Masterclass: How to go from founder to CEO (without imploding)

21:45The way you start is the opposite of what you eventually need. And so you get to this point and you're like, what do I do now? And I'll give you one last example. For company values, I've actually taken a different stance on this than I had before. The different stance is when I started my last company, I actually wrote the values out in advance, and I failed to live up to them. And my premise when getting Hampton working was I was like, I'm actually not going to write down values. I'm going to start this company, and I'm going to see how it feels. Then I'm going to name the values later on. Jack Smith, baby naming.

22:21My friend Jack said something, and he did something that honestly changed my life. He did the weirdest thing that I'd ever heard of, and I mocked him at the time. He did not name his baby. Jack had a baby and he refused to name her for the first year. And I said, Jack, why are you doing this? He goes, well, I think I should get to know her first before we give her her name. And I said, Jack, that's absolutely insane. What are you doing? And I started thinking about it more and more. And I got to know the baby. And we started calling her legal name was Baby for the first year. And I was like, you know, baby's kind of nice.

22:52This is kind of nice. And then they like thought of all these names that represented her personality. And now I know her as her new name. and I realized that is actually sort of brilliant. And I did the same thing with my company where I purposely did not have values. And I was like, what attributes bothers me? And what attributes do I particularly love when I see us do here? And now after, you know, my company is weird. I started it, I had someone run it, now I'm back running it again. So we're like a weird timeline, but it still feels early for us. And we are now, but we're now like a couple of years in, just now naming our values.

23:25and it has felt like that has been 100 % the better move. And it feels great, honestly, to stick to these values because before when I named values, it seemed kind of weak. It seems kind of dumb. You're like, I'm gonna hire people according to these values that I actually made in the case of The Hustle. I made when I was 26, I'm now 28. I don't even align with them anymore, but I'm stuck with this. I don't like this feeling. I feel like I'm in a prison. And so now I'm just gonna look soft by not following the things that I said I was gonna follow. We did things differently this time and it's been so much better.

23:56What's an example of a value that emerged? I can give you the three. The first is... You're the first person to ever ask me about my company values, actually. So the first one is fun. So I just value fun. And so fun means in our copy, I want to do silly stuff just because. But also, I don't want to follow data all of the time. Sometimes we're going to do stuff just because it's exciting or it's fun. And I'm going to hire people who I have fun being around. The second one is speed. So I realized I valued moving fast a lot more than I previously thought. And the third one, which is actually kind of controversial, or it doesn't feel right at first, but I'll explain, is pride.

24:32So what does pride mean? I told my company, and they're like, gay pride? What do you mean? And I'm like, no, guys. I mean, you could have that, but that's not what I'm referring to. It's like we're having fun. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a bunch of bros being dudes, you know? Pride meaning I want us to have pride in our personal lives and our work lives. And so what that means is we started off virtually and the data showed that we could sell it and make money for it. But it didn't feel good. I didn't take pride in that. I took pride in saying we have in real life, even though the data didn't exactly show at the time we should have done that.

25:08I'm doing it anyway. Or if we're going to lay people off, I'm going to go above and beyond. And I'm going to give them like more severance than the market rate because it just makes me feel good. Or if we can afford it, which we can, when a vendor submits their bill to us, even though we have a net 90, I'll pay them that day. because it feels good to do the right thing and to treat people well and to have this reputation as someone who does something a certain way. And that gives me a lot of pride to do that. Or when someone was, and I tested this, I would tell a couple of people, here's the value that I'm doing.

25:36And someone showed me a text message that we're sending to potential customers to remind them of something. So like a reminder text message. And I was like, show some pride. That's just a boring boilerplate message. Show some pride, make it something special. and so like that is a way where I started like throwing this out there and like using it and I'm like oh my god that actually changed behaviors I told someone to like show some pride and they like in this really small thing they're showing pride or we had a work event and a couple of the guys there they just dressed sloppy like some of the other people like looked really nice and I don't expect everyone to wear a suit or anything like that but they just like their their like beard was all out of like whack and they have like kind of a dirty shirt on I'm like dude have some fucking pride, man.

26:18You don't have to go buy new clothes, but show up a little bit better than you are now. And so that's been the values are speed, pride, and fun. That's interesting. Yeah, I'm curious how it's going to play out. I've never heard of somebody do that, where you do it later. And also, I think it's very rare for values to actually show up. I would say that out of 100 companies who took the time to set values, what percent would you say actually live by those values? Live by those, I don't mean perfectly. I guess what I mean is compared to a similar company like them, they do things differently because they valued it.

26:59What percentage would you say actually do that? Very few. But I think to be like 10%. But I think to be a 90 percentile plus company, I actually do think you have to do things like living to your values. I think in order to be... Who have you seen do that? Have you seen anyone? Like, have you kind of gone into a company and been like, wow, they actually... Well, like the companies that I tend to admire or the books that I read of the people I admire, they're kind of quirky and they're very different. And so I think Coinbase was a good example where they took a stand. I think they said no politics.

27:31They also took a stand that they're going to be remote first, but their offices, they just put this video out, where their offices are going to be like the best and they want it to be beautiful and they want it to be people that they love it. They love working there. They didn't have to do that, but it just seems important to the CEO and now to the rest of the company. Or with Jason Fried from Basecamp, like he does things that are a little bit different than normal. And I think that what it does is it turns off a lot of people, but the people who truly love it, they absolutely love it. I think that's what's going to happen at my company.

27:58My value, the values that we have, they are going to turn some people off and eventually they're just not going to work here anymore. Which one do you think is going to turn people off? Because those all sound pretty uncontroversial to me. I want to not have fun. I want to take no pride. I want to move slow. I don't think anybody would say that. Dude, everyone wants to move slow. Like moving fast. Nobody states that. Yeah, but you could tell like when someone like says like this is going to take six weeks and like, well, what would it look like if it took two weeks? That makes so many people uncomfortable.

28:26So we've talked about this before. I'm surprised you didn't do it. Zuck had this thing back in the day where he said one of the great lessons he got when he was a, because he was a young CEO. I think he was 18. He's like, you need to acknowledge the trade-off in the value itself. So, you know, instead of saying, speed, because everybody says, yeah, of course, we all want to move fast. He would say, move fast and break things. That was the value. And because he said, move fast and break things, you would explicitly acknowledge the trade-off that, hey, when you move really fast, you're not going to, it's not everything's going to be done, you know, perfectly, neat, and orderly, like things are going to break, things are going to happen.

29:01And by putting it in the value, it made it real. It made it something that not every company would agree with. It made it something that you could be criticize on and made some acknowledge what will be uncomfortable about doing this. And so I'm surprised you didn't do that. I'm still working on wordsmithing, if I'm being honest. But I think that speed and pride actually can be inverse and they can be the opposite. But I actually don't think that most people, I don't have a cute phrase yet, like move fast and break things. But I don't think that most people are comfortable when you say move fast.

29:33And I think that at my company, I've noticed that someone will say something, this is going to take a quarter, and I will pose the question, what do I have to do to see results for this in two weeks? What's that look like? That actually rubs a huge percentage of people the wrong way. The type of people who kick ass at my company, they say, oh, you know, that's kind of an interesting question. I guess if we do this, this, and this, and maybe that would be exciting, we could actually pull that off. But a huge percentage of people, I think, are very nervous about speed. They're very nervous about moving fast.

29:59I mean, have you not experienced that? No, 100%. I just don't think that if you say the word is my value is speed, I think when you say, who agrees with this? 100 % of people raise their hand. And nobody will say, you know, I disagree. I think we should be moving slow. I think 0 % of people do that. So that's why I'm like, in practice, what you're saying is actually more like uncomfortably fast, right? Or, you know, break the speed bar. So what we do is whatever would be normal for this project, we're going to cut that in half as a default. We're going to have a different speed bar than everybody else or than whatever your default is.

30:33And so I think I would have pushed you to be like, hey, I think you should make that actually say what you're trying to say. Yeah, admittedly, I'm still word spitting a lot of this stuff. But I'll give you an example for speed. It's like if you go to joinhampton.com and you sign up or you submit lead information. If you just pay me. No, no, no. If you like, if you're, if you, it doesn't work perfectly right now. But if you apply and you fit our criteria, meaning you have a company that does at least 3 million in revenue and you're one of our 13 chapters. Helen, who works at a company, is going to call you.

31:07Right now, it's 60 minutes, but we're trying to reduce it to 15 minutes. You're going to get a phone call from someone who works at a company. And all they're going to do is say, I see you. Thank you for applying. We have to review all the application, but I'm here. And you can text me if you need anything. Thank you so much. So that's an example of moving fast. I think you should make, you know how some companies have a wall of love? I think you should make a public or at least public in your company list of you write the value at the top so you write whatever your thing is like move uncomfortably fast that's the value and then i think you should have a running list of concrete anecdotes where that's true and then you just see how long you can get that list to be and you can see how how much is being added to that you can see who's adding to it because that's the person who's actually like living by the values um and then you'll when you do that when you actually write it down you'll realize like damn we say that, but what do we actually do that's fast?

31:59Or we say take pride. What's an example of something we do with pride that others wouldn't, or we weren't before we actually did this? And I think when you do that, it actually becomes real. That's a good idea. I think most values just are... I think that percentage of companies who actually live their values in a way that's different than the company A versus company B is so small. I think 10 % is extremely generous. I think the number is probably closer to 1%. Who have you seen? Well, you know, the hard part when you're an entrepreneur is that you don't really work in many other companies. And so you only hear like secondhand information or you got, you know, we got acquired.

32:33Twitch, I don't think, I don't even know what the Twitch values were, but whatever the hell they were, they were not very powerful and they were not, we weren't doing them, or at least I didn't see anybody doing them, right? Nobody talked about them. And so I think that, you know, the couple of times that I've been in other people's companies, I haven't felt it. I think it's quite rare. You know, I think Elon does this really well where he drives a hardcore sleep on the factory floor mentality. So you see it with stories of him, literally sleeping on the factory floor. You see it with his company.

33:05So right now, if you go look at XAI, Zuck is throwing huge pay packages at people. OpenAI has the most popular product. Why would I, if I'm a top researcher, go work at Grok? This is the question they have to answer. And what they do in their propaganda is basically they show how, you know, quote unquote, cracked the team is, how hardcore they are about what they're doing, the culture and taking pride in overworking. And so like he does that. He also does it on the speed bar. Like there's a story of, there's a story in the Bolter Isaacson book about him that Jason Fried actually told on the podcast.

33:40And it was basically like they were ready to launch. It was a, they were doing some project with NASA. They were ready to launch the rocket. So half the NASA team was there to watch. And then there was the SpaceX team. and they discover a crack in the skirt of the rocket. And they're like, oh, shoot, like there's going to be, like we need to delay the launch. There's a crack in the rocket. And he goes and he looks at it. He's like, why do we need the skirt of the rocket anyways? And they're like, well, it's for additional thrust. He's like, will we have enough thrust? So what happens if we take the skirt off?

34:16What if we just cut this? What if we removed it? Like, there's like a set of shears over there. Like, what if we just cut it off? And they were like, well, you'll lose thrust. He goes and he does some calculations, like, on the side. And he comes back. He's like, we'll still have enough thrust. Let's do it. And he himself takes the shears and he cuts around the crack and basically removes it. And then that's the rocket that crashed. Yeah. And he totally didn't have enough thrust. It was insane. No, it actually, the launch goes well. And the NASA director wrote about this afterwards. She was standing there.

34:47and she goes, she's like, I've never seen anything like this. The NASA engineers, all we could do is stand there and watch. Like this would never be the way that we would do a launch. Like this was unfathomable. And, but that's what they did. And so those are the concrete anecdotes where you're like company A versus company B, company A does something different. There's another story of like, they needed to get a rocket from like one place to another and the ship, you know, you normally put a huge rocket on like a ship and take it from, you know, point A to point B, but it was going to be like three months or something like that.

35:19And so he's like, could we drive it there? And they're like, drive the rocket piece? Like, you know, drive that thing there? I think I saw that. Wasn't, they put it on like a bunch of trucks and the car went like five miles an hour. They had like a car in front that was basically like clearing the way. And literally when there was power lines, the guy would stand up in the truck, on the front truck and with a stick and push the power lines up so that the truck with the rocket could like go under. And they now get into this route. Elon's basically like a redneck. Elon's a hillbilly. No overpasses.

35:48They were like, oh, we're going to have to drive around here or go that way to get there. And they did it there, right? That's like the equivalent of being like, it's like, I got a guy. You need the wire removed. I got a guy. Just grab that old broom over there. I got a guy. Yeah, so I just think pretty broadly, whatever percentage of energy you're going to, great, you got the three values. I would just be like, it's not what we say, it's what we do. And so we're going to track what we do that's in line with these. and like, you know, that's what I'm calculating. And every week, every month, I'm going to see how much we add to this list.

36:20That's a great idea. I didn't think of, so we have a thing where we give examples of, like we celebrate them, but like, you know, who moved fast and even if it was a bad thing, let's like talk about it. You know, you do that with like sales calls. You're like, all right, let's get like the blunder of the week. All right, here, does everyone know why? Yeah, like good job trying and let's improve this way. So I used to give out, I mean, this is, I'm not like, this is not what they teach you at harvard business school but here's what i did i used to i bought this replica wwe championship belt and every friday i would give it i would basically i would call the team over so get everybody away from the computer we would all grab a beer or a drink or whatever and we would stand so we'd stand a little huddle as you know with 12 15 people at the company at that time and i would basically give the belt to somebody and they got to keep it like kind of on their shoulder on their desk for that week and the belt holder got these like small perks.

37:10Like you got dessert first at lunch, you got this thing, whoever had the belt that week. And then that was basically my opportunity to shout out the person who did the thing. That's the behavior that's in line with the values. And so it was never like the person in charge. It was the person who did something above and beyond the call of duty or like, you know, in line with one of the values. And I would tell the value story and I'll tell you what the person did that was like out of the ordinary, that was in line with the value, that that's what we're all about. And then I'll hand them the belt.

37:37And like, guess what? you do that 52 weeks in a row, like people start to get it. It's like no different than second grade class. Like people start to, people start to understand like what gets rewarded around here, what gets, um, you know, what, what is the, what is the benefit? And then what I did was I assigned a prize to it. So you would get some cash. So I'd give you like, I don't know if it was like a thousand dollars in cash. And the rule was you can only spend that thousand dollars on something that is a story that you're going to tell us, you know, the following week. So the belt holder would be like, yeah, I got the thousand bucks.

38:07And what I did was like, you can't just be like, I paid my rent with it or like I paid groceries. It's got to be something that's like story worthy. And so then that person got to stand up with pride and like do the thing. They got to come home that day and tell their girlfriend or their wife, you know, like, hey, like I won a thousand bucks. I got the belt. I like did this thing. And you get to, it's like you, that's how you make it like deep inside of a company is like, you know, reinforce it on a weekly basis and almost like productize it. Alex Ramosey says something cool. He's like, most of your team, they don't need to be taught.

38:35They need to be reminded. For the majority of things, you teach them once and then you just got to constantly remind. It's almost always a lack of reminding, not a lack of teaching. I thought that was really good. It's true. I mean, it's true for myself too, right? What are the most valuable lessons? It's like the ones that I keep having to learn again and again, right? Yeah, it's like I've learned this all. I don't need knowledge. I need wisdom. And just like you need to remind me in order to make this wisdom sick. Yeah, exactly. I think you guys like this podcast for two reasons. One is if you are building a business, it's lonely.

39:07And listening to Sean and I, we're sort of like your friends. And the second reason is you know that we are builders. We love building companies. It's kind of our life's vocation. So if you have a business that does at least$3 million in revenue, I think I know exactly what you're experiencing. You've built a great business. It's working. And you finally have a second to look up. You're young, you probably run an internet company. In your town, there's potential that you're a freak, that you have no one else to talk to about growing your company. In fact, when you even go out in public, you probably don't even like telling people what you do for a living because you don't feel like explaining it.

39:40If you fall in this category, that means you're making the biggest decisions of your life, 10,$20 million decisions all by yourself alone. And without that push, in my opinion, the risk is not blowing up. It's drifting into good enough territory, into becoming mediocre. And the worst thing that can happen to you is 10 years from now, you look back and you realize, I missed this amazing opportunity. I didn't grow, I plateaued in life and in business. My company, Hampton, we changed that. If you're running a company that does at least 3 million in revenue, you can apply at joinhampton.com. We vet you, we curate you, and we give you eight handpicked founders who have similar businesses, similar sizes as you, who will challenge you, who will hold you accountable, and who will give you perspectives that you cannot get anywhere else.

40:26and this all happens in real life. So check it out, joinhampton.com slash network. Can I ask you about this thing that you have on here about, I want to tell you about something, but I first want to hear about this edge. Founders who go all in the second time on edge talents that they have. Yeah, basically I'm the type of entrepreneur who seeks variety. I get excited by new things and I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs who have that same, you know, that's the kind of guy they are, right? That's the kind of gal they are. They're into that. I think everyone has that. Everyone has it a little bit.

41:00And there's some, I don't know if these other people are just better at resisting it or they have the opposite urge. So we had the founder of RX Bar on the podcast and Peter. And so he had come on and he had built RX Bar from his parents' kitchen table. He built the number one or whatever, like a top protein bar basically. Sold it for whatever, what was it,$500 million-ish? Or more. Or$600 million, something like that. And we were talking to him a couple years later and we're like, Peter, what's up, man? What are you excited about? What are you interested? What are you doing now? What are you going to do next?

41:31What's the next move? He's like, I'm launching a protein bar. Like what? And he basically was going back to the market that he knew better than anyone else with a new product, David Barr, which is, by the way, now already like multi-hundred million dollar company faster than RX Barr ever was. In terms of revenue, right? Because he's playing, yeah, because he's playing, I think we talked about this, I think they said they're over a hundred million in revenue and he's what less than two years post launch. So, you know, so incredible success. And it kind of makes sense. It's like when you see people playing a video game and you see those guys who they're not buying the next game and starting that they go and they basically speed run a video game.

42:09If you've ever seen people speed run Mario or something like that. I mean, they just know the level like the back of their hand and they're able to like do it with a level of mastery that, you know, any newcomer, including themselves would not have been able to do. And so this fascinates me because I'm so opposite, You know, if I have a success in something, the last thing I want to do is go do that again. Boring, not interested. And yet there's this group of people that do this. And the reason why this came up for me was I was looking at carbone pasta sauce. Do you know this story? Yes. Amazing.

42:38Amazing, amazing, amazing. You want to tell a little bit of it and I'll fill in some gaps? Okay, so I believe Rau's is a restaurant in Manhattan. And I think it's actually only one restaurant, like a small restaurant. It's a family Italian restaurant. Not even, I think, in a popular area of Manhattan, but it was still a very popular restaurant. And now a lot of people know Rau's tomato sauce. That's the pasta sauce, which is, it's not like gourmet level, but it's like a significantly elevated ragu where it's like$8 a bottle versus like the$4 a bottle. and so approachable, but definitely elevated.

43:13And it's crushed it. It's killed it. And it basically took this very small Manhattan one-store restaurant and made this massive, potentially multi-billion dollar brand. Now, this other company called Carbone, which is a little bit more, less of a family restaurant. It might be a family restaurant, but a little bit more flashy. And I think they have like amazing, I think it had an amazing leader. But basically the CEO of Rouse has done the same thing with Carbone. So now you can buy Carbone sauce and it's the same thing where it's slightly elevated, but still approachable. And just crushing it.

43:41Is that right? Yeah, you nailed it. So just to fill in some of the details. So Rouse scaled up and sold for$415 million in 2017. And since then has sold one or two, like private equity sale, then sold one or two more times. Last one at$2 billion. So here's this$2 billion pasta brand and the CEO runs and scales that company. And separately, Carbone basically kind of goes through a similar model. When the pandemic hit, Carbone the restaurant, which had this incredible reputation, tries to figure out like, okay, well, now people are at home. Our business took a hit. It became this incredible forcing function, right?

44:18So like sometimes you turn your disadvantage into your advantage if you're a great entrepreneur. That's the key. So you look at this situation and you're like, all right, what am I going to do? How am I going to flip this on its head and not just survive this, but can I do something with this? And so they decide, hey, we're going to come up with a jar version of it. We'll sell it direct to consumer on our website. Okay, great. So they go through dozens of trials. They're getting the flavors right. And, you know, they launch and it does okay. Not great. So this guy, Eric, comes in and he comes over from Rouse.

44:47He had a non-compete. His non-compete expires. He says, all right, great. I'm going to do this. And they spend kind of like four months just working on recipes, flavors, trying to figure it out. They're in the lab. They're in the lab. They're grinding. They're grinding with the sauce flavors. They're grinding garlic. Yeah, they're in the lab. The problem is, you know, there's a pretty competitive category. And so, you know, pasta sauce, which was, you know, obviously like not a new category. It's like, where's the opening? And he goes, he thinks with my reputation, my connections, I'll be able to get us into retail.

45:17He goes and he knocks on all the doors and no interest. And so he's like, shit, all right, what are we going to do? And for basically, I think he said like 18 months, they, you know, he was struggling to get people to call him back and he could not get his foot in the door. And so then he had to think about, all right, we need to come up with a value proposition. We need to come up with a position that's going to be different enough where the retailers want to carry us. And so he's like, all right, listen. He puts part of his hat is like a Don Draper hat. The other part is the economic hat. So the Don Draper hat's like, all right, we need to market this differently.

45:46This is restaurant quality sauce. We use San Marzano tomatoes. We cook them on an open kettle on fire, right? Like, you know, who knows how, maybe that's how all sauces are made. Who knows? But starts to build a little bit of the story. And because this is so premium, he's like, you know what? we're just going to price this at twice the price of the other. What's their price? Double it. That's our price. And so now it's priced at$7 to$11. It's a very expensive item. But what that means is that a retailer who normally takes a portion of that sale, instead of making 50 cents on a sauce, they're now making$2 and 50 cents.

46:25So they had a big incentive to carry it because they're like, hey, if this sells, we make way more per jar than we going to otherwise. And so this becomes the pitch and this pitch starts to work. It takes off. And now they're north of a hundred million in sales. They're in 27 ,000 stores. And it's just fascinating to me that this guy is just running this pasta playbook again and again. And I started to think about that. And I was like, who else doing that? So we talked about the RX bar friend of the pod, Nikita Beer did the same thing. Basically he's like, cool, I'm going to make these like teen, these sort of viral teen apps where teens are able to kind of like, I don't know what you would say, like compliment or like give, like, hey, who's the most likely to do whatever?

47:10Who's the most blah, blah, blah friend you know? And then it sends them a message. Somebody said you're the blah, blah, blah, blah. Click this to see who said that about you. And for a teenager in high school, like, that's an irresistible text. Goes viral, right? And so he's done this a couple of times now and has parlayed that into like, now he runs product for X and works with Elon Musk. Which is insane. Which is an insane career leap that should be studied. Okay, but we have other friends. So there's a friend of the pod. We can't name them. But in the D2C space, similar to RX Bars, they built a brand.

47:41And we have one friend that has now built four different$100 million brands using the same e-commerce playbook. Two of their brands literally compete head-to-head against each other. If you search in this category on Amazon, the number one product is theirs and the number two product is theirs. They look like two totally different competing brands. He owns both of them. And I was looking at the revenue of these companies and it was like, oh yeah, this one did a little better this month. It did 8 million this month. And the other one did 7.5 million this month. And I can't believe it. And this is like, almost like full self-driving for him.

48:14He's on autopilot. He knows what to do with these companies. I don't exactly know who you're talking about, but I think I do. And answer this question. Is there a chance that the website of the two is the exact same website template? Yeah, why not? because I think I know who you're talking about. I think they owned one thing and then they sold it and they just basically it looked like they said, so let's just say hypothetically. No more clues. We can't do any more clues. No, no, no. Hypothetically, just like a pen. They were like, all right, this worked for pens. Now let's do the exact like export, upload.

48:46Now we're going to do the same thing for lighters, but like same branding. Yeah, yeah. So again, if the sort of mindset of like going back and speed running the level again, so different than me. I mean, what do you think about this? Do you have any examples of this? What do you think of this model? It's 100 % the way to go, I think. But you don't do that. I think I did. Yeah, the reason I started Hampton was because we, at The Hustle, we owned a community called Trends and I realized all the mistakes that I made. So I think it's the same thing. Yeah, I mean, my career started, it felt like as a blogger when I was 20 years old.

49:19And frankly, I feel like I've been doing the same thing for now 15 or 16 years. So yeah, I do think it's the same thing. Explain your thing. When you say doing the same thing, what's the thing for you? It's all been centered around content and community. So basically, when I moved to San Francisco, I had a book club. And that's actually how I met some of my best friends. So like of the two guys who are in my wedding, or of the six guys, two of them I met via my book club, where we would have a monthly book club where we would meet up in real life. And then from there, I hosted a handful of events called Bootstrap Live.

49:50In order to make these events popular, I started blogging, creating a newsletter. That turned into a huge conference called HustleCon where I actually just looked at the numbers last night because we were thinking about doing some more events at Hampton and we had 10 ,000 people in one year in 2018 come to our events. So I've been doing events in community for 15 years now. So it's been actually quite consistent. Even more specifically, you're like, I want to have this community, either personally be a part of it or attract this community and then you're like, cool, how am I going to do that? I'll use content as this magnet to bring people in, whether it's the podcast, it's the blog, it's a newsletter, it didn't really matter.

50:28It's like, I'm going to go talk. That's going to attract these types of people. And then my business is the community. Whether, you know, HustleCon was like, I'm going to charge you$300 once. Trends was like, I'm going to charge you$300 once a year. Hampton's like, I'm going to charge you whatever, $8 ,000 once a year. And you've just been doing that same playbook, but smarter, better each time. Yeah, I basically am trying to make up for the mistakes that I'd made in the previous thing. And, you know, like, I think that when I started the hustle, I think I told you this. My goal was to get to 100 million in revenue with a newsletter.

51:01And at the time, that was considered laughable. And frankly, I didn't entirely believe it, but I was like, I don't, I was like - Frankly, I was the one laughing. Yeah, I laughed at myself. But I was like, I know for sure it gets to 30 million, but I have a feeling that if something can get to 30 million, it could probably get to 100 million. And like, there was no math behind it. I was just guessing. And I was proven to be right. I unfortunately didn't do it. I sold too early. But my competitor, now one of my best friends, Austin Reef, he actually did do it. And so the idea that I've basically have looked at either community or content, and oftentimes they're married.

51:31And I'm like, I want to get this to 100 million in revenue. I have never built a business to 100 million in revenue. And that's the one thing I've been trying to do now for 16 years. And I hope I can pull this off. But it's been content and community the whole time. And frankly, I didn't do it on purpose. I was just trying to do stuff. And I'm like, oh, this comes way easy. I'll just do this. I wish I would. I don't think. I think I've always failed at being reflective and being like, oh, like I made this mistake before. I can avoid it. So oftentimes I actually continue to make the same mistake over and over and over again.

51:59But with like Peter or the guy you're talking about or some of our other friends who are two-time founders in the same industry, they do a much better job than I personally have with using the same contacts, the same group of people and just rinse and repeating. So by the time this goes live, I think the Eric Ryan podcast has gone. We'll have gone online. And Eric Ryan, if it hasn't, founded, I think, four companies that if I had to guess, each of them was in the nine-figure valuation. And he just did the same thing over and over and over again with the same people. And I definitely think that's the way to go.

52:25And it could be way more fun. And so you go back and you commit the same crime again and again and again. And I kind of love this model. I don't do it myself. I don't really have the – that's not my wiring. But I find it fascinating. Another example of this is the guys who started Money 2020. I don't remember the name. Oh my God. Dude, I've been begging him every month. I send him an email. I say, will you come on MFM? He has told me now that he's going to come this November. So I'm putting that in the record. It's happening. So what's the guy's name again? Jonathan. Jonathan. All right. So what these guys did, which is amazing, is they basically figured out a model, a blueprint.

53:01And like a home builder who has blueprints for a home that they can just copy paste and just build again and again and again. They've basically been doing that for, I don't know, industry conferences. I don't know what you would call it. Is there a different term for that? So if you want to figure out and follow along, everyone should Google this guy's name. His name is Jonathan Wiener. Go to his LinkedIn. And he originally started as a conference business, I think in 1996. I think that was his first event. And if you go to his website, you'll see the name of something like six different events.

53:34Go to the website of each event. It's the exact same website, but in a different niche. So he had Money 2020, which was a payments conference. and there was a shtick to all of his conference. I think you get a$2 ,000 ticket, but if you're a vendor, you're obligated to go to three different meetings with different people. I think that's part of the whole thing. So he did Money 2020, which was a payments conference. He did Shop Talk, which was an e-commerce conference. He did Grocery Talk, which some food, the food business, I guess. And then now he has Human X, which is for artificial intelligence.

54:11and he also has health, which is for health innovation. And so he's done this where, I think he's on his fifth or sixth one, but the previous four collectively at each time, if you add it all up, I think the public price is six or$700 million. So it was like one was 125, another one was like 200. And he's done that four times to where it adds up to like something like six. Yeah, actually it's, the adding up is not even the most impressive. It's the fact that each one succeeded and became a nine figure. so over$100 million business, again and again and again and again. It's literally like having a money printer, right?

54:48So I like these people who have these blueprints and then go back to the well. And they are these sort of repeat offenders. And I think it's pretty fascinating. The problem, of course, with this is the psychology. So one thing that a lot of founders struggle with is knowing too much. And knowing too much hurts you in two different ways. The first is, if you've been in a space for a number of years and you met all the right people, you learned all the hard lessons, you know the nuances of that space, you're the most equipped to do it, but you also have the most scar tissue. And so some people literally can't get past the scar tissue and the trauma of it.

55:22And emotionally, they don't want to go back into that space again. And they want to go into a new space and get new scar tissue from new spaces. And that's a very, very, very common thing. What happens when it works is sometimes you then get a different problem, right? Yes, you know a lot. You know how to do it, but you're bored of it. It's like sitting on a seesaw that's balanced. You kind of want to go up and down, right? Like that's kind of the point. And so a lot of people who are in the game of entrepreneurship and you succeed, maybe your money problems are solved now. So now if you're playing, you're not playing for the money as your top priority anymore.

55:55You're playing because you like the sport of business. And the question is, if you're going to play in the sport of business, like where are you going to get more kicks? Are you going to get it from going back and dominating and doing that again? Some people do do that. And there's other people that need something new. And I've always been in the need something new category. I didn't really even question it. And over time, I've met a handful of people that do this. I know one guy that did this with sports betting. He built the most popular kind of blogs in sports betting. And then he basically sells those leads to sports betting casinos or website or like, you know, FanDuel, DraftKings type of thing.

56:25So he dominates the lead flow and then he sells the leads. and he sold one company for like 40 million. Then he did the state. He's told the story on the podcast. If you go look at when I sold the Milk Road, go listen to Kendall's part on this. Basically, he did it in, I want to say like New Jersey, or he did it in the first state that it was legal. So only New Jersey was legal. All of his competitors were like, oh, US market shut down. Only one state out of 50 is available. It's a dead market. We got to go international. And he had the opposite takeaway from that. He's like, oh, so I could just dominate New Jersey.

56:59And he created like NewJerseySportsBettingInfo.com or whatever, you know, some website like that. He owned all of the New Jersey sports betting traffic and he sold it to one of the companies for I think 40 something million. Then he did the same exact thing again. Minnesota opened up and he literally like repeated it, did the same thing in Minnesota, sold it again to the same company for another 45 million, but faster this time. And this time they were like, oh yeah, shit. Okay, in the contract, any other state, you can't do this again. Like you can't do this. We didn't put that non-compete in the first one.

57:29We didn't realize that, oh, you're just going to do this again in the second one better than we're going to do it. And so he sold the same company essentially twice for$40 million or something each. And then, by the way, I just caught up with him recently. Guess what he's doing? He did it again? He's selling leads, doing the same thing in the same playbook. I couldn't believe it. And so actually, I totally could believe it. It's actually the most believable thing in the world. All right. Is that it? That's it. That's the pod. Hope that stuff helps people, I don't know, run their companies better.

58:00All right. Talk soon. 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 look. This episode is brought to you by HubSpot Media. They have a cool new podcast that's for AI called The Next Wave. It's by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lance. And they're basically talking about all the new tools that are coming out, how the landscape is changing, what's going on with AI tech. So if you want to be up to date on AI tech, It's a cool podcast you could check out. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.