Reddit wiped out of ChatGPT, the real AI agent numbers, what agencies are worth & more job full

All right. So, Neil, I was in Arizona with some of our mutual friends this week. And, you know, I— we're talking about a couple of things. And, you know, did you see that podcast interview with Travis Kalanick on— with David Senra?

I did not. Was that the one where he was— he badmouthed VCs kind of?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. So I saw the clip of that. Yeah. Yeah. So Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber. So he had a conversation with David Senra, who does The Founders Podcast, and this one's called David Senra. But anyway, so there's a couple lines in there that I think stick out that I think we can react to. He did actually say, I'll tell you one thing, don't put money into bench— don't let Benchmark invest in you, right? Or like Bill Gurley, like he's looking, he's talking about VCs, he's badmouthing them because he got kicked out of his company because of that. Now that has nothing to do with us, but I do want to talk about the true lifestyle of an entrepreneur. And one of our mutual friends, we're— I spent like 9 hours playing tennis Monday through Wednesday, right? And we're just like, dude, Like at the end of the day, one of the main things is the founder has to be involved, right? And the funny thing is I think about you for a moment, right? Like I think about one of our mutual friends. So he was out of the company for 2 years or so, okay? And when he was out of the company, his CEO was alone. He basically had like dad was there, right? But when he came back in, it's almost like mom came back, right? And when mom came back and you split the load, the company was able to move forward like that. I think about you, I look at you, even though you don't really have a title at your company, I still look at you as a CEO because you're driving things.

But I'm not the CEO.

Whatever. You look at Elon Musk, he's not really the CEO, right? Like he's driving things. And remember, long time ago when, when, when he put money into Tesla, Elon said, I don't want to be the CEO. He's like, I never want to be the CEO, right? And then he realized to get things done, you have to have the CEO title, right? And then he's driving things that way. And he's not like a typical CEO. You'd agree with that, right?

No, he's not a typical CEO.

Yeah, so I still like, despite you not having a title, you drive things like a CEO. And I think Mike Kamo, who's your co-founder, you both are the drivers, right? And I think it's so important to have, it's so helpful to have a co-founder there because when you only have one driver, right? It's a lot more difficult when you don't have mom and dad both there.

Yeah, that's why Y Combinator typically only invests in 3 people founding teams or 2, but it's either 2 or 3. I haven't really, there must be some examples, but Y Combinator usually doesn't invest in a one-person-led Or one person founding team.

Yeah, you know what though? What's interesting is, I forgot, I was listening to another podcast recently and it was like, I think it was a16z, I think it was, it might've been Ben Horowitz talking about this, right? What they've noticed is this, you might have 2 co-founders, you might have a technical co-founder and a founder, right? The founder might be more sales-led, marketing-led, and you have the product person, but usually what happens there is only one of them is the true driver. You usually don't have 2 drivers in a company, right? One of our mutual friends, I would say both of them are drivers, I look at you and Mike, I would say both of you are drivers. It's actually fairly rare to have both of the co-founders being drivers, and you call it the pusher.

Yeah, I agree with you. So it's semantics here, but I think we're speaking the same thing. I look at it as I don't drive, I push, and—

It's the same thing.

A real-life example of this, or let's go back to driving. The reason I don't consider myself a driver is And even Mike Kamo, my co-founder, we genuinely don't run the business. The CEO runs everything. He knows so much more about the business than us. I would be in trouble without him, being really honest. Although at this point we have a big enough executive team. I'm not saying the CEO could be easily replaced. I don't agree with that.

Yep.

But he has built a really solid team underneath him. And he has told me if something happens to him, Here are the few people who should help run the business. He's been very explicit about that.

Yep.

When I look at Mike Camo and I, I would say we're more pushers than anything else. And I don't think Mike knows what I do on a daily basis, Mike Camo. My CEO's also named Mike, so just trying to reduce confusion here. And I also don't know what my co-founder does on a daily basis. We have ideas of what we're focusing on.

Yep.

But we're also in a point in our career where I don't think we're really grinders anymore. I don't have it in me to really grind it out. And I'll give you an example with Fuse, you know, Kellen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You met up with Kellen, we did dinner together.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Kellen and I were talking about doing a business together. They would fund it. We would end up creating a company that would help automate a lot of the work that marketing agencies are doing. He was down to fund it. I would own a large chunk of it. If I wanted a bigger chunk, I would just put in some of the money that would be raised. Let's call it a $10 million round. They're willing to put in $7 million of it, roughly. I'm speaking on their behalf, but that's roughly what they would've put in for a first round for 20%. So $10 million, you lose 20%. So call it $40 million pre-money valuation, $50 million post.

Yep.

And I remember I was walking up and down in my driveway, My son was kicking the soccer ball to me and—

And you were ignoring it? I'm just kidding.

The soccer ball— I was half paying attention. I tend to kick the soccer ball with him probably like 4 or 5 times a week. I don't like when my daughter gets involved playing soccer with us. I know that sounds really bad to say. I love my daughter, but my son and I do stuff we're not supposed to do. Like, let's kick the soccer ball on the roof and see if we can get it stuck. And we'll break shingles on the roof and do stuff that you're not supposed to do. But I have fun just messing around and like, let's kick the soccer ball into our balcony and like, we'll break furniture and pots. And I know that's a really bad example and we're wasting thousands of dollars, but I'm really bonding with my son and we're having a blast.

Yeah.

But I'm talking with him as I'm kicking the ball with my son. And I'm like, I'm telling him, like, or I'm asking him like, what's required of me? And he's breaking down usually what people do in these kinds of roles. And I'm like, dude, I don't know if this is for me. And he's like, why not? I'm like, I got to kind of answer to someone because I have investors, even though I'm an LP in his fund. Yep.

And— Well, it's work.

Yeah. So I was just like, I got to sign up for all this kind of work? And I'm like, this isn't me. And he was just laughing. He's just like, I know, but he's like, it's a big opportunity. I'm like, yeah. I'm like, he's like, I respect it. And I'm like, look, dude, I don't mind writing you checks for your venture fund and you guys can invest my money in other places. Like, They do with a lot of other investors. I don't want to do the work.

But here's a side thing, right? So you've heard of the story before where there's a fisherman in Alaska. He's very successful, right? He's fishing all these fish. And then an investor comes up and is like, dude, let me invest in your— let's build this into a company, right? And the fisherman's like, well, why do I need that? Well, what we're going to do is we're going to expand and then we're going to build this into a huge multibillion-dollar operation, right? And then the fisherman's like, well, then what am I going to do after that?

Right?

He's like, well, then you can, do what you're doing, like you can chill and you can catch fish every day. He's like, well, I'm already doing that right now, right? So the point is you've already worked, and this is not saying don't work hard. Like Neil's already paid his dues, right? He's already worked very hard. He's just not in that season anymore. We have different seasons of entrepreneurship. But going back to this, if we think about, when I think about driver, pusher, at the end of the day, the reason why I think the founder is so important is because the founder is naturally incentivized to care the most. And that's because you, naturally you have a big chunk of the company, right?

Yeah.

And so of course you're going to push the most, of course you're going to drive.

And my—

and our mutual friend was talking about another friend that we knew, and we've talked about this before, like we have a lot of people that, you know, they will hire someone and then get out of their way completely. And I think that's one of the biggest fallacies, I think, in entrepreneurship, because we know someone on Twitter that likes to talk about how he owns all these different businesses and all that, right? And not even a he, or it could be a she as well. But to say you're going to sit out of the business and not push, I think is broken. And the reason why I'm even bringing this up right now, 'cause we're talking about that clip, right? So this is what Travis Kalanick says. The lifestyle of an entrepreneur at its core is I can take more pain than the other guy and I'll prove it. There's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it, right?

Yeah.

And so by the way, if you and I are put through poo-poo moments right now, we deal with them pretty well, right? Unless someone tries to screw you over on like, you know, maybe you're buying something at a store, that's a different story. Then you lose your stuff, so.

Yeah, I actually get upset on that end, but normally I have a really, I don't ever have a temper or get upset. I used to as a kid, but I do get upset when someone tries to pull one on me and screw me over. But you were spot on. To go back to the pusher and the driver, I went through this this week because when we look at M&A at my company, it's 2 deals a year is no problem.

Yeah.

When you start doing 3, 4, 5, 6 deals a year, it puts a lot of burden on the team and it makes more work on the integration and it's just harder, especially if you do them in the same regions. But right now I have an LOI out for a company in Latin America, which I think will go through. We have terms agreed upon in one company in the United States.

Okay.

Which I think will go through. We're in negotiation with one company in France, and we've already discussed pricing and everything, and they want to sell to us. So I think if we want it, it would go through. There's one in Germany that I want, my team wants, but how many deals can you end up doing? And we think that one's probably one of the better ones. And then there's another one in the US, that has some hair on it, but they work with our ideal customers in a service that we don't do a ton of, but the business isn't growing like a hockey stick, but you combine both, they work with our ideal customers, they don't sell all the services we sell, we only sell— You don't buy the growth. Yeah, we could make the math work out on that. So roughly, I don't know how many of them will go through, but it's more than 2. And you're talking about it in a period of 6 months where Maybe 3 on the low end, 5 on the high end, right? And I'm still building the pipe, but I keep telling my team, I'm like, you can do it, right? Why not? And I keep pushing them. And I remember them saying, 2, we don't need to do more than 2 a year, it becomes really hard, to now my team is coming back to me and is like, yeah, this 3rd one's not bad. Yeah, maybe this 4th one too. And they're changing their attitude because they just—

You built the muscle.

Yes. I keep pushing and pushing and getting them used to it. I'm like, I'm like, instead of saying, hey, I get you can't do it. All right, let's do only 2. I start asking, why is it that people only do 1 or 2 a year? What are the bottlenecks? What's the main reason behind this? What are the big things that I'm missing and I'm not thinking through? And then they break it down. I'm like, then how would you solve for that? Oh, this is how I solved for it in the past, and this is what we'd do. We'd build a pure integration team that just focuses on X, Y, and Z, and then it becomes more manageable. I'm like, okay, then go do all of that.

So this is what we call Reverse first principles thinking. And I just came up with it. So, you know, Elon likes to talk about, you know, I think about from first principles, Jensen Huang, I like to think about first principles and what that really means, by the way, for everyone. When you think about a rocket, right? The Russians were trying to charge Elon like an arm and a leg to buy these rockets back in the day, like $6 million or something. And then Elon's like, well, what actually needs to go into a rocket? Well, actually the components actually lead up to about $300 grand or so. So you actually end up saving like what? Like 95% plus, right? Something like that, right? But he broke it down into first principles components. This is the same thing here. What's required to get a deal done? That's what you're basically asking your team. When I say reverse, you're basically putting on your team to think from first principles. Now, Neil doesn't read these things, so I'm just giving it, but that's what he's doing intuitively, which is amazing, right? But the funny, this is no different than like we look at Noah over here, he's got a 6-pack, right? He's working out all the time, but you're just stacking on a little more weight each week, a little more weight, a little more weight, and eventually it's like, Oh damn, yeah, I can actually put up 225, like easy, no problem, right? And, you know, there's, there's a lot of examples like that.

But I can't do what he does and have a 6-pack. I don't think I would ever achieve that.

Well, that's because you don't eat enough. We can talk about you for a moment.

I would have to eat less to get rid of body fat.

How many grams of protein do you get per day?

Recently or when I try?

When you try.

When I try, maybe 80 to 100.

It's not enough. You weigh like 120, right?

I weigh 125 this morning.

So, so this is— so here, here's the hack for you, okay?

This is funny.

So you You guys can go to Chick-fil-A, okay? Go to Chick-fil-A, you get the 24 pieces, you will actually get 76 grams of protein on a 24-piece and it's only 400 calories, right? And it's not that expensive either.

But I don't care for a 6-pack to eat that much protein.

You don't need a 6-pack, but you need more macros. You need, if there's anything, you know what's funny? Hormozi, he, he, when there's a period of time where he's making these videos, like workout videos and things like that, right? And he's like, you know, for, for 20 years I've had 200 grams of protein every single day. And literally he'll eat like a giant tub of like, you know, Greek yogurt and all that.

Yeah.

But the, the thing is this, he'll get He gets 200 grams and he'll eat whatever he wants, like cupcakes, dinner, dessert, and all that, right? And so, as long as you get your macros, it shouldn't be a problem for you because you're already at the right weight. And this is not a workout podcast, but I'm pretty sure if you wanted to get it, you just need to adjust your diet a little bit, right? Right, Noah?

See? But I don't want to adjust my diet.

Well, your diet's fine. It's fine.

Yeah. No, overall I eat pretty healthy, but I agree with you. I do work out enough. I don't eat enough protein. And Just in general, if I get 100 grams of protein a day, I'm happy. And my goal is to get there. And I think I can consistently get there. I don't know if I can get enough protein to build like massive muscle, but I'm okay just having 100 grams and eating some carbs.

I think 100 is perfect because 100, you'll be satiated. It's already like, you know, 80, 80, more than 80%. That's all you really need. I think some people like it's got to be 1 to 1, but honestly, 80% is fine.

Yeah. So even 70%, I don't think it's the end of the world. Well, I don't want, and this is the problem With, I think, some people who are in fitness. I was talking to someone the other day and he was just like, dude, I'm more jacked than ever. Because my friend was at a gym, Curtis, you know Curtis?

Oh yeah.

Curtis was at a gym. He sends me a picture of another guy that I know. And the other guy, I'm not that close to him or anything like that, but he sends me a picture of him. So I text the guy and I text him and I was just like messing around, you know my personality. So I text him like, you're looking a little weak there, bro.

Yeah, yeah.

And the guy's in pretty good shape. He has a 6-pack. He posts images of his six-pack online. I don't follow him. I think that's you can post whatever you want online, but I think to some extent it starts becoming a little douchey. Just my own two cents. I've told him this too.

Yeah.

And as he's responding to me, and I'm just joking, he's like, "Dude, I'm more ripped than ever. I'm taking repetitide or repetitide. It's something like that." Okay. It's like this peptide.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's like an Ozempic alternative.

It's like a GLP-1. Yeah, it's powerful. It's a little too powerful.

And he's telling me, he's like, I now have my bottom six-pack. I never had the bottom. I only had the top 2. And he's like, you want me to send you a picture? I'm like, no, I don't need no pictures or anything like that. So he's going in real in-depth and I'm telling him, I was like, why would you want to take this medicine to just get your bottom six-pack? To me, you're already in good enough shape. He's like, dude, this medicine's really good for you and all this. And I just stopped the conversation. And I'm like, you should Google it. Whatever it is, there's side effects.

It causes mood problems, that one.

Well, not just mood problems. You can't take drugs and medicine or a magic pill and expect it to not have many side effects. Some may be really minor, but I wouldn't want to risk my life.

One of my favorite quotes in business or life in general is there are no solutions, only trade-offs. So everything has a trade-off, right? There's no perfect thing. You live in a big house, guess what? There's a trade-off, right? You get, you have bugs, you have bugs. If you live in a high-rise, like, right? You don't have to deal with bugs, right? But then there's a high-rise, you have to go all the way. There's a trade-off to everything.

Dude, you're so right. There's a trade-off in every decision you end up making in life.

Or let's do kids versus no kids. You have kids, like you're very happy, right? But sometimes like, you know, like there's, there's like, this is a good trade-off, right? Like you have to take care of them. There's a lot of work that goes into it, but it's worth it right now. On the flip side, I don't have kids, but I'm like, man, the grass is greener. Like I wish I do have kids, right? But there's always the trade-off that comes with it, right? And you have to decide what's acceptable to you, what isn't acceptable to you.

Kids are short-term, uh, not a short-term, it's a long-term pain. But in the longer, longer run, like when they're older, it gets much better.

I think it's short-term pain because 18 years goes by so quickly.

And then long-term pain. I don't think 18 years is a long time.

Dude, look at how fast, how long have we known each other?

10 years? 15?

15, 16 years. Look at how fast the time has gone.

Yeah. Time has gone by fast. Yeah.

So it's, it's fast.

Wow. 16 years. That's a long time.

Yeah. No. How long have we known each other? To 2017? Almost 10 years. Look at that. It was like yesterday when I met him, right?

Yeah.

So anyway, but you know what's interesting? So I was playing tennis the other day. I want to show you this because remember we were talking about the Nobel laureates, right? When you're like a—

The what?

Nobel laureates.

Oh, Nobel laureates.

Okay. So performance of physics and chemistry Nobel laureates and nominees, right? So remember we talked about kids that get pushed really hard. So I'm Chinese, right? And then Neil's Indian, right? So Growing up in my culture, because I grew up in like a Chinese dominant area, Taiwanese more specifically, the parents push them really hard. So Yaniv and I were watching this girl playing tennis because we were walking up to the tennis courts on Tuesday or so, right? The first thing that Yaniv noticed, like, dude, she's really freaking good, right? This is like a 14-year-old. You know what the first thing I noticed was?

She's Asian?

No, no, dude. That is the first thing I noticed. Yes, I guess. But, but, but, but like as As Yaniv's admiring her skill, she's really good at age 14. I was looking at her, I'm like, she hates it. And then Yaniv's like, what do you mean? I'm like, and then I walked up to the coach that sees her playing a lot. I'm like, she hates it, doesn't she? And he's like, yeah. He's like, how could, like most, like you're the only one that's noticed. Like everyone notices how good she is. The first thing you called out was how much she hates it. 'Cause I'm looking at her body language, she's hitting it hard. Like she's doing really well. The coach is coming out hard on it. We can keep doing this all day. Like if you wanna do this, we can do this. She does not give a damn. She's just like looking at the floor when she's like in between sets. She's just like looking at her hands or whatever. And the coach we were talking to is like, I've seen that girl coach up since she was 4 years old to 14 years old, right? And she has cried all the time. She has never in one second or one minute even looked like she enjoyed it. And I'm looking at the dad, I'm like, hey, what's her last name, by the way? He gives me their last name, Jing. I'm like, oh, they're Chinese, right? I could say this because I'm Chinese, right? I'm like, That is an example of a tiger parent that's pushed them so hard. But remember, we saw this study before where if you have like an elite kid that learns piano or they learn tennis, they become number one. The issue with that is they're so narrow-minded that they actually end up average later because they never actually enjoyed it. And the people that are more well-rounded that are like exploring all the time, they actually end up being top 1%. They never had to try that hard. And so like, I'm looking at that, I'm like, man, it's like, As much as like I want to be a dad, right? But it's like I look at the parenting piece and it's like, dude, trying to drive, trying to drive, I think your company is one thing, but trying to drive your kids is another thing. And you're a parent, right? And maybe it's too early for you to say, but I'm actually curious to see what you would say here. Because again, like, look, same individuals, elite university and top 5%, late 20s, only 15% of those people actually become elite. The other 85% comes from people that weren't pushed that hard growing up.

Yeah.

I thought that was fascinating.

Yeah. So my wife and I have this philosophy when it comes to raising children or our kids specifically. If they don't want to do something and they've never done it, we push them to it and we actually do force them to try it out. If they try something out and they hate it, we don't keep pushing them to do it over and over again. And to be very specific, If they try it once and they say they hate it, but we think they're good at it, or the coach says they're really good at it and they have potential, or we think they may like it, we push them to do it 1 or 2 more times.

Mm-hmm.

But if they keep saying after 3 times they don't like it, they don't want to do it, we don't make them do it. Even if that sport or that activity would be like, this gets you in a ride into Harvard or Stanford, I'm making up the school. I don't care. I don't understand why people force their kids to do something that, you know, they hate because like your childhood memories should be some of your best memories. You shouldn't have resentment for your parents for making you do stuff that you hate. Now, on the flip side, if they have to do homework and they hate doing homework, I will force them to do it because there's certain things that are good for them, like eating balanced meals, And we'll still give them ice cream and stuff here and there, but eating balanced meals, doing your homework, reading books before you go to sleep every single night. And we make it fun. If our kids don't want to read, why don't you want to read? Oh, you find this boring? Well, let me go find different books that you actually will like and I'll read it to you. And eventually you'll see other people reading, then you're going to want to read too. But I just believe it's a really bad parenting model to just force your kids into something like tennis because you know it's a great ticket for them to get into a good college when they hate it.

So what I would say is this, because Yaniv was asking me, our mutual friend was asking me, he's like, so why does this happen, right? I was like, because in Asian cultures, like if you can get through this, if you can get through the suck here, the whole idea is that you have the wherewithal to get through anything tough, right? Because if you've gone through like 10, 15 years of this pain, right? But to your point, I actually subscribe to your point. There's no point in making— like I think the goal of not even kids, but just in life in general, is to just learn and explore things. And there's some things that you're gonna like, some things that you're gonna hate. So let me read the study to you real quick and then we can move on. So this study was led by Arne Gullick, I'm butchering it, but a sports scientist at the RPTU University in Germany. They crunched data on more than 34,000 elite performers, Neil. So including sports, chess, classical music, and academia. And including that, although they often reach a high level, the best performing, most intensely drilled teenagers tend to not become true superstars as adults. Those who do make that grade, by contrast, tend to not stand out early on. They take longer to reach their peaks and seem to keep their interests wider for longer. So I just think that's really interesting. And I think this— I think at work certainly be the driver. I think in other areas, maybe, maybe, maybe not so much. But that was eye-opening to me because in that moment I was like, okay, maybe I don't want to push my kids, my future kids that hard because seeing her suffer like that, Was painful.

So, yep. And on a random note, remember I talked about the person who's taking those drugs and there's always—

Yeah, he just texted you.

He just texted me. He's like getting ripped. He's at the gym with his shirt off. I'm like, why are you texting me a picture?

I'm like, I don't— Do I know this guy? Does it start with N?

No, you don't know him. I don't know him well either. I met him at a conference a few times and spoke. I was like, dude, don't send me this crap.

That's funny. That's funny. By the way, one more quote from, so The— remember the Four Seasons quote? No. Neil, what do you define excellence as? Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

I don't really have a definition of excellence. Let me tell you. All right, go for it.

So defined by the Four Seasons founder, okay, excellence is the capacity to take pain, right? And that's why Travis Kalanick is like, everything that you go through, like you think about a marathon runner, for example, right? If they're smiling at mile 21, they're not a true killer, right? They need to be grinding through it. Because if you start to let up at that point, someone else is going to come and eat your lunch, right? And it's crazy to me because to your point on like Travis Kalanick is post-economic, but he's still grinding so hard, right? He wants to work on harder and harder problems over time. And, you know, some people are built differently. I don't think there's any right or wrong way to entrepreneur, but, you know, suffering is built into it. And so—

Yes. When I look at excellence, I didn't really think too much about suffering. I look at it as you're never really excellent. To me, excellence is like continually trying to improve and get better. And never really being satisfied with what I've achieved.

Isn't improving a lot of pain?

That's true. To go through it, you are suffering because you're always trying to achieve more and more.

You almost have to enjoy it.

Yeah.

Like, that's why we've become a little numb to it over time.

And I can't speak specifically for Travis because I don't know him, but what I found, and he's much more successful than I am, once entrepreneurs have made enough money, a lot of them still do more because it's not about the money, it's about purpose in life. But the grind that they have later on usually isn't as nearly as much of a grind as they had before they really started making it.

I mean, look at Bill Gates. Do you think he grinds anymore?

No. Even Travis, like, I do think he works hard. I'm not doubting that. People say I work hard. I don't think, and again, I'm just taking a guess here. I don't know him. I don't think he works as hard as he did when he first founded Uber.

Probably not. Also, you have a lot more leverage when you're a little older, right? Like the success that he's had, the team that he has now and all that. So that's what I would say, by the way. Did you see that Reddit got wiped out in the ChatGPT results?

Yes, it's pretty much almost zero. So did G2 and a lot of the other review sites as well.

So this is a graph from PromptWatch that I have pulled up right now. And so Neil, would you want to describe what we're seeing?

Yeah, so PromptWatch is talking about how often ChatGPT is citing Reddit. And if you can look on August 14th, it pretty much dropped down all the way. Now, this is nothing new. I still love this data and chart from PromptWatch, but ChatGPT was cited really heavily early on in the Reddit days. Reddit went public. Sam Altman also has stock in Reddit. I believe it benefited him to do a deal. And then Reddit kept getting cited less and less over time. And you and I called this on previous podcasts. We also said we don't think Reddit is going to be cited that often in the long run, as well as G2 Crowd and a lot of these review sites.

Nope.

For ChatGPT to do really well, they got to look at proper industry websites and see what they say about businesses within that industry versus people who can sign up anonymously on Reddit and say whatever they want.

It's too easy to game.

In a bad way, in a negative way, yes. And actually in a positive way too.

Yeah. Well, everything, but actually when you think about, I was talking about with our mutual friends this week, everything is a game, right? Like the way you behave in a company, the way you serve your customers, all these things. But Anyway, so I thought that was interesting that PropWatch called that out. And these algorithms are always shifting, right? But I was also, I was looking at this tweet over here. So this guy, Matt Swolinski, he works for Victor now. He used to work at growth. He used to do growth for Whisperflow and Superhuman. So he said, Meta quietly ended the media buyer job and most SaaS teams have not noticed. So creative is the targeting now. A $100K a month, K account per month spend needs 400 to 500 new creatives a month to feed the algorithm. 2 static ads and a lookalike audience is not enough. not a strategy. So we should talk about how we think about this because we're doing this for clients right now as well. But my opinion on this is that the really, whether you're in SEO or paid media, what we're hiring now, Neil, is what we call 4-deployed marketers. Okay? So 4-deployed marketer needs to be a T-shaped marketer that is deep in one area. So it could be SEO or it could be paid media, but then they're actually very broad across other categories. So they know how to do analytics, they know how to do organic social, they know how to at least talk about this stuff, right? And so You can't, I believe in today's age in 2026, you can't just be a media buyer. Like it's unfathomable to me, Neil, that people today, they're like, if you think back to when we were like 24, 25 years old, did we know how to do analytics? Like, yeah, we did. But now it's considered like a different job. And I do believe you should go deeper in it, but to be a well-rounded marketer, like I think I look at you, I look at me, it's like, sure, we might've started in SEO, but we know affiliate well, we know SEO, sorry, we know paid media well, we know all these things, we know email well, we know copywriting well.

Yeah.

And that's what I think it is. So this is not even the end of the media buyer job. I think this is the end of the— we're going to see less specialist marketing jobs and we're going to want more generalists that are just strong strategists at the end of the day.

Yeah. And I look at this as the same thing as engineering. If you look at a lot of the engineers now, I know there's more job openings for engineers, but the ones who are adapting and leveraging the latest technology are doing really well. The ones who are slow to adapt are getting fired and replaced. The same thing with marketers, whether it's media buyers or anything else, you have to And I think that's a big problem in which a lot of people just get stuck in their ways in marketing, but they don't realize that the number of changes these platforms make just to their algorithm is ridiculous. Like Google's at over 10 algorithm changes a day based on the last posting they did. It was around there, 9-point-something. If you're not adapting, you're kind of screwed. And platforms change so often, technology changes so often. Don't get into a field that requires a lot of adaptation if that's not you. You want the same old thing over and over again?

Yeah.

Fix roofs. It's a great job, pays extremely well. HVAC is another one. There's not as much change. If you're going into a field that requires change, either buckle up and adapt or don't get into it at all.

I think one thing I'll speak for both of us is Neil and I, we're both looking to continue to hire and we're looking to continue to hire people who have a great relationship to change and are very, they are self-starters and they're learners, right? If you love learning and you have a great relationship to change, That's how you're going to succeed in this new world for a very, you know, a fast-changing environment. Again, if you're in HVAC, maybe not so much, right? If you're building buildings right now, maybe like I'm looking at the Amon that they're building over there right now, maybe not so much for the next, you know, little while before the robots take over. You know, Neil, I want to talk about something in terms of how we're thinking about marketing mergers and acquisitions or just mergers and acquisitions in general, because Earlier, let's just say earlier this month, I sent you something on something that you might want to consider, but there's a reason you didn't want to consider that deal. So yeah, what can you say about your deal underwriting process in your head?

For that deal specifically or any deal?

We can go with that one. Yeah.

So you can make numbers up.

I can make numbers up.

People aren't going to know the company. I can actually even say the real numbers.

Sure.

Because it's so generic, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah. This person was in a pickle. They needed $350,000. And when they were needing $350,000, Eric messaged me and said, if you do a deal with this company and they can't pay you back, you can just take over the company and the company is worth a lot more. They have investors. They raised 8 figures. It's It's not that easy to take over a company when someone doesn't pay you back the money right away. That's number one. 2, I believe the company is going to have mass AI disruption. They already are facing it, and I believe it's already affecting their numbers. So I don't know if I even want to own a company like that. And then the 3rd one is if I give them $350,000 and they only needed the money for 3 months, even if it was for a year, How much interest am I really going to collect on that money? Let's say they want to give me 50% and then I had to pay 50% taxes of that money. Is it really worth doing all the legal paperwork and everything for, call it a profit of, you know, $75,000, $80,000 after taxes?

Also, how many more times are they going to need to do that?

That company?

That $350,000, that $300,000, the $350,000.

Oh, I think they're going to keep needing more and more money, but I'm not in that business of trying to make You know, 10 cents on a dollar. There's a lot of people out there, they're in that business, they're in the lending business, and it can be a great opportunity. I'd rather go invest that money and buy companies that have long-term potential. Dude, yesterday I looked at a company, I won't reveal the name. They work with most of the big tech organizations. So if you look at them, you'd see a massive agency. They do $30 million plus in revenue. They claim $11 and change in profit. In EBITDA, I see $9.8, $9.5, somewhere around there in EBITDA. I don't think they're at $11 either way, but they have heavy client concentration. They'll only grow 6% this year over last year. Their margins used to be 14%.

What kind of agency?

A creative shop.

Okay.

Their margins used to be 14% max. They all of a sudden jumped up because of AI and their revenue jumped up. So if you look at the last 3 years, 3 years ago, they were doing okay, call it in the 20s. Then 2 years ago, they declined from the 3rd year. So did profit. Then a year ago, they grew rapidly because they got 1 or 2 big contracts, which made up the majority of their revenue and they used AI to cut costs. So the profit shot up. This year they'll grow 5, 6%, similar margins as last year because they use AI to cut costs and they have a lot less headcount. And I told the banker, I love this business. I would've bought it 3 years ago if they were reasonable. The guy told me when I talked to him in 2024, at that time, call it, they were doing, I don't know, $3, $4 million in profit. I'm just rounding, but let's call it, I know it was more than 3, but less than 4. He wanted 12 times his profit for a non-recurring business. I'm like, no one's going to give you 12 times. He's like, yeah, I'm going to get an offer soon. Someone wants to buy it. So I'm like, no, they're not. I didn't tell him that, but I was like, I'll just wait until they don't buy you and then I'll come back. Because everyone knows what things trade for. It's really hard to bullshit that. So then when I hit him up again, I'm going through it and I'm like, one, you have client concentration, it's too heavy. 2, this company is going to see price compression because they just cut a lot of staff. They're using AI to do a lot of stuff and they're pocketing the money. They're going to get competition and the margins are going to drop. They're like, yeah, they're already starting to see it. And I'm like, yes. So the banker's like, yeah, maybe you can buy this company for 8 times. I was like, 8 times for something where I believe half the profit's going to go away. So now I paid 16 times. They have client concentration, so a little bit more of the profit's going to go away. I think the business was realistically Run correctly when they were doing around 3 to 4 in profit. And at that point, I would've paid 8 times that business.

It's funny, you can actually reverse the math and say, hey, if we take away your other profits and everything, you actually divide it. So whatever he's asking for, like 20 times, right? You divide it by 2, divide it by another 2, right? You had to pay like 5 times or something.

Yes. And what I was willing to pay years ago, I would've given them 4 times their money upfront. And then did a few-year earnout where they can get the other 4, right? Because you just want to make sure the business doesn't go backwards, especially when everything's not recurring contracts and these businesses—

And then these businesses are very founder-driven too.

It's very founder-driven. So you have to be careful on that, but their clients are a lot of repeat. And then on top of that, when I looked at it and I told the guy this, because I remember talking to him 2 years ago and I was at Javier's, which we're going to later today. I talked to him when I was in Javier's. The same one? Same one in Century City. I was on the phone call while I was at Javier's.

Yeah.

And I remember him saying, oh, we're part of an agency network and we get a lot of business from them. And I was like, well, we're not going to get the business from that network because we're a competitor to almost all those agencies. Well, you only offer creative services, so people of course will push your business. And on top of that, he gets a good chunk of his business from other competing large holding companies like the WPPs, the Dentsus, the Publicists. I'm like, they would never drive us any revenue because we're direct competitors. And we do a majority of the services that they offer in a lot of the countries that they focus on, while you only offer creative services in the United States. So I was like, you start wiping out all that revenue. I'm like, I can't pay what he was looking for. But because they have such solid brands and do such good work, I would've gave him 8 times his profit, call it 2 years ago when the economy was bad. And even with the AI disruption, because I knew I could take that business and grow it globally into something that was like 4 or 5 times the size.

But also these things take a The unseen point Neil's making here as well is these things take time because Neil might check in with him in a year or 24 months or 36 months. I will not sell this company for the deal he's going to offer. A lot of these things take time, whether it's recruiting an executive or doing a deal, you just need to keep checking in.

Dude, out of every single M&A deal we did, how many do you think happened from the first conversation?

Zero.

Only one.

Yeah.

All the other ones happened years after we originally reached out. It doesn't mean that the businesses didn't grow or there was something wrong with them back then or when we bought them. It's more so it was hard to align expectations with what the market's willing to pay and what some of these founders want. I find that in almost every single deal, I reach out to tons of companies and I end up buying them 3, 4 years later. Do you know what the equation is for— Actually, 2 years later.

Do you know what the equation is for happiness?

What?

It's your expectation minus reality is your happiness. So if your expectation's too high and reality is this, then you end up depressed. You're not happy about it, right? And this is the situation, like they've gotten told that the multiples are supposed to be this and that, that you just keep following up with them until their expectations drop, because then they start to realize what the reality is, right? And I'll tell you how I'm thinking about M&A for us in the next few years. For us right now, right, I'm thinking more so how are we selling all this stuff? Because when we're on conversation with these, they're like, what do we do about data hygiene, data security, permissioning, all these things, right, that we're building with the AI implementation stuff? So for us, it's still much more about signal for the next 12 months or so, right? Then we can figure out, okay, once we have, once we have more or less product market fit on this stuff, then we can go out to market. And plus the market will have matured a little more, right? Because I think going out there to buy, at least for us right now, agencies, because chances are we're probably— they're not going to be aligned from an AI standpoint, right? Chances are you're going to have to cut. You look at what Bending Spoon is doing, private equity model where they're just buying companies, they're just cutting a lot of headcount, right? I'd rather focus more on, hey, what have we figured out? What do we need to plug in? And then 12 months into it, once we figured it out, we go out there and we go to market and then we can say, okay, we know exactly what we want, but we're going in right now because this stuff is so nascent, it's a little too early. So.

Dude, you want to know what my favorite thing about M&A is?

What?

I get to talk to—

You like the negotiation, I'll tell you that much.

Yeah, I do like the negotiation. I talk to so many entrepreneurs I learn a ton. I would probably say I do at least 2 new calls, or not every day because I don't really do them Saturday and Sunday because people don't want to talk then, but I do at least 10 new M&A calls a week with brand new companies that I'm hitting up. Forget my team. This is just me, right? It's even more if you count my team. And I remember I was talking to a guy in in the UK and his agency operates all over Europe. So I hit him up to see if he was interested in buying his company. I asked him for numbers. He wouldn't tell me the numbers. I told him what we pay and I'm very direct because I don't like wasting time. So he wanted me to sign an NDA. I signed the NDA and then we jumped on a call this week. So when I jumped on the call, he landed from his flight. It was an hour late. Which I didn't care for because I wanted to learn more about the business and they had a good amount of employees. And I'm like, man, if I plug them in, they can help us in multiple markets all at once. And he tells me about the business. He's like, yeah, this is the perfect time to sell. I don't want to keep working on this business. I'm over it. So one, I never want to hear that. If you feel—

No.

If I'm buying you and giving you money and you tell me you're just done with it, I'm like, Okay, then why would I give you money? But I never stopped the conversation. I asked why, and I tried to dig in. So then he tells me, oh, I sold 70% years ago, and he sold it for a good amount of cash. The business, let's say, was smaller at the time. I don't know what he got, but let's call it $10 million. It was something like that. It's different currency. It was in pounds, but let's round with roughly $10 million.

Okay.

And when he was telling me about this, so he still owns the remaining chunk. Maybe his team owns some percentage. I didn't ask him. Even though he operates in a lot of different countries in Europe, I was like, why are your investors and you looking to sell? You must have grown. He's like, well, we're struggling. Valuations are down, so I'm over it and I'm just willing to take a loss. I'm like, but what about your investors? He's like, oh, I can talk to them. I'm like, Well, the decision is up to you because they own majority. That's the first thing. So then I was like, this guy's not going to even be able to sell. It's not up to him. It's up to the investors. 2, I don't want this business because the guy running it doesn't even want to be here. So then 3, I start diving into all the countries they're in. And he's telling me on how he has this model in which you can run an agency for one country, but service many countries all at once. We haven't been able to do that. We actually have offices and people in a lot of different countries, which just increases costs drastically and just makes economics less efficient. I was like, this guy's model must be better. He's growing because you can look at LinkedIn and look at headcount, but a lot of times it's off. So when he's breaking it all down and he's breaking down his revenue and his churn, I quickly see that the economics aren't working out. by being in all these countries and not having too much of a physical presence. He's getting some business, but he can't scale and actually get the big clients because when he's telling me the issues that he's facing, such as, oh, we can have meetings here and there, but it's hard for us to build relationships because then you need salespeople, you need account managers on the ground, you can't be centralized. So our model's better. And I'm like, wait, that isn't better because you're not closing all the accounts and you're telling me why you can't close the other accounts. But I learned from that call. That buying an agency that does multiple regions may not be the best. And the original approach we had, it was validation that even though it's expensive and it takes a long time to break even, it is probably the better financial move for the long run.

Yep. So here's what I outlined with my thesis here, and then we can move on. So I actually created an entire document when I was flying back and forth with Arizona, right? So The goal right now for us, you look at Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator, right? So Sequoia calls its thesis the services, the new software. That's the blog post that they wrote. So basically they distinguish tools from completed work. So Copilot sells the tool and Autopilot sells the work. Its playbook starts with outsourced intelligence-heavy tasks, then expands towards insourced judgment-heavy work as the AI compounds. And so you can do this for marketing, you can do this for accounting, you can do this for a series of different services. Andreessen Horowitz, the other venture firm, Uses 2 distinct formulations. So you have vertical SaaS now with AI inside, argues that AI lets vertical software take on tasks previously too complex for software, and describes a 3rd wave of cloud plus fintech plus AI. So software is eating labor is one of their arguments, right? And then YC, finally, last but not least, the accelerator calls the opportunity vertical LLM agents, right? So you can have agents again for like finance or for marketing or sales and things like that. And so The whole idea here is that still, if we don't establish the thesis on our own first and establish a, you know, over the next 12 months or so, what things should look like internally, then we cannot define what the buy box looks like, the underwriting standards, the diligence process, integration model, founder compact, scoreboards, all these things, right? And so at least for us, as quickly as I want to move, I think it's more prudent to establish it more aggressively because we're learning so much as we're getting on these calls right now. And I think it's still very early days right now. So I'm very much the executive sponsors on these. But this whole memo talks about who else is included, what the lesson is with all this stuff over here. But the cool thing too is I had this breakout looking at Bending Spoons, looking at Jellyfish and Acorn, looking at S4 Capital.

Jellyfish, the agency?

Yeah.

Who's Acorn?

So let me read this to you. So I think you'll enjoy this because it has 2 agencies in here. Okay. So BrandTech acquired 100% of Jellyfish, the agency. Jellyfish founder, Rob Pierre moved to chair while Nick Emery took day-to-day CEO authority and Pierre stepped down months later to a different path. Acorn Eye founders Claire Leon and Ro— this is another company— Ross Cavalli remained founders and directors while becoming global leads of the combined Jellyfish commerce capability. So that this is like an agency buying an agency by an agency situation. And the core lesson here is founder retention is not one structure. BrandTech shows founder transition and retain capability founder tasks. Single Grain must specify whether each founder is operating vertical CEO, portfolio capability leader, or about So there's all these lessons here. There's all these different models like S4 Capital and Monks, right? Remember they named it Media Monks? And so—

Now it's Monks.

Yeah, now it's Monks. So the— so this describes the operating model as one brand with unified systems and a single P&L. So in fiscal year 2025, reported net revenue declined 10.8%, while marketing service operational EBITDA margin improved from 14.2% to 15.1%. So the lesson for this one, Neil, Is one P&L centralization can improve coordination and cost control, but margin improvement can coexist with revenue decline. Single grain must track retention, organic growth alongside efficiency, not treat cost reduction as proof of successful integration. So my point of saying this is like you look at Bending Spoon, like they have this, they're all about buying these successful SaaS companies, cutting, and that works for them. There's all these mini lessons from each one that you can integrate into these playbooks. And I think that the meta lesson is you have to figure out what works for you.

Yeah, to figure out what works for you. So if you had to pick 2 things you're going to do for the remainder of 2026, what are they going to be? And then the second question I have for you is, are you ever going to fix how your company is just founded by you and bring in someone else?

So is your question tied to marketing or business?

Both.

Okay. Let's talk about marketing first, what I'm going to do for the 2 things for the rest of 2026. Uh-huh.

And then do the business side. And then the 3rd one, which was about the founding partner or co-founder, that is more business side. But I'm curious on all 3.

I think so. I'll start with marketing first. So we're— and I'm sure you guys are doing this too, but it's not even just about marketable moments. It's really about how can you ship stuff and stay top of mind, right? And you look at what Nikita Beer, the former product lead at X, he left pretty quickly, but he launched a lot very quickly.

Neil's going to fall asleep.

He's about to yawn. So anyway, Nikita Beer was like, look, it's not about just like one big launch video or whatever. It's like constantly shipping all the time so you're top of mind, right? And there's so much stuff we're shipping around like the single brain gateway we have, the ambient agent. There's all these things that we have where the engineers now, they're all learning how to do marketable moments. And so we want to push that very hard. But to answer your question directly, it's also the agent-led growth piece, right? How do you set up the MD files? How do you make it easy for agents to purchase and setting up APIs and MCPs? I think, you know, it's that agent-led growth piece. We want to solidify that foundation and marketable moments ties in with that. So that's maybe 2 things. And the 3rd thing is I'm paying a lot more attention now to how we're doing organic social. So we just had a new contractor start on organic social. First post he puts out, like 500 comments on LinkedIn, and then it's like he's just responding to people and stuff. I'm like, this is pretty good, right? So I'm going to hit on that more. But how this relates to also the business as well is—

Yeah.

I have now all these workflows sourcing for all the people, and I stole your 2 promotions at 2 different companies, an average tenure of 3 years. It's just sourcing everything every single day, and it's also sending them very specific questions too, which we can talk about later. So that's the 3 things on the marketing side. And related to that, on the business side is the recruiting piece, right? We have these workflows reaching out to people, hey Neil, saw that you're working on this and that. You know, we're building these revenue company brains at Single Grain. Would you be interested? We're looking for AI, very AI-forward people, right? So recruiting's a big one. Second thing is related to that. There's some executives that we're bringing in. To answer your question directly, would I be open to a strategic investor? Like, yeah, I would be. And we do have a new executive that's coming in that's going to free up a lot of my time. We'll see where I can focus more on product marketing and recruiting.

So before I ask you a question about the single brain side, well, then you have to answer the question too. No, before I ask you a question.

Okay, but then you have to answer the question after, go ahead.

Okay, dude, this is how many people actually use agents in the marketing world.

Yeah, I'm curious how it looks in a year.

Yeah, so—

So Neil, you should read to the—

Sure, so how popular are agents in the marketing world? OpenAI says users are using agents when it comes to their platform 1.1% of the time only, which is really tiny. We interviewed companies, 100 companies, the total employee count in marketing was 1,416. Numbers are rounded for clarity here, not the one for companies using agents because that's a straight number out of 100, but only 17 of those companies were using agents in marketing. And when you dive in a little bit deeper, majority of the companies aren't actually using agents. And when you actually look at how many employees, it's only 3 point— roughly 3.5% of employees are using agents in marketing.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know about the other departments. It's hard for us to survey that due to the fact that we don't have access to a lot of engineers or product people.

Is that a dog or is it— It's a dog, it's a dog.

That's a dog barking. But yeah, I was like, it's very tiny. Everyone talks about agents and how they're using them, but I don't think actually most people use them in this full way.

Well, let's test this real quick. So Noah, how would you define what an agent is? And I'll repeat it in here. 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. A program that's going to run things for you and manage all of your AI. Okay, what do you define an agent as?

I look at an agent as something that is software that's going out there and doing things for you and actually executing and getting it done and reporting Yeah, so Noah and Neil said the same thing, and I actually agree with you guys.

To me, an agent is just code. Like, you define something that you want, the agent thinks in the middle, and then you get an output, right? And so I just don't think that— I don't think most people— like, agent is such a weird— like, I even hate using the word agent, right? Like, it sounds so like, oh, look at me, I'm using agents. Look at me, I have a 6-pack, right? Like, you don't even need to say that. It's just like, I'm just having this do it for me, right? So I just don't think most people know, but I would suspect that that number goes up a lot once people are just like, okay, that's what I use. But in my mind, I'm just like, I'm just going to call it a model. They're just using AI, right?

So yeah. Spot on. I think what will happen is in the future, the number will go up. People will be using Gemini or ChatGPT and it'll do stuff for them, but they'll look at it as like, oh, just Gemini did it. They won't call it an agent. They'll just be like, hey, help me get it done.

It's not like I've logged onto the internet and used TCP/IP protocol today. You know what I mean? And so like all the flows that I have working, like, are those agents? Yeah, they are. But like, it feels so icky for me to say agent.

I don't know But I think a lot of the flows and everything will change drastically in the future. Probably.

But you know what, I was reading, I don't know if you saw this, but I'm reading this other Nvidia book, right? And one of the senior engineers who's still there today, I think he's been there for 20+ years, he's like, dude, if you think about it, like people are like, oh, AI's going to destroy the world. Like, no, AI's not going to destroy the world. You know why? Because AI's not going to think in human terms, like zero-sum where we're trying to kill each other all the time, right? AI's going to be thinking about, oh, we need data centers? Oh, okay, let's put them underground because there's a lot of space underground so we don't have to disrupt the humans. But humans are territorial, right? Like if I'm competing with you, you're competing with me, I'm competing with you. Like we're a little terrified, like we want to compete with each other, right? AI's like, no, like he's like, dude, AI moves at the speed of light. AI doesn't have to be on this planet. It can be in space, it could just be moving around. And so it's going to think way beyond this. And so the way we're even talking about it right now, you look back on this in maybe 2 or 3 years, it's like, look at these dumb humans talking about like us, right? Like they're going to think way beyond how we think right now.

Yeah.

So, but yeah, what's your answer to the 3 and 3?

3 and 3. So 3 things that I'm focusing on in marketing till the end of the year, and then 3 things that are business for the year. Marketing, one, I am trying to get a list of conferences that I should speak at that have our ideal customer profile. We're trying to move more and more upstream to larger companies, even on the SMB side, because you could be an SMB, but you could be part of a franchise and there could be 300 of your locations.

Yep.

So we would consider that SMB, but it really is starting to become enterprise because it could be multimillion-dollar accounts. And I believe you're going to get a lot of those relationships from conferences. The second thing that I'm working on heavily towards now and the end of the year is GEO and getting ranking specifically through one simple, obvious tactic. So, I am typing in all the queries that we ideally want to rank for or be mentioned globally on these LLMs, and I'm looking at the sources they're citing, And I'm trying to convince the people that are citing my competitors to also mention me within their articles because I found that that's the quickest way to get AI to cite you. You know how everyone's like, you need to create listicles, you need to do this. If you just look at the articles that they're only pulling your competitors from because they list out and you get included in those same exact articles, it's the fastest way to get mentioned on Gemini, ChatGPT, any LLM by far. So I'm manually myself emailing the people and building relationships and trying to get included in every single one. And my team's helping me out because I don't speak all the languages and my team also doesn't.

This is where you would set up a GrokBot for this, just for fun.

Yeah, so those are the 2 things on marketing. If I had to pick a 3rd thing for marketing right now—

By the way, that's digital PR.

Yeah, the 3rd thing is ramping up content even more. So 2:00 PM today, I'm starting to film 30-minute to hour long-form videos that I'll publish. But I want to see, this will be my first one that I've done in a long time. I want to see if I can do 2 of those per week. So I'm already producing a lot of content, right? I do 2 shorts a day, a chart a day. Sometimes we miss a chart, but let's call it 3 pieces of content. I also produce a long-form video, one a week, that's usually around 10, 15 minutes. I'm now trying to produce 2 longer form articles per, or longer form video content pieces per week. That would be 30+ minutes. And this does not include text-based. And then of course we do the podcast and stuff like that.

My guess, if you stop doing the long forms, is because you get bored. Because they're so long, the long 45 minutes to 60 minutes, unless I'm doing a webinar where you can kind of just be yourself, it's really hard to do those.

It is. It's more screen sharing than it is Than of me talking and going line for line.

But you know what I've learned? And this is, and I want to come back to your answers, but like when I do a webinar for 60 minutes and I'm just sharing screen and I'm kind of just like talking, it's actually very enjoyable, right? It's not enjoyable when you have a script, for me at least, in front of you and you're like very stiff and you're like, yeah, you know, we're going to do the 10 things on this and that. And then it's like, you just have to like, it's a slog. Like remember that one time we went to record that course for you for that one company and that took the entire day. And then like that was painful. Yeah.

Dude, the way I do my recording these days is I record in my house for an hour and then the crew that's helping record, I will go and either eat lunch with them in my house. So like Uber Eats something or whatever's in the fridge, or depending on the time of the recording, I will just go into the theater room and we'll watch a TV show for 30 minutes to an hour.

So you just get a mental break and then go back to recording.

Yeah, that's good. That's good.

Good.

Yeah.

Neil and I, we're a little older now. We're in our 40s now, so we need mental breaks. We need to take naps sometimes too, you know? So yeah, but continue. Did you, you covered the 3 marketing and the 3 business already?

No, I covered the 3 marketing. Business is find more companies to buy in Europe this year. I already found the one in Latin America that I want to buy, so I'm not really focusing on Latin America anymore.

You got the German one too?

It's not done yet. I look at it as once they sign an LOI and then once we really know, German one's too early. But, um, yeah, so I want to focus on Europe and that'll set us up for a much better next year. I want to start infilling, uh, services. When I say services, like what do we lack? Because one way to grow is you just buy in regions.

Mm-hmm.

The other way to grow is you add in the services that you're not offering. So we offer, for example, marketplaces and TikTok shop marketing. We've been doing that for a while. We're not known for that. There's other companies out there that are better than we are at it, just being very blunt, because that's all they specialize in. So either go and recruit those people from those organizations and bring them over, or if I can't do that, just go buy a competitor who just does that. So I think what, that's 2, and then the The third thing that I'm trying to do on the business end is, this sounds really cheesy, I need to push my team, especially my executive team, to create a much better work-life balance. When you try to recruit amazing people, they die for the company and they'll do whatever and continually work. But just like how I'm getting older, my team's getting older, And, you know, it's just like someone the other day is joining our call when they're— one of their immediate family members passed. I'm like, well, what are you doing? You know, like, this is not acceptable. Like, dude, I can't say that. I had to be there, but I'm like, hey dude, we're going to reschedule this call. I can't say directly on the call, like, what are you doing? But it's just like, no, I don't want you on the phone. Go be with your family.

Let's talk about this for a second. Cause we had someone from my team his wife got hit by a car, right? And then he's sending me a message saying, hey, my wife got hit by a car. And I'm away from the computer at this point, right? And then 30 minutes later, you see another message come in, hey, I'm standing by right now, can I go? I'm like, what? Why are you even messaging me about this, right?

Yes, why?

Yeah, and so by the way, notice one thing, the A players, they don't need to be told to work hard. They don't need to be managed. They kind of self-manage themselves. The only thing I'm concerned about with the A players, not even just executives, the A players, is that they're working too hard and it's leading to burnout. That's the only thing I'm concerned about.

Totally agree with you. And that's my problem. It's like the A players have this issue where they worked too much and you got to actually pare it down a bit and be like, no dude, slow down here. You need a balance. You know, I was talking to one of my executives and he was literally before I came here and he was telling me how he wants to buy a house in I think it was like Mexico or somewhere like that, and how they have some immediate family who lives there and they want to spend more time with them. So they want a house down there. And he was just trying to figure things out. And he's just like, yeah, I need this kind of— he's not looking for much. This guy is more frugal with money than most people I know. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I was like, dude, you should just go buy something Nicer. And he's just like, oh, 'cause expensive or whatever. And I was like, dude, it could all be figured out. Just go do something that you enjoy so you can spend the time. And when you're in that house for 3 months out of the year, you actually enjoy being there versus just being miserable. But some of these people are just working and he's just like, yeah, when I'm there, I want more space so that way I can just work uninterrupted for 3 months out of the year. And, uh, I think it was a vacation home. And in this country, homes aren't as expensive. I was like, you should just get oceanfront. And it's not that much more, like maybe $100 grand or $200 grand. But this is executive, like they can easily afford it plus more.

They make good money.

Yeah. Yeah. They make really good money. They can buy it with cash if they really wanted to, uh, plus more. But it's just sometimes pushing these people to adjust a little bit of their values, especially if they have kids and stuff. I'm like, you would enjoy life a bit more if you did these things.

But you see the difference here? that's a lot easier to manage versus having to manage pushing someone to work. Like that's a mindset thing, you know what I mean?

No, no, you cannot push someone to work harder. That's called you fire them and you move on.

Exactly. And you know who said this? Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said this, right? In his entire career, he has not found that you can make someone work hard who doesn't want to work hard. Like that's a mindset thing that you have to transform. Like you have to go on your own spiritual journey to learn how to work hard, right? Whether it's something that happened to you in your childhood or whatever it is exactly, or you're just a competitive person. But that's why, Like, that's why I push that. Sometimes my team thinks I'm crazy on the AI thing, but I'm just like, dude, it's so easy. If they're into the AI stuff, it means they're going to push themselves hard, right? At this point in life.

And if they're not, there's no point in hiring them because you don't want to train them and have to convince them.

No.

It's a waste of your time.

Yeah.

You're only a single founder.

Yeah.

It's easier if you had double founder, maybe.

It would be way easier with double founder, I'll tell you that much, right?

Why not just go find another co-founder and bring them into the business?

I wouldn't be opposed to that, but I think once we start ramping up these acquisitions again, I think naturally you're going to try to keep some of these founders, right? And you've kept a lot of these. founders, right?

We only try to keep the founders. We do not try to do deals without the founders.

So, okay, if you look at the net amount of deals that you've done, how many deals have you done in the last 5 years?

I don't know.

20, 30?

No, less than 20 for sure.

Okay, so let's call it 15.

Okay.

How many of those founders are still with you today?

Out of all the deals we've done, only once where we got rid of the founders. Technically, Actually 3 times, but 2 of them, we didn't want the founders. We just wanted the technology. Okay.

So 13 of 15.

Let's just call it that. But there's only 1 time where the founders wanted to leave and we accepted it. So call it 1 deal out of all the deals we've done where we accepted it. The other deals where we didn't want the founders, we went into trying to buy the company without the founders.

Okay. So let's say you kept 93% of the founders. That's a huge number. Now let me tell you the mistake I've made in the past, just so you can learn from both of us here. So the 2 deals that we did, right? In the last 5 years or so, one of the founders should have kept. The other one, like, and I didn't structure the deal that way. I structured it where it's like, you let him walk, but I learned my mistake there, right? The other one, like, we shouldn't have even done the deal in the first place, right? But all that to say is, again, if it's a very people-driven business and people look up to the founder, like, you gotta keep them because it's gonna keep the other people glued in as well. So is that the 3 things that you mentioned? Uh-huh.

Okay. But what kind of companies do you want to buy?

Not right now.

None?

I'm not looking at anything right now. Yeah, I'm looking at what's good. Like, I'm looking for signal versus noise right now, right? If I'm hearing more data integration, security, all this stuff over here, and we're getting more and more of it, and we're piloting more and more of it, then that's a signal to me. And then at the same time too, it's like the way we're grading people right now when it comes to hiring is very different. It's almost like to your point, you said, remember I did that talk at that conference in Manhattan Beach and you're like, you know, the talk is ahead of its time, right? And sometimes I'm a little ahead of my skis on this stuff. And so I need to— I want to wait to see how the market settles a little bit for the next 12 months because we're getting signal from too many different places right now and we want more signal.

You want to know what I would do if I was in your shoes? I'm not saying it's the right thing.

Go ahead.

Your single brain is getting good brand recognition. I hear it enough. And I hear it enough from people who don't really know how well I know you or don't know you. A lot of these people don't listen to the podcast. So, some people would be like, hey, have you heard of this Single Brain thing? Do you know this guy named Eric? He has this company called Single Brain. I actually hear it more often if I look on a quarterly basis.

Mm-hmm.

My traveling's not consistent every single week or month, so it's just easier to look at quarterly but it's a drastic improvement on how many times I'm hearing single brain. I hear single brain way more than I ever hear single grain. I'm not trying to throw a diss at you.

No, no, no.

I'm telling you reality, okay?

I have a response for that.

Go ahead, go ahead.

Okay? Yeah.

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

No, no, I don't think it's bad at all.

Or any of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think the future of your business is in single brain, which I think you already agree with and you already know, and you knew before me, hence you made that change. But, and here's the big caveat, I think the one thing that you're lacking that I would focus on over the next 6 months if I owned Single Brain, finding that guy who worked at a SaaS company as a CEO who grew it from $3 million to $100 million or $5 million to $100 million, literally was Helped it raise money, has the relationships to bring in customers and knows customers who'll sign on right away, enterprise customers with big checks, and have that guy go and help run it because they will drive revenue. In essence, you're bringing the person who will go and bring you the large enterprise contracts because of the relationships, and they were in a related enough field. You can't be 100% related because It's new tech.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's related enough where they know the decision makers for your exact company because their old company that they were at was selling into that same exact person.

Yep. And he has the relationships or she has the relationships.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think that would cause you to, I'm not saying you're not growing fast, but that would cause you to grow much faster, close a lot more revenue. That is what I would say could really change the trajectory of your whole business if you can find that person next to sales.

So you know how I said in my 3 recruiting, So that's in there for the recruiting. And I think that's a great idea and I'm glad you called it out. And here's the thing, when people talk to us about single brain, oh my God, so much excitement, ready to do that. How do we do it, right? On the single brain side, right? I was listening to some of these client calls when I'm just like, yeah, you know, just when I ask our little brain thing, it's like, when we do things that are off, right? When a client's about to churn, what's happening? Not proactive and not urgent enough, not creative enough, right?

Yeah.

But like the ironic thing is all that is just downstream from hiring good talent, right? And so that's why recruiting's so big for me right now. But I also look at recruiting kind of as marketing because I'm just like messing around with these flows that tie into sales outreach or marketing outreach or just recruiting outreach. So this is why, by the way, let's talk about GrokBot for a moment. So thank you for that. But GrokBot, it has taken X by storm naturally because Elon owns X, right?

Well, it's also really cheap.

Yeah. Well, now they've made it even cheaper. They made it more available on Super Grok Plus, Cursor Pro, and Cursor Team subscribers. So you don't have to pay $300 a month anymore. I noticed something. I was flying I was flying back yesterday and I was like, I was trying to cancel 'cause I put it on the wrong account, right? The $300. And then it's like, wait, don't cancel. If you pay us $100 for the next 3 months, every, every, like, okay, we'll give you a Super Grok Heavy, which includes cursor and everything, right? So you're like, wait, but again— I'm like, wait, everyone should cancel right now. So I'm messaging Yaniv, I'm like, hey, you should cancel, like sign up and cancel right now, right? But they only do that on iOS, just FYI for now. But the cool thing with that, by the way, so Grok will give you the Super Heavy, right? Which is $300, but you get Cursor Ultra, which is $200. So you're actually getting for $100, I think, or maybe $300 for $1,500 worth of value. You can do that right now. I want to call out, so Nikita Beer, everyone overthinks marketing. For every product launch we did at X, I write the announcement 20 minutes before clicking a post. Better to be launching something every single week instead of focusing on how to make a single day traffic spike largely larger. So the Grokbot team, by the way, they're DMing me. They're like, hey, we really liked the article you shared. We're going to give you more usage. We're going to top you off, right? And then like all these people are tweeting and they're kind of retweeting each other. Their sales, their enterprise salesperson at Grokbot, he's like, Grokbot for GTM. Everyone retweets it, right? And you have Elon retweeting people that are using it. So he's just using that marketing engine. They have people that are reaching out to KOLs or influencers and giving them all this stuff. And the product's good enough on its own where like all the stuff you're talking about, with like reaching out to people daily or different languages and all that. I'm like, dude, you could set— your daughter can set it up for you, your son can set up. It's so easy to set up that I'm like, this is like the Hermes and OpenCLAW moment, but for everybody, because it's so simple and so reliable.

And affordable, and it does 85% of everything you need.

Exactly, right? So, and you, it has all these connectors, like, are they thinking about SOC 2 compliance? SOC 2 compliance is in there, multiplayer with agents, multiplayer with humans, that's all going to come. And so now we're going to see agents being used a lot more now with GrokBot. So I think they're doing a great job with their launch. One, it's a great product. Two, everyone from their team is kind of promoting everything, right? And they have a really good deal for you too, because they're just bundling things together and just giving it away for free. So it's like multiple marketing attacks from all angles.

Dude, it's funny because I started looking at SpaceX stock. I was waiting for it to drop to 70-something, but it didn't. I'm not— no financial advice.

By the way, you know what's funny? So I was with Syed and Yaniv, Right? And we're, we're all on the same page. We're like, yeah, we're gonna wait for that shit. Not that shit. It's a great stock, guys, but we're gonna wait for that ship to drop to $70. And then we're all like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's, it's a lot of money right now. It's $1.85 trillion or whatever it is right now. It's not worth that right now, but they will become worth way more. Of course.

I think it's, again, not financial advice. I think it's one of the— I personally am willing to bet a lot of my money on them for the whole future.

For the Yeah. You know what I mean?

I, I'm in it for around 5, 10, but I'm not saying I wouldn't hold longer. But for the next 5, 10 years, I don't see anyone taking them over, at least in the space race in the Western world. I'm not saying someone in China can't do some miraculous things, but on the Western world, a lot of this stuff is regulated and is very hard.

I just hope Elon stays safe, you know?

Yeah. And, and yeah, and he doesn't say—

I hope he stops saying stupid— I think he said another stupid thing this morning. What did he say? I think it was something along the lines of, God, here, let me look it up real quick.

But speaking of that, I was watching an interview of Elon and he was talking about how he can't go to Target or anything like that. Someone was asking, he's like, yeah, he's like, I have to worry about my life.

Oh wait, I remember, I remember. He made a comment about The Odyssey and something about The Odyssey.

Oh, the movie.

Yeah, the movie. And saying like it's too woke or whatever, right? And I'm like, dude, you just don't need to say those things. You know what I mean? But yeah, continue your thought.

I thought he was talking about the other—

Oh, he talked about the death, the George Floyd thing. Did you read about that?

No.

Okay, this he shouldn't have said. So Elon Musk shared and endorsed arguments from conservative commentators claiming Derek Chauvin did not cause George Floyd's death. Whether it's true or not, just not worth talking about. 'Cause that was the whole lead-up to the whole BLM thing.

He needs to stay out of politics and, you know, current events. He needs to just focus on SpaceX and Tesla.

There's enough for him to focus on.

Yes, and I don't know why he has so much time. Kids, just 12 kids. I thought he had 60.

60?

Yeah. How many kids does Elon have? How many kids Elon has?

Let's see who gets it faster.

It can't be 14. I thought it was a lot.

I thought it was like 60. 14.

14.

14 with 4 different women.

I don't know why I read 60. It was a large number, like 60. Like someone's like claiming Elon. It was probably fake social media.

Yeah. Griffin Musk, Vivian Wilson.

Or was it 60, the guy who created the, what, Telegram? I think it's the Telegram. Telegram founder number.

Did I show you the YouTube?

Oh, his is over 100, but it was his.

Did I send the Instagram reel to you where there's a guy and the journalist walks up to this guy in, I think Pakistan or something, right? And he's like, how many wives do you have? He's like, how many kids do you have? He's like, 70, right? And the guy's like, whoa, 70. How many wives do you have? He's like, 16. And then the guy's like, how many wives do you have? He's like, 1. And he just starts laughing. He's just like this. He just starts laughing at him with only 1 wife. But I thought it was pretty funny.

He was laughing at the guy with 1 wife? Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, cause he thought in his culture, it's not a good thing.

I think in, in, I think it's in Muslim culture.

It's, you can have multiples.

Yeah. Like 4 plus.

I thought that was like back in the day. I didn't know they'd do that in today's culture.

It's still active, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, but anyway, going back to Grokwa and this could be the last piece over here. I think the way you look at them, they're just shipping rapidly. Okay. That's one piece. The second piece is they have multiple people engaging with others and blowing up posts. Okay. Third thing is they have people DMing key influencers as well. And the fourth thing is the way they're bundling with Cursor and GrokBot and like Superheavy and all that stuff. And so it's actually all these things are marketing. And I think we're going to see much more multifaceted marketing in the next— in the— just starting from now. And that's why, like from a marketing angle, when you ask me, I'm like, there's so many things that we have to do. Same thing for you guys too.

So, and It does 85%. It doesn't do 100%. It doesn't do 95%. I would say it probably does around 85% and it's one of the cheapest solutions out there right now.

Yeah. Anyway, go try GrokBot. I think I have a— there's an article on my X account about GrokBot for marketing, so you can check that one out. So anyway, that's it for today and we'll catch you later.