Why Companies Fail Without Posting Content in 2025 | Pearl Talent

Just hit post. Everyone thinks everything needs to be perfect. People don't fucking remember. Just post it and keep going. Like, people don't post content like, oh my God, someone's going to judge me. Welcome back to another episode of the Isaac Kassab Podcast.

This time out of New York.

This time out of New York.

Um, they put like the cringiest video of me doing like, uh, one of those like TikToks where it's like, oh, sorry, the boss is in the meeting and it's me doing like some dance. It's like, so it is.

That's great, dude. You should be doing all those things for your business.

It's kind of like a full send situation.

It's good.

Just give everything a shot. See what pops, right? That's it.

Um, you're driving this bus.

What's been going on?

What's been going on? Um, I do 3 things. I make content, I try to close deals, and I box. I feel like that's all I'm doing in my life right now. Yeah, I mean, my family and my relationships are like, and you, and you, unspoken. That's just like obvious first, number 1.

And, and you say that my travel life is crazy, but your travel life is actually as much as mine, just like in shorter bursts, which could be worse.

Not right now. Right now I'm like locked in.

Locked in.

I'm here.

I think we need to have like a Ben and Isaac show.

Ben and Isaac show?

I just think like it's just so much—

We're never in the same city.

There's so much to be said. No, but I appreciate you spending some time with me in this setting. I think, you know, it was a— for those of you who don't know Ben, Ben's one of my closest friends, was my roommate for my last year of full-time New York, Ben was the antithesis of our content journey and like a lot of what we're doing now to share more than anything, like how we've been able to impact both the lives of talent and like the founder lives and like unlock a lot for what founders have been able to do with hiring internationally. But like the content piece has become more and more fun. The beginning was so painful.

Yeah.

And then with that was like the you got to start content.

I think it's like there's two ways to live in New York. One is you just like, like the city and try to be like a normal person. And the other one is you're like building a business and you try to maximize every second of your time and every inch of your space towards your goal of building your business. And I feel like I took the second approach before you moved in. And then when you moved in, it was kind of like, you don't know what you're getting yourself into. Like, I'm not joking. This is like actually how it operates. Yeah. And I think it was a bit of a shell shock for you. It's like you wake up at 7:30 in the morning and there's 15 founders on your roof, like sauna and cold plunging. But it's just like being all in on whatever the mission is that you're after. And I think community building then turns into content because you want to amplify the things that you're doing and then it kind of just compounds from there. I think you said something interesting right before we started. Which was unless your product is flying off the shelves, which 99.99% of businesses, that is not the case, right? You are a marketing company.

100%.

And most companies have way too big of egos to realize that they are a marketing company.

Yeah.

And yeah, marketing is a very vague term that can be done in millions of different ways. But for like smaller, scrappier businesses, like founder-led marketing to me is like the table stakes.

Yeah.

And I, I think being in New York, being around the founder communities that we're around, we tend to like see or hear trends way before they actually hit mainstream. And I think this concept of founder-led marketing and the storytelling that goes into that has been talked about for a few years now. And I think for the first time over the last couple of months, from my perspective, it's very mainstream. Yeah, I, I mean, I think the biggest turning point or thing to talk about is how I gave up my corporate job 12 hours before my first day because I realized a suit and tie in a cubicle just was never going to work for me. I always joked I would have either quit after 2 2 weeks or gotten fired after like a day. And then I—

Cobalt came immense.

Well, yeah, elite. Ended up, ended up doing a couple of different startups for a few years and then eventually went off on my own and started Platter. But along the way, I have dabbled in a lot of different mediums of content, did some YouTube stuff with my roommate before you, Ryan, which was pretty crazy. I have a podcast that's almost at 100 episodes. I hired a full-time videographer 3 months ago, so like going all in on YouTube now. I've dabbled in content in a lot of different mediums. I have tested a lot of different things. I think my biggest regret was not starting 5 years earlier when I watched like all my creator friends do it.

Sure.

I think I'm in an interesting spot because I have a ton of friends that are full-time content creators and a ton of friends that are entrepreneurs, and I kind of feel like I sit in the middle to some degree and have started to like pull some founder friends into the content world and some creator friends into the business world. And so it's been like an interesting thing to watch. But what's ironic about this, at least from my lens, is like I don't really have that big of an audience. Like I have, I don't know, 13,000 followers on LinkedIn, 10,000 on Instagram, a couple thousand on Twitter. But I feel that the opportunities and the impact that that has had on my life and my business is orders of magnitude greater than like the vanity metrics that someone else from the outside looking in can see. Everything from raising money to closing deals to hiring talent to just getting opportunities it— I mean, I attribute back most of the success to being willing to be vulnerable on the internet, because when you put something on the internet, you're just increasing the surface area of the number of people that are going to see that thing. And all it takes is for one person to resonate with that for it to change the trajectory of your life. And I really do believe in that.

I mean, it's, it's a fact. And like, I think like to everyone else, like, this is, this is Ben, Ben Sharf. Outside of being a phenomenal friend, phenomenal founder, he's like really taken the lead in what I think is like founders diving extremely deep into content versus like to what Ben was mentioning, like a lot of creators kind of led the way and then the founders moving into that motion has been one of the most successful marketing strategies I think that is coming to like our world of tech founders and just overall builders. Ben brought me into the content journey and like really explained like where he was seeing upside in his early years of that and With that, he built an incredible tech company. On top of that, he's built some phenomenal communities of people. He hosts people over his house consistently. When we lived together, we were hosting twice a week sauna ice baths. Now it's Advanced to Poker as well, and some other meetups. And inviting 2,000 people to see him knock someone else out is probably the best way to say that on this forum. But I think what was super interesting is when we started bringing together founders at the roof. I think like just the energy that was buzzing at 7:30, 8 o'clock in the morning when like people were doing the ice baths, people were jumping in the sauna. A lot of times you'd go for like a run with people and like, it's funny 'cause you'd think about what I thought about that as someone who wasn't going out of my way to create content around this sort of thing. And a lot of it was giving, this is anxiety-ridden. I don't wanna spend a lot of my time putting content together. In the early, early days, it was like, ah, like, how does this change my positioning as a founder and like what people think of me? It's been only great things, thank God. But like, it was really the start of something special in terms of like the community and the content. Like those two pillars are so important to most companies. And so like, what were some of the aha moments? And I think it might have been the YouTube era with Ryan, no? Like that was some really crazy stuff that you guys were putting together. Like, What led you to be like, all right, like, this is actually going super well and I'm going to go deeper and deeper on this for my business and for my life?

I just think it's more about getting over what other people think of you. Yeah, but I think it's what— it's, it's kind of—

you hounded me for—

it's one of those things where everyone's in the room and we're all thinking the same thing, but only one person is gonna actually have the balls to say whatever the thing is that everyone's thinking. Yeah, like, I feel that way about content. Everyone is scared to be the one to say it because they don't want their other friend to text their other friend and be like, oh my God, you see how cringy that video was that he posted on the internet? Or, yeah, well, you post a video that only got 2 likes and all your other posts got 100 likes and you're embarrassed that you think that your social clout went down because no one engaged with your post. And it's always just another intrusive thought. And yeah, like, I started doing the content thing, but I feel, I feel as though similarly to how I bothered you for so long before you finally did it, like, I went through the same journey you did just way before you went through that journey.

Yeah.

So for me, watching a lot of my friends go from zero to massive both from vanity metrics to opportunities to just like growing up. It was really cool to watch. And every day that would go by, my negative self-talk to myself was, it's too late to start posting now. If I would have started 2 years ago, I would have had so many cool things to talk about. Why would I start doing it now? Yeah. And it's just this perpetual negative self-talk. And I don't even remember the exact moment, but I would always dabble and then not and then dabble. And at some point I just accepted the fact that my value as an operator in business in general is really just around relationships. I'm a visionary type person who has a million ideas. I'm not the best person to be like in the weeds making the spreadsheet and making the pitch deck, but I can sure as fuck tell you what I think the idea should be and who are the 5 people that you should talk to to bring it to life. So when I think about how do I become the best at the thing I think I'm good at, content is just another lever because content is a one-to-many relationship. I only have so much capacity in my life to sit down and have conversations, to text people, to have meetings. There's a finite amount of time to do that. But if I can build leverage on the internet and post something that can be seen by hundreds or thousands of people, it just allows me to be better at the thing I'm good at, which is the moment that I realized I want to actually be successful one day. Like, I need to be exceptional, exceptional at something. And to me, I think it's storytelling and relationships. And so I Content is the obvious way to get there for me.

Yeah, and it's like, from all the relationships that I've met through you, it's also incredible, like, there's something to be said about consistently putting things out and being top of mind for people as well, right? It's not just like, is this thing gonna go extremely viral? And that might even be the metric that we're looking for, right? Vanity metrics that you're mentioning. It's like, or maybe that's not a vanity metric, but maybe it's, there's something around like being top of mind that like consistently helps. I know like it's, Platter's in such a very niche vertical, and so you've been able to conquer meeting everyone in that space, and like, to your point, you can only go to so many conferences, right? But if you go to the conferences, you take the video editor, and then you have a really strong magnet around like, how do people look at you when they think about your vertical?

It was so crazy. I don't even know if I told you this, but there was a huge e-com conference in New York a week and a half ago in Brooklyn called Beanstalk. And I went to it and brought my— I'm friends with the founder, Beanstalk, and brought my videographer to the 2-day conference with me and we filmed a bunch of content and I have multiple clips. I have one clip. This girl walked up to me, she goes, oh my God, are you Ben Sharf from LinkedIn? And I was very honest with her. I was like, I don't know you. Yeah, I wasn't. And I looked at her, I go, you have 2 options. You rather me bullshit you and be like, oh my God, so good to see you, or tell you the truth. Like, I don't know who you are. Yeah, I love your content. Like, okay, well, why have you never liked it or commented on it? Like, again, that's like example number 1 of what you actually can see visibly from a vanity metric perspective is not the indicator of people who are paying attention to you. Because to your point, there are definitely people out there who read all my posts. So I'm staying top of mind, but their thought isn't, oh, let me like or let me comment. It's just, oh, this is Ben's thought today. This is Ben's thought today.

Right.

And so staying top of mind for when there is a moment of relevancy to them to act on it, that's kind of what you're waiting for.

100%. What do you think about like founders that are starting to explore the content world? Like what advice would you give them?

Just hit post. Everyone thinks everything needs to be perfect. The question that I always pose to people when they're like trying to justify it to me or rationalize it— I mean, I'll do this exercise with you. Do you listen to podcasts?

I do.

What's your favorite podcast?

I listen to All In Podcast the most frequent.

Do you remember the first episode they put out?

I don't remember even the first episode I listened to.

That's the point. People don't fucking remember. Just post it and keep going. Like, people don't post content. It's like, oh my God, someone's gonna judge me. Well, I just asked you, like, you don't even remember the first episode, so what the hell makes you think someone's gonna remember the first thing you put on the internet? Yeah, it's just—

it—

dude, we're like, we're robots. It's like doom scrolling. You read something, you like it, you comment on it, you move on. Yeah, sure, maybe if it's thought-provoking enough, you might send it to a friend, you might think about it a little bit, but I'm gonna post something the next day or 2 days later, and you're gonna forget about the thing 2 and a half days ago.

Yeah. How do you think about creating content? I know, like, one of the things I really appreciate about you is like you make content that you just enjoy to make. Like you're out there making things that like you're excited to share with the world. How do you think about the balance of like creating things that you're excited to make versus— or not even versus, like how to build a strategy around what you should be posting?

So I think there's two sides to it. One, actually a good friend of mine, a big YouTuber, Brett Conti, He's been doing YouTube for like 8 years. He has like almost 1 million subscribers. He just posted on his Instagram earlier today. I read this. He was like, if you're making content just for your audience, I think you're doing it wrong. You need to make things that you yourself wish existed so you could watch it, right? So I think having passion about the thing that you're creating is super important. And then I think the second piece of that is obviously understanding who are the people that you're trying to get in front of to make sure that there's some relevancy to it. 'Cause obviously I'm not gonna go on my YouTube channel and just make videos about like cooking classes and, and you know, my favorite decor for my living room. Like you want it to be relevant to who you are and the people that you're trying to go after. So for me it's entrepreneurs and brand owners and knowing two things to that. Number one, like what are the types of things they might be thinking about or want to learn about? And the second one is you have to be interesting. Like don't just go on camera and preach at people all day. It's the same thing about content. Any channel, you need to have a human element to it and then you could have like a tactical element to it. But if you're just preaching all day, people are not like falling in love with you, Isaac, as the character. They're just like, oh, this is the guy that's just yelling at me about why I need to use his business every day.

Yeah.

So I think for me it goes to this concept of having like top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel content. Like you need to have variance in the things you're posting on the internet if you don't want to lose people's interest. Because if I'm just posting like 5 ways to increase your conversion rate all the time on your website. Like, are you going to pay attention to that? No, because you don't have an e-com brand. But like, if you know that I'm in that space and I'm posting other interesting things, you probably know someone at one point. You're like, yo, you should meet this guy. Like, he's really cool. He posts a lot of content about the thing you're doing, but you wouldn't pay attention to it if it's just like super narrow and super annoying to pay attention to. Yeah, not everyone's going to give you the same advice. I just think like in terms of making content sustainable, you have to actually enjoy what it is that you're doing.

How do you like from— for founders that are like early stage, like how do they practically start to build their content ideas? Like, like what would you say like is tactically the right way of starting? Obviously ship thoughts, right? Like immediately start. But like, how do you like make it sustainable in the early days?

Step one is figuring out the medium in which you want to do it, right? I think putting content on LinkedIn versus Twitter versus YouTube versus Instagram versus TikTok, they're all very different mediums. I have friends that are amazing at Twitter that I think would suck at YouTube. I have friends that are so good at LinkedIn that can never do TikTok and so on and so forth. So I think understanding your own personality and what medium plays well into number one, the type of content you want to make, and number two, the vertical or the type of people you're trying to go after because different audiences live on different platforms.

Yeah.

So that's number one. And then number two, I think in terms of just getting started, it's not that serious. That's my advice is just acknowledging that it's not that serious. Just post shit and and try and see what happens.

Yeah.

Like my girlfriend posted a video yesterday of her like eating eggs at her kitchen table, like talking to her mom, and it got like 400 likes on TikTok.

Yeah.

Took me 8 months to get her to post a video. And in my mind I'm like, that's what you chose to post?

And it worked.

Like you just have to, you have to iterate, but there's levels to it, right? What you, what you start with in terms of just getting your, getting your feet wet versus building like an engine that is sustainable. Like it's a very different It's a very different beast. Like, I, I put out a lot of content, but what people don't know from the outside looking in is that like I have a full operation that's happening to allow me to do this. Like, the average person who views my content is like, there's no way this guy's a business. Like, he doesn't actually work all day. Like, that is 100% the perception. Don't give a fuck. Like, that's the whole point. You can't give a fuck. But you need to have systems and people and processes if you want to build a content engine that's like high volume and high quality while also building a business. With that being said, I do know some founders that like they do TikTok, for example, where it's just like them on the street talking while they're walking to their next meeting and it's like 20-second rants and they're very clever and creative and that is all they need. And I actually look like the idiot because I have a whole different, different content. It just depends. You have to figure out what your lane is and stay there.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm really curious, like, you seeing me start into content and like for many months just like falter and like start and stop and start and stop. Like now that you kind of see us deeper into the realm, like, I'm curious what you're— what, like, you're curious about from my experience or like from other people's experience because like you've been in this for so long. Like, what are some— I was like genuinely curious, like, what are some things you think about?

Is it as scary as you thought it was?

No, I actually don't. So, you know me well. Like, I am not a very shy person, and like, I'm pretty— You don't say. I'm pretty, I'm pretty like personality, like I am who I am around anyone. I'm the same person, I would say. Like, I'm not doing anything other than that. So I didn't care very much if any of my stuff didn't hit. When I, you know, there's certain topics actually that I spoke about that I'm like, ah, I don't really know if I need everyone to know about this about me, but I think like it like brought out a genuine side that was pretty interesting at like from a content perspective of people that might not even know me seeing and maybe built more trust because it was like intimate. I think what was tough is the legwork behind it. Like it's actually insane how much you got to put into like building the right systems and like you know, a lot of— I mean, a lot of the intros you've made for us on the Pearl front have been people in the content world. And it's very clear there's like a lot of upside in like individuals putting together content in a more like structured way for their business outcomes. Right. And so it's been more like I was shocked at how hard it was to consistently do it and most importantly, like how freeing it was to delegate it off my plate. We spend a lot of time. I was just on with a 50-year-old investment banker who has a small shop and just like advises companies as they buy and sell. And like he, he heard about us through somebody or maybe even through, through our content. And he's like, yeah, I want to hire 2 people, one person to do outbound for me so I can find more clients and the second to start putting out more things on LinkedIn and It's like we're out of the early adopter phase. We're deep into like, you know, this is hitting mainstream. And so it's gonna be very interesting to see how even like if more people continue to create content, if you kind of miss like the early adopter wave, like what's gonna happen with content. But you know, there's all these social platforms that are coming out and they're gonna lead us into whatever comes next for us now.

I forgot the, you know what, I actually wanna look. 'Cause I forgot the name of it. I think it was Sam Altman.

I think I've heard that name before.

Did you hear about the— it's the Dead Internet Theory. Have you heard of this? No. So he, he is— it's a series of recent concerns that he raised centering on the Dead Internet Theory, which basically talks about how it's indistinguishable to figure out like what content is real versus AI, and that he believes like over 80% of content on the internet now isn't human.

Wow. So what's, what's next?

Well, I don't know. Uh, that's a really like scary thing.

Yeah, especially because you like— we know how much time we spend on like all these channels and our friends and like people that are even more upset. Like, I don't even think— I don't think we're like the biggest consumers of content.

No, not at all.

But we still can— but we're still on, you know what I mean? But we're still on.

Yeah, yeah. It's more just about, um, at what point does spending this much time even making content actually become— yeah, really stupid. Because you're just getting overpowered in algorithms by AI. But yeah, I'm, I'm curious to see if there will ever be like a platform that's like the anti-AI social platform. I don't know if it's actually viable, but like a way to build a platform that doesn't allow—

yeah, I'm sure that's going to be part of—

I think the only way that it's possible is by building a piece of hardware.

Yeah, right.

Because like you can generate a post on AI and like sit there and literally type out letter for letter what they posted. So there's no way around that, right? Unless you had like, imagine like a flip phone hardware social platform where you literally— I'm ready for that.

I'm thinking about going to flip phone.

You literally could just type on there a post. Like, I think that's an interesting idea.

Bullish flip phones. I think like, I'm trying to move into like on weekends only use flip phones. Just 'cause it's too much. Like, it's too much. We do too much.

Like, I started turning my phone off on Friday nights.

Yeah, it's huge. Who are some people that you've seen in the recent year to like really just crush content?

Um, I mean, obviously different platforms matter, but watching what Zach Pogrob has done on Twitter has been like bonkers.

What's— talk through it a little bit.

So Twitter is a platform that rewards wit. Like, you need to be clever and funny and also just like unapologetic and controversial. And I think if you embody those things naturally and you have high velocity, you can just crush on that platform. And Zach is a character who will go on there and post like 50 times a day about all sorts of shit and sometimes controversial. Yeah, but has just picked up the attention of everyone he wants to have the attention of and like his specific vertical.

Yeah.

So I think it's been really interesting and cool to watch him do that. And then I have— I mean, there's a couple other people, there's people I've seen on each platform, uh, that are very impressive to me. But I think the, um, most interesting part from my perspective is just when you find characters that have their own unique vibe. Because right now a lot of the internet is just, uh, copying what everyone else is doing.

Yeah.

But when you find someone who like has a vibe or a style or a storytelling element where you're like, that's cool, it looks like— I mean, maybe you just didn't see where they found it from, but it actually feels clever and authentic. I think finding authenticity and uniqueness is very hard in the world today because everything is so like copyable and inauthentic.

Yeah, it makes me think of, um, this like homie that was in my class at Babson, Stodd Guy. Yeah, I just love his content. So just like different from other people's, and I think he just does an incredible job hitting his target audience. Um, and it's just like, just absolutely hilarious. Like, I love that little vertical.

I mean, have you seen like the European kid? Yeah, yeah, yeah, dude. Like, I played paddle with him last year and he's like a normal dude. He's like very— that's from similar, but on camera he's hilarious and so out there. Yeah, it's like he created a character.

Yeah, he created—

it's like, I think what stands out actually is, uh, to better articulate it, it's like character building, it's world building.

You know what I also 100%. And I think that's actually getting to a pretty interesting thing, which is like, if you don't have a business idea, just start ripping content. Like businesses will— ideas and opportunities will come from your content. It's pretty incredible. Like, and we've seen it with the big influencers, right? Like building out different companies like Prime. Obviously everything that Beast does is crazy. It's just interesting to think like, how long will this last?

What is the content strategy that you guys are using for Pearl?

Yeah, it's been a— like, I think the first thing we do is like we just try to keep on having fun with it and like throwing new things at the wall just like to keep it engaging. But what, what are some verticals that have worked super well? I think like our mission at Pearl is to attract my friends who never left Venezuela, our friends of friends who never left all of their home cities, countries that are bright and like aggressive and like wanna hustle, and like convincing them that they should work at companies like Platter or at Pearl or at Hone Health or at Ambience or like really any of these just like outrageous, you know, we're working with 200 companies now, like these are unreal opportunities. And so the main focus of Pearl is really to convince these people to, come work for more aggressive companies and startups that are US-based where like opportunities will be far greater. So that's the core of it. So everything is around how do we put out information that is maybe just like funny content of like how like our internal team loves to like banter and like how we work hard, play hard, or maybe it's like putting content together around events that we're doing not only in the US on Founders, right, which like we started, In my journey of starting events, it started with you. Of course, I was running the Family Office community before, which also brought me a lot of insight. And we've always been hosting Shabbats, and we love bringing people together, period. But we started doing those type of things, like event organization, and then like the content of that made people feel like, oh wow, like that's right around my corner. Like, I'm like, I'm not that far away. Like, I feel like part of that group. Like, I know that individual there. And so like That's been a huge focus. And it also is interesting because that same content, when you see that from the States, right? Like if you see all that, you've been working with us for a while, like some, and one of the first people we worked with, but like when you're, when you don't have exposure to like Latin American friends or like knowing that people from these countries are like just as good as us, maybe you've worked with BPOs and like you've never seen like the high quality because, you know, the best candidates are not applying to a BPO role. They're going to like the baddest bank, the baddest consulting, the best venture, the best startup. And so we've been trying to— we're pulling from there. And so when you're able to see this content of like, oh wow, like these people are working in the office, they're grinding, like they're having this fun time, like that resonates with a lot of founders and like gets them over the bridge of like the uncertainty of what it would be like to bring someone abroad. So that's like the main focus of it. I think I've also just like to throw out my random thoughts on things. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it hits far less and sometimes it makes me even feel cringy, but like, I could give a fuck honestly at this point. What I wanna do in the future is like, how do we activate other audiences outside of our talent and like put out information that makes them feel super engaged, right? Like we've been doing so much in the AI building world for our own company. And then we started thinking about, all right, like, how should we be building training programs for people that we're sourcing so that like they could be AI enabled? And so now it's like, all right, like, how do we build content to make people interested in that, to attract more of that talent that are— they're yearning for more education, more learning, like making sure they don't get left behind because someone else learned AI and they didn't. So that's like a big thing that we're pushing into is a combination of the talent and also like What else are we doing that makes us cutting edge or that creates a ton of value? Um, posting photos like of this or like whatever, you know, whatever I'm doing for fun. Um, I like posting every once in a while pictures of family because like it really does, you know, you and I, like we're just very social animals. Like we're out and about a lot. We meet a ton of people. We want to stay connected to them. Like hard to do, you know, we've spoken about like the pros of like, what if we weren't off Instagram? And there's a shit ton of pros, right? Like mental health is a huge one. But like con is like if we're meeting hundreds of people a quarter or a year, like how the fuck are you going to stay in touch with all these people? Like you're not sitting there writing 1,000 emails a weekend, you know what I mean? And so the content stuff has been a huge reward for me in that sense. So I'll put out some things about my family. I do the monthly newsletter to my friends and clients and people in our network. Where I kind of just share cool things that people are building or like things that are happening at Pearl. You know, we, we put out content that we opened up a new office in the Philippines and then we went to Medellín. And so that's been kind of our journey now. Open to criticism?

No, I think I don't really have criticism. I think it's just understanding like what is your end goal and how do you work backwards to get there? Yeah, right. Is it staying top of mind for people? Is it attracting prospects? Is it attracting talent? Yeah, different types of content mediums speak to different audiences for sure. And then I think the other thing is just like understanding your ability to do it for an extended period of time. Yeah, I think for me, I found with content, like, if I'm not excited about the content that I'm making, it just dies. Yeah. So I have a lot of fun with doing things that are a little bit outside the box in the realm of Platter because I think most traditional like B2B companies are pretty dull and boring.

Yeah.

Like I want an idea that I will probably execute because I want to in Q1 is I want to rent an RV with my videographer and my growth team and drive around the country until we meet like a certain number of brands and like daily vlog. Yeah, like go to the 5 major e-com cities in the US and like I'm doing this until I meet 1,000 brands in person and like daily vlog the journey every single day. Like people will want to pay attention to some goofy shit.

You have to include brands that like didn't say yes.

Yeah, yeah, just fucking go. Just show up to their office and like knock on their door. It's like, who are you? It's like, so cool, welcome back to another episode of my vlog.

Damn, that'd be cool. I think the content stuff, like, I really enjoy speaking to founders on here because like what I've been appreciating a lot, you know, there's obviously been like a lot of ups and downs of like how do I feel about the fact that like now everyone I know is seeing a shit ton of me very frequently. That is a part of it that still today is a little bit like, it's interesting. I don't mind it. I'm not upset about it. I hope I don't run into people and they're like, "Fuck this guy." But—

It will happen.

Yeah, it'll happen. I'm sure it has. Yeah, yeah.

I'm sure it has. 100%. But that goes in tandem with the idea of not giving a fuck.

100%. Like if my friends are coming up to me—

That person wasn't meant to be in your life.

If my friends are coming, no, not even that. But if my friends are coming up to me and they're like, "Dude," I can't keep on getting notifications that you're posting on LinkedIn. I'm like, dude, like, yeah, yeah, mute it, like it, share it. Yeah, do whatever you got to do. But the amount of people that I've been able to meet that like will probably see this and will know that like my journey started obviously at some point. It really was like with, with you pushing me, which I am indebted to you for. But, um, there's a lot of people are like, oh wow, like this is something I should definitely keep an eye on and like, or do. Right? And then they probably go into the cycle that I was in, which was— and that you were in. It's just like, all right, I guess it's a lot harder than just said and done. But I hope to create content all the time. Like, I want to start getting in front of founders who can share what are some of the practical things that they started to do when they were reaching levels of burnout or exhaustion, which made them more centered and more ready for the long-term journey that they're on. And so like, I like speaking to people about that. You know, you have a great routine within your mornings. You just mentioned the things you focus on, your boxing, your sauna, and that's— I mean, the apartment's crazy and perfect for hosting, period. So you don't have to really bounce around a lot, which you still do. But, um, I think that's something that's exciting.

Yeah, I mean, the— I think the easiest way to think about content is, and this is like a very popular notion, but something that not a lot of founders necessarily know is like, don't, don't feel like you have to go create content. It's like, just start to capture the things you're already saying and doing.

Yeah.

So it's less about creating and more about broadcasting what's already happening. Like, every person says something, has an interesting conversation that if it was available for other people to listen to, would find value in it. It's more just about figuring out a way to do that.

I think like one thing that's interesting is like what is at risk? So I, I generally think that there's two types of companies. There are companies that are creating something that's so incredible that it is revolutionary and the product will sell itself. Like it will be posted somewhere and it will go viral because it is such an incredible life-changing thing. And there's the 99% of other companies which like are not creating something innovative, which is are outrageously innovative, um, and they gotta do a phenomenal job of getting in front of individuals who could leverage or get value out of using their company, and they gotta fucking grind, right? They gotta grind, they gotta market and sell, and that comes in a lot of different formats. We've seen like the cold outbound, we've seen, uh, now content, we've seen the conference circuits, we've seen, um, warm intros and network, like what like, how can you— how can you explain, like, the practical loss by not doing content? Right.

I think it's hard to quantify it because you never know what's— you don't know what's possible.

Yeah.

I think it's more just seeing enough data points of things that have happened for people to then recognize, okay, well, if I also did this, I wonder if any of those things would happen for me.

Yeah.

Right. Like, I tell this a lot, but with Platter, for example, I closed my largest investor inbound from LinkedIn. I closed one of my largest customers inbound from LinkedIn, and I hired one of my best employees inbound from LinkedIn.

Right.

It's like those are kind of the three buckets of building a business, right? Hire good talent, make sure people are willing to pay you for your product. And if you need money to get started, like, get an investor.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's like that's at a micro scale, right? But think about these businesses that post content, they get 100,000 customers, 10,000 customers because they had something go viral. I just think it's the underlying point of content for me is that you can only be one-to-one in like conversations and content is one-to-many. So if you're trying to maximize visibility, like content is the most effective medium to do that.

Yeah, I actually have one question that I'm curious to get your take on. If you were running Superpower, how would you focus their go-to-market. And that's a kind of crazy thing. How would you, how would you, what would you do in the content world if you were a superpower?

What would I do in the content world?

Yeah, like they have such an upside to like really getting mass adoption by virality. Like what do you think would be interesting content for a company like that that is like focused on—

I mean, I think they're, they're taking the angle of like we're trying to go after the big giant, right? Like it's very known that the healthcare industry is very gated, closed walls. It's like monopolized where the same people run the show. And to try to like go after that is— you need to be a little bit crazy to even try to do that.

Yeah.

So I think being extreme is very important, which they do, right? So their whole thing is they're trying to boil the ocean, like building an AI doctor, right? And they also go to the extreme of all their employees that have superpower tattoos, how they all sleep in the office, and they're They're doing the thing. They're very, very good at generating hype and attention. And look, like, when you're trying to build a generational company, there's nothing wrong with building hype before your product is actually where it needs to be. I'm sure their product is way behind the attention that they have, and that's normal. There's nothing wrong with that. But they— you need to like have the world on your fingertips, especially when you're trying to build in consumer. Distribution is everything.

Yeah.

How the hell are you going to get a business to have 100 million customers, whatever they're trying to do without having virality and content and eyeballs and something that's a little bit contrarian where someone's like, oh wait, like, did you hear about these guys? Like, what are they doing? So everything from like the name of the business to the domain, to the branding, to the mission, to the founders building it, to the story that they've told, like it's all really ambitious. But if you want to build something that's revolutionary and make an impact, you have to go that route. 99% of companies should never try to do what they're trying to do. My business, your business, it's very mundane, very boring. A million people have done it before. That doesn't mean you can't make a lot of money doing it. So it's just about being honest with yourself of what type of business are you trying to build and how am I going to get there?

Yeah, I agree with that. I think the more polarizing things they can put out there, the better they'll do.

And like, 100%, I think that's true for most businesses. I just don't know if every business needs that, right? I feel like you guys had insane company growth over the last 12 months. What would you attribute that to?

I think like first and foremost, it's always around the talent. Like if the talent are outperforming and really crushing it, then like the network, everything happens network effect-wise, right? Like our clients are wowed, which is exactly what we're looking for. We're not looking for like, are they happy? Like, are they happy they brought this person on overseas and like the overseas person is doing above the expectations of an overseas hire, right? Like we want them to be like a top performer in the company. And I think that's what we are generally seeing. In the last year. That led to an incredible amount of growth within the active accounts that we had, right? So what started as a company with 2 or 3 hires now has 7, 8, 9, you know, the extremes are in the 40s, 50s, 60s. So it's like, it's like big. And then like, of course, for us, we love to see that for all the right reasons. I think that the network effect of like our clients, our friends, who we've like, you know, when we jump on sales calls and we have a sales team now and I don't, I take like warm intros from friends because I'm obviously always down. It's like, hey, like this is, hiring is extremely hard. Very likely you will fail at hiring at some point if you haven't already. And What we do is we have access to insanely hard-to-reach micro talent bases. And that we've been developing for 7 years. We've also, because we started this as a way to help our previous venture-backed companies scale, we've gone through 7 years of iteration on how do you vet someone. And then the most important thing is like, how do you make sure that if you're gonna go through the energy of like bringing on a hire, interviewing, that you're reducing the chances of failure during the onboarding process, right? Like, how do you really, just in the most like handheld aggressive way, secure that that individual has everything they need to be super successful? And then it's easy because in 2 weeks you'll know if this person's meant to go up and to the right, or like they're actually the wrong hire. So like, I always tell my team, as a small tangent, it's like If we've set up everyone for super success in the first 2 weeks, you're not cutting it. Like, keep the pipeline open because like we want to be the leading indicator to our client of like, hey, like we're not as, you know, we were not as sold as we were in the interview process and like becoming the champion of our client and coming to them and be like, hey, by the way, like we're flagging this person internally and like we're going to work with them, but we're opening up the pipeline also. That level of trust has led to so much because like it's so hard to hire well, like it really is so hard. And so at the end of the day, what we do is like we reduce the chances of your hiring process leading to failure or leading to having someone that isn't going to work out. And most importantly, you don't spend 2 or 3 months with that person. Um, that's been super successful. Um, then having those success stories out and about into the world, because everyone at the end of the day hires in business, like that has been a huge compounding effect on the network effect. And so it becomes a flywheel. And I think our client-oriented— our client and our talent-oriented team, their prerogative is to build incredible relationships, to keep our clients really happy, even if for whatever reason that, you know, we're a couple hundred people in, like, there's things that happen in life, like, and it's, you know, it's just a numbers thing. And so it's about how strong is the relationship with that we're managing with the client and with the talent where they feel so taken care of that we're kind of changing what it's like to have an overseas talent company. And so it's great, though, because like very few people built in my space on first principles, right? Like they built a business product. They're like, cool, we're going to take this much margin and we're going to figure out how to reduce the chances that X, Y, Z things happen so that we can continue to have this margin. What ends up happening is a lot of our clients will have more profit because they'll pay their talent less, but they'll also charge less than us, and— but they end up having more churn. And so they end up losing a lot more money because they have to put so much more time into recruiting. We just invest in, like, once we get the great people, like, keeping them really close by for when the right opportunity strikes, that, like, they can know us. That's, like, what's been breeding for 7 years. And then, of course, we're headhunting for every role, so we don't have, like, a talent base that we rotate out. Which is what everyone else in MySpace has. Like, if they say it or not, that's what, like, it is. They have, like, a very large funnel of people that came in and, like, somehow were screened and they're reaching out to them. Um, so what's made us super successful in this last year and, like, have led to our compounding effect is finding the right talent and then just white gloving the hell out of our process, of our client and our talent. And so That's led to network effect, the network effect has led to content, content has led to even more network effect, and when like people that you know see you, you know, putting a testimonial up on Pearl, they're like, alright, like next time I hire, I'm gonna be thinking about giving, you know, Isaac and Monty a call, or the team at Pearl a call. What I'm really excited about though, moving forward is, you know, when I was leaving StageGlass, as like, you know, my co-founder, Jack, was basically positioning the company to be sold. I saw that, you know, going from a company that sold a product that made very wealthy companies 1% wealthier didn't change a lot of lives. Like, this was a really interesting thing because, you know, you saw me in those days when I was working with these, my talents that I started hiring overseas, 2020, 2023. And that kind of got your ball rolling of like, oh, like, wow, like if this, like if I'm looking at this person talking to Isaac, I can hire one of these people, like I need that. And that was when we were doing it without, without it even being a business. And like, so what became interesting to Monty and I is like, we actually have an ability to give back to our communities because there is this like snowball effect of like, if one person is hired and that person does well, multiple people in our networks are going to meet this person. They're going to want to hire more. And then we have the opportunity to like guap all these people internationally, change their lives, change their family lives. And you know, it's no secret that we're paying 1.5 to 2x what everyone else is paying in the markets, which does really well for us. It really helps us attract the best. But that snowball effect has been super rewarding selfishly. Like, it is rewarding to help people in their lives. So that drives me a lot. And now I think the next phase of that is starting to build education hubs. And that will be content as well, honestly. Like, you know, those education hubs should allow people to learn skill sets that will advance them in their ability to penetrate US companies, ideally through PRO. But even if it's not through PRO, like, that's still the mission. Like, the mission is to change lives. Like, it was always that as Monty and I started building into PRO, you know, we bootstrapped it all the way through. It was extremely painful. You saw me in some of the harder moments through a lot of transitions in my life. And It's just nice to be at a point now where things are already flowing really well. We have the right directors coming in, and now we're thinking about, all right, how do we change not the lives of a few hundred people, but tens if not hundreds of thousands of people? And so that's what I think the future of Pearl is. Hopefully, AI doesn't become this thing where humans are not needed for work or business. Uncertain 5 or 10 years down the road, genuinely uncertain. So we gotta hedge against that shit, but in the meantime, we're here. We're trying to help as many lives as possible. And it's cool though, like I travel a lot to Latin America now and the Philippines far more frequently. And it's incredible to see, like I was extremely focused on like making the culture like a fun, you know, just like vibe. Like I'm a goofy guy. Like it's funny 'cause like when I'm on Zoom on, or on Google Meet, like my team, you know, I kind of like, I'm operating, like I'm operating, I'm running multiple teams like as a manager, which now I've been hiring these directors, but like, And so I land in the Philippines for like, you know, in between the last visit to the Philippines to this visit in the Philippines, we've 4x'd our Philippines team, our in-house, our corporate team. And it's just like to see their vibe and then for me to be able to approach that vibe. And it's exactly the vibe I want if I was living in office with this team every day. But that's now like pushing into the events that we're having with talent and like It's creating this like really cool— I don't know if it's a movement yet, but like I want it to be a movement. So I think that's where this will go. And without any investors, we don't have any pressure to do anything that we don't want to do. But definitely thinking about what that means for then helping other people found companies, be it stateside or some of the talent. Like I'm thinking of the internal team at Pearl as like a mafia. I'm excited for like 5 years on the road to see the mafia go and build and like be part of other incredible things. So that's how we're thinking about it for now.

Mic drop.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it goes.