Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss how AI startups are poaching top growth marketers with equity packages that beat agency salaries, and why live events and community matter more as AI floods the content market. They also cover hiring strategies: Sequoia and HubSpot vet executives thoroughly and set hard expectations, while some firms use hire-fast-fire-fast tactics.
Chapters
So do you want to know about the Elon Musk daddy's home insane work schedule?
Go for it.
Okay, so Elon Musk, obviously he's been involved with politics in the last 12 months. He got involved with Doge. He spent a lot of his money helping, you know, campaign, right, the, the current president campaign. Um, and so this guy tweets this, he says, Elon is back. This is literally what it means to be a wartime CEO. So keep in mind, when he was involved with politics, that means he was very distracted from from his businesses like Tesla and SpaceX, for example, right? So Elon tweets this, he says, Daddy is very much home and burning the midnight oil with Optimus engineering on Friday night. Then I red-eye overnight to Austin, arriving at 5:00 AM. I wake up to have lunch with my kids and then spend all day Saturday afternoon in deep technical reviews for the Tesla A15 chip design. Then I fly to Colossus 2, which is their data center, on Monday to walk through the whole data center floor, review transformers and power production, excellent progress. depart midnight. Then up to 12 hours of back-to-back meetings across all Tesla departments, but particularly focused on AI/Autopilot, Optimus production plans, and vehicle production delivery. This is what it means to be a wartime CEO, and that's what he means by Daddy is very much home.
When you told me this title and I saw it on the sheet, you know, before, because you highlighted it before we started, I thought you meant That this was his schedule when he's home.
Oh, did you think—
Like related to his family and kids?
Oh, oh, no.
'Cause like Daddy's Home as a title.
Daddy's Home to take care of his kids with his company. That's how he's looking at it.
Yeah.
But his kids are included in here, but you can see the vast majority of his stuff has to do with work. And I'm actually listening to this pod right now on the Founders Podcast talking about how Elon works. And one of his ex-wives said that he's not built for a life of domestic tranquility. All he thinks about is work and he cannot get his mind off of work. And now that he's back and he's focused, this is why he has that $8 trillion— or sorry, he has a $1 trillion pay package if they hit $8 trillion in market value, right?
But I love how he made time for lunch with his children.
No, I really do.
I get he's a workaholic. I think a lot of us are. He's a different level of a workaholic, but even at his level, Yeah. It's awesome to see that he schedules in making sure that he's having lunch with his kids and getting that family time in when he can.
Yeah. But it just goes to show you that like people think it's easy to manage even one company or 2 companies, 3 companies. Some people don't, don't think about these things, right? But you can see how much work and effort he has to put into this. And the other interesting thing, I don't know if you know this, this is just a little side point here, but remember he was fired, basically he was ousted from PayPal back in the day. Yeah. Okay. So Peter Thiel, like the PayPal Mafia, all these people that ousted him, but he Actually, instead of saying, screw you guys, you ousted me, he actually kept good relations with these people. And that led to—
I think in the long run, in the short run, there was some issues.
Maybe, but Peter Thiel ended up saving SpaceX by putting $20 million in from Founders Fund 8 years later. So if he didn't maintain, somehow hold on that relationship, it would've been screwed. And also he made a relationship with Chrysler to get an investment into Tesla, and that saved Tesla. So all these things.
Yeah, so the Daimler Chrysler investment into Tesla, you know, right before then, He had a deal to sell to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Hmm. I didn't know that.
And I think it was somewhere around $10 billion. Don't quote me on the number.
Yep.
And what ended up happening was, is the Daimler Chrysler deal came in, so he decided not to sell to Google.
Yeah. I mean, he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. And his wife said this back in the day, he would wake up in the middle of the night vomiting. He'll be talking to himself in his sleep, right? But this just goes to show you that the amount of work it takes to build something really big and the consistency it takes.
Yeah, I got the number wrong. And yes, in 2013, I just Googled this. Google AI Overview says, yes, in 2013 when Tesla was struggling financially, Elon Musk offered to sell the company to Google for $11 billion, and the deal included $6 billion for the acquisition and $5 billion for factory expansion. However, the deal was called off by Tesla, called off as Tesla sales improved and the company recovered, meaning Musk no longer needed a savior. And I believe also the Daimler-Chrysler deal came in sometime around there. But I don't know if he still does, but my guess is he still does. He has a great relationship with the Google founders. He used to stay at their house when he was traveling to Northern California, and he's just like, yo, I want to sell my company, I need money. Okay, sounds good. I really think it was like the Ellison deal when he was raising money for X.
Yeah, yeah.
He's like, I actually—
How much do you need? Like, how's a billion? He's like, maybe a little more. He's like, okay, sounds good, I'm in.
Or yeah, he was like, a billion or whatever you think I should put in, right? And then he's like, all right. But that's really how it is. You've raised money before, right? Not a ton of times, but you've raised money. Have you ever raised money from friends?
Yeah.
And when you raise money from friends, you do a big hoopla speech or you just text?
No, it's just, you text. Yeah. It's like, how much do you need? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same for you too, if you need it.
I've always had, when I've raised money from friends and family, it's, and I haven't done it in a long time, but when I did it in the past, it was more so like texts or calls. Like, hey dude, just looking into this. I'm in this. All right. Sounds good.
Yep. Yeah. So anyway, that, that's, I mean, it's, it's good that he's focused again. It's, it's, it's good for everyone to see that this, this takes a lot of the, a lot of crazy work to get things done. But that is the Elon Musk daddy's home schedule. Here, one more thing I wanna leave off with for, for everyone here. Um, Elon's algorithm, if I were to simplify it for everyone, this is how he, he, he thinks about operating at SpaceX or Tesla. Think of it as DESSA, D-E-S-S-A. Let me explain what this is real quick. D stands for delete. So whenever you look at something, you want to delete. His whole thing is deleting as much as you can from stupid processes and things like that. So delete. Okay, that's D. E is the edit. Okay, you want to delete and then you want to edit and then you want to simplify whatever it is that you're working on. Then you want to speed it up and then you want to automate it, right? But at the very top of that, you're questioning everything. And if he runs that across everything and it just— he just keeps running that over and over. He won't take no for an answer and he works all the time and it inspires his team. So I'm not saying that's for everyone. That's just his style, but I think there's a lot we can learn. We can take pieces from what we like about what he does. I'm not saying, oh, he's a good or bad person or whatever, but I think there's a lot to learn based on what he's built.
With the D is delete, delete what part?
So anything from a process, he, his whole thing is you, you need to question every single process and then you need to delete, and then you need to delete to the point where sometimes you wanna add 10% back. Most people don't delete enough. He thinks that's how a lot of companies become too bloated.
So example of this, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here with the delete side, is this an example like with the Tesla seat? They try to make the manufacturing easy and they're like, why do seats have 100 or 200 parts? So he simplified the Tesla seat to have a lot less parts.
Yep.
All right. Yep.
That works. Um, and here's another thing. I mean, it used to be, so when they were launching one of their first rockets, um, they had 2 cracks. Usually when you have cracks, you need to delay the launch, right? He's like, Why don't we just cut off where there's cracks and just shave it off? And NASA expected them to delay it by weeks or even months or so, and they ended up launching the next day.
And did it work out?
It worked. That was a 1-hour decision.
That's cool. What happens if you could just put super glue in and hold it together?
I don't know about that. See, you and I aren't physicists, so I wouldn't know.
No, no, no. I'm messing around when I say super glue it.
Yeah.
But no, that's true. Why not just cut off where the cracks are if it's not that important and needed, and then you're okay?
Yep. Cool. Actually kind of similar to this. You, you, you, your, your phrasing for this is pusher. So up top here, so we got pushers, drivers, and barrels, and Elon's a very good example of a pusher, driver, and barrel. So first, why don't you define what a pusher is in your definition? I'm going to define what a barrel and a driver is.
How about you start with the beginning, define the driver, the barrels, and I'll define the pusher.
So a drive— here, let's start with barrels first. So barrels, this comes from Keith Rabois, okay? And he talks about in In a company, you have a lot of ammunition and you have a lot of barrels, okay? You could have all the ammunition in the world, but if you don't have barrels, like the guns to push them through, the bullets through, you're not going to make things happen. So if you only have 5 barrels in a company, like 5 bullets or 5 cannons, you're only going to be able to do those 5 initiatives at once. And so you need as many barrels as possible because they just make things happen. They move very quickly.
What's a barrel in a company? Is it human capital?
Human capital, yeah.
Okay, so you need enough humans to actually go and execute on what you want.
And it's no different. I mean, this is kind of similar to like a driver. A driver will just make sure, They respond very quickly. They'll push. Like Elon, for example, he'll message his, one of his engineers at 2:00 AM saying, hey, I want to build, hey, what's it going to take to build tunnels under the street? Right? And then they get on the phone. He's like, okay, I'm going to message you in 3 hours. Okay. I want to know what the costs are and all this stuff. 3 hours later, he calls him 5:00 AM, right? Okay. What are all the costs? $5 million. It's going to cost us for these machines.
Okay.
Buy 2 of those machines. I want to talk to you about it on Monday. Right? That's an example of a driver, a barrel. These people are just people that make things happen ultimately.
I thought that was a pusher.
They're, they're the same thing. They're all the same thing.
So you're saying a company needs drivers, barrels, pushers. Barrels, I get human capital, but you're saying pushers are very similar to driver where you're just pushing.
Yes. Yeah. To me, they're all kind of the same thing. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Because to me, a pusher is someone who's just pushing people.
Yeah.
Like I message, uh, one of our engineers, Saloon, when we were working on a visibility product early on, and I was just like, How much will it cost per prompt? And he's like, I'm at a party. He's in Brazil. So call it, I was messaging him like 6, 7 PM my time. So call it close to midnight his time, somewhere around there.
10 PM, 4 hours ahead, no?
Brazil changes depending where you are.
I believe from 4 to 6. Oh, I thought it was always 4 to 5.
No, no, it depends on the time and the season.
Yeah.
Right. So let's just call it midnight. Let's just use the easy number. And he's like, I'm coming home from a party.
Probably drunk.
No, he wasn't drunk. And he's just like, can I get it to you in an hour? I could have said, you can get it to me the next day, but I was like, sounds good. And then he got it to me in an hour and then we were discussing back and forth on the pricing. And then we were discussing, because that involves cost, right? APIs. And then I was like, okay, what can we give the maximum that we can give away for free without really breaking the company? And then we figured it out, almost figured it out that night. I would say a few days later they finalized it, but I had enough where I was comfortable and then I told the team to go and run.
The thing with these drivers, barrels, and pushers, these people are your A players and they can't stand having to work with B and C players, right? And if they work with a B and C player and they can't get what they want, here's you as an example. If you don't get what you want, guess what? You're moving on to the next person and next person. And guess what? That person's kind of dead to you, whoever you couldn't get it from, right?
It's sad, but they end up eventually being fired.
Yeah. So it's not—
Assuming that they really aren't good. If other people find tons of value in them, it's different. But usually if the founder of a company is working with someone and they can't get stuff done, they tend to lay them off.
95+ percent of the time, that's what happens. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I would say. So, so my point of saying all this, we're talking about Elon in the very beginning, this whole daddy's home thing, this daddy's home, when daddy's home, daddy is driving things. Okay. Daddy is a barrel, right? Daddy's a pusher. Maybe it sounds weird that I'm saying it this way, but it is a reality.
Dude, and it really is hard to find a balance. I'm not at the level of the Elon Musk or anywhere near there, and I never will be, or even the Peter Thiels or even people below that level. I'm nowhere near close to any of them. But what I found in my life when it comes to pushing, I used to push really hard and I still do, But I don't push myself as hard. And a great example of this is I have a speech on the 28th of next month, so October 28th, to a Fortune 10 company. All right? From there, I could fly to Malaysia on the— right after my speech and then speak. And I think I can make it back home on the 30th because of time change. 31st, I'll be there for Halloween. And then the next day I fly out to Milan. From Milan, I go from— after I'm there for a few days of meetings and speeches, then from there I go to Spain for meetings. Then I go to London for more meetings. Then I'm back home for a day. Then I go to Toronto for a day. And then I go to Dallas the next day after, and then I'm back the day after that. So you're talking about like a week and a half to 2 weeks of traveling, right? And I could have done the Malaysia one and I was debating it with my CEO this morning over text. And I'll read you what I typed to him. I'm like, you think I should go to speak, go to Malaysia and speak on the 3rd of October, speaking at the 28th. I'm not going to mention the company name. And then my Milan speech is exactly on the 2nd, but I'll leave before then because of meetings. And normally I would just say, yes, APAC wants me, but I know the kids would be bummed for me missing Halloween. I could then fly from Malaysia to Milan. Worst case, I could still make that trip. And he eventually called me and he's just like, dude, we bought a company in Malaysia. There's a ton of people in there. Have someone who doesn't have a kid speak. And for them, they wouldn't miss Halloween because it's in their own city. And I was like, oh, that's a good point. And he's like, it may not be as effective, but it'll be good enough. And I was like, yeah, I'm okay losing some potential revenue by me not being the one to speak just to see my kids during Halloween.
And keep in mind, how many Halloweens do you get with your kids? Maybe like 6 or 7?
More, yeah, and then it's over.
Look, but they're not going to start doing their— you start doing that at age 3 or 4 or whatever. They're not going to do it in their teens, right? Because they're going to start to become too cool for you, right? So yeah, I would say the Halloween is actually more valuable than the Malaysia one in different, different terms. Um, one more thing and then we can move over to one of your topics, but I think this is all related because Here's a question for you. I want to posit that true leadership actually comes from near-death experiences. And so you becoming a pusher in your early career, were you a pusher? How aggressive were you?
I was actually pretty aggressive from day one.
Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
I got more aggressive and less— I don't know if empathetic is the right word or more political.
No, you definitely don't have— I don't have empathy. I don't think you have empathy. On the personality test, we both have low empathy. No, no.
What I meant by that is earlier on I would push, but I would try to also be empathetic at the same time and try to understand why they wouldn't move as fast and try to help them out and be okay with it.
But you couldn't understand.
I couldn't ever understand. It's just not my personality. I wish I could understand. I just can't. But I don't think I— I did push a lot. I did not push As hard as I do now. And what I mean by that is before, when I pushed, I would care what people thought about me. So I would be careful in how I phrased it or found the right time to push.
Mm-hmm.
But I still wanted to, and I did overall.
Yep.
Now I just push whenever I want and I don't care what people think.
Yeah. But I, I think this is important. So where I'm going with this is that I think leaders really become leaders once you go through a couple of near-death experiences, which we've been through. You've been through so much where you're just like, dude, enough. Like, I, I've seen this movie before. I know exactly what I want and I'm going to ask for what I want and I'm not going to wait. I don't care what you think. And as much, I think humans still care a little bit all the time, right? But I think you have to go through a couple of near-death experiences to really evolve your leadership style into what it needs to be.
You're spot on because earlier on when I was more sympathetic and I was trying to figure out how to push in a polite way, which doesn't really work out in my opinion, a lot of those companies had near-death experiences and some of them actually did die. And in today's world, the reason I push harder and I don't care is because I know the consequences from not pushing and not pushing when you should push instead of just being like, oh, let me wait a week or a month, maybe they'll figure it out and then I'll push then. No, it doesn't work. You just lose a lot of time and money and it just crushes the business.
And this is fascinating because I've always known you to be a pusher, but you've seen me evolve over the years.
Yes.
Yeah. The near-death experiences, like they shape you. Yeah.
Eric, if— can I share how you were before?
Yeah.
So Eric used to have this philosophy. It was really admirable. I couldn't do it.
Noah's here. He can even validate this because Noah— yeah, it was admirable.
Eric used to have this philosophy when I started working with him. And even over, I would say over the last 5+ years ago, you had this philosophy where he would want his team to try to figure it out. And he wouldn't have the attitude of they should just figure it out on their own. He would actually try to help them. Books, knowledge, videos, conferences, coaching, like you said.
Paying for their coaching.
Uh-huh. So he would try to help them improve. And I remember you quoting me an IBM quote one time. It was something on like someone made a big mistake at IBM that cost like $100 million. And the CEO said, why would I fire him? We just went through some training or learning.
Screw that fire though.
Yeah. But, uh, and I'm not saying I'm right. I've never created a company the size of IBM, but Eric, you know, would quote that to me and he mentioned on how his team was learning a lot and they were improving. And it is actually true. Your team did improve over time and learn. I had a very different philosophy than Eric. And my philosophy, I would say, has been very similar from day one of being an entrepreneur. And I'm not saying my way's the only way that works because I know entrepreneurs who tell their teams, don't work all the time, don't work on weekends. Have a work-life balance. And some of these companies are much larger than mine. Many of them are. And my philosophy has always been screw it. If someone needs to get something done, like I need a marketing campaign or ad up, I expect it up on Saturday. If I have the idea on Saturday, if they can't do it, I go and find someone that Saturday. No joke. We hired a Facebook ad contractor for less than 30 days.
Yeah.
And my team's like, why? Because I had an idea on Saturday and I wanted it up that Saturday within a few hours, and I knew my team wouldn't get it up, so I found someone who'd get it up that weekend for me.
You know what's funny? We have a mutual friend that does exactly that. So he's, you know, they do a couple hundred million a year, right? And he can't take it anymore. He has an army of contractors under him, and I'm just like, why do you have so many contractors? He's like, because I just can't take it anymore. I just need to get things done.
Yeah. And eventually we end up finding people within our organization who will get stuff done for us on the weekends. But the point I'm making here is, and Noah could attest, Eric was a really chill boss. Would you agree? He's nodding his head yes.
So do you think it was— I'm asking Noah right now. So do you think it was— how chill was it on a scale of 1 to 10? I don't think I was that chill, but 1 through 10 in the beginning and versus now, what do you think the demeanor, the difference is?
Yeah, I'd say like 6 on the chill scale.
Okay.
Now you're like 9. Yes.
Meaning that I'm tougher now. Yeah. Yeah.
So if any of you couldn't hear Noah, he doesn't have a microphone in front of him. Noah worked for Eric as his full-time videographer. He used to follow you around.
Yeah. So Noah would know me the best over the years. Yeah.
And he knew Eric on a personal level as well. He said Eric was on a tough to chill factor, chill being really chill being like a 1 and really tough being a 10. Eric was a 6 and now he's saying that Eric is a 9. I would agree with that.
And I think you've always been a 9+ since knowing you over these 14, 15 years.
Yes. I think I've gotten chill, but more chill on the personal side. Business, I've maintained more—
The kids took the edge off.
The kids took the edge off. I also am not a pusher. What I found over the years is as your organization scales and you start adding like hundreds of employees, thousands of employees, there's people who are workaholics in your organization who just work 24/7 and can't stop. Those people actually push to have some sort of a balance. And I know they can't, but I try to push them to have something like, it's Sunday, your kid wants to go to a park, you should probably take them to the park.
Because they're so good and you want to keep them. And you, this, I do, I do watch these people. I'm just like, dude, you really need to take a break right now. It's okay. The work's always going to be there. But that's only few and far between.
Few and far between, but most of my leadership is like that. So I have to, you have to push them to take breaks. What I found is if they keep working too much like that, it creates issues with their spouse and their family, which then creates a whirlwind of issues and creates issues at work. So I try to solve it before that happens. Like, dude, before this call, remember I told you someone called me and said, Should I get a divorce?
Oh, that was someone on your team.
Uh, someone who's close. I'm not gonna go full in details there, but I already know if they don't figure this out, they're gonna have work problems and personal problems, and they're just gonna be screwed up. And I asked them on the phone the first thing, and I'm— I can't give someone advice if they should get a divorce or not. That's not my place in life. But I asked him, and this person's a male. I said, do you love your kids? They're like, yes, I love my kids. I'm like, do you love your wife? And I'm like, and they're like, I don't know. I'm like, what do you mean by that? Do you not enjoy the time with your wife? I love the time with my wife. She's like my best friend. I was like, okay. Do you still get intimate? Yes. You know, we enjoy that part without going into details.
Okay.
So then I was like, what's the issue? Oh, we both complain about small stuff. All right. And then I was trying to figure out what the issues were with the small stuff. It's related to food, being prepared. Sometimes they don't have enough time for each other because of the kids and getting them ready. They don't work in an office. The kids are home more. They take care of other people within their family, like helping them out. So their time is stretched and he doesn't have enough time because he's working all the time. I was like, And his wife doesn't want them to have a cook or a nanny or any of that all the time. And I was like, I'm going to tell you to do something. And he's like, what? I was like, go get a nanny for the weekends because weekdays are pretty covered and nighttime. And I'm like, just do it. Your wife already knows you have issues. It's okay. And I'm not saying, by the way, this person works for me or anything like that.
Yeah.
And I was like, you should just go. And hire this person. Your wife will forgive you. Tell her how you want to spend more time with her. Go to lunches. And she's like, yeah, dude, when we do vacations and we have help, like we all have amazing time. I'm like, and the examples he gave me without going into detail, it's caused by not having enough help and being stretched thin. I'm like—
Why don't you just do more of what works?
Yes. So I was like, before you decide to do anything and tarnish your life, Because divorce is going to be hard on everyone. I was like, why don't you go and you just hire a person to help out? And he's like, you know what? I'm going to try that out because the moment, the days we have help or the hours we have help, it's great for both my wife and I. And I was like, all right, you do really well financially. Money's not an issue. He's like, no, I have a lot of cash in my bank account, home, everything's nice.
Yeah.
I'm like, all right. Try this out. But that's a problem. If you have people in your organization who are workaholics, which is fine, if they don't create a balance, it screws up everything in their life, including work. So you got to solve that problem beforehand.
Remember also, before we move on to the next topic, you picked the next one, but we also talked about the concept of burnout. Vacations don't necessarily solve burnout. Burnout comes from not making progress or not feeling like you have momentum. And I can actually see that with my org, right? Versus like, you look at 5+ years ago, When everything was crumbling, right? It's not a matter of going on vacations. It's a matter of like, hey, are we winning or not? And are we having little milestones as we're winning? People just want to feel like they're winning.
That's true. But the problem is, and this isn't a problem for you because you're single, or I think you're single, you don't have to— when you look at your goals for your growth and your revenue, your world revolves around business. And your family being your dad, right? You don't have siblings from my understanding. I've known you for years.
Never.
No, no. Right. You have close cousins and friends. You still talk and hang out with them. You just showed me a video that one of your close friends sent you.
Yeah.
But the point I'm getting at is you're able to focus 100+ percent of your time on work. If you have another person and kids, you now have to worry about, are the other people in your nucleus accomplishing their goals and feeling satisfied? I'm not.
Yeah. Everyone has their own goals. I think in this case I'm just talking about business in itself, but yes, the personal thing is a factor for sure. Yeah. Anyway, you can pick the next one.
Sure. Oh, did you see how Google AI Mode is going to get super popular now? It's already actually growing in popularity. They have over 100 million active users, but they're integrating into Chrome. So it doesn't matter where you are on the web, you can get help from Google AI Mode for anything you want.
The funny thing about this Chrome, this new Chrome now, it's basically what all these other browsers were doing. Comment, Dia, all these other ones, and it's It's like, oh, summarize this YouTube video. Oh, do this shopping for me on Instacart or whatever. And Google's going to have— Chrome's going to have so much more data on you now that their ads are going to become way stronger.
Yes. I think Google AI mode is going to become extremely popular. It's going to go from 100 million active users to hundreds and hundreds of millions of active users, if not a billion, really fast.
I think Google's in a really good spot, dude. You got Quantum, you got Waymo, you got— you got— they're in the lead.
They're in the lead.
Yeah. Nano Banana, V3, everything. Yeah.
They have really good products. I was talking to an AI video creation company, text-to-video, and I'm an investor in a fund and the fund invested in this company. So they're just picking my brain. They do good revenue, not like $1 million, $2 million, like substantially more. They're not at $100, but you get the point, right? And we were talking to them, they're still growing at a really rapid pace. I was like, I'm like, your biggest threat, I'm like, you guys need a free version of your product. And I was like, you need this as quick as possible. And I'm like, your biggest threat is Google's video generation and image generation products are amazing. I think they're— I've used a lot of the ones in the space. I actually think Google has the best video and image generation products out there.
I agree. And they're actually doing a better job of marketing these now because they have multiple Twitter accounts, one for NotebookLM, one for Nano Banana. And they're actually getting a lot of impressions and they're cross-promoting each other now. So they're starting to pick it up on the marketing side for these products.
Yeah, but hands down I was like, they're going to crush you. And if you don't believe it, even if you're growing because the market's big, they're going to crush you because they can just make everything for free due to the fact that if it costs them $2 billion to run it for free, but it generates them extra $10 billion in ad revenue, that's a huge profitable win for them.
They'll do it all day, yeah.
All day long.
Dude, this is why we talked about this. Google has one of the best distribution in the world. They just sucked at marketing for a little bit. They're getting better now. Uber as an example, they're actually transitioning to this. They're just they have all this distribution. They're partnering up with like Waymo. They're trying to get Elon.
Uber's partnering with Waymo.
Yeah, they they partner up with Waymo. They're trying to partner up with like all the.
You sure that's not Lyft? Lyft just announced a partnership.
No, they're trying to partner up with autonomous vehicles now, and they're trying to partner up with different different fleets. So imagine if you have like a fleet of cars in the future, you can add it to the Uber network. And they're they're I think they're going to try to convince Elon to do the same thing with robotaxis because it's like it's a win win win for everyone, right? And their whole thing now is is. You know, it's whatever humans need, we're going to add it to our distribution network. So like Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of Uber, he has Cloud Kitchen. So they're adding that into Uber as well. And so it just goes to show you that distribution is very much king as long as you know how to market this stuff.
Yes. And if you look at some of the biggest companies in the world, like the auto space, Uber's there, or transportation, they don't own cars. You look at Airbnb, they don't own any properties.
Marriott doesn't even own a lot of their hotels anymore.
Most hotel chains or A lot of the popular ones like the Hiltons and Marriotts, the St. Regises, although St. Regis I believe is owned by Marriott, they have a licensing deal with the person who owns a property. Like even here, we're in a Mandarin Oriental recording this. Do you know how much of the building the Mandarin Oriental owns?
Like less than 10%.
Zero.
Oh, 0%.
It's a management deal.
I'm right, less than 10%.
Yeah. Yay, that's true. They don't own the building at all. A lot of the deals are management deals. And I know this because in my HOA, I got a notice saying for like the agenda, you know, discussion of the renewal of the Mandarin Dental. And then right after is like approving the renewal of the Mandarin Dental.
Yeah, the name, because the name has always changed. Like you used to live in a different, in a Mandarin in Vegas and it changed to Waldorf Astoria.
It was after the, not the P.F. Chang's, what's a quick Asian fast food place?
Panda Express.
Panda Express. Yeah. The Panda Express guy bought The Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas. He lived in the building too at the same time. He then changed it to Waldorf Astoria because he felt it would be better to draw in more people into the hotel.
Interesting. Did it work?
I don't know. Because when I sold my unit, because it was part residential, as you know, the bottom half was hotel. The residential was owned, of course, by the people who bought the properties. He bought the hotel side as well as the common areas. I sold my unit when it was the Mandarin. And the one of the main reasons I bought there is because of the Asian food and Indian food, and it was this comfort food for me.
So I visited Alex and Layla when they were. I don't know if they're still there, but they are there. Yeah. So to me, it felt like the same thing. So I'm not sure if it changed.
The restaurants have changed. I don't know if they changed a tea lounge and stuff like that, but some of it's a little bit changed because they got rid of like the Asian theme.
Yeah. Oh.
All right.
So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency. Called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. You know what's interesting? I want to talk about this real quick because I don't know if you actually know about these changes, but Did you see all the big changes coming with YouTube?
Are you talking about the creator stuff where you can now plug in ads like you do with television?
Yeah, stuff like that. So what do you, what have you seen so far?
Yeah, so I believe it starts rolling out end of Q4 fully, and then, or it starts really rolling out sometime in Q4, and 2026 it's fully rolled out, I believe Q1. The easiest way for everyone to think about this change when it comes to creators is let's say, A company hits up Eric and I to create a video and they pay us and it gets, you know, our average impressions that they're paying us for is they're just paying us a flat fee. An average video of ours gets 10,000 views. This video gets 2 million views. They keep making money when we just got paid one time.
Mm-hmm.
On the flip side, if Eric and I get paid one time and our average video gets 10,000 views, but this new video only generates 1,000 views, this advertiser is kind of screwed because they just paid you to create a video on them, even though you're mentioning it's sponsored and all that kind of stuff, and it got 1/10 of the views that it normally does. And when you run videos, if you think about the way most people record videos, you just talk and you record and that's it. If you look at how TV shows are filmed, You film and they have cliffhangers right where there's commercial breaks, right? The good shows, the good producers tend to do that. And then they can swap in advertisers whenever they want. And just like the television networks, people stop paying you, swap it out with something else. The cool part in today's world and what the changes YouTube are making, it's going to be more like you have a TV media company where you can figure out where you want ads put in and swap them in and out and people can buy impressions and work out deals and I think it's less risk for the advertiser and it also gives the creator more opportunities to monetize. In the last, I think it was 3 or 4 years, YouTube made an announcement that they paid out over $100 billion to creators. I don't know if you saw that.
Yeah, I saw that.
And I think this is just going to make creators more money and advertisers willing to spend more because it makes it more trackable and more transparent.
Cool. So I want to talk about, so that's a big one, but there's a couple other big changes and maybe we can react to these changes because some are, I think, really exciting as a creator. Right now with YouTube, you know, obviously you can do the thumbnail testing. So they have 3, right? Yeah. Now you can do title testing with it as well.
Yeah.
So you're going to have 3 that you can test and title titles and your thumbnail. That's obviously the biggest indicator or the biggest way to get people to click. They also have inspirations coming too. So oftentimes people will have like, you know, they'll have writer's block when it comes to new ideas. So these inspirations are AI-generated to look at what performs well on your channel and then look at what else is happening in your niche and give you ideas. I think that's great. Long-form ad swapping, you just talked about. Short-form product linking, you can do with more accuracy now.
Yep.
And what I think is interesting, what's more exciting to you and me with this crappy Marketing School small YouTube channel is that we can add collaborations. So you and I, if we just add our marketing team or whatever, as managers, they can just add your channel and my channel for this long-form podcast on Marketing School, and we can add it as a collaborator, just like you would on Instagram. So what's going to happen? This Marketing School YouTube channel would collect the revenue and then you and I would just pass over some of our reach to this channel and then it would grow, right? That's exciting to me for sure. I'm going to test that with this channel. Once it works, obviously you'll be like, okay, I'm down. But you're like, I don't know about that. Yeah.
No, the other thing that we've seen with YouTube, and this is just an interesting stat that we've seen on our end, People try to optimize for the hooks. Like with my channel, the videos that don't have the best retention in the first like 30 seconds or a minute, like, you know, with the hooks, are the videos that tend to get the most views.
That don't have a hook?
No, that don't do the best with retaining people from the hook.
Because you change the subject?
No.
Sorry, I'm not understanding what you're saying.
Okay, so let's say I create a video on SEO. Okay? And if I have a video that's like, You already know what's hap— you already know that SEO has changed, but this is what's going to happen in 2026 that no one's talking about. Okay. I consider that a decent hook.
Yeah, you got my attention.
Okay. I just came up with that on the spot.
Yeah.
When I hook people really strong, my retention's better in the first 30 seconds or a minute or whatever you want to end up calling it.
Yeah.
Those videos tend not to get the most views. Okay. All my videos have a hook, but the ones that don't have the best retention and the hooks aren't as strong, no joke, those videos tend to have the best overall views.
That's interesting. Maybe human psychology is getting used to not wanting to see these sensational hooks and wanting to see something normal.
It could be. When we start diving a little bit deeper, what we found is The videos that have the most views are on topics that people are the most curious about and they're much more likely to watch the whole thing. Yes, there's still a high drop-off at the beginning, but the retention throughout the rest of the video is fairly good.
Yeah.
And it's better than the ones that I just hook them really strong.
Yeah.
And I think what's happening, because I'm not switching it, it's not like I'll use that hook that I just gave and then talk about paid ads instead of SEO. Like I still keep it relevant to the hook or else then people are just going to be pissed off at you and then give you a low thumbs down on everything. But what I found is more important than the hook, and this is at least for my channel, I need to look at more channels and get data on this, more important than the hook, more important than that thumbnail click-through rate is what I found is people really want to watch the whole video because it's a topic that they truly care about.
Yeah, that's interesting. I think we're going to have to look at more data. I will say though, when I watch stuff on Stuff I'm interested in, like AI marketing agents and people are doing a screen share and it's like 30 minutes. I find myself watching the whole thing.
Yes, but it comes down to what I found is it's more about the topic and is the topic interesting enough to your ideal audience where they're going to watch a large chunk of it?
Bingo. It is the topic that's number one, even over the thumbnail, the headline. It is the topic, the ideation. And I don't, I think even for us, I don't think we spend, enough time on the topic ideation piece. For you, I think you guys do. I think we've got— we've kind of slipped from it and we're kind of going back to it. But 2 more things I want to talk about here before we move on. Dubbing. So dubbing has come out and I was listening to one of these influencers, I think Colin and Samir, he was switching between him in English and him in Portuguese and it was like pretty damn good. So dubbing's coming. We're going to abuse that, right?
They've been talking about that feature for a while.
But now it looks good. Yeah. And then influencers inside Google Ads. So you're going to be able to look for influencers that you want to hire inside of Google Ads.
That's cool.
Yeah. So, but the collaborations thing is the most exciting to me. I'm going to test it for this channel and if it gets enough views, I'm going to bother Neil to do it too.
But yeah, I think the dubbing, because the problem I have right now for YouTube, we have offices in 20-something countries. I stopped tracking and we generate a large chunk of revenue from outside the United States in non-English speaking countries. Of course, executives at a lot of these corporations that we work with speak English. Like we work with like Prudential in Brazil and Novartis, you know, the big pharmaceutical for the Ozempic drug in Brazil as well. So even though a majority of Brazilians speak Portuguese, on the executive level in large corporations, most of them speak English, but when they're consuming content, marketing content or content that you were marketing—
Native.
It's in their native language. And when you talk in English, it just screws up your reach in all these countries.
So I think this is going to work out well long-term. Yeah.
I can't wait to dub my video and I'm hoping it's the same video, same URL, same video, same URL.
Yeah.
In all the languages.
Yeah. No, literally there's just a, you just switch the language and I think they're already by default, they're in Portuguese or whatever. Right. It's just going to go to that. And I think that's going to drive more business and more, I think it's going to drive more brand awareness long-term too.
So yeah, here's a hack that a lot of people aren't doing. One thing that we've been doing is we crawl and we use AI for this. I don't know what AI tools my team's using for this, but what they do is they look at all the languages that are outside of English that has marketing-related videos. It maps out how many views a video's getting, and it looks for a disproportionate amount of followers to views. So like someone having 1,000 YouTube followers and then the video getting 10,000, 12,000 views.
Mm-hmm.
And that topic's made some topic in marketing, it's recent, like when I say recent, last 30 to 60 days, it does really well in those countries. And then we look at the English variations, AI does, and it tells us which videos haven't been done in English yet. And that gives us ideas for topics for us to create videos in the United States that could potentially be viral hits. Because if they got 10,000 views with only 1,000 followers, We'll do like, let's say if it's talking about AI mode before a lot of other people are and it has a unique take, we may be like, well, we have a different take and a better take because of Chrome and all the integrations. We're going to do a video on AI mode and we're going to do a different spin on it because we think this is what's going to actually change AI mode for marketers. And then we'll do a video on it and we've seen a really high hit rate from that. And when I say a high hit rate, around like 40% of it, 40% of the time it doing really well.
That's high. And by the way, if you want to build a YouTube trending topics agent, like what Neil's talking about, I just talked to the CEO of Lindy the other day, right? And basically you can use natural language now. So text to agent. So like you can dictate what you want. And you know, these workflow tools like N8N and all these things, you have to like make these things and click them around. Literally, I just dictate what I want. After the podcast, I, first time I did a podcast in a while where I interviewed someone, right? I just wanted to max out what I can learn. And he's like, yeah, all you need to do is dictate out. I was dictating out, I was editing my agents.
All of my agents got better.
And I was making, so the thing that you just mentioned, you guys can just take this transcript, whatever Neil just said, dump it into Lindy, try it for free. He's not paying me to say this, right? But it's, it's pretty crazy where this is going. And now I'm just, I kind of want to spend, this is why I'm leaving my Vegas trip early. I want to go home and I want to make agents tomorrow. But it's exciting because he said at his company, he's like, he's like, yeah, we're all in the office. I was like, so you guys are in the office 5 days a week? Oh, he's like, no, no, no, 6 days a week. I'm like, okay, so what are your people doing all the time? He's like, all of my people, 30% of the time they're building agents, sometimes even more than that. They're just using this text-to-speech thing, thinking about all their problems, all the annoying things. And I'm like, wow, you guys can use whatever you want. You can use Lindy. I'm sure there's other tools you can use. But the thing that the YouTube trending topics, the international one Neil just mentioned, just take this transcript, guys, and go have at it.
Yeah, we find it to work. And when I say 40% of the time it's working, like 40% of the time when we've tested it, it hits, it gets over 100,000 views. We've tested it for me and it's either 2 or 3 other people.
Yeah.
One of them is in the beauty space. One of them is in the automotive space, not like car repair, but more like exotic cars and talking about like cool, I don't know, like not hot rods, but like the Lamborghinis, the Ferraris, but not like, here's the latest Ferrari, more like, here's a tuned up Ferrari, you know, and like, look what it can do. But yeah, we found that 40% of the time it gets more than 100,000 views when we do it.
You know, your recent videos, it's all like your surprise face is like, Are they? Yeah.
Yeah. Or the thumbnail must be, I'm guessing.
The thumbnail is you like, whoa. Like, yeah. Yeah. It's— I'm going to go look at it right now, but go ahead. You can pick the next one.
Let's talk about this one. Why framing is everything.
Wait, hold on guys. Just look at this.
Dude, the last 2 are me like, oh my God.
Yeah. But they did well. I mean, the last one here, well, one's 2 days ago, 12K, and the other one's 200K views. But look, look, look, look, there's more. There's more. You're just, you're constantly shocked.
Okay, wait, wait. What's the one, the Perplexity SEO?
How many did that get? 99K views.
The one on the top right?
Top right is 17K views.
Okay, what's the one after the ChatGPT opportunity?
This one?
Uh-huh.
ChatGPT's 36K.
Okay, and the one on the very right, Old Google Dead?
18K.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I was trying to see if there's a pattern in which my shocking faces get more views or not, but there isn't.
I don't think there's a pattern. Yeah, there's still a pattern. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, okay, so you said, which one did you pick?
Uh, what is it? Why framing is everything.
This comes from this guy, Caleb Waitney on, on, on, on Twitter. So there's, this is framed, you like data. Okay. This is framed in data over here. What I'm showing here on the very left side, you can see the framing here is the world is awful. Okay. And globally it says 4.4% of all children die before they are 15 years old. This means every day, 16,000 children die.
Right.
So the way you look at this, it's negative framing.
Yeah. The world is awful. How many children die again?
16,000 children die every day.
Oh, that's sad.
Which is a lot. It's like, oh crap, I didn't know that.
Right.
Yeah. And then, but then you look at the middle one, the world is much better. In the past, around 50% of all children died. Today, 4%, 4.4% of children die. So it actually has gotten a lot better.
It's like, oh, okay. Okay. That's good.
And then you go to the very right side. The world can be much better. Okay. So 4.4% of all children worldwide die. In the European Union, only 0.47% of all children die, half a percent, right? Meaning that, hey, we know we can already do this, so we can actually make this even better.
Yeah.
But this is all the same. It's all, it's all data being manipulated into a different headline.
Yeah. It was either New York Times or The Economist or one of them. Ended up doing framing with pricing on their page for like an upgrade subscription to like their digital newspaper. And it was 3 plans and I'm butchering this because I don't have the pricing in front of me, but it was something like a monthly.
Yeah.
A yearly or something like that. And like some bonus offer. And they made the, they made one of the plans look so better yearly or annual or every 6 months, they made one of them look so bad. So you would just take the middle offer or the right offer. So in other words, sometimes when people do pricing, I'll actually give you guys an idea for this for software. If you're selling software for $10 a month, or you want to do, call it $100 a year and you give 2 months free and no one's taking either of them, sometimes you'll do like, You know, 6 months for $30 and people are like, wait, that's a really good deal. Because on an annual basis is only $60. Let me take that. And they'll put like best value.
You're talking about The Economist, right?
Yes.
So here's one from The Economist. It's, I, this is kind of similar. There's a better American example, but this is a New Zealand pricing, right? So right here at the very top, we're looking at 3 pricing options. You have print package only, so no digital.
Okay.
So you only get the magazine. So in New Zealand dollars, This would be $530, okay, for 1 year. Now, if you go digital package only, it's $460, okay? But if you go print and digital, it's $640, best value. So why would you not do print and digital? You would be stupid not to.
Yes, but the one I was talking about wasn't that one from The Economist. It was one where they made one of the offers so terrible that you would pick the one that is the cheapest, and by far it was the best deal.
Yeah, I'll have to find it, but that's—
it was Economist or New York Times or one of them. But either way, sometimes people put on their pricing page offers that are terrible just so you take, you know, the one they really want you to take.
Well, they have this, this one's interesting. This is, I don't know if this is from Economist, but this is interesting because it says on the very left side, it says chosen by 16%. On the right side, chosen by 0%, chosen by 84%. I think this is the case study, but I think you're probably referring to something more like this.
It's more something like that.
Yeah.
Anyway. And sometimes people do take the bad offers.
Yeah.
I don't know why.
A very small percentage, but you know, sometimes, sometimes people just have a preference. Maybe they don't want digital at all. Like if you're older, you know?
So yeah, I actually miss the newspapers, like the actual ones you hold in your hand.
That's why I only buy physical books. I don't buy Kindle or anything. I like, I like holding it because it also forces you to focus and you're more immersed in the book. If you're on like a digital device, I'm like, I'm going to be prone to doing other stuff.
Yeah.
So yeah.
All right. Here's another one. How long have you been doing Single Grain for?
Oh, I actually looked at it on LinkedIn. It says 12 years, 9 months.
All right. And I have this topic here, 10 years. That's how long it really takes for marketing to kick in. Assume you're consistent for all the 10 years and you're trying hard. Okay. If you looked at your business, you weren't there from day one, but you have a lot of the stats and data.
Yeah.
Yeah. You were there what year? Like 3, 4?
It's Single Grain started in 2009. I didn't join until 2012 or '13, 2013.
So yours was, you guys had a reset. So let's, let's call it, you started when the—
I took over in 2014.
Okay. So it's been a little bit more than 10 years, 11 years. Yeah. And you agree the company pretty much just reset from there.
Yeah, I've had to reset the company twice.
No, but when I mean reset, it was really tiny back then.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you grew it from pretty much nothing to where it is today. You agree with that statement, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So you're pretty much starting all over.
Yeah.
When you were going through it and starting over at the beginning, how'd you get your customers?
SEO didn't kick in yet. A lot of it's in the very beginning, you're talking about with or without you?
When you took over in 2014—
When I took over, just to make it clear for everyone, Neil generated a lot of leads from his old blog and he actually sent the leads over to Single Grain because Single Grain was started by Neil's cousin, Sujan. And when I took over, I think at a certain point, even before that, we stopped the Neil Patel lead flow, right?
Yeah.
From what I remember.
I believe so, but in general, the business didn't work out. People didn't want to be part of Single Grain anymore. Eric wanted to take it over. I think we gave you our shares or maybe for a dollar.
Legally, I had to buy it for a dollar.
Yeah.
So you basically gave it.
Yeah. Yeah. I think other people sold you their shares. Yeah.
I bought real money and Heaton shares for $1. Yeah. 'Cause we didn't— the rest was through profits.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, so then, and I don't think we took profits. I think we just gave a dollar.
We just gave it. Yeah.
Uh, and Eric was starting over at that time. How were you generating revenue?
So we had customers already that we were holding onto, but I would say that some of it was word of mouth and then some of it was through SEO.
Yeah, but when you had customers, I don't think it reveals much. Your revenue was, we can always cut this out if you don't want, but you're talking about sub-million bucks. It was really tiny at the time. It was nothing. Yeah, it was very little.
Yeah, yeah.
So back then you were getting some through SEO, some through word of mouth. Okay, go back or then fast forward 5 more years. Go to like around 2020.
Well, fast, if we fast forward 5 years, yeah, let's go to 2019. 2019. Let's go 2019. Okay. So by that point, we, when I first started at Single Grain, we started doing a lot of guest blogging and there's a period of time for 3, 4 years where we started ranking number 1 for digital marketing agency. And that's what allowed us to get all the leads to hire the people that we needed to hire to grow. And it wasn't so, This gets a little complicated. I don't know if you want this in here, but like 2014 to 2015, it wasn't until really 2015 to 2017 or so I really started to focus on it. Because even the first year when I took it over, I made it go from bad to worse. Remember that?
Yeah.
Yeah. So I made it go from bad to worse. We dropped all the way down to 1 employee and then thank God the rankings kicked in and then we started getting all these leads and then we were referring the leads to another agency that we're both referring to. And then eventually we were able to—
Oh, back then. I think it was a San Diego agency, right?
Yeah, the San Diego agency. Yeah. But then I would say, and Noah was part of this, Probably, no, because you joined in 2017 or so. 2017 to 2019 was like the most fun like ever, right?
Yeah, the office in downtown San Diego.
The office in downtown, like I loved everybody, it was great. And then the fall—
And Eric was a 6 at this point on the scale of 1 being really easy to go, 10 being—
He said I was going up.
Hard.
Towards the end, I was going up, yeah. Okay, well, but you didn't leave until 2021 where things were, you know, we had a lot of cleanup to do at that point.
Yeah. Okay. So, but, so how were you getting your business around 2019?
Majority through SEO.
All right. Yeah. Now fast forward to 2024.
Yep.
Okay.
10 years.
You can even say now. Yeah, you can say now it's the same thing.
Yeah.
How are you getting most of your business?
Honestly. Honestly, there's still a good chunk from, from SEO. Not nearly as much before. Before it was like 80+% from SEO. Now it's a combination of referral and then people consuming content from different places and referrals. Did I say referral already?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What would you say is non-ranking? How much of the business do you think is from people just knowing the brand at this point?
It's tough to say because—
Give me a range. It's not 1%. It's not 50%.
Let's say it's like 15 to 20%.
So your brand is kicking in where you're getting customers.
Yeah. And because a lot of them say like, I either follow Eric or I've known Single Grain for a while.
Okay.
Yeah.
And those customers, are they tending to pay on the lower end of Those are down to pay more. And so they are the higher end, middle?
I would say middle to high.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what's the churn on those customers?
They stay longer.
They stay long. By how much longer?
Tough to say right now because we had such a reset in the last few years. Yeah.
Would you at least say 10%, 20%, 50%?
Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah.
So in other words, your brand's getting out there, it's kicking in. You're getting better quality customers and they're staying longer. And this is why I tell people it takes 10 years for marketing to really kick in because you start getting a lot more word of mouth where that doesn't really kick in in the first few years unless you're lucky and you created this AI tech that just does everything for everyone and it's easy and it's really free or cheap.
Yeah.
But in most cases, marketing does not kick in as, or word of mouth marketing does not kick in, which I believe is the best form of marketing until really 10+ years. You do see traction going up to it. Yeah. But after 10 years, that's where it really starts growing. And from years 10 to 20, that's where we see great lift. We did a study on this and I think it was something like 18% or something like that of your ideal customers should know about your brand roughly around year 10.
Oh, there you go. Yeah. And the same for you guys.
For us, we haven't been around 10 years yet. I think this is year number 8.
But you've been marketing for over 10 years.
Yeah, but our agency's starting to get known. And when I ask our team members, keep in mind, we have data analytics, we track. The hard part with the marketing agency, unlike most fields, is if in most fields, when you're selling to someone, you're selling at least on the enterprise end, you're selling to C-level, you're having a direct conversation with them, you know how they found out about you. The marketing category or the marketing agency world is a little bit unique. When you're selling, you're typically selling through procurement and procurement reaches out. This is specifically for enterprise. And when procurement reaches out and you ask them how did they learn about you, almost always they don't Have the answer.
Nor do they care.
Nor do they care.
Yeah.
And typically people who are in charge of sales for us will ask, but when someone says, oh, I don't know, it was either a referral or employee mentioned it or award, or we heard about you, or maybe Google's website recommended you. And they go on and on and they give you like 6 or 7 examples. You know, at that point, they, Probably don't know. They're just rattling off a lot of random things. Like they're like, it could be a conference that we saw you at. Yeah. You don't want to keep pushing them to find out how they heard about you and why they included you, because if you bug them, they may exclude you from the RFP and just be like, screw you. We don't want to work with you guys. You're irritating.
But that makes sense. But how about, that's the enterprise side, but what about NPXL, your small business division?
I would say. It's less than 20%. I would say it's closer to 15% that are referrals now. Partnerships probably make up another 12, 13%. So I would say, and then if you exclude ads, so the rest are ads and inbound.
Yeah.
Like from rankings and ads.
What percent do you think come from ads?
Maybe 10%. 10, max 15. I'm 99% confident it's at least 10%. I'm 99% confident it's not 15%. So it's somewhere in that band.
Yep. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, it's funny, yesterday I was recording this new style for my short-form content. So I got all these scripts, right? And one of the scripts was around like X years to see success in marketing, X years to see success in the podcast, X years to see success in business. A lot of it's like years and years and years. And that's how long it takes. I was like, oh, that's a good format.
It's a good format.
By the way, I'll— I'm going to try this out. But the way they scripted everything, it was like 24 pages of scripts for short form. I'll send it over to you. Like, I do think if this works out— first, I was like really hesitant. I was going to record yesterday. I was so pissed off. I was like, I have to do these new styles, all these things. I don't even like— I have to do these clone videos. Some I'm standing and then I'm behind a green screen and all this stuff. I don't want to do any of this, right? After I did it, I was like, Yeah, I think this will work. So I'll let you know. And then you should work with these guys too if it works.
How much does it cost?
It's cheap.
Less than $1,000 a month?
Less than $5,000 a month.
Okay.
It's a good deal.
And they create the scripts?
They create all the scripts. It was 30 scripts. And I was like, this was really worth it.
Manually or they're using AI?
I actually think they're doing it manually. You know what I did afterwards? I took that 24-page script and I made a Gemini gem from it, right? 'Cause you could just take the doc, it's like a custom GPT, but Gemini's connected with YouTube. So I took our Longform podcast, I was like, hey, I want the same level of scripts from this 80-minute podcast. And it actually did a good job.
Oh, cool.
Yeah. So anyway, little hack for you guys. But I digress. You have one here around how AI companies are taking a lot of the good marketers.
Dude, I've been getting a lot of requests from venture-funded startups that raised between $10 and $50 million. Like, hey, we're in growth mode right now. Do you know any amazing marketers we can hire? And they're usually asking me for people who will work in office, typically in San Francisco. That's the most common city request that I get. I do get every once in a while LA, but it's mainly San Francisco. Every once in a while I'll also get Seattle, Washington, because I used to live there. But it really is mainly SF. And I know a lot of great growth marketers, But almost all of them work for the AI companies. And I've asked a few of them if they're interested in jumping ship and they're like, dude, they're like, my comp is so high.
The comp is so good. Yeah.
And then I'm like, oh, is it because shares? I'm like, oh, there's probably liquidation preferences when some of these companies raise, you know, like $10 billion, $2 billion, whatever it may be. And they're like, yes, it's shares, but they're all— and once they told me their salary, I'm like, oh, okay. It's both. They're like, yeah, they're paying extremely competitive salaries, if not more than market rate. And I'm getting shares. So they're like, it's hard to find a job that pays as much cash. Plus the shares could be worth a crapload of money when this company goes public. And a lot of them work for AI-related companies that are worth well over a billion bucks.
Yeah. What can you do?
Yeah. They're just, they can pay more.
I would say if I were starting from scratch today in our, in our mid-20s, I'd probably just go work for one of them. So.
Dude, me too. If I was starting from scratch again, I would not be an entrepreneur. I would just go work for a company and make it grow.
In this very moment, because AI is so hot right now and they've raised so much money and I know like it's, yeah, it's a good deal.
So no, but even, yeah, in this moment, but even at my age, if I was starting from scratch again, assuming I had my knowledge and pedigree, I would just go be a CMO at a corporation.
And just keep in mind at these AI companies, just like the one AI company I mentioned, Lindy, They're working 996, so just expect to work a lot.
Did Lindy raise a lot of money?
I don't know. You can look it up. I suspect—
How do you spell Lindy?
L-I-N-D-Y. He did say on the podcast that their investors are like, you guys are one of the most efficient companies because they just keep building more and more agents.
$50 million was their last round.
Okay. From who?
Funding raised about $50 million with Series B in January 30th. It doesn't show me.
Yeah. Dude, speaking of people real quick.
Oh, notable investors. Menlo Ventures, Coatue, and Battery.
Okay, those are serious companies.
Yeah.
Yeah, serious firms. Dude, speaking of people real quick, so I was reading on X, but what do you think about the concept of hiring fast and firing fast? So this comes from a private equity owner.
Hiring fast and firing fast?
Yeah. So here's what he said. Let me give you the background and we can react to this. So he said private equity, obviously you're hiring a lot of CEOs, right? So his biggest insight was hiring a long-term CEO is a crapshoot. Year 1 and year 10 data was exactly the same. After testing everything, there was no difference. This is why he says hire fast, fire fast, because even with 10 years of data, you can't predict if someone will scale with the company. Humans are too wild. And I was thinking about yesterday when I, you think about the NFL draft, like how often do they get it right? They get it wrong pretty like—
A lot.
Yeah, and you have all these scouts, you have all these analytics, all these things, like humans are too unpredictable.
I was reading an article from yesterday, I just pulled it up from the AI Overviews. It was an article on Sequoia Capital and I don't want to go through it because it was long, but Google summarizes it. And Brian, so Brian Halligan, the HubSpot guy, he joined Sequoia. I think he's like a coach there or something for executives helping them scale. And I'm pretty sure Brian doesn't need any more money, so I think he's just doing this for fun or to keep him busy or something. This may be his passion, but he had a really good article on Sequoia Capital from a lot of the stuff that he's learned at HubSpot. And we've hired a lot of executives. You know my hiring process, it's pretty thorough and we hire slow, we fire fast.
Mm-hmm.
If we know the person or people in our network know 'em, we hire pretty quickly.
Mm-hmm.
But we generally are pretty careful and our executive rate is not that high. Like you would think that we're hoping for like a 90% success rate.
You mean your executive success rate, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
We're above 50, but we're definitely below like 80%. We're somewhere in between.
Yep.
And I don't know the exact percentage, but I know we're above 50 and I know we're definitely below 80%. And Brian talks about this at HubSpot because I know they have a crazy crazy hiring process. And he talked about how 40% of executive hires did not work out for him. No matter how good you are, he's like, the problem with it, and he's spot on, when you're recruiting executives, especially like VP of marketing or CMOs, people interview really, really well. And they've been around the block, so they're much more polished. It's harder to sniff out bad executives. What we've done that's helped increase our odds of recruiting amazing executives, especially in marketing, we will tell them how we expect them to be player coaches. So they got to teach the team and help them improve, but they got to get their hands dirty.
Yep.
We also tell them how we expect tons of hours of work. I'll call them and other people will call them at random hours. We expect things to get done. And if this is not the environment that they want to end up working in, Yeah. Cool. This isn't for them.
And I think that's really important because you're just, you're just setting expectations. It's not, there's no right or wrong. It's just, that's how you guys do things. And a lot of people, but by the way, the reason Neil's doing that too is a lot of executives, they've gotten used to having a lot of resources and being very cushy, right? It's like, hey, if you're going to come here, you're not only going to be managing, you're going to be in the trenches as well. And you're going to be working a lot. So don't expect to go into a situation where you're very comfortable. That's the expectation you're trying to set. And I think it's really important that what we do with our hiring process is at the very end, I'll say, Hey, I'm going to anti-sell you. I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't join us, right? And then I tell them and they still say they want it, right? So, but I think your way of doing it is all your people in the hiring process anti-sell them at every single stage. Yes.
And we do it from day one because we don't want to waste the next person's time in the interview process if we already know they're not going to be interested, if they're not going to be down with our culture and the way we operate.
Yep.
Yep. All right.
So I got one here on, do you want to see the true state of the economy or do you want to say something?
Uh, one thing to give you idea, you know Nick on my end, right?
Yeah.
Dude, when we were in San Francisco, I, I won't mention the company name, so I met up with a really large corporation. I told Nick that day when we were in San Francisco, I need you to create a deck in less than 24 hours to send to a potential customer, and here are their requirements. He ended up creating almost a 90-page deck. It was 80-something pages.
From scratch.
From scratch. And he had to turn it into me and do it. And I remember him telling our CEO, because our CEO was in Cuba at the time, and I was not, I was trying to not talk to him and have people not talk to him because he needed to spend time with his family. He was still working. He would just act like he wasn't working so I wouldn't know. But Nick was telling me, he's like, oh, I'm glad that you're back, Mike. And I probably called Nick during that week 20-something times.
Wow.
It was that deal and 2 other deals. So 3 total. I made him scramble last minute and do stuff. I usually send it to Mike and then Mike rounds up who he wants into doing it. And Nick makes commission, so it's in his best interest. But like, He's a trooper. He doesn't complain. Yes, it is, but it's also tough. How do you know when you're listening to a podcast that it's AI-generated or not if the audio's really good?
I don't know. I don't know right now.
I don't really listen to AI podcasts at the moment, but I think what makes The human touch really good is people can meet you and they can relate more. I'm not saying they can't do that with AI. I just don't know how they can do that with AI right now.
Yep.
Time will tell. But from our experiences, when we go in person and go to events, people like the fact that we're humans. They can interact with us, take pictures. I'm not saying I'm popular or anything like that, but, or Eric's popular or anything like that. It's more so people like how they can interact and share stories and we can relate to them.
I think events are going to become even more valuable and communities are. I mean, even you look at the last 12 months or so. So this year I didn't do my annual event that I do, right? And when's the event happening? When's the event?
What annual event?
Remember, I would do it at the Beverly Wilshire or like, you know, we do like the little, the little mastermind thing. Oh yeah. Yeah. And like this year a lot of people were texting me saying, hey, when's it happening? I was like, oh no, I'm doing— I had to handle the YPO Global Marketing Summit this year. And so I think these types of communities are going to going to become more and more valuable because it's just all this stuff that you're seeing right now. There's going to be a proliferation of all this AI content, which is fine. But the unique part to your point is the human connection, whether you are introvert or not.
Yeah. You're actually better off doing more of the YPO marketing summits each year if they let you.
They won't let me.
Than doing your own thing.
Yeah. They won't let me because there's a board that they have and they They like to cycle through different people. The problem is every person they cycle through, a lot, it's the event experience varies, whereas like I've done a lot of these and so I know how I want it to go, right? And so the quality changes every year. Yeah.
And you picked a legit hotel, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
What do they have that we love?
The gelato.
Real ice cream.
Yeah.
Yeah.
St. Regis Bell Harbor. Shout out to St. Regis Bell Harbor, which I was going to say is owned by Waipio, but it's not. So yeah.
Cool.
Yeah. Anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
