The Realities of Entrepreneurship with Mike & Kass Lazerow

26:55I want to ask about golf.com. How did you get that URL? So this was the business before Buddy Media. So it started as golf serve because back in 1998, when we started it, there were no, you know, single word URLs left with the word golf in it. And I had this idea that if you're a recreational golfer, that meant you didn't go to private courses. You had to go back to the same exact public course to get your USGA handicap. And I just thought that was just crap, like not fair. And, you know, there's all these amazing recreational golfers that don't have the money or the access, just like Mike and I at the time.

27:35And I said, like, we've got to go and start, you know, providing USGA handicaps. And golf was huge. And we started at GolfServe. And then I think it was, wasn't it a part of like an ESPN? So it was NBC. NBC. Okay, got it. Yeah. So NBC had invested in a company called Quaca Sports, Total Sports. Oh, that's right. And the company raised a billion dollars, went out of business, and they had all these bankruptcy auctions. And one of the auctions was for golf.com. And it was a phone auction. You dialed into a courthouse somewhere. And we were willing to bid up to a million dollars for the URL. and we bid$289 ,000 and we got golf.com and we built it for a few years.

28:27And then wait, how did you get the 289 ,000 then to pay for it? So we already had a company. So we had golf serve and we'd raise a little money to do golf serve. Um, and we were operating and I don't know, I forget if we like put some more money in or we just raised a little and had the money to do this. Cause we wanted this URL. Yeah. Yeah, because we saw this before apps, before the mobile phone, it was all about URLs. Every ad on the TV said www.expedia.com or www.expedia.com. And it was like you would plaster that. So that's how people found out about websites. And so we went after it hard because we thought that these vertical niches of focusing on primarily rich people at the time, And we were going to do wine and health and fitness and some others.

29:15Never got out of golf. And then ended up selling that for$25 million to a company that no longer exists called Time Warner. Which is crazy in and of itself that golf.com outlasted Time Warner. When you sold that, was this the first time you guys had millions as a couple? I know you had a public company beforehand, the student video thing. I forget the name of it now. but was this your first big hit? It was. So that was the first one together. I'd made a little money off Uwire, which we took public as part of student advantage. And that's what most importantly, that's what got us to New York because golf magazine, which was the buyer owned by time Warner wanted me to be the general manager of golf.com.

30:06And without that deal, I would have never met you, would have never met Howard Lindzen, would have never met Roger Ehrenberg, a lot of the people who have been really important to our lives. Yeah. And so, I mean, did you go out and spend the money? Like, did your lives change when you've heard, like the first time you made money and you realized, oh, this is a viable thing for me to do. I'm going to be financially free in this life. Well, you have to understand, like, and there's a little story to this. When we started Goff Serve within, we started at September, 1998. By December, 99, we had sold it to chipshot.com, which was a company that made custom golf clubs out of Silicon Valley.

30:49And it was the most expensive place in the world to actually build golf clubs, but they were registered to go public, right? And they pulled that out the following year. And so we went into bankruptcy with them and then had to restart the entire company again. So by the time we had to restart it, we did not own very much of it, like barely any of it. And what we got out of it was enough to buy our first apartment. All right. Well, that's, that's something that's good. That is something. I mean, looking, looking back, it was a lot for us. And we made$3 million before taxes. So then you pay the taxes and it's like, whatever, 2 million.

31:30Then you show up to New York and you're like, wait, apartments cost what? Like public, you know, private school costs what? And so let's just say we didn't feel rich living in New York city. We were very hungry. We had that taste of success without the type of wind that we got at buddy media. And it just made us work harder because when you're working with your spouse, you're all in, there's no safety net. There's no, Oh, my spouse has another job that's generating income. If it goes Mahola, your life is impacted in a way that if you don't work with your spouse, it doesn't happen. Well, within a year of you guys starting Buddy Media, the world entered this great recession.

32:12There wasn't really, no matter how much people liked you, there was no money available from VCs, I imagine, at the time. And were you worried? Were you scared?

32:26Cass, what do you think? I wasn't. I know that's going to sound kind of arrogant, but I wasn't. That's what I was going to say, but I didn't want to. I just feel like we had a plan. I knew Mike would always be able to pivot us to a model that worked. And if I could hire the right people and keep them there, that was going to work. And that was our mission. Right, because Facebook was still growing, recession or not. Yes, exactly. Facebook was growing and we raised our seed round. It was hard, but we raised like a million and a half at, I forgot the valuation, I trust you, three million to three and a half million dollars.

33:04It was about three and a half, yeah, because I think it all ended up at about five after. By the way, I don't think you had a hard time raising money. I had to beg to, I was surprised. I heard that you were putting money in from Howard, and I'm like, why didn't Mike call me? Well, you know how it goes. Once it tips and you get momentum, then it's like super easy, right? Yeah. But, you know, it didn't seem like a slam dunk as kind of young entrepreneurs working together. So a lot of people don't at the time didn't like husband and wife teams. You know, Howard Lindzen was very important. He committed and then, you know, made a bunch of introductions that made it happen.

33:42But the valuation really reflected how hot the deal was, right? Like hot deals don't get done at 3.5 million pre. But we just wanted the money to go because we wanted to be fast. We wanted to just build. The good news, our later stage rounds were done in the hundreds of millions. So I think it all evened out and we owned enough of it to be very happy at the end. But it was a scary time in the world. And we thought it was the perfect time to build something because less competition. Facebook was still growing. And if we just focused on our customers, which we eventually found, we would be okay.

34:19And that's what happened.

34:35I know, Mike, at some point you dealt with a cancer fear. When was this in the timeline? So my issue has always been my heart. So I have an artificial heart valve, almost died twice, congestive heart failure as a kid. In between my sophomore and junior year of college, I had a new aortic valve put in. So a fake valve. I still have the valve. I think I'm one of the longest living people with this valve because most people get it when they're 70 or 80. I've had it since I was 19 and just turned 50 this year. Now, Cass, did you think that was sexy? He had this aortic valve in there at 19? Big time.

35:16That was exactly what I was looking for. I think that's why crossed eyes. I was looking for that. Definitely. And so the only reason that's relevant is after that happened, I went from being kind of a stress ball and really, you know, worried about everything to like love and life. I'm like, what's the worst thing that can happen? I didn't die. Right. Like, let's go. Like, this is fun. I'm in, I'm in overtime. And so that fearlessness, I think, really helped me as i moved forward through not only buddy media but you know to this day in terms of how i operate which is yeah you only live once i shouldn't be alive let's let's do some awesome stuff while we're here and so what were some of the things like so you wrote this book shoveling shit what what is some what are some of the that is shoveled and how do you you know by the way it's interesting.

36:08You know, we, we were, I think you were mentioning age earlier. It turns out the average age for successful entrepreneurs is somewhere in the mid fifties. And, you know, some professions like mathematicians, the average age for a brilliant mathematician is like 25 for the mathematician's greatest work. But for historians or writers, the average age is 69 actually. And this is from, I had a podcast guest, Arthur Brooks, who writes about this type of thing. He's very into transitions in life stuff. Yeah, he's a Harvard professor. Jay, what was the name of his book? From Success to Success or... From Strength to Strength.

36:50Very smart guy. But yeah, wisdom, the wisdom of... People always talk about like the young, brilliant entrepreneur, but it's really the wisdom of entrepreneurship that drives success. Definitely. I also, I think Mike and I feel like there's a lot of glorification around being an entrepreneur. And what we've tried to write about in the book is you have to have this like always on shoveling shit mindset that you're constantly going to be shoveling out of some kind of mini catastrophe. Some kind of, you're going to be fundraising all the time. Then something's going to, something good happens, something bad's going to happen.

37:30You're in the middle of the storm. you're coming out of the storm, or you're about to head into a storm. You have to have that mindset. And those entrepreneurs that can actually grasp that and like it are going to succeed, because that's really what it means to be an entrepreneur, in our opinion. So being able to basically expect those shit storms, to use the phrase, and not quite enjoy it, but learn how to, how to, how to ride those. Yes. And, and have high, you know, stress and distress tolerance. Like you, you have to know that, like there's no, we, we meet so many entrepreneurs. I'm sure you do too, who have great ideas or have an idea and they think this is going to be the greatest thing ever.

38:14I'm going to be able to work the hours I want to work. Um, you know, I'll make all this money, all this kind of stuff, all these like interesting ideas. But when you actually start doing the work. It's not like that. You won't miss like big events maybe with your kids or your friends, but you are missing all the like in between. That's like one of the big messages. You are, this is always on. Yeah. And, and it never turns off. And I would say 80 % of the time, maybe this is just me. I would say 80 % of the time, it doesn't really feel good.

38:51no it's really torturous yeah i think we wanted to like we've read so many of these books because you know we read an entrepreneur books you know a lot of our friends have written books and a lot of them glorify it and our series of just kind of lessons it's hard to apply we wanted to write the most honest book of the life of an entrepreneur not just the business but the imbalanced life, the sacrifices, the misery. And really what we came out of it saying is that there's nothing we'd rather do. It's both miserable and awesome. And that's why it's shoveling shit, a love story. It's our love story with each other, but it's also our love story of entrepreneurs, why we've invested in a hundred entrepreneurs, why we're so excited to give advice, even when we didn't have money, like when we met.

39:47And at the end of the day, there's like, you know, in a world where people don't have purpose and passion, entrepreneurs have that, like they show up to work. They're like, wait, what, like what just happened? Like who just quit? Like what client just left us? Like we got sued by who? Like you show up and it's just like shit hits the fan and you just have to deal with it. And at the end of the day, it's awesome. And the people who do it and who get to the other side start to love it in this masochistic way. They start to love because it's not that people are smarter who are entrepreneurs. It's not that entrepreneurs are any more strategic.

40:33Go to any business school, go to any company. They're really smart, strategic people. It's the people who are willing to put in the work or make the sacrifice, who are willing to basically not see friends, piss people off by doing what they do. And so as we kind of thought about our life and wrote down these 30 years of stories, it came down to, man, this sucks. And it's awesome. I mean, I think probably you have a higher tolerance for it than me. like I just, for instance, I remember having this web agency at one point and then just, you get those calls on like Friday afternoon from the client that is, is most on the edge.

41:15And he says, listen, you need to call me, talk to you soon, but it's Friday afternoon. You call and they've already left for the weekend. So now you have all weekend where you're like, assuming you're going to lose this client and, and you're going to have to fire people. And then by the way, then you don't lose the client, but it's just weekend after weekend or day after day. There's, there's some, there's always something happening to worry about. And, and in every business I've ever done or been involved in is it's just a lot of, a lot of worry. Like, do you ever wish, sometimes I look outside and I wish I was a professional birdwatcher.

41:53Then my job is to take a notebook. Oh, there's a yellow tailed, whatever it is. And like, you just write down the names of birds and life's good. Well, we tried that. Like after I left. So after we sold to Salesforce, I went to Mark Benioff and I said, one of us has to get back home. You know, our kids were struggling. They hadn't seen us in 13 years or whatever it was. We just needed to focus. You know in your gut that, wow, your family's falling apart. So obviously, it was either me or Cass. Cass volunteered, so she got laid off, which was good. Mark treated it really well, paid her all of her stock.

42:37He was total mensch, which we forever will appreciate. Then I busted my butt for four years, and then I was fat and unhappy and not connected. I wanted to be with Cass and the family traveling the world. so I left Salesforce and I said I'm just I'm not gonna do anything now I don't really I play how long did that last how long so I got I'm a painter on the side and so I got an art studio actually Mike I got I got you the art studio I surprised him yeah I don't know how to get anything I haven't logged into it by the way but like it's hard to get a lease of anything in New one of the places you used to live at.

43:21It was at 78th Street. Oh, yeah. I lived at the Ab Florida on 78th and Broadway. And after a year, I was like, I'm miserable. I fucking suck at art. So it's a hobby. Hobbies are things you love but suck at. And I'm like, I build businesses. That's what I do. And so we went back into investing, and now we're kind of full on on the investing side and buying companies. And who knows? maybe one day we'll start a company. Well, investing in companies in and of itself is starting a company. It's a company that helps manage and operate multiple companies that you have small stakes in. That's right. And then there's a lot of decision-making and so on.

44:04And we went after that hard. I mean, at our venture firm, Velvet Sea Ventures, we have about$400 million of assets under management. We've done our own investing. and although we do love investing and will continue to invest, what really separated us is our love of being an entrepreneur. And what are some of the other pieces of advice you convey to some of your entrepreneurs or to the readers of this book? And I know you don't want to give away, when's the book coming out actually? March of 25. So don't worry, you'll be back again in March when it comes out. We'll go in depth into the book. We're like, what's one or two things?

44:43Well, I think we've touched a little bit on it about the imbalanced life. And, you know, Mike says like picking your co-founder is like picking your spouse, right? You basically work married to this person, so you better get it right. Because it's awfully hard to divorce someone that you've picked as your work partner, right? Your other founder. We've talked about pivoting. I mean, I think that's a huge chapter in the book that goes over, you know, how do you know when you need to? And I think, like you've said, these entrepreneurs and people get so full of pride. And I think that's why they're not pivoting when they want to or when they should, because they're holding on to an idea.

45:23It's ego-based. It's fear-based. We go into that quite a bit. We also talk about marketing and perception as reality and how you can do this in a very effective and efficient way when you are a startup. And teams. I mean, teams are like a couple chapters of our book because it's the most important thing. Like the thing that differentiated us were our people, right? It's not just a business model, especially Mike's idea or how I'm executing it. It's the wonderful people that we are able to hire and field in the right position. I call it money balling, but it's really you get a lot of velocity and good things happen when you put the right people in the right spot.

46:07I think that's really true. And I think a lot of people don't know how to recognize who the good people are. Like people are such good salespeople that they can convince others, hey, I'm your ideal employee. I'm your ideal partner. I think it's really hard to find the right team. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't easy. And I remember right in the beginning when we started in 2007 and 2008, it was hard to find any engineer. And at that point, we just started buying these small engineers who had apps. So we'd buy their apps and then kind of inherit them. That was one way we did it. But when we think back about Jeff Ragovin, for instance, how did he find you, Mike?

46:47Did he Facebook message you? I reached everyone I knew saying, I need a really great salesperson. And someone in the Northwestern Development Office, Northwestern University's fundraising team somehow is connected to Jeff. And then that's how we met. Yeah, I mean, you meet these people. And I tell you, he's the greatest salesperson I've ever met. So strategic. Probably the number one relationship person I've ever met. And he's great. How did he sell your services? Because there wasn't a guy in charge of Facebook for Pepsi Cola at that time. Who did he call? So the way Jeff and our whole team sold was, you know, Cass and the marketing team would soften the field by like, we did tons of marketing, tons of dinner events, tons of just events.

47:41And we basically had a vision. And the vision was that the world is moving from ads to streams. And this was back in, you know, 07, 08. So it was before everyone was just like, on Instagram and all these apps, just looking at the stream. And we said, you have to adapt and birds of a feather flock together. And we offered off the shelf everything they needed to succeed with first Facebook. The other thing that we did very strategically is Peter Thiel, who's on the Facebook board, was one of our investors. We got very close with the entire Facebook team, the sales team and the go to market team.

48:21And so in order to spend money with Facebook, they had to get up and running on software that helped them manage it. And so we became the number one provider and they started just sending clients. I mean, it grew fast. Now, we didn't realize how fast at the time, but we grew from$0 to$50 million in annual recurring revenue in three years. So from launching the product to getting to the$50 million run rate, and actually we crossed$5 million in monthly recurring revenue that month, that is really fast. I don't think we've had any companies that we've invested in that did that. And we got there because there was a seismic shift in the world that Facebook was ushering in.

49:08It wasn't us. It was every company waking up and saying, I got to figure this out. How do I figure it out? Oh, by Buddy Media. And it wasn't a coincidence that that happened. I mean, people don't remember, there was excitement around Facebook then. I mean, look, it was, I think, in the summer of 2006, I think it was Microsoft offered Facebook a billion dollars and they turned them down. And I remember writing at the time, in the Financial Times, I wrote a column, Facebook was smart. They're worth at least$100 billion. Everybody at CNBC laughed at me because then I went on CNBC to talk about it.

49:45But of course, it became much more than$100 billion a few years. On IPO day, it was$100 billion. And then what was strategically smart was getting right away in your round, maybe two of the most important people in the Facebook ecosystem at the time, Peter Thiel and Mark Pincus. Yeah, and Ron Conway, who was very close with Zuck and everyone out there. I spent a lot of time on the West Coast building relationships. I felt like if we're going to build on a platform, we really need to be close to that platform because at any given time, we were one decision away from being out of business. They could have just said, listen, no more APIs, no more marketing platforms.

50:32We are going to do that. And that's happened in some other areas. If you think of Twitter, Twitter shut off APIs. guys. I remember Twitter that affected Howard's stock tweets. Yeah. And so these platforms have a way of like being nice until they're not nice. Right. Oh, we love you build on top of us until they're really big. And then like, oh, thanks. We'll take over from here. And so I spent a lot of time out there. And, you know, I'm not going to lie. A lot of what we did at Buddy Media was, I mean, we did a good job, but a lot of it was luck. Like, let's just be kind of completely honest. And when I say luck, it's timing.

51:11It's everything went our way at a time when it didn't have to go our way. And so we were part of something much bigger. We just happened to be there with a bucket mopping up the money. I don't think it was luck in the 2009 or 2010 time. Maybe it was, I don't even think it was luck in the beginning, but maybe it was good in 2007, six, whenever you first had this idea, it was, it was talented that you recognize this was something that was going to have explosive growth. I was so excited the first time I used Facebook because I remember thinking, when would I ever call up my first grade best friend and ask him, hey, how'd your kid do in a soccer match yesterday?

51:53I would never do that. But now I see these things and everybody in the world can. And it was just an amazing feeling, which doesn't occur anymore for some reason, but it did then. That's why I wanted to jump in. That's what you just said is exactly why I love Facebook. dudes don't love calling other dudes, but we like keeping in touch, right? Yeah. I mean, this is something else that I think we talk a lot about in the book is networking and fundraising, right? You never stop networking because you never know where your next dollar will come from or your next opportunity. And Mike was so good about that.

52:30It's grueling. He was traveling all over the country, all over the world. but you as an entrepreneur, you can't sit still and just hope, okay, like I can pick up the phone and call someone. You have to build that relationship. And when you do build it, then there will be people who are interested. And to our delight and surprise, most, if not all of the people that invest in us are really good friends of ours now. And we're still in close, you know, in touch and really close with all of them. I mean, I think of Karen Klein and, And she's one of my favorite investors. Who invested on behalf of SoftBank, yeah.

53:05Yeah. And what's a good, like going to conferences, I always find to be a horrible networking technique. For you guys, what is a good networking technique? So I love cold calling. Like you did with me. Yeah, and I think if you think about most people, they haven't made a ton of money, right? And so all you have is time. So instead of watching Netflix, pull up your computer, find people's email addresses, write in through info at whatever.com, tell a good story, and try. These doors will not open up for you unless you try to open them up. And I've always just, when I was, I just thought about this, haven't written about it or anything.

53:49When I was like 12, I wrote to the board of a company called Sally May, Student Loan Marketing Association. I was 12 years old. I said, you have no students on your board. I would like to serve on your board. And they responded. They said, thank you very much. We don't accept seventh graders. That would be illegal. We can't employ children anywhere in our business. And they use like a child labor law to say like why I couldn't be on their board of directors and be an officer with a company. I like they had to like really think about it. Like they had a meeting. How do we reject this kid? And so like, I just think entrepreneurs have it.

54:31You know, you're an entrepreneur where you will not shame yourself into doing things or out of doing things that are really uncomfortable. Like it's not like, I don't love emailing James Altucher about his company, but I love the company. Like I was just with a friend of mine who started Bonnaroo. and Outside Lands, big music festivals, right? And someone asked us, how did you guys meet? And Rick Farman, who's at Superfly, invented the modern music festival. He goes, well, I got this email from Laz who said that he came to my festival with his two kids and he created a video about how much fun he had, even though it was 110 degrees and he was sleeping in a tent and almost killed them.

55:15And I thought it was awesome and we got together and I've been friends with him ever since. So people who are listening to this, who are not thinking about who are the people that they'd love to meet, because most people are sitting around like bored. And if they get an email from someone who's like, hey, I really like what you're doing. I'd love to just like talk to you and see how I could help out. Like a lot of people will respond, whether you're Mark Cuban or whether you're Cass Lazaro. But by the way, as I realized this through my own career, this becomes like a magic power. practically. The fact that most people don't realize this, that like a lot of people reach out incorrectly.

55:53And I hope in your book, there's ways of reaching out correctly. A lot of people just say, Hey, they don't really provide value. Like you provided value. You told Sally May at the age of 12, this is, this is a problem you have from my 12 year old point of view, and here's a solution to it. And so you, you have to do that and iterate over and over before one person responds, but that is the way to do it. You have to provide value. Like what I mean with an entrepreneur, the question I always ask is how can I help? If I can make anything happen in the world, what is that one thing? I can't do too much for you.

56:28I got a job. I got a family. I don't want to like, you know, piss them off. But like, what's one thing that if I did for you would really change your business? And that question sticks with entrepreneurs years later, like big entrepreneurs, like entrepreneurs who like make it. You remember how Roger Ehrenberg always says it too? Like he can't stand when entrepreneurs or anyone says, hey, can I pick your brain for a little bit? I know, it's the worst. It's the worst because it just, it's offensive. Like my time isn't worth it and your time is and all that kind of stuff. The way Mike's gone about it and taught so many entrepreneurs is the right way.

57:08Like I have some ideas. I'd love to share them with you. I'd love to help. You know, that kind of mindset is necessary to open doors. By the way, my equivalent 12-year-old experience, if you don't mind me sharing, is in 1980. So I was born in 1968. In 1980, I went to the Democratic National Convention, which was in New York City because I told them they needed, kids can influence parents. So they needed like junior Democrats of America and I was happy to run it for them. And so they invited me to hang out on the floor of the convention with all the other delegates and stuff. And, and so I, I, I spent the convention there.

57:47Doors can be opened and it's not, you know, I look back and I love warm intros and, take advantage of them if you can get it. But you need to open your own doors. And I think that's what sales is. Sales is like getting someone to do something that you want them to do without them knowing that you want them to do it. Now, let me ask you, did you write this book together? Yes, we did. It was an interesting process. You would love this because I had all these ideas that I'd written down, and you ready for this in a spreadsheet? Because I think in spreadsheets and I'd written them all down and kind of built the chapters and ideas and each cell was like a different bullet.

58:33And I go, okay, Mike, I need a little help with this. He's like, I can't write a book in Excel. What are you talking about? This has to be an award document. He was mad. This is like a two day discussion. how did that break it into stories and and write the book so we didn't like we didn't you know we had a lot to say but we didn't really know what a book structure was because we read all sorts of stuff and we didn't want it to be just you know and so we like we do everything we ask a lot of people and we had we wrote it but we had help from someone who's written a bunch of books about like, how should we think about structure?

59:20CAS is all about structure. Once we had structure, which was basically three or four stories a chapter, three to five lessons per topic, like key lessons, the writing was really easy. And because we have 30 years of material, I wouldn't say it was enjoyable, but it was, we got into a flow that got it done. Yeah, because you had the stories. So it was a question of dividing up the stories by chapters. And that's something that's very structural. You can do it in a spreadsheet. The part that gets a little tricky is, it's like you have a sign behind you right now, Mike, day trading attention. Writing a book is like day trading attention.

1:00:03You have someone's attention. You know you have someone's attention at the beginning of a chapter. Otherwise, they would not have opened that chapter. But then you have to keep that attention. There's a give and take. And it's very important to hold onto it. It's a precious thing. someone else's attention. And I'm sure by the end of this book, you appreciated the importance of that. And, you know, I went to journalism school. I love stories. Part of like sales, fundraising, everything is a story. And I didn't want, and Cass didn't want the world's greatest textbook about entrepreneurship. We wanted a very quick read that when people put it down, they're like, that was worth it.

1:00:43I learned something. It was funny. It was fun. I got to know these two goofballs. And so I think that's what it is, is it's a fun read that happens to teach you about, you know, money balling and pivots and raising money and picking a partner. And how do you green light an idea? And how do you kill an idea? And all these things that we've just done over and over and over again. It's basically the combination of all of the questions we get from entrepreneurs every day told through our stories and our love story. I can't wait to read all these stories. The book's coming out next March. You'll come on again to talk about it, I'm assuming.

1:01:23And everybody should pre-order. Can people pre-order yet? It's probably too early to pre-order. Yeah, not yet. But then go to CassandMike.com and sign up for a free chapter and connect with us. And we're going to be having some fun. We'll be doing events. So definitely sign up. we want to make this interactive. We love entrepreneurs. So part of this is we want to interact with more entrepreneurs as we go through the process of promoting the book. So everybody should sign up for CassandMike.com. And just knowing you guys, I can guarantee those events are going to be something special and worthy of attending.

1:01:57I will seek to attend. And I do want to mention, when I did write my article, you said to me, Mike, that I wrote it just to be shocking. And now you probably know having written this book, if you write something just to be shocking, it'll never be good. It won't be good. You have to care about what I did care about what I was writing and it was important to me. Now at the time you wrote something that's probably the nicest thing that anyone has ever written about us other than like maybe something our parents wrote us. And, you know, at the time, I think we were in a place where it was just we were in PTSD.

1:02:39But we've taken that with us. And there are a few people who really impacted us in a huge way, kind of how you think, and how you think differently. You know, Gary Vaynerchuk, who started his, his business from our conference room at Buddy Media, who, you know, he wrote the forward to the book, one of our great friends, and we've seen him build his business. We've seen you write like 15 books since we met and do all your businesses. So part of this book is a love story to you guys for saying yes to us and building that relationship. Well, I always appreciate you guys. I'm looking forward to the book.

1:03:21I'm looking forward to you coming back on. I know you're have some amazing stories to tell and thanks for giving us this this intro now to be continued amazing thank you thanks for having us i appreciate it