MBA2320 Bonus Episode: You're going to love My First Million

23:52And you got to like, can you nail that sale? Because if you can, you could build a very, very big business. And I mean that in like the most loving way possible, which is basically just saying to most entrepreneurs and most kind of young people, like get out of your bubble. Well, you end up not chasing fads. Like there's a lot of fads, like business built on, built on fads. Right. And those are great businesses. Right. Like we hear about them all the time. The guy who, what was it? The, um, the teeth, like, I can't remember like the, the, the hillbilly teeth. You remember this at gas stations?

24:20Like apparently like$20 million like business, right? Like the Snuggie, huge fad, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, I believe in revenue, but like something like quilting has been around forever. It's not sexy, right? But the targeting gets really interesting. And like some of the other things, right? Like you guys talk about this a lot where it's like services business, you know, lawn care, HVAC, all these other things end up being like stuff that sticks around for a long time. And, you know, through the businesses that you don't really hear of, and there's a lot of opportunity in terms of roll up or like flipping the model that, you know, was basically being used by the folks that are the incumbents.

24:53So what are some of these other... Or if you're going to innovate, innovate on just one thing. So it's like, oh, quilting people love, but there's not a lot of Instagram theme pages and communities on Instagram. Okay, that's like, it's just like, I can do one new thing on top of nine old time, you know, nine things that are still going to be the same. And that's like a new thing, right? Sam did the news, but he did it through email instead of through, you know, printed papers, right? And so like one new thing and then he didn't need to change everything else. Everything else could stay the same because the human needs stayed the same.

25:25Oh, yeah. Sorry. We went up long ass time on quilting. Talking about quilting, baby. It's great. What else you got? What are some other kind of niches that you like? Three other spaces. Happy to go deeper. Trades roll ups, plumbing companies, HVAC companies, electrician companies. There's a lot of that stuff happening. It's not like machine shops or those types of things where it's just like hard to innovate. It's like skilled enough that there's a niche and there's like a moat, but it's not skilled enough that you can't roll it up. A lot of these guys and gals are looking for basically a way to retire.

25:55And it's kind of like accountant shops. Like they don't get more than one X max, right, in terms of their business. Basically things to sell to kids of old people. That's the best way to put it. What does that mean? I don't know. I saw you wrote that. Products that prey on baby boomer kid guilt. Yeah, yeah. So a really good example. It's not a huge company because it's a one man shop out of Boston is Nanograms. it's basically a, um, I don't know if you email or you post it on Instagram and then it automatically sends a postcard to your Nana or to, you know, whomever you want to send it to. Um, so there's some really interesting things that are happening there where like you have high disposable income in a certain group, low amount of time that wants to be spent necessarily with like, you know, their parents or their grandparents, depending on, you know, the, the personality.

26:44Um, and as basically the trend that's happening is there's a huge portion of the population that are aging. So you're seeing like the multiples on things like old folks homes or hospice care actually increasing pretty substantially, which is kind of crazy. And then there's, there's, there's got to be more technology plays. I don't have like a giant technology play there. I just have seen like a number of people like start to build on that particular trend. And then the last one, which I think is really interesting is death. That sounded terrible. I find death interesting. No, I'm not that that's scary.

27:15But there are four or maybe five companies that basically own everything in the literal last mile of your life. Coffins, the funeral service homes, everything that's being sold in the funeral service homes, even like how the memories and kind of like that last part looks. There are some businesses that have tried, but because of like the five people kind of owning everything and multibillion dollar companies. What's the biggest one? What's essentially happened? I don't have the names in front of me. I know someone tried five years ago, a guy named Dave Balter in Boston, basically tried to start a memory company where basically you would load up memories, essentially.

27:58And then all of a sudden you would get that information back via Alexa. So you could be like, oh, Alexa would tell me about my grandpa or something like that and what happened like six years ago or something with him in an adventure. But he was the one telling me that like basically he would go visit, you know, these companies like, hey, maybe I could sell to these companies. And they were all like buttoned up suits, you know, all that kind of fun stuff. And so that's a space that I think given the aging population, there's probably something there that makes sense as well. Gotcha. Let's switch gears real quick.

28:28You had said something else, which was let's do some quick hits. OK, so let's try to do these. Give me the kind of the quick, quick jab on these. You said, I used NSA learnings to do competitive intelligence. What the hell are you talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my first job out of school, I worked at NSA. So I was an intel analyst. Best way to put it, I was like Jack Ryan's desk job. So none of the cool stuff. I did have weapons and defensive driving training, which is kind of cool. The defensive driving training is like so much more useful than the weapons training in my real life. But what's really interesting about it is like it's basically was the best career start in like first principles thinking and like thinking about like a target.

29:08And so I had a competitive Intel program basically at ProfitWell. It was just me running it where I had every quarter I had stats and it's kind of like what you guys have talked about before, but like a little bit deeper. So what I did is I had shadow lists of like our each competitor, even our partners, like customers. And I would send like shadow NPS surveys, you know, product research surveys, these types of things. And the thing that people miss on competitive Intel is like, it has to be done over time um and this is something that like they teach you when you're going after a target on the inside which is like i need to understand not just a point i need to understand like multiple points in order to kind of create a profile basically and how did you get that nps stuff no he said he sent a fake nps i straight up sent surveys to their customers surveys to their customers walk me through that walk me through all your research methodologies This is crazy fascinating.

30:02Yeah. So there's two, there's two main sources of information. There's moles and then mass data. Moles are like qualitative, like almost like customer development product conversations. These are former employees. These are, you know, customers I know that are friendly to me. They're not going to switch because of whatever, but I can like talk to them. Okay. Let's pause at former employees. You go, you find, okay, this person used to work here. What happens? What is the, what is the guy? I do this all the time. Present this. But yeah, me and Sam have talked about this on the pod once. But totally.

30:32So I like you meet him at a conference. Oh, it looked like on Twitter that didn't end well. They weren't like after four long, wonderful years at so and so I've now moved on. But it was like I'm now over here. Right. They took out the competitor name. That's someone I want to like, like a better phrase, target and have a conversation with and be like, hey, man, how's everything going? Right. Like that type of a thing. And again, you're not going to get a vast amount of information. But again, it's about collecting different points. Right. Right. And then I've talked to an investor and then I've talked to an investor who's thinking of investing in the company.

31:01And then I've talked to like some customers who are officially churning from the product. And all of a sudden I can start putting this together. But the more fascinating stuff and that's color, right? Like that's color that kind of guides your analysis. Because you as an analyst, what you're trying to do is you're trying to predict what's going to happen or based on some sort of stimulus, what they're going to do. Right. So if all of a sudden something comes in or there's a feature that's launched or some sort of messaging or marketing thing that happens, what are they going to do? And that's going to help you respond to whatever they're going to do.

31:29Right. And prepare for it. Right. So that was really interesting because you almost get like feel from those types of people. Like, oh, it turns out like there's an exodus. A lot of people are leaving. That's great. Let's step on the gas here. But the real kind of secret sauce is what Sam started asking about, which was there are many lists of customers that you can find. If they have some sort of a snippet, obviously built with Clearbit, all those types of things. Right. That's one. Everyone likes to talk about their customers. Right. So they have case studies. That's two. Everyone likes to put the logos on their website.

32:00That's three. Right. And so you're looking at social, you're looking at built with, you're looking at all these logos. And then I'm like, well, who's the main customer? Right. I can go find all those email addresses. Right. And you're not looking for like, oh my God, I have 10 ,000 people. Cause most of these people don't have 10 ,000 customers. Right. But what we were looking for is enough that then I'm going to start sending on an every three month basis, a survey or every other month I'm going to send an NPS survey. And then I'm going to send. So what domain do you send the survey from? Like, yeah, like a name plus feedback, feedback.com or something or what?

32:30There's a couple. I don't want to go too deep, but like probably my reputation's already fried on this. So like, but let's say you're, let's say you're trying to, let's say you're creating a HubSpot competitor and you want to get HubSpot NPS information. You send an email that it's like HubSpot feedback.com or like get HubSpot feedback.com or something like that. I wouldn't go that far because if someone finds that out, like it looks real bad. Right. But what I would, and I'm sure people are going to think everything I'm saying is really bad, but like whatever. Right. And so what I would do is I'll do more like marketing software research.com or something to that effect.

33:06And then the way that I position it is, Hey, so-and-so you've been identified as a user of HubSpot. I would love 30 seconds of your time to understand what you love and what you don't love. Right. And the 30 seconds there, 30 to 60 seconds there is really important. We've sent our pricing software is fed through surveys. We've sent like probably 10 million surveys at this point. If you're not compensating someone on an individual basis, the raffle thing doesn't work. It's, I mean, it will work with some people, but most people doesn't work. But if you're not compensating, you have 30 to 60 seconds.

33:34So I'll send a survey that max five questions, right? NPS standard question. Here's five features. What's the most appreciated or most preferred feature on that list? Same list. What's the least preferred, right? So three questions. Maybe I'll throw in anything else you want to tell us about HubSpot, right? And then all of a sudden I have like a picture and then I'm going to send, oh, it's interesting. We're thinking about building this thing. They're thinking about building that thing. Like let's do something next, next quarter or next month. But the same survey can be sent multiple different times.

34:01But the important thing here is you're building a timeline, right? Because now all of a sudden I can see these trends. And what was really interesting and the thing that I told you guys about was not only, so first you should never show this information to your product team. It is the worst information like we've seen like competitive based product teams are really bad like it just doesn't work um but i have data and i'm happy to share it that competitive based marketing teams like teams that it's correlative of course it's not causal but those folks who have competitive programs typically have much better retention and lower cac because they just understand what are you talking about what basically he's saying what implanting is what he's saying is you've you learned this stuff if you go tell the product team hey here's here's what they said they want, or here's what you should build.

34:44Screws them up. They don't, they don't build the right stuff. But if you go to a marketing team and you say, here's what, here's what pain points were most important to them, or here's what benefits were most important to them, or here's what, here's how they ranked these guys versus us, the marketing teams. If you have that competitive Intel as part of your process, a marketing team will perform better than a marketing team without that. Perfect example, real world example. We start hearing, this is the early days of the metrics product. We realized getting accuracy for metrics is actually incredibly difficult because it's not like marketing metrics that can be like 5 % off, like financial metrics.

35:18If you tell me I have this much money, that's supposed to be in my bank account. I'm making decisions based off that. It has to be 99.9, if not a hundred. Right. So we start feeling this just as a product team. All of a sudden we start hearing from some of my, like my, my moles, if you will. And they don't know that they were these people, just to be clear. It's not like I turned them and they're like, you know, there's drops and everything like that. But also I start hearing like, ah, yeah, we're using it, but the accuracy sucks. Right. So all of a sudden we start hearing this totality of information.

35:42All of a sudden that is our core marketing strategy. Every single time comparison pages. We didn't do that many of them, but every single comparison page is the number one thing. All of our ads, like competitive ads, that's what they were. And then over time, all of a sudden that became their home pages, right? Because they're reacting to us rather than us reacting to them because we found the snippet that makes the most sense. And the most like aggressive thing, if this doesn't sound aggressive enough is, so I have all this data, I have all this information, I've collected it, I've synthesized it.

36:12I know - By the way, do you keep that like a spreadsheet or like a notion and you're making, and you're writing like narrative formats? It depends on how I'm using it, right? So the data is just tracking over time, right? So I can send you like some slides or something like that. So I have some slides that like I put together for when we were going to go raise money for the first time as well, because it's just really good data in general. one thing I have is basically spreadsheets that has a lot of this information especially the qualitative and then the other thing that I build off of this are red team docs I don't know if you guys know what those are but basically like every thought I've had or every thought that I learned from this data because this data like customer data and market data is probably 10x more important but this is like some interesting data that's easy to talk about in a podcast but red team docs is when I look at all this data it's like what are the things that kill us every single thought that I've had that could like kill us or hurt us goes into a doc.

37:02Some of those docs get built out. Oh, someone accuses me of X. Someone says this on Twitter. And then it basically at minimum has, here are the steps that we're going to take so that when that thing happens, all of a sudden we have a headstart on the little critical piece of the thinking. But to make a long story short, the thing that I referenced with you guys is I would have, like, these are all funded competitors. So they would try to go raise money. I would have their, um, the people they were trying to raise money from come to me, like not tell me that they were trying to raise money, but it's obvious because they invest in the space.

37:36It's not the associate. It's like the partner coming, like all that kind of stuff. Some of them would straight up tell me like, Hey, we're thinking of investing and so-and-so, what do you think? But what I would do then is I would show them these slides and I would just basically be like, here's all the information on, on us and, and the person that you're thinking of investing. And I wouldn't say that unless they were upfront about it. And what it, I, I know for one, we, we killed one of the rounds that someone was trying to raise. Like, I can tell you that definitively because one like, okay, I'm going to invest in someone going against this psycho who like has all this information, right?

38:06Like that's a pretty scary thing. And then two, like all of our numbers are better because I, you know, we just ended up, you know, doing really well at certain, a certain number of things. Right. And so that, that I think is, again, it's a program that I think that you should have at least at a bare minimum from a marketing and go to market perspective. if you have a market that becomes really competitive. If you're in like the blue ocean, as they say, like it's probably a waste of time. But it's just something where our ocean got red real quick. Sam, I think the look on your face, tell me what you're thinking right now.

38:38I think I'm very good at research and I'm very good at doing what I do, which is like doing the exact same thing of finding moles, getting intel, reverse engineering. You have said, I think I'm a nine out of 10. You have said some things to me that I realized that there's another couple levels that I can go to improve. It's pretty magical. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. Well, then keep in mind, like I have all this market data, right? So that was interesting too, because all of a sudden I can understand like, so for example, COVID hit. Again, I can't look at anyone's accounts and we're very, very, very, very like strict about that.

39:15But I can see, oh, this sector that has 50 plus accounts, which is our terms, this sector's tanking. this sector is taking off. I can change my marketing almost instantly. Right. And when you have some competitive Intel, especially on segments, like I knew the segments that our competitors were going after. And I knew the segments we were going after. It just helps feed the wheel. And when you're feeding the wheel and you're getting that PhD in your business, which I think is really important if you're, if you're going all in, like all of a sudden it's like now a lot of the decisions, like we don't have to think about because it's like, we know what's happening.

39:44We know what strings being pulled. Let's react to it. Let's respond to it and kind of go from there. How much of your time is spent on that? You are a freak. Well, now it's a system. You mean that in the best way possible. It's a system now. So it's a system. So I don't spend that much time with it. I just get to collect, right? And it's just documentation, right? So for example, I have names. Like I know I have six names that I can tell you of users of a competitor of ours. I see them pretty regularly, especially since events are back. I'm friends with a couple of them, right? And I'm not hiding the fact like, hey, how's it going with competitor A, right?

40:19Like I'm not hiding it, right? And that's the thing that like, there's a point here where I think you're kind of being an asshole and you're being like conniving. And then there's a point where you're just like being smart and collecting data. And I try to stay like obviously on that part of the divide, if that makes sense. Would you ever turn that into a business? Yes. Yeah. I think you could create a really good business around collecting NPS data. Honestly, G2 crowd reviews, that's where there's a ton of like data. like I would love someone should create this because it would just do my job, which is great.

40:53Quarterly report kind of like for this is the thing for us to reports. I think there's also like a market to like blow that whole business up. Give me like quarterly reports instead of these reports where you called 100 people, a quarterly report on the same company or on the same industry that has here are the reviews, the new reviews, positive of a competitor here, the bad reviews, negative of a competitor. Here's MPS data, all that kind of fun stuff. And, you know again you have to be careful on how much you use this information like you're using it to build like a profile you're not using it to like immediately react to and that's a mistake a lot of people make sean and i had we brainstormed this a lot and we were talking about how we both use glass door reviews because even though like glass door is typically like either fake or incredibly happy employees or like disgruntled employees there's not really a middle but like you can still get a lot of interesting information from there and you get intimate information from like LinkedIn, like they'll say like, you know, I manage a pipeline of a$10 million a year business.

41:47And like, Oh, okay. Thanks for telling me. And like, we would like, we, we, we brains from this idea of this business where we, I think we call it like I spy or something, or like it involved like spying on like many people in a, in a particular industry and just sending you an email because you can use like Facebook ads manager and be like, Oh wow, these guys just made a switch. They are now targeting older women as opposed to younger women. Uh, and we called it like spy something. And it's kind of funny. You worked for the NSA. You, you, you, you don't, you are the spy that we were talking about.

42:16So like, it is kind of interesting. I do think actually a business could be built doing this. I think the problem is, is that, so I've been talking about customer development, customer research, because you should do all of this for your customers. That's what you first start with rather than your competitors. Like better stuff sounds sexier, right? But I think that like, I used to talk when I give talks at conferences or like events, all about customer development, 15 % of people like care. And then even when you give them, like everyone cares, everyone tweets the tweet. Oh yeah, you should talk to your customers, right?

42:4515 % of people actually do the work. And then when you actually take care of the work for them and just give them the data, and this is the one risk of this type of a business, I'm sure there's a big business in it, but then they like, don't know what to do with it. Right. And so all of a sudden it's like, okay, you're, you're kind of giving people information, which that's probably fine. Cause it's a vitamin then like they don't, they, they like that they have it. Right. But then actually implementing on stuff like they probably don't do it. And that means like, I don't know if you get if you get a 36 month customer, like I'll take it.

43:13Right. Like they don't need to be 60 months necessarily for for you to build a big business. Right. You're doing one other thing that I find fascinating. Actually, well, there's two. You said you're I'll start with the less fascinating one. You said you're buying a shit ton of debt for pennies on the dollar and going to forgive it. So what's what's actually going on there? Everyone wants to be Mr. Beast on a long enough timeline. Everyone wants to be Mr. Beast. That's what I feel. so like it no so like here's the thing i i'm probably going to reinvest everything that i got into this into like another business did you say how much how much did you make from the sale trying i gotta work with a lot of people uh so i'm trying not to to be super over or under nine figures uh i'm not gonna say what i got let's just put it that way but um i'm happy to dm you I was I asked you if it was over or under a hundred million dollars and it took you a minute to think about it.

44:10So what I'm going to assume it's that number, give or take 30 percent. Give or take 30 percent. Yeah, let's just let's. But like, again, part of its stock, it's not all cash. Like there's a lot of different factors here that we I don't want to get into. But I am I'm going to I'm fine right now. Like I'm going to do fine that if that makes sense. So, um, but I want to reinvest it all. Cause like, again, I'm, I'm not a car guy. I'm not like, and again, I've had it for like two months. I went from like, this is a fun fact. I did the whole Dave Ramsey don't have any debt, pay off the house as soon as possible thing.

44:45So in January, I had$20 ,000 in my bank account and I paid off house. Like that was it. And then this happened. So, um, I haven't adjusted to it is what I'm trying to say. So like, this might change in like six months, but I, I want to like, you know, I want to go all out and go all out, not in a way of like, you know, like fancy cars and stuff like that, but like in stuff that's really interesting and gets me on the quickest path to learning. And one of the reasons for the debt thing, um, and also the, I don't know if you're going to bring up the other one, but like the debt thing was this, the debt market's just crazy.

45:14Like it's insane, right? It's, it's, it's insane how much debt there is, how that debt is purchased. I don't understand it. Um, and this is one of the ways that I can like really understand it and also do some good in the world where it's like, I can buy a bunch of debt for pennies on the dollar. I can understand how that system works, how debt collectors work, how the debt collector sell to another debt collector. And then also like, obviously forgive some medical debt. Make it simple. What debt have you bought? How are you buying debt? What debt are you buying? How are you buying it? What are you doing with it?

45:39Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have not actually purchased the debt yet, right? I am basically exploring right now. I just put some feelers out because that's the other thing, the debt market. Who did you reach out to see if you can acquire some debt? See, that's the interesting part. That's what I was about to bring up. it's so shadowy that like, there's not like a website that's like, we buy all the debt and then sell the debt and all that kind of stuff. There's nothing. So I have a buddy. Um, I think he's, I don't know if he's cool with me saying his name, but he used to, he runs a really cool subscription conference now, but he used to do this.

46:10And I was asking him, he was on like the, the board of one of these debt agent, like a associations, like a business association. And I was like, Hey man, isn't it scammy? And he was explaining to me that like, in that market, there's like 20 % of the market. That's like very bad. Like those are the ones you hear all the stories about threatening people. The other part of the market, like he was in this, he was like, he would just call people and be like, Hey, like, what can you do? Right. Because he bought it for pennies on the dollar. So he's like, give me 30%. Great. Like he made money. They get it done.

46:36All that. And this is like someone who owes that market. This is like someone who owes$2 ,000 because they got an x-ray or took an ambulance or, um, yeah, I don't know whatever else you have credit card debt for. Right. Yeah. And the other thing is the reason, the reason this is interesting and this is like to kind of speak a little bit more like how i'm thinking is like i don't want to build a quilt company although it would be fascinating don't get me wrong like i the stuff palmer lucky's doing in defense i'm i'm all about it the stuff that like uh aaron schwartz did uh before his passing like in terms of opening up uh databases that were that were behind um gateways but supposed to be free and making them free like that's the type of stuff i want to do and like if you look at debt money in politics and defense Those are three giant areas where like there's huge things holding us back.

47:24Cost plus pricing and defense is holding us back. Palmer's working on it. Debt. There's just so much debt. Most of it's student or not most of it, but a lot of it's student debt. And so like there's something interesting there of like how can you make money but also like not be a jerk. Right. And also like, you know, take that burden off people's plates. And then politics, money and politics. There's something there because I don't think we're just going to magically have, you know, people wake up and be like, let's vote against having this much money in politics. So, like, what's a world look like where you accelerate the money in politics and hopefully break some of the log jams and kind of go from there?

47:57So that's that's those are the three things I really think about in terms of like post paddle life, if that makes sense. And Sam, you want to do anything on those? Otherwise, there's one. Yeah. Well, before we I want to get to this last one, this is interesting, but I do want to do a quick I have a quick question, which is. you you're 32 right 33 how old are you uh yeah 30 33 yeah I turned 34 in a couple months so you're 33 34 you just made a huge sum of money have you done the math to when you become a billionaire uh I'm sure you have and uh how does it feel to have such a huge sum at such a young age I mean that's pretty wild right here's the thing I learned and And some of your guests, so actually friend of the show, Hermosi, I talked to him a couple of weeks ago and what I told him and he kind of was like, yeah, exactly.

48:50Back was it amplifies the worst in you and the best in you. You're just the same person. Right. So like I thought when I was going to get money, I was going to like, oh, I'm going to be healthier because I can like afford, you know, someone to yell at me about eating. It's like, no, like now I can afford to go to terrible places all the time. Right. And, you know, I could afford that before, but like, I think it's one of those things where I'm a big believer, something I talk a lot about, and I don't know if this is interesting, but like Teddy Roosevelt, of all people, wrote this speech called The Strenuous Life and is basically his concept.

49:23And I think it's a better speech. Everyone references man in the arena. I think man in the arena is shit versus strenuous life. He basically said in modern parlance, like if you've been given something like whether it's, you know, middle class life, upper class life, whatever it is, if you've had an exit, even though you worked for it, right, whatever, like your duty is to like go be strenuous again. Right. Your duty is to go crazy and like, you know, go deeper and make big swings. Right. And that's why I'm talking about like, I don't want to go into quilting because it's like, yeah, there's a money grab there.

49:50I think it's great. but like I want to like fix democracy. I want to like have defense. I want to fix debt. Like I want to try and fix those types of things. Um, because I think like for every person doing that, like you obviously have tons of people that are digging ditches who have no ability to like, you know, they're leading a strenuous life. Cause they have to, so yeah, I'm, and I know that sounds like, I don't know, people judge that answer like in multiple different ways, but like, yeah, I'm having fun, but I'm also like all in, right. Like I'm trying to go. And it's part of the reason we went to paddle is like, I didn't want to like hand over the keys because I wasn't done yet.

50:19I want to see what a company going through a public offering looks like. I want to see that so that I can decide, do I like that? Do I want to go big next or do I want to do more small shit? So that's kind of what I'm thinking about, if that makes sense. When you were younger, were you kind of highly competitive at anything? You between ages, I don't know, 12 to 18, if you look back now, if you were like a researcher just getting to observe you behind the glass panel, would you have seen anything in the way you behaved that would lead you to think oh this guy's gonna have like a really interesting career in life or would you have looked like an you know an average teenager at that time um yeah so i had a not i don't know how sam would look at this i had like a midwest childhood let's say a bad midwest childhood which is like the things that happened to me like would clearly be abused today but maybe back then like they were like okay and And so, so there was that.

51:17And I think that like, that makes me an incredibly insecure human being. Like I'm, I'm incredibly insecure about like most things, but what I kind of learned, and I don't know if this was trial and error, but I had some good like mentors in life is like, instead of like taking that and go become, you know, a deadbeat, like channel it, right? Like use that anxiety, like and channel it. The one thing in the answer to your question, fun fact, I am a national champion debater. um so i uh i did speech and forensics um in in high school should i make the joke john yeah or do you want to would you consider yourself a master 12 year olds 12 year olds i love it yeah so i i did by the way so this is a thing this segment i don't know if you heard this we did this segment on here i said i've observed these three patterns people who are amazing and debate go on to do amazing in business people who are amazing gamers can go on to do amazing um i think poker was maybe my other one but those three are like not you wouldn't associate that with success in the business world but they have like this i just keep seeing it over and over and over again well so you know what it is so i i did um so i like i was doing football and like wrestling and all that stuff i i had to have foot surgeries for whatever some reason and basically i was like oh i can't i can't do wrestling that season so i went and started doing what's called forensics when you're in high school.

52:34And then I was like, oh, you can get scholarships. So I went to the school I went to on scholarship to do this. And it was one of the best schools in the country for it. It's Bradley university, like lovely school, but like as the Northwestern kids would make fun of us in Illinois, like you get a public school education at a private school price, basically, unless you're on scholarship, that type of a thing. And if you think about it, so what I was doing is at least in college for 40 hours a week, four years, I was synthesizing information and structuring arguments and getting to root cause, right.

53:02Which are these things that we always talk about. I never wanted to go into business. I, my dad still thinks I should be a doctor. I was going to go into law law, but you know, more people were graduating, you know, in law school than actual legal jobs. And I graduated. So long story short, it was one of those things where I was like, you know, I can synthesize information really quickly. Right. And that's like, I talk a little faster and all this other stuff. And so I think that's, that's helped me a lot because literally our marketing strategy in the early days was I just write blog posts and I write them pretty quickly and they're relatively deep they're not all gems but you know it's one of those things that that definitely helped me and i use it i probably use it every day you want to go to the last one sean this is the most interesting one you're doing you're also doing a hostile takeover of a publicly traded person so i saw this is this guy i don't know how you say it i've only got the background k mike em is his heck handle and there's this guy yeah yeah tell the story what who is this guy what did he do with him what the heck are you doing Okay.

53:59So again, quickest path to learning. That's, I think that's really important for like entrepreneurs, executives in general, Mike Merrill, it like 13 years ago, 2008, something like that. He became the first publicly traded person. So he sold shares in himself. He's, there's an interface. The, the, the website is a little buggy sometimes, but there's an interface. He sold shares, he gets the money, but then what he does is he gets to choose to put votes up. And then the people who bought shares vote their shares. And he doesn't do little stuff. Like he does little stuff like what color glasses should I get?

54:32So a lot of the things we probably don't want to make decisions on ourselves, which is really interesting hack. But he also what he'll do is he goes and he'll put, should I move in with my girlfriend? He puts that up for a vote. The debate is fascinating because some of them are his friends and his family. And then there's just randos in Connecticut being like, I've known Mike for like a long time through the project. I don't think this makes sense. He said this like three years ago, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's fascinating. So I knew about this girlfriend. What's the URL again? Say that.

55:02Spell it out. K Mikey M K M I K E Y M dot com. And so I, I got a little money and I was like, I've, I don't know what it's like to like do a takeover of a company. Right. And this is when Elon Musk was like doing his stuff with Twitter. And so long story short, I was like, oh, this could be fascinating. One, because there's like, I don't know how people react when this stuff happens. And so he put an auction up for additional shares. And this is what he does every so often when he needs some cash, he'll actually put an auction up and people can buy presumably if it's a Dutch auction under the share price.

55:37Right. And I did like, by the way, do you get anything as a shareholder? There's no dividends. There's no like nothing like that. You can sell your shares. People buy like shares. So like I put my shares up and get money, like actually get cash. Right. Dude, look at Sean, go to the website. Right. So he just says a thing. So look, let me give you an example. It's called the Finger Holders Contract Gig. I guess Finger Holders is the name of the company. But the short, the TLDR is, should I take a short-term gig contract coordinating the development of a community around the launch of an NFG project called Finger Holders?

56:10Should he take a job? Yeah. And then it goes the whole background of like, why I'm interested in this? Why do I want to do this? What are the contract details? How much are they going to pay me? What's the proposal? And then there's 300, I think there's like a crazy amount of comments that says like pros working on a project. Sounds fun. Cons NFTs are divisive and may alienate some of your shareholders. And there's like incredibly thoughtful discussion on why he should or should. What? So listen to this. So I sneakily, I start buying shares and I start researching people who haven't been active because you can see the last time they like logged in and stuff.

56:46Because I want to start contacting them. He launches this auction of about 2000 shares. And I know that most votes, there's only about 5000 shares that are voting. So I was like, cool, if I get 2000 shares, which is like 10, 11 % of the entire thing. And then I did a sneaky way of doing the auction, which we can get into if it's interesting. But anyways, so I get the shares and then I go speak at his shareholder meeting. He has a shareholder. How much did you pay for the 2000 shares? Uh, it was like 13 grand. And so his market cap is only like, uh, is, is, yeah, it's not, it's, it's, I don't know.

57:16130 ,000 where everyone gets in. Yeah. So right now he's got, I think 16 ,000 shares or something that are, have been sold in the share price. I haven't checked today, but there's a share price. It goes up and down based on like purchases and stuff, but he's worth it. It's in the six figure range. I think ballpark. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you owned all the shares, theoretically, that's the value. But then the other thing is the community makes it interesting. So I go speak at the shareholder conference and I go, Hey, and it's on YouTube. And I say, listen, I'm doing a hostile takeover of Mike.

57:43Here's why. Like, I think the project's undervalued. you guys voted to like make him not go on social media. Like that doesn't make sense. Like in order to get more people, he has to like do this, blah, blah, blah. I think. And then all the questions are like, well, what about like, is this good for Mike? Cause there's a lot of his friends, like his actual in-person friends. And I was like, listen, I think what's good for what's good for the share price is good for Mike and vice versa. And I talk about it. It's like a half hour interview I did. And then everyone, and then there's all these people, especially the people who don't know him who are like, I think Patrick, I think the takeover is good for the project.

58:17I think it's this, cause it goes through lulls. 500 to a thousand more shares roughly to control the vote. You thought, uh, no, no, no. I already, I already had, I got 1930 out of the auction. Right. Right. But you said each vote has about 5 ,000 and you just need, you just need 51%. It's never, it's never one-sided. It's never one-sided. So like if, if it's 2 ,500, you already can swing whatever vote. And, and what's funny is I'm texting him and I'm like, hey, man, just so you know, here are my intentions. It's a little takeover, right? That's cool. That's some insider trading, though, no? No, I didn't do anything.

58:53It's like when Elon goes and talks to Parag and he's like, hey, look, I'm doing this and here's what I want to do with Twitter. And also there's kind of nothing you could do about it, but I'm going to inform you because that just seems like, you know, the standard due process here. What obligation does this guy have to follow what you say? Like, wait, no, what if he just says, ah, fuck off. I'm done with this project. And I mean, he could shut the project down. I don't know. Like, so first, before I started doing this, I started tweeting to him about what happens if there was a hostile takeover.

59:25Elon Musk seems interesting, right? Because I wanted to see like, is this like it's is this going to be a good investment? Probably not. But like I'm learning. I can't tell you how much I'm learning. Right. Because all of a sudden it's like, oh, interesting. Shareholder made. They responded to this. And these aren't like the investors that I want to be working with for the rest of my life, but it's really fascinating. He has never, to my knowledge, in 13 years gone against what a vote has said. But he could. It's all in good faith. He could. I mean, there's no, yeah, there's no like, oh my God, I can sue him or anything like that.

59:55Also, he gets to choose what he puts up for a vote. So if he's like, yeah, I just want to move on with my girlfriend. I don't have to put it up for a vote. But there has been some talk of you get to burn some of your shares in order to put a vote up for a vote, which is fascinating. It's, he's been covered by wired Atlantic, all kinds of stuff. It's in, it was in a lull and I'm injecting some excitement into it again. And yeah, I'm looking at the price chart. So it looks like it's, it started 2008. It opened at a dollar 99 cents. It looks like, and it basically was like between one and three dollars.

1:00:28Then it kind of peaked in 2013. Maybe he got some press or something like that. It was 13, $13.50, something like that. And then for the last six years, it's basically been flat at roughly four or five bucks. Time for a takeover. And now it's$6.85 right now. And so it was about five when I started the takeover. This is far more interesting to be as small as it is, right? I mean, to be as unknown of a project, it feels unknown. To be as unknown of a project as it is, it's been around this 2008. eight it's pretty un under covered right well so in the beginning he got a lot he was like on the today's show he was on all kinds of stuff and then he did because what was interesting is he's had some epics with it like a project was i think it was called the girlfriend project and it was literally about his relationship his girlfriend buys shares his ex-girlfriend is still a shareholder i'm pretty sure his current i don't know if it's his wife or not is like a share like and that was the end of the shareholders meeting was his ex-girlfriend his current girlfriend or wife having a conversation.

1:01:32It was the most interesting like half hour I've ever seen in my life because they were just, and they're friendly. I think there might be friends, but just them talking about Mike. And it's kind of beautiful because you have all these people who like, are there just from a money perspective or just a fascination perspective in my case, or from a love perspective, like supporting this guy and like trying to make the right decisions for him. So I think it's brilliant. Like as soon as I announced this on Twitter, we got some inbound from like some, like I don't think they're documentarians or something like that.

1:02:00Like, I don't know if it'll come with anything, but it's like, it's a fascinating story that I think deserves more, more, more give. So I'm glad you asked about it because you guys have a pretty medium audience. So it's great. There's, there's even like a, what happens when I die? Like unlike a company, I will die. So what happens to my shares after I die? There's like, this is pretty crazy. I mean, it kind of makes no sense in that. Like, yeah, it's completely nonsensical. Yeah. But bro, you bought$150 ,000 image of a monkey. So like, this is, you know, like. Did you buy an ape? Punk. Oh, you're a punk guy.

1:02:34This is from Ape Fest. So this is my fun little - Yeah, it was a coin flip to use the Milkrow portfolio. Either we buy an ape or a punk. And they were the same price on that day. And we knew that the purchase was going to have to happen. Board Ape was about to buy the punks. And so it was like, which asset should we buy? Knowing this news is about to break or it has just broken or something. And we flipped punk. And then apes went through the roof. It bumps up and flat or down. Everything's down now too. It's interesting. Very interesting. Dude, check this out. So if you go to Mike's blog, so there's news.kmikeem.com where he like, it's ran like a shareholder company.

1:03:15I mean, like the investor relations page of a publicly traded company. And he has a list of all of his principles. And on health, it says like as of October 23rd, 2019, I'm in favor of experimenting with psychedelics. and you click psychedelics and there's a like notes from a board meeting about like who voted and why they voted and what is reason and what the reasoning is and how they are or are not going to start doing psychedelics then in 2016 i will not take a psyllium pills i don't know what that is um and it's like talks about why he wanted to take them and everyone's voting and he has like an update on that and then like entertainment um shareholders will have direct control over my television television watching i will and then 2019 i will watch spider-man um there's subscriptions i will not subscribe to spotify uh yeah some of these are like stupid like the glasses one it says that 34 users voted with 18 1800 shares so 34 people participated in that vote for the glasses i guess that was not a very uh not a very big one let's see this and if i believe he's put I haven't, I'm pretty sure he's put like who he's voting for like president up.

1:04:26Like he's done stuff like that as well, which gets really fascinating. Yeah, but that's just as meaningless as the glasses thing. That's true. He is in, I believe he's in Oregon. So I'm not sure. I mean, he's in a state that is going to vote one way or the other anyways. Wow. Yeah. 2020, I will endorse Bernie Sanders for president.

1:04:46Okay. Amazing. Listen, man, this was, this was fun. I'm glad you came on. and uh yeah good times i think you brought some good stuff but sam what'd you think dude can you send me send me the uh the research thing that was the most fascinating thing that was really interesting i will and i'll send you some redacted i'll send you the structure and you can don't redact it no no one will i won't share it with any of these losers it'll just be for me don't let me think about i met again i have a boss i'm on a board i gotta be careful now so yeah well are you guys i'll send you something and paddle isn't public now but it will be right uh i mean we're we're not going next year a number of years probably before anything like that happens but um great you know there's no laws i'll hook you up i'll hook you up with something don't worry don't worry this was awesome i i typically hate having not hate i i say no to everyone sean brought you in we kind of hate having guests but then we have many ways and we're not we're not fully sure why we do it but we do it in the moment it seems like a good idea halfway through the episode, it's like, I kind of wish I was just bullshitting with Sam instead of doing this conversation.

1:05:52But I'm always happy when we do it because I don't have to prepare. But you are one of the few. One out of every four is awesome. And I'll just hope that everybody thinks they're that one out of four. You actually were that one out of four. So good for you. What makes a good guest versus not a good guest just for the audience to hear. If they listen to the pod, if they already know the vibe, if they know what's cool, that tends to work really well, I think. What do you think, Sam? i agree and most people most people aren't like sean and i in that they don't do this for a living and so they need to come prepared with the things and even us we come some we do research sometimes we do sometimes we don't but there's at least bullet points so it's like all right next and you did a good job of saying next a lot of people um if you i don't know if you paid attention but sean very purposely in the beginning he's like i don't really care about the company and your background let's just move on to the other stuff and uh we actually we we tend to do that a lot and so that was cool um and so that's also the least interesting except for michael sailor that episode was like that episode was money because he was just so weird like it was just like what's gonna happen guys like what's gonna happen the next minute that was that was an interesting one did you hear when he out alpha'd me i was like yeah i like fast cars he goes i don't like fast cars but i have a really fast jet that's well no the quote the quote i tell everyone from that episode is yeah i don't really like things that you can't in normal use go at their max speed like and that's what he was referring with cars like it was like boats and jets i'm allowed to to go at max speed you know cars not really so i just thought who even has that thought about like am i utilizing this machine to its fullest velocity a guy who's not i'm not most of his balance sheet to bitcoin that's that's who has that thought which is great i love that those people exist dude sean i did you see my instagram or twitter or something i did i uh this weekend i was in the hamptons uh that's not a humble brag it was my in-laws house so i had nothing to do with it but and that's a midwest thing he just did a midwest thing just so you know the very midwest oh no i have a yeah i have an equinox member but like they're gonna do my laundry so it's like worth it was on sale like i'm not a big time guy i'm not a big time guy yeah that's what it was my in-laws house and i went out there and i drove we went to the beach for bonfire on the forth.

1:08:06And we drove by this area that was just packed. It was like a, it's like a small one lane road and it was packed full of cars, but they were fancy cars. And in front of me was a Bugatti and it was a special Bugatti. And I looked it up. It was like a$5 million Bugatti. And I was like, what the fuck is going on here? And so I get to the parking lot to park my car and it was full of black limousines, but not limousines, like the Escalades full of them. And then in the corner, one of the limos had their trunk open and literally I'm not exaggerating. I have video of it a hundred limousine drivers were just hanging out drinking coke eating chips and i was like what the fuck is going on here and they go it's michael rubin's party uh michael rubin has a famous white party and i made a joke i was like he only lets whites in which they didn't like the drivers no yeah yeah i was like you know like oh whites only really that's weird maybe i should go um i don't know it was a bad joke and and anyway i go rubin and they go yeah it's rubin he um he's having this party it's famous he goes I drove this one guy was like yeah we drove Drake and so the guy was like yeah Jay-Z's there and I was like wait really and I looked it up on Instagram and it was this crazy party and I was like uh well tell me everything he goes you know I drove this guy and he's broke one guy goes uh I drove Tyrese you remember Tyrese from Fast and Furious yeah yeah yeah he's like I drove that guy and the driver goes I'm richer than he is that guy's broker than a joke I got more money than that guy and I was like wait what really and he like kept dishing he kept telling me all this and he goes the guys who are really rich they typically drive themselves because they got that bugatti and they want to show it off um but it was really fascinating i was just hanging with these i we hung with them for like half an hour just asking them all rumors and gossip and they knew it all dude that's amazing i after you sent that you sent me that video and then i went on instagram and i saw like six nba players were posting stories from the party so it's like james harden's at the party and then whoever you know like these other The guys were Joel Embiid's at the party and it's the all white party where everybody's like, it was just rappers and athletes it seemed like, which is great.

1:10:08Exactly. It was so cool. He's got like this private beach area and then we were like 100 yards down the beach and right next to the parking lot and it was just packed. And there's Bugattis, there's all these crazy cars. It was pretty wild. I just imagined you in the, in the party with like, you know, that meme where it's the guy at the party yelling into the girl's ear and you're just like, it's a newsletter. We send it daily. It's a marketing automation company. Technically I'm there, but like, you know, to full snapshot of your customers in one CRM. No, I said much in Austin. My first million.

1:10:47I said million. Yeah. No, no, no. With an M. You use Spotify? We're on there. We got video access on there. No, we mostly talk about 12-year-old stuff, but it's pretty cool. Sean, no, he's not here. He doesn't leave his house. Sometimes he has long hair. Sometimes he has short hair. I don't know. No, I'm not. My in-laws live here. That's why. My in-laws live over there. No, my dad-in-law is jacked more than I am. It's kind of uncomfortable sometimes. That's fucked up. That bit will not get old for a while. That's awesome. I guess we got to end there, right? Yeah. Thanks for coming, dude.

1:11:37That was an episode of the podcast, My First Million. There are more episodes available where you'll hear Sam and Sean dive into all types of businesses, business ideas, and interview folks like Mr. Beast, Rob Dyrdek, Alex Hermozzi, and dozens of other guests on businesses they'd start today. To hear those episodes, just search My First Million in your podcast app. That's My First Million.