#861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies

21:30Tim Ferriss:So what was the response to that post? Massive traffic and controversy. Kind of everything you want in a piece of content, to be honest. I mean, you had the traffic, you had people, the wow factor. And then you had the controversy, which is like, those aren't Google's 200 ranking factors. No one knows those. And then people saying, well, this is at least trying to come up with something. And then people saying, well, it shouldn't do it. So there's a perfect little debate around it that was pretty lightweight. It's not anything super controversial, but just enough to get people's attention. So yeah, it brought in, I mean, I would say I was probably getting like 150 visitors a month.

22:08That probably brought in a couple thousand when I first put it out. It's brought in millions since then.

22:12Tim Ferriss:And what did you then follow that up with in terms of lessons learned, coming up with new rules for yourself in terms of how you were going to approach the business? How did that inform things going forward once you saw that response? I just threw out the whole playbook I was doing. Consistency thing. I would even have on Fridays, I would have like a Q &A. I would just put five questions and answer them. And of course, I wasn't getting any questions. So I just completely made them up and then answer my own questions, just to have something to put out there. And I'm reading it. I'm like, why would anyone want to read this?

22:47So then I just scrapped the whole thing and was like, I'm just going to put out something once a month and it's going to be the best thing on that topic that's ever been written by 10x. And that was sort of how I totally changed my content focus to quality over quantity.

23:02Tim Ferriss:You had a fun YouTube video on ultimately the acquisition of Backlinko. I guess the original email you got was like, hey, we'd love to connect to collaborate. And you're like, well, that smells like every bullshit spam email I've ever received. So you just ignored it, right? As I remember. And we won't spend a ton of time on this, but what is SEMrush? This is the acquirer, ultimately. But for people who don't know, what is SEMrush? They're a marketing platform that help you get better results from SEO, pay-per-click, and also now AI search. Are they private, publicly traded? They're publicly traded, right?

23:47Tim Ferriss:Yeah, publicly traded. They got acquired by Adobe last year. So they will be part of Adobe, I think sometime this year when everything goes through. Got it. And they acquired you ultimately while they were public. Because, I mean, there's so many good aspects to this. Do you want to tell the story about flying to Boston? I mean, eventually this contact, I can't remember his name, but since you ignored the first email he wrote and basically said, hey, look, we might be interested in buying your company. Let me be direct. And you're like, okay, I'll reply to that one. But can you tell the story of flying to Boston?

24:21Tim Ferriss:I think it's pretty funny. I also liked in your video when you said, up to that point, I hadn't sold anything except for maybe a used car. I think you said something like that. I was like, that's a pretty good line. Okay, so the first Boston trip, what happens there? or like what's in your mind? In my mind, I'm like, we're going to close this thing. Let's go, go to Boston. It was really a meet and greet where the executive team just wanted to meet me and chat about how it could help them, how Banklinko could fit into their platform and their business. So I spend the day with them in the office.

24:52And then afterwards, we all go out to drinks to celebrate the deal. And I'm like shitting myself, right? I'm like, what? We're celebrating the deal now? I never saw a contract or an agreement or anything. I'm like, we're going to sign it like tonight. So we go out and we're at Legal Seafood in the Prudential Center, taking shots. Yeah, this is great, Brian. This is going to be the best thing ever. And I'm thinking, where's the contract? When are we going to sign? Like, I really thought right there, they're going to - Did I miss something? Did I black out? Yeah, exactly. I'm like, did I agree? Like, is a verbal agreement enough for a deal like this?

25:24So yeah, that was definitely, I was way off on that. It took two more months of due diligence after that meeting for the deal to actually close.

25:33Tim Ferriss:You said two months. Yeah, which for people who have never gone through it, that can be very challenging if you don't have your ducks in a row, which almost nobody does unless they've kind of been through this before or are venture-backed and they have kind of people overseeing all this stuff. Two months is pretty good. It's painful, but man, due diligence can go on forever. For people who are starting a company, maybe they never intend to sell it, but hey, you had not gone into Backlinko thinking that you were going to sell it. But they want to preserve the optionality. I remember coming across, and I haven't read it in a long time, but a book by John Warlow called Built to Sell, which talks a bit about this.

26:12Tim Ferriss:And I thought it was actually very good, like a very, I don't want to say basic, but pretty sort of foundational primer for some of this stuff. But what advice would you give to folks? I mean, one comes to mind, which I have also had to learn the hard way about independent contractors. But what are some of the tenets or sort of commandments of like, hey, just in case one day you want to sell this thing, here are a couple of things that I learned. Anything come to mind? Independent contractors, for sure. Maybe you can expand on that, Tim, because you have experience with that. If you ever want to sell something, the acquiring party is going to want to know with some assurance.

26:48Tim Ferriss:And they'll have reps and warranties in the agreement that basically say, hey, if you miss something or you're not telling us the truth, there's going to be a world of trouble and we'll probably be able to back out of the deal and take all the money back. But they want to know that everything they're buying is free and clear. So if you've had, as I have and as you have in some cases, well, I'll just speak personally, always maintained a very small full-time team, but have used dozens and probably hundreds, certainly hundreds of contractors over the span of decades. And if you're building something and they want to see, they meaning the acquiring company, every single contract to make sure that someone isn't going to come out of the woodwork and say, hey, I own a part of that.

27:30Tim Ferriss:Hey, hey, I contributed this, and therefore, I am entitled to a piece of equity. Yada, yada, yada, yada. Which, if the deal is big enough, come out of the woodwork no matter what. You see this with a lot of tech IPOs and stuff. As soon as they follow the S1 getting ready to IPO, then some rando comes out of the woodwork and says, I'm the seventh co-founder. And you're like, what? No one's ever heard of this person. And they just want nuisance money to go away. That's the relatively short and sweet on independent contractors. This is going to be true also with pretty much any agreement or contract.

28:04Tim Ferriss:You just want to document, document, document, make everything formal. No verbal, no handshake. If you want to preserve the option to cleanly and hopefully relatively quickly sell a company later. Anything else that you would add to that, Brian? If you don't have your finances in order, like you don't get P &Ls, that is something they obviously will care a lot about. And luckily I had a good accountant that did that stuff. So that wasn't a big deal. The number one time sink for me was independent contractors. I mean, I'm like you. I hired so many people that created like a blog post image or something or like a social media image once for like 10 bucks.

28:44And I had to go try to find them. I have to hire almost like a private investigator to find these people because you don't even barely remember them. Even people that ghosted me. I had people that I paid a deposit for work and they never even replied. They totally ghosted me. And I still had to reach out to those people. Of course, I'm not going to reply. But you have to show that you tried. And then obviously, since this experience, every contractor that gets hired signs an ironclad agreement that says, you don't own any of this work. Once you're paid, it's a property of blah, blah, blah. That made things a lot easier the second time.

29:19But I had no idea this independent contractor thing was so important to the acquirer. but it absolutely is.

29:25Tim Ferriss:Yeah. So we won't spend a ton of time on sort of what followed, but there was one funny anecdote about the public announcement. Could you just explain that? Given the time zone differences, I thought that one was great. Time zone differences, and I'm like early to bed kind of person. So they told me that, hey, Brian, we're going to announce this tomorrow and we're going to announce it at 5 p.m. Eastern. And I'm like, oh man, I don't know. is it possible to send it earlier? That's like 10 p.m. here. I'm already kind of getting ready for bed. Basically saying, I'm in my PJs at that point. Is it possible to push this earlier?

30:01And they said, no, because it's a public company, due to SEC rules, we have to make these announcements after the markets close. Yeah, I was so embarrassed. I was like, oh yeah, right. I forgot the league I'm playing in here.

30:15Tim Ferriss:So you sell the company. Presumably, there's some type of burnout or a period of time for which you're required to still work on Backlinko. Who knows what the exact terms are of that, but for people who've never gone through it, you can have a vesting period, you can have an earn out where you get X percentage of the total purchase price based on hitting or exceeding X, Y, and Z metrics or whatever. So there's a period of time like that. Post-acquisition, let's just say, because I know that was very stressful and you started grinding your teeth and that kind of evaporated as soon as the deal was done.

30:48Tim Ferriss:Let's just flash forward like two or three months after the acquisition, what does your life look like? What does a week look like for you? It's honestly not that different because I had another startup that I was already working on. I was basically running on a treadmill and then I just hopped onto another treadmill that was right next to it and just kept going. So there wasn't a whole lot of downtime to really reflect or analyze. That one day that the announcement was made, especially the next day, because it was late here. So the next day was really when I was sending messages to people and stuff and getting congratulations and whatnot.

31:23But after that day, I was pretty much back working on the next thing. Didn't reflect too much on it. So my life was more or less the same one day after.

31:36Tim Ferriss:Looking back, are you basically like, hey, I'm a border collie. I need to work or I'm going to go crazy. So I'm glad I did that. Do you wish you had approached it differently? I kind of wish I approached it differently. Yeah. And looking back, I wish I took some time off. It's just tricky because you know how it is when you have a startup, it's kind of a strange situation. Like I had a new company that was growing. I had this old company that I sold and it felt weird to say to the new team, like, Hey guys, I need to reflect and about how great my life is. I need to chill out. You guys still work though.

32:10Like you want your asses off. I'm going to still on the beach for a while. So it felt a little weird. I felt like I kind of had to go back into the trenches with them right away, almost even more so to prove like, look, I'm not done. I'm not going to rest on my laurels. We're still in it to win it.

32:24Tim Ferriss:And financially at that point, were you focused on the new company splitting topics because you wanted to get to that sort of big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? What was the driver behind that? I don't know to what extent you were sort of financially stable, had savings. We don't have to get into all the nitty gritty if you don't want to, but I'm just curious, Just what was driving the involvement in the new company for you? It wasn't really 100 % financial. When I sold Backlinko, before then, I was probably okay for most of my life. Then when I sold Backlinko, it was like, okay, I'm probably good for forever.

33:04And then I wouldn't have probably started something else right away if I hadn't already. Towards the end of Backlinko's, when I was involved with it before I sold, I was honestly getting a little bit bored with it. I was bored talking about the same things, writing about the same things, doing the whole course launch thing. And I kind of wanted something new. And I saw an opportunity where there were more trends than ever. And I couldn't find a good tool for curating them that was like, here are all the trends in this space right now. There was Google Trends, which is fantastic if you know about a topic and you want to see how it's trending.

33:36But what about a trend you've never even heard of? And that's sort of where I realized the opportunity was. So it wasn't really purely financial. It was more like, this is kind of exciting and new. I think it's a good opportunity as well. And it'll give me something to do between these sessions with Backlinko, which was, it was also boring because it was so optimized. Like I work like three hours a week. It was like four hour work week, honestly, at the end. It was getting so much traffic on autopilot. The launches were really easy to do. Even courses were easier to create at the end because it just had it all down to a science.

34:06Even if it was a totally different topic, I knew exactly how to create a course. So the challenge wasn't really there. and this was like, okay, new challenge, new space. It wasn't so much financial, it was more just to freshen things up and to try something new.

34:19Tim Ferriss:Yeah, and you'd also already committed to other people with this new startup. So it makes a lot of sense. When you had, with Backlink goes so much on autopilot, the three hours per week, what were you doing with the rest of that time? Because the most, and we don't have to dig into the book too much here, but if I had to point to one chapter that people pay no attention to, because typically they're like, oh yeah, that'd be a nice problem to have. And they like, forget about it. It's the filling the void chapter. Filling the void chapter for work week is really important. So you don't go into like psychological free fall, among other reasons.

34:54Tim Ferriss:But what were you doing with the rest of your time? If Backlinko at one point, when the flywheel was really spinning, was only occupying or requiring three hours a week? I was bored, honestly. I wasn't filling it well. I wasn't filling the void. going to the gym, reading books, playing video games. I think that was part of this, and we, this boredom was, I needed to reread that chapter essentially and fill this with something meaningful. And I think that's why I was seeking another startup project because I'm like, I need to work. I need to build something. I'm not building this, I'm just maintaining it.

35:28So that's really what got me into exploring topics. So honestly, the filling the void chapter, the whole filling the void concept, I really only took seriously recently. But before then, I filled it with nonsense, to be honest, and then started another startup.

35:42Tim Ferriss:What were some of the things you did differently with Exploding Topics after all the experience with Backlinko? And maybe things that, in retrospect, you're like, wow, that was a really smart decision and change. And maybe somewhere you're like, hmm, okay. Lesson learned. Probably, if I were starting from scratch with Exploding Topics, I would have done it differently. Anything come to mind in terms of good and quote-unquote bad decisions? Yeah, we can start with the bad one, which was how to monetize this site. I had this very strange idea that we're going to create this awesome free resource that anyone can visit and just see trends right away.

36:21They can filter, they can go by category. And you think, oh, how are you going to monetize that? Logically, you think SaaS, an upgraded version of what they're seeing for free. And for some reason, I was like, a paid newsletter. Let's create a paid newsletter. So we created this paid newsletter that was granted helpful in objective terms, but not necessarily for that person who wants to see trends in their particular niche. So we would send them a trend on some sort of face cream, and then on a car, and then a battery, and then a tech startup. And they would be like, what is this? People were like, I want just trends about e-commerce.

36:57I just want trends about this one thing. Why are you sending me all this stuff? And then people would also sign up thinking it's SaaS, even though we said everywhere, like paid newsletter, paid newsletter. And they'd be like, I thought this was SaaS. I thought this was SaaS. That was our number one complaint. And yeah, sometimes you just need to get that bean over your head because I was like, oh, SaaS is so complicated. My co-founder was a coder, but I'm still like, oh, we're going to have to hire developers and I don't know anything about this whole world.

37:19Tim Ferriss:And for people who may be listening who don't recognize the term, a lot of people will, but software as a service, think about Dropbox, maybe not the best example, but Dropbox is a great example. But with a lot of these products, there's a freemium version. There's a version that you get to use for free. And then if you want a bunch of additional storage or features or access, whatever it might be, then you pay$9.99 a month or whatever. And there's the basic, intermediate, advanced version, enterprise, et cetera. That's SaaS. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to define that. If you had told me that before we started, I would have been like, oh, logically, then we should have the premium, advanced enterprise version in the backend instead of the paid newsletter idea.

37:56So that didn't really go well until we ultimately shifted to what we should have been in the first place. So that was sort of the bad decision. The good decision was definitely investing in this data, publishing data early on. So with Backlinko, this is something I only discovered after like five years of running the site. And then with Exploring Topics, I was like, day one, we're going to publish tons of data. We're going to be the source. That's another strategy, like be the source of information on technology. software, e-commerce trends, anything trend-related, we are going to be the source.

38:30We're going to have the latest data, we're going to have the best visuals, and we're just going to be the source for that information. As opposed to writing how-to content, we really focus on data-driven content.

38:41Tim Ferriss:Did it work right out of the gate, or was there a formula that you realized worked after you had a particular well-received publication of data? It took a while to get going. A lot of mistakes, a lot of posts that weren't great, or the topic wasn't a good choice. What really helped us, what was sort of the smash hit, were these very specific stats that people look for. So what I discovered through this process was this stats page idea is nothing new. Like people write, you know, the biggest stats around the fitness industry or LinkedIn stats or whatever. And those are fine, but usually journalists aren't looking for LinkedIn stats or TikTok stats.

39:23Some of them are, and that's fine, But most of them look at something very specific, like how many users that TikTok have or how many people use LinkedIn every day, like daily active users, or how many posts are on LinkedIn every day. It's super specific. So if you're able to find a credible stat around that, then you can crush it, even if you're not the one that developed it. A lot of times, these are also buried in PDFs or white papers or, again, interviews that you have to pull out. One of our biggest smash hits in this area was how many users of ChatGPT have. Granted, we publish this early.

39:57That's another thing that can help a lot. If you publish one of the first or the first specific stats page, then you get into this virtuous cycle where you're very visible when someone's searching for that topic. Then they link to you, they mention you, makes you more visible. And then you just are in this massive flywheel. So one of our best pieces was how many users does ChatGPT have? and every once in a while, Sam Maltman will give a talk and he'll mention it or when they raise a round, they'll mention it. And all we did was just document their user growth based on these statements that they made.

40:29The initial post probably costs hiring a freelancer like 200 bucks. And then to update it every couple of months, it was like another 50. And it's been referenced like 3 ,000 times. It's absolutely insane. The effort to reward ratio is nuts on that. And of course, it's just like part of it is Some pieces do better than others, but we've noticed that that formula tends to work well. If you can find a trending, specific stat that bloggers or journalists are looking for when they write about that topic, they're very likely to reference you.

41:00Tim Ferriss:So I read, I'll give credit here. This is on growthmanifesto.com, found this doing research. You were interviewed towards the end of that interview by Alex. He asked you what the best piece of business advice was that you've ever received. Now this may have changed and there's probably more, but it was Noah Kagan advising you to double down on what works. Could you expand on that? And then I'm wondering if there are any other sort of mantras or short pieces of advice that you would also put on like the Mount Rushmore of your best advice that you've received. It sounds so simple, but it's one of those pieces of advice that's simple but hard to follow.

41:38Because when you're running a business, there's like a million things to worry about, to focus on. There's new opportunities, new challenges, other competitors. you have an employee that's sick, it's hard to really focus on that little thing that works. I think this is especially important when you're first starting out. Because when you're first starting out, nothing's working, almost by definition. You're starting something new, at least in my experience, when I'm starting something new, I don't know, nothing's working. And then when something does, most people are like, okay, that works. Now let's go with something else.

42:08But instead, you should just take that niche. It's almost like a little niche when you're rock climbing. Just take that niche and just double down, triple down, quadruple. It should really be like 10x down on what works. It's so rare that you find something that works. And honestly, in most businesses, if you can find one thing that works and scale it up, that can get you pretty far.

42:26Tim Ferriss:Aside from the four-hour work week, which was, I suppose, a catalyst of sorts in the beginning, have there been any other books that stand out or resources when someone comes to you and they're like, I'm thinking about starting a business. I'd like to start a business. Are there any books or resources that you tend to recommend frequently? Yes. For people that are just like, I want to start a business and they're like, I don't know what to do, how to do it. They're like totally green. Then Ready, Fire, Aim is usually the book that I recommend. You familiar with that one? I've heard of it. Michael Masterson.

42:59What leads you to recommend this book? It gets people into the action mindset, like leaning towards action instead of analysis. I was guilty of this when I first started doing a lot of spreadsheets and analysis and business cards, registering your company, all those things that you can do later that don't really matter. This gets you going on the most important things. And then later you can always change course. But the key is really starting, starting, starting, or like Paul Graham says, action produces information. So this book will hopefully give people a kick in the butt to get started instead of analyzing and then being like, okay, now I'm ready.

43:37Just be like, start today and then change as you go. I feel like that book is almost a litmus test. If you read that book and at the end you don't do anything, then you're probably not ready.

43:49Tim Ferriss:Yeah. The whole point is to get started. And it gives you advice on how to know you've got traction and what to do once you get traction. So I feel like if you just read the book and you're like, okay, what's the next book to read? It's probably not the best approach. So that book is hopefully the kick in the butt that someone needs. This might be a tough question to answer, but how would you define the startup costs for Backlinko and Exploding Topics? In the first three months of those two companies existing, how much money was invested in each of those? How much money was required slash invested?

44:24For Backlinko's case, a few hundred bucks at the most. It was like domain, WordPress. I probably hired someone to create a basic blog design theme for WordPress. Don't remember how much, but if I spent$1 ,000, I would say that's a lot. I was probably more like$500. It's a blog. Really, at the end of the day, there shouldn't be a lot of costs involved with that. Exploiting Time was a lot different because I acquired a prototype version from someone for$75 ,000 to start with. that was part of their pay package as well. So just on day one, I was in with that much. And then it was a redesign and a rebrand, adding more trends, hiring a couple of people to do some basic things.

45:11So that was probably more like 90 ,000, something in that range. But it was a unique situation because I wasn't built from scratch. It was acquiring someone. And then that was also paying for some of their time. It was kind of like hiring them as part of the acquisition and that was paid out over the course of a few months. So I'm not exactly sure how much would be like in that first couple of months, but it was in that range.

45:32Tim Ferriss:Why did you acquire something and what was the deal structure of the acquisition? I acquired it because I was trying to build this exact thing myself and just stumbling and stubbing my toe over and over again. So I knew that there was an opportunity for this like trend. Like I couldn't even describe it very well. It's was you want to go to a website and just shows you trends in whatever niche you're interested in. And that sounds so simple, but nothing existed like that, believe it or not. And I hired someone to build something like that. And it was horrible. I used Reddit. So we'd look at subreddits and we would see how many times a word was mentioned or something.

46:08We found nothing valuable. The signal to noise ratio was completely backwards. It was like for every 200 hits, one was like decent. And then one day someone forwarded me this random site, this guy started and I'm like, no, this, this is exactly what I want, but it was even better than I had imagined. So then I reached out to him and then the deal structure was buy it a hundred percent straight up. Part of the acquisition costs will be, you'll get paid that. And then on top of that, if it goes well over the first, I think couple of months, then we can set up some sort of part-time deal. And if that goes well, we can do full-time.

46:45Tim Ferriss:And he would be helping you throughout that entire period of time to help you determine if it's going well or not. Exactly. And he was the coder and developer behind the original version. So he was best qualified to continue to work on it and improve it. Rather than hiring someone random to come in, it was his vision to start with. Then I said, if it goes well with full-time for, I think, another month or so, we'll be co-founders on this thing. The only rub will be if you want a lot of equity, then you're going to have to put money in to fund this thing. Or if you prefer that you get more cash, then you can just get a proper salary and then I'll own most of the business.

47:23So that's what we did. He chose more money and then he owned a part of equity. How did you end up in Europe? Love, to be honest.

47:33Tim Ferriss:Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah. I mean, my wife, we met in Thailand like many years ago. And then we moved to Berlin. This is actually a funny story, partially from the four-hour work week, because you mentioned Berlin as like this cheap place. So we're in Thailand looking at Craigslist and looking at all these apartments that are like palaces for 300 euros a month. And we're like, Tim was right. This is amazing. Like you can live like a king in Berlin for nothing. So as we're like flying there, we send out all these emails And of course, it's all scams. It's like, I'm lost. And I'm like, oh, I'm out of town.

48:10And I lost my passport. But if you leave this money into this Western media, we show up to Berlin. We're in a hostel for like eight euros a night in a 12-bed hostel while we realized that this whole thing, all these ads we're applying to is a scam. No one uses Craigslist in Germany. So then we eventually found an apartment lived in Germany and she's Portuguese. So we visited Portugal a number of times where we lived there and eventually it was like, we could freeze our asses off or we could live in the sun.

48:43Tim Ferriss:So let's live in the sun. So yeah, that's how we ended up here. The thing about the 4-Hour Workweek, right? The principles and frameworks all still work. Obviously some of the tech tools, since they were last updated in 2009, most of them are completely irrelevant. Probably not going to use GoToMyPC at this point, right? to access your home computer remotely to do the work you need to do. But the pricing examples obviously have changed, right? Since it was first written in 2007, 2009. So the principle, the idea of geo-arbitrage and applying that to what you earn and how you pay contractors, employees, and then your sort of living expenses, it applies, but definitely for anybody who ends up picking it up, If you read that doing something in Buenos Aires costs A, B, and C, I would go online and fact check that because it's probably changed a little bit.

49:38Tim Ferriss:Looking at all the questions I could possibly ask, I mean, what are other sort of lessons learned or things that you would like to share with folks? Could be about your journey, could be about mistakes along the way, really anything at all. because part of the value of these conversations is that we can get into a lot of specifics that are omitted in the magazine profiles of people that end up reading like a list of highlights. And there's obviously a survivorship bias to begin with if people appear on magazine covers. I know that's an antiquated example to use. But what else would you like to share with folks or anything else you'd like to add just about the journey?

50:18Tim Ferriss:Because it's not over, it still goes. One thing was honestly that I've discovered recently that I wanted to share would be actually filling the void. I felt the void after selling Exploding Topics and how I was able to fill the void. Yeah, please. So set the stage for you. I sold Backlinko and then about two years later, sold Exploding Topics and was just kind of going full time. Not super crazy working all the time because I was fairly efficient, but still working all the time. And then went from that to like, stop to zero. And a lot of people, I think they have this feeling of like listlessness, no direction, maybe a bit of depression.

50:59For me, the symptom was stress. Like I think I was wired for stress, not only just in general, but also because of the sale process is stressful. And then just because the sale is done, your body and I think part of your like reptilian brain doesn't really recognize that. And it's looking for threats and it's looking for opportunities and it's just not chilled out. So I struggled for like two months with stress. On my Oura ring, my stress was like 2X baseline from after I sold. And you'd think it'd be the opposite. You're like, this is great. Like I sold two companies. I'm good for the rest of my life.

51:35What is there to be stressed about? And then I realized what I needed was a hard reset. That was the first step. We went on a trip, got away from the environment, got away from the day-to-day life. and then it somehow was able to hack my brain to be like, okay, you're safe or like things are chill now. So when I went back home, the stress was gone. It was like back to baseline or below baseline. What was the trip? It was a trip to the south of Portugal, to the Algarve. Yeah. So I went to the beach. Nice oranges. Yeah. Toasty. Yeah, good orange. Depending. Good oranges, yeah. Yeah, so I spent some time down there and that was just like the hard reset.

52:18I think you're just going to get out of your environment. But then when I got back, it was like stress is gone, but now feeling a little bit bored. Like that boredom was coming back. And I was tempted to start another startup. And I read this, someone sent me this, another friend who had a big acquisition. He sent me this thing by, I think it was Harvard Business Review. And it was where they interviewed founders that had just exited and they asked them their advice. What was it like? What were the good ups and the downs? And they basically said, When you sell, there are psychological dangers that can occur.

52:51One is that you lose your sense of structure. The other is you lose your sense of purpose and you lose your sense of connection with your team. It all goes away. You have it and then one day you literally don't. So different people react to it in different ways, but they warn that a lot of case studies in this paper were saying people that started companies within a year of selling usually regretted it. Take a year and don't make any major commitments whatsoever. So that's what I did. It kept me from starting these. I had all these ideas. I'm going to start a sub-agre. And then I'd be like, wait a year, wait a year, wait a year.

53:23And then by the time a year came around, I didn't really want to because I was able to fill the void largely with tennis. For me, tennis has been, it just, one activity fills almost all of these, checks all of the boxes and fills this void. It's amazing, man. Because if you think about it, if you want to have fun, you play video games or watch TV or something. If you want to have socialized, you go out drinking. If you want to exercise, you go to the gym. If you want to get fresh air, you go for a walk. Tennis has all these things in one activity. And if you want a community, you need to... I actually don't even know how to do that outside of tennis.

54:02That was the thing that changed. I joined a tennis club, and there's a lot of other entrepreneurs there. A lot of Americans, man. It's like the 51st state over there, to be honest. It's getting a little crazy. But anyway, so I've filled the void with this community of people that are playing tennis, trying to improve, obsessed with the game, watching YouTube videos, reading about it, practicing all the time. And now I don't have that same sense of wanting to start something new.

54:30Tim Ferriss:I love that. And just a few observations since, as you'd imagine, since the book came out in 2007. I've had the opportunity to sort of vicariously watch a lot of people grapple with this. And having worked with so many startups in angel investing, granted in a kind of venture-backed environment, but a lot of the challenges are the same. Whether you're coming out of, for instance, I know guys in special operations, if you're coming out of running a company, if you're coming out of starting and running a company, when you lose, as you put it, and I really liked the categories you mentioned, right?

55:08Tim Ferriss:When you lose the structure, when you lose, in a sense, the identity, when you lose the connection to team, you can end up with a severe degree of vertigo and a very precarious paradox of choice. And something like tennis, and some people listening might think like, what, tennis? Probably. Even if it's not the forever solution and the end-all be-all, what it does, just like getting your recommended daily allowance of essential amino acids and vitamins and so on, you're getting just enough that it provides you with the psycho-emotional health and space to think about things more clearly instead of being reactive.

55:55Tim Ferriss:You know what I mean? You're getting enough of all of those things, and it provides you with a buffer and a certain equilibrium that allows you to think about things more clearly. And furthermore, this is not necessarily a problem you have to solve after everything vanishes. You can think about this in advance and experiment with things so that when you have a real phase shift, which in the context of the 4-Hour Workweek isn't necessarily selling a company. It's just like once you get it to a high degree of automation where it requires two, three hours a week, if that, to manage, which is more common than people might think.

56:38Tim Ferriss:what you do with the rest of the time is a tremendously big question. So I love that. Makes me want to go back to the Algarve also. Can get a little toasty. Could be worse. Let's put it that way. Yeah, it's a good country for tennis. If it's possible for you to find that Harvard Business School piece, that HBS piece, would love to put it in the show notes. I am sure that we can track it down one way or the other, but we'll put that in the show notes for folks who want to check it out. Yeah, it's a great read. It might have been Yale or something. I'll find it. Yeah. Yeah, whoever it was. Brian, this has been super fun.

57:10Tim Ferriss:Where would you like people to find you online? If anywhere. Let's start with YouTube. So that would be the first place. And then LinkedIn. At Brian Dean on YouTube. And at Brian E. Dean on LinkedIn. That other Brian Dean must have grabbed that one.

57:29Tim Ferriss:I don't know. Brian, is there anything else you would like to say before we wind to a close? This has been great. I know it's late several time zones away and I appreciate being flexible on the timing so thanks so much for taking the time everybody listening or watching we will link to everything we discussed in the show notes as usual at tim.blog.com and until next time as always be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself thanks for tuning in Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

58:17Tim Ferriss:between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you.

58:56Tim Ferriss:So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I've easily worked with 100 plus founders and entrepreneurs over the last 20 years, and I've seen some massive wins, some huge companies built, and some failures and zombies. Among other things, repeatedly, I've seen how customer service can make or break a company. This is where FIN comes in.

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