This $50M/Yr Side Hustle Is On Track To Make $1 Billion By 2030

24:43What if we just put risk in the feed of LinkedIn? You know what I mean? How would you justify doing that? So I don't know if they acquired a company that was doing this. or if there was just like, I imagine some product manager that looks like he's just got back from NAMM and he's like, I had an idea and I got it through. I got my manager to approve, my manager's manager. It went all the way up to the product org and went through the committee and it happened. They all said, yes, I get to launch this thing and like in six months, it's going to die. But I actually think this is actually a good startup opportunity.

25:18I think that if somebody built the third party LinkedIn games app. I don't know fully. I haven't explored the LinkedIn API and what's all possible. But if you can hook in and if you can build a game on top of LinkedIn, that's just like a total greenfield opportunity. And LinkedIn will buy it if you do a good job. If you build the actual games product that's getting engagement there and you don't have to invent the games. Just steal the games. And you're basically saying, proven game and new social graph. And that's the whole business model here. That's pretty insane. I did not see that they were doing this and that is actually quite smart.

25:53LinkedIn is the behemoth that somehow always works and so it's quite wise that they're doing this. The one that I don't believe in is Netflix is doing games. I don't know if you've ever seen like they have a games thing in like there's a trivia game you can play in Netflix but also if you go to the app store and you search Netflix as the game producer, they have like 50 game titles. It's like pretty insane how many mobile games that they have. I don't understand this. I don't think it's going to work. I don't understand the tie between this but you know basically secrets it's out. It's like, yo, games make a lot of money and people use it all the time.

26:26Maybe we too should be in the games market. That's wild. That's insane. That's what they're trying to do. That's awesome. Kudos to those guys. I've not seen that. I will. Let me do a quick thrill of the show. I want to promote something. I'm going to try and make it extra thrilly. Have you ever thought, while you're building stuff, you think to yourself, am I doing this right? I remember being in San Francisco and I thought, well, well, Sean's got a fancy office, therefore we have to have a fancy office. Or this particular CEO said, you have to focus on this one thing, so I have to focus on this one thing.

27:01So to grow Hampton, we came up with this podcast called Money Wise. And Money Wise is basically like a personal finance podcast, but for high net worth people. And I've done eight or nine of the episodes as like the temporary host. And I want to tell you what my biggest takeaway, which is to get wealthy, or even to spend the money once you're wealthy, there's no one way that people are doing it there's a lot of different ways that people are doing it and i've already like recorded i think 12 or 15 of these and i had to do nine already for the the um first season dude it's first of all it's insane that people reveal all this information so we basically what we do is we have people come on and they reveal their income their expenses exactly what their portfolio looks like and then like we'll dive deep on one topic like parenting or whatever.

27:45Are they anonymous or they put their name on it? I haven't listened to it. Half and half. So sometimes they're anonymous. And what we do is we change the name and we actually change the voice. And so there's a bunch of people who you know of that have been on, but they changed the voice. But then sometimes like the guy from Simple Modern came on and he's completely open about it. And he'll say, here's exactly how much I have in my bank account. Here's what we have in my index or in my portfolio. Here's how much income I have. It's insane that people reveal this amount of information. It's almost scary.

28:14And so my big takeaway is one, there's no one way to do it. Two, I'm shocked that people reveal all this information. And number three, the more money you get, the more intentional you have to become. Because these people will make literally$100 million and they don't spend any of it. And they're like, I don't even know what to do with this money. What's been a lesson learned either in probably in the spending side? So what's something somebody said about how they spend that you were like, oh, that's a good idea. That's a cool, intentional way of going about this. We talked about giving money away last time.

28:48You can't use that one. Use a different one. So I firmly believe that owning more than one home is a massive pain in the ass. And that's a dream that people want to have. They want to have a second or third or sometimes fourth home that a lot of people have. I think that is a huge pain in the ass. Place the word home with problem. It's like, I have a second problem in Tahoe. I have a third problem in Florida that I go visit once a year. Nice problems. Dude, it's such a pain in the ass is to have that. And unilaterally, people seem to regret having multiple homes. And so being intentional about spending money seems like a huge deal.

29:24One of the very few rich people things that I think is totally worth it, flying private. I think that is the one thing where it actually might live up to the hype. I think buying a plane, sorry, Preston, I don't know if that's worth it. But I think charging a jet as much as you can would absolutely worth it. And so we're doing this podcast, whatever. It's called Money Wise. You guys should look it up. I'll tell you quickly. I had this premise to make a hit podcast. I think you need one or more of the following. You either need great production. You need great delivery. You need a unique perspective.

29:56So unique perspective is like LeBron James talking. Great delivery is typically like comedians. And then great production is like cereal or whatever, like these like wondery things. my gap in the market that I wanted to exploit was the first one I think you and I do number two and number three and I wanted to do number one and so so far it appears to be working um so if you're a creator those are the three the three ways I think to do a podcast and that's my little pitch on money wise congrats that's a good good thrill to show I liked it um all right let's do let's do some other ones do you have another good one or can I do my ai camera one real quick do your ai camera one because I have something funny to tell you all right ai cameras So I play in this basketball league in San Francisco.

30:39Shout out to Ruben Torenberg, who hosts this league. He's been hosting it for like 10 years. And it's basically, it's called SF Tech Hoops, I think it's called. And basically, it's like people from the tech industry that like to play basketball. And for a long time, Ruben, basically, he runs the league with some real heart. And I really appreciate that. Meaning, he makes the teams, he has the league. There's the table stakes, what you expect. teams, jerseys, referee, scoreboard. Great. But then what he does is every week he writes an email recap with GIFs and whatever and he basically like team one took on team three.

31:11They were led by Sam Parr. He scored 13 points and he had a great buzzer beater blah blah blah. But then in the second half this is what happened. So he writes these great updates from the commish. So he writes his own like internal newsletter for the thing. The second thing he does is he films it. He used to film it basically put two tripods with the iPhone on each side and he would try to afterwards go through and cut a highlight. and highlight is a really generous term because you're talking about out of shape tech dudes like i made a game-winning shot last week and in my head and if you asked anybody that i talked to afterwards this was fucking jordan against the calves in 89 or whatever i was you know i was i was flying through the air you know hit the shot at the buzzer it was amazing it was like just and then i watched the clip and i was like uh like you could literally you couldn't fit a book under my feet where I jumped.

32:01I was like, this is ridiculous. This looks slow. This looks terrible. This is like a game loser, not a game winner. So Highlight is a little bit generous, but either way, he puts the TLC into running this league. So he just bought this new thing that is a game changer. And he bought this AI-based camera called, I think it's called Veo. And there's a bunch of these. There's like four companies doing this, but Veo. Check this out. Basically, it's one camera. It's a smart camera that you post on a tripod. And it does a couple of very basic things, things that sound trivial, but make a huge difference.

32:36So he used to have two iPhones because you needed to record both sides of the court. And basically for one iPhone, half the time when everybody runs to the other side of the court, it's just empty. And so then he could never have like a full video of the game because he couldn't get the camera to follow it, right? He'd have to hire somebody to manually like swivel their head and do this. But now with AI, basically it's one camera that just tracks the ball at all times. So this works in soccer, it works in basketball, it works in football, it just tracks the ball and the players and just keeps everything in the center of the frame without having to have a human doing it.

33:07The second thing it does is it uploads it all to the cloud. The third thing it does is it live streams it all, which is cool because now people can watch your games, which is like friends and family can watch games. The fourth thing it does is it can try to cut highlights. So it can basically try to identify a cool moment and then cut the highlights or keep track of stats. It's just getting better and better. These are all software updates from here. The hardware is just camera with enough of a chip inside that can connect it to the internet, connect it to the AI software. And so these companies are crushing it.

33:35They raised over$100 million in funding. And it's like some European company. There's four or five competitors. All of them have raised a bunch of money. And I think they're all doing really well. So I noticed this at our game. And then my brother-in-law, who's got a kid that plays competitive soccer, she's like seven years old. And I was like, dude, have you seen this thing? He's like, bro, it's on every field. Like this is like, you can't go to youth soccer now and not like every single field has one of these. And so I think the same way that, you know, Steve Jobs had like the vision, I think it was Jobs or maybe it was Bill Gates, but it was like a computer on every desk.

34:09I think it was Gates. It was a computer on every desk was the goal, a personal computer. and I think now it's going to be basically a camera on every field right it's like every single high school every single middle school every AU game every you know travel team they're going to use these things because why not well somebody's going to make the investment one time they're really it's not one time so alright so for the most popular version it's a thousand dollar one time expense and then it's $130 per month yeah the most expensive one I think there's like cheaper ones than that I don't think you have to get the crazy one But yeah, that price is going to go down.

34:45The$1 ,000 hardware is going to go down. But the$100 a month is going to stay there. But if you're a team or really, you don't even have to buy it per team. It's like the league needs to have it. So it's like the venue needs to have it. And I just predict that every venue is going to have these. Whoever wins is going to get these into every single field, every single court. And it'll just be that way. Tennis, wrestling, every fringe sport. There's people who want to watch. It's the family, the friends, the athletes themselves and their coaches. And there's enough motivation to do this. Their website is so good that it makes me want to play soccer.

35:23It's sort of like GoPro where the footage is awesome that I got to get into snowboarding right now just so I can go and live a life worth recording. Dude, that's how I felt when you were talking about the magazine stuff. I was like, yeah, the wind blowing through my hair as I'm on this boat. Yeah, maybe I do want that lifestyle. Yeah. Do I want to be a boater? That's how I feel when I go to their website. This is, A, this is awesome. B, I'm shocked at how large this is. I guess it's not a surprise, but it's sort of as a surprise that there's multiple companies that have raised nine figures to build this.

35:55I think these are doing, you know, 50 million plus a year in revenue minimum, you know, the leaders of this space. I don't know the exact numbers, but like ballparking, I would be surprised if it was under that. This is absolutely insane. I never in a million years would have thought that this would become a thing. I have the opposite opinion which is this is an obvious idea it's obvious that it's working but it's not obvious that like no I think this was obvious before dude when like why didn't you start it well because the idea this idea has been around for a long time so for example in NBA stadiums there's like an enterprise version of this called Second Spectrum and there's a company called Synergy Sports that basically there's like cameras that they install in the in the NBA venue that tracks all the players and all the motion and it keeps track of certain specific advanced stats for the teams.

36:44And so this idea of like, oh, wow, couldn't you either install cameras or use computer vision to track stats? That's interesting. Then there was Flow Sports, which is basically live streaming niche sports like, you know, jujitsu competitions, wrestling competitions. And they were doing tens of millions a year in revenue. Yeah, their office is here is in Austin and I've been to it and it's sick. It's really cool. It's a big company. And for those, those are for more official competitions, like, you know, the Texas State, you know, karate championships or whatever. Not like, you know, little Susie's soccer game, which like, you know, Susie's parents and grandma and whatever want to be able to watch.

37:21Like back in college, I remember my roommate Trevor, he would always watch his little sister's basketball games and he'd be on his computer and he's watching this greeny footage. And I'm like, who the hell's streaming this ninth grade girls, Wyoming basketball, regular season game. And he's like, he's like, I pay for this thing because like we pay and then this guy films it and then he's, you know, he uploads it later. It's not live stream, but he uploads it later. And I watched the shitty footage, but like, I really want to see my sisters play. Like that matters to me. I'm willing to pay like my price sensitivity.

37:54It's like, I will pay the equivalent of a Netflix monthly subscription, but instead of giving me like all the world's best content, I get my niece's games. And it's like, there's an emotional reason to do that. So this idea was around for a long time. I've noticed this, but it needed a technology inflection and it needed the AI camera where you don't have to hire somebody. The quality is now good enough where it's actually fun to watch. You can live stream it, record it, cut highlights, all that shit. And so now I feel like the idea, it's an idea whose time has come. And we were, I was talking to my buddy Luke about the AI, like the AI wave.

38:28He's in my AI tutoring group where we learn about AI together every week, once a week. And he's like, whenever there's a new technology shift, he goes, I always think back of I asked the question, what is the restaurants of menus on the internet of this wave? I go, menus on the internet? What do you mean? He goes, well, when the internet first came out, the very first obvious startup idea was like, well, let's just take restaurant menus and put them on the internet. He's like, before we could do DoorDash and online ordering, all the next gen shit, the first thing you do is you just put the menus on the internet, just a picture of the menu.

38:59And he's like, for every tech wave, there's always like the like, very obvious, it's kind of not where the thing is going to go. But it's like immediate value add, no brainer, like, wave one of what people do on these apps. It's like for the iPhone, remember, it was like the beer app, the flashlight app, the calculator app, like that was the menus on the internet. And now with AI, there's some things like this that are like the menus on the internet version of what you can do with AI. Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction?

39:31Well, I've used Mercury for years now, and let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean, branded invoice. Boom. Deal closed. Cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to Mercury.com and get started in minutes.

40:03Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC. So you're AI tutoring person. It's now warped into a studying group? Oh, yeah, bro. It's growing. What is it? I don't even want to tell you. It's like Fight Club. it's like Fight Club with no fighting just screen sharing on Zoom. But is it like a group of you who meet and you just come with homework and questions? It's three of us who people I think are awesome that I wanted an excuse to hang out with. So it's me, it's Matt Mazio and it's my buddy Luke.

40:40And I'm like I wanted to hang out with these people more anyways. They're also in AI, they're investing, they maybe start companies in the space whatever. And it was like hey let's just do this together that way it's a little study group where you see something and then one person says something and then the other person pushes back. He's like, well, I don't know. What about this? And everybody gets a little smarter for doing it. What are your biggest takeaways now with AI then? Because I don't know much about it. So Sam Altman recently said something. He goes, there's two types of companies in AI.

41:10There's the companies that can't wait for us to release a new model. And there's these companies that can't sleep at night knowing we're going to release a new model. Meaning... He's like, we're going to crush you. They're not saying this, but the way they've architected their business is if we make GPT-5 better than GPT-4 and we improve a bunch of capabilities, the model gets smarter, it gets better at doing all the things it's doing. Which he's like, by the way, that's exactly what's going to happen. Duh. Like, insane to bet against that. He's like, they risk being, like, you know, you know, blown up.

41:42Like, you know, they become obsolete when that happens. I'm pretty sure he goes, we're going to steamroll them. Yeah, he goes, those companies will get steamrolled. Yeah. Which is not a good thing. That is amazing. So then the other companies, he's like, the other companies are begging us, can't wait for the next model to come out because it's just going to make their product better. So then the group, we were talking through like, okay, what does that really mean? Who are the companies that fall into group A and fall into group B? And there's an interesting discussion around that, but I'll just give you like a simple example.

42:12Let's say you're some company that you do transcription, translation, and whatever for companies that are... Rev.com. But not Rev.com. So Rev.com says, pay us. Rev.com is a good example of the Steamroll type company. So it's basically, it's like, pay us. We do transcription really good. We have human transcribers. They're great. It's like, well, guess what's going to be better than the human transcribers? GPT5. It's going to be awesome. And it's going to be way cheaper than Rev.com. It's going to drive your price to zero and be better. So that's like, Rev.com is in trouble. Then you have a company that's like, cool, we do transcription translation in the context of this certain healthcare thing, this workflow where doctors need to transcribe their notes on the go, and it needs to be really high fidelity.

42:55And today that transcription is done by a human, but like, whatever. It's like, they have a full enterprise workflow. And if the transcription capabilities get better, they're like, awesome, our product got better. but the product was like open ai is never going to build the thing that integrates in with the the doctors you know like um whatever you know healthcare record system that they use like they embed themselves in a workflow and that's like 90 of the product and the 10 improvements to the the ai the transcription the translation but whatever it is if those get better great our product got more effective but it didn't make our product obsolete because we have this 90 that we around it that is really specific to a certain use case, certain workflow.

43:39And so we can't wait for the next model to come out. Versus maybe other companies like Rev.com or companies that are like, we're like OpenAI, but we're better at... Here's an example of a company I think is at risk. These companies that do text-to-voice. So 11 Labs is one, PlayHT is another. Basically, they're like, we're better than... like we can do AI, you type in a thing and we can create a human sounding AI and we're going to fine tune our model to do that. But then OpenAI releases, like every month they just release a new thing. It's like, yeah, we have text to voice now. Check it out. Here's the demo.

44:14The demo is awesome. It's only going to get better and then it's going to become a standard API for anybody to use to use text to voice. It's like, I think those companies that are trying to be like, we have our own proprietary model, our own fine tuned use case, they're going to really struggle because they can't compete with the behemoth. How are you taking advantage of this then from a business point of view, or are you? I would say on the investing side, I'm much more measure twice, cut once right now, meaning I'm not spring and praying a bunch of checks into a bunch of random AI companies.

44:47I think it's really hard to figure out right now which companies actually have legs. Also, they're all really overpriced. So I have this combination of really high price, really low traction. Product is really good in a demo, but not really good in production. and I don't know if they're going to become obsolete due to open AI. So there's a bunch of problems there. It's like, actually a better bet was just like in the stock market, just buy companies that have like a massive advantage when it comes to AI. So go buy NVIDIA, buy Facebook, buy a bunch of stocks that are going to benefit from AI, whether they're not just like a one random startup that I'm hoping is the one out of a thousand startup that becomes enormous.

45:22Well, that's what Morgan Stanley put out this report and they said, they go, AI is going to be a big deal. Unfortunately, we... Well, not unfortunately, but we think that it's going to impact big companies who are already established. It's just going to make them... There's going to be more value in making those companies better than there is starting new companies. Exactly. And they actually said marketing... And the reason I thought it was cool is because I own stock in a marketing technology company. And they're like, we think that marketing technology and that type of stuff, Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever, that's going to be the biggest sector that's going to use this shit to grow.

45:56Well, I think it's a safer bet. and it's a more obvious bet. I don't think that investing in startups right now is a bad idea. I just meant it's really hard right now and it's unclear to me and I haven't put in the time to get a lot of clarity on which... I don't have a bunch of startups. I'm like, these are going to be winners in this space. I just haven't been able to get that level of clarity yet. So it's like measure twice, cut once, meaning first I'm like, let me just learn this in more depth. Let me use all these tools, which is what we do. So like in these sessions, we will just be like, cool, here's a tool that could do X.

46:26And then he's like, you drive. And I go and I start trying to build a thing that's going to be useful in one of my businesses. Are you paying this person? Yeah. Still? Dude, this is so smart. Because we did it as a group, the sessions are more fun. And it's a pretty valuable network of people to be really tight with, which is ultimately what you want. You want the thing to be so mutually beneficial that the financial outcomes of the thing are so secondary. The primary should be the session is fun and these people are awesome and I get to hang with these people. these people, I get to basically, you know, iron sharpens iron with these people right now.

47:00That's like what I wanted this to get to. And so I feel really good about that. Dude, that's so smart. More people should do this. I mean, I used to do this with book clubs, but if I had a very specific interest like you have right now, and even if it's just a temporary thing that lasts six or 12 months, that's the way to go. It's so smart. That's such a smart thing for you to do. Well, the smartest people, I think, always did this. I can crypto. I know people were doing this early on. You know, I remember hearing these like sessions about South by Southwest where I forgot whose room it was, but it was like, everybody used to go up to Garrett Camp's room and at South by Southwest, it was like 15 people that were all kind of like loose friends like this, but like a lot of mutual respect.

47:37And it wasn't like a paid party or some like event with sponsors. It was like, no, dude, like we're here to basically talk about everybody should have opinions on where they think the puck is going. And then they would debate. And that's how Matt Mazzeo actually got in with Chris Saka. Saka was like, who is this motherfucker that has like really interesting things to say? It's like, he's an agent at CAA in Hollywood. This guy should be in the tech world. And he recruited him from there. And this is where a lot of the guys who invested in Uber early on, like Garrett and Travis were in the room and they were talking about Uber at the time.

48:10And Gary Vee was in the room. And there's this legendary story. I have no idea what actually happened, but I remember hearing these stories and being like, I need to get into rooms like that. What is a room like that? And how do I make a room like that? If I either need to get in or I need to make a room like that. What was the story of the room? Well, I just told you. Yeah. Ari, was that the second time this episode Sean copped an attitude with me? Well, I'm like, I told you the story. You're like, well, so what happened? I'm like, well, that's the, I told you everything I know, bro. I don't know anything else.

48:37Does Zoom have like a bitch slap animation that I could use? I know they got a thumbs up. Yeah, you know when you do the thumbs up and it like starts bubbling hearts behind you? Do they got a middle finger? Let's see what happens. Yeah. Does that work? That's the second time. I apologize. I'm a little sassy today. I could be catty on Wednesdays. I know. My bad. I apologize. Is that the pod? Do we wrap up there? I guess so. I think I need to go work on myself. Go meditate. Chill out. 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.

49:17On the road, let's travel. Never looking back.

49:25All 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 can tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

49:52It's an entrepreneur. You can 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.

50:17For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.