Episode 3-From Boarding School to Building Platter: Ben Sharf on Betting on Yourself

Step 1 is setting the goal. Step 2 is starting it. And most people just are afraid to start because they're scared to fail. They're scared to fail. You can't be scared to fail. I actually— I'm super excited for this episode. Thank you for joining. This is season 1 of the UnOrdinaries podcast, where I interview people that I admire and I'm genuinely interested in what they're doing and what they're building. Ben is a really good friend. We've known each other for a bunch of years. I actually went to college with his sister, but he is one of the most open builders, both personally and professionally, and in terms of how he's optimizing his personal life, his business, his friends, and his family. So I'm super excited for him to join us today. A little bit about Ben and his background. He is the CEO of Platter. Platter is an awesome e-commerce platform helping brands kind of optimize their storefronts and optimizing profitability. Basically any brand that exists that wants to maximize their revenue, you go to Ben and Ben makes it happen. Ben has a really interesting background. He went to boarding school and then he played college hockey. Started a company out of college, went to Gopuff, and that led him to Platter today. So I'm super excited for this conversation. Ben, could you just kind of kick it off? You went to boarding school at 15. How was that? Like, were you scared? Were you excited?

It's a good question.

I—

so what's funny about it is I didn't know boarding school was a concept. Like, I grew up in Buffalo, New York.

Did they recruit you or did you like, hey, I want to play hockey in college. Everyone that plays hockey in college goes to boarding school.

I wanted to play hockey in college, but not necessarily that I know the path to get there. And my dad was a soccer player in his past life, and so he didn't necessarily know like where I was supposed to go to do that. Also, so are there two types of kids that go to boarding school?

Kids that go for sports, or kids that get in a lot of trouble and their parents are like, hey, I think you should, you You should go.

There's an important clarification there is a boarding school and a prep school are generally the same thing.

Got it.

When someone says prep school, it sounds like very sophisticated and like elevated, which is more like the ambitious, high-achieving kid. When you say boarding school, it sounds like the degenerate kid who like needs to go get whipped into shape. Those are the same thing. And you do have a mixed bag of them at these schools. Typically, if you go to a very good prep school and you have some degenerates there, they usually come from insane family money. I mean, that's just the reality of it, of like how they end up there.

But it's like a city kid.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I didn't know what prep school was. And then at 15, I got recruited to go to this school to play hockey there. And when I started talking to the coach to understand it, my dad wanted to do some of his own diligence to see, like, should I send my kid away to this place? It's also the price of a college tuition, which is crazy. It's even more expensive these days. And he reached out to a friend of his and he's like, hey, didn't you send one of your sons to boarding school? And it happens to be that he went to the exact school that I ended up going to in Connecticut, which was like pure coincidence. So I left at 15. It was really with the goal of playing Division I hockey. I went there, so I did 2 years of public high school at home in Buffalo and then 3 years of private school in Connecticut. And then after that, spent a year in Canada playing a year juniors and then played 4 years at Colgate University. But I would say that back to like the original question, it was probably the best decision that I ever made to go to prep school because you basically force yourself into this environment surrounding yourself with very ambitious people, and you're given resources that really force you to level up, right? Like, school was a lot harder, the sports curriculum was a lot more intense, and everything about it just like forces you to develop an independence at a young age that you don't normally get if you're still living at home at 15.

That makes a ton of sense. Did you always want to be an entrepreneur, or did you want to be a college hockey player and professional hockey player, and that turned into being an entrepreneur? What was your path to being interested in business and entrepreneurship, or did this happen later in life?

I know I always wanted to be entrepreneurial. I enjoyed playing hockey, and I think it was one of those things where, like, if the opportunity to play in college presented itself, awesome. And if the opportunity presented itself to play beyond that, also great.

Sure.

I actually, like, pitched my dad on not going to college. I don't—

I did. I did the same too. He's like, no way.

There's a program that exists. I don't— I haven't looked at it in over 10 years at this point, but it was called the Make School and it was this— it's this program that I'm sure it still exists, but it was out in Silicon Valley. And the idea was that instead of going to college, you would go to the Make School for 2 years and it was basically a 2-year fast-track course on every aspect of building a business. And then you would go work at one of the big tech companies. They had like partnerships with Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. And the idea was that the Make School was free, and then you had to go work at one of these big tech companies for I think 2 years, and they would take a percentage of your salary, and then you would leave there and go start a company. So I like pitched my dad to go to this, but like I grew up in a traditional Jewish household. My dad's a doctor, my mom's a nurse. That conversation lasted 4 seconds. So in my mind I was like, okay, well, if I'm gonna go to college, like I want to play a sport, because I knew that a sport was also a vehicle to get to a school.

Sure.

I wouldn't have been able to get into without hockey. Because the other reality is that if you're an athlete, you do get like benefits to get into better places. And that's kind of how I ended up at Colgate. But knowing that I was always entrepreneurial, like I was always tinkering with shit and building shit when I was at Colgate. Like I had like a campus coat check business when I was at Colgate.

It was like, what is a campus coat check business? Well, what I realized, you go to a frat house and like people steal jackets, people steal jackets.

And I went to school in the Northeast, and in the winter at Colgate it was really cold.

I went this year because I lost so many jackets.

Exactly.

You put it outside the frat house, like in the main room, and there's 1,000 jackets there and you just— they get taken.

So I was like, okay, well, I would probably like pay $3 to just like put my coat there and someone pay attention to it or like work with the local bars for sure.

I mean, $3 is a steal, whatever.

It was like, I don't even— I don't even know what I was charging. But my point is that I was just like always like trying to make a dollar here, there, whatever. I mean, that went back to when I was in prep school. I like started my first company. So I always had that muscle in me. But I think the big realization for me was that because I grew up in this traditional household, you were kind of taught, go to college for 4 years, get the consulting or banking job for 2 years, and kind of take the stable path.

What led you to entrepreneurship? So, I mean, that is a stable path. That's— I mean, that's the household you grew up in. Me specifically, my father was an entrepreneur. My mom is— she just opened a company. She's a newfound entrepreneur. So I grew up wanting to build my own company, build a company, chart my own path. I mean, that wasn't your upbringing. What, what led you to entrepreneurship?

Uh, a couple of my dad's friends were very successful entrepreneurs, and I think I always admired the life they had way more than the ones that were like, you know, working at a bank for 40 years.

Sure.

Not that there's anything wrong with it, it just wasn't something that resonated with me. And so I think I always had a curiosity about it, but I think it took me a lot of years in my life to come to terms with the fact that you need to live your own truth in order to, like, be fulfilled and not what everyone else wants you to do. And I think, you know, as a young kid, it was— you want to be the perfect child and do everything that everyone else is expecting from you, like get good grades, like, you know, be a good person, be an athlete, like win all the awards at school, so on and so forth. And when I got to Colgate, I fell into this trap because it's a very corporate competitive school. I think Colgate has like— I don't know the actual metric, but it's like the most people on Wall Street relative to like the size of the school. It's a very corporate heavy school, all the banking consulting places.

So I'm just pivoting for a sec. So as we hire for Cosine, we're trying to identify a few different archetypes. You were an athlete in college. Do you have any other athletes that platter today? Like, I know you hear stories how investment bankers love to hire athletes because they just have a great work ethic. I mean, what's, what's your take based on being an athlete and how you hire for Platter?

My right hand at Colgate actually played at a higher level than I did in hockey. I love athletes. Yeah, I would say like it depends on the role you're hiring for, right? I think naturally there are certain departments or roles where there are way fewer athletes. Where, like, I don't know, I don't— I'm trying to think right now, like, how many, uh, like, engineers do I know that were like high-level athletes versus like salespeople, go-to-market people? Like, I think there's just something about the personality that's a little different. But generally speaking, like, if I talk to someone that's an athlete, uh, that's absolutely a plus in my mind because I think that's a whole list of characteristics that you embody that are just unspoken if you're able to make it to a high level in a, in a sport.

So after Colgate, you got a consulting job. You went through the whole recruiting process. You were about to start the day before you started. You just had an epiphany and you said, fuck this, like this, this isn't for me. What's the backstory?

Yeah. So I got that job my junior year of college, actually. So it was like junior summer was when you like— or junior spring was when you like—

did you do the internship?

And then I didn't do the internship, but I went through the interview process and did like all the case study interviews and whatever and got the job. End of my junior year, which was cool because then it was like senior year, you can kind of just like have fun.

Sure.

And obviously like stay afloat and then go to this job after. And then the other thing that allowed me to do senior year was like really to lean into hockey because I just like didn't really have any other responsibilities. So I was like, I might as well make the most of it. Uh, I trained harder than I ever have, like that summer, like went to school a month early, uh, with two of my best friends from school. We like all went to school together early and just trained and My first 3 years playing hockey at Colgate were like mediocre. I was like a depth guy. I wasn't, I wasn't one of the, the go-to guys per se. One thing led to the next. Senior year, I ended up leading the team in points. Um, I actually tied for the lead in points with my roommate and best friend from Colgate who now plays on the Maple Leafs.

Were you the goal guy?

My senior year, I ended up being, uh, I was half and half.

Nice.

Uh, but that wasn't a reality that I lived my first 3 years, so it was like something I'd never imagined. My senior year, I signed with an agent, was talking to professional teams. We beat Brown in overtime in the first round of playoffs, and then 2 days later, the AD walked in the locker room and was like, your season's over because of a global pandemic. It's like, flipped my world upside down. So in that moment, I was planning to sign to play professionally because one of the things you could do is when your season ends your senior year, you can sign with the team and go leave school for 2 weeks and just like get your feet wet to see what the experience was like. And I was really interested to try something like that because I didn't know if I wanted to pursue it after school. But if you can try it with like no strings attached, that's awesome.

Yeah.

Wasn't able to do that. Got sent home, graduated online, spent the next like 9 months. I guess the other detail to add here is when COVID happened, not only like did I go home and graduate online and had no clue what was going to happen with hockey, they gave us the option to defer our analyst job for a year because they didn't know what was going to happen to their own business. So I basically got a free option call to defer for a year, have a year to do whatever I wanted, and worst case scenario would go back to the consulting job. Realized, uh, after a few months, like, hockey was off the table because it was like 9 months. They didn't know when seasons were going to start, how much guys were gonna get paid. And I was like, you know what, it served its purpose. I'm ready to move on.

And you had a different passion. You were always—

yeah, I wanted to explore other things. It served its purpose and I was ready to try other things. And I had this full year before going to the consulting job So I ended up joining an early-stage COVID testing startup that scaled to $50 million in revenue in 5 months, which is like a crazy experience.

How big was the team?

I mean, it got to a point where it was in the hundreds because we were across 14 states.

Crazy.

And I did that. And then that experience came to an end for reasons we don't need to go into. But I— at that moment in time, it was about a month before my start date at my consulting job. I had full intention of going to the consulting job.

Sure.

And I was out in LA visiting my sisters, and a mentor of mine connected me with another mentee of his, and we had breakfast in LA. And he was like, what are you up to right now? And I was like, funny enough, I just finished this. I'm planning to go to this job. And we had a bunch of mutuals and a lot of like, uh, similar experiences. And he was like, do you want to come work for me and do BD at GoPuff? And I was like, it's interesting, but my job literally starts in 2.5 weeks, so I would need to explore this in a very expedited way. And in my mind, I always told myself that I was going to get a consulting job for 2 years to be able to then join a high-growth tech startup and do like business development of some kind. At least at the time, that's like what I thought my path was. And so in my mind, I told myself if I could—

no, knowing you now and having known you over the past few years, you're not a consulting guy.

I joke that I would have either been fired or I would have quit the first week. But again, like, you're a product of your environment. So had I gone there, you probably would have never known this version of me because it would have shaped my worldview, perspective, whatever. But I ended up going through like 7 rounds of interviews in like 9 days. And the realization I had was, why would I go to the consulting job if I can just skip that step to get to where I thought I wanted to go anyways? And got an offer from them like 2 days before my first day at my consulting job, countered, agreed with them 12 hours before my first day, and then told the consulting company that I wasn't coming anymore. They sent me a label to send back my laptop and I started at GoPuff and the rest was history.

How long were you at GoPuff? Because your time at GoPuff gave you the idea to start Platter, which is what you're building today.

I was there for a year.

You were there for—

I spent a year. I would spend— I spent the year building an e-commerce business unit there, which is how I got into this ecosystem.

At the same time, were you ideating on ideas? Because, I mean, in college you were always creating businesses. Were you just like, hey, I need that idea? To give me the excuse to go do my own thing?

I think it was twofold. I think one was ideating on ideas and the other one was I wanted to get a little bit of experience and build a little bit of a network and like learn from some people because I was very green. Sure. I admire and respect people who are like the high school dropout or the college dropout who just went right into it and built the thing for them.

Definitely.

But I think for me, in some ways it was like I needed an income.

Sure.

Like I wasn't really in a place where I could just start my own company that wasn't generating revenue and like live off what? Like I wanted to— I didn't want to live in my parents' basement. I wanted to like be in New York and like be around my friends and whatever. So I was like, all right, I'll get a job that's relevant to my interests. I'll tinker on the side on my weekends and my evenings, whatever. And you know, when the rubber meets the road and the opportunity's there, like I'll jump. And I was there for a year. I met a lot of amazing people in the industry, uh, ended up joining forces with, uh, a guy who worked at the COVID testing startup with me. And then one of my childhood friends, and we were all at other jobs, you know, spending our nights and weekends. And it got to the point where we started to get a little bit of traction. And then you hit that inflection where if you don't lean into it, it's going to start to go backwards. And you kind of know it's a natural progression where like it's time to make the jump and the rest is history.

Was everyone on board? Were all of the co-founders ready to quit their job and start Platter full time?

Yes. But what's interesting is that we actually sequenced who quit first. So my technical co-founder quit first. So any profit that we had went into his pocket to fund him because that was his only salary. And like the technical one needed to go first because there's nothing for you.

You need the product. Yes.

So he basically jumped full time and we were just kind of like living a double life, like working nights and weekends until it got to a point where it was sustainable enough for all of us to kind of make the jump.

Could you explain what Platter is in your own voice?

Yeah. I mean, in the most simple terms, we build and optimize Shopify stores. So our whole thesis was that the traditional development agency model with e-commerce brands is very twisted because there's an incentive misalignment where as a service provider you want things to be more complicated and take more time because you make more money. Sure. So our belief was that if we can build a product and offer a service with it, we can introduce a lot of efficiencies that you don't normally get. So it's more cost effective, it's faster, and you benefit from the economies of scale of all the other brands we've worked with. We've built over 200 storefronts in the last 4 years, which anyone in this industry would know.

The total sales, all those 200 storefronts combined. I mean, do they do billions a year in sales?

Oh yeah. Cumulative, you're saying like GMV? Yeah. Yeah. In the billions.

So could you give a real life example? A brand that doesn't use Platter today, they do the— they have a regular Shopify storefront or they do it themselves. And let's just say last year for Black Friday, they did $5 million in sales this year. Shortly earlier this year, they got set up on Platter. What's that delta? How much are you increasing revenue?

So it's— I wouldn't say it's as black and white as that because the most important thing is like what you see on the— like what you see front-facing doesn't actually tell you the story that's going on behind the scenes, right? Like the anecdote or the example I would give you is like you meet someone, they might smile and shake your hand, but like, dude, you don't know what they're going through.

Yeah.

It's the same thing with a storefront. Like, all because it looks pretty, it doesn't mean that the actual engine that's running that thing is working effectively. So what you learn is that there's a lot of bad actors in this industry, and there's a lot of inefficiencies that happen that people just— you don't know what you don't know, right?

Could you explain bad actors? I, I'm not—

yeah, so, so like people just overcharging for a service because you don't have any benchmarks to know if you're getting ripped off or not, right? So we have anecdotes and case studies of brands we've we work with where we've saved them half a million dollars in annual operating expenses by moving to Platter because they were paying way more than they should have and had a way more complicated storefront infrastructure than they should have. But they didn't know. No one else told them. It's like most people in this industry, how do they figure out like who are they going to work with? They ask their other buddy who's like building a brand, like, yo, who built your website? Oh, you want me to introduce you to them? Great. But if the person you ask for the intro doesn't actually know what good looks like, now you're just spreading like information that is not quality. So like from our perspective, if you can just improve the awareness of what you're doing is like the right solution. The same way with really any business fundamentally, it's just like doing a lot of good work for an extended period of time has its compound effects, which is how we've been able to get to where we are now because we have really good brand equity, because we've worked with a lot of really big logos. And naturally now when other brands are looking for a solution to this problem, and they come to our website or they hear me talk about it or they meet someone, they're like, wait, you work with like this brand, this brand, this brand. Like, I would also love to talk to you because clearly if you were successful with them, you know a thing or two about the problems I'm facing.

What's your goal for Platter 5 years from now? I mean, you guys are growing like crazy. You just raised the fundraising round and you guys were profitable before that. What, what, what is that cash being used for? And as you kind of plan Platter 5 years from now, what does that look like?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's been all, all of it's been towards like growth and products. I think 5 years from now, like, this is a business that you— it's an, it's an acquirable business.

Sure.

I think it's a business in an industry that has a lot of brand equity that some of these other larger giants would love to be able to like get a lot of these logos in their portfolio and can add more scale to the business. Right. Like, I think it's something that we're very capital efficient. Like, we've only raised a couple million dollars. I don't necessarily think this is a business that would benefit from raising tens of millions of dollars. I think it's a business that's a lot more acquirable. With like capital efficiency. So I think for us it's continuing to compound on the growth and then just finding a larger player in the ecosystem who maybe offers complementary services, who wants to like take our product and offering and our portfolio to like roll into their business.

That makes sense. So how big is the Platter team today?

25.

As you hire and scale, like what's the archetype of someone you look for? Like we were 18 people now for Cosign. And we're still iterating on each hire, who's the right fit. And unfortunately, there's a— there's been some people that joined our team, then shortly after we realized they weren't a fit. So, I mean, you have— we've had conversations kind of offline. How have you hired people in the past? Like, how has that changed since you started to today?

I would say of all the, like, aspects of building a business, I think people is the thing that you learn the most when you start scaling, because it's also something that you can't really learn until you try it yourself. Right. Like, I think there's, there's something to be said about the concept of understanding something at the intellectual level versus the experiential level. You can read books about it and talk to people about it, but until you actually go through it yourself, you don't really understand it. I think for me, what I've realized in hiring, there's a couple of things. The first one is understanding that you need different personality types for different roles. You can't expect your sales guy to be the same personality as your engineer if they're going to be good at their job. Yeah, you find unicorns who are like extroverted and can also be very technical. They're not— they're far and few in between. If you find them, like, more power to you. I would say for me, there's like a list of characteristics that are like table stakes. And then beyond that, it's a little bit more nuanced depending on what the role is. But something that I always look for in someone is curiosity. That's like a very important characteristic for me because I want to know, like, are you someone who just wants to clock in and clock out because it's going to give you a paycheck? Or do you actually take pride in what you're doing? And you give a shit enough to understand why things work the way that they do.

What is the Platter hiring process like?

How do you—

I agree, but how do you effectively benchmark curiosity as part of the hiring process?

Well, that is typically just in like a 15-minute behavioral conversation. Like, I love talking to candidates early on in the process. I would say it depends. It depends where they come from. So like, if I get a warm referral for a potential role, like, that's something that I'll take. If we have people that are like applying to jobs typically of other people on the team who will like screen first. But like one of my favorite questions to ask a candidate is, what do you do for fun? Like if your answer for me is like, I love watching Netflix, like I love taking my dogs for walks, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But know that you're in an interview for a role where you're probably not the only person that are being asked this question. So like say something that's going to be memorable, but also like say something that's true. Don't just like make something up. Like, I had some guy who went down a rabbit— we didn't end up hiring him, but we went on this rabbit hole about like board games that he loves playing. And I'm a big board game nerd, so we ended up talking about board games for 15 minutes. Yeah, but I actually think there's power in something like that.

Absolutely.

Because you are willing to—

you're unique.

Yeah, you're unique. And I've realized, like, I asked that question and then I like forced that question back on myself. Like, I'm thinking, okay, well, if I'm asking this person this question, like, Ben, what do you like to do for fun? I feel like my range of activities are so obscure and random. It's like I'm a huge board game nerd. I'm a huge fitness guy. So like I just did a boxing fight. So that was like, I love doing extreme physical activities. Meditation is a newfound activity that I really enjoy. I also love to travel. I mean, I think that's like a very table stakes answer as well. And I also like building businesses. But I think when you combine, like, you like to go places, you like to build things, you like playing board games, you love physical activity and like trying new things. Like, I also like the board game one was a big one. Like, I got— I stumbled upon a friend who like started chess boxing because I like really liked chess and then boxing. And I was like, I would never find myself even—

are you a chess boxer now?

I— my friend is like pushing me to, to do it because I like did the boxing thing.

You had a big past few weeks. You were on 60 Minutes and 30 Under 30. That's, uh, congratulations.

Thank you. Same you.

I appreciate it.

I actually don't know if I texted you this and told you this, but I've told multiple people this. The way that I found out that I got on Forbes was because you texted me.

Yeah, no, I, I—

you texted me, congrats. I was like, for what, dude? And you're like, on Forbes. And I was like, what are you talking about? And you're like, check your email. And it was in my spam.

So funny. I just got back from the gym, I got an email, and then I went to go look at it, and it's pretty cool. I mean, did you, did you know you were gonna like— what was that process like? Did they reach out to you to verify information? Because for me, they reached out over the summer, they asked for financials, balance sheet, etc., kind of provided all of that to them. Somebody, one of my, one of our investors nominated me and then I didn't hear back since. I was like, damn, like, I guess I didn't get it. Like, at the end of the day, it's just a list. I mean, it's cool for just like a social validation, but I mean, it has no bearings on success, but it is cool. Like, I'd rather be on it than not. And I'm grateful to be on it with a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs like you. But what was that process like for you? Because it's funny, like I had some friends that like to joke around that reached out to me. They're like, how much did you pay to be on it?

That was— I was just going to ask you if you got asked that question, because that was one of my— one of my employees was like, yo, congrats. And he's like, I have to ask you a question. Like, how much did you pay for it? He's like, because if you did, I'm going to retract my congratulations. So funny enough, I didn't pay for it.

I don't believe that. I don't— I believe in the integrity of Forbes and then no, I don't think anybody pays for it. I don't think—

but I don't know, like, who do you go to? To, like, is there somebody you reach out to who's like, yo, I'm willing to pay you, like, can I do that? I don't know, is it like an under-the-table, like, broker type of thing?

I don't— I mean, if you look at, like, the categories, like, and you have really reputable judges, like, for, for finance, I'm pretty sure you have the Tariq from Kalashi. You have really reputable people that are curating the list and I mean, I believe $5,000 is going to like get them out of bed to like— I agree.

No, but for me it was— I mean, we filled out the application to apply and then had a bunch of people recommend us. I think I probably got 20 people to write recs. That's awesome. And diversified that across. So what's funny about it is that I handled the whole process for me and my co-founders. Sure. Like I wrote their applications also and like I basically got this list of people to recommend us and had different people do it for each of us, um, because I do think there's like a volume game there where it's like if you have like these 20 people that I got to write recommendations, all had been on Forbes in the past in like relevant categories. So I think like you kind of have to make it to a place and you don't have to get that many. I think for me it's like, well, just make sure kind of thing, uh, but I think if you get enough people who've done it before who have a good reputation, it's almost like you become unavoidable.

Could you talk about goal setting? Because right after you, you posted that, that you were selected for Forbes, you shared something you wrote.

It was January 15th of 2020.

Yeah. So 5 years ago, 6 years ago, where you talked about your goals for, for your 20s, for the remainder of your 20s. And one came true. Thankfully, the other one didn't come true. And that was to be on Forbes. What was the other one that didn't come true?

To complete 2 years at my consulting job and get one promotion.

Well, thankfully, I think it all— I think it all worked out.

I think, uh, there's probably some people— I mean, my co-founder is actually living proof of it— that get both of those. Yeah. Uh, but I think sometimes one is easier if you don't do the other.

For sure. Everyone has their own path.

Yeah.

But for goal setting, what does that look like for you? So that was Are you in the Founders community? Spivak's community?

I'm not. I'm not in the Founders Club, but I will give Aaron a lot of credit because Aaron is a very good friend of mine. And I— I don't know if you asked me that because you're referencing this goal setting thing.

Yeah. No, he shares his goal setting. I'm not familiar with it. Like, I obviously am familiar with goal setting, but he talks about how he sets goals. I'm curious.

So I sat down— I sat down with Aaron 2 years ago for like 5 hours. Just me and him, like in a room with a whiteboard. And he walked me through his entire goal setting process, which is like this.

Is that what you follow today?

Yeah.

Yeah. What is that? Because I set goals, my goals, I write on my notes app and I like it. But I also— I've never done a mood board. I've always wanted to do a mood board. And I feel like what he's shared, it's like a combination of the two. How do you set your goals and do you think it's an effective So the thing I'll say about it is effectively setting goals is really hard.

It's really hard because it's really uncomfortable because you need to set goals that are like attainable. But if they don't make you a little bit uncomfortable, they're not really good goals to share. The idea is not to set a goal that you know you're going to hit just to like stroke your ego, right? Like I, I have a friend of mine when I posted that, one of the most successful entrepreneurs I know, he's 31 now. I think he sold 5 companies already. Uh, he sent me a screenshot of his goals that he wrote for his 20s that he wrote in 2016. Dude, his— these were his goals on his list. Uh, get a pilot license and buy a plane, do $100 million in revenue as an entrepreneur, get courtside season tickets, um, buy a house. Well, a couple other ridiculous ones, and run a marathon. He accomplished all of them except the marathon. And I was like, dude, the only one you missed was the easiest one on that list, objectively.

So funny.

But I say that because—

is he gonna do it? Is that—

I don't know at this point. I was joking with him because his co-founder of his, his business that he's building now is an Ironman guy. So I'm like, dude, you were literally building a business with a maniacal guy who like runs marathons for fun. Like, I feel like you have to just do it just because you didn't finish it in your 20s. Anyways, the reason I say this is because I went back and read my goals for my 20s. First of all, hilarious, because there were certain goals I put on there that were so ambiguous and not actually goals because I didn't really know how to set goals. Some of them were tangible, sure, but a lot of them weren't. Uh, the second thing is I, I think it's a really good exercise for people because it's really cool to just see how your worldview evolves, uh, when you look back at it years later. Because again, like this concept that I just said to you about like set audacious goals that really scare you a little bit.

How are you setting goals for next year? What's your process? Is that— is it— you just write on a piece of paper, I want to do this, or is it— is it more complex?

So it's— there's like a— there's like a template presentation that like Aaron gave me that I'll use, which is basically like setting your goals. Like the mood board is one of them, setting your goals from like a physical perspective, from a wealth perspective, from a mental perspective. And there's like different questions to ask yourself. One of the big things that Aaron is really good at is around limiting beliefs. That's a huge problem for people that they like shy away from doing things because they don't think they're capable. And the other piece about it too, which I credit Aaron, I would say to being one of his superpowers, is simplification, right? So the way that I'll pose that to you, like, we can run— let's run through this exercise for like one goal. If you tell me, Ben, my goal for next year is I want to make $100,000, like that's, that's my financial goal. I would say, okay, that's great. How— well, actually, let's, let's do this. I'm going to pose this back to you. We should just— we can just pick a number. It doesn't have to be— let's just, let's just say $500,000. Let's say you tell me I want to make $500,000 and I say, great, how are you going to do that? Right? Like you're going to talk about what are the, what are the ways that I'm generating income today? So let's just say with Cosign, sure, you have a salary of $100,000. So now there's a delta of $400,000 that you need to make up. Okay, well, can you generate an additional $400,000 from Cosign? If the answer is yes, how are we going to do that? How many customers do you need to sign to generate how much revenue to be able to give yourself an additional $400,000? If the answer is that's unattainable, what are the other revenue streams that you potentially have in your life that can do that? Do you have investment properties? Great. How many do you have? How much are they generating you month over month? How much of that can you take into your pocket as income? Are you going to do consulting? How many hours in your week can you dedicate to consulting and how much will you bill for your time and how much money will that make you? What I'm getting at here is that it needs to be so simplified that it's actually very clear what this tangible path is. You can't just like write a number down and be like, I'm going to strive for this and I'm just going to hope it happens. So the idea with goal setting is set your goals, make them uncomfortable, but like try to actually map out like what are the steps I need to take in order to get there? Because it gives you something very tangible to like resort back to. Like, I think one of Aaron's goals was something about like the number of members or number of, I think, admissions calls they would have with Founders Club. And it's like, okay, well, I need to be able to figure out how to like book this many meetings. I need this many admissions people to talk to this many people to get to this goals over this time, this goal over this time horizon. It's very tangible. Yeah, but again, those are very uncomfortable conversations to have with yourself because at the same time, if you knew how to make $500,000, you probably would have done it already, right? So you just need to like set something that makes you uncomfortable, reason with yourself on how you're going to get there. And then like Aaron, the other thing that Aaron said to me, which I resonate with, is like, know what the end of the story looks like so you can reverse engineer it on how you're going to get there and how you're going to make it happen. So when you set your annual goals, then you can break it down into micro goals to really work towards it.

Step 1 is setting the goal. Step 2 is starting it. And most people just are afraid to start. And because they're scared to fail, they're scared to fail. You can't be scared to fail. I actually, I actually have to—

I don't even remember, to be honest with you, what I set my goals to be for 2025. And I'll look at the end of the year and then I'll recalibrate for 2026 because like your question was, what are your goals for next year? The reality is that the last 45 days of my life have been probably the craziest 45 days of my life. So I'm still in this period of just like decompressing and processing. Yeah, but towards the end of the year, like, I'll carve out time.

So we have a few minutes left. And one, one thing I really appreciate about you is you're just so open how you optimize, like, personally and professionally. Something you did, which I think is insane.

You did a—

it was a 7-day or 10-day?

10.

A 10-day silent retreat. What is that? Is that like a yoga retreat? You just sit in a room and you can't speak to anybody.

Yeah, it's—

sorry, you didn't open your mouth once.

You could. So each day you could talk to the assistant teacher for up to 5 minutes to like ask questions about the practice.

So you—

because there's— so it's, it's called Vipassana meditation. It's like a very specific type of meditation. And there was like a 1-hour period every day where the teacher would have like office hours, basically, because over the 10 days you're learning like different things. There's like a very, uh, rigorous process that you follow. Like, what you're doing on day 1 is not the same as day 7, but you can't do what you did on day 7 unless you learn what you did on day 1. But you can ask questions to the teacher to make sure you're like understanding things properly. So you're doing—

so what is a typical day?

Uh, so I preface this in saying I went into this experience blind. I had a friend who did it whose advice was go into it blind, because typically people, when they find out what a typical day looks like, they end up getting scared of actually doing it. Yeah, it was, uh, wake up at 4 AM every day, meditate from 4:30 to 6:30, breakfast from 6:30 to 7:15, 7:15 to 8:00 you had a break so you could like walk around or rest, 8 to 9 was a group meditation, 9 to 11—

what is that? Like, what is meditation? Like, so is it— are you doing yoga meditation? You're just sitting there like— no.

So this, this specific practice is basically grounded in the law of nature, which says that everything is impermanent. So the idea is to retrain the habit pattern of your mind. So when you're in a deep meditation, what's happening is you'll start to get sensations on your body. Those sensations will either manifest in the form of gross sensations, which are like pain. Like, I don't know if you ever meditated, but like your leg starts to hurt and you're like, ow, and you want to move it to make it go away. Or like craving and clinging is the other sensation, which is like euphoric, where you almost feel like you're on drugs, but you're actually just meditating. All of these sensations that come to your body are actually subconscious experiences that were buried in your subconscious from your past. So a time in your life where you got really angry at someone, that will manifest in the form of like a very gross sensation. The idea of the meditation is to retrain the habit pattern of your mind to remain equanimous and not react to these, these sensations. So like, I can basically sit and meditate for an hour without moving a muscle now. I mean, I practice for hours and hours. The idea is that if you can teach your mind not to react to these sensations, which are basically experiences from your subconscious, it will retrain your mind. So in your conscious life, you don't react to these experiences the way that you maybe did in your past. So like, for example, if someone says something where normally the old version of me would like be explosive and get really angry about it, I can like teach myself to breathe for a second knowing that that moment and that sensation is impermanent. So there's no reason to overreact because it will go away.

Would you do it again?

It's a good question. I think I still need to like process it a little bit. I have a friend I met there, because you can talk on the last day, who the first time he did it, when he left, he's like, I'm never doing that again. And 8 months months later, he's like, I have to go back. And he does it once a year now.

Who would you recommend it for?

Um, I would say it's one of those things where like, you'll know it's— you'll hit a point in your life where like, you'll know it's your time to want to do something like that. I think people who are either at a crossroads with some big decision in their life, um, a lot of people with severe trauma go do something like this. It's a really good medium to like learn how to forgive or learn how to like sit with things that maybe dictate your life. Um, I think people who have a curiosity to like understand what the mind is capable of— that was really my driving force. Like, it's— your mind is powerful, and most people will never be able to experience what that is because it's— you're basically experiencing since, um, stimulation deprivation for 10 days. Like, it's no technology, no reading, no writing, no exercise, no talking.

So if you walked out of it with one big takeaway, what would it be?

Um, I had a couple big takeaways, but I'd say the biggest one is probably that something that I was guilty of was basically assigning labels to myself that weren't necessarily true. So my example for you would be like, I would always identify myself as a chaotic person because I live in a busy area, I work in a busy environment, I'm very ambitious, moving fast, always doing things. So I always like associated with this con— this concept of chaos with ambition. But what I realized is I'm not actually a chaotic person. I just told myself that and started to like manifest it becoming real because I gave that label to myself. But the truth is just that I'm a product of the environment that I'm in, and I'll go all in on whatever it is. Like, put me in the world I'm in now, I'll be very ambitious. But like, put me in the woods for 10 days and I'll also lean into whatever that can provide me. So I realized like, don't just box yourself into something because you think it's the right thing to be. Just like actually observe the reality as it is and and just like let it happen.

So when you went to your girlfriend and you're like, hey, and you live with her, hey, I'm going to leave for 10 days to go on this silent meditate— meditation retreat. What was her response?

So she actually was the first one to tell me about this. So she wanted to do it. And then she, with her work schedule, she just didn't. Yeah. Finding 10 days is very challenging, right? Because you're off the grid, you have no access to technology. Um, she was like, she didn't think I would actually be able to make it through 10 days. She knew that I wouldn't quit just because of my mentality, but she's like, this is going to be really hard for you. Uh, but ironically, I think it was equally as hard for her as it was for me. Like, I've never spent 10 days apart from her since I met her.

Yeah.

Uh, and after the fact, I saw my phone. She would send me videos like every other day and long text messages about what she did that day. Just about how she missed me.

Amazing.

Uh, yeah, which is awesome. And after, like, I got to hear about her experience, and she's like, I was crying for like the first 4 days, and by the 5th day my friends were like, all right, you need to like get it together. Because the other thing too is, I mean, being in her position, she's like, what if he goes in there and has this realization that this isn't maybe the right situation for him? And you have intrusive thoughts, which are very normal. Uh, but I can tell you that anyone in a healthy relationship, you come out of there loving your partner 10 times more than you did before you went in there. Because when you strip your ego away and all you have is like your thoughts and your time, and time you really start to like understand your motivations for why you do certain things. Like, why do you spend time with these people? Are you working on the things you're meant to be working on? Are you living a fulfilling life? And it really lets you evaluate everything. Uh, I would say it was the hardest thing I've ever done, but the most profound, profound thing I've ever done. It was the definition of delayed gratification.

Ben, thank you so much for, for sharing privately with me, publicly with everybody. This was awesome. I'm a huge fan of you. I'm rooting for you. I appreciate you. Thank you.

Right back at you, dude. I appreciate it.