You Don’t Need A Mentor -> Focus On THIS Instead

0:00One thing that I don't think anybody really talks about, it's kind of touchy feely, but every single successful person I know has a story like this. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off on the road. Let's travel. All right, Sam, I want to do a short episode that is about one specific topic, believers. So a lot of founders I know are interested in getting investors, getting advisors. I'm sure you get hit up a lot in your email for either, hey, will you invest in this? Will you advise in this? So I think everybody needs somebody in their career, usually in your early 20s, that believes in you more than you believe in yourself at the time.

0:42They just have an irrational belief. You're a penny stock, but they see you as a blue chip and they want to buy up all your stock. And they do that by spending time with you, by spending effort with you, sometimes investing in you, sometimes advising you, but it's not the advice. It's not the money that actually now in hindsight, when you look back is what mattered. The thing that really mattered was this person believed in you more than you believed in yourself at the time and that they were, they almost trick you into believing in yourself or to just going forward and overcoming that initial like hesitation or doubts to just get going to where finally your evidence will start to catch up.

1:17And eventually you're fueled by your evidence and you're fueled by, you know, your own self-belief. But it's like jumping, jumpstarting a car. There's people in your life who do that. I've, you know, I've never talked to you about this. I know a couple of people out in my life that did this. I want to hear, did you have this? I had this with a couple people. First of all, my wife. I felt like she was doing the same thing when I met her. She was picking stocks. And she picked a good one, I hope. Yeah, I had two. The first one was Scott Belsky. So Scott Belsky currently is the chief product officer of Adobe, soon to be CEO, I think.

1:50And he's probably a billionaire because he has started and sold a bunch of companies. And I cold emailed him when I first started my company, The Hustle, asking him to invest. And he said no. And then about six or eight weeks later, he was on our daily email. And I got an email from him in particular when I was having a horrible day. And he goes, these emails are just so good. I have to join. And he gave me like$15 ,000 or something like that. And I only met with Scott in person one time. And like, because Scott has always been he was a big deal back then. He's an even bigger deal now. And he had one meeting with me where he taught me I had never heard the word steward you know steward like you are a steward of this capital you are a steward of the brand and he gave me this pump up talk and he's like you are so like i could tell you are going to be a steward of the hustle and a steward of my money and anyone else's money your customers you have this and and i remember thinking it changed my life the fact that scott fucking belski believed in me and he used this word steward i was so into it the second person was Tim Ferriss.

2:53So I have told the story before, but basically I met Tim Ferriss because he lived near me in San Francisco. And we would walk our dogs at the same time and just talk about neighborhood stuff. Well, a few weeks after we first started talking, I get an email from Tim saying, Hey, I know what the hustle is. It looks really cool. Could we meet and get dinner? And I can ask you a little bit about email because I want to start a newsletter. And I was like, Yeah, sure. Let's do it, man. And so we go out to dinner in our neighborhood and I get down to sit at dinner and he goes, Oh, you are the dog owners guy?

3:23Like you are the same guy. And I was like, yeah, man, what's going on? Because I never told him what I did for work when we would walk our dogs together because I wanted him to think I didn't want to bother him because he was like a celebrity to me and I didn't want to ruin that relationship. And it was awesome. The fact that this guy like wanted to meet with me and I was like, what you guys are doing is so smart, so innovative. And I was like, it's not that interesting. He's like, no, it is. And he like bought into me and he believed in me. And that was such a big deal to me that he gave me the time of day, just even just at dinner.

3:50It was like game changing where I was like, I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the best. Like there is no one better than me. And I had that like energy because of those two meetings. And did you use that as, I guess, like, was it just like a temporary high that fades, you know, 30 minutes later? Or do you feel like that planted some kind of seed in you? It planted a seed because then I would look at Scott and Tim's other endeavors. You know, they did some amazing stuff and it felt good. You know how when you go to a website and you see someone who puts your logo on their website to brag that they use you, you go to like HubSpot.com and like Nike, it says like Nike uses...

4:28And I felt so much gratitude that I was one of the logos on their websites. Do you know what I mean? And I remember like thinking that I'm like, look, like this person picks a bunch of winners and I happen to be part of this basket. I feel honored. And so I would use that for a long time of like, go to his crunch based profile. He lists the hustle as an investment. I remember thinking like I was so special and I used that for fuel for a long time. Dude, that's a that's a great story. Have you done that for anyone else? Do you think? Yeah, look, you and I, you and I have done it together on this podcast when we call people out.

5:02And I think like, for example, Michael from our future, this kid who was probably 20 years old when he cold emailed you and I to make videos for us. And we loved his energy. But I think that like you and I both bought into him a little bit where like your energy is so good or same with Dylan and Henry. Uh, like, yeah, I think you and I have done it together. Who bought in, who bought yours? So I'll give you three quick, quick examples. The first one is a woman named Lisa Keister. Lisa Keister is a professor at Duke or she was at the time. I have no idea what she's doing now. It's a good reminder to look her up and drop her a note.

5:33I took a class my last year at Duke. I was a pre-med student. I had taken the MCATs. I was ready to go to med school. And my last semester, I said, I should take a class with my two best friends. It's crazy. We're friends through college. We live together. We've never taken a class together. And we decided, let's take the easiest class we can. I was so burned out from studying for the MCATs. I just wanted something that was like the easiest class. We looked it up on ratebyprofessor.com and it was like the easiest class is a class called Getting Rich. Sounds good. Good title. And she was just click baiting us.

6:01Like it was a personal finance and entrepreneurship class, but getting rich sounds a lot better. And she was a woman who, she had a crazy story. She graduated from Duke with a degree in Mandarin because that's what she was interested in. She just followed what she was interested in. And she remembers, she told us, she's like, I remember at the time feeling completely clueless what the hell I'm supposed to do with my life because all my friends were going to law school, banking, whatever. I didn't want to do those, but it just felt like school was just giant like pipe that just dumped you out in New York or LA or San Francisco in one of these tracks.

6:29And I wasn't on one of the tracks and I felt bad about myself. And I realized like, you know, people are like, what the hell are you going to do with this Mandarin degree. And they're like, good luck with that. And she's like, I bet I can figure something out in China. And so she just moves to China, one-way ticket, ends up building a great business there, connecting Chinese companies with American companies because she spoke both languages. Anyway, she got super rich in the process, retires by 30, comes back to Duke to teach. And so the reason she bet on me or believed in me early, well, she was not an investor.

6:58She really wasn't even an advisor. She was a believer. We had this terrible idea to start a sushi restaurant chain. We were like, why isn't there a Chipotle for sushi? And we were like, we'll do it even though we had no restaurant experience, no sushi experience, no nothing. And everybody I talked to, every adult, every grownup that I looked up to was basically like restaurants equal fail. Doing a startup versus going to med school, like, I don't know, man, like, are you sure? Like, you just got accepted in, like, you should just go. And she was the only one who was like, this sounds awesome. You guys should totally do this.

7:30You could totally do this. and at the time I took that as she believes in our idea we have a good idea and I wish I could say that she believed in us but she didn't even really know us that well she was actually just such a big believer that like if you just do the most interesting thing and like the most exciting thing and ambitious thing for you in your life at the moment shit works out she was just a believer in the path more than even us but at the time I interpreted it as she thinks we can we're gonna to win she thinks this is a good idea and that this is going to work and so even false belief will work it'll fuel your engine for a while not only false belief but just her one conversation with you which she does not remember and at the time she was like what i'm saying is not important this is no big deal and conversations like that make such a big impact every once in a while it's like when your kid draws something and then they show it to you and it looks horrible but you're like this is awesome oh my god did you how did you think of this or like whatever like are those two colors that is that because of this and you make them feel like they're a fucking artist she did that for me except i was 18 years old i was 22 years old or something 21 years old and she looked at my shitty business plan and she was like that's awesome you could totally do this and i it fueled me and so lisa keister was the first one and she it was genuine by the way there was no like bs in it i think she genuinely had that level of enthusiasm and excitement about it and it was contagious.

8:56It cannot be faked when somebody's genuinely excited for you. The second person was this guy named John Prendergrass. So we got into some accelerator. You're supposed to get assigned with a mentor, which is like the most fake way you can get a mentor is like it gets assigned to you. And this guy put in a request. He goes, I want these guys. And it was because he himself, although now he was doing some fintech company, his first business was he was a franchisee of Boston Market. And he was like, oh, these guys are doing a restaurant thing, I can help them out. And he helped us out in two ways. The first was he gave us real talk.

9:27So he took us into, we came to his office and he was like, so what's the plan? And we told him the whole business plan. We gave him the pitch. We had practiced a million times. Then he goes, is this shit going to work or not? And just him asking us that way, like jarred me. And I was like, I have no idea, which is like not what you're supposed to say when you're pitching or investors or employees or anybody really. You're supposed to just say, of course, it's going to work. Here's the research. Here's the studies. Here's why there's the plan. I was like, dude, I have no idea. And he goes, so you probably shouldn't sign a lease, a personal guarantee at a 10-year lease, right?

9:56If you don't know if this concept is going to work. He goes, how can you figure out if the concept is going to work? He just asked a better question. Instead of where should we launch, what location should we go for? He's like, how do you figure out if this is even worth doing if people want this? And he got us thinking, he got us to eventually do a cloud kitchen. And so he helped us that way. But the thing he did afterwards was much more valuable. after we so he talked to us for about an hour and you know the bad news was we were dumb the good news is we knew we were dumb whereas there was a lot of 21 year olds who are dumb but they think they're smart we had the one asset which was we thought we were pretty dumb and so when somebody told us a good idea or somebody seemed smarter than us we actually like took them up on it and so he told us to do these three things or think about these three things so we just immediately went and did those three things and then four days later we were like hey john we did those four things.

10:45Here's what we learned. Here's what we're going to do next. And so he was like, these guys are great, which is now that I'm in the position where sometimes I give people advice, that never happens. Like it seemed like the obvious thing to do, but actually that rarely ever happens. Rarely do people ask a question, genuinely want the answer, then take good advice and act on it and come back and say, here's what happened. They closed the loop and say, here's what happened. Here's what we're going to do next. And so he wrote this blog post and what he said in the blog post, I don't believe was true at all at the time.

11:15But dude, that was like a gust of wind in our sails. He goes, I met these founders and I've met a lot of founders, probably a hundred founders. And I've given a lot of advice. He goes, these guys, they took what I said, they acted on it immediately violently. And he goes, one of the most important things for an entrepreneur is a high bias for action. He goes, and these guys named us. And he goes, they have the highest bias for action of anyone I've met in the last 10 years. I didn't even know that phrase. It's kind of like you're talking about steward. Like I didn't even hear bias for action. That was not a phrase I'd ever heard, but I was like, fucking put that label on my back.

11:48That's me now. I was a blank canvas before that. I was an empty vessel and him giving me that label became kind of like calling cards. Like, yo, I don't know what the right answer is, but I know that how I do things is I have a high bias for action. So I'm just going to take a shit ton of action and I'll figure things out that way. and so he gave us like a real gift in that moment which was again not really true but it didn't matter it was like true in my mind and therefore he gave me something to strive towards which reminds me of your your Belsky story so check this out so John is a an entrepreneur I guess he I think he has a podcast too I found I won't say too much I don't know if you want people to see is I found an old Sean website that is basically your resume.

12:33And on your website, and on this website, it has references. And you've got one from John. I would bet on these guys in almost anything. They have the highest bias to action of any entrepreneurs I've met in the past few years. And it links off to this blog post that he wrote about you, which is insane. In the blog post, he has a conversation that you guys had together. And it's pretty funny. Yeah, exactly. So that was the second one. And the third one is Michael Birch. Michael Birch, he was the guy who was what I wanted to be. He was a Silicon Valley billionaire, built multiple successful companies, was living the life, had a cool office in San Francisco.

13:13And I moved to San Francisco to work with him. And so I worked with him and eventually he ended up promoting me. He was the CEO at the time. I was the junior guy in the company. I was 24 years old, probably youngest guy in the company. And he actually promoted me to CEO, which was insane this is you know like an 18 person company at the time and it wasn't that he promoted me as it was the speech he gave he goes he took me off site and i thought i was getting fired because that's what i had seen in movies is they take you like out to coffee because they want to like shoot you in the head out there and not cause a scene in the office so i texted my mom i was like oh no he wants to meet off site like i'll be home for lunch you know it's over i had a good run it was fun but like you know whatever i was doing there making it up as i went i did something wrong all right let's take a quick break because i gotta tell you a story Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team.

14:00I 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. And 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.

14:29That'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 A, and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. He sat me down. I was having his wife and he goes, you know, when you meet somebody, sometimes you just know. And I think he's talking about his wife. And he goes, I've met a lot of people in Silicon Valley. I know now when somebody special and they're going to do something special in their career because you're either going to do it here or elsewhere.

15:01So I'm going to give you the keys to have you do it here. And I was blown away. You know, it was like a astrology reading. Like it didn't mean anything. There was no evidence. There was no logic. There was no explanation, no rationale, but him just saying, uh, you know, you're going to do something special. Yeah. That fucking fueled me. I, I, I then like failed for like six years straight right after that. Um, which felt horrible because this guy believed in me and I just felt like I couldn't deliver this like, you know, billion dollar company that I was supposed to. But that fueled me for a very long time.

15:29Dude, this more than anything inspires me to give these speeches to other people. Yeah, I'm just going to go willy nilly, baby. Everybody's getting the fortune cookie for me from now. Can I just tell you one of the funnier things that I've seen this week? So on Sean's, this looks like Sean is like a year out of college on or he's 24 years old on your website, which I assume is your resume, basically, you have your height and weight listed. So it says Sean Burry, 24 years old, six foot, 167 pounds of pure hustle. Yeah, dude, I didn't know how to make a resume. Twisted steel and sex appeal. You've listed your height and weight on your resume.

16:17And you said, I live on a stage, run on fumes, and I'm willing to take big risks. Oh, my God. That is so funny. When you're the greatest founder in the world, they don't call you the greatest founder. They call you Sean Porter. Right. Yeah. I didn't know how to make a resume. I didn't know what you're supposed to do. So I just like thought from first time, like, what would I do? And it's like half NBA draft scouting report, like my height, my weight. I did it. You can see it on there. I did a thing that was like, you'll probably see this. I did like skills bar, like an NBA 2K where it's like, this person is like good at three point shooting, bad at dunking.

16:54Like, and I remember I did this and the guy in the interview was like, so I looked at your resume, if we're going to call it that. And he goes, hard work is only like halfway full. Why would you, why would you say that you don't work hard? I was like, well, true. That's why. dude a lot of your stuff is accurate by the way if you did that 24 that so over 10 years ago uh negotiations was high design medium programming nothing public speaking almost 100 out of 100 you had attributes son you you knew exactly what i mean you're on point writing high uh this is such a funny website this is so funny yeah organization under 50 like on a scale of zero to 100 my organization's a 40 that's true you know that where's my hard work with my work ethic okay i gave myself like a 70 whereas like you know improvisation i gave myself a 90 this is fucking accurate at least i told no lies this is so funny and then you have like a collage of all the stuff but it says hot off the press and has it's a collage of all the times that you've been mentioned in media this is awesome it's actually cool to see i bet you a lot of people who listened to this we should go when I did when I did that my final interview with the with the billionaire he scrolled down to the bottom I had this little like motivational poster looking thing I mean it's all cringe now dude like hey let's be very it's not cringe it's not cringe this is all very cringe but I'm like it's like proud cringe like when you look back and you're like oh I was a geeky in high school but like you know this kid's going places that's what they're yeah but I felt like I was going places and I had one thing on here that they got referenced as she was like you know why I liked your resume the very last line on your thing said don't believe your own bullshit i like that and that like resonated with the you know the billionaire and um i was like oh man i was just throwing shit at the wall this whole thing was like a hundred possible things that might resonate you're like uh i actually did believe my own bullshit and it worked like i just threw all this shit and it got me here um that's awesome i like looking at this website by the way uh yeah believers versus advisors i'm on board be a believer for somebody and if somebody believes in you it's a good reminder today to hit them up and thank them for it that's a that's that's the takeaway here that's it 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 all right this episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies.

19:34Shouldn'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. It'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.

20:05And 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. For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.