Unicorn Founder on Unseen Arbitrages, the Paradox of Wealth + Charlie Munger Wisdom ft. Ryan Petersen

24:36I made some stupid decisions too. I once invested in a nightclub that failed. That was stupid. But it didn't change much. Well, first off, people would tell you that money's not important or won't. I don't believe these studies that say like, oh, like, you know, you stop at 75 years. It stops improving your life at a certain point. I'm certain that that can't be replicated. You know, most of these psychology studies turn out to be not, there's a replication crisis in psychology, and I'm certain that that's one. And like, you know that money is great because the more people have, the more they want.

25:15It must be great. Right. It must be amazing. Can't get enough of it. Wait, could you say more about this paradox of wealth? Because I saw you write down this idea. I want to read you a line from this and just kind of hear you talk about this. So here's what you wrote. You wrote, paradox of wealth, focusing on making money will cause you to make less money. Nobody wants to give money to people who are too focused on money. They perceive them as greedy and self-interested to try to avoid them. They give money to people who add value for them. It is fine to want money. It's great. In fact, money is one of the best things in the world, but it's a paradox.

25:48The more of it you want, the less of it you get. So hack your brain into instead focusing on the things that are upstream of making money. What's upstream of making money? Yeah, I think upstream of making money is solving problems for people at the end of the day, which means learning. You gotta build your skillset up so you can learn. Upstream of that is learning what the problems are and developing a set of skills and capabilities to let you solve them. Salespeople can suffer from this or they can be great. Like great salespeople are really consultative, like good at asking questions, good at diagnosing problems, understanding what their product or their firm can do.

26:22to solve that problem. And you bring those together, you win. Everybody wins. Creating win-wins. But the perception of a salesperson is a pusher. That I'm going to try to get you to buy something you don't want or need. There's a lot of bad salespeople that are like that. Which is a bad salesperson, yeah. But that's the image that most people have when they think of salespeople. And you know this is true because we can't even call people a salesperson. Account executives. Account executives. Because sales is such a bad word. Yeah, we had to rebrand it. We had to go aioli instead of mayo. There's only a couple of, this may have changed.

26:59I think it did. In fact, a few years ago when I looked into it, there were only three universities in the United States that offered a major in sales. Wow. You know, like it's part of everybody's job. It's like probably 10 % of all the jobs in the whole world are sales explicitly. And then everybody has to sell their ideas. And we've, yeah, kind of been wrongly scapegoated as though this was like a terrible profession. when in fact they're the key driver of every company. Even tech companies, so many good tech companies fail with good technology because they can't ever learn how to sell it, get customers.

27:33And then there's companies where the tech is just, they don't even have tech and they're just good at selling. So yeah, I think hacking the brain, I used to say things are correlated with money, but I think it's better to go upstream and actually causing a generation of wealth. And the more you can study that, then you'll get lots of wealth. And I don't think it's bad to want money, but you just have to realize it might cause you to get less. It's a bit like love, by the way. Someone's obsessed with finding a girlfriend or husband or something. It gets kind of creepy. Work on yourself instead.

28:11Yeah, that's a great one. There's a great story about Buffett. I don't know if you heard this one, where he goes to a classroom. And there's a bunch of kids sitting there. And he says, all right, let's play a game. And he basically says, I want you to point to one person in this classroom. You could choose any classmate, not yourself, but somebody else. And you get to get 10 % of their earnings for the rest of their life. Write down on a piece of paper the name of the person you're picking and why. And so, have you heard the story before? I don't want to bore you. Yeah, but maybe. It's not going to surprise you, but like, it's interesting.

28:42I think it makes the point well. So, everybody writes down the name. And then he brings it up. He's like, you know, okay, who here? Just raise your hand. did you pick the person with the best grades? And nobody raises their hands. So it's already that tells you something, right? About school and what we think is the valuable thing versus what everybody intuitively in their gut knew is the valuable thing. He says, okay, did you just pick the person with the highest IQ? And a couple of people raised their hands. Did you pick the guy who could throw the football the farthest? Nobody raises their hand.

29:10And so then he finds, starts asking, he's like, what qualities did you pick? And basically that's where, you know, it came down to some version of the following characteristics that Buffett ultimately used for picking people, which is, you know, he talks about like energy. So it was people who are really, they're really obsessed with things, really into things. When they put their mind to a project, they just never stop. They just never give up. They just kind of have an endless energy towards something. Another one was like integrity, right? Because if this person is going to act out of bounds, then, you know, owning 10 % of their future if they're in jail is not going to do me much good.

29:42I got to have somebody who's going to play by the rules and play by the law. They know what rules to break and what rules not to break. And the last one was intelligence, which was somebody who's good at figuring things out specifically. So not your grades or just your raw IQ, but somebody who tends to figure things out. And he's like, great. So now you have the formula of what you need to be. If that's what you would pick in others, that's what you need to be. And that sort of reminds me of the paradox of wealth, which is like, if you put 100 people together, you're like, all right, who's going to be the wealthiest?

30:10I think intuitively we would know it's not the person who's going to just like sort of only chase money and try to just extract as much money as they could out of some system, it's probably not going to work as well as somebody who does the things you talked about. Speaking of school, I took a negotiations class once and it was one of my favorite classes. Everyone should try to get into one of these things because the way they work is you're getting. I've always wanted to take this. I don't want to go to business school, but I'd love to take a negotiation class. Yeah, you're given like a case study where both parties read this document.

30:38You have slightly different rules to play and then you negotiate with each other under those conditions. But what's amazing is that in a class, there's 30 other pairs if there's 60 people in your class there's 30 other pairs or 15 whatever however many people doing the exact same thing so you can compare yourself how you did against other people in the same seat as you and that was over almost 20 years ago it was very interesting because I've seen a lot of these people and you can track the people who are the best negotiators in a classroom environment or not the most successful because they're very good at extracting too much in a one-off negotiation but that's not how life works right in life there's repeat games like you gotta let the other guy win you gotta you know if you just took advantage of someone like they're never going to want to do business with you again guess what like you're not going to do that well so it's kind of interesting like like long longitudinal study that someone could do on these things i worked with my dad for about nine months and working with your dad's interesting experience in a bunch of different ways but one of the things you actually get to see your dad in a new context i got to see my dad at work and one of the things that i asked other people at work i go what's my dad good at?

31:43What's his strength? And they all said, you know, he's a good negotiator. He's a great negotiator, but he's a little too tough. And I, okay, interesting. That's because I asked strength and weakness and they kind of said the same thing. So I got into the situation where it was one like high stakes negotiations, basically like the future of the company was like kind of up for grabs and somebody had leverage, somebody else had leverage. We all sat down at this table and my dad did one thing really great, which was, he was like, we didn't really like the options on the table. And he's like, oh, okay, cool.

32:14I'll always go with the third option then. No. I was like, no what? Like, what's your counter? He's like, no counter. No. And he's like, basically in a negotiation, he's like, I was like, well, how are you going to explain this? He's like, oh, it's not about explaining. In a negotiation, the more irrational person tends to win. The more stubborn party wins because the other person will just realize this person's irrational, so I just have to play by their rules. So he was super stubborn and he won. And at the end, they took a break. It's kind of like, okay, let's go break before we kind of come back and finalize.

32:42And I asked this other guy who was kind of the arbitrator sitting there. I said, what do you think? And he goes, I think you took too much. And my dad kind of smiled. He took that as a point of pride. And I sort of was like, well, what do you mean by that? He's like, you were at a poker table and you tilted the table and all the chips went towards you. There's no way this deal gets done. Eventually gets done, right? Because they have nothing to gain. You've taken everything away from them. So they have nothing to gain out of this transaction. Today, they feel forced, but soon they'll just realize, I don't have to do that.

33:13I'd rather not. And that's exactly how it played out. And I learned a lesson sort of at my dad's expense about in a negotiation, both sides need to leave a little wanting. Or even if you take too much, you sort of need to give back at the end in order for something to be sustainable, or especially if you're playing a repeat game. Where have you had negotiation in your life since then? Because it's just not an everyday thing. It's a once in a while thing. Oh man, we run a global logistics company where we have to procure ocean freight and air freight and then we have to sell air freight and ocean freight.

33:46Okay, maybe it's a daily thing for you. There's lots of other trucking and custom services, everything else that we do on the end-to-end basis. So there's a huge amount of negotiation. I think one of the big opportunities we have in this industry is, I think the industry is very short-term focused and transactional, almost mercenary. And some of these things you have to kind of go with the industry. You can't change everything about the industry at once, but being able to play the long game and say, hey, we're going to make tons of money by building trust with people and showing them where the profit pools are and not taking too much of it and figuring out how do we create the right win-win scenario.

34:22It's a good framework, actually, for evaluating any company. There's six stakeholders at the table for every company. You have your customers, you have your vendors, which in some cases don't matter that much, but for us, they matter a lot. you've got your employees, your investors, you have regulators, and you have like the communities where you live and operate. And so you've got these six stakeholders and you got to create a win-win. And it's a very simple way for each of them. They need to win in an ideal scenario. And you can go through almost any, any company and say, okay, let's score them A through F on for each one of those things.

35:00Very rare to find a company where every single parties winning um somebody's usually you know so so what's the goal is it mostly a's and but nothing below a c what's the what are you trying to be a's but but where you have something that's bad like you've got a lot of risk and that's no good right it could all come to a stop like if especially if that like the regulators are not happy communities are like i don't know protesting you and trying to run you out of town like i think like airbnb is a good example i think it's a great company guests pretty much love it the the homeowners definitely love it they're making free cash off this unused asset investors done really great uh the employees seem really happy over there the regulators they not thrilled in some cases they didn't manage it sometimes they like it because it generates tax remnants communities i don't know i don't want people throwing a party in the house next door to mine and so that's an area for them as they have this framework.

36:03Okay, where should we emphasize what are we doing? And they have, they look at this, I don't know how they use that exact framework, but they certainly are going, okay, let's ban partying. What else can we do to make neighbors like us more, right? And so it's a pretty simple framework. I think someone's looking for a job at a company, they should definitely take the time to score each company they're considering on this framework or investor is the same way. Because if everybody's not winning, then the thing might not be sustainable for the long term. and all the good returns as an investor come by holding for a very long time and letting the compounding machine run.

36:37Yeah, the risk accumulates. It may not be a problem right now, but it's accumulating. Eventually, that's a powder keg.

36:47All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours and I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.

37:13And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money. I can pay invoices. I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200 ,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column 8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.

37:39You are also a partner at Founders Fund, right? Yeah, a venture partner. A venture partner at Founders Fund. Your LinkedIn says, looking for a generational company to back. How's that going? Great. I mean, Founders Fund, I've been a very loyal part of the Founders Fund network for a while they they were our first series a investor they lent our a and our b and participated i think in every other round that we've done basically and uh when they asked me to join it was kind of no-brainer for me i mean it took me a little while i said no a bunch of times i shouldn't say no-brainer but the only fund that we can send her joining because i think they're really unique in their refusal to follow the herd um and to think for themselves but uh i i joined actually full-time as a general partner.

38:23And then I came back to Flexport. I took about six months where I was the executive chairman. And then I realized I had to come back and be the CEO again at Flexport. And so I kind of scaled my role way back at Foundershwan, but I'm still part of the team. You said like, you know, they're unique in how they do things. I've interacted with them a bunch too and felt that. But I'm always interested, like what's the cause of that effect? So like what is an example of something that they do differently on the input side that leads to the output of being, you know, sort of independent thinkers or contrarian or willing to make bets that others don't?

38:59Well, a lot of it just comes from Peter being refusing, like he's just like, that's his whole life thesis is that people are mimetic and they will chase the same outcome, the same goal, the same object, the same mimetic desire. Everybody wants the same thing. And if you can avoid that, there's a huge arbitrage opportunity if you can go look where other people aren't looking. and so a lot of it just comes i would say probably just from peter but they've they've really trained it into the team it's how does that manifest itself it's a very high paying job valgus one actually has a better compensation structure it's almost all tied to the outcomes the performance but like a lot of vcs just make super huge you'd be surprised how high the salaries are yeah at a lot of the at other vcs um so they make a lot of money in a job that can't really be measured except on a 10-year time horizon.

39:49Even on that, it could be luck. And you don't have an overseeing, like a boss breathing down your neck. You can do it from anywhere, kind of. Every time I email a VC, they seem to be in France. So it's a job that is kind of a dream where you just, so what's the incentive structure there for? Just don't get fired. And it's hard to fire you for performance because it takes a long time for these things to mature. And again, it could be luck. So the way you get fired is by everybody consensus agreeing that you're doing dumb things. It's not by doing dumb things. It's by having a consensus form around you that this guy's making dumb decisions.

40:31We got to fire. And there are a lot of cases where funds fired someone who it turned out a few years later had like been their best guy, but they didn't know it. So therefore the way to avoid getting fired in VC Again, this is not Founders Fund. This is what I like about them, that they're very different. But the way to avoid getting fired is to be, well, to double check everything you do with other VCs. Right. To make sure everybody agrees. And you don't want to do it internally because then you look like you got no opinions. And you can't operate. So you do it with all your buddies and all the other VCs.

41:03So it's just a collusion, massive collusion racket. The incentives are just structured since that everybody's talking to everybody to double check and make sure. And then that leads to regression herd mentality, regression of the mean. It leads to people not wanting to take a lot of risk, which is just lame, right? Like venture capital should be all about risk taking, but it's not. Often it's not. And I think Founders Fund's very good at not participating in those things. They don't really go to conferences. The conference they do do is called Hereticon. It's like literally about heretical ideas that you're not allowed to say out loud.

41:42That's probably the most unique conference. Most people probably don't know what it is. Can you explain what Hereticon is and then maybe some examples of what a talk at Hereticon might be about? Hereticon is an idea, but most conferences, people on stage are like, you can't say anything that's not fitting the mainstream narrative. Right. And Hereticon, the idea is that you come up into the stage and say something that would like get you canceled or some heretical idea. The definition of heretic. Again, they don't publish the talks online, I don't think because of the nature of it all. But I'm working on, I'm going to do a talk.

42:15If I can make, maybe next year, I'll try to do a talk. The definition of heretic, a person holding opinion at odds with what is generally accepted. I texted a bunch of friends who went, I said, hey, what was the best thing? And they were like, well, like, you know, somebody gave this talk. Like my belief in the probability that aliens exist has like, has like actually meaningfully changed based on X talk. or this person gave this talk about, you know, the conspiracy around XYZ. And it just sounds fascinating. It sounds like, you know, one of the few conferences where I would get there early and stay late.

42:48Yeah, yeah. Which is like the market of great idea. But it's not just on like our brand, right? Like, don't just follow the herd. They're not trying to like just reference, check every deals. They'll put their neck out there, make some crazy bets. What's amazing that I didn't, haven't yet figured out is how they have such an amazing track record because I don't think just YOLOing it into... They're very good at picking founders, I think. Right. There's no formula for it because people are unique. But it is a really interesting... And they're writing... They're very big fun these days. And they write large checks with conviction, but without being like spreadsheet monkeys who are just...

43:23Of course, they do diligence and analysis and stuff. But they're much more built on who the founder is and what they're all about. Right. Right. Before you came on, I sent this doc to every guest. And one of the questions I asked is, what are three strong opinions or life philosophies you live by? So one is related to what we're talking about. You had this quote from Emerson. It says, the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. And you had some examples under this. Can you talk about that, what that means to you, and what are some examples?

43:55Well, there's some great, very practical examples that you can use in your life, and you'll be able to see that this is true. and literally related to crowds. And next time you are entering a stadium, watch, your brain will want to just follow the people mindlessly into the stadium. But if you're able to snap out of that and go, wait, let me think for myself right now. These people have no idea. Most of them have never been to this stadium before. They don't know where the entrance is. There's always another entrance that nobody's lined up for and you can just walk right in, always. Or a parking, I'm a big skier.

44:25Whenever you go to the ski resort, there are these guys that are like waving parking attendants. and their job is to park all the cars. But their job is not to park your car as close to the mountain as you could be. Like there's not a thousand spaces right next to the chairlift. So they're going to point everybody to where there's a thousand chairlift spaces, which like for sure, you're going to have to take some kind of shuttle. Right. It'll take you an hour to get to the ski lift. But if you just ignore that guy, I mean, I don't want to be rude and figure out a way to do this. It's not like breaking the rules or whatever, but go straight to the front and there'll be a spot right next to the chairlift because somebody leaves.

45:00Somebody's always leaving. And so, yeah, you can apply this at the very practical level of like moving your own body around when there's large groups of people and watching the herd mentality play out. It's very difficult often for people to do. Like people are terrified of public speaking for good reason. Like for thousands of tens of thousands of years, if you were standing in front of a large group of other humans, they were probably about to kill you. you're either their leader or they were going to kill you. Something bad's going to happen. This should be, of course, it's terrifying. And learning how to become their leader is not instinctual.

45:40I think it, maybe for certain sub, you know, certainly not for me. It took me a long time to get practice, some degree of just practicing, to not feel terrified in front of groups and then to enjoy it. And like, I don't think leaders are terrified. They love the crowd or like, But even Bruce Springsteen says he still gets nervous when he goes and plays. And then he has to hack his brain to believe that that's energy he can harness to give the fans what they want. Yeah. You've mentioned a couple of things, just like that Bruce Springsteen, the mindset, hacking your mind. Are you big into mindset?

46:13I think any founder, it's very hard for people to understand what a roller coaster it is emotionally. And how painful. The lows are pretty low. And the high and the low can come in the same day. You get punched in the face constantly. And yeah, you can get pretty down. You need to have release mechanisms and hacks and ways to get yourself back up. Because it's not, it's certainly not for everybody. Can I tell you a little hack I do that maybe is useful for anybody out there? So I have a Slack channel called literally highs and lows. And what I do is that anytime there's a high or a low, I'll go post it there.

46:58And the beautiful thing about it, because of the Slack channel, you could just scroll up and realize you're like three months ago. Oh yeah, I remember that felt like kind of the end of the world. That felt really bad. And now I don't, it's like a stubbed toe. It's like, do you remember how your last stubbed toe felt? Like, is this like a private channel? Is this for yourself? It's me and my co-founder. So we do this and I do this in across every business I have. And so whether it's a high, and then I go back and I get humbled immediately by a low. I'm like, okay, don't get too high on your own supply here.

47:23Or it's a low currently. And I'm like, well, I've already gone through. If you just scroll up, I've already conquered a bunch of mountains like this. Before I've dealt with this, I'll be fine. And it's like an immediate kind of perspective machine. And it's not even like somebody else's perspective. It's like I also was in the same channel three months ago saying the same thing, crying wolf basically about this high or this low. And neither are as good or as bad as they seem in the moment. Yeah, I like that. I might try that. It's very hard for a non-founder to appreciate how difficult that is.

47:58My wife is a former journalist, tech reporter, in fact. Oh, nice. And her watching my ride firsthand, watching is the wrong word, participating in it, has really kind of, she's like, man, I wish I would have known this side of the thing when I was writing about tech companies. I understood. Because, you know, I think tech reporters are, all reporters fight a very important function of holding the powerful accountable. But founders are not that powerful. We're kind of suffering through. We're up against some very powerful forces in the world. We feel like we're the ones trying to speak truth to power and fight for the little guy and stuff.

48:41And then the narrative within the media has been like, the founders are the ones that we have to hold accountable. What about this multi-billion dollar, trillion, almost tens of billion dollar megacorporation that I compete with? I'm kind of pathetic sometimes. I mean, we beat them every day, but sometimes they're better than us in certain days. I'm like, we're trying to get better. We get better much faster than they do, but we're not always the best. We're starting out, especially as an early stage founder. You have another one of the life philosophies that was simple. It had no extra words.

49:13So I kind of want to hear your explanation of it. You said, you can just do things. What does that motto do for you? Oh, I don't know. I think there's this idea that you need somebody's permission to do. I mean, you should have. By the way, a law class is useful for people if you're an undergrad to try to get into a basic class. A law class? Yeah, law. Don't break the law, but you should have an understanding of what's legal and what's not. China GPG is pretty amazing for this. But in general, it's not illegal. You can just do it. and there's a lot of things that people are expecting. You know, we come up through this like education system where it's everything's gated and you can't get to 12th grade math until you finish 11th grade math or whatever.

49:56And you don't get to go to college unless you get these grades and stuff. So within the institutions of the world, like, yeah, there's, you can't just do things. You have to follow the rules. But like in the real world, that's not how it works. Like there's no boss, like waiting to tell you what you can do. A lot of people believe that they have to raise venture capital to start a company, for example. And we're like, well, maybe you should think of a different idea that doesn't need any money and just do it. And that's what we did. And we raised VC after 10 years of doing companies without. Right.

50:28Yeah, you don't need to have like the victim mindset. You have, on the YC application, there's this question about like what, I mean, the YC application is not long either. So if the question's on there, it must have some value. There's only like seven questions on the whole application. And it's, what's an example of a real world system that you've hacked? Meaning like, kind of like this, like you could just do things or not following the crowd, finding the side door into something. I asked my friend, Sheil, who I think invested in Flexport early on. I go, hey, I got Ryan on the podcast today.

50:59What's a good Ryan story from early days? He goes, oh, there's a bunch. He gave me one. He goes, he bought AdWords for the keyword Uber promo and just put his own promo code there and just got a bunch of cheap Uber rides for himself that way. Is that true? Did you do that? I got, I became Uber's best customer lifetime probably because I did, I got like$10 ,000 in Uber credits by doing that. And then I treated Uber like it was free because it was free for me for a while. and I probably netted out to spending, like I bet you that, you know, I spent way too much on Uber as a result. Yeah, that was a good hack.

51:39I didn't come up with that. I copied it from a friend, but. You know, what's funny is I had two friends that did that and I never, it didn't have occurred to me to also do that. Right? Like I just assumed it was done because other people had done it. And I do think they kind of shut it down. I'm not sure it was even bad. Like I think I paid for Google's AdWords campaign or Uber's AdWords campaign for them. We had this dude call into the podcast once, and he's a guy in India. And what he was doing was he realized there's an arbitrage where Uber had this like credit, like kind of you give credits to somebody and then you'll get credits, right?

52:10That was the kind of like the PayPal, give 10, get 10 type of model. But what they didn't do was they didn't account for geographic differences at the time. So he would just get a bunch of people in India to sign up. He'd give them, you know,$10 of Uber credits, which is like a big deal. And they would sign up and they would take a ride and a ride in India is really cheap and he would get$10 of credits and he would sell it to Americans. And so I bought thousands of dollars of credits off this guy and I rode really, really cheap because you could buy like five grand of credits for like$1 ,000 because this guy was farming them in India basically.

52:42And this worked for years and he called into the podcast and he was like literally in like a small apartment in rural India. And he was like, he's like, I make, you know, like, I forgot what it was, like$15 ,000 a month, which is more than like my entire village makes basically doing this. He goes, I don't know how long it'll last. That's why I'm still living here. I'm just saving it up for now. But eventually they'll close this loophole. And when they do, that'll be a sad day. But it was amazing to see that loophole, that hack. Yeah, I definitely spent through the credits pretty quick and then just became Uber's biggest customer for a long time.

53:13Now I'm mostly riding my bike and I stopped riding Uber to work. One thing I find fascinating is you have a side hustle. And I find this interesting when entrepreneurs have these like side things that just work right off the bat. You did this one about phone booths, like phone booths and companies. Could you just quickly tell this story? Because I think it's kind of inspiring. Yeah, well, unfortunately, it closed down. They sold the company and I didn't make any money. I think it was kind of mismanaged, to be honest. Okay, fair enough. We basically, it started at Flexport. We never had enough conference rooms.

53:44And so I made, I got these carpenters on Craigslist to make a couple of phone booths out of, just like wood, built a phone booth in our office at Flexport. and put like a lot of foam padding in there to make it somewhat soundproof and they were terrible the ones i made myself on craigslist because i didn't put uh we put a fan but not enough ventilation so you'd come out of this thing just dripping in sweat and yet people were in there non-stop using it i was like if the product's this bad and yet everybody wants to use it there's like something here yeah so my friend henrik um who's the founder of air help really ran with this idea.

54:23I should give him all the credit. He built it into a company. I kept talking about it. This is another thing to do is talk about your business ideas at parties and stuff. And if everybody wants... Every time I talked about this idea with founders, they'd be like, I want to buy five of them. They were like, oh man, I should just start this company. I've got like a waiting list to buy this stuff. So we made like these really nice Swedish design. And now that the company's failed or been sold, I can tell you the IP, the secret here. the intellectual property was we didn't we put three fans in that thing the genius the genius hack so we was doing like 50 million dollars in sales 50 yeah we're selling thousands of them and somehow we couldn't make money i was very frustrated we hired a ceo just the unit economics wrong or the overhead was the problem too many people on the team spending money on ps i'm not sure what happened i'm a little pissed about it because it's like dude you're selling 50 million dollars of the phone was you should make 10 million in profit at least like the high margin all right somebody should reboot this idea and just do it or do it without the mismanagement i i believe so uh now it might have become very competitive space like there's a lot of people at the time there was no good cheap phone booth out there trying to make like i think we sold for like three grand but you can make a phone booth for a thousand bucks like come on it's not right um so yeah i think in the uh you could just do things category i'm gonna put this in there i I think somebody could just do this again.

55:45Yeah, feel free to run with that one because that company didn't work. They sold to somebody. But I think the founder had ambition to be like a billion-dollar unicorn company instead of like, dude, let's sell this thing to Staples for$50 million and be happy. Exactly. Ryan, thanks for coming on, man. This has been fun. I'm a user of Flexport. I use it for my e-com biz. You've helped me forward a bunch of freight. Here's how I know you've helped me. I still don't know what freight forwarding really is. and we've done tens of millions a year in revenue. And that's the beauty of it. I don't have to know.

56:19I just know that our shit gets taken care of. It's a low price. It's the easiest to use tool. So thank you for making that happen. Thank you for Import Genius also because I would have never found my supplier had I not used that. Where should people follow you and find out more? I'm on Twitter. My handle on x.com slash typesfast is my handle. And go to flexword.com if you're an e-com business or you run any kind of logistics. You need to ship things from anywhere to anywhere. We started in freight forwarding, which is, well, I joke, it should be called freight email forwarding. Sean is like passing emails around the world to get a container or some air freight moved.

56:54But last year we acquired Shopify Logistics, and now we do direct-to-consumer fulfillment all the way to the door as well as distribution into Amazon FBA, handling that problem of getting appointments and managing all of that. So helping brands solve problems in their supply chain is what we're all about. there we go by the way you're at your handle is types fast and i love it your brothers is types faster ultimate big brother move uh for him to do that it was true he does type faster than me all right ryan thanks so much man thank you 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

57:41Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. Clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

58:11If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit Mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC.