The $70M/yr Sports Bar + Sleepy Industries Worth $100M

25:26What's their market cap at? Oh, geez. 58 million. What happened? Oprah, what happened? That's what happened. Oprah left. Oprah's gone. Are you serious? That's what caused this? Well, and they lost$110 million last year, and the business declined by 10%. Ozempic hit them? What happened? I think those epic hit them. Well, let me make an argument as to why Weight Watchers is going to start selling those epic and why Sean is going to own 10 % of the company. So listen, that's your little, your eight week project, your holiday project. So Weight Watchers was started, I think in the sixties. And the way it started was it was, there was this housewife in New York city and she was a little overweight and she got a bunch of dieting tips on how to lose weight.

26:09And then she created like an eight person support group where she got her friends to give her$2 per meeting and they met once a week and it helped everyone lose weight. They were held accountable and they loved it. She did it for about a year. And then eventually this one man and his wife or his wife was like, Hey, you should lose weight. You go to this woman's support group, but she'll lose weight. And this guy was a businessman and he was like, Hey, um, we should definitely make this a thing. Like her name was Jean. He was like, Hey Jean, this should be like a business. This was amazing. I actually lost weight and it changed my life a little bit.

26:44And so they come up with this idea to franchise the business. And they launched it in 1963. And by 1968, they had a million members, each paying a monthly fee in order to attend a local meeting that was based off of their dieting advice, but a local meeting where you would go once a week or once a month in order to have your support group. And then by 1968, they sold the business for$350 million. They sold it for$71 million then, which is something like$400 million in today's money. Oddly, they sold to Heinz, Heinz Ketchup, which is the maker of a lot of foods that are the opposite of what Weight Watchers would suggest.

27:22But anyway, they do their thing. And then Oprah comes into play. And so Oprah comes into play. And when she comes into play, the stock takes off to where she buys a bunch of stock. And then within weeks or something like that, she has tripled her money and it booms and it takes off. Well, over the last handful of years, her Weight Watchers plan has been shedding her weight to watch her stock. And she's been losing a bunch of her stock and selling it. And now it's plummeted. And so the stock is horrible. And so my opinion is if I'm Weight Watchers, I think I'm just going to start selling Ozempe.

27:55That's what I'm going to become. If I have millions and millions of members who are subscribed to me for weight loss tips, if I needed to just only care about money, My new game is, well, and by the way, they have 3.8 million paying subscribers. The name of my game is, hey, for an additional$300 or$400 or$500 a month, we really can guarantee that you're going to lose weight. They're definitely going in this direction. So I didn't realize this, but do you know who the CEO of Weight Watchers is? No, who? Her name is Seema Sistani. And the reason that name sounds familiar is because she was formerly the COO of Meerkat.

28:34Do you remember Meerkat, the live streaming app? What? Yeah. So she worked with Ben Rubin. And when they turned into House Party, they ended up getting acquired. SEMA ends up now being the CEO of Weight Watchers. And she recently wrote an email to the team. So this is a couple months ago. And it says, team, as the week draws to a close, I want to take a moment to address some of the breathless media coverage I'm sure you guys have seen. And basically it says, hey, we're in a good cash position. We have strong liquidity. The work we do matters. Our business is healthy. And it says, we've repositioned the company to grow with a clear differentiator.

29:15We're going to offer a full spectrum of weight care from behavioral, which is the thing where they've been doing, to clinical. And clinical being the sale of essentially semaglutide type products is where they're going with it. So I think it's kind of interesting what you're saying because I don't know what the what is the price of a Weight Watchers subscription? If you don't have insurance, semiglutide is somewhere between five hundred to a thousand dollars per month per month. Exactly. And so like if your insurance and your insurance will cover it if you have diabetes or if you're obese. And I think isn't there like government proposal to like make like a free ozempic to everybody?

29:54like isn't there like some proposal that's like going to cover it in uh that the government would somehow cover this well the ozempic issue is basically highlighting an issue with uh the healthcare system and just so it's funny that ozempic is like the straw that's breaking the camel's back but they're like dude in europe this drug is five dollars in america it's a thousand dollars what the hell what's going on so it's kind of like nobo nordisk which is like the company that makes ozempic they're not only i think the i think they are now the most valuable company in europe but on top of that i think they spend more on lobbying than like any any other company right now and so they are pushing very hard for u.s lobbying um which is insane so weight watcher subscription is 9.99 a month right now for the first nine months and if you just take the idea that they're going to go from making a hundred dollars a year per paying customer to you know even if a fraction of the audience decides, yes, I'd like to push a button and start to get Ozempic or start to get whatever their generic version is going to be called, they're going to jump to$5 ,000 or$10 ,000 a year for those customers.

30:58So if you believe that they have the right distribution and they have the end customer relationship, they might be swapping out training wheels for Harley Davidson in terms of business models. And the business is quite large. Unfortunately, they lost a lot of money. But last year, they did$900 million in revenue and had $100 million loss. So those are huge numbers. But their market cap as of today is$60 million. And so I don't care, but it's going to be fun to watch because there might be a roller coaster here. And it's so here, by the way, the one of the reasons the business is not doing great.

31:34So by the way, your project for me was to what? To take Ozempic or to buy the stock? Because I might do both. I might double down and do both. Maybe a little bow. Okay. So when Oprah did it, so the estimates are that she made a quarter of a billion dollars over 10 years of owning and then selling the stock so basically she announced that she was uh uh like you know part of weight watchers the stock doubled in a matter of days and so in february of this past year 24 the stock went down by 25 just when she announced like all right uh let's ran its course i did my thing i'm out i'm no longer involved i think sean purry is going to be the new Oprah.

32:10I think that, look, for$2 million, you can own 4 % of this company. Did I math that right? Or close to 4%. I think, and then just announcing it, we're going to do a good old-fashioned pump and dump. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You just got us flagged by some agencies out here. They're listening to podcasts now. You know we're big in the SEC right now, right? This podcast is going viral there. I'm joking, by the way, but I do think that a$60 million market cap for a business that has these large numbers, even if it is a massive loss and a reputable brand. I'm just reading about them on the fly here while you're talking about this, but it looks like they made$100 million deal to buy Sequence, which is a telehealth business that lets you do virtual prescriptions for patients who want weight loss drugs and that they will start doing the semaglutin stuff soon.

33:02So we'll see. Yeah, I just thought this was interesting. I want to put it on record that we've discussed this because maybe there could be like this could be like one of those big opportunities. But because$60 million for a brand that's so reputable in some circles, but like everyone knows what that means. That's like pretty amazing to me. Okay, I like it. Sam's stock picks. By the way, there's a great there's a great. By the way, any stock pick I have just don't listen to anything that I ever give advice regarding the stocks like it's horrible. What's that guy? there's a guy who does this YouTube channel called Good Work.

33:36I think he's part of Morning Brew. And he put out this video that I thought had the best YouTube title that I've seen. I know. Is it Zid? No, no, not the Zid one. His Zid one was also great. The Zid one was Is Zid going to kill me and the boys? And now the new one is Can this extremely loud man make you rich? And it's a picture of Jim Kramer who's like, you know, shilling some stock. That was awesome. Dude, their videos, he's the best. Like I did. He's the absolute best. I want our YouTube team to just look at these titles and thumbnails. This is what winning looks like. This is what we need to do.

34:16I'm just going to read you some of their other titles. His other titles. So Saudi Arabia going sicko mode on its sci-fi city state. It's the picture of that giant wall that Saudi Arabia is building. Helping a fourth grader explain her loser dad's stupid hedge fund job. LOL.

34:35yeah it's great yeah i'm a big fan of this guy uh he he's really good i the austin's one of my best friends uh the founder or the ceo of morning brew and i give him a hard time for a long time because they've morning brew has not been able to like hire interesting talent and hiring and retaining and developing talent on a media as a media company that's really really really hard you got to find interesting people which is hard and then the most interesting creative people are typically also the biggest pain in the ass is to work with and to retain them. This guy and a few others, actually, but this guy is a really good example of how a media company finds talent and nurtures it and makes them huge.

35:14Yeah, he's doing amazing. Good job. What is his name, by the way? I don't know this guy's name, but... Dan Toomey. Dan Toomey. Yeah. Dan, you're doing a great job. So I moved to this new city. It's called Westport, Connecticut. It's a 35 ,000 person town. And I've been reading all these books about biographies of politicians and stuff lately. So I thought, I don't really know anything about politics. I'm going to see if getting involved is even interesting. So I just emailed the mayor, which I didn't know if that was a thing or not. But I just found her email and I emailed her. And now we're going to go get lunch together.

35:46What did you say? I'm going to get lunch with the mayor. I said, in a small circle of the internet, a very tiny corner, I'm a little bit popular. And I'm not sure what that means to you, if anything. but I'm just trying to like make myself look a little bit important to you and I would love to hang out and introduce myself with no agenda and that's all I said and she said absolutely and so what's the plan here what are you gonna do I don't know yeah I gotta figure out how to be conniving and how to take over a town I don't have a plan yet but I just thought it was interesting you're gonna like I don't know like two seasons of house of cards or something and just start to get yourself in the mindset yeah yeah i'm just gonna like come with like armed guards and just take over like it's just i'm gonna pull i'm gonna do a coup it's gonna be a coup yeah i don't know i just i uh i think local politics are are like a really interesting way to actually have real impact and but it's kind of just seems fun and so i didn't know that you could email a mayor and they would reply but they did it reminds me of when we got to college my buddy Dan, that you're given like a school ID, right?

36:59A school email address. So his was, I don't know, like dnc6 at duke.edu. And so the first thing he did, which I would have never thought to do, but he's a weirdo and a genius. And so he goes, he emails dnc7, or no, dnc4 and dnc5. And he's like, fellas, I'm here. I don't know who you are. I don't know what those initials stand for for you but i'm here to carry the torch the legacy what do you guys do and like one of them's a banker somewhere and it's like could have led to like you know like an internship basically just by sending out a random email being like hey i'm the i'm the i'm the new guy in town that has the same uh you know i'm the next in the uh alphanumeric sequence here for us and did they become friends i don't know i feel like he just would open up all these doors and just look inside like what's in this closet right you know when somebody comes into your house like oh what's this over here.

37:52Have you seen people do that with their, with their phone number? They change one number in the phone number and they text them and say that their phone number comes. Yeah, exactly. You said something a few weeks ago that had an impact on me and I've been meaning to bring this up to you, but I had to test this out. So you told me that, uh, there's been a few weekends where Friday to Sunday you did phone lists. And I thought that's a great idea. Uh, the problem is, is that I'm, uh, an addict of all types of sorts. And just like everyone else getting rid of my phone is like really hard so i looked for a solution and i found this thing this isn't a sponsored thing i've never talked to these guys i just think it's cool have you seen this it's called brick yeah i've dm'd these guys they're young guys i don't do you know who did you look them up yeah so i looked them up so let me explain what this product is but i think it's only 49 bucks so for people listening uh on your headphones not looking at a screen i just showed a brick it's like a two inch by two inch square uh that's made out of plastic just like 3d printed plastic And the way it works is you download their app and you say which apps are allowed.

38:51So in my case, I think I've allowed texting, phone calling, and email. And basically, I use this brick and I touch my phone with it. And it bans or makes every app on my phone, except for the ones that I've allowed, it makes it so I can't use them unless I touch this brick again. And there's an emergency button within the app. But only three times can I click emergency override. and I could override like if I'm away from this brick. But if I leave this brick at home, I can only use the apps that I've allowed on my phone. Shockingly good. This works. I like it. I love it. And I think these kids who started it, I think they started it when they were like 20 year old college kids.

39:34Is that right? Yeah, something like that. And I think this business might be amazing. You know, it's only 50 bucks. It's hard to make a lot of money on$50. But what's interesting is that we build all this technology to like we want new, we want more convenient, we want better. And then after a while, you get used to this life and it gets better and more efficient and more addicting. And you want to create things now that will undo all of that. And so I've been testing, leaving my phone at home. I've been testing, but that's a little bit inconvenient sometimes because what if there's like a real emergency?

40:04So do I have to buy like a dumb phone? But then to buy a dumb phone, I need a whole different cell phone plan. It's like a safe for the pantry. You like put your snack in it and then you lock it. It's like this can only be open at 7 p.m. Yeah, well, one and one time I broke it to get to my phone. Like it's fucked up how bad I am. And so this brick so far, I think is the best solution I have found. That's cool. Yeah, I looked into this because I was curious about it. I think it's a really cool idea. I like the design of it, too, by the way. I like the name of it, how it just bricks your phone. I love how bricked up you are about this whole thing.

40:35So I think it's a great I think it's a great product. I don't use it personally, but I have thought about doing the kind of dumb phone, smartphone phone thing. And this does seem better than having two phones, but I would lose this brick for sure. So what is it? So if I lose this brick, I can just through my own phone, just put in the emergency and be like, Hey, I need my phone back. Yeah, but only like three or five times. I forget the number, but after a certain number, then the app, like the brick doesn't work and you got to go buy a whole new one. It's like a nicotine patch for cell phones.

41:09Yeah. And it's awesome. And that's exactly what it is. And I think it's actually pretty good. And it's cheap enough that I'm going to just start gifting these out. It's a great passive-aggressive gift, right? Yeah, it's like getting your pellets out, I guess. Hey, asshole. Here's something you need. Yeah, but these are awesome. By the way, I think it's called NPC. Is that the technology that they use for this? Is that a thing? NFC, I think. NFC, sorry. Which is like a very, very, very tiny chip. And then the rest is just like 3D printed plastic. And so there are like interesting ways to make this fun.

41:43Like you can 3D print anything and just touch your phone. And so like, for example, if you have a music event or not a music event, like a, like a small club or something at your home, like if you have like an event, something where it's like a book club or you have 10 people coming, you just touch your thing. Everyone touched their thing and that bricks your phone. Like there are like a bunch of cool ways to make this fun. So that can brick anybody's phone or just your phone. If you, if you have the app, I think it could break anyone's phone. Okay, well, there's a next level to this. Of course, of course, but it's actually quite cool.

42:14And then have you seen the things where you go into comedy shows and you put your phone in one of these like airtight bags? Yeah, I hate those things, but I understand. I hate them too. They're at the local school that I live at. They're starting to do that for the school. So you have to leave your phone in these bags. Yeah, my four year old is in TK. And she's told me her friend has a phone. She's like, Yeah, she showed me. It's a real phone in her bag. It's hers. And I have so many questions. I'm like, we're like friends with the parents. I'm like, do I just text the parents? Be like, yo, you got your kid a phone?

42:45Or do I just text the kid and be like, is this a real phone? What's going on? That's insane. Can I finish with just a pro tip, a life pro tip, a little framework, a little bit of value here at the end? I feel like we gave some dessert and now it's time for a quick vegetable. All right. All right. So I have a friend who is named Stan, and Stan is a Silicon Valley OG. And what's interesting about Stan is that for many years, Mark Zuckerberg personally tried to recruit Stan. And he always said, no, no, no, no. And Zuck just kept reaching out, kept trying to recruit him, and eventually got Stan to join Facebook.

43:22And he ended up running Messenger, the multi-billion user product inside of Facebook. What does the recruitment from Zuck look like? So he's not one to kiss and tell, so he didn't give too many details and brag about it too much. But I got the sense that not only was he recruited, but he had reached out to him many times across the years and eventually made him an offer so good he couldn't refuse. And so he joins, and I asked Stan, and I go, Stan, why are you so good? And I was like, no, no, no, bad question. Let me ask a better question. Like, what are you doing differently than the average person here in Silicon Valley who has maybe the same skill set as you, but isn't having the same result as you?

44:03Are you asking why Zuck wanted him or why he's had success throughout his entire career? I knew Zuck wanted him. I didn't ask why Zuck wanted him. I asked him specifically. I said, why does somebody who, why are you having more success than the average person who has the same skill set as you? Like, is it that you're just working 10 times harder? Are you 10 times smarter than somebody? Or do you know something or do you do something? And he told me one thing that I thought was interesting. He said a few things, but the one that stood out, this was many years ago, by the way, so this still sticks with me, is he said, you know, in Silicon Valley, we're big on being data driven and data, data, data, and data is awesome.

44:37But he goes, what I found is that most people, when they look at data, they already have a story in their head about what they think happens or what we need to do. And then they simply just search for data that's going to confirm that story. Or they just like squeeze the data until it fits that cookie cutter story that they want. he goes, I'm different because I just do one thing different. I look at the data and I ask a simple question. What story is the data telling me? And what story is the data telling me is a much better question. For example, we were just looking at the Weight Watcher stock and I was like, what happened?

45:12And you go, Oprah. I was like, Oprah, what happened? And you go, Oprah happened. But if you actually look like the stock falls off a cliff as soon as like the Ozempic trend started, right? Like that was the date. Oprah left, I think, in like 2014 or something. She left like a long time ago, but the stock really fell off a cliff when Ozepic took off. And the data is telling us that something happened in early 2023 that really hurt Weight Watcher stock. And then you go look at what actually happened. And I've, I just felt this in one of my companies too, where we, in my e-com stores, like we've been beating every month forecast.

45:46And then August was the first month we didn't beat. And I asked the team, I said, what happened? And my CMO will give one answer. And our chief product officer will give another answer. And then the website guy will give a different answer. And how am I supposed to figure out what answer? And the way I figure it out is I tried, I just told them, I said, post the data first and then tell me the story. Because what always happens is they tell me the story and then they'll go find some data that might, some cherry pick a bit of data that might support that. But they'll leave out a bunch of other data.

46:18Well, it's like, you ever played those things where it's like find a word? And like, it's like the puzzles in the New York Times, like find this word. It's like if I already know I'm looking for this word. Yeah, if I know I'm looking for this word, I think I can find it. But if you tell me that I got to find a variety of words, I might find those first. Exactly, exactly. And so what we did, I just flipped it. I just said, before you give me your idea of what went wrong, can you first just show me the picture of the data, like the full set of the data of what happened? And then it should tell us a story.

46:49So then we just started asking the question, what story is the data telling us? And I think that that is just a much better way to approach data decision making. And I think that is a great hack that this guy who's had amazing success in his career says, you know, this is one thing I do differently that I think it leads to a different result. Because every time I do that, you know, it's like, how do you be right more often? One way is just remove a bunch of your bad habits and bad biases that's causing you to make bad decisions. And I think this is a good habit that would lead you to make better decisions.

47:19So I wanted to share that. that's kind of a weird that's if for for you to think for him to think why am i so successful not weird weird's the right word that's a very particular well i i specifically asked what are you doing differently not why are you so successful but what do you do that's different than the average person who's got the same skill set as you what is it that you do differently so for example i know that you know sam you're a great writer i could be like why are you a great writer? And you might say, well, I practiced a bunch or I read or I naturally have a gift for it. A different question is, what do you do differently than other people who also write blog posts or write newsletters?

48:00What would your answer be? I potentially am significantly more honest than most people. And I explain all of the bad sides and the good sides up front in a particular story, which makes people like and trust me more. so uh like i try to be the opposite of sensational yeah you wrote an email to the mayor and you said your honest thing was in a small corner of the internet i'm popular i don't know if that matters to you but i'm trying to impress you because i i don't know if that worked but i'd like to i'm say that i say that to impress you nobody would say in the email i say that to impress you like obviously they do that to impress them but nobody says that out loud i think your gift is that you are willing to say the honest part out loud and that that endears people to you and that makes it more likable and that makes it more distinct and that makes it stand out versus you know reasons that other people their writing might stand out so i think that's a it's a great example of like that question of what do you what is it that you actually do that's different versus how do i become successful or you know how did you become successful like people have different they'll give you a different answer depending on the question and i guess what i'm saying is it's calling him weird is not the right word because that sounds negative what i mean is that's such a a particular and unexpected answer of like oh you just look at the data and you're like not judgmental about it uh versus coming to it with an emotion or a story to prove so it's like you're you're like you're black and white uh about different information and you're not uh coming with an agenda right it's a weirdly specific answer i agree now the caveat is this was like 10 years ago when he told me this.

49:39And also, I bet if I asked him the same question today, he would give me a different answer. Maybe that was just top of mind because of what was going on that day in his world or what he had noticed recently. Why did you just remember this now? Because I saw the problem pop up in my own company where I was like, oh, this is hard. I can't get to the truth because everybody already has a pre-baked answer. And then when I told them, hey, can we figure out what went wrong? They say, yeah, I'm going to go figure it out. But really, it's just, oh, wow, they never changed the answer when I just said, hey, what went wrong?

50:10And they say, can somebody dive in? And they come back with the same answer every time. It's like, wow, what's the point of diving in if you already had the answer? And then when you dive in, you simply just go find one or two cherry picked data points that support that. And then if I go look and I say, well, is that really true? Because what about this? And it kind of violates the narrative. So it's more like, maybe you're right, but that doesn't explain all of this or correct? And then they're like, oh yeah, that's true. And so I need my own team doing it. And I think in general, if more people did this, they would be more successful, myself included.

50:43I'm guilty of this as well, where I have an immediate reaction of what we should be doing or what's bad about what we're doing or what's not working. And then I try to find data or examples that support it versus first looking at the actual data and feedback and then saying, what story is this telling me? When you go through that, how often do you question if you are right or wrong? Or put differently, what level of certainty is your average big monthly decision? That's a great question. What percent certainty is my average monthly decision? In the situations where I have data? Because there's two types of decisions.

51:25There's data where there's decisions where we have information and there's decisions that will actually go create information, meaning we're only going to know this by trying this and that will gather more information. like here's here's what i mean every month or quarter or so a business that is in the 5 million 10 million 20 like the some range where it's like all right this like definitely is working but i don't know if it's going to be massive medium or it could even go out of business eventually but like there's something here so for those types of businesses uh every quarter or month, there's a decision that can potentially change the trajectory entirely or not impact anything at all.

52:09And I've noticed that it's monthly or quarterly. And I asked myself, wondering, before I was very certain, like, if I do this, I'm going to do this, or we're going to figure it out. Now, I'm actually realizing the decisions I make during those periods can actually be very impactful, both in a negative and a bad way. You can make a decision today that you pay for in 18 or 24 months. And so I used to be very confident. Now I'm less confident of like, I think this, but I want everyone to know I don't know anything. And so what I'm asking for you is, do you come to these decisions with high certainty or low certainty?

52:43I don't really think about it like that. If I had to answer that part, it would probably be high certainty for the next phase, the next chunk. Meaning, I know that I've looked at what the options are and what the information we have is. and of those two things. And once I take those, I have the menu of options and I got the information that we have. I can make the right decision for this moment. That doesn't mean it's going to end up being right. It means given what I had, that had to be the right decision. There was only other suboptimal decisions from there. But there's still some probability that that's not going to be true.

53:17But I couldn't have known that because I just didn't have the information. I think I've done a good job of hitting the ball into the net where I look back because I do this often. I look back and I say, could I have known this? Or did I already know? Did I actually know deep down? And I ignored it. Or did I know, or could I have known, but I rushed. And I have cut those down a lot, mostly, honestly, because I work with Ben and I talk things out loud. And when I'm talking out loud, I can literally hear, like I can litigate against my point. I can hear the holes in my argument. Right? And I'm comfortable enough with him to be saying it out loud and not feel stupid to mid-sentence, be like, but actually I think that doesn't matter at all or but actually that might not even be true I might just be saying that or I'll stop midway and just say but honestly of all those things the most important thing I said was this and that actually wipes out all the other shit and so never mind let's go for a no instead of a yes and I'll just edit it midair because he's he makes me feel comfortable enough and are we have enough trust built up where it's only about getting it right There is 0 % about appearing right, which in my other companies before, I think I was much, much more tied to having to feel like I needed to maintain some appearance of being smart and in charge and knowing things.

54:35And I wouldn't litigate my own thoughts. I would not cross-examine them enough. And I think that led to a lot of bad decisions before. And the reason I'm bringing that up is I'm feeling this is a similar thing. As I get a little bit older and sometimes have more success and sometimes not. What I'm learning is that there's a million different ways to get different things done. For example, we saw go viral this founder mode thing, and everyone loved it. And maybe that is right for certain people. I could point to many examples of successes that are not that. It's the exact opposite. It violates exactly what that person is saying is the law.

55:14And as I grow and start getting to some of these decisions, I'm learning a little bit. it's more becoming, I don't know anything. Let's just do what feels good. And so I guess it's like surrendering to the world of like, I know nothing. Right. You're kind of back to where you were when you were 18 years old. Of like, I don't know the right way. Whereas when you're a little bit younger, you read all these books. According to the startup, what's that startup book about lean MVP? Lean startup. According to the lean startup, we have to do this, this, and this. And so you just do that. And sometimes it works.

55:48but there's just there's so many different ways to make the same thing work because of that i want to get some of these decisions i'm significantly less confident in having the right answer but i'm kind of okay with well i think there's a difference between confidence and certain so i'm definitely less certain that doesn't necessarily mean i'm less confident meaning i can be confident that this is the right decision to make but i can agree that hey there's low low uh certainty here that this is going to work or that this is correct one of the things that's helped me is to uh figure out some words to describe this.

56:17Because what I found was that one of the big leaks was that I was miscommunicating my own certainty to others, meaning I talk in a very confident way, or I'll say, let's do this. And even though in my mind, I'm like, let's do this. And then we'll know by next Friday, or we'll try it three times. And then we'll know after three times, whether this was the right path or the wrong path. But I want to go try it three times, right? I want to go give it three weeks, or I want to go give it three months. I know that for certain, but that was coming across to other people like this is the way and this is the right answer and then they got very they got a lot of whiplash when that would change and i'm like why are you getting whiplash we were looking for we wanted to try it to know if this was the correct path or not and turns out we're going to turn and so i found that i use this phrase a lot now which is let's turn over another card which is like a poker term right so it's like in poker you operate with you have your hand first you have your two cards you just know is it should i fold here or is it worth worth seeing the flop So I'll say that.

57:11Let's see the flop here. Let's see the flop is let's take the call with the person. Let's take the meeting. Let's make the prototype. Let's draft the thing. Let's write down the plan and then let's see after that if we want to do it or not. And then sometimes we'll say, you know what? Let's turn over another card, which means let's get to the next milestone of information to get to a point where we will have more certainty of whether this is the correct thing to do or not. And that language at least taught kind of like my little team, which is they know now how much, like, yes, we are doing this.

57:43We're committed to doing this step, but we're not committed to doing the next thousand steps because we're going to turn over another card and we're going to find out some more information. We're going to find out, right? Oh, we think this guy's really great. Should we hire him? Let's turn over another card. Let's do some reference checks and let's give him the project, right? We don't need to debate more. We've already debated as much as we need to given the information we have. At this point, it's about getting more information. And the other thing that's helped a lot is be specific about what information.

58:10So often Ben will hit me with a like, well, let's see. Or like, yeah, I just want to like look into it more. Like I want to try it out. And then we'll just pause and be like, cool, what specific information do you think you lack right now? Like if we don't have enough information to make a decision, what is the information we need? And then you often realize you're like, and actually it's just, I didn't feel confident enough to make a decision right now. I don't even really know what I'm looking for. So even if I spend another few weeks thinking about this or exploring this, I'm going to do it haphazardly because I don't have clarity on even what I'm looking for.

58:43I don't know what question I'm trying to answer here. So therefore, probably going to still be as uncertain three weeks from now as I am today. But when you kind of try to pin down like, well, what do we really need to make this decision? Or what extra information do we need to know? You might be able to make the decision that afternoon. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm become old, but I thoroughly enjoy it. Like, like, like, these are the things I think about lately. Uh, it's just like, am I making the right decision? Uh, you know, like, uh, what's that one smart dude say? A life unexamined is a worthless life.

59:19What's that dude's name? Socrates. Uh, uh, and so I'm like examining like some of my, um, decisions and things like that. Um, anyway, I could talk about this stuff all day, but it gets pretty nerdy. I have another little exercise for you. I do this thing. It's on the wall over here. you can't see it but i take every month and i just make a box so it's like a 12 box grid and in it we'll look back and we'll say okay last six months a 12 box so it's like january february each each month is a box okay so i just make it make a like a calendar looking thing and then what we do is we just go and we look and we just say what's the one thing we did like what were the things we did that month that were the the like big the things that actually made an impact We worked 24 days out of the month or whatever.

1:00:05We did so many things. But when you zoom out and you just look back, you're like, what were the things that actually mattered that month? Similarly, we'll say, and in that could be a decision. It could be a product you launched or a thing you did. It could be a buy-sell decision. It could be a hiring-firing decision. It could be whatever, right? But it's all big font. So it's got to be something you can read from 10 feet away, meaning you can't just write in there your entire to-do list. And when we do that, it's amazing because every month has like an embarrassingly low number of things that actually mattered, like one to three.

1:00:40And everything else was just the cost of doing business. Everything else was just the noise that it took to get to those one to three things that even mattered in a month. And when you do that, you start to... But the good thing about going back and looking at it is the more you go back and look at it, the more that in the moment you start to realize like, oh, this is probably going to be the thing for the month that actually matters. Let me really focus and get this part right because it's probably going to make up for all the rest of the random activity, the random motion that I've been doing this month.

1:01:12Because you start to see patterns of what even could make it into this box. And those are the things that matter. Okay, this month, this seems like it's probably going to be the thing that we'll end up writing in the box for the month. And you never write it before? Well, I don't know before exactly. Right. Like I just on a given day, I kind of know what I'm focusing on in a given week. I kind of know what would make for a good week. But when I zoom out, it's like, you know, the decision to invest in X or the decision to bring on this person, this trip that we took that had those five meetings in person that would not have been the same over Zoom.

1:01:52you know spending that two days with that person who we think is like just awesome value add to our life so such a fun awesome person and going deep with that person rather than keeping it surface level like little things like that or it's the decision to stop working on X project was the main thing we did that month and that was huge because had we not done that we wouldn't have had the time and the bandwidth to do this thing the next month so it's usually things of that at that level that's pretty good I'm gonna start doing that Is that it? Is that the pod? Are we doing a Sarah's list on Wednesday?

1:02:25Next episode, we're going to do Sarah's list. I got probably six or seven companies right now that I think are good contenders for it. And if you don't know Sarah's list, we'll do the teaser here. Sam's wife, Sarah, blew my mind. Me and Sam were entrepreneurs. We're taking maximum risk. We're living off of nothing. Sam was paying himself like 20 grand a year or something like that at the time. and I just looked at what we were doing, which was this kind of like one in 20 shot of success, mostly eating shit every day, had to be innovative, had to take high risk. And then we looked at Sarah who joined, I think, Airbnb and Facebook, companies that were like, I could have told you in my sleep that those were winners.

1:03:08And she joined as like employee 400 or 1 ,000 or something like that. Not even betting on it when it was the first 10 employees. And the basic math was that But if you get a job that's, let's just say, I don't know her number, so I'm just going to make this up. You get a job where you're making, let's call it$150 ,000 a year base salary. And then they give you a stock option grant that's going to give you$40 ,000 a year of stock on top of that. So you get, let's say, a$200 ,000-ish stock package. If that company just basically 4Xs, 5Xs in a four-year time span, you've made a million dollars without taking any of the risk.

1:03:48that we were taking as entrepreneurs. And she did it multiple times. She did that multiple times. And we realized, wow, there is a set of companies that are like, they're past the point of like, they're out of the, they're going out of business. They're out of the, the death trap of, or, you know, like the highly likely to die, you know, area. These are great businesses that will just keep growing, keep compounding. You could join them today as employee 500, and you will become a millionaire without doing any of the entrepreneurial stuff. If you could just identify the kind of like 10 companies a year that fit that mold.

1:04:18And so we take a stab at identifying those 10 companies. And that's what we call Sarah's list. And that episode, we're going to record Wednesday. So I got to prepare for it. I got a couple, but it's really hard. This is actually a hard list to make because I don't want to like, you're not exactly giving advice, but some people take it as such. So I want to make sure that it's good. Well, we've also done the look back at the last time we did it. And I think our hit rate, We'll do it again. We'll go look at an update. See what was the hit rate of the ones we did last time. We do not proclaim to be, you know, that these are all going to work.

1:04:53No way, right? That's not it. And the hit rate's good because we pick things that are obvious and they get big. That's the point. It's all relative to the current valuation of the company, right? So, oh yeah, that was already a billion dollar company. Cool. It's six now. So it's 6X, right? Your$200 ,000 stock package is 6X now. All right. That's today's pod. We'll talk to you Wednesday. 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.

1:05:31All 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.

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