids, college kids fooling around with it. But then there was I think two different companies that raised money, I think, from Founders Fund. And actually, they were ex-Palantir guys. I forget the name of the company. It's a four-letter word. It was like Gelt or I forget what it was, but they were, I tried to invest in them and they were like, they weren't having it because they were getting big and they didn't need any money. But do you know what happened to those guys? I don't know the name of it. That's really hard to remember.

27:16No, I also don't know what came of it. But yeah, I remember when the California wildfires were happening. It felt like every three months there was like a new fire and the entire state of California was covered in smoke. Yeah, I remember when that was happening. To find early detection of wildfires was like a startup idea that a bunch of people got funded for. Yeah, it was really interesting. What we need to do, what I'll do not this week, but next week, because we have Jack on next, is I'm going to actually do research and see how these guys are doing because it's very similar to what you're talking about.

27:45And what was your other thing that you're looking at? You're going to go from selling to governments to selling to Jessica Simpson. Yeah, exactly. Not the same IQ. So basically, this next idea is so celebrities are having this like deepfake crisis, crisis and opportunity. So deepfakes are getting really, really good. And celebrities now have a crisis plus opportunity. So the crisis is you've seen this fake Tom Cruise. It's deep fake Tom Cruise. This guy's like amazing. Looks just like Tom Cruise and it's like a video. This is getting really good. You're not going to be able to tell. Did you see the ones where they put our podcast in Spanish?

28:25Yeah. Those are awesome, by the way. We should do that. We should release our podcast in every lane. They were amazing. They were so good. And I've heard of these new scams where they'll take people whose voice and video you get access to and they call your parents and be like, hey, dad, look, I'm trapped. I need some money. Can you please send it? Like, just don't ask questions, just send the money. It's wild. And so I think there's an opportunity here. So I think celebrities who get paid for their name and face and, you know, oh, I got to go fly to, you know, Arizona and shoot this commercial for Gatorade right now.

28:54And it's going to be three days, but I'm going to get paid all this money, blah, blah, blah. That's going to change into Gatorade would like to use your, your AI clone in their commercial. You cool with that? Yeah. You get to sit at home and collect the check. And it's like, maybe it's 50 % less expensive for the brand. Maybe it's the same cost for the brand. I don't know. But celeb, you don't have to do the work anymore. That's going to be a big deal. So the more famous you get now, you're not going to have to actually do the appearance thing because you'll just send your AI stunt double to go do it.

29:24So that's an opportunity. But there's also a risk there, which is what if somebody's just doing it without your consent? And so I think somebody is going to need to create a sort of celebrity deepfake licensing company. So it's a company that goes and says, look, we're going to create the legal entity that's going to house your name and likeness that other brands can come interact with when they want access to this. And we're also going to do the detection to find out, is anybody doing the unauthorized use of your name and face somewhere? And we will handle all the takedowns for you. So it's kind of like a reputation.com, but for this new deepfake thing.

30:02So you basically will go and I think you'll, you need to, it's almost like angel list. You need to create the legal framework for how these work. You need to go sell this to every agency and say, Hey, you should, we've created one for, you know, you have one of these for all of your, your clients on your roster. And when a brand comes to you, use this to issue the license that has the rights and controls on it, that has the digital encrypted watermark on it, that has the tracking on it. And then we will also fight anybody who is trying to use it without paying you, because that's going to become an issue as well.

30:35That's what I think is going to happen. I think somebody could build that company right now. I used to get all these emails when I first started the hustle, because what we would do is we eventually bought a Getty's license, which is like 50 grand a year. But before that, we would use, I would just type in whatever picture I wanted. And then I'd go to Google and click like allow for commercial use. And then I would like, I would use those pictures on our website. And then once we got popular, we would get all these emails from these patent trolls. They're not patent trolls. I mean, we were using someone else's picture and they would say, send us$3 ,000 and we'll go away.

31:07Otherwise, we're suing you. And I started looking into them. And basically what they did was they've just built this technology so they could detect if someone's photo was being used and they would automatically crawl. They would use who is and find out who the webmaster was and send you this email. And I wonder how those folks turned out. how some of these people actually built those things. And if they were profitable, I imagine so. There was one time I used someone's picture. I think it was a thumbnail picture. It was the smallest picture. And I didn't even know we used it. And I think maybe someone at our company took a screenshot of it and tried to alter it and then put it on our website in the smallest way.

31:42And they totally caught it. And within a few hours, we had to send them$3 ,000. It's like, shit, they got us. I wonder what that looks like in the world of AI when you are having a bunch of these fake celebrity videos. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I think somebody's going to need to create the good version of that. So one option is become the troll. The other option is become the official broker of the usage of these digital defakes. Alright, so that's my second one. The company, by the way, is called Felt. F-E-L-T dot com. Felt. That's what we talked about. That's a good memory.

32:14You want to talk about how you flew Ben out to convince him to move with you? Yeah, I think it's good, actually, because remote work is, you know, obviously all the rage and remote work is great in a bunch of different ways, but I'm of the opinion, which is remote is great when you have things figured out and you need people who are just operational to do things. Anytime there's a lot of needs figuring out or creativity or just your brain trust, I think works best in person. And so I told Ben the other day, I was like, Ben, I think we're onto something with what we're doing. Business partner, Ben.

32:49business partner Ben, I was like, you know, he lives in Austin right now. And I was like, you gotta, I was like, you gotta move out here. And he's like, oh, but like, you know, I live here now and wife, kid, we have family in Texas. I was like, yeah, I know. But like you, we both believe the following, right? Every time we get together, magic happens. This can be pretty big. Like what we're doing can become pretty big. and so even like a 10 to 20 percent improvement on what we're doing is actually worth maybe tens of millions of dollars so it's like you know it could be worth it to move and california's a great place too so it's not like i'm saying you know let's go to a rural ohio or something and so he was like okay why don't we do this so he moved out here for the month so he got an airbnb in the burbs or san francisco in the burbs where i'm at and he's like i got an airbnb brought his wife's kid came out here.

33:43He's just been living here for the month. And I also, I offered him, I was like, dude, I'll pay you dollars if you move. But I told him, I go, but the number drops by 20 % every quarter that you don't move. I was like, this is not like a standing offer forever. It's a burning, it's an exploding offer. I said, you should take your time. You should think about it, but you should also know every quarter that you don't move, that number goes down. dude he should tell you you come get your ass to texas yeah no he knows i'm not going anywhere he knows i'm not going anywhere that's not the that's not the deal i actually lived in texas for a long time and you know the other thing is like here you know in san francisco there is kind of like for for example for our rolling fund there's so many companies so many other investors so many people in the startup world like proximity is power you want to be near as many other people as you can that are doing the same sorts of things as you as you are to the extent that but your lifestyle will allow it.

34:39And so, yeah, we'll see. He told me. I think I got like a 10 to 20 % chance of him coming out. I was with him a week or two weeks before he went out there. And I was shocked when he told me that he thought that there was maybe a 20 % chance that he could be convinced. And by he, I mean the Levy entity, the household. And I was shocked that it was 20%. Is it still 20 %? I don't know. I think so. But we also work a lot when he's here. so I'm sure his wife's like, dude, this is terrible. You work more now? Like, oh man, I don't want to do this. And so that might be working against us. The other thing though is the way we work is kind of goofy.

35:18I don't think most people do this, but you know for coding, they have pair programming. It's not that popular, but some people do it. And what pair programming is, what's the name of that agency that was in San Francisco that was like a really popular dev shop? It went public at one point. You know the name. Yeah, yeah, I don't remember it. but yeah, I know what you mean. They popularized it at least. I don't know if they invented or popularized it, but basically it's two programmers working on one computer, you know, right? It's like the engineering two girls, one cup, basically. It's like you sit together, there's one keyboard and you would think, well, okay, you have half the efficiency, like only one guy's working, only one guy's coding, but actually you get more than double the efficiency because it keeps you completely focused and you and your partner are basically both talking things through and figuring things out on the fly and literally me and Ben do that when he comes out here to work.

36:06I'm like, all right, put your laptop down. Like just, we buddy up side by side at this desk and we'll just work on the same thing at the same time. And like, I can't just like open Twitter and start messing around over there. He's like, what's happening? What are you doing? You can't just like open new tabs. You know, as you're figuring something out, one guy's pointing something out and you just sort of really stacking, as I call it like stacking focus. It's like whatever my level of focus is, plus his level of focus on the same thing. So that's been good. The other is the in-between time. so already when we work remote we call each other all the time you know probably on the phone two hours a day three hours a day maybe on calls either with others or just ourselves but what's happening now is we'll work on something for a bit that's kind of like us being on a call together working on something and then we're like all right let's go get food and we'll just hop on our bikes we'll go to this taco shop we go get this we go to the same taco shop every day we get the same meal every day.

37:00What do you play Wolfleball afterwards? Yeah, we hold hands and we skip home, basically. But while we're doing it, it's sort of like the best ideas are coming out in all the in-between time. And that's the time where normally, if we'd be like, okay, bye, close Zoom, close Google Hangouts or whatever. And then I put on a podcast and he does something else. And it's the in-between time where you get the serendipitous ideas. So it's just kind of reminding me how valuable it is to work in person. so here's the issue that you have or i've always had with you which is whenever i am around you both of us are high-ish energy people where you're the type of person that eggs people on and then i'll egg you back on or i could see like and i'm not even that bad at that but you do i'm sure there's a lot of other people like sully where you guys just start egging each other on and it's like wait a minute we're totally off track here we should just do the same thing over and over again does this having him around just distract you further because i can see you guys It's just like you're sitting on two love seats and you're throwing a football back and forth.

38:00And you're like, why don't we do this? What if we did this? It's like, well, fuck it. Let's just do it right now. There's definitely a part of the day every single day that's like that. I crumple up a piece of paper. I throw it to him. He throws it back. And we're playing catch, talking about bullshit that like, you know, things we could do that are not like just the obvious things. But the beauty of it is, as I've gotten older and I've gotten wiser and I've been doing this podcast, two things have happened. One, I hang around you And you're very good at just doing the thing every day, whether it's your workout or it's whatever.

38:33So I'm just going to do the thing. And I don't want to get distracted by everything. I just want to do the thing. So hanging out with you helps. There was also a guy who came on the podcast a long time ago, one of the earliest episodes. And he's from Peak Design. They make these like camera bags. So he started his company off. That was two years ago. Yeah, this was like one of the first 15 episodes, I think. And so he makes these camera bags. Who knew? And they do like, I don't know, at the time, like 70 million a year in revenue off of camera bags. And like clips for your DSLR camera. I was like, what the hell?

39:09This is that big of a market? And he had done it off of Kickstarter. And he's kind of an inspiring guy. And as I was talking to him, I go, so what's your philosophy around business? He goes, everybody's got these plans. They got these ideas, blah, blah, blah. like, he's like, life and business is just the six inches in front of your face. It's just this. He just held up his hand, six inches in front of my face. He goes, I just look at this and I just do six inches in front of my face. It's all I'm focused on. And I just do that every day. And that stuck with me. And so we have, you can't see it, but on the wall here, I wrote six inches in front of our face on a giant, like post, like a giant sticky pad thing.

39:45These things are great, by the way, you should buy these. These are giant sticky pad things where you sort of tear the paper. It's like a huge post-it note that goes on your wall. Dude, at Monkey Inferno, your old office, you were like that guy. You always had whiteboards and like pads. That was your thing. I was at the whiteboard. You were always standing up like writing. Yeah, that was you. You always said that. You guys want to do a little whiteboard sesh real quick. So yeah, I have it here and it says the six inches in front of our face. And so the first thing we do every day when he comes over is we reprioritize the six inches in front of our face.

40:15It's like, what are the small no-brainer steps forward? that will make this like 1 % better today. And the first three hours of the day, we don't do anything else besides knock those out. I think theoretically, we could just do that for eight hours a day. I would get bored out of my mind. Also, I can kind of get eight hours of work done in three hours of focus when I put my mind to it. And so that's what we do first. And then for the rest of the day, we think, okay, what else could leapfrog something forward beyond those 1 % obvious improvements? So we knock out anything we can think of that's a 1 % obvious improvement the six inches in front of our face first.

40:51And so that's how we've been able to stay focused. Dude, you shared something on Twitter about, what's this football player's name, Russell? Russell Okung, yeah. Oh my God. So I'm not a sports guy at all. So I didn't even know who this person was. And you shared this thing that's basically, who is he? Was he good? Yeah, he was awesome. He was a former lineman. So linemen are like the biggest guys on the football field. So he's probably 300 pounds or something like that. He's like 6 '5". He's 6 '5", 310 pounds when he played. When he played, yeah. And he was like a star. He won a Super Bowl ring.

41:25He was a pro bowler. Awesome, awesome player. I remember, I think he was playing on the Seahawks for a while. That's kind of what I remember. He's now on Twitter. There's a couple of these athletes like Ndamukong Su, Russell Okung that are like, they're kind of like on tech Twitter somehow. And so Russell's one of these guys. And you can DM him. And he's been replying to my DMs. Yeah, like Matthew Delvedova invited me to an event the other day. I was like, this is so cool that they've crossed over and they've got their athlete camp. They've also got kind of business tech interest. And by the way, the best thing about it is they come in so humble, which is like, they don't come in with this.

41:57Well, you know who I am personality. Like this Saturday, so we do, I started this basketball pickup game every Saturday for founders and investors out here in the East Bay. And we rent this gym and then we all just play pickup for like three hours. And Zaza Pachulia came and he's a former player on the Warriors. And he tweeted like, oh yeah, I'll play. And I didn't invite him to the first one because I thought he was joking when he replied. And then he emailed me after the first one. Like, bro, what happened? I didn't get the invite. No way. And I was like, oh shit, you actually were going to show up.

42:28And so he came this week and he was fucking awesome, dude. Like not awesome at basketball. Obviously, he's awesome at basketball compared to us. Zaza, is it like a big Russian looking guy? I don't know where he's from. Where is he from? I don't know. Serbia? I think he's from Serbia. I'm not 100%. I just Google it. Georgia. Georgian. Yeah, he's like seven foot. And he's just, he's a beast. And so now he works for the Warriors. He does like their business side, their basketball operations and investing for them. And he's a super personable, super funny guy, like was totally humble. And like, you know, obviously - Did he play?

43:02Yeah, he played with us for three hours. What? It was amazing. I was talking so much trash to him and he was just such a good sport about it. It was amazing. So I just, I gotta say, I've been so impressed with the way that kind of like the athletes I've seen that cross over into business and tech. They do it with, I don't know, so much finesse. It's really impressive. Wait, what did you learn about, I love seeing pro athletes in real life and just like seeing them joke around or like behind the scenes Instagram videos where they're like, hey, watch this. I bet you I can jump over this thing. And they jump over this like huge thing.

43:31You're like, oh my God, these people, like we're not the same type of person. Was there any athletic attributes that he had or was he just totally chilling? Well, yeah, for sure. I mean, if you see Zaza play in the NBA, Zaza was basically like a screen setter. Like his number one skill was, he could set a huge pick to get Steph Curry a shot. But when he played against us, he's Steph Curry. He's just draining shots from all over the court. He didn't even take these shots in the NBA. You never saw him take these shots. And he's just pulling up from the three-point line. And I was like, when's the last time you played?

44:03He's like, 2019. No way. He's like, no, no, I've shot around. He's like, I'm in the basketball facility, so I shoot around. But he's like, I don't even know the last time I played a competitive game. so a couple things so his warm-up was like a real warm-up like he like he's talking but he's doing these like hip flexor openers and i'm like oh yeah he's like he's actually an athlete who's had to like get his body ready many many many times over and so you see like a bunch of the dudes who come in and it's like oh here's this vc or here's this like tech founder and we're like i don't know i guess try to touch my toes is that what i do to warm up like we don't know we don't even know what to we don't even know what to do to warm up whereas he's like doing these like you know hip openers Then the second thing is when he played, obviously his game was a lot better than you see on TV because you got to be a star in your role in the NBA.

44:50And he was a star in his role as this like paint protector, screen setter. Here, he could do a lot of other things that he never got to show there. The other thing is like he was like a bear. So he was mostly, you know, just playing point guard, just passing the ball mostly. Obviously, he could post any of us up. He's got a foot on all of us, you know, in terms of height. So he wasn't just abusing that. But like we beat him the first game and then they won like six straight. You beat him? you beat his team? We won the first game they were just like you know whatever we got off to a quick start but then the they went on a 6-0 run or something like that just crushing everybody and then when we came back out to try to beat them it was a very competitive game and then it's like we poked the bear it's like all of a sudden he started driving to the hoop and he started like playing like aggressive it's like oh yeah don't forget the bear can kill you the bear might be nice right now but the bear will let you know that like I could kill you if I wanted to and he just chose which dial he was going to yeah he's like let's just put it to a 6 now We were at a three.

45:43We'll just put it at a six just for a few minutes. All right, we'll go back to a three. This has been a three up till now. I'm just going to show you that, then I'll go back down. Wow, that's awesome. I love seeing those types of people just in normal settings. And so talk about Russell. So what Russell's doing, I saw him, you shared it. He has this website. And here's why it's interesting. One, he's doing a 40-day water fast. That alone is interesting. But what's even more interesting is he's doing it in a very like, I wouldn't have expected this 6 '5", 300-pound football player to be so introspective.

46:14And if you go to his website, do you know the name of his website, actually? No, I don't have it in front of me. If you just Google his name and then go to his Twitter, and you can click off to the link. He's got this website. A, it's built on Ghost, which is a pretty in-the-know, nerdy web platform. I think it's okungfast.com. That's where he's hosting. If you just Google it, you'll see it. But it's like a yellow website. And he has email pop-ups. And everything is set up really, actually. exactly how it should be. The email pop-up is thoughtful. And then you go to a confirmation page, that's thoughtful.

46:45And he's blogging every single day. And he's posting the same picture every day. So as of now, I think he started this thing at 260. I have the notes here. I think we buried the lead. So he's going on a 40-day water-only fast. He's lost 100 pounds so far doing it. And obviously, it's not just about the weight loss. It's about the mental challenge and the mental clarity that he's getting as he's doing this. Sort of this really intense fast. I think he's on day 21. Well, he talks about how it's a spiritual thing. And he basically, he's just so much more thoughtful than I ever would have pegged this guy just because I'm stereotyping like an NFL player.

47:24And his writing is very good, very clear. And there's a lesson that he's learning each day. And he talks about that. And everything's well written. It's just wonderful. It's really, really cool to see this guy do this thing. The fourth day was the hardest, he goes, because this is where the body is transitioning into a new state. So he's like, I had headaches, fatigue. My body was transitioning to using fat as the energy source rather than, you know, the input of new, you know, carbohydrates and whatever. And he looks good. So you could see, even when he started it, you look at day one where he started, he still looked pretty lean.

47:54Now you look at him at, he's starting to get like skinnier and skinnier and skinnier and his writing is starting to change. It's very fascinating. And he's been tweeting about it every day as he goes. I need to blog him about it. I think it's awesome. I love seeing this. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and he's also like... He's on day 21. He's on day 21. He's also like a Bitcoin max. He's an interesting guy. By the way, there's a guy I met named Byron Jones who retired this year. He was like one of the best cornerbacks in the league. And he retired, I think, at 30. So he came into the league probably 21, 22, and he retired at 30, which is an early retirement.

48:28And he got paid very well, probably made like, I don't know, $80 million playing in the NFL. But he had said something when he retired, which is that I can't run or jump anymore. And which is shocking because this is like one of the most athletic guys that was in the NFL at the time when he was playing. And I went to a dinner. He had a 44-inch vert. Wow. 44-inch vert, 12-foot broad jump. Freak. My buddy Romine hosts this event called Game Time every year in LA. And it's basically a mix of investors and athletes that get together. And so I've gone the last couple of years and he hosts this dinner.

49:00And at the dinner, there was a few NFL players on the table. And they all mentioned like, I forgot what they were called. Torbidol. not the steroid it's like some shot that NFL players get basically it's a pain tolerance shot a pain reduction shot painkiller and they were just like dude that shot it's like magic and it's a curse because it doesn't make you feel better right it just makes you not feel pain no no you feel better sorry it doesn't cure an injury but it doesn't cure the underlying issues he's like we would go from Sunday you play Monday you feel bad Tuesday you feel like man I was in a car accident And their body feels like it was in a car accident.

49:38And you're like, there's no way I'm going to be able to practice on Thursday and play next Sunday. Like, that's just like where my body's at on Tuesday versus Sunday. Seems crazy. And they said that like, they're like, man, that, you know, like the culture in the NFL is like, you got to play obviously. And so these, like a lot of guys get in the habit of taking this one shot, T something, I forgot what it's called. And they take the shot and they're like, it's like a miracle, dude. Like within an hour, you're running again. And they're like, you went from not, you know, like limping to like, you're just back to you.

50:07but also every time you do it, it's like taking time, you know, it shortens your career because it's just so bad for your body. What you're actually doing to your body when you do that is you're not like, it's not like the underlying tissues have healed in the process. It's kind of a crazy thing. So I think one cool thing about Russell's doing is he's basically like trying to rewind the clock on, you know, when you're in, when you're alignment, they tell you to beef up and what he's doing is, is doing a sort of a rapid and drastic change in his physiology in order to get his weight down so that he can live a longer, healthier life as he goes.

50:39Yeah. He said, I went through a pulmonary embolism. I don't know what that is. Is that a heart thing? I had lacerated lungs. No idea how you get lacerated lungs, but that's wild. A series of surgeries, ligament and tendon damage, and getting up every day was just really hard. I thought magically when I finished playing, it would get easier, but it got harder. I had completely depleted my testosterone. So he basically just explains, he's like, I was left in shambles. And so that's, I guess, one of the reasons why he's done this. And I think it's really, really, really cool. I don't think I'm going to do it.

51:11Shout out to him. I like seeing him do it. What else you got? I like this question I got. So a guy tweeted at me. I want to get your take on it. So his name's Christian Van Uffel. Great name. The Christian says, question for you, Sean. He goes, what work seems like small boy stuff, but actually packs a punch? So we have this phrase we say on the pod all the time, no small boy stuff. And we don't even spend a ton of time defining it because, honestly, small boy stuff is kind of obvious. But I would say the general buckets of small boy stuff would be overly worrying about things. Small boy stuff would be thinking small rather than thinking big, thinking short-term rather than thinking long-term, caring too much about what other people think of you.

51:52There's a whole bunch of things that you classify as small boy stuff, like complaining when things get hard or things don't go your way, complaining in general, waiting in general. These are all small boy moves. but I thought his question was great because the magic is in things that other people think are small, but actually pack a punch. And I had an answer, but I'm curious what your answer would be. I'll give you, you want me to go first? You want to go first? I'll give you a very quick example. We had our, I keep talking about the offsite, my CEO of the company, he put all this effort into creating like little individual awards for people and like writing like appreciation notes and like being very thoughtful in the itinerary.

52:29And I was like, dude, just like who gives a shit. Let's just get in a room and hang out. He put all this work into it, spent hours and hours and hours, 100 % worth it. I was giving him a hard time. And then afterwards, I go, nope, you're right. I was wrong. That is an example of things that seem below your pay grade that you proved it was worth it. Love it. I would actually also give you credit because that would be one of my answers, which is admitting when you're wrong openly and quickly. I remember hearing a story about one of the guys at Sequoia who's awesome, helped build Sequoia into the most successful VC brand or one of the most in a long time.

53:04Somebody asked, what makes him great? They go, all he cares about is getting it right. He'll be in a meeting with you. He'll say his opinion and somebody else will say their opinion. Most people either start to debate or it's like, we're talking past each other. It's like, I'm talking about one thing. You're talking about another and I'm the boss, so I'm going to get my way. And he's like, he's the first guy and he has this phrase he always says. Well, he would go, okay, nope, I like your way better. Let's go with that. Nope, that's better. Let's go with that is a awesome small but big thing you can do as a leader in any company.

53:36It sets the culture that it's not about who's right. It's about getting it right, getting to right over time. Here's what I wrote as some of my answers. I said things that seem like small boy stuff is actually big. Doing customer service yourself early on, so being on the front lines, answering customer service emails, questions, feedback, picking up the phone, all that stuff. manually onboarding your first 10 or 100 users. So literally yourself sitting there with them, going to sit side by side with them and having them install your product or onboard onto your product and answering their questions.

54:09Seems like an unscalable, small boy way of spending your time. Actually, no, it's a huge, huge thing and it'll teach you a lot about your product and your market. Sending follow-ups. Follow-ups, following up with somebody who didn't answer you always feels like a little low status bitch move, but it packs a big punch. Follow-ups are where all the magic is. And I think there's also a big piece of follow-ups, which is a lot of people don't follow up because they don't hear back and they assume they're saying no, they don't like me, they hate this idea. You don't want to look stupid. They get in their head about it.

54:43They start assuming the worst. Instead, assume the obvious. People are busy and they forget. People are busy and didn't get around to it yet. And when you follow up with that mindset, that's the sort of no small boy mindset. and it was like, I'm offering something of value to this person. Of course they would want it. Maybe they haven't yet seen the value in it. Maybe I didn't convey it properly or they just haven't gotten around to it. They're busy and that's okay. I'm still here. And the other one I wrote was finding things that recurred daily and making them 2 % better. Because daily things that you do, things you do with high frequency compound if you made them slightly better.

55:16And so this is where I think a lot of people are like, why are you optimizing for your shoes or your mattress or your pillow or whatever. I'm a stickler for how a meeting starts. I'm always like, no, no, no. At the start of every meeting, we say, all right, the purpose of this meeting is this and a good outcome of this meeting would be Y. If you can't say X and Y, we're not doing the meeting. I'll stop people and I'll say, no, don't do this. Or when people talk, I'll be like, hey, you're talking a really low voice and you're not sitting up straight. Can you just do it? Say it with some energy, it'll make a difference.

55:49But that's every meeting then, people know that's how we do meetings. And so once you teach people how we do meetings, we're going to have a lot of meetings at this company. So we're going to make them better. We're not just going to have shitty meetings and let them slide. So finding recurring things and making them slightly better because it'll compound over time. So that was my answer for that. What was your partner's name at Monkey Inferno? Furkan? Furkan. Furkan, I think, was like, I don't know him well, but I could hang out with him for 30 seconds and I could just tell he's the man at seeing redundancies, seeing things that you do over and over and over again and be like, yeah, we're going to get rid of that and we're going to fix it by doing this, this and this.

56:24And it seems like you're like, dude, you're just slowing us down. What are you doing? He's like, no, no, no. You got to go fast to go slow or you got to go slow to go fast. He seems like that type of personality. Did he do that all the time? He was definitely, he had the hacker's laziness, which was like, I'm not going to do something unless it's clear that it matters. I'm just going to do shit. Just to do shit. That's the first thing. Second thing, I'm not going to do the same thing every day. If I have to do it multiple times, I'm automating this. And same thing, he would look around and be like, what's Sean doing?

56:57What's Jason doing? Are the non-technical people? And he'd be like, hey, Neil, you see, Jason keeps, what he's doing is he's going and finding each person manually on Twitter. you should just scrape this whole list, put it in a database, and copy-paste this code snippet so that he could put that on his machine so that he could just have his leads ready so he could go faster. He would do a lot of stuff like that. He told a story early at Apple. Apple was a mobile ad tech company that is now worth billions of dollars. He was the co-founder of it. And when Furkan told me a story, he's like, yeah, Adam, the CEO, he's like, one thing he really cared about was his dashboard.

57:34Like, what does our dashboard look like so that I have visibility? And he's like, I kind of watched Adam to see like, is there really any value out of this? Or is he just, you know, sometimes CEOs just have pet projects. They just want to look nice. And he's like, is it that or is there value here? So he shadowed him. He's like, all right, I'm not going to sit at my computer. I'm sitting at your computer. You show me, what are you looking at with this dashboard? What do you do with it? And so he showed him and he's like, yeah, I look at this. I look at this. And that tells me who we need to go after for these deals.

57:58And I need to figure out how much to offer them so that I can get them faster. Like, you You know, instead of just saying you should work with us for these features, if I just make a monetary offer that's better than their current ad network, they'll switch. And he's like, okay, so you need to figure out this list. You need this data. And then you need to know a projection of how much we can make with them so you can offer less than that, but still more than what they're probably making for their current ad network. And I should show you what their current ad network is in this dashboard. I'll just figure that out by looking at their SDK, blah, blah, blah.

58:26lot. He basically put together this command center for the CEO. He basically built a sales tool rather than working on features of the product. He's like, I'm going to build you something. What they did was they would go to a developer. They say, you should use our ad network. They're like, I already have an ad network. He's like, cool. I'm guessing your ad network pays you$9 CPM. They're like, yeah, something like that. He's like, cool. We'll pay you$22. He's like, how can you do that? Our ad network is better. I can sit here to convince our ad network is better. But I'll just sign this paper that says, we're already going to pay you$22 no matter what.

59:00Like, I'm just confident it's going to perform because I know our ad network's better. And they're like, okay. He's like, but here's the, you know, you got to switch. And we have these two engineers standing here next to me. They're going to help you switch today. And then they were just, and they just rolled through the ad market because they were able to go to people and make them no brainer offers. How did they make them no brainer offers? They, because they had this command center internally. That was how big is this app? What are they currently using? How much are they currently making? How much do we think we can make off them?

59:27And then how do we have a spread there that we can work with? And so I thought that that was a great example of figuring out how to make the company successful in a way that most engineers would not do. Because most engineers just want to work on product and not even product. Like the under the hood parts of the product, which is like even worse than making the product better. Dude, this is the most wholesome episode we've done in like two months. Because we weren't talking about like CEOs fighting each other and shit. no one's making no one's getting made fun of we're totally aligned lots of take-home value here this is this is a this is like the most wholesome thing we've done in a long time i actually am like i feel like i'm learning this is this episode was good because i'm sitting here in a notebook taking notes i'm learning that's a good i'm learning yeah love that well that's it that's the episode good pod i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to I put my all in it like no days off On the road, let's travel, never looking back All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury.

1:00:36They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder. It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself.

1:01:11And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency, well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show. For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.