SaaS CEO QUIT His Job To Start A Trash Company

25:17And I linked to the website where Tim Ferriss, he actually made a blog post where he talked about Harry's. their pre-launch strategy. And so he made this account. If you go to his website, his website is LoneStarTrash.com. Great name, by the way. It's hilarious, this website. And so if you refer a new customer, you get a t-shirt. If you refer 10 customers, you get one free month of trash pickup. And so within 24 or 48 hours, he sets up a Stripe account, he collects$15 ,000 in sales. And so with that$15 ,000, he says, shit, I'm in business. He goes out and he buys 200 trash bins because that's, I guess, how many customers he got for month one.

26:02And there's a picture of all these trash bins in his driveway. Then he goes on Facebook Marketplace, searches within 500 miles, and he finds a trash garbage truck for sale for$40 ,000. Apparently, Amex, I didn't know they allow this, but they give you a line of credit up to$60 ,000 or$80 ,000 for 7 % interest. He uses that and he buys this truck without ever seeing it. So he calls the guy and he's like, hey, do a FaceTime with me, whatever. Spends$2 ,000, gets this truck shipped to his house. Now, he's in business. And tomorrow is his first day in business. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. He's got to get up at 4 a.m.

26:40It's one day a week. You've got to go with them. I'm going to go with them. Not tomorrow, but over the next few weeks. I'm going to get a video crew. I think we've got to go do this. But this guy has started a trash can or a trash business. And so let me see. I have his math here. He was like, I think a bad year is going to be about$150 ,000 in revenue. I think a decent year will be$250 ,000. And I think a great year will be$350 ,000. And if it works well, I'll expand to new regions. and it's crazy fascinating that he's doing this and he's doing it mostly in public where he's like tweeting out all the stuff that he's doing and it's just so funny that this guy's doing this because he's like making a joke about it.

27:22So for example, he bought hoodies for himself and I guess the one employee he has and what's the t-shirt say? It says... It says, great days start with a good dump. A picture of his garbage truck. And I had him interview to get information for this pod. I asked him all these questions and I wrote them down. And he's taking a very technical, techie analysis towards this. He's like, look at the SEO for the largest company, Waste Management. They have this many pages. But the second highest in the country only has 650 pages. I think I could rank there by doing X, Y, and Z. And it's crazy fascinating.

27:59And get this. So one truck holds... I got to remember this. One truck holds 200 bins worth of trash. And those 200 bins worth of trash cost$250 to dump. So the costs are going to be the truck, the cans, which eventually pay off pretty quickly, and then labor. So it's a pretty fascinating business. And I cannot believe that he just went all in on this and he's making it happen. I appreciate people who do this so much. I love this story. And I feel very invested in this. I've invested in a lot of companies, but I feel invested in this. I need this to work. Lone Star Trash. I feel like we should single-handedly pump this.

28:42And to all listeners in the, where is he, Dallas? He's 30 minutes outside of Dallas. And he explicitly said, he goes, when you talk about this pod on the pod, I'm afraid that too many people are going to go to my website and there's a buy now button. And I'm just going to have to like go through all the work and refunding them and telling them we can't service them. So I have to remind people he is only servicing one region. right he's like he says my neighborhood has um i think three or 400 houses and then there's 400 houses in the sister neighborhood he says the trash collecting companies currently charging 33 dollars per month per bin so most houses have two bins so it's 66 bucks a month so let's just do the math here 66 bucks a month just his neighborhood that's 26k a month 316 000 a year double it for for both and that's like sort of 600 grand of potential revenue if he got everybody to switch of course not going to get everybody to switch but i do think he could do pretty well so here's should we brainstorm a few marketing tactics well but it's actually could be potentially bigger than than we think so he goes he goes i he goes i talked he goes basically i went and went on facebook marketplace and i found all these trash guys uh who are selling these trucks and i just played dumb with them i was like he's like i didn't even play dumb i am dumb i don't know anything about this and so he makes friends with all these guys on facebook marketplace who were selling trucks.

29:57And he's like, I fly up there and I meet one of them. And he's like, this guy is in Oklahoma. You would think that he's just a country bumpkin. His business did 9 million in revenue, 2 million in profit. He owns a plane that he flies around in. And he starts talking to these guys. And he learns that there's a small town, McKinney, which is north of Dallas. I guess it's a small city. They just went out to bid for them to get a new trash collector. It was 50 ,000 houses. And the contract is$20 million a year. And that's a relatively small region outside of Dallas. So it potentially could be bigger.

30:25And we know, we talked about Wayne Hazinga, a billionaire who started AutoNation, Blockbuster, and Waste Management. Now he used to own the Florida Panthers. And then we talked about Bradley Jacobs, who's a multi-billionaire who started also with trash businesses. Maybe it could be bigger than we think. Spencer, if you're listening to this, which I'd be stunned if you didn't listen to this giant segment about your company. Me and Sam, we haven't talked about this. I don't know if Sam's cool with this. But we're going to buy your next truck for you, sir we're gonna invest in your company and we will fund your next truck and that will be the mfm trash truck how many other podcasts do you know that will have their own trash dude i would 100 i would i would i would put up 20 grand to exactly we're both in for 20 grand we'll buy the next 40k truck whenever he's ready to expand this we'll come in at a low valuation here right give us a you know 500 000 valuation and uh we as this podcast will then single-handedly promote this neighborhood by neighborhood as you expand.

31:26But I think he should do a couple things. So here's a few free marketing ideas for him. Do you know, can you design the bins? Like, could he paint the bins? Could he color the bins in a different way or design them so that if you're using this trash company, your bins will look different? I don't see why not. I mean, like a bright pink one or something. Like the Lyft mustache back in the day. Remember when you would go through San Francisco and you'd see these cars driving with this fluffy mustache on it? Like, what the heck is that? And then somebody would have to tell you, It was so weird. You had to ask, what is that?

31:57And then as soon as somebody knew, they were happy to tell you, oh, that's Lyft. It's a ride-sharing company. You could actually just request a ride on your phone. And then the driver will show up like that. That's his car. He puts the mustache on it. That means he's a taxi. And it's like, whoa, okay, interesting. And the Lyft, I have a Lyft mustache right here. I admired this marketing tactic so much. I stole a mustache off a car, and I have this thing. You'll have to have like, he could have like, he could paint like cookies on the bin and then the truck will look like cookie monster or something where it's like silly when it like goes into the truck.

32:30The truck and the bins need to become his marketing assets. And so the bins should look like you've made a choice that you have decided to go with the local provider who's all about service, that's has fun, blah, blah, blah. Right. So make the bins fun and interesting in some way. Great idea. First step. Second step. he should go around and basically fly after that other company puts bins out. And let's say they're knocked over or in the wrong spot. He should put a little thing that says, we would never do this to you. We're a new company started by a guy who lives here. I was so frustrated. And tell your little founder story.

33:07Put it as a slip inside of every trash bin. Because you're really just marketing in this 400 house radius, right? So pretty easy. Next thing. I don't know if you know this, Sam. Kids love garbage trucks. garbage trucks, fire trucks. They just love them. So take the truck on tour. It's like the Wienermobile. Do you remember that? The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile? Yeah, exactly. They would go to school. This is the Oscar Mayer playbook. And so in our town, the fire department for Christmas, they always like, they'll bring the fire truck out. They'll like play music off it. They'll put a Santa on top, do the same thing.

33:41Every holiday you're putting the, your, your truck's going to drive around. It's going to be themed and it's going to like, you know, create an occasion for the fact like when a garbage truck comes outside here I grab my kids and we run outside because they love to see it they love to see it pick up the trash whatever and so use do something that's going to get the kids to do it so for example go around let the kids ride in the truck or drive the truck or something like that or let everybody get out their hose and wash the truck so you can like spray your hose at the truck while it's going by create something that's going to get kids excited to see it if families excited to see it so that they know who you are tell your story so I think if he does this he could literally get like 80 % of the neighborhood on board because the other trash company does no marketing whatsoever.

34:23And it sounds like they're not doing a great job. There's a little bit of an opening here to go in and sell a better service. I think it's just fascinating. I think that obviously the margins are going to be way worse than software, but you have a recurring element here. The size of the market is every home in America. And also just what he's doing. You remember how we talked about Pinks? was a window cleaning company. And for some reason, they just have cool hats and people have their hats. They sent me one. I wear it. It's awesome. What he's doing with great days start with a good dump. That little silly stuff or the fact that his website is kind of funny and how it has an affiliate program.

35:05This is brilliant. I do think he's missing that branding though. There's no like, you know, Pinks has got its color, it's got its name, it's got whatever. Uh, there's like the two guys in a truck kind of like moving company. That's another good one where it's like, you know, two, two dudes in a truck. He needs something like that. Yeah. But, uh, keep in mind, I'm pretty sure he started this three weeks ago. Uh, so he's like, he's like, look, why didn't everything figured out? Yeah. I decided this was my mission eight weeks ago. I'm all in like, just, you know, you can't stop me now. Also, we'll crowdsource this dude.

35:40If there's a design agency that listens to the pod, you need to do a free, a pro bono free full branding. Where's Red Antler? Red Antler, I need you to take on this project for free in exchange for marketing collateral that you did this trash company, this local trash company in Texas branding. We need a design company. Let's crowdsource everything we need to make this happen. And he said, so I had him fill this out on 1215. He goes, I came up with this idea 60 days ago. So what's that? So in October 15th, he came up with the idea and then he got customers that fast. I just can't believe this.

36:16It's just so funny. And he's got all these pictures of all these bins in front of his house of him and his wife cleaning the bins. It's just, this is art. Also, TikTok. He needs to go on TikTok and tell the story. I don't know if you've seen, but like, so somebody posted this TikTok the other day. They go, oh, you're worried about, like, you know, you want to start posting on TikTok, but you're worried, oh, what do I have to say? Or how do I look or whatever? And the woman goes, do you know what I watch on this app? I watch guys cut sand. I watch women clean houses. I watch a massage therapist.

36:52I don't even get the massage. I watch other people get massages. I watch chiropractors and fruit getting crushed. Yeah, cracking necks and opening up avocados. What are you waiting for? And I think that is a you know, Marc Andreessen did, it's time to build as this rally cry. There's like the equivalent one of like do you know what I watch? I'll watch anything is the rally cry on TikTok. And I think he's got to tell the story of like this dad, this father of two who got so annoyed with his trash company that he's just decided like, all right, F it, I'm doing this. He says that he goes, his goal is 24 customers in less than 18 months, which is around a million dollars in ARR.

37:34He said he's going to hit a thousand customers in the first six months. And his first day driving the truck, he goes, I screwed around with it a little bit to test it out. but I really am just getting going tomorrow for the first time. And then listen to this. Listen to this guy's humor. He goes, I go, are you looking to hire for certain positions? He goes, yeah. In fact, as I'm typing this, I'm sitting at the bar at Dave & Buster's watching adults play the claw game. Anyone who wins, I slip to my biz card and give them an invite to make$20 an hour driving my trash trucks. This guy...

38:10He's great, man. He's great. He's great. He's full of humor. This is awesome. This is a really cool thing that he started as just like a stupid idea, but it's got legs. And I think that this is going to be awesome. This can make, because I think Spencer also wants a bit of fame, a little bit of content fame. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not just that. I think he, from meeting him, I think he has an urge that I have, a very primal urge inside, which is like, I just want to live, I just want to do something different with my life. I just want to do something different than the path. Like, okay, I get it.

38:46I can do the path. But I really don't want to just do the path. I think Spencer has this, which is what leads somebody to do something like this. And it sounds like he's already pretty all in, but triple down. Go even further all in. Rebrand yourself as Trash Daddy. Tell your story to the world. Do the unnecessary. Every Sunday have a theme. Remember how Goggin used to do this with Sprig? He used to put a truffle in every box. like you know every time you ordered you get a little chocolate truffle with it like just keep coming up with surprise and delight ways to go do the absolute unnecessary because that's what people pay attention to the things yeah like leaving a toy trash truck in people's mailbox or something like that sam brilliant i should be doing this frankly this is this is my tip get out of the way yeah yeah he's the right graves i'm the travis kalanick i need to take this thing over.

39:42This needs to be my business. I can't get his ass on this one. I'm so funny. No, I think this is awesome. What's his handle? If you look up Spencer Scott, I think his handle is aka Spencer Scott on Twitter. This is going to be a really fun journey for us to follow along. We're early on this and we're going to help make this a thing. This is awesome. By the way, Spencer, if you're listening, holler at us. I know I talked to you about this before, but now it's public record. Yeah, that was awesome. Okay, wow, what a segment. What a way to start off the New Year's. That was amazing. That's what this podcast is all about.

40:18If this is your first time listening to this podcast, that's what this podcast is all about. Yeah, finding cool stuff. Alright, I wanted to tell you another just like fun product real quick. This is a quick one. Click this link to this thing Birdie. Birdie.design is the name of it. Dude, I can't tell if these things are popular. Like, is this like a yellow cab where like I noticed one and they're everywhere or have they always been everywhere. We talked about this type of stuff a while ago. It's everywhere now. I've never seen one. You've seen one of these in real life? No. Well, go ahead and explain what it is.

40:50Okay. So I'll explain it into the context of this. One of the running jokes on the pod is that a completely valid business model is just X, beautifully done. And if you're pitching somebody, you really don't even have to say much more than that. You're like, what if it was just headphones just really well done or a thermostat you can't argue with somebody who is just saying we're just not going to do it you know all the bad ways you could do this we're not going to do any of those just beautifully done and Nest is a thermostat that's just beautifully done this is an air quality monitor that is beautifully done so go to birdie.design and you'll see it it's this white circle with a small yellow bird, like the old Twitter logo.

41:40And when it's pointed up like a cuckoo clock, that means the quality is good. If the air quality in your house ever drops, rather than beeping like an annoying smoke alarm or having tons of numbers and strange colors and you're like, oh god, you get stressed out. The bird just changes positions just to tell you that, hey, the air quality is not great right now. And then you look in your app and it'll tell you all about it. So this thing is awesome. I think it's big in Europe. It's not actually, they're like just now, like, actually, I don't know if this is true, but they're expanding to the, to the States now.

42:13I think it's bigger in Europe. I think this is a fantastic idea. Beautiful website. The currency is DKK. What's DKK? Some type of monopoly money. I don't know. Danish crone. Ah, croner. Yes. How could I forget? So yeah, this thing costs 2000 DKK. an unknown amount of dollars. $300. $300. That's$300. It's beautiful. It's a piece of art. It's wonderful. So we talked about this with Steph Smith. Steph Smith said that these air quality control like monitors, they're going to, she said they're going to explode. And then she went on and said, she goes, I predict that the subreddit called air quality is going to be the next big thing.

43:00It only has 4 ,000 subs, but it's doubling every six months. And I think that with wildfires and all this other stuff, that air quality control is going to become a huge thing. And I keep seeing people tweet this constantly. They have these little digital meters and I don't know what the measurement is, but they say CO2 is this number and it looks like a little digital clock. And they're everywhere, man. People are traveling with them. I'm seeing this everywhere now that she told us about this. Yes, exactly. So she was saying like, she's like, I noticed that sleep, our slash sleep quality went through this crazy trend over the last four years where sleep became like, the Vogue kind of health trend.

43:37And she's like, I think air quality is going to be next. Look at the growth of the air quality subreddit, the products on Amazon that are there. And it's kind of like an immature space. And I think this is a wonderful, beautiful product design for a product that's in that space. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at the Amazon ratings right now. I mean, some of these products have tens of thousands of reviews. This is going to be a thing, man. This is going to be like the next version of ring i think uh these air quality controls but the thing about it is i don't know if this is pseudoscience like like i don't know the truth of is are you willing to bet your life on it that's the beauty of these products right that's the beauty is it's like a dog vitamin it's like i don't fucking know if this works like but like i'll buy that insurance like right but don't you love your dog yeah how do i get co2 out of my house i can tell you i don't breathe less.

44:28I don't know. Remove the car from the living room. I don't know how to do it. It's coming from me, I think. Like, don't fart. Yeah, I don't know how to do it. But when I see it, I'm like, that sounds important. It's like the word leaky gut or a juice cleanse. Like, well, if you use those words, I guess I have to do it. Right. I don't know if I have leaky gut, but I sure as hell am willing to take any product that will stop it, you know, just in case. all right let's take a quick break because i gotta tell you a story let me tell you about the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a janky interface it's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send and it froze they flagged the transaction they locked my account they put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me i got to visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about Mercury.

45:22And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money. I can pay invoices. I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200 ,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to Mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column 8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC. All right. I've got one more quick thing. yeah you go i need some advice so i own a facebook group you know one of my hobbies is i have facebook groups i'm one of the only people that actually do that i actually have three or four i've got a couple that are in the 60 and 70 000 range but i have one that when trends shut down i just posted in there and i said um i don't know what i'm going to do with this but here's a facebook group i call it uh i actually i'm not going to say the name of it because i don't want to get flooded with new people joining.

46:21And I just said, this Facebook group is going to close down. I just made a new one. You guys can all hang out in there. It's got 3000 members. Most of them are people who have small businesses doing hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's mostly like those types, that size of business. I have no intention to monetize it. But I wouldn't be lying if in the back of my head, I'm just thinking, this could be something I'm missing out here. The group has a lot of traction. people post every single day. Are you a member of it? I think... What did you call it? Let's give it a... You want to give it a plug or you don't want to give it a plug?

46:57It's called... Yeah, terrible name. I think it's a hilarious name. And the tagline is shipping products with the bold, fast, fun energy. It's a community of people who build and talk business that are bold, fast, fun. The artists formerly known as Trends were a pirate ship of people who care about talking nerdy business stuff, showing off projects, asking questions and commiserating with our fellow pirates. And mostly because Trends kicked us out and we're a bunch of DGENs we need a place to go to. And so I created this group. It's got 3000 members, dozens of posts per day. If I wanted to monetize this, which I actually am not sure I will because I don't want to work on it.

47:31What would you do? The real answer is kind of a boring answer. I would absolutely not bother monetizing this. I'm not going to. There's a 1 % chance. Let me tell you some reason why. You have an incredible business that you already own and can focus on, any ounce of mindshare and timeshare that you spend on not that business on some really secondary business is dumb and wasted. I agree. I agree. That's the first thing. But we are a podcast where we talk about stuff. Right, right, right. So for the sake of argument, I'll tell you what you could do. So I do think you probably should have called it something like the artist formerly known as trends.

48:09I think that's a better name. I think you could simply reboot trends. That's the first simple, obvious idea. Right. So let's not let's not, you know, overcomplicate things. People liked trends. These are people that already were in trends and paying customers of trends. Trends is now free slash like, you know, different, let's just say. So there's an opportunity to do this. I actually think this is true about many businesses. There is this window like, I don't know, three years after a company has been acquired where you can literally just start the same company again. this is so common. I see this all the time.

48:46People can literally build the same company. The guy we sold the Milk Road to, he did the same thing. He built a company, sold it for$45 million and then he built the same company, sold it again for another$45 million to the same company. And then finally they were like, hey, non-compete this time. You can't do this again to us. And people really, really underestimate how much you can do this, especially a few years after a product's been acquired because by that time the team has changed, the product's been folded in, a whole bunch of stuff has gone awry. So I think that's the easiest thing you can do.

49:19I believe they shut down Trends because I think it had 500 ,000 people on the list, on the email list. And HubSpot was like, dude, Trends charges$300 a year. It probably makes, I don't know what it made, but let's say$5 or$6 million a year. And we have 400 ,000 people saying they're interested but haven't bought it yet. We can make way more money just making it free and a portion of them will buy our software. And so, but like many entrepreneurs would be like, yeah, but 5 million or$6 million a year with two people running it. That's pretty dope. I would like that as well. The next thing is, I think you could use it for growing Hampton.

49:56So the way that Y Combinator uses Hacker News. So Paul Graham basically creates Hacker News. Hacker News becomes the most popular forum or message board for developers. and he could have been like, guys, we've got to do a job board and then we've got to do sponsored posts. Then we've got to make a paid tier. That paid tier is going to have certain permissions. He's like, no, no, no. I already have one of the best business models in the world where YC can basically invest in young hackers for like, at that time they were giving you like$18 ,000 for 6 % of your company or something like that. all he needed to do was just keep the thing free and keep it awesome so that it became just like a an asset a marketing asset out there for YC that existed for YC and I think that that was the right move and that's what I would do if I was you for Hampton.

50:54You've given me ideas so look here's how I think about some of these small projects I think I I don't want to spend a second doing it. But what I love about little projects like this is there's people in my family. There's people who I'm friends with. I'm like, I don't want to spend a second doing this. But I will give this to you as long as you keep it awesome. And it makes a little bit of money for yourself. You can just pay yourself with all that money. I don't care. But as long as this thing lives and it's great. I don't need to make a cent from it. I think what I can do is make this a thing where the community stays amazing.

51:27and once or twice a month, I can have a sponsor that pays a small enough salary for the person running it to make a living while keeping the community great. That's a great idea. I'm glad I brought this up. I should do this. I love how you were like, you gave me a great idea, but the thing you said was completely different than what I said. That's how this works. That's how this thing works. That's a little yes and there for you. To all my thespians out there. Sam just yes anded. With a huge leap. Didn't you say sponsored? Yeah, I said the word sponsor. Oh, you're talking about job posts on Hacker News.

52:05That's why I was saying the other. What Paul Graham didn't do. You stop listening. And then you said sponsorships. That's a great idea. For the record, I'm not going to I'm not going to spend any more than 10 minutes a month on this thing. I'm not actually going to do anything, but it is fun. And this is the point of the podcast is to think about this stuff. We'll see what happens. But I'm not personally going to spend a second with this. But you know what I mean? All these young bloods that we have in our crew who I would love to work with in some capacity and I don't have an option to work with them or something.

52:40I'm just thinking about it. I'm just... I'm going to start doing yes saying to my wife that says like, hey, let's go do this. Yeah, let's do that. and we're gonna do it differently than what you said we're gonna do what i said yes that is my new thing yeah that's a great idea and also at that time we're gonna do this other thing you're like what are you gonna eat for dinner and i'm like well i had thai for lunch so not that you're like thai that's a great idea i'm so glad you said thai that is so fucking funny i'm gonna get saying the shit out of people from now on um well the beautiful thing about yes anding people is uh instead of they can't like argue with you because you're like oh are you trying to be a buzzkill and not yes and here are you trying to like stop our flow they're like i guess i gotta go with this it's not going the direction I want.

53:42Last thing, you have Camp MFM coming up on Wednesday. I had to bow out because I'm committed to this whole being a parent thing, you know, whatever that thing is. The whole, this whole, you know, being a person dead and all that nonsense. I'm committed to it. I saw the flyer you made for it and I did not have any FOMO until I saw that the Airbnb founder is going. In particular, the Airbnb founder who interviewed me for my job at Airbnb and then fired me four days later, one day before I was supposed to start. He's going. And I would have loved to have gone to see that guy. By the way, he fired me for just cause.

54:23He was right. I was wrong. How did you get him? Ben is the easy answer. We went into Camp MFM this year with a fresh mindset. New year, new us. is basically Sean and Ben you went and found last year we did two years ago 15 people including Mr. Beast maybe 20 people last year we went to a kind of a crummy house that was just huge and you somehow got us all Nikes and then we went like basketball shoes and then we went and like played basketball your version of the story sucks here's what happened last year yes Andrew real quick so yes but completely different last year um ben was like why don't you host an event why don't you host like a conference or something there's so many people that you know are in the kind of podcast audience twitter audience that would love to come i said yes but a couple of problems a i don't really like big groups of people like i really have a bad time when i go to events with like a lot of people in them it's a socially not something I enjoy.

55:30Second, conferences are kind of boring. And if I don't want to, like if I, when I hear, oh, you're invited to come to a conference, either you're going to watch people talk or you're going to get to talk on stage. It's not, again, I had that Spencer Scott urge to just do something different with my life. So I said, why don't we do something different? I said, what would I, what would be the, instead of just saying no, let me instead ask, what would be the event that I would love to go to? I'd be looking forward to. And I was like, oh, what I would want is just kind of like a summer camp for adults where it's kind of like a summer camp.

56:02I used to go in the summers to play at a basketball camp. So I love basketball. I would just go to something that's super fun. We're going to play. And then we hang out and we talk. Yeah, we do that after. But the main thing is we're going to play and we're going to compete and we're going to have a lot of fun. And that all the guests, it's a small number of guests, but that all of them are like the 20 most fascinating people I know. We tried it last year. it was amazing um mr beast i tweeted out the thing i said here's my my dream for an event and i had three bullet points and i put out a google form and in that google form there was like 200 people replied of which 199 we did not invite to the event but one of them was mr beast and i didn't know he followed us i thought it was a prank when i was like oh yeah sure your twitter handles mr beast yeah sure whatever and then his email was like a real name but it was kind of like a Yahoo or something like that.

56:53I was like, this has got to be fake. Then I get a DM. So I don't even reply. The next day he DMs me, says, so are we doing this or what? And I like, you know, spit out my drink and I was like, oh shit. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. We're doing this. Where do you live? Oh, North Carolina. Funny coincidence. We're doing it there. I was like, I'm going to make this easy for him. We just so happened to be doing it in Greenville, North Carolina. Exactly. And so we went, you were there. It was a great time. There's 27 people and we we invited this uh guy who trains a bunch of nba stars like kairi irving and trey young and these guys he used to train kobe and he came down he basically was like kind of our our coach and it was a bunch of out of shape you know business people plus a couple of entertainers so like you know um people from the entertainment world that joined as well anyways it's a good time so this year we wanted to do it again but we made you know came up with some differences so i was like even less people last year we had 27 people this year we cut it down to i think 17 um which was we really only tried to have 15 but we ended up at 17 we we said well we don't want to do it with the same exact group every single year because again the point of this is we're trying to rotate kind of like you know just people we want to use it suddenly as an excuse to meet people we want to meet and by the way you forgot we all lived or it was only two nights, but we all stayed in the same air.

58:14It was just a huge house. It was like a family's house that had all their, like, I shared a bunk bed with Ramon and his son, and then they had like a lake that we were swimming in. It was awesome. It was a crappy, like, inside house, but that's actually made it amazing. It made it really fun. Well, it was the best house in Raleigh, North Carolina, but that says more about Raleigh, North Carolina than it is the house. So it was, so this year, we were like, alright, we're doing it again, and we came up with kind of a dream guest list. Now, why did I say that Ben was the way that we got the Airbnb guy to come?

58:48Because Ben somehow just like he is the Twitter API. He just consumes so much content that he knows. I was like, you know, it's like an AI search. I was like, who is a super interesting business person who also loves to play basketball? He's like, oh, I think the Airbnb guy plays basketball every weekend. And I was like, how could you possibly know that? And he owns the San Antonio Spurs. He owns San Antonio Spurs and I was like, oh wow. So we reach out to Joe Joe's assistant. He finds me his email. I cold email him and I say, hey you don't know me from my name's Sean, but you don't know me from John.

59:25Here's the event that we're doing. I think you would really like it. We'd love to have you. And he calls me and he basically calls me, asks me some questions but I can tell you, it's just like, are you are you like an insane person? Like, do I want to be around you for two days or not? And, um, and so he's coming, there's the guest list kind of amazing. So I'm going to do a recap of it afterwards, but what a, what a thing to manifest. Uh, like, you know, Jess Ma came on the podcast and she said this thing. She's, I was like, so you, you run a, a venture studio and idea lab. Like, what do you call it?

59:57She's like, Oh no, I don't call it anything. She's like, I have a team of people that are like my little manifestation company. Like if I want to make something happen they just help me make it happen make it come make it go from idea to a thing and now that's how i think about what me and ben do it's not like a holding co it's like a manifestation co it's what is the life we want to have and then we just sort of make it so and this is one thing that you know i would want to have as my kind of like annual annual thing that i do yeah but dude i gotta tell you so just i'm flying out tomorrow right so i'm like all right i gotta get my my haircut and my beard i gotta get i gotta get yeah by the way your haircut looks quite good you should do that more but you'll notice my hair might look good but my beard looks untouched why is that what happened let me tell you a little story so this is a little i didn't think that well i think that and so i uh i go to this barber shop normally i have this guy who comes to my house cuts my hair and it's like a routine so i don't need to think about it but he couldn't come so i was like all right i'm gonna go to this place i go and uh this i'm like great yeah i got this big event just need a you know little standard f-boy haircut trim the beard a little bit and we're good right he's like i don't do beards and i was like pretty sure i booked that what do you mean um he's like i was like this is a barbershop right like what else do you do if not hair and beards he's like he's like i just don't want to mess it up i was like well i also don't want you to mess it up but i needed all right whatever weird but okay and then he's like okay what do you want for your haircut i show him a picture and he starts doing it and um super nice guy but i noticed that his hand is like really trembling while he's cutting my hair and i'm like okay this is interesting um i feel bad for him but you know sam i also feel bad for me because you don't want to get your haircut by somebody's hand is trembling with the clippers so i'm like okay this is now a high risk situation i'm about to go to my biggest event of the year I hired this vlogger guy to follow me around.

1:01:52I'm not trying to have an F'd up haircut, but I put, I put my faith in this guy. We did it. The haircut turned out. Okay. I was like, you know what? Beard trim. Forget I ever said it, not doing it. And he's like, he, at the end, he goes, thank you so much. You were, you've been so kind to me. And I go, I didn't do anything. What do you mean? I just sat here and got my haircut. He's like, I was so nervous. I have never done that haircut. And I was like, Hey man, what the hell? What?

1:02:23you got the most basic haircut that every guy ever has this is the standard guy haircut what do you mean this is a barbershop you work here right like did i just ask a customer to cut my hair most bizarre experience he's like i was so nervous he's like i've done one of these before and i totally screwed it up bianca she's amazing he points out he points at this woman bianca goes she had to fix it for me she's so good with the clippers i'm like so why did bianca cut my hair What's happening right now? You should tell me you should start a trash company to fit right in. It's outrageous experience.

1:02:57Am I right? I was laughing so hard. I was like, what just happened to me? This is like a comedy skit. It's going to be Wednesday to Friday. This is the, I just got FOMO for the first time last night when I saw that Joe was going to be there. I'm bummed I can't go. Hopefully you do good and hopefully you get some good podcasts. Yeah, that's a lot of pressure. I'm just going to try to have a good time. That's my goal. Or make videos that give views. I'm a Gen Z bingo card. All right. That's the 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.

1:03:34On the road, less travel, never looking back.

1:03:42All right. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. They 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.

1:04:10It'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. And 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.

1:04:35For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.