Top Talent Left Zuck for Elon, Cloudflare’s Bet, AI Pilot Fails & YouTube’s Edge | Ep. 3035

Elon Musk just stole 18 of Mark Zuckerberg's best AI engineers. So Zuck has offered his engineers $250 million each to stay at Meta, but Elon gave them something money couldn't buy and they abandoned Meta. What do you think that was that Elon gave them that Mark couldn't?

Shares in xAI at a really good valuation because Facebook is already worth a lot. So what are they going to do, double?

You're probably right on the shares, but here's Elon's response. So he said, many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI, and without the need for insane initial comps. Keyword, initial comp. Still great, but not unsustainably high. Also, xAI has vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta, and we are hyper merit-based. Do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher. And you've read about this on Twitter. He'll have like young kids going in. If they do an amazing job, he'll promote them quickly. He'll pull in engineers from different areas. For example, actually, I'm not going to name names here, but someone I know is a friend of a friend is married to a guy that came up with the chopsticks for SpaceX when they land, right? So, you can imagine he's doing really well now. But that was just a scenario where he just raised his hand and said, hey, why don't we just— nobody could come up with a good idea on how to land it and said, why don't we just use chopsticks, right? He didn't say it like that, but that's what it ended up being. And so, you know, just by reading about Elon, it's very merit-based. The other thing too is When you work with Elon, you're working on something. The vision matters a lot. And you've seen like he's going to sleep in the office, he's going to do whatever it takes to get there. And he is right, vastly more market cap growth potential. You give him more stock. But I think he paints a very compelling mission and vision. And when he's pulling in SpaceX engineers and Tesla engineers to do whatever it takes to build the Colossus factory, you know that this is probably the best visionary founder of our time. Not saying that Meta is not interesting and then Zuck isn't a great entrepreneur, but I think the fact that— by the way, you want to know some of the last names of these people he's pulling in? Let me tell you. Let me tell you, Neil. You tell me what kind of people these are.

Wait, let me guess. They're from China or India.

If I had to take a guess on the two, probably more from China. You're right. You're right. So Xinlei Chen specialized in multimodal AI at Meta. Qingyao Cui worked on vision and video. Okay. And Alan Rice, That sounds American to me, manage critical data centers. And so sometimes it's just not about— it's not about the initial compensation. I think the money matters a lot, but I think the long-term compensation and the vision and the mission matter too. And being able to work with a generational entrepreneur, maybe the best one, is great because I do think Zuck's a generational entrepreneur, but I think Elon's number one.

Yeah, and I don't know how true this is, but speaking of these AI platforms, I was talking to a VC that was breaking down, um, uh, uh, what is it called? Uh, Anthropic or Claude, right? Um, well, I don't know which one's the parent company name. Anthropic's the parent company, right?

Uh-huh.

And they were talking about their valuation, was it either $70 or $100 or whatever? And they were just like, do you know how much some of these early investors made? And I'm like, I don't know, 10x, 20x, 30x. And he was just saying, and I don't know how true this is, he He was saying, no, more like 2, 3x. And I was like, what? He's like, they've raised so much money and with the warrants, it just makes it hard as an investor that's early to actually make a huge premium. And I was like, oh, that sucks.

Dude, you know what's funny? I bet your angel investment, let me speak to my angel investments. I'm like, oh, so-and-so company raised at a billion-dollar valuation or whatever. I'm like, oh cool. And I'm like, I look at it, I'm like, oh yep. My multiple is like 3, 4x on that. Okay. And then like another company that I invested in, oh damn it, the SAFE note was too high. Okay. So maybe it's still a 6, 7x return, but it's like that. Okay. And by the way, there's another company I invested in, Lime. Okay. I thought that was going to go to zero. Turns out they're driving a ton of EBITDA now, right? They're doing pretty well. I think it's like $150 a quarter or something like that. I could be wrong, but I'm like, oh man, I'm going to make a lot of money on that. Nope. I'm gonna get like 3x once they go public. Okay. And so, so it just goes to show you that the game of venture angel investing, it's pretty harsh. Um, and if you're not gonna play full in, all out, you're probably not gonna win.

Dude, remember our dinner with Kellan at Abra, the Fuse VC guy?

Yeah.

So I met him up, uh, at Spago like a few weeks ago.

Yeah.

And we were talking about, um, a company that, because I'm an LP in funds, I don't do as much angel investing anymore, but I tend to just stick with being an LP because it's easier. And he knew one of the funds I was the LP, and I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I keep getting reports from them because they have so many companies and they made this fund. It's more than 10 years old, so it's pretty much wound down. They just have a few outstanding investments. So I was like, yeah, I'm like, this company here, I hope it's going to do really well because it's a massive SaaS company that does well into the 9 figures in revenue. I'm not talking about like $100 million. I'm talking about well into the 9 figures, like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And he's just like, no, not so much. I'm like, what do you mean? And he's like, dude, they— and we both didn't know the exact amount of money they raised offhand and we didn't search it, but we both knew they raised over half a billion dollars. So well over $500 million. And he's like, their churn is too high and their growth is nonexistent. It's a flat company. And I was like, oh, you know, even though we were the first check-in through that fund, there goes that money.

Yeah, yeah. Plus, like, there's a lot of dynamics that we— people don't think about, right? All the, the rounds of dilution, liquidation preferences, and all these things. Um, bad market to go public in, right? Or you have a, you have a tough government on you as well, the last administration, right? So, um, you just never know. And it's just better to bet on yourself, and it's better to bet on yourself without many other outside influences. So when you have a board, when you have investors and things like— I think a board's actually good if you have an internal board, but when I think you have too many winds of opinions driving you, I don't think you can make a proper decision on your own. And that's what caused a lot of problems for people, especially right after 2021. It certainly did for me.

Yeah, no, and this is why I don't do much angel investing and I stick with my own business. I'd rather just run Google Ads or rank a site organically or You know, build up a brand and just generate revenue that way. It's more control and the returns tend to be better for people like you and I. That's actually the best part about being a marketer because people have asked me a lot of times, and I know you must get this question a lot, if you had to start all over again, what would you do if you only had like $100 or $1,000? You must have answered that like 100 times by now, right? I'm assuming you got those questions a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. You get that question on podcasts a lot.

Yeah. And I'm like, we're marketers. We would just start all over, launch a site.

I'll just do the same thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's a great skill set. I think, by the way, just to reinforce, like, it's earlier in this episode, we talked about focus, but the problem with marketers is we know how to do so many different things to drive revenue. And then we think we're like God, and we think we can do everything under the sun. And that is what ends up causing problems for us. You're actually much better acquiring all these skills, learning how to drive revenue, and then just focusing on one area. And that's how things have gotten really big. But I read this tweet from Andreessen Horowitz. They tweeted this and I thought this was an interesting concept. So, you know, a lot of people, especially people, technical people, they think it's all about building the product, right? And the line here is really, ultimately your job isn't to build a product, your job is to solve a problem. So people in agency, they like to talk about the different service lines that they have and people in different service lines, they like to brag about that. Or people that are different product managers for different types of products, they like talking about whatever product they have. But ultimately, that's not what matters. Your job as a business is to solve a problem, and then you make money from that as a byproduct. So, most companies, they avoid the messy, unsexy work, but that's usually where the biggest opportunities live. And you do the work that others won't. It's to solve problems, and that's it. It's not about the product that you have.

Dude, the money's in the messy. People don't like the messy. They like the cool and sexy.

Yep. Yep.

And do you—

here, you can pick one. You have this Cloudflare one that's interesting. This keeps— this one keeps coming back, this topic.

It's just like Cloudflare, their stock is doing decently well. I think they have like a $70-ish billion market cap. This isn't financial advice, by the way. And, and by the way, Eric and I don't want to give you any financial advice. Do whatever you guys want. Cloudflare just keeps pushing, hey, make your website a toll, pay for it. And the reason I believe Cloudflare is big on this kick is because they're afraid overall website traffic will go down, which will impact their earnings. So they want to be the toll road of the internet to save their business. That's my 2 cents. I don't think their business will ever go to zero, but that's my 2 cents on why they just keep doing this.

Have you mapped out how much money they can make if, you know, 10% of the internet or 10% of their users went with pay-per- I don't know if toll.

Can you repeat again?

Yeah. So I'm just saying that, have you— this Cloudflare thing, have you done the math around, hey, like maybe 5 or 10% of their users opted into this or websites did, how much money they would make?

No. Do you?

No, I haven't done it. I'm just wondering because the fact that they're pushing it so hard must have meant that they've mapped it out. But I just don't think it's the way— it's too much friction for what it is. And you don't want resistance to happen on the internet when people are just trying to browse around freely.

Yes. I also think their model is just going to screw up businesses and cause them to make less money in general.

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Yeah, dude.

Speaking of which, I had— it's funny, we were talking about WordPress, about how it powers 40% of the web, and you and I were talking about how a lot of this stuff is becoming for free because of Jason Lemkin's tweet. But WordPress was like automatic Matt Mullenweg. He responded to one of my Instagrams. I'm going to look for it right now, but I don't know, that just brought it up. So let me see what he said.

Go ahead. But I know a lot of people that talk about how WordPress is powering 40+% of the internet. It doesn't matter how much of the internet you're powering. All that matters is, can you make money from powering 40% of the internet? WordPress does a decent job of making money, but not like Shopify. Shopify doesn't even power 10% of the internet or 5% of the internet.

It's a much smaller number, but look at the Yeah. Anyway, it's too hard to find that tweet or that reel. So I'm going to move on to the next one. You want to pick the next one?

Let's go with the MIT report. Did you read that MIT report?

I read that one. But the problem with that one is Ethan Moloch, he actually looked at the methodology for that research and it was only on 52 companies or something like that.

Too small of a sample.

The sample size was too small. So I'm like, okay, of course this thing's going to get a lot of headlines because people fucking hate— sorry, people hate AI, freaking hate AI.

Right?

Um, and so sorry, whoever heard me cuss, I meant freaking. But anyway, go ahead.

It's early school right now, so we're good.

Okay. All right, go ahead. You, you can shed some insight.

And sorry if your kids are listening in the background. Um, but one thing I do agree with the report in, and they talk about how 95% of generative AI, uh, pilots at companies are failing. Now, I don't know if that number is 95% for most people or if it is You know, 50% are failing. I do agree that a big percentage is failing. Does it mean generative AI is bad? No. Does it mean AI just in general is going to fail and it's a fad? No. It just means most people in an organization, I think this is very true, this is what I got out of the report more than anything else, don't know how to use AI effectively and you need training in an organization to teach people how to actually use it to do their job better, or you need to replace people with people who actually already know how to use it so that way you don't have to train up your existing. I think the more realistic solution is you have to come up with some sort of training program to help all the existing people in the organization, because once you have too many people, it's not like starting from scratch. Starting from scratch, you can just hire people who are good to go from day one, but if you already have thousands of people, you got to figure out how to train these people to use these products correctly.

I think there are 3 types of AI people at a company. You have, let's call it FCA, Okay, so you have people who are fanatics, that's the F. You have Cs, these are the converts. And then you have people, A, these are the anchors. So let's start with the anchors first. The anchors are the people who are unwilling and these people that are dragging when it comes to AI, and these people don't like AI. Okay, those are people you probably need to rotate out of your company. Not financial advice.

Let's rephrase. Those are people you need to rotate out if AI can help them with their job. Like if their job is legal and only going to court and they're just amazing at fighting and litigating and they barely use AI, but they have other legal people underneath them, you probably don't need to get rid of that person.

Okay, then the converts are the people who are willing, but they just, to your point, they need to be guided, they need to be taught, and they need to be shown the light and they need to be pointed in the right direction. So they're down to do it, you just need to show them. The fanatics, these are people that are talking about the latest things. Oh my God, this is happening over here. Oh my God, check this out over here. They're trying all the new things all the time. These are, you want to, there's only a handful of these people in your company. These are the people that you want to bring with you. And we actually have a mutual friend that I was texting with the other day, Neil. What he does, and I think this is genius, and I'll probably do the same thing here, is he has selected these fanatics and then he takes them all on a retreat, okay? And it's like the super exclusive thing. It's like, oh my God, all these people, like, I want to go on that retreat. It's like the super elite group. And then at that retreat, it's a hackathon where people are building things. They're only vibe coding things and people are sharing what's happening at the end. It's also grounds for him to see who they might need to let go, okay? Because some people will make excuses that, oh, I just couldn't build this, I couldn't do this, I couldn't do this. He's like, oh man, I can't have you anymore, right? And so, he decides to rotate people out. But the point is, doing this hackathon, he's probably going to do them once a quarter or so, but it gets the best of the best together and you get to break bread with these people, you get to build better relationships and you just get these fanatics together and point them in the right direction and then they'll start guiding other people. But this is no different. than what Steve Jobs did back in the day where he had his top 100 people or top 150 people summit. And I do know there's some other companies right now that are doing that top 100. I think Coinbase does that too, where they have those people get together. And I think it's really smart if you can get your top 10% of people together for this specific initiative.

Okay, so I have one issue with the fanatics, and now I can see you. I have one issue with the fanatics. We have quite a few of those fanatics in our business and a lot of my friends' companies, and I've seen them at publicly traded companies that have market caps $50, $100+ billion. And I've interacted with a lot of them. The one, this isn't all the fanatics, but a lot of the people in the fanatics bucket, they always tell me how the latest cool thing they're doing and they say how this is awesome and they show me the work and most of the people I talk to that are in the fanatic category, they're doing all this cool stuff and it has no impact on revenue generation or saving money. All right, I'll give you one or those two because that's the purpose of AI, either make Make it so we make more money or make things more efficient so we save money. Just as a business owner or executive, that's really what those 2 things people are looking at. So what I found really useful is that C category. What'd you call the C category again?

The converts.

Okay. What I found is a lot of the converts are— there's a lot of people in that category that understand the concept that things need to either make more money or save money, They're just not as financially or tech savvy. And then having the fanatics help them be more efficient in those areas, we found to be a winning combination.

Yeah, I think it's helpful if you have converts, especially that are business outcomes driven, because the fanatics are actually usually the— I would say, not usually, but a lot of the fanatics are younger people in their 20s or so, and are really excited about new tools and things like that. Dude, in my 20s, when I worked at different companies, I was always the new tools guy, right? But now I think it's important for the converts or even people leading this, maybe if you're like executive of the company, you have to just constantly add, hey, this is really cool, but like, what are the business outcomes that we're trying to drive to here? And just constantly setting it around that band. And then if they look at you blankly, like we have had people who are fanatics that can't just— they just for the life of them, they can't tie it to revenue. If they can't do that, then they still can't be in this group and they still can't Come attend this hackathon.

I haven't met one fanatic yet that is over the age of 35. I know they do exist, but in all the companies that I've talked at and the teams I've met, all the fanatics tend to be 35 or younger. And to go more specific, most of them tend to be in their 20s. Yeah.

And I mean, even beyond that, some of them are like in their late teens. Um, and then, you know, we have mutual friends that are hiring the late teens and these teens actually sleep in the office and they're like super fanatics.

So. We have one, he's early 20s, he's showing me all this cool stuff with AI, he's telling me like, if we don't do this in our company, it's going to die, right? Really loyal guy, great guy, I love him to death.

Yeah.

And he's showing me all this cool stuff, he's like, look how powerful this is, and for like 6 months now, I've kind of just been trying to drill down one point to him, I'm like, you need to focus on stuff that either produces more revenue, Or saves on expenses.

Yeah.

And we're talking about doing stuff for customers and I'm like, yes, but the customers are paying us to help them drive more revenue. I get it's traffic or leads or sales, but overall they're paying and they need to see more revenue in a profitable way. And it has to be more profitable than what they're doing before.

Yeah.

Or they need to save money. And I'm like, and some of these younger people, I really struggle for them to get that concept.

Yep. No, it's, uh, even I just find that I need to repeat myself over and over, and if they don't get it past like, I don't know, the 4th or 5th time, then I, I'm probably moving on to like talk with somebody else. So that's just how it is. Oh, you're wearing your watch today.

Yeah. Oh, you must be pregnant or something. I usually wear it. You do?

I don't notice.

Yeah, even when we do our recordings, I usually have a watch on.

Oh, I don't notice. Um, but—

Actually, no, probably I would say 50/50. But, uh, when I have meetings or I'm going somewhere, yeah. Today I had kids go to school. So I had meetings and stuff.

Speaking of AI, did you know that YouTube— there's a guy, this guy named Ramiro, he's basically saying that YouTube is now in easy mode for new channels in 2025. So YouTube apparently made an update recently, so they now run on a dual algorithm system. So they have the old model plus Gemini AI. So Gemini prioritizes viewer experience, relevance, fact-checking, and emotion for YouTube. And so practical strategies now, it's saying that You want to use Google's ranking signals. So it says use— here, I'm just looking at it— use Google ranking images and thumbnails, add factual details, names, dates, locations, and descriptions, match background music to intended emotion, encourage context-rich comments by asking questions. So basically what it's saying is these fast edits and all these things and the suspenseful music and all that, Gemini can now detect that and that's not what it's looking for anymore. So Gemini is running quietly in the background. It's learning from videos, audience patterns, and after a year of training, Gemini now helps decide what YouTube recommends and ranks, working alongside the original algorithm, meaning that there are 2 now, which is what I said earlier. And they haven't really publicly announced it because they're still testing it. But basically, and I'll wrap this up here, so focus shift is now on viewer experience. So unlike before, it's not about flashy editing or transitions. Gemini focuses on individual viewer patterns. So what people have watched, what they're evolving to, and what they're likely to watch next. And it creates a profile, right? And that means that if you're a smaller creator, you want to get into YouTube. Neil and I have been talking about YouTube quite a bit. Smaller channels can now compete with larger ones by tailoring content to Gemini's priorities. So, haha, that means our Marketing School YouTube channel should do better theoretically.

And you know what's funny, Neil?

My mom kept telling me, she kept asking me why I wasn't getting any views. I didn't realize she was talking about my, um, my Marketing School channel or our Marketing School channel because each video before would get like 20 to 30 views.

And, uh, really? Yeah, she—

yeah, but like now it does better. But the content that we have, I think if it's going to go down this path, this algorithm, I think it's going to do a lot better. So it says success depends less on entertainment value now and much more on how well the content matches what Gemini expects and verifies. So let's talk about this.

Keep going. I had to send this text. Someone screwed up on my headline. They just published my video on ChatGPT.

Now Neil's pissed. So I know how—

Yeah, now I'm really pissed.

So Neil's out of it now. So I just think my reaction here is that if you are— if people are watching deep content, so let's say when I say deep content, like a screen share for 30 minutes or an hour or something like that, I've seen some people do it well. I know there's this Wes McDowell, I think he does these, these, these 20 to 40 minute videos. And I like doing these, these screen share videos where I like talking for 30 minutes or so. And I think the thing to understand is that if you have a lot of people leaving comments and they're saying, I don't know why this isn't getting more views, that means your video is probably really good. It's just the algorithm hasn't picked up on yet. And if the algorithm's actually getting smarter, this means that smaller creators are going to have a shot. And I do think my bet in the next 6 to 12 months, if this algorithmic change is true, the Marketing School podcast channel is going to grow a lot faster. And it's about damn time.

Oh, that's good, dude. What pisses me off, and I know this is a side tangent, my team publishes content, you know, some, some of the stuff we use contractors. I'm texting the contractor right now and I said, use the title, Rank #1 on ChatGPT, My 3-Step Traffic System. And then the video's not doing well. And then little do we see, they picked their title, Is ChatGPT the New Google for Traffic? And I'm like, guys, stop trying to like just do stuff that is like, oh, let me try to do something that's like more evoking curiosity. And I'm like, dude, people use YouTube for educational. The video breaks out how to rank on ChatGPT. Let's just keep it simple.

I just hate when— okay, so I run into the same problems that you run into. When instructions are given, instructions aren't followed. And then the thing is, I come back and I catch it later and I feel like I'm constantly looking behind my shoulders. Is that kind of how you feel?

Yes.

Yeah. And I can't wait for the time where I don't have to do that anymore.

Yes, same here.

Yeah, because look, here's what I'll call out. So those of you that can't see the video right now, once this happens, it ruins your day. Like, I'm looking at Neil right now and I know how, like, because I feel the same way too. And I already know Neil's day is ruined for the next 5 to 10 minutes at least.

I'm pissed. Yeah.

And so I'm trying to— what's gonna happen after this? What Neil's going to do after this, he's going to send them like a barrage of text messages.

He's going to get a screenshot. I already did. While we're on the phone, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I counted 6. One's a screenshot. 7. 7 text messages while I'm recording a podcast. And then just wait till I'm done.

Dude, can I tell you something? So I was talking about this last week, but me, I've been used— I've been so impressed by ytjobs.co. So the YouTube jobs website. Because it literally, I think I told you this, but it shows you who verified who they've actually worked with because the, the per— the other channel has to verify that they work with them. So when people apply now, I have like, it'll score them like, um, like a purple diamond. It's like the highest rank and they'll show like gold star.

I'm a little confused. There's a site called what? YT Jobs?

Yeah, this, this, this will help you, I think, with your situation right now because this is YouTube related. Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah, but what's the exact URL? I'm confused.

YT stands for YouTube. So ytjobs.co, that's the website. Okay.

So it's not like a YouTube job website. It's a third party.

It's a third party. It's not owned by YouTube. Yeah. And the good news with this website is all the creators that are applying to work for your company, again, they are verified, whoever they say they've worked with, like, you know, this person, 6 million subscribers, 12 million subscribers here, and they have testimonials and things like that too. I'll ask them, I'll say, hey, if you're going to apply for this job, show me 3 retention graphs, show me what you would do with this video. And the people that are serious, they'll do the work. And literally we've had one editor that we've been testing. He is head and shoulders above all the editors that I've ever worked with in the past. And they just know what to do. They'll like be proactive about ideas. They'll send Loom videos and things like that where it's like, I feel like instead of looking behind my back, I feel like they're watching my back. You know what I mean? And this is no different than, you know, Neil, the The way that I stole from you around hiring people who have at least 2 promotions at 2 different companies, these guys have it. And so you look for the people with the gold diamond or sorry, purple diamond and the gold stars, give it to someone on your HR or recruiting team and just post everything that you're looking for, all the problems that you're having right now. I think this site can solve a lot of it because there's all YouTube native people.

Oh, that's great. I'm going to try this out, but yeah, little issues when people don't follow instructions and this is my problem as a business owner or a manager, I'm really detail-oriented and the little things, if someone gets it wrong, they bother me and I don't know how to get over that. I just can't. It's not my personality and I expect everything to be done the way I believe it should be. If someone has a better way, show me data and I'm all for adopting a new way because I always want improvement and I expect everything to be as great as it possibly could be. And if it's not, I just get irritated.

I don't even know if it's a detail-oriented thing. I think it's a high standards thing because I'm 6% detail-oriented on that personality test. I remember when I still had your profile, you were like 99% detail-oriented, but both of you and I on that thing are 99% demanding. So I think it's probably more of a demanding thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can see that you and I are both demanding. And by the way, I know I'm a hard person to work for, right? This is why I'm not the CEO of a company because I know I'll just piss a lot of people off every single day.

Well, same here, but I am the CEO. So that's the problem, right? And I think you have to have very, very thick skin to deal with you or me. But I, yeah, I don't know. We'll just leave it at that. Maybe that's it for another episode, but we do have like probably 2, 3 more minutes. So is there anything else you want to cover before we head out here?

No, but going back to the detail-oriented, I mean, being hard to work with, my CEO is detail-oriented and he holds people to a high standard. But he does it in a much more finesse type of way to not piss off a lot of people culturally. Yeah, well, I don't— I'm like an HR nightmare to work with, but I don't manage any direct reports, so there is no HR problems.

Again, the Dharmesh— so Dharmesh Shah, co-founder, CTO of HubSpot, and the Neil Patel way of not having any direct reports is the dream, I think, because you can go in and fix whatever needs to be fixed, right? Whatever is broken, whatever's big, those are the things that you want to be applying your leverage to. Because those are the things that you can affect the most that will have the biggest impact. You know, I will say that we have a new exec joining us in about 2 weeks or so. The good news is, have you ever worked with anybody that's Dutch, Neil?

Yeah.

You know, Frank Slootman from Snowflake, he's Dutch, right? So I've listened to him talk before on podcasts, like this guy's hardcore, right? He's respectful, but he's hardcore. And so—

Dutch, you're talking about people from Netherlands, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, correct.

Yeah, we have office there. I don't know where. I've never seen it, but I've been there and met my team there, but I didn't go to the office.

And what's their style, you would say?

They're reserved. They can be direct, which is good, but I would say they're still reserved.

Yeah, they're direct.

It's a way of thinking.

They're direct, they're reserved, but they're also kind in the way that they're direct, right? And so I think this should hopefully help shift the culture a little bit. Because right now it's like me driving a lot of the pressure, but I think to have someone who's very direct but also approaches it in a different way is going to be good for us. So we'll see how it goes.

Yeah, because I'm not the easiest person. Like me, I'm more like, I'll meet certain people in our organization or a buddy's organization or a client's organization, and my personality is not the best and I know it's a fault. Like I'll tell people on my team, I'm like, This person's not going to work out. You should get rid of them. And I'm like, cut it. And they're just like, you only met them for 10 minutes. I'm like, I already know. I'm telling you, it's not going to work out. Here are all the things you're going to experience wrong. Move on.

Let me ask you, because I do the same thing too, but I think I'm right a good percentage of the time, but not always right. So what percentage of time do you think you're right on that call?

Like more than 95% of the time. Okay.

I think mine is more like 85-90%, which is still pretty high, but I think I'm still wrong sometimes is my point.

So in the 7 years in business at NPD, or 8 years, I don't know how long, how many years, I only made that call one time where I was wrong and that person still stuck around.

Yeah.

And the person stuck around because my executive team said, no, you're wrong. We've worked with them in the past. They're amazing. They just need a much longer ramp-up time. I was like, okay then.

But you're okay being wrong too. Like it's actually more convenient to be wrong. It's convenient.

They'll call me out and I'm like, yeah, I know I'm wrong. I don't care if I'm wrong. I don't care if I'm right. I just want growth. And if everyone said, Neil, you suck, you should just pick up trash all day long and we would grow faster. I'd be like, cool. I used to pick up trash and clean restrooms for a living. I'll do it again. If you tell me that's going to provide more growth, tell me what to do. I will gladly do it. I don't care what it is. Cool.

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