The high schooler making $20M a year

27:51So, you know, you see a bear. Wow, that's a bear. Okay, but I've seen bears. You see a bicycle. Okay, that's a bicycle. But you see a bear on a bicycle. Holy shit. Never seen that before. That's amazing. And for you, that's basically like, you know how to code, but a lot of kids know how to code. And it's this other piece that you also had, which was the knowledge of, and you even said it in your video, video editing and just making fun videos. This kind of the TikTok knowledge and you combined how to make TikToks that will get views with how to make apps that work. And that is your bear on a bicycle thing.

28:23And so I'm pretty inspired because there's actually like a group of people who are just like you. And I would say right now is like a very golden window for that group of people to go build things like, and, And, you know, hopefully people listening to this, hopefully there's, you know, we trigger another 20 to 100 people just like you who hear this story and are like, you're their social network, right? They're going to hear this and they're going to start doing it. And that set of skills, I think, is very, very valuable for this moment in time. I totally agree. And that's honestly why I'm super motivated to go on podcasts like these.

28:55I was super motivated by others before me that I've watched on podcasts. And so this is almost a full circle moment for me to come on here. Yeah, that's interesting. Sam, would you be going on podcast? Because like, you know, while you're here, I'm like, oh, this is great content. I'm excited. But then there's like the fatherly part of me that's like, shut up, dude, just shut up. Why are you on the podcast? You shouldn't be saying any of this stuff because you have such a good thing going. And you can always tell the story a little later. You don't need to invite, you know, the other Zach Yadigaris of the world who are, you know, they can code, they can make TikToks, they got cool haircuts like you, and they're just going to do the same thing, right?

29:34So like, why go on and spill your secrets? You know, why do that? So I've heard this before, that usually, you know, what it takes, or people usually know what it takes to be successful. But then they are looking for an easier way, they're looking for something that is not as burdensome, not as hard, doesn't require as much sacrifice. And I've been coding since I was seven. I'm 18 now. That's 11 years of coding. I've started totally science. And before that, I was tutoring kids and coding lessons for almost a decade of my life. I was in the entrepreneur game. And so I think that, yes, I can share all of this information publicly, but it's only a select few who will actually work towards it and put in the amount of hours required to achieve the result where I want to help those people.

30:36I think helping those people achieve the same success, especially if they were in a situation like mine where they maybe weren't entirely sure where to go, but they knew there was a world out there where they could have massive impact at such a young age, even balancing school on the side. And so I completely support those people. You have a trait that, like, Sean and I's good buddy Jack Smith is, like, the perfect embodiment of this trait. But a lot of entrepreneurs are, which is you're logical, which, like, a lot of times will be awkward on, like, day-to-day level. Like, for example, my friend Jack is, like, he's so, So he does think so differently from everyone because his way is actually better.

31:19But we've all done it in such a way for 100 plus years that we're like, well, I don't know. We just do it this way. And so, for example, he didn't name his daughter the first year because he was like, I have to get to know her before I can name her. And I was like, yeah, that makes total sense. It's just strange to think about. You have that type of energy. You said, well, I'm worrying about grades so I can get a good job or get into a good college. I get a good job to make money. What if I just make money now? That way of thinking is amazing. And it's really fun to be around people like you. And so I want to hear your perspective on a few things, this fresh thinking on a few things.

31:52The first is you have 15 employees. Do you have any employees who are in their 30s or 40s? And what's it like having to go from being just you and your buddies in a room messing around to at 15 people, you're actually running a real company? So yes, we do have employees that are in their 40s. and it's difficult to be honest with you. It's hard at times. To make them call you sir. I do not make them call me sir, but it is difficult, especially when I have to fire someone that has kids, and I do have imposter syndrome at times, which is something I try to not let hold me back ever, so even if I think a certain way, I still act how I know I should.

32:44I'm reading this great book right now called The Great CEO Within. I also keep it on my desk as a reminder. And it helps me lead. I try to be an inspiring leader that helps people, that doesn't lead by telling people what to do and just do it now. I try to inspire them to want to do the work. Does your staff, are you guys a well-organized company, you think? or is it a shit show? I think that we are pretty well organized and that's mainly credited to our COO and the third co-founder I didn't mention, Jake Castillo. He's really good at organization. So one of the things we talked about was like, you know, why come and talk about this?

33:29And part of you was like, well, I want to inspire other people, but we don't want to inspire just a bunch of copycats. And so we asked you, we were like, hey, what are some other ideas that if you weren't doing this, you think somebody could go do right now? So how can the next you, how can the next high schooler get to where you're at? $20 million a year in revenue as a 17, 18 year old. So what ideas do you have for us? Sure. So obviously, you know, you could teach a man to fish or you could give a man a fish. Teaching is better. So I have a few frameworks, which I think will help even more. But I also will give some ideas.

33:59Okay, go for it. So how I usually look at these AI problems, or not AI problems, but creating something new in general, is that AI has enabled people to basically build on top of and innovate on any tool or company that exists right now. So the calendar was innovated on, and now there are AI calendar tools like Motion, which help you organize and structure your day a lot easier, your assistant. There are note-taking tools where people have always taken notes by hand. People have also recorded lectures, but now there are AI platforms like TurboLearn AI, where you can record your lecture and then the AI will generate notes for you.

34:46Calorie tracking. There have always been calorie trackers, but now with AI, you can just take a picture of your food and it will tell you the calories. So I try to look at everything that doesn't already use AI and think, can AI make this more efficient, make this a better process. And my perspective on coming up with new ideas is generally that I want to find something looking at it from marketing first principles is how I always think. So almost going backwards and I look for an aha moment that I could capture within some sort of experience and then wrap a whole app around that. So for Cal AI, the aha moment is take a picture of your food, get the calories.

35:40And that's great for marketing material. They come on, they do that, but then there's a whole app around that that gets them to stay. There's another app on the app store right now called Fitness AI. And their ads recently have been around their AI body scanner, where you just take a picture of your body and then it will tell you your body fat percentage and a ton of other useful information on your composition. So that's what draws people in to that AI tool, which is the aha moment. And then there's a whole fitness app around that you stay to track your workouts on that app. So that's the framework I generally like to use.

36:19And so what do you think is, so you're saying work backwards from the magic moment where AI does a magic trick and you're like, holy shit, that's cool. And then build a sticky, you know, for you guys, let's take a picture, get the calories. And then you have the tracking and the charts and the other stuff that's going to keep them, maybe the coaching tips or whatever, that's going to keep them around in the long term. Cool, got it. And the other thing you're saying is take any app that's popular that we've already been doing and to say, what's the AI version of this? Is that the brainstorming session you would do is basically like, all right, Evernote, what's the AI version of Evernote?

36:53or, you know, our buddy in San Francisco, I mean, Sam's buddy, Siava, he had this company called StudySoup. And StudySoup was literally for college kids. They would have paid note takers who would take great notes in a lecture. And then you basically have the slackers and you had the kids that were on top of things. The kids on top of things were the supply side of the marketplace. They would give their notes and the slackers would buy their notes. And so, oh, cool. I don't have to take notes in this class because I'm getting them done for me. And you're basically saying that TurboLoan has become an AI version of study soup, right?

37:25Where it's like someone records it and now you have well-taken AI notes for that class. Yeah, exactly. So what are some examples? Yeah, so here's an idea. I've actually seen something like this or recently on Twitter, I saw something blow up. Maybe it was a couple months ago, not so recent, where someone put a bunch of their journal entries into ChatGPT and then asked, what are some insights you could give me to make my life better? Why don't they both do that? Yeah, well, that's great. So I think there is the possibility, and I think this would be a great idea, to build a journal app. And these journal apps already exist.

38:04So take an existing one, put your, and this is the spin. So you can make it voice notes, you can make it typing, whatever, doesn't matter. But the key feature, the aha moment AI feature you implement is that periodically you will have these insights generated from the AI on how you can improve your life. Like, hey, on Monday and Tuesday, you hung out with Sally and you had a bad day. Maybe Sally is the cause of your bad days. Gotcha. Okay. I like that. So AI journal. I feel like with the kind of younger generation, I feel like therapy is a lot more normalized. Therapy is cool, basically. Whereas my generation and my parents' generation was like, therapy equals you're broken, you have a problem.

38:48and it was like, you know, more taboo. The whole idea of Sopranos was a guy who goes to therapy and now his friends are going to murder him because he's so soft. Yeah, exactly. And now I feel like with the younger generation, it's almost like a cool thing to do. I don't know, maybe I'm speaking out my ass here. You tell me if I'm wrong. But it's way more normalized. It's not a taboo thing. And in fact, probably being anti-therapy would be a little bit low status now at this point. And I feel like what the problem with therapy, of course, is that it's a little bit of a loaded word and B, you know, who's paying$100 a session for this stuff and stuff when you could have the AI therapist in your pocket, whether they're using your journal entries as the starting point, the magic moment or not.

39:33What do you think of that space? Do you think there's something interesting there? I think AI therapists are something that a lot of people have spoken about and I haven't seen anyone do it great. There are definitely apps already where you could talk to people, chatbots, but I think they're all missing the feeling that you are actually being heard, that the feeling you would get talking to a real therapist. So maybe it's the verbal aspect that's missing and something like ChatGPT's voice mode, integrating that can now actually make it a better session than just typing. But that is a good idea that uses the AI spin for sure.

40:15Gotcha. And what are some other ideas you have? You have two more, it looks like you wrote on here, yeah? So the first one is some kind of system or pipeline to convert an Android app or an iOS app to the other. And this is something that would greatly help startups. When we started Cal AI, we built it on Swift. And that's because Swift, usually you can make a much smoother user experience on iPhones. using something like React Native, which can build to both iOS and Android. It's more difficult because it's not actually using the native components to make something that feels super polished on an iPhone.

40:56After building it, we had all of this demand for an Android app. And it was problematic. We had to take away from development time on the iOS app to build out the Android app. And we had to release it a few months after. it was it costed us thousands of dollars tens of thousands of dollars and every time you build a feature you have to build it twice you have to build it on one and then on the other yes every single time so it's annoying i think with all these ai tools there is definitely the possibility to build something that lets you upload the code base to one native project and then it will convert it to the other.

41:38Now, right now, I think AI can probably do 90 % of the work, but there will need to be a tiny bit of human intervention. So maybe this would be best done as an agency. It's very AI powered at the moment, but very soon it's going to be something where an AI agent can do it all for you. Yeah, that's a really good idea. We used to use something. I had an app like years ago, a roommate finding app. And what was it called where we used something that turned a web app into an iPhone app? I mean, there's been a lot of tools like that. And they were horrible. Like, it was really bad. But they were huge companies.

42:16Yeah. Yeah, because this is a problem, right? Like, you have to maintain two different apps. Every feature, you have to build twice. Every platform has its own bugs. And you basically have to hire double the number of people because the Android guy focused on Android and the iOS guy focused on iOS. And so now you have more headcount. And so you always want this thing that's like, but you need it. But still, you're right. Like having it be native actually results in a better user experience, more stickiness, more revenue, etc. So if you try to do the web app thing and you just put a web app and you try to wrap it, it doesn't work as well as doing a native app.

42:50And so you're right that basically AI coding is getting so good that you could do 70, 80, 90 % of the code transfer just through AI. And then maybe you do it as an agency or you have one person who's doing that last kind of the last mile to get it to work well. That's cool. What about this remotely configurable onboarding flows? This sounds like to use a framework, you know, it's a paper cut you have, right? So some of the best places to find startup ideas is you're trying to do a startup. And in the process of trying to do it, you run into something that's like, God, I wish somebody had just built this.

43:25And maybe you build it in-house or you just keep dealing with the pain. and that's a very good source for startup ideas. Yes, I have heard that piece of advice to work at a startup to come up with new ideas and it's 100 % true. So while working on Cal.ai and then a few other apps before Cal.ai while I was learning how the whole consumer app space works, every app you have to build out the onboarding flow. Every popular app on the app store has one. It generally will ask the questions that are either required to set up your account or simply to prime you for what's coming, to explain something that's going on in the app or to ask you questions that set your mind in the right direction to maybe help you convert when they actually hit you with a paywall.

44:17And there is no good solution right now to build these. Everyone has to do it custom in their own code base. But someone could really easily make a system where anyone can swap out the questions, remotely do A-B tests on these, which another problem here is that anytime you want to test out something new within your onboarding flow or within your app in general, you have to submit an update to the App Store, which could take a few days. So building out a system where you can build out the whole onboarding survey questions and then also change what the screens are, see how that affects conversion rates, see how that affects completion rate, drop-off rate remotely would be huge.

45:03Are you the type of person that even though you have a full-time gig, you are experimenting on new ideas that are unrelated to Cal AI? So for the last few months, I kind of was. we were orienting ourselves as an app studio very briefly. And the idea behind that was that our real sauce was in our marketing, not in our app development. And so we could build a bunch of these other AI apps, spin them up, apply the same marketing, and blow them up really fast. But at the scale Cal AI is and the rate it's growing, we realized pretty quickly that it made more sense to stay full-time on CalAI because the same time it would take to build another app and scale it to six figures revenue, we could have added an additional seven figures in revenue to CalAI just because everything boosts each other.

46:00Increasing retention will increase LTV. And as we increase retention, we could increase a funnel. So one plus one can equal three instead of two. I think that is totally the right move is there anything zach you know sean and i are parents and there's a lot of people who listen to this or who are parents is there anything that you you seem traditionally obviously you're traditionally successful but you also seem like uh you you're very thoughtful i think that like yeah thoughtful like you seem like you'd be a good son regardless of uh regardless of if you who cares about this app you know like you you you you're you're you have your shit together at a very young age, emotionally.

46:40What do you think that your parents did that set you up to have this success? Or do you think that, and this sounds like a douchey thing to say, were you just born, you know, interested into this stuff at a young age? You know, like there's a lot of like self directed people. I have four siblings. I am the second oldest. And from a young age, I was very wired to want freedom. And I think it becomes, I think it comes from my siblings. If I wanted to buy something, my parents would have to buy something for all my siblings. So they wouldn't do it. I would have to find the way to pay for it myself.

47:21That's what made me start teaching coding lessons at such a young age to earn money. And related to that, I actually have a story that when I was 10 years old, I wanted to cook scrambled eggs by myself. I don't know what it was, but I really wanted independence and freedom. So the independence to just cook myself breakfast at 10, I could have burned the house down. So my mom didn't let me. And I got so mad about this that she didn't trust me to cook eggs on my own because she was taking care of my other siblings, getting them ready for school, that I actually ran away. from my house. And I ran probably 15 minutes from my house to a local soccer field.

48:12And the police were called. I actually got picked up by them and brought back home. I was going to come home eventually, but I did run away. And it's really been the freedom that has been the driving force behind everything. The yearning for freedom. Well, but you have that now. somewhat. I still feel confined, honestly, by being in high school. I haven't dropped out and I want to go to college just for the social life, not obviously to get a job. So I feel, I always feel almost trapped in situations where the outcome is determinant on what someone else decides for me, not something that I can control for myself.

49:03And someone has to accept me into the college. If I let my grades drop in high school, then they could rescind me even if I get into the school. And I hate that. But right now for the next year, at least, I think I have to make that sacrifice. And then when I'm in college, I want to make a good group of friends, then drop out. So you're going to go. What's your GPA right now? My GPA is a 4.0. And do you want to go? what did you get the SATs yeah yeah so i took the ACT and i got a 34. okay that's very good i think right yeah it's like a two points away from it's like a 90 it's a 99 percentile 98 percentile okay so you're you're you have it like neglected school you got a 4.0 and you're doing this with school i'm working hard in school i'm not by the way it's It's noon on a Monday.

49:54Where are you right now? I actually skipped class to do this podcast. Let's go. Sorry, Miss Bickerstaff. The boys are calling. Are you at school right now or are you home? No, I left school. I'm home right now. And you told your parents it's because there's this podcast that I want to go on and it's going to be good for business. Yeah. How many other people do you know that are like you? Like, is there a community of like 100 of you guys who are like high schoolers who actually build shit and want to do cool things? There's not that many high schoolers, but there are people who are slightly older.

50:2819, 20. Sam, look at how he's already got the mastermind hand pose. He already has the visionary hand position naturally, dude. Straight out the box. I have a handful of people that I'm friends with, but not many. Definitely not. Do you guys have a club? Do you have a name? Like the Grubs? Yeah, yeah. It's the Cool Kids Club. club that's it's you guys are pretty cool uh so that's a good name wanted to be in yeah i've always wanted to be one of the i've always wanted to be part of that uh if you need another member let me know um have you considered just like moving to palo alto and like hanging out like you know in the movie uh the social network sean parker gets to act like a college kid without going to college or are you dead set on going to uh going that route Well, over the summer, when things started taking off in June for Cal AI, Henry and I decided, let's go all in.

51:23We moved to San Francisco for the whole month of July. We lived in a hacker house. We worked out of a co-working office with people years older than us. So we lived the San Francisco startup life. life it was very productive but at the same time pretty lonely although we could talk to some people yeah we made friends we would get lunch with people first of all san francisco is not the most fun city but also just the fact that people were years older than us always made it difficult to relate to them yeah that makes sense we had a i have a friend that uh like he got accepted into some program where he went to college at the age of 14 or 15 and he was telling me he was like man like i wanted to like date girls and like you know do that normal shit and it was weird i started fooling around with one girl and i eventually had to break it with her that i was fill her in that And I'm like, I'm 16.

52:31And so I imagine it's weird being in these situations where you're just as mature. You're more mature than a lot of 21-year-olds or a lot of grown adults. But you're in this situation where I do understand why you feel trapped. You're in these weird spots at such a young age that you literally couldn't go and do some of the stuff in San Francisco that everyone else is doing because of your age. But it's pretty amazing. I hope you enjoy the time. I think being 18 and experiencing what you're doing, this is like one out of a billion. This is a really special thing. How much are you paying yourself?

53:06So we haven't paid ourselves anything. We are reinvesting it all. And that's not to say that we won't. We do have profit every month. It is a difficult situation with the App Store because we get paid out two months after we earn the money. So our growth is so quick that the revenue we generated two months ago, we have to put it all in the marketing to keep growing faster and faster. I think in a few months, we may start having a surplus where we can't spend it on growth, even if we wanted to. Yeah, that's great. Hey, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They're the fintech of choice for over 200 ,000 companies.

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54:47Dude, this is awesome, man. Congratulations. And I'm excited to see what happens. Who are like, who do you admire? Who are you learning from and looking up to? Like, who's inspiring you? Are you just like, oh, Elon and Jeff Bezos, that's what I care about? Or are there other people that you're more interested in personally? Like you said, you used to listen to podcasts as inspiration. Who are some of those people that you like to listen to? Totally. So I love your guys' podcast. I'm more inspired by people who are dead than people who are alive. And maybe that's because I feel like they're not my competition anymore, or they are, but they're not progressing anymore.

55:27So I see exactly where they ended up. Psycho, love it. Yeah, I get it, you sick fuck. Makes sense. They're not my competition anymore. I've already finished them.

55:43People like... I think he's going to kill us, Sam. I think he just threatened us, Loki. Okay, so you like learning from dead people. What does that mean? Books? How do you learn from dead people? I like audio books, but I don't actually like reading physical books. I also like learning about them from podcasts. Which dead people? Oh, so like Founders? You like the David Sendro's podcast, Founders? It's one of my favorites. I do listen to that. There's one I've listened to recently, How to Take Over the World, which goes into people. Oh yeah, our boy Ben, let's go. So let me ask you a question.

56:15What's a thing that people your age are doing that seems weird to us but it's totally normal. So what's a phenomenon that you're like, yeah, kids love doing this. They spend all this time doing this or they spend their money on this or this is a new trend that seems to be weird to others, but we get it. It's normal for us. Yeah. By the way, is wearing Ralph Lauren polo sweaters, is that a new trend that young people are doing? I think you've influenced Sam. Yeah. Great sweater. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead with what cool young people are doing. So there's something really interesting, a really interesting phenomenon I've seen recently.

56:52And it's not a new software. It's not a new social media platform. What it is, is these little things you put on the back of your phone. It's called an Octobuddy. It's Octobuddy. And it has suction cups on it. So you could stick your phone to a wall. You could prop it up on your table and watch your videos is the purpose. I don't think people actually, I've never seen someone actually use the suction cups, how they're designed to, but it's a trend among all girls in my high school. I, over the last few months, I've just seen more and more people have it. Now everyone does. And it's, it's fascinating.

57:33Something definitely. It's like a TV mount. You mount your, you can mount your phone to any, any surface basically. And what do you mean it's not used how it's supposed to be? Isn't that what it's supposed to be? Well, I think it's more of something where now girls look at it like the color of their nails or having long nails on where girls get different colors and oh it became an accessory stylistic accessory status thing than actually function keep going tell me what young people like like whenever i meet a young guy i'm like tell me everything well that's the main thing that you wouldn't typically notice are your friends drinking yes definitely it's big like to party do you guys like to smoke weed i'm someone who doesn't do any drugs i'm pretty against them and I don't drink either, but it's, I mean, everyone around me is.

58:19So drinking is common. Very common. Very, very. You also mentioned this, uh, this like turbo learn thing. That sounds pretty awesome. What else is like, uh, what other, uh, who else is like you out there? Who's basically scaling up to millions in revenue just off of this kind of like AI TikTok type of model. So there are a bunch of consumer apps that are coming out or have come out. And honestly, I think a lot of it is attributed to Blake and I speaking publicly about this, showing that it's really possible in the app space. So new apps like Quitter, which is an app designed to help men quit porn with all of these little social or by having streaks, essentially, to gamify the whole experience.

59:08So that's a new one that just came out. You inspired these guys? I'm friends with the founder, and he was inspired to get into the app space by seeing Cal AI really take off. He was with me in the early days. That's cool. It's got 5 ,000 reviews on iPhone. That's pretty good. Yeah, so they're on track to make over a million dollars this year. I think consumer apps right now are like the new dropshipping. you know uh sean has said this once where he was like you know sean was like i'm a content creator you know he's got newsletters and twitter and podcasts but these tiktok guys it's as if you know i am really good at riding horses but along comes henry ford and it's just it's just the cars are no comparison you know i can't there's no way my horse and i are going to outrun uh even the the crappiest car this is one of those moments that i'm having right now talking to you uh so So for a long time, Sean and I, our friends, will do dropshipping.

1:00:05When we were 25, that was the thing, is create a dropshipping site. And people still do things like that. Seeing what you're doing with tech and influencers is so much better than... You even make Mr. Beast look old. You know what I mean? Like chocolate? Like what? That's crazy. You know what I mean? But dude, people used to look at me and Sam when we were like... So we met when we were, I was probably 24, 25 years old. We were the prodigies. And it was like, okay, that's very generous. But what I mean is like. It'd be like, if there was something on the fringe or the edge about either growth hacking or a clever way to make money, usually it was us who knew it.

1:00:45And people would ask us about it. Like I remember having like the Atlantic, the publisher come to my office and they're like, newsletters. And I'm like, yeah, like it's a thing. That's old news now. These guys are so much better. And we are that person now. I'm going to go to his office and be like, just tell me everything. it's something that always happens it's going to happen to me too i know that every year i age i am becoming exponentially less impressive and there's someone that's going to come and be the next big thing the growth hacker that is in the front of everything i think it's just about building momentum and i'm pretty obsessed with this idea of making sure that everything i work on will 10x the previous thing so that I'm always moving forward towards a bigger goal.

1:01:32You actually mentioned Mr. Beast. He's actually someone who greatly inspires me. I love the podcast that you guys had with him. By the way, I've heard this now a couple times from people who are like 18 and they're like fearful that when they're 22, suddenly their accomplishments are no longer cool. And I just want to say, I get it. Makes total sense. It's also total nonsense. And what I mean by that is not only is it still super impressive, but the real game is when you stop trying to impress people. And so what actually happens is you graduate out of the I need to impress people phase. And the person who's 17, 18, they're still getting that high of of being the impressive person.

1:02:13Oh, everybody's kind of patting on the back. And actually, the only way to win the game is not to continuously be the youngest, best looking, richest person, because you'll never win that game of comparison. The only real way to win the game is to realize like, oh, I just need to be doing the things that are fun for me. And like the act of doing them is rewarding and not look for the rewards of impressing people, which is obviously easier said than done. But that's the real thing to focus on and not like this feeling of I'm running on quicksand, you know, because it's I'm getting older. Oh, no.

1:02:44Or like I have to 10x my growth, even though I'm already at, you know, 24 million ARR. It's like, sure, that's all fine. I'm not against growth, but somebody said this to us. Actually, they said this while we were hanging out with Mr. Beast. They go, be very careful because growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell. And so, you know, growth for growth's sake is not where it's at. And there's more to the game than that. And he's like, I'll leave you with that to kind of figure out what is the answer. I'm not going to sort of try to tell you what I think is right, but I'll point that out because I think for me when I was young and I know for a lot of ambitious people, it just seems like grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.

1:03:23It's the only thing. And it comes from a little bit of a, I don't know, like a little bit of a place of anxiety, I think. Right. Yes. And I've had this, a similar thought to this where I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I've thought, okay, once I find my success and let's say I'm quote unquote financially free? Will I even want to start something new? Or will I not care anymore and just want to find happiness elsewhere? Maybe I have one of the tenets of happiness, which is I'm financially taken care of, but then I want to prioritize relationships and happiness in other aspects.

1:04:03You're always going to be making stuff. I'll predict the future. Maybe you'll take the foot off the gas and want relationships and a family and all that stuff, you are going to be creating stuff for a very, very long time. Well, that is why I'm going to college. It's almost to take my foot off the gas a little bit, build relationships, and then I want to drop out after a semester or two. I mean, I think that's really smart because you have your whole life to make money, but you really only have this four years to make lifelong friends from college. So actually, the scarce thing is the friendships and that college experience because there's a window of time, that expires.

1:04:38And so do that because you still have 50 years to make money after that. What school do you want to go to? If I got in, then Stanford is likely the top. Surely we have listeners. This is going to reach a lot of people. Surely there are some people listening. Dean, I know you're listening. Yadigari, Y-A-D-H. Yeah. You can find him on Twitter. DM him. Actually, that's... That's what they should do. If I'm out of college right now, I'm DMing this kid an acceptance letter. That's how, a college needs to hustle. I'm tired of these colleges sitting down their ass. Someone's going to be like, sup. You're just going to get a DM from the D, sup.

1:05:20Who's your favorite, who are your most inspirational follows on Twitter? I want to, basically, I find you so fascinated. I want to be inspired by the people you're currently inspired. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want your info diet. Who do you inspired by? and try to make it people who you think I won't know. Okay. Who do I follow? I actually don't usually use Twitter for people I'm inspired by. That's interesting. What's your main social network? What do you use when you're bored? What do you open up? It is Twitter. It is Twitter. That is my main social network. When I'm looking to be inspired, there are definitely a few people.

1:06:00David Goggins, for example, he just pumps me up. so I have people like him that you know inspired by his mindset completely I used to actually be in this phase where I was addicted to motivational content I curated my tiktok for you page I only liked motivational videos and anytime I lost motivation I would just scroll for five minutes then get back into it so definitely those kinds of people but it's mainly those like mr beast Elon Musk. I follow both of those on Twitter. My own co-founder, Blake Anderson, who's a few years ahead of me in life and knowledge too. So definitely learn a lot from him.

1:06:42Cliff Weitzman. He's a recent friend of mine. I think one of you know him. Yeah, yeah. We know Cliff. Yeah. So he's super inspiring to myself as well. That's dope. Okay, amazing. Sam, anything else? Is there that's don't ask me, Zach, is there anything else that you want to inspire me by? Like you're you're you're amazing. Like anything else that you want to tell us? Yeah. Did we miss anything? I appreciate that. I mean, it's always hard going on these podcasts. Like it's it's a whole full circle moment. And also, it feels almost bad speaking about all of this. I try to stay humble, but then at the same time, I know you have to speak your way into the world.

1:07:30If I wasn't posting anything publicly, I've had a lot of debate over the personal brand, then I wouldn't have so many opportunities that I have had. Sean, one of my best buddies, Val, I think Zach asked him out to lunch or something the other day. Like the other day and like was this asking him for advice on maybe coming on this podcast, but also business advice because Val's a great guy and really successful. And I thought it was funny because actually you remind me of Val a lot, Zach, but it was funny. Apparently Val's kids were like, were you hanging out with our friend Zach, uh, like at lunch the other day?

1:08:06And he was like, yeah, but it was like a very, you know, oddly a business context. Uh, but anyway, Val called me and was like, this guy, Zach is one of the most impressive people I've ever met. And Val is a very hard person to impress. He's pretty low key. And so, well, one of the funny things is like, you have this paradox because you, you want to keep your asset. Your asset is you're young and ignorance is bliss. You don't know how hard some things are. You don't know what's possible. You don't have a ceiling on anything because you don't know any better. Right. And that ignorance is a, is a real tool, the naivete, the beginner's mind.

1:08:41And so you want to keep that. And on the other side, you have this giant problem, which is that there's always kind of like this, I forgot what they call it, but there's this three known thing, right? It's like, there's the things you know you know, there's the things you know you don't know. But then the real one that matters is the things you don't know that you don't know. And so talking to whatever, smarter people, people who have played the game for 15, 20 years, they will help you surface that last one. And that last area of things you don't currently even know that you don't know, that's the thing you should be worried about.

1:09:13But how do you worry about it? You don't even know, you don't know where to look. But it's by talking to other smart people that that gets revealed to you. And so you have this paradox where you want to keep what you got as your big asset, your naivete, your beginner's mind, your useful ignorance. But at the same time, talk to some well-meaning people who are a little bit wiser to try to figure out a little bit of a push in one direction or the other. They'll kind of nudge you. And that little nudge can totally change your trajectory, right? Because like, I mean, just imagine hitting a golf ball and even just changing by two millimeters, the angle that you hit that ball, it ends up in a totally different spot.

1:09:52So you want to find those people who are your two millimeter people, the people that would just give you that slight angle adjustment in order to make it happen. I don't know how you do that exactly, keep both of those, but that's what I would do if I was you. I try to find a way to keep both. I totally agree. I have heard that it's much easier to learn from someone 10 steps ahead of you than 100 steps ahead of you. 100 steps, so much is missing, but 10, you can piece together. They can lift you up the extra steps and help you get from zero to 10. Yeah. And one other thing you're going to figure out is that all successful people do not have equally valuable advice.

1:10:29So you will meet a lot of people who are successful or sound interesting, but their advice is not great. And the hard part is figuring out how to parse it and dis like dissociate it slightly from the results because their result might be totally dependent on the context law. Cause there's a whole bunch of different variables that will lead to that, or maybe just their understanding of your situation. And so trying to figure out how to parse advice is like an underrated skill and, and make sure that the people you take advice from that they're actually happy and they're people, and they're, they're people you admire or who's like themselves and they're happy for you, you know?

1:11:03Yeah. Like you'd want their life. That's a very good point. All right. Well, on that point, let's call it a, let's call it a day. I think you got to go back to school now. Yeah. Lunch is over. Hey, thank you, Zach. You're the man. Anytime you want to come on, please let us know. Congrats, dude. Thank you for having me. And I'm going to, I'm going to use the app. So I'm going to download your app right now. Start tracking. Thank you. And that's it. That's the pod.

1:11:33I'm all in it like my day's off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:11:42All 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.

1:12:10It'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. I highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

1:12:35For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.