Final Boss Sour’s James Hicks + River’s Rae Lambert | E1993

27:23And people were going now to Walmart and buying a dog food bag size, like, you know, like a 50 pound bag of rice size, uh, a frosted flakes or something. And I was like, well, that's interesting. Like, I guess like 10 boxes of cereal in one. Okay. It's really terrible for you, but it's terms of sugar in your system. Probably not a good idea, but okay. Do they understand what you're doing and talk maybe a little bit about retail and how retail is changing or not changing or, you know, experiential stuff in retail. How do you think about it? Yeah. So I think that we are probably ahead to your point of like the level of innovation, right?

28:02So we do a lot of storytelling online. You can't do that much storytelling in retail. But if we start building this awareness through social, people will get kind of glimmers of the story, and then they'll kind of finish their journey in retail, right? So that's how we view it. I don't think anyone is going to stop in their tracks with their shopping cart at Walmart, open our box, read the whole story, and go through the whole funnel of acquisition in the retail store. We got to do that storytelling on our end. And we got to generate that awareness. So then the store just becomes like the bottom of the funnel, the last kind of place of distribution.

28:45Got it. So there's not like super innovation going on there. you're just basically trying to be more interesting than everything else on either side of the aisle. And maybe you bring customers to the table, which is, you know, maybe the opposite of how most CPG interacts with Walmart, which is they're in just some back room trying to strike a deal based on economics, as opposed to striking a deal based on, hey, we're bringing you, we're going to bring people into the store. And that's a much different conversation. You know, it's like, I'm going to have a conference in Vegas. Like I know we're, we're going to do an all in poker series two months, you know, been planning, he's talked about it a little bit.

29:22And like, if you bring a thousand poker players or 10 ,000 poker players or even more, well, you're bringing those people into, you know, whatever casino it is, whatever hotel, you know, there's going to be some splashy cashy, you know, they're going to buy other things when they're there. So if you do bring the sour boss, uh, you know, final ball sour there, you know, that's going to be totally, they might buy some other things while they're there. uh stupid question you used a video game metaphor are you gonna make a casual video game even as somehow related to this we had this like incredible moment in time in our childhood where you know dungeons and dragons was a board game became a serial became a cartoon and this thing forget about omni channel but omni media and obviously star wars being the best example of a media company you know making their money off toys and then eventually video games and all kinds of spin-offs so you're gonna make a video game and how do you think about you know ip development if at all it's possible i mean all of our ip is is original and owned um so i worked so to create this brand i worked with a video game design company out of eastern europe right interesting so didn't do didn't work with any cpg designers went out of the box to find find them oh how clever they also develop games and so it is our intention that at some point we'll do something uh we're we're starting with a little like a little casual game that's going to involve like scanning the qr code that you get from a tiktok box and you know so we'll start small with these little pieces but yeah i mean we built the brand as if it were like a full you know kind of super mario brothers type game i don't know if we'll ever get there well i have an idea there like what if when if you to play the game if you take a picture of level one two and three you unlock levels one two and three in the game yep then if you beat levels one two and three you unlock level four and level but you have to beat the video game in order to order level four sour totally that could be super interesting uh you could get people working for level four as it were absolutely because level four doesn't exist right now right like level four is in the laboratory somewhere level four is in the laboratory level four and the final boss level are both are both being worked on I think this would be like a very interesting competition TV show, like actually to do a straight up hot one style, you know, YouTube challenge where you bring 10 kids and family members together to just see who taps out level four or five or six.

31:43Is there like a level of sour that people cannot handle like there is with peppers and like the ghost pepper and everything? A little bit. I mean, if you go too deep, like, you know, one of our employees was doing a TikTok live and everyone was just daring him to eat more and more products. And so he took down like 20 bags. And so a little bit of tongue burn afterwards. It's nothing serious that, you know, a little milk in a couple of days of rest won't cure for you. Yeah. But yeah, I think it's very personal. People have different tolerance levels. I can handle pretty, pretty heavy. I think Jelly Belly did a really interesting job.

32:22Every time my daughters go to the Jelly Belly factory, which is outside of San Francisco, you can actually tour it and everything. They have a series of disgusting flavors. I can't remember what they are, but it's so rancid that my daughters think they're little pranksters now, my eight-year-olds, and they will take the really disgusting ones and put it in the fruity ones I like and give me them and pretend it's green apple and then I'm eating something that's like dead cockroach flavor. And it's just absolutely, they get a real kick out of it. So there's so many brand extensions you could do here.

32:52And I like the side quest for the dips. So you can really start figuring out and be innovative in terms of making all this stuff. It's much easier with like, um, what do they call it? Co-packers or something. There's like a whole infrastructure level that we could equate to like, say, Amazon web services in terms of you figure out the formula in your laboratory and then the co-packers do it. Or do the co-packers have the laboratories where they can pop up like an experiment from you? So explain that level of the infrastructure that I think probably most of us don't understand. Yeah. So in general CPG, you work with a third-party formulator and a third-party co-packer.

33:29I've been, in my experience, kind of burned with that setup because you end up with a product that you don't really like. You don't really control the negotiation. And so when we started, we started doing it ourselves. So for the first month or two, we launched about a year ago in last October. We were in a shared kitchen in LA, building the product ourselves, tinkering with the recipes. We really kind of nailed the product ourselves. Then when we got too big, we then worked with a co-packer, but we, at that point, knew exactly what we were doing. We knew exactly how we wanted it built. We were the formulators.

34:06It felt much more natural and we found a great co-packer to produce for us. so right now how it works is uh we have a co-packer in north carolina who does all our products for us we still do all the formulating we still do all the um product design ourselves which is like the ip you probably don't want other people you know for higher labs doing it because then once they formulate it and they get insights now they can go sell it to a competitor or knock off brand yes which i think exists in cpg as well so it's kind of like making electronics i watch that happen in electronics all the time you hire somebody in shenzhen to make something unique for you like a smoke detector and all of a sudden there's four knockoffs that their cousins are making yep and there's always a legal discussion who owns what and it yeah it's it's troubling so you just get you pop up a ghost kitchen and you you just get in the lab literally get in the laboratory and make cool stuff i am super excited to go on this uh journey with your team yeah we're super excited to have you i'm hoping i can like get into this i want to do some of these with my kids online and right i want to do some tiktoks and so i'll put it on my tiktok and uh maybe i you know i got uh one of the nut groups uh that makes nuts this great macadamia nut group made like all in spicy nuts uh based on uh yeah based on the all-in crew and just think it's like really interesting how brands can like incorporate influencers so you could literally if you had one of these influencers do really well as a partner and affiliate you could literally make like a short run thousand collectible based on, you know, Jake house, sour, you know, whatever I'm, you know, into Kiwi, whatever.

35:42And I could be like, that's just mine. I, it's Jake house Kiwis and it's super sour Kiwi. We're going to sell a thousand of them and whatever they're collectible. Just love that. Have you ever thought about putting prices into captain jacking? What was it? Captain, uh, No, no, no, no. cracker Jack, cracker Jack, everything about cracker Jack. And when I was a kid, I was enamored of getting like tattoos and, you know little airplanes and you know it was literally a 10 cent thing inside of there but i i didn't notice that there was no uh you know action figure as it were have you thought about that little prize in there we've thought about it right now we're thinking about it more from a digital perspective so uh like the q like i said the qr code to the game is the is the prize um but yeah and then we thought about like you know kind of golden ticket kind of raffle aspects too which are super fun i think that these things you know two of the great if you look at all the um studios i was speaking to somebody who worked at one of the studios i won't say who but it was like hey what's the difference between like paramount studios and this studio and disney and universal and i was like ip and he's like close and i'm like theme parks he's like yep and so it turns out like experiencing things in person is really interesting for people i think there's like um something called milk bar is that the candy experience you go to where they make candy and stuff like that maybe uh yeah there's like anyway there i noticed like when i was at universal there was like a candy store that was kind of experiential have you thought about that like the in-person experiential thing like they're testing a pop-up where people come and make their own fruits in the lab with their own sour profiles or something i know my kids if you had like a little pop-up store somewhere it would be a destination for them like the jelly belly factories so have you thought about that retail yeah pop-ups and experiences totally i mean like Whenever we do a trade show or if we do an in-person event, it really becomes part game show, part experience where people are challenging each other to go across the levels.

37:36And that kind of experience, when you've done that, it really, to your point, unlocks a different level of loyalty to the brand. So yeah, we do that stuff all the time. And as we grow, I think we'll formalize a better plan around it. Yeah. I think like doing an interesting pop-up at like, you know, there's this thing VidCon, which is like for all the YouTubers and stuff like that. Doing a Final Boss Sour pop-up outside of that, like even if you went, you know, punk rock and just had like a food truck or something like in the area and people could come up and challenge themselves. Or if you even did it like in the place where people were challenging each other and sitting across from each other.

38:13Wow, it could be really interesting. So continued success. I think it's really awesome what you're doing. and just type final boss sour into TikTok and just go check out all the excitement around the brand. And I'm guessing there's a website as well. Yeah, people can go to. Yep, finalbosssour.com. Just buy it for your kids. It's like really interesting. They'll get a lot of fun out of it. And it's BFU, better for you. Absolutely. All right, we'll see you all next time on this week's service. Bye-bye. All right, listen, you remember FTX, the failed crypto exchange? It has to pay out$12.7 billion to users who lost their shirts when it folded.

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39:56WashingtonPost.com slash twist. Go ahead and support them for supporting this week in startups and get all that great content in your email box, on your phone. Subscribe 50 cents per week. WashingtonPost.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I was really excited to have our next guest on. Ray Lambert is the CEO and co-founder of River. It's a great origin story, which we'll hear about today, because she became a fan, Ray did, of the All In podcast, and she started doing meetups with fans. And when we had our first All In Summit in Miami, she said, hey, I'm doing like a meetup with 10 folks, all the women coming to the event, we're having a brunch.

40:35Would you like to swing by? And I was like, okay, that's across the street from my hotel. So you're stalking me. Of course, I will stop by. And that's how this all got started. We have been using the River Platform, which has essentially productized these all-in meetups to do our Founder Friday meetups. Founderfridays.tech is the domain for that. And, you know, the concept is there's a lot of digital communities or digital products that have communities forming, but there's no way for them to get together. So Ray and her team's vision is to build that platform. It's called River. And they attended the launch accelerators 30th class.

41:20We made a small investment in the firm. And, you know, we're going to continue investing and pulling the string and see where this takes us. Welcome to the program, Ray Lambert. Thanks for having me. So tell us the sort of insight you had into community and how this has manifested itself into a product. So how do you take this organic, hey, we're doing some meetups, we got a mailing list, we got a form online, and we got a location and we tweeted it, and then making that into a product that a bunch of brands like this week in startups all in i believe the blueprint guy i think bology and his nation state is using it and i know my first million really cool podcast they have been using it so tell us how you take this like weird energy that exists in the world and then productize it yeah my initial first reason for doing all in meetups i had moved to miami and was kind of disappointed with the tech scene they're just huge rager parties that just didn't feel productive i wasn't really meeting builders and uh i had been to the summit loved everyone i met there i'm like let me try to meet more of those people and it turns out just generic meetups they're just you don't have enough kind of in common when you go to a typical tech meetup or some other like generic event and so when people come to an all-in meetup or they come to a twist event they just they like finally have met their people and so there's this kind of magic like cathartic experience that people have and like kind of like the weirder more lunatic-y the topic the better um you know when i hosted a brian johnson don't die event in boston the 30 people who showed up were like oh my god i did not know there were 30 vegans who go to bed at 9 p.m in this town so that was kind of like one feeling one insight and then another one was that people were totally willing to step up and host and make it happen in their city a lot of investors or customers like well where do i find hosts i'm like nope the other problem is how do you let hosts down nicely who aren't the right fit because i get like hate mail once a week from someone who's been rejected i think that was my insight was you know when you were doing the all-in meetups i was like i don't want weirdos using meetups as a way to siphon off the community the all-in community to get customers or clients for their consulting business no offense to lawyers accountants or recruiters and all these great people totally try to do that but i don't want my brands hijacked to do their bd because by the way we have sponsorships and we have advertising on this week and startups like there is a channel for that i don't want some law firm subverting my partnership with wilson sassini in order to you know uh do some local meetup with founders and then get their next 10 clients because i have a product that does that with wilson sassini yeah and the the great hosts who just actually want to just build a community in their city like they don't care they're not trying to do business development you know it's always the service provider who's pissed at me because they're like wait i don't get the emails like no you do not well and this was the key thing you know i said to you i want to invest in building this community for this week in startups and for all in um and you know i i want to have a purpose so there's a really good book on community the purpose-driven church um by rick warren he had done a ted talk at some point he said listen each church needs to have one thing they do not 10 things they do there has to be some purpose for this and once you have a purpose you know people can buy into it or not buy into it and the purpose for founder fridays.tech which you can go see and you can find it on the river platform as well was i wanted founders to meet with other founders and help each other uh you know with their business challenges that's it pretty simple you know founders helping founders for founders by founders i think is the way i framed it yeah and you know anything that's not that distracts from the mission and distracts from the purpose and rick warren's sort of goal i actually read that book it's a book from 1995 and i think it's um you know if you get past the religious overtones if you're not into that you can kind of see the brilliance of focus religions are so good at getting together community they have real estate that they go to they have consistency where they get together at least once a week they have common rituals that they can all like get to know and understand they're very good at community i mean the catholic church is like they're like geniuses all right so that's the purpose-driven church the perfect driven life tell me about the software platform what does it do today and then what are the components that are not software that need to be done manually in building a community and then we'll get into community best practices but you you had a i think an acute list of problems or challenges that brands you know and this is kind of like tedx in a way in a box is one of the ways i said it to you at some point but you're running these meetups god there's so many challenges and you have to prioritize them.

46:33So walk us through like, what are the three or four most important things that you've solved for with technology? Yeah. And I tried all the event platforms when I was growing all in meetups to 50 cities around the world. And it just like instantly feel the pain. So one thing we do really well is you just create an event template and then you can duplicate that across every city around the world. Just a couple of clicks instantly and it will snap it to the location, the right time zone. it'll bring in the title of the city into the event and the image of the city and so as opposed to creating one individual event across 50 cities you just do that in a few clicks like people might do that on an event bright or something so now they've got 50 events in 50 cities maybe they had 50 logins 50 times yeah and then we also have batch editing so it's like an event campaign series so you can say hey every event that has this word in the title or is in this date range or has this tag i decided i'm going to rename them all and instead of going into every event you can just batch edit and then the events once they get listed on your community page like this weekend startups on our river community page the events are geolocated so the nearest event to their ip address shows up on top and so instead of having to promote you know hey here's the singapore meetup and then in another tweet here's the london meetup you just say hey go to the community page on river the thing that's on top is the one nearest to you and you can just go to that once you click on an event you can either rsvp and then it's just like a normal event app or you can apply to host and this is where the kind of real power of river comes in if you apply to host you get dropped into a lightweight applicant tracking system almost kind of like when you apply for a job much like much lighter weight than that and community manager can look who is this person what are the vibes you click on their social, have they hosted past events, so they have a good host rating.

48:24And you can approve, reject. Once you approve them, they take over limited edit access for the event. And so they can say, hey, this is the venue, this is how much room there is, actually, I'm going to have it at 630. They can send messages to attendees, but they can't get access to their email or phone numbers. So they really have everything they need to make a great event happen under your banner and your brand, without being able to take attendee data or delete critical information. Got it. And when you think about community and this distributed community, I saw you did something for Tim Ferriss's...

49:01His 10th anniversary. His 10th anniversary of his podcast. So there is some manual work that needs to be done here by a human, like vetting the hosts or answering questions or customer support. so tell me about the best practices that you've learned in the past year on community yeah so every community is different um and this is why it's been a little hard to automate i mean one of my co-founders is a fantastic data scientist and we will bring in more machine learning over time but each community is different so we have solana and super team community web 3 communities they don't want their name or their headshots in their bio they're very like anon accounts whereas the tim ferris community is just like a lot a slightly older crowd um like more kind of web 2.0 the way you expect.

49:45So we usually do either us, we'll do it for our client or customers, or they will that post themselves. Honestly, you can kind of thin slice it and make a pretty good decision in 30 to 60 seconds. We each community can require, okay, I really want this person to include their LinkedIn, or I need a headshot or I need a bio. So for founder Fridays, for example, like if it's not explicit that if it doesn't seem like they're actually building a startup right now then they don't get approved um so each community is kind of different and that's where that's where a lot of manual work comes in now the nice thing is is once we've activated a community it gets much faster so you know they host their first event they get feedback a rating okay now they're a great host there they can become a pre-approved host and that just happens a lot faster so the it is kind of like front-end work and then the other thing just on the manual side a lot of people have never done any kind of events like this is very different like when tim ferris did his 10th anniversary meetups did 150 events around the world and all simultaneously and so it's it's less about a big conference or one day huge attendee and it's more about organic 10 20 30 person events and this just like designing the programming for this or like setting the intention setting the vibe is just uh something that our clients like need help with so we usually just design partner with them like many great startups you know you're i think creating a new category um there are things that are analogous why po young president's organization has chapters there are multi-level marketing companies that do like local smarmy kind of you know things where they pressure each other into spying from each other and you know how multi-level marketing works you have tedx which was really interesting hey not everybody can come to ted it's super elite it's super expensive 10 15k a year 20k a year depending on what package you're on but you can do something locally in your community plus there's all kinds of problems because somebody will come and say something stupid at a local event and then it blows back to ted and they have to like work on it but let's put all that aside this is a new category and then of course you know the motivations and can it be a business uh eventually emerges when you get to year two or three of this so like ebay it was or craigslist you know it's just a passion right like i i i'm into pez dispensers i'm into bob dylan memorabilia i want to get the set list from a bob dylan concert it's not really about commerce but then or etsy the way it started but then all of a sudden like people become professional at sea they become professional at airbnb i feel like that's starting to happen here and i think we're in year two of river uh or in that sort of time frame and i know i'm thinking about it as what is the is there a business here is there monetization uh or a business model here that would accelerate it or is it just a passion project so walk me through what you're discovering in terms of emergent behavior from your partners who are paying you know a small amount of money for the platform i think it's a couple hundred bucks a month it's not super expensive 500 a month so it's not super expensive um and it solves so many problems that the 500 a month is really easily worth it for me um to not have to do the duplication all that stuff you're talking about but what's the big picture here has somebody figured out like this is going to become YPO yet or there's sponsorship ability or it grows a mailing list to the point in which you can sell them and upsell them other things what's happening in emergent behavior in the ecosystem yeah so we have the beginnings of a sponsorship marketplace and this is really interesting like found money for a community so when Solana Foundation did their kickoff for their meetups just like you could apply to hosts they're a little apply to sponsor button and 30 out of 50 so 60 percent of events got a sponsor now this is like time this takes so much time uh and it's so you know most marketers or big brands know that events have a really high torque on being like a great channel 80 percent of brands do event marketing of some kind just extremely labor intensive and not easy to scale um but then you have you know like this weekend startups i'm sure your ad reads are pretty expensive and maybe someone can't afford that but they'd love to host the local austin this weekend startup founder fridays meetup so this is kind of like easy found money there and then for a lot of our communities they don't have an email list they don't have an email strategy i mean for all in you guys aren't doing email.

54:37So the 9 ,000 emails you have are from people attending events. And so now you have this email strategy and this data strategy, the sponsorship marketplace. And then eventually, I think River's going to become like an ad network where just like someone saying, hey, you know, like a Google ad, I want to spend$1 ,000 a week on this type of ICP. They could say, I want to spend$1 ,000 a week to support meetups under these certain communities. And that could just be automated on the platform. So we'll be doing that. so i could turn that on right now for founder fridays the sponsorship piece you could turn on the apply to sponsor and then we kind of sneaker feature it i would say we're about three weeks away from really releasing like an in-app purchase you know because we want it to be like uber where you can just purchase it and then you know some brands they need to be approved by this week in startups because you don't want to associate with lunatics but um they once they're approved they can just in-app buy i would do that i would just say um five hundred dollars you could sponsor it and i would give i don't know 70 of that to the local hosts to buy food and drinks and then 30 to the mothership for you know our time managing the program because we actually hired somebody half time as you know yeah yeah and so we have a community manager now and i'm making that investment just because i want to meet the hosts and we did our first host meetup i think you were there uh where i got on a zoom call and i was like this is amazing you know this is working for me on so many different levels and i hate to even talk about it because i don't want to give other people this like secret weapon i'm building but uh for me to know who are the people in each city who opted in to host an event with our brand who are founders means those was a really good founder so it's a savvy founders i might want to invest in and when they started telling me about their companies i was like whoa this is the this is like premium deal flow and then if they are monitoring they're almost like scouts for me like the scoya scouts program where i started my investment career they're kind of scouting the local market they could tell me hey this founder's legit they're doing interesting stuff so now i'm looking at like wait a second deal flow here and i like the idea of like a little bit of splashy cashy money going back to them for what i'll call uber money like pocket change you know take their uber or you know pay for their 50 uber to and from the event and pay for the first round of drinks or some chicken wings so yeah kind of and i would be okay with your team taking a percentage as well so if you told us you know to turn on the sponsor feature it's you know part of your 500 a month um if we and we take 10 but if you pay a thousand dollars a month we take just the three percent processing fee or whatever you know there's some model there where i would be okay with you actually having an ad network and if you sold tim ferris's my first million and this week in startups in a bundle for five hundred dollars an event or a thousand dollars an event or fifty dollars per person coming to the event i would be like yeah i don't care it's not the reason i'm doing it exactly so i really they're really interesting it's a live model based on them and then they could opt into when they go to the event getting more information from that sponsor yep that one's working and then another one where you have a design partner for is um paid events where and i don't want to release too much because they haven't fully launched yet but um they're doing their own paid events in new york city it's a total vibe going viral people are doing it a lot in new york and they want to expand to other cities but they want to control the revenue line and they want to control the brand and so they're going to be rolling out with river and the host just like we were talking about will get a revenue share from the paid event so instead of a sponsor it's just a paid event um and that's going to help them scale 10 times faster than if they had to go interview and source the host themselves yeah see for the founder friday events i like this small intimacy but i was thinking there's a lot of people who want to come so maybe we do like a two-tier thing where when you have a founder friday you have people who are members who come to that small eight person six person pods and talk about their business and then it opens up to a generalized cocktail party and then you could just sell tickets to the cocktail party anybody can come a lawyer accountant whatever and those are just 50 buck tickets anybody can come and then we just tell the local host you take 25 bucks we take 25 bucks call it a day yeah love that yep yeah um super interesting so uh what do you think ultimately you know with all this learning the business becomes what do you think you're thinking ad network or there's just it's kind of like a marketplace like etsy or something what's the analogy here because it it doesn't fit into a box i wish it did it would make my financial modeling much easier yeah um yeah we start with b2b sas like pricing subscription model because that's just easiest um rolling out the sponsorship marketplace but we're also rolling out like other contribution marketplaces so people want to apply to speak or they want to be a photographer or they want to help check in and so right now we kind of orient everything around the role of the host but the host would be able to drag and drop and say hey here's some other roles i want people to sign up for um and so i could see that's brilliant so i could say we have the hosts there's three co-hosts in the city we don't have an official social media photographer and we don't have a front desk person volunteer for those two roles yeah oh that's so good and then same for speakers everyone's always looking for if they're hosting a more programmed event they're looking for speakers and so then it's really just pulled from your own personal network where you know we sent out like a test email to a thousand of our users to see how many people are interested in speaking and like a hundred people are like me i want to speak which is crazy and so you could have like a speaker profile basically on a river with speaker ratings you know okay this person's really good at talking about this topic and ai this person could talk about fundraising and then you can start kind of getting notified of when events are coming up so really we want to be you know there's lots of event listing platform you know tools that are just like hey list your event but we really want to help you you know find a sponsor find a venue find a programming and just like pull off a really great event um without really having to do much work at all so it'll be a real marketplace yeah yeah i i have a feeling you know what you have here is a powder keg um and just watching the impact it's having on my two brands all in getting to 9 000 emails those emails are worth conservatively ten dollars each so i would say ninety thousand dollars in value has been created if it goes to twenty thousand you know now you got two hundred thousand dollars in value because if but one percent of those people buys the you know all in tequila that sax is working on or one percent buy a ticket to the all-in summit you know these are high ticket value items So, wow.

1:01:44You know, those, the top, I would say the top 10 % actually are probably well-heeled, like seriously well-heeled, like CEOs who could buy a$7 ,500 ticket for that brand. And so now you look at that, you know, that's, you know, 900 people who can afford, you know, a$10 ,000 ticket or something. Like now you're talking about real value. Now that's$10 million in ticket sales that could be potentially unlocked. uh and then on the this weekend startup side well we find the next uber robin hood calm in that mix but one time in 10 years and if we invest 50 000 a year you know over 10 years that's 500 000 if we were to hit another uber brand you know pick a company you know these things can be worth 50 100 250 million dollars in returns for the fund so you know these investments are really easy for us to make i think yeah for sure for sure and how we do this i also think like for other creators you know because not everyone's selling an expensive conference ticket or investing in startups but you know with generative ai there's just so much content has become a commodity there's so much crap that's being created and i think i call them cold creators people who just like put content online and then they don't engage in any way you know as consumers like how many podcasts are we listening to how many newsletters are we listening to so it's a really interesting way to like engage with your top true fans and like inspire more loyalty like i hear people all the time when they come to an all-in meetup they're like oh i had to make sure i listened to the episode before i came in case someone said somebody asked me a question and what's my opinion right which bestie do i agree with disagree with yeah so brilliant exactly yeah so it's almost like if you're a brand and you don't have this you're not really connecting with that top one to ten percent of your audience i think that's super brilliant listen continued success with this um i'm super excited that you decided to do this i know you had a vibrant consulting business i tried to hire you i was like this is going to be huge and then in i had the inability to hire you because you're so independent and strong that i said well can i just give you a hundred thousand dollars to see if this crazy idea works out and here we are well i mean amazing how you have gotten the tim ferris's my first million and i know that my first million team did something called hamilton or something what's the name of their hampton is their founder group yeah they have a founder group called hampton and one of my founders joined it it's like 7 500 a year or something or 5 000 or 10 000 i can't remember what the number was it was a lot of money and i think it's got hundreds of people maybe a thousand people in this now so if it's ten thousand dollars he's got a thousand people doing it's a 10 million a year community like YPO.

1:04:30And so, you know, there's something there where I think people like Soho House kind of high-end memberships would want to do this. So I'm also looking at that, really fascinated as to what that could become. For sure. Yeah. Awesome. Continued success. I'm so proud of you and the team. Thank you, Jacob. You have worked so hard. And my Lord, you know, when I, every time I talk to your team and we're in the founder Slack and I see the next high profile community that you engage with it's just amazing and you know i see that with podcast ai as well um there are something about yeah the the companies that can land the lighthouse customers so i don't want to say easily but who can land them and it's hard to land them because they're busy and they get so much inbound that like a tim ferris is notorious for and he's a friend of mine like you know he's a less is more guy like i don't want any distraction in my life I'm just doing like something really essential and then taking all back all my time to actually get someone like that to engage is incredibly hard.

1:05:33And that's what's most impressive about you as an executive is your ability to, you know, get that. You know, you get someone like Brian Johnson, you get Tim Ferriss. It's just so hard to do. So, you know, I think it's your superpower as an executive and continued success. And we'll see you all next time on The Swing Star Wars. Bye-bye. Thank you.