20VC: The Biggest Lies of Silicon Valley, Why Entrepreneurship is Not For Everyone, Why VCs are Out of Touch, Why Many Would Be Great Entrepreneurs Will Burn Out, Why You Should Let Your Children Suffer and Why You Will Choose The Wrong Partner with Nick

22:14And so I just say, oh, fuck it. I'll do it. That's why it's so hard. Because look, when the employee walks in with that monkey, you know that it's more of a pain in your butt to get them to tend to their own monkey at first. It's more of a pain for them to handle the monkey than for you to just take the monkey and put it back in his cage. Because yes, you can do it in one minute. Whereas telling them and teaching them and working with them and coaching them on how to solve their problems takes more time and they're not going to do it as well. So yes, it's a process. but what happens is it it's a snowball it accumulates the momentum picks up and if you start to work with these employees and invest in these employees and give them more tasks it starts to roll down the hill they start to get better and better and before you know it they're actually better than you and you have no idea what's going on inside of your own company it's a pretty amazing feeling what do you do when trust is lost when things are not going well and you've lost trust in someone, is it possible to rebuild it?

23:08And how do you manage that situation? I think all stress and problems and losses of trust are a result of one of two things. One, they're not good enough at their job. They're not working hard enough. It's a competence issue. They're just not good enough. Number two is a moral issue where they don't have your best interest in heart and they are making decisions that are going to benefit them and actually hurt you, lying, stealing, cheating, and so on. Both of those, you have to make the decision right then and like, okay, do I keep investing in this person? Do I keep giving them more things or do I take things off their plate or get this person out of my company altogether?

23:38It's tough. That's why this is so hard. Managing people, everything in business is a people problem. You're managing people, you're managing their emotions, you're managing them lying, stealing, cheating, not working hard, doing whatever. It's not easy. That's why managers get paid the big bucks. You said I could ask you anything. What do you still do today that you wish you didn't have to do? Maybe I wish that my entire Twitter was automated so I could get off of it for a year and the tweets would keep flowing. But a lot of my tweets are made by my team. They're reposts from either my newsletter or written from an interview like this or something along those lines.

24:08But I am operating at an area of really high leverage, but it wasn't always that way. I mean, five years ago, I was driving a box truck around the streets of Boston. So I've made a lot of strides when it comes to delegation. What do you think are the biggest hiring mistakes you've made? You've mentioned the three to 400 people plus. What do you think are the biggest like, ah, fuck, that was a big hiring mistake. Overestimating somebody's competence is a tremendous mistake and there's no backtracking from it. If you think that somebody can handle it and they can't, those are the worst. I mean, because hiring somebody is expensive.

24:38It's time consuming. Training them up is expensive and time consuming. And getting to the point where you've done both of those expensive and time consuming things and realize that the person's just not good enough to do the job, that hurts. And it's unavoidable. It literally is unavoidable. I hire fast and I fire fast. I'm not going to go send somebody through 10 interviews. I'm going to get somebody in my company, I'm going to start giving them little things to work on. And then I'm going to give them more and more and more trust as they prove that they can handle it. Early on, I was really serious about, you know, top grading and personality tests and doing all this crazy shit with hiring to try to figure out who's a good fit.

25:12And I'm still making bad hires. And I realized, hey, the only real way that I can figure out if somebody's good is to get them in and get them to start working. I am not good enough. Some people are. Some people are good enough that in a 10 round interview, they can figure out this person's be highly effective. I am not arrogant enough to think that I could do that. So I've got it to a point now where I hire fast, fire fast. It wasn't always that way. And it was a mistake for me. How do you fire? It's really hard to do. There is no easy way to fire somebody. You talk about what it's like as a business owner and why it's not for everybody.

25:39One of the things I've changed my mind on is that five years ago, I thought entrepreneurship was for everybody. And now today, I don't believe that anymore. I think the fact that you have to let somebody go in your company who was in your wedding three weeks earlier and they're crying in your arms looking at your eyes saying how am i gonna you know my wife's pregnant what am i gonna do nick what do you want me to do when you gotta let them go and i've done it a lot of times and it never ever ever gets easier no and it almost shouldn't i do believe actually because if it gets too easy you almost lose your humanity in those situations like it should be hard because it means you actually feel but i'm really intrigued you said about entrepreneurship being not for everyone we have every business school we have every business book all full of shit and they all tell us that anyone can be an entrepreneur and anyone can be anything why do you think entrepreneurship isn't for everyone i think the average competence of human beings is a lot lower than everybody would think or the average we'll just talk about america for a second the average american is 30 pounds overweight they have less than a thousand dollars in their checking account and they're just trying to do as little as possible to get paid next friday so that they can go drink six beers with their buddies and watch netflix that's just the truth.

26:47We surround ourselves online with high performers, people who want to own companies, and we forget that most people, A, don't care. And if you've ever hired people, if you've ever built teams, you understand that a lot of people are not good at making these decisions that are required of entrepreneurs. We talk about delegation and decisions and the constant nuance and uncertainty of being an entrepreneur. You're making incomplete decisions with incomplete information, and it's very high stakes. It's very uncomfortable. That is not for everybody. That is obviously not for everybody. Five years ago, I thought everybody should be an entrepreneur.

27:14this is the path to wealth, the sweaty startup mentality, forget tech culture, let's build small businesses. Anybody can do this. Today, I think I couldn't have been more wrong. I think 95 % of people are way better off going and working for a company, earning great money, building their skills over time, focusing on other areas of life that is not business and entrepreneurship. Do you think VCs are rightly positioned to invest often in companies for the masses when they live a life of the very few? And I'm fortunate enough to live a life of the few. I'm sure you do too. and we enjoyed the luxuries of it.

27:46But when you speak about, you know, drinking a six pack and having Netflix and you did a tweet about queuing in Walmart and I joked with my team today, I said, I bet he's got a portfolio of precisely fuck all. But are VCs rightly positioned given their distance from mass market? I think VCs are rightly positioned to do the things that VCs do best, which is the tail case of value add, which is making a few people's life better. And then those things over years trickle down to the masses. to change the world you have to start with the elite you have to start with how companies interact you have to start with doing all these little things to make companies more efficient and make the world more efficient and those things do require venture capital and and the goal of venture capital is to find those edge cases so yes they're very well positioned in that regard but i think when the vcs and the tech guys and the people who live in adventure you know in la and new york city and san francisco when they're talking about business in general one must understand that these folks have not been in a Walmart in 10 years.

28:43They just haven't been in one. They haven't looked at the average American. They have no idea what the average American thinks about, looks for, eats, does with their free time. They have no idea the way most Americans are interacting with the world because they're in a bubble. They're in a bubble of elite, unique people. There's very, very famous influencers on Twitter and in the tech world who think, they actually think artificial intelligence and software will control the entire world. They think that it'll solve every problem and that nobody will need to work because software will solve all the problems.

29:15What they don't understand is that when you close your computer and when you look outside, there's every single person spends 97 % of their time in a physical building, turning on faucets with water coming out, hoping that cold air comes out of a hole in their ceiling so that they can stay cool in the summer. Those things are not cleaned, built, maintained by software, and they never will be. There's a huge part of the world that is localized and physical and requires sweat and work. Are you worried about income inequality? I think one of the biggest problems we see is the massive divergence between the 1 % or the 0.1 % now and everyone else.

29:48I think it's going to be a bigger and bigger problem with AI actually. Are you as concerned as I am about income inequality over the next decade? I'm not concerned with it. I think it's a very natural phenomenon. And if you try to fight it, you're fighting a battle that has stood the test of 2000 years of civilization as it has advanced. You could take all the money in the United States right now, you take all the money and you could divide it equally among everybody, take all the money and divide it equally. And in five, 10, 15 years, you could argue about the timeframe in five years, at least 80 % of the cash would be in the hands of 20 % of people, 80 % of power would be in the hands of 20 % of people.

30:18And in 10 or 20 years, 1 % of people would control the world again, because there's people who know how to make money. And there's people who know how to buy things that make money and invest and build companies and delegate and build things of value. And there's a vast majority of people who only know how to spend money. They know how to go to work, make money and spend it. And this stuff's a skill. It is an ability and income inequality is natural. It always has been natural. I'm not worried about it because today the poorest people in America have a better life than the wealthiest people in America 50 years ago.

30:47They have better access to healthcare. They have better living situations. They have more amenities. They have better food. It trickles down massively, at least in developed countries. Speaking of that wealth, I do have to go back to the statement that you said earlier, specifically about children and kind of your grandparents, your parents, you. And then, you know, you said I started on third and my kids will start one foot from home plate. What did you mean by that? A lot of entrepreneurs kind of brag about the fact that they're not going to give anything to their kids. They say it like I'm going to give all my money away and my kids will get their own cash or opportunity or whatever it is.

31:19I think that is such a cop out to the art of parenting. My job as a parent is not to, oh, your dad's rich. You're not rich. You go back to first base and let's see if you can make it. That's not my job. My job is to raise kids, to build a family that can handle the wealth, that knows how to make people's lives better, can invest the money, not try to just avoid it altogether. It's like saying, hey, my son's name is Timothy. Hey, Timothy, you are not allowed to drink a beer your entire life. I'm not going to ever give you a beer. I expect you never to drink one. And now go out into the world and handle it.

31:52The first day at college, they're going to get so obliterated that they just don't understand. And it could potentially ruin their life. Money is the same way. Like I'm going to teach my kids how to handle money, teach my kids how to think about money. And I'm going to set them up with all the opportunities that I possibly could. Why would I do all this work to build this network, to build these companies, to build generational wealth, if I'm not going to pass on some of that advantage to the people who are literally my children? I completely agree with you. So I'm thrilled about that. I think Bernard Arnault also, by the way, is one of the best examples of instilling work ethic, grit, hunger.

32:21And his kids are unbelievably hardworking and talented too. I can ask you, how do you teach your kids to respect money, not be assholes and have those good morals, but have cash and have that wealth. I think money only amplifies the human. If you're a shitty person, money's going to amplify that. If you're a great person, money can amplify that and can impact a lot of people. The mistake that people make is thinking that life is easy for people who are rich. And look, life is hard for everybody and it's relative. Of course it's relative. There are people who are trying to figure out where they're going to get their next meal.

32:50I'm not trying to downplay that, but life is hard for everybody, no matter how wealthy you are, but how much money you have, you can't get away from all the basic shitty administrative tasks that you got to do in life. You can't get away from the hangover. You can't get away from the travel delays. You can't get away from the rain that just opens up and pours out of the sky when you're trying to host a barbecue in your backyard. You can't get away from the fact that, hey, oh my gosh, I'm 35 years old and I'm starting to get some fat that just sticks to my body and I got to figure out how to keep that off.

33:18You can't get away from a lot of things. And also relationships are really hard and money amplifies a good relationship and money amplifies a shitty relationship with your spouse or with your family. So having a lot of money is a pretty serious responsibility. And it all comes down to struggle and your ability to deal with stress. Stress is relative. An example, there's two people, they both get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception. One of the person runs a company, and they've dealt with a lot of problems and they've dealt with a lot of stress in their life. And one of the person one of the people that lives in their parents basement has had everything taken care of for them as a trust fund, has an American Express, and has super rich parents where they just take the jet and go where they need to go.

33:52The person who is used to dealing with stress, they're going to figure out how to fix the flat and they're going to drive home and they're going to forget to tell their spouse about that flat tire at dinner. It's going to be a non-issue for them. The other person, it's going to ruin the week. They're going to have anxiety about driving again. They're going to tell everybody they know. That flat tire is a serious stress for them because they have no stress in their life. You have to teach your kids. I'm going to teach my kids how to struggle with grace. I'm going to let them practice making decisions.

34:18I'm not going to put them in a bubble so that all the decisions are made for them and that they get out into the real world and it's time for them to make decisions, but they have no practice and they're horrible decision makers. And I'm going to let them struggle. I'm not going to protect them from hardship and hurt and pain. I'm not going to coddle them. And I think if I can teach them how to struggle with grace and deal with hard things with a positive attitude, I think that I'll be able to raise decent kids. how do you determine between hardship and pain that you're willing to let them go through versus hardship and pain that you will let them or you will actually jump in on say child is cycling too fast on bike chance of falling off and hurting themselves well good you should learn that you shouldn't cycle too fast on a slippery surface or close to other people but also could hurt themselves you don't want to see timothy crying he's gonna have a cut on his leg you're gonna have to clean that up.

35:10What is too much? That's the ultimate question of life. How much do you protect your kids? How much do you coddle them? And how much do you let them figure out and solve their own problems? A wealthy person has a high school kid who gets a DUI. They get a DUI. They have two options. They call their friend who they play golf with, who is the judge and get them off the hook. Or they make their kids spend two nights in jail and live with the consequences of that DUI. I'd like to think that I'm going to make my kids live with the consequences of their decisions. They're going to live that if they make a poor decision, if they drive their car too fast and crash it.

35:39If they don't put a case on their iPhone and it shatters, they're going to live with the consequences of that poor decision. If they ride their bike too fast and they fall, they're going to live with it. I just hope that I can teach them to not make those big mistakes that can screw up your life. Does your wife agree? No, I think, you know, this might be a touchy subject, but I think that my job and her job are totally different. Okay. How so? Well, look, my wife's role and her natural ability is to care for them and protect them from pain and nurture them and teach them how to be loving. My job as an adult is, especially for my boys, is to teach them to be strong.

36:10I have to raise strong kids that can deal with hardship. And so we have two different roles there. I think to Warren Buffett's statement on the most important decision you'll ever make is the partner that you choose in life. When you were thinking about the partner selection process, what did you want in the partner that you chose for life? People get way too serious about trying to find that person. I think if you find somebody who you're physically attracted to, you're emotionally stimulated, mentally and emotionally stimulated by, and you can trust them, that's number one. If you can trust them, odds are you can make a marriage work.

36:41That sounds brash, but many people are way too picky today about who they marry. They should have gotten married a long time ago to one of those girls that they thought wasn't perfect in some way. But me and my wife have very similar moral views and how we think about household responsibilities and jobs and who does what. And she thinks, and I think as well, that her raising kids is 10 times more important than a career. The child that you create is way more important than her having a career. And she is also in that camp. In our house, my job is to take care of the finances and be a good dad and be around, do all the things that I'm supposed to do.

37:16And her job is to take care of these kids and grow human beings, which I think is a little bit more important than growing a business for somebody who you don't even have equity in that business. I speak to a lot of people about parenting and actually one thing that they say, man or woman, but on the one who stays at home, they say actually that the hard thing is the lack of mental stimulation. And you come home at the end of the day, you've been firing all day. You've been doing deals. You've been doing tweets, podcasts, you name it. You've been stress testing your mind across many different disciplines.

37:43And for the person who's been working, it creates this chasm where it's like, what did you do? Oh, I looked after the kids. It's the same. Is that ever a challenge? Do you worry about it kind of not being intellectually stimulating enough? Yeah, I'm exhausted when I get home. I get off this interview and I got three more meetings today. and then I got to work out and then I'm going to get to dinner with her. And yes, I'll have to turn it on to pull up some more energy to have a conversation with her. The sad part is, is that women are so isolated. They're so isolated. There's no community. 50 years ago in small town America, all the sisters and siblings and friends lived on one block and they were popping in each other's houses and they were having dinner constantly.

38:20And it was a community. They were raising kids as a community. The women were together. And today men build businesses in lonely environments and women raise kids in lonely environments. And it can be really hard if you have that traditional structure. Can I ask you, what do you think of today's state of parenting? We mentioned their separate roles, but also like the cycling and, you know, letting your child fall versus not. Do you think we mollycoddle our children too much today? Oh God, yes, absolutely. The number one thing that you can do to set your children up for failure is to protect them from the fact that life is brutal.

38:53Life is hard. You have hard decisions to make. It's hard dealing with people. It's hard making money. It's hard working for companies. It's hard staying in shape. It's hard building relationships. It's hard having friendships. Everything worth doing in life is hard. Anything worth doing in life is hard. Being married is hard. Being a parent is hard. Building a company is hard. Staying fit is hard. Anything worth doing is hard in life. So why is our job as a parent to put a bubble around our kids so that they don't deal with any pain? It doesn't make any sense to me. The more well off a parent and family is, the more they coddle their kids and the more they try to keep them from feeling pain.

39:28Like I was saying, dealing with these decisions and living with the consequences of poor decisions. So if you're not going to teach your kids to struggle and have a positive attitude through the struggle, they're not going to win at life, man. They're just not going to win at life. They're going to be soft. They're going to blame other people for their problems. They're going to have the victim mentality that we hate so much on social media. It's a parenting problem for sure. What do you know now that you wish you'd known before you had your first child? I asked you this before and you didn't tell me because we said we'd save it for the show.

39:56But if you could cool yourself up when your wife was going into labor that first time, what would you tell yourself? I wish we would have started a little bit earlier. Now that I'm having these kids and we're on the way up and I have one that's about to turn six years old and I can have mentally stimulating conversations with him and I'm really starting to be able to teach him. In the early years, they want their mom and their mom is the number one influence in them. And this kid is finally starting to find interest in dad. Dad, I want to go on a hike. Dad, I want to go camping. Dad, I want to go play golf with you.

40:22That is so much fun and rewarding that I just wish that we would have got started earlier. I think it's a duty. It is my duty as a person who I think at least that I have my shit together when it comes to parenting that I'm going to raise decent kids. It's my duty to create as many as I possibly can. I wish that we had started a little bit earlier so we could have six, seven, eight kids. How old are you now? I'm 34. 34 now. Okay. Okay. I'll open up more. How would you respond to the people that say, oh no, you don't need to do it now. You have the time. Kids are the most amazing thing about life.

40:51Why would you delay that? Kids made me stronger. They made me more focused. They made me more motivated. They made me more driven. They made me more protective of my time. How did they make you more focused and driven? I had a measuring stick for time when that baby was born. It wasn't just wrinkles in the side of my eyes that became a little bit more apparent every year. I had a human being that was growing. And I know now in seven days, I'll be six years post the birth of my first child. I got extremely motivated when that child was born. I got more focused on the future and generational planning, and I got more focused on what I can do to be a better human being.

41:24I was less interested in wasting time on the weekends. I was less interested in friendships that weren't mutually beneficial, and I just improved. I improved. My entire goal in life is to be an old man sitting in a leather chair in a big-ass house with kids and grandkids running everywhere. I'm saying, like, tearing the shit out of my house. I want new babies that can barely walk, bumping their head on my coffee table, and I want 12, 13 year olds running around with Nerf guns, busting holes in the walls. I want complete chaos. Maybe it's a holiday, but I want to raise family members that want to spend time with me.

41:57That's my whole goal as a parent. Number one goal, I will have succeeded as a parent if my kids want to spend time with me, even when they're no longer under my roof. After they go off to college, if they want to be around me, I'll have succeeded. Are you mirroring the family environment that you were brought up in or is this the opposite of what you were brought up in? Yeah, it is the environment I was brought up in. Yeah, we had three kids, small town, conservative values, went to church. Gender roles were prevalent in my community and culture when I was young. And my wife is the same. Like we both just feel amazingly proud every morning.

42:28We go downstairs, we have our coffee, we sit in our chair and we watch our three kids just play. And we play with them and hang out with them. And we look at each other almost several times a week. And we're like, can you believe that we built this? Like, look at these things. They're us. It's spectacular. Do you imagine conservative values that I saw at TikTok, if you can believe it. I'm very down with the kids, Nick, but of Elon Musk saying that woke culture is probably the most dangerous mind virus there is today. But I'm intrigued. Do you agree with the woke virus being so potentially damaging?

42:59And does it make you thoughtful of what you say? I definitely am careful about what I say. I'm not uncancellable yet. I know that I need to be careful. I have a small window in time to build these companies to capitalize on my personal brand. And I know that if I get canceled, it will set me back in my mission to get these points of view across to a lot of people. That being said, I think this woke mindset and virus is a tremendous advantage for me and my family. Because the people who buy into it are victims. The people who buy into it are blaming other people. The people who buy into it are focusing on things that are totally outside of their control.

43:31I don't do that and my kids are not going to do that. So we're going to have a competitive advantage against everybody who spends time focusing on things that don't matter. and worries about things that they can't control and blames other people for their problems. So absolutely, it's going to be a net positive for me because people who raise their kids to be accountable, they raise strong kids, they raise their kids to suffer with grace, they raise their kids to be good stewards of money, it's going to be playing the game on easy mode while everybody else is out pointing fingers at everybody else.

43:55A lot of what we've said today actually centers around advice and a lot of people gain comfort and security in advice. Meta question, how do you advise people on advice, advice to take versus the advice not to take and how to action it in the right ways. How do you think about that? The problem with advice is that it gives you a false sense of productivity. People are listening to this podcast and they're nodding along and they're thinking, wow, this podcast is making me better. And then they go home and get on YouTube and they listen to more advice and they get on Twitter and listen to more advice.

44:24And before they know it, they've listened to a full day of advice and they're thinking before they went to bed, wow, I'm doing a lot. This is great. If you're not doing anything in the real world, if you're not trying to advance your career, if you're not trying to get better, if you're not making yourself better by doing things that are hard and getting uncomfortable, the advice, using your words, the advice could mean fuck all to you. Like it does not matter. Like if you're not in the trenches building a company, you're not going to be able to listen to anything anybody says and actually apply it.

44:47You can take advice for 20, 30 years and get nowhere because you're not actually doing anything. And that's the hard part. And also is that everybody who gives advice is a successful person because you know, you got to have a resume to make your advice weighted. So all the people who have the most clout and status on Twitter, they're all successful people. And getting advice from successful people is very risky because successful people look at the world totally different than you do and that I do and that we did when we were young and not successful yet. So what you have is a lot of people who are not successful yet getting advice from successful people.

45:17The successful people, they feel totally different about wealth and risk because they already have it and they're trying to protect it. It's not like that they don't have it and they're trying to get it. You see what I'm saying? They're in different phases of life and what worked for them might not work for you. Are you in wealth protection mode or in wealth creation mode? And can you be in both? I'm in both now. Yes. I went from wealth creation mode early in my career. And look, this is just the perfect example. If somebody came to me and they were 25 years old and they were me and they had my first storage deal that I built from the ground up that changed my entire life and made me millions of dollars.

45:47If they had that sitting on a desk in front of me right now, I would tell them not to do it because I wouldn't do it because it was too risky. Does that make sense? Like the deal that we built for 2.9 million, It's worth$11 million now. I've made over$2 million personally on that deal. It changed my life. I would tell somebody probably not to do, looking back at what decisions we made at the very beginning of building that building. How messed up is that? How did it feel when you made that$2 million? Does money make you happy? Yes, money is drastically underrated in this world today. The people who say that money doesn't matter are full of shit.

46:16Let's just say it. Nobody says it. The identity of a man. As a man, nobody gives a crap about you. Nobody cares about you. When you're born and when you grow up, nobody cares. You have to go out and it's your job and most families to go out and get what can make your family's life better. And every single thing in life worth doing costs money, whether it's health care that you have to have, whether it's an education, whether it's a safe car to take you around and the building that you spend all your time in money gets all of it. So how can people argue that it's not critically important? And it's also our identity as men is really wrapped up in this stuff, which is sad and is great at the same time.

46:50But it's a reality. How do you think about your identity today? Is it father? Is it entrepreneur, a husband? I'm trying to, and look, it's my ego. I'll be honest. My ego is pushing me to prove. I have something to prove. I have a chip on my shoulder. I have something to prove. And it's that I can play the game of business at a very high level, very high level. But I can also do those things. Be a good parent, be a good dad, stay physically fit, maintain amazing relationships with people I love and know, and also have hobbies and other interests in life. I don't know very many well-balanced people.

47:22I'm trying to make that happen. Did you put that chip on your shoulder? Who did that? I preached it into existence with my Twitter. And it's amplified because I'm out here preaching about it. It's so weird how Twitter works. Like my tweets, most of my tweets are just tweets directly to me. Like they're reminders and advice to me. I am giving advice to myself on the internet. And it just so happens that 315 ,000 people have followed me because they think it applies to them as well. All this shit applies to me. I'm preaching to myself. Do you measure value back to business from Twitter? and do you see an active correlation between Twitter and your business value creation?

47:56Oh, it changed my life. Absolutely. Yeah. It made me confident enough to take these big shots and it gave me a competitive advantage in business. It gave me distribution. It gave me access to partners and talent and it gave me a network. You said network. Final one there, because I could talk to you all day. How do you think about networking? I hate the word that network. It feels transactional, dehuman. I've loved this because we've already opened up. I hate networking where it's like, here's my business card. Let's do deals. I think the average person networks all wrong. They just have the wrong mindset when it comes to networking.

48:26They have a mindset when it comes to networking, how can you help me? And they walk around, they go to coffee, they go to meetups, they go to events, and they walk around their handouts saying me, me, me, me, help me, help me, help me. And what you have, if you've ever been to a college networking event, you have a bunch of people with absolutely nothing to offer anybody else walking around shaking hands saying, help me, help me, help me, help me, help me, help me. It's ignorant. It's crazy. The way to build a network is to get really fucking good at something, Period. End of story. As soon as you become an expert at something and you prove to people that you know what you're doing, whether it's through making money that way or doing something in this regard or having something on your resume, when you prove to people that you are an expert in some field, then all of a sudden they can get something from you.

49:05They can gain, they can benefit from you. And that's when your network explodes. My network has exploded because I am a card in other people's Rolodex. Think about it that way. As soon as you become a high value card in somebody else's Rolodex, your network will explode. Your network will truly accelerate and will truly be valuable when you have something to give other people. So, so many people walk around their handout, help me, help me, help me. When they should be forgetting about networking, they should build a business. They should get rich. They should learn how to operate. They should learn self-storage.

49:33They should learn venture capital. They should become an expert first, and then they should go out and build a network. And the same thing happens with social media. Everybody wants a social media following. Everybody wants a lot of followers. Everybody wants to be an influencer. very few people are willing to do the freaking work to get really good at something and make the money and practice what they're preaching and it just doesn't work and the best way is to document the work as you do it like take people with you on i knew nothing about venture when i started but people like go with me on the journey and everyone likes to see development in themselves in someone else and so i find it the best way to learn but bring people with you final one i always get told never meet your mentors or never meet your idols they'll always disappoint you do you agree with that statement i think that that's a very encouraging beautiful thing about life and yes i would agree with it i think people could meet me and i would let them down in so many ways with my competence with my ability with the way my businesses are run i think it's a beautiful thing about life and that you don't have to be spectacular you don't have to be perfect to do amazing things like that should be inspiring it should be inspiring that the men that are at the top of the echelon of the most wealthy people in the world are broken in some areas of life.

50:42That's inspiring to me. It makes me not feel that bad that I am broken in so many areas of my own life. Where are you most broken? I'm always trying to improve every area. I'm addicted to Twitter. I have to really fight this God complex that influencer status brings, health, fitness. I have a lot of areas to improve there. My hobbies, I'm horrible at golf and still fighting the good fight. You've always got to fight the good fight there. I want to finish on a quick fire. I say a short statement you give me your immediate thoughts does that sound okay oh boy here we go okay so what single piece of content has had the most impact on you i read a book called entre leadership by dave ramsey and it wasn't a book that's super tactical but it was a book about how he built his companies and how he thinks about dealing with people and i think every single problem in this world is a people problem and that had a massive influence on me you can have dinner with one person dead or alive who's that person and why i'd pick chris powers in fort worth he's a friend of mine, so I will have dinner with him, but I just think he's a badass.

51:37You can make one public company investment and hold it for 10 years. What's the company? Meta. It's a beautiful business. Zuckerberg's a stud. Why would you try to reinvent the wheel? Or Google. I have a lot of public equities and they're all a lot of money in public equities, and it's all FANG, and it's going to stay that way because those are the best companies in history of the world. And why would you try to reinvent the wheel? What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? Well, the big one is that I previously thought that everybody should be an entrepreneur and a manager of people.

52:04And now I'm realizing that that's just not the case. And most people are better off going to work for somebody. I'm spending my thirties replacing cheap shit I bought in my twenties. Nice to eat. What are you replacing now? I was extremely frugal to the point where I would not make radical decisions about the cost benefit analysis of buying things for my family and my house and me personally. So I'm replacing my wardrobe. I'm replacing my equipment. I'm replacing our vehicles. I'm replacing our mattresses, just all the shit that I cheaped out on that there actually is value in paying up a little bit.

52:35What are you most concerned about in the world today, Nick? I think there's a lot of really, really smart people who could build amazing companies if they started small and had a small goal, but instead they get caught up in the hoopla of entrepreneurship culture on the internet. And they're trying to build massive unicorn venture capital backed companies. And I think it's going to burn out a lot of brilliant people and they're going to end up going to get jobs instead of building wealth and being their own boss and succeeding in entrepreneurship. What questions do you least want to be asked in interviews?

53:02The uncomfortable stuff is just the insecurities and the fact that I started on third base. And I like people to think about me as a self-made person, but I'm not a self-made person. And that's uncomfortable. Could you not do more if you did less? I do believe in focus. Do you not think sometimes you are great, but you could build one great company rather than 10 good companies? Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what company is the best business and requires that level of focus. I'm a very good gatherer of talent. And my plan right now is to gather talented people and let them do their thing with extreme levels of delegation, meaning I'm not that involved.

53:36So I'm trying to enable people and layer on the synergies around my brand and my distribution and my ability to track talent and get good operators and just see what they can do. And some of them will win, some of them will lose, but I like my strategy so far. But yeah, long-term, it'll be a power law for sure with what I'm doing. Penultimate one, what's the single best investment under$500? dollars i got some foot shoe inserts that changed the way i feel like it makes my body less sore and they're called power step they're called power step shoe inserts and they raised up the arch of my foot i just feel a lot better when i'm active and running around and my feet don't hurt final one nick where will you be in 10 years time what do you want nick huber to be in 2033 i want to be on a mountain it's august so early season hunt on a mountain with a bow in my hand and my 15-year-old son in a tent with me.

54:21Nick, listen, I've so enjoyed doing this. The hard thing about my job is often people don't tell you how they really feel. I think we did get there today. I've so enjoyed this. So thank you so much for being so brilliant. You're an exceptional interviewer, man. You did a really good job. Thank you. I have to say, shows like that are really why I love what I do so much. This is a show where we totally intended on talking about business and delegation for a lot of the show. And in the end, we end up most of the time talking about trust and talking about partnership. with a romantic partner. It was fantastic.

54:50And it was great on the show. I so appreciate his putting up with my wavering schedule. If you want to see more from the show behind the scenes, of course, you can do that on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC. But before we leave you today, this episode is brought to you by Tegas, the go-to research destination for bold investing. Tegas curates expert insights, analysis, and financial data to give you powerful perspective for your investment decisions. With lightning-fast access to over 60 ,000 transcripts across 20 ,000 companies, you'll discover a wealth of unique insights to fuel your fundamental research, gain perspectives, synthesize information, and even model outcomes, all on Tegas.

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57:23We have the one and only Jason Lemkin back with a very special guest. This will be a fun show on Wednesday.