Zero to $1m/ARR with Christian Friedland

Foreign.

With me today, we have Christian Friedland, probably one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. Founder of maybe, but I don't know. So, Christian, you founded build.com. you grew that to what, a couple billion in sales?

Well, that's half the story, I guess. I grew it to about 60 million before I sold it. And then I stayed on as CEO and we grew it to just under a billion in GMV before I left a couple of years ago. Now it's well beyond that.

So how did you come up with the idea? I know the answer to this, but I want to hear it again from you. So you're in chico. How did you get the initial idea? How did you get, you know, your first couple customers? What was like, you know, the starting point?

Well, you got to understand I'm a OG of E commerce. So you were still probably in diapers or, or maybe in grade school. But back in 1998, I was in computer science grad school, and there was the last. The big E commerce tech bubble was just starting to form and I'd been involved in computer science my whole life. And I realized that E commerce was going to be a huge thing. It sounds silly to say it now because it's so prolific, but back then there were people that literally were saying things like, no one's going to buy shit on the Internet. No one's going to buy shit over a computer. And I'm like, well, no, that is not going to be the case. So I went, there was companies launching Amazon, all these other upstart e commerce companies taking on shitloads of capital. And I was looking for a segment or a niche that I thought was a blue ocean because you don't go into books, there's a bunch of behemoths. You don't go to try and sell computers online or computer components. Red ocean, shitty margins. So while I was in grad school in computer science, I was working at a plumbing wholesale house. And it hit me, I was like, jesus, like we had all. Back then, there was a very restricted distribution and you could sell this and you couldn't do that. So I'm watching and I'm thinking, God, these people are just trying to come in and buy this stuff and they can't even find a way to get it. There must be a national market. I started doing some research and I figured out an actual great segue into home improvement or into a category was going to be plumbing and more specifically, faucets. They were expensive, they were easy to ship. There was already a bunch of distribution, drop ship, catalog distribution. So I did them. I, you know, I played the game of, you know, it's a $10 billion industry, you get 1% of that industry. But blah, blah, blah. I've got a meaningful company. So room in my apartment. There was no Shopify, there was no Magento. There was none of that shit back then. There was no. There wasn't even an erp.

Let me ask a question here. So we're in. So for people listening, like Shopify, you have like Stripe, you have all these easy tools like build a company, but you didn't have any of that. You didn't have like, how did you process, like credit cards? How did you, like, how did you build this in like 2000. It was 2000 when you launched.

1999 when we launched and OG and no, literally, I remember like getting DSL and Chico was a big fucking deal. And I can only find an ISDN provider. If you don't know what that is, that's 128k. I had to like pull wires in my house. And I literally had a hosted server in my room running ColdFusion and SQL Server. No access database running with ColdFusion. And literally I was serving pages from that. From that. I built the shopping cart myself, I built the search myself. I built the shit shitty ERP as it was back then myself. And literally, if people only knew that they were basically like storing their credit card information on a freaking PC sitting in office in my shitty college apartment in Chico, they would have freaking died. But as soon as I got the site up, people started buying. I was right. Like, there was demand. I had product market fit right off the gate. $32,000 out of room in my apartment. Within two months. I quit my job and started basically coding and doing customer service full time. I hired my first employee, literally, who worked out of my apartment.

Who was your first employee?

It was a girl named Julie Gardner. So she would like, she was still going to school, so she would come, I was still working. So like, when I went to work, she would cover calls and process orders for me. And to the drop, she was supplier. They literally wouldn't take email. We had to send faxes. We had to fax them orders and then key back in the tracking information to customers. It was the jankiest process you've ever heard.

Okay, so just to back up, so your first office was inside your apartment. You had cables going everywhere and you had your physical servers inside your house?

Absolutely, yep. Big old CRT monitors No flat screens. It was old school shit.

So a lot of people listening to that are like, all right, we got aws, we got strive, we got Shopify, we got like. But you just like, how did you, like, what motivated you to like do all that? That's like you just assembled all this stuff. It wasn't created. Like, what, what was your motivation, man?

Like, dude, entrepreneurs these days, I mean, there's so many freaking amazing tools exist back then or now that don't exist then. Well, I mean, anything else? It was a crowded market, right? Everybody was going to work at Cisco Systems or one of these other tech darlings whose stock was going to make them all millionaires. I wanted to focus, I wanted to focus on something that I had a conviction around, no one else believed in. Everybody said, e commerce isn't going to work. And I launched right at the dot com bubble crash, which made everybody say, oh, E Commerce is dead. This was a stupid thing. But I recognized that just, it wasn't dead or, or stupid. Obviously I was right on that one. But it was just poorly executed. People chase poured too much money after these companies. They were, they, you know, retail is a tough business. You've got to be really, really tight with your expenses. And people were just. I recognized that this was going to be a huge, huge category and no one else saw it. So you know, it was a clear, clear opportunity. And the lack of tools made it a bigger barrier to entry. No one could get into E commerce even today. Andrew. A lot of I do consulting as well and a lot of the companies that I do consulting for who've been around for 50, 60, 100 years still don't really understand E commerce. So we take it for granted, you know, our generation, your generation, definitely even my generation to some degree. But yeah, people, people are farther behind than you would ever think. So you know, if you get ahead of, if you're ahead of something, I mean, look at what other people have done. Like no one, no one would have thought that Tesla would be where it is today. When they launched that first roadster, it looked like a niche product that no one would ever, never be, ever be interested into. So if you're far enough ahead of the curve, there'll be a lot less tools and a lot less help for you out there. But you know, then you've got a blue sky to be able to chase against because there's not a bunch of competitors. I mean, if you start a SaaS based company right now, there's probably 10 other people already out there that are doing exactly what you're doing. So yeah, the proliferation of tools means the opportunity that I created back in 1999 is long gone. But for other entrepreneurs it's like, okay, so what is out there right now? There's not a perfect amount of tools. There's not a huge community and a bunch of support and businesses built around helping your business. You know, things like machine learning and AI. Right now I feel like our frontiers where you know you can, you can, you still have the ability to spin up TensorFlow and start putting around. But those are the areas and spaces where I think the real. If you want to go into an area and you're working on and you're trying to figure out where what's going to happen in the future, those are the types of things you should be spending your time with building SaaS businesses or marketplaces or things like that. Sure you can make money doing it, but there's, it's, it's crowded, it's very competitive and you probably need a lot of capital. I didn't need any money to start my business. I spent, I spent a couple thousand dollars to get it started.

Did you, did you raise any capital?

Never. My business partner Dave, he came in with like 2 to $3,000 just to get us incorporated and like buy a fax machine and some other stupid shit.

That's a big investment.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you get in the tech runs.

With two $3,000 raise? It was definitely a good return on investment on his part. But yeah, some of the best businesses are built off of, you know, or some of the most interesting business. And I think where people have big opportunities, it's not looking at what everyone else is doing, not look at all the tools that are available, but looking out towards the future and then you're really pushing kind of on a frontier, you know, if it's not mainstream yet and there's not a bunch of tools and support, you really get to pioneer as well too. I mean I was a pioneer in E commerce, as silly as that sounds. I know Jeff Bezos, but I know Niraj Shah Wayfair, he held on to his company.

Yeah.

Working out well for him.

I want to pause on that though. So what you did is you saw an emerging market today. It's like a multi billion dollar market. It's a huge ass company. But what you were able to do is you were able to identify a growing market opportunity, capitalize that and, and then over time the market, the TAM increased. How important do you think that is for entrepreneurs when they're looking at a market, maybe it's small today, but in 10 years it's gonna be a hundred times bigger. Like, how do you think through that? Like, do you recommend, or let me put it this way. Would you recommend an entrepreneur look at a market? Huge addressable market, tons of competitors. Let's just try to get like a small piece of the pie. Or would you recommend going after more of like a moonshot where it's a small market today, but in 10 years you can kind of ride that wave and then as the market grows, you're going to be one to essentially capitalize on that growing market. Does that kind of relate to build.com or when you started, it was kind of niche, but then E commerce exploded, you rode that wave.

Well, I don't think there's not really an either or. It's kind of both. But I think what's really important is finding something that you recognize is a shift. And when I say shift, I mean, like, I knew that there would be. I was, I have, I had a conviction. I shouldn't say I knew, I had a very, very strong conviction that we were at a inflection point for more and more people were going to use their computers to buy shit on the Internet. And it was obvious to me, because I'd grown up with computers my whole life, you know, other things that are obvious. And now you're in that market and you go, yeah, well, of course, yeah, of course people can buy online. That's going to continue to grow. But then, you know, if I was starting something now as an entrepreneur and I had a long timeline and I really want to get passionate about it. I would look, I would look at where big markets are moving, right? So I really went Into, I started build.com because I saw the home improvement market shooting, shifting online didn't change the nature of a faucet. It just changed the nature of how someone's going to buy it. And that incremental change has a huge impact globally on every single product sold in the world. So then the question is, what are those changes that are coming up on the horizon that are early still, right? You can go into E commerce, you can come up with a differentiating value proposition, get really good with branding. You can launch a new pair of shoes like Allbirds or a pair of fancy underwear and probably be successful. But it's a red ocean. You better be damn fucking good. Well funded, and it seems like a grind now. That's not what I. That's not my flavor. Tradition of entrepreneurship or that's worked for me. I would look out to. I mean, you look out at things like, okay, what does the shift in electric vehicles mean and what are the implications of that? What is the shift? What if we're in early innings of machine learning right now? What areas is that going to impact? You know, people that got early into online gambling, people got early into some of these other categories that were nascent at the time, but we're going to explode. So where are things heading in the future? And then focus on understanding, learning and master and understanding and learning and identifying opportunities in industry and focusing on them. That's you want to. And anywhere where you see a big shift, you know, the automotive industry is. Transportation in general is massive. You know, other industries that I like to look at is like the labor market. The way that people work is going to dramatically change over the next 10 years. You know, Covid, plus working from home, plus you know, the loss of these jobs and transportation, potentially hospitality. What does that, what opportunity does that create that where it's people, people are going to need to do some type of other different work or spend their time. I don't know. I mean, these are the types of things that. These are the types of problems though that I think entrepreneurs should focus on. One, because there's a lot of value to create in those and two, they're relatively blue oceans. There's not a lot of noise and space there. And you can really be a pioneer as well.

I like that. And then so with just all of your experience and knowledge, if you were going to start like a new company today, I know you have like 10 going on right now, so maybe you.

Don'T want to start a company, but.

Where would you look? Would you look at machine learning? You know, the technological barriers are like fairly high, especially with like AI and stuff like that. If you were, you know, Christian Friedland, you had no capital, like what would you do? Like what would be. Like, do you have a framework that you would just kind of recommend or.

Well, I mean, I go back to like, if you're sitting around with a group of smart friends and talk about what's going to, what's, what's changing in the future. And there's a couple major shifts that are going on. You know, the sequencing of our DNA becoming now readily available to everybody and CRISPR for gene editing. The reality, as crazy as it may sound, of people self hackers turning themselves into fucking superheroes is no longer like completely fucking crazy. Like giving yourself genes for super strength, giving yourself genes to improve your vision. And there's going to be a tremendous amount of innovation in medicine as well as cognitive enhancement. Give yourself a super fucking brain by switching a couple of genes. This technology is not something you have to get in a magical lab. You can get buy a kit online for $150 and, and literally fucking DIY edit your genome. I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying in, you know, somebody who has a passion around that has the opportunity to create, have a big impact in the world and thereby create a lot of value. So it's going to completely change medicine and it's going to completely create. I mean CRISPR is terrifying and amazing all in the same stretch. And that's something as an entrepreneur I would say this is something I want to understand and figure out. The other thing is AI and robotics. I mean it's obvious robots are continuing AI. Really AI is not even here yet. It's really machine learning still. We're still in the early ages, we're in the baby stage of AI, but we see more and more intelligence in everyday devices that we're working in. And we know that robotics are, you know, right now, they might clean our floor or do some other dumb shit, but in the future, in the near, near future, robots are going to be doing more and more of the work. They're driving cars now, going to be doing more and more of the work in the future. And just to understand, not even, I'm not saying start a fucking robotics, a military robotics company. You're not going to be like, what's the name of the company with the dogs? Dynamics. Boston Dynamics.

Is that the walking dog?

Exactly. I know you're talking, we're not going to build like military killing machines. But just understanding what happens with that shift, how could you participate in that in a way that doesn't require a lot of capital? Is there some specific code or algorithm that you could write or some bridge that you could build between something that a big robotics company is doing? And that applies to the real world. Entrepreneurs can often insert themselves even in. Yeah, like, well, people said there's no way you're going to compete against Home Depot. And look, they're $100 billion market cap companies. They're just going to come in and crush you. And now Bill.com is a multi billion dollar player that they're both aware of because it came out of nothing. But if I'm an entrepreneur today, I'm looking at those categories where nobody's really focused on right now. Everybody talks about the FAANGs, companies, and everybody talks about, you know, what's hot, SaaS and all these things that are hot in the zeitgeist. I'm going to build a tool that does this and go to war with all these other people. I would look beyond that. I would look beyond at these big systemic shifts that are going to happen and learn and master them and figure out how you can participate, potentially commercialize and come up with a product.

So if I distill that down, you essentially look for paradigm shifts, big shifts in the way consumers purchase things, interact with day to day activities. So you capitalize on people shifting to Internet. I capitalize on people shifting to mobile. And now you're thinking of. It's always interesting talking with people like you as you're thinking bigger, but you're looking beyond where we are today and where we could be in five years and figure out a way to get in on that rising trend. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

Well, when I invest in your business, Andrew, I still remember we were sitting at Trey Sombre's in Chico. I remember that you had built an app.

Freaked me out, dude. You were like, hey, I'll give you 25k on the spot. And I was like, what the hell is going on? And you drove it like this Mercedes. I was like. Because I had come to your talks before that, like I looked up to you. I was like, dang, Christian Friedland, this guy's the man.

I remember role models for one. But so no, I had, I remember sitting down with you, the big differentiators. You built a product, you had some customers that were live and you were identified. A paradigm shift. And it wasn't a huge one, but it was a big enough one. That was a huge market opportunity. You said, every little shitty small business for $39 a month should have an app. And here's why. And that resonated. And I said, you know, absolutely they should. And this is going to be a big and growing market, especially with the proliferation of apps and the App Store and the story worked out well and sold your company as a good return on my investment. All is well done and you capitalize on that shift. Now if somebody came to me today with that same story, I would say pass. But at that time you recognize that shift. Just like if somebody came to me and said, I want to start a company selling branded faucets on the Internet, I'd say you're a fool. 20 year ago idea.

So I think I'm getting a theme here. And I am completely aligned with you on this is just the importance of markets. Because I'm not gonna lie, when you invested in me, I was 21, I didn't have any experience. My last job was at Sears. So you weren't investing in me. Cause like I was a rock star developer. Was it maybe just the total addressable market or the market opportunity? Cause I'm a big believer that if your market is big enough, you know, the team, the product, it's much easier to succeed in a big growing market than it is in like a tiny niche market where you gotta be, you know, building to perfection. Is that.

I don't know, I just, I disagree a little bit. I agree in principle, but I like, I don't. You don't need to have a huge tan. You just need to be right place, right time, sometimes, sometimes just the tallest midget as well too. Like, I'm an investor also in a company called Hydro builder Justin Marshall's business and he is the online retail, the largest online retailer of hydroponics online. And his thesis was, is weed's going legal, Everybody smokes weed, everybody needs to grow weed. And I want to be the guy selling the picks and shovels for people that are behind the grow and not be involved. The actual plant. I said I'm in. That was eight years ago and that was a similar deal to yours. And he's now, you know, way north of 20 million. I'm I think crushing 30 million in sales. And he is going, he's a big player in a small niche market that he recognized was up and coming. And he was early, very early. But it's again, it's worked out very well and it's not going to be a billion dollar company, but it could easily be $100 million company in the next three to five years, which, you know, with. He put nearly no money in other than my money. He's going to own most of the business. It's a great outcome for him, great outcome for me. So it's not just huge, Tam, it's how early are you in a trend that is very easy to predict. And what I liked about you, one, no, you, you weren't a McKinsey scholar, but you, you had grit, you had developed and launched an actual product. And I agreed with your thesis in regards to the ship to mobile, which was so obviously apparent. And there wasn't a lot of competition at the time when you're out there or competition that I thought you could effectively compete against. So yeah, there's definitely the Biggest theme, I think, is being early is really, really important, especially if you want to reduce your risk because you're not super well capitalized or the smartest guys in the room, necessarily. You don't have to be. If you get in early enough and your timing is good, you, you know, you can ride that up all the way until, you know, and then when, when the, when the big money and the smartest guys in the rooms come along, you can either sell to them or join them.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Compete them. Which is, which is even more exciting.

Yeah. So basically, spot trends and then make a bet that that market is going to grow over time. And when it grows, you're going to benefit from a growing market because you're early in it.

But you, you and I have had a prior disagreement agreement. And who's to say who's going to be right? In the short term, you sure look right. In the long term, I might be, but it's so blockchain, right? Blockchain tech is still very, very early. There's still a massive amount of applications for it. It's pretty popular and it's pretty mainstream now. And it's a bit of a red ocean. I think you, unless you have something really unique, you'd be late. I don't believe in. I believe that cryptocurrency, 99% of those stories end in tragedy because anybody can launch you and I can launch cryptocurrency while we're sitting on this call right now. Call it freaking gas coin. That's a great. It's worth whatever. Somebody to pay for it. And there's a lot of that going on. There's a lot of fraud. And I think that the cryptocurrency story ends in tears. I also think it ends with the government using the platforms that have been built to run their own currencies. But the blockchain story, to me, from a building company of value perspective, I'm sure there's a lot of opportunity still there. I'm sure that we're really early. In blockchain, we're still really early.

I would argue too early, because I was in there and developing anything was close to impossible. Literally nothing works. User experience is terrible. So maybe I guess like an entrepreneurial superpower is like, when do you enter? Because you could have entered build.com in 1995. Yeah. But then you entered in 1998. And then you. So you don't want to be like too early, but, like, not too late.

Oh, hey, credentialify way Too fucking early. I built this applicant tracking system that had, like, credential verification and it was trying to give away the applicant tracking system and just couldn't even give it away. No one needed Applicant tracking system. I get my resumes, my email. I was hard selling, hard selling, gave up, and then funded and sold for billions of dollars. But I was super early there, too early. So I have stories of being too early as well. Another good example of too early. If you start trying to start an electric car company 20 years ago, the battery technology wasn't there, the motor technology wasn't there. If you tried to start a solar company Anytime between 1965 and 2010, you were fucked. Even SolarCity got sucked up by Musk. I mean, that is the right direction, but the timing on that market is very difficult. I mean, economics are rough. You always want to look at overall economics of your market. If it's a low margin, hard to run, shit business. Electric airplanes might be the future, but the airline industry just sucks. The business model. I would never want to be involved in anything like that ever. But, yeah, I have to say, I think I wouldn't even call it a superpower. It's like, what is it? What do they say? I'd rather be. I'd rather be lucky than good. And timing isn't a thing. It's everything. So you get your timing right and you may be right on blockchain, it's probably. But I mean, I guess what I would say is it's like there's a lot of other stories of ecom, of entrepreneurs that just slugged it out and never gave up. And they might have been a little early, but then eventually paid off. I remember hearing a story about the Airbnb guys. They almost quit. They were like, fucking. They ran it for years. They had no traction. They were frustrated, and then all of a sudden just took off.

Yeah, and they had a lot of, like, consumer education.

And just.

I read a quote one time, like, the hardest thing to do in business is to change consumer habits. And I think they just kind of chipped away at that for the longest time. And people were like, yeah, I'll let you rent my home just like you renting yours.

I rent all my shoes. My wife gets fucking pissed. I rented this place to, like, this hospitality CEO for two weeks.

So let's, let's, let's try to distill this down because I think there's some. There's some amazing wisdom here, but it's hard to spot these trends. I'm going to Give a little plug for Michael right now. I have a thesis that a lot of companies have been essentially overfunded. It's a little different than the dot com boom in 1999. They're actually profitable, they're making money or no, they're not profitable, they're generating revenue, they have customers. And there's going to be a point when the funding kind of dries up and these are going to be great acquisition targets for B firm strategic, whoever. That's the bet I'm making on the market that it's going to kind of trend in a direction and grow where these companies that have been funded may not be able to reach the next round of funding and they're going to need to look for acquisition opportunities. So that's just a random thought on that right there. But I also think of businesses that way where just the importance of being able to spot a trend early and then ride that wave. How would you look at markets today? Just with a blank canvas of okay, Christian, here's like a million bucks. I need you to go find a trending market. How would you kind of like, you know, get in the weeds on that and get started? That's a super hard question. So.

No, not really. Actually it's not that hard at all because I thought actually quite a bit about this and it's really what you expose yourself to. So first off, let me just address your microacquire just for your own little self plug.

You don't take the shit on it.

I kind of agree with you. But I think the bigger opportunity for microacquire is there are a lot of bootstrap lifestyle businesses or people that started their companies. They're doing a couple, couple million dollars in revenue, they're making some money and they don't have an exit because they're too small for anybody necessarily. There's not really just a robust market of places to buy those types of businesses. There's Biz, Buy, Sell and a couple others. But somebody who really guides you through that process. So I don't. I think there's something there. I absolutely think there's something there. And as I think, you know, going back to that trend, we're entering an era where people are, I have to believe people are gonna have to start working for themselves more as these transportation jobs dry up and robotics and machine learning wipe out more and more of the workforce. So I think you might be in the right place at the right time as far as like trying to identify trends. I think the biggest thing is like Expose yourself to thought leaders, right? You know, subscribe to leading venture capitalists blogs because they're really, they're at the bleeding edge of the zeitgeist of what's really going on, you know, Sequoia A16, et cetera. And then also, you know, subscribe to like Future Loop or Ray Kurzweil's. Ray Kurzweil is a great guy to follow because he's very, very much a future thinker and a very successful predictor of what future trends have been. And just kind of inundate your inbox with, with interesting information from these people. And then of course the cool thing about Google and Facebook completely violating their privacy is then they'll see what you like and they'll start pounding you with more shit. And then you almost create this like feedback loop, this feedback loop of like future innovation. And then you just have to apply your own filter against what's too soon and what's not. Like when does this become something interesting Where I now see opportunity, where I want to go deeper and start to do some really deep research and understand another area is drugs, man. Drugs are right now we're going through maps is decriminalizing, is in the process of decriminalizing if not getting MDMA used for therapeutic use. Psilocybin mushrooms are being decriminalized and there's a bunch of companies right now that are working towards commercializing psilocybin. The marijuana play is already almost again. You're late, you're late to the weed business. If you're looking to mdma, psilocybin mushroom farms.

Are you starting one of those right now, Christian?

Yeah, right back here. Yeah. No, I'm just a consumer. No.

I get what you're saying. I love every time we talk like you think just so big in these big like, you know, obviously when we went legal that changed. You know, that's a multi billion dollar if not like I don't have a calculator in front of me, but trillion dollar market opportunity right there. But if you spotted it early, you're gonna benefit from that.

And I got a look, I got my, I got my. Made a little hay on the mobile shift. Thank you, Andrew. Making a little hay on the ship online for people buying their grow lights, et cetera. And you know, the only other thing that I think I'd like to say as well too in regards to being. Yeah. And then once you find something that you really are passionate about, the entrepreneurial, you know, it's the alcoholic telling you not to Drink.

But I remember you telling me this before.

Focus. Stay narrowly focused and be committed entirely what you're doing. And. And don't go off and start a hundred other fucking things, which is the hardest thing for somebody with an entrepreneurial mind to do. Yeah, but I still gotta say it. At least.

You told that to me several. Several times. Probably one too many times. And I obviously have more gratitude and appreciation than I could pretty much say for keeping me focused all those times when I'd send you these novel emails of like, hey, what about this pivot? What about this pivot? And you're like, dude, no, just keep. Keep going straight. All right, Christian, I know you're busy, so I want to. I want to kind of wrap this up with you. Who do you. Who do you look up to? Who do you admire? What are, like, the entrepreneurs? If you had to pick, like, two, that you're just like, dude, that's a badass. Or if you want to go the other way, you know, a dumbass or something like that.

Ah, well, you know, I'll say it.

You don't have to answer that.

Well, I would say probably, like, my favorite would be, I think Ray Kurzweil is just. He's so fucking far ahead of everybody else, and he's such a. He's such an optimist, while everybody's like, oh, global warming and starvation and fucking misery is all my feet is in politics. He's like, technology's gonna solve everything, bro. He predicted the iPhone. He predicted Solar. He predicted 10, 20 years ago. He was the guy behind Dragon Speaking Software. He predicted Siri. He wrote the fundamental tech for it. And the guy's trying to live forever, which I can appreciate as well, too. He believes in the singularity. We're going to eventually upload our brains into computers, which I agree with as well. So I'd say probably one of my favorites is Ray Kurzweil. And then, of course, I would also tip my hat to the other greats as well. I mean, what Musk has done is obvious. He's obviously very clearly in the present. Zeitgeist is amazing. But there's a lot of other entrepreneurs that arguably, you know, have been incredibly impactful, like, you know, the Rockefellers of the world. And I mean, you go. You can go down the list. And for their time, there's a bunch of different entrepreneurs that I admire for different specific reasons, and different entrepreneurs have carried the baton further and further. Da Vinci, man is a. Was one of the fucking most amazing entrepreneurs of his time. Talk about a future thinker that came up the helicopter before anybody knew how to fly. I didn't even know that.

My last question would be. And I know the answer to this. And I wonder if you still remember this. What's the one book you recommend entrepreneurs that are maybe like, just starting out to read? You told me this in a speech at CC Chico. I was in the crowd. We didn't know each other at the time. Do you remember what that book was?

It was probably one or two things. It was probably Guy Kawasaki's Rich dad, Poor dad or how to Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

It's a great. Well, here's the funny thing. Everybody and people get caught up in this, and I think there's a level of bullshit to it. Anybody who's a startup entrepreneur is think the first thing is, like, Maslow's hierarchy. How the fuck do I get rich? That's number one. Nearly every entrepreneur. And they'll come up and it's a social mission. Yeah. If you really. If you really were that altruistic, you wouldn't care about your equity or anything else. They all care. I mean, even the Google guys almost sold Excite. Luckily, Excite said no, or we'd be in an entirely different world because they were going to cash out and get paid. Yes. At a certain point in entrepreneurship, you transcend money. But where your first endeavor is, and I love Felix Dennis books, it really talks about that grind. And then you get out of that grind, you get in that slipstream, and it's absolutely unbelievable. But it's a nice story of a guy who really came from nothing and built an amazing empire. And the fun that he had it. Because people, especially Silicon Valley people, just hate talking. They never talk about money publicly. They only do it behind closed doors. And it's just absolutely silly to me because it's an important topic.

As soon as I heard you gave the speech, I literally bought the book and it changed my life. I literally, or actually you changed my life more than the fucking bug.

But you need better role models. Like I said, you need to upgrade. Now I'm just. Time to move on.

Intro me.

But, Christian, I'm looking for them myself.

All right, man. I know you're busy, but, dude, thank you so much for joining me on this. If people want to learn more about you, we're going to find you online.

You know, I'm not really all that active, you know, just chris@chrisfreedman or my chrisfreeman.com website. You can follow me on Instagram or some shit, or you come stay at my hotel in Puerto Rico. Hoteltrist.com. it's Beachfront Hotel in San Juan. There you go. You can really get to know me. Take a vacation.

I'm gonna be out there soon. All right. Christian, I appreciate it. Thanks again for everything. I owe you more than even words can put in. But, dude, you're the man.

Appreciate it, buddy. Take care, buddy.

Cheers.