Wealth Secrets of the .001% With Syed Balkhi

Compounding is probably the most wonderful thing that exists. Never interrupt compounding unnecessarily. I started WPBeginner, which helps people build better websites using WordPress.

You've been in the WordPress space for—

17 years. I started in 2006.

How do you maintain your friendships with other high performers?

Give unconditionally. I'm not expecting anything in return. That's probably the most powerful form of compounding. Compounding goodwill.

There's a negative compounding phrase.

The frustration coefficient. Frustration coefficient can be deadly and you need to be mindful about that.

In your own words, who are you?

I'm a blogger.

Yeah?

Yeah. I blog and I help people build better websites.

That's well said. You know, one time we were at an event and people were introducing each other. This is at a private dinner. And one guy walked up to Syed. This is Syed Balkhi, everyone. And founder of Awesome Motive. He has a bunch of WordPress companies. And they're like, so what do you do? And Syed was like, I'm a blogger. And then the guy immediately was disinterested and he walked away.

But I am a blogger, right? I do— I started WPBeginner, which helps people build better websites using WordPress. And WordPress is this open source software that powers 43% of all websites on the internet. So yeah, I'm a blogger.

You and I, look, we're recording right now. Those of you that are watching on camera, I am in shorts and I'm wearing slippers right now, and we're in a hotel room. So we thought we'd bring you this conversation. And because we've been doing this retreat for— we call it the Tealuminati. We've been doing it since 2018 or so.

Yep.

And now we're now in 2024, and we thought we'd bring you some of these conversations over here. So here, Syed, how do people have an exit every year in business?

You run a profitable business and you take draws. I find it, I find it a little confusing. I'm perplexed by some of the founders' choices where they have no profit. They're not running their business profitably. They're burning money and they're raising capital. Every time they raise capital, they dilute themselves. And only at the end of the day, maybe like 8 years down, 9 years down the road, they will exit. And the amount of money that they make from that exit because they've diluted so much and with different liquidation preferences and so on.

5%. It doesn't—

yeah, it doesn't turn out to be as, as, you know, wonderful of a story. But, you know, those big media outlets will never say this is what the founder walked away with. They will talk about what the exit size was. But most of the money in, in those situations went to the venture capitalists and the private equities or whoever invested under good terms, right? So I believe that most businesses are not going to hit venture scale. Like, you know, it's rare that you will make a Microsoft or Amazon or the Ubers of the world, or, you know, those businesses are rare. But there's so many more businesses that are wonderful businesses that grow steadily. And if you run them profitably, I think you would have more than enough money to live off of. I mean, I don't have very much needs in my life. You know, I'm a simple person. I have a beautiful family and that's what I focus on. I don't need to buy mega yachts or jets or anything like this. You know, I told you I come from Pakistan and for me, what I have, I'm really, really grateful for. And I think that to me is a way to exit. Run a profitable business. Every year, take a distribution.

Yeah. You know, we— so we have mutual friends where they're taking $20, $30, $40 million distributions every single year. And that's a sizable exiting event every single year. And the great thing is you still have the asset that you can continue to compound.

Yeah, absolutely. And you, you know, when you build a business at that scale, um, you're able to deploy it, you're able to— I mean, that, that is life-changing amount of time.

Just keep buying assets.

Yeah, you can, you can buy whatever you want at that point, but that is life-changing. And you can, you can do a lot of good. You can give back to the world, you can donate to have philanthropy and, um, towards the causes that you want.

What is your philosophy on Masterminds, peer groups, things like that? Because I think for even if you're, whether you're an entrepreneur or not, it's something that's worth pursuing.

Absolutely. I think one of the best ways to level up, at least what I've found in my career, is surrounding myself with high performers, other like-minded people who are creative, who are hardworking, who are solving problems in a unique way. And you can learn from their experiences and apply them in your own journey. So I actually prefer— this is my only way to network now. I don't like going to those 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 people events because I feel you don't go deep. You're, you know, on the surface and you're meeting thousands of people. I prefer doing events like this where we're 8 people, but we're going deep and we're really talking about the struggles, the challenges that you're having, because they make a much bigger impact.

So let's say you're someone that you're like 18, 20 years old. So how does that teenager or early 20-year-old start building a network?

I think you start following people that you admire, that you're looking up to. Like when I was 23 or so, 24, I discovered this value investor named Mohnish Pabrai. I read his book called The Hindu Investor, and I followed all of his principles and so on. And Fast forward about you know nine ten years. Now I'm in a mastermind with him, and we're in a small forum group, and we've become friends, and I've learned so much from him. So I think you you start you know by following the people, and then what you will find is you'll find other people that are following those same same people and the same principles, and that's how you build your cohort. So you know I have our cohort right here. Then I have you know a different group that I hang out with that might be. my mentors in some way, or I would feel that, you know, I looked up to those guys and still do.

And so for each of these cohorts, can you define a little more, like, what are you getting out of this one? What are you getting out of other ones? Because I think you need different masterminds or different groups or different things for different situations.

Absolutely, yeah. You know, you're only going to get out of something what you're going to put in. You know, so that you have to be prepared. So when we're coming and doing this Illuminati event, what I really like about it is that One, we're all trying new cutting-edge, you know, techniques, tactics, marketing hacks, business hacks. Because we're hackers, right? We all started with nothing. You started with nothing. I was 16 when I started using WordPress. And so we're very creative and we have a unique way of solving problems. So my biggest thing every time I walk away with it is some cool idea that's going to— that I can amplify. In my forum group that I am with, I am getting a lot of wisdom and life lessons and philosophies on bigger picture things of how you do asset allocation, how do you think about life, and how do you think about kids. I have a 7-year-old. And I think that's probably going to be my biggest contribution to this planet.

Yeah. And your group, that forum group, by the way, it's a lot of great people in it. They're mostly capital allocators, right?

Yes.

And they're, you know, they're a little older than you, right? So it's a little different.

Yes, and but I do value the experience.

For sure.

Yeah, and I think there's a lot of value, you know, to be part of that group. I really enjoy the conversations and the energy that's there and the wisdom that's there is next level.

Yeah, so from that one you get, you get life wisdom, you talk more about capital allocation. This one is like, you know, we're entrepreneurs but we're also marketers, right? And then we're also around the same age too.

Exactly.

So it's a little different. You know, we spent some time working out this morning too.

Yep, absolutely.

So, funny thing is, one thing I've learned is this, right? Like, you talked about following Maneesh Pabrai in your early 20s or so. Eventually, you get to meet these people, right? Like, you and I, like, I messaged you when I was working on a company. You were like 21 years old. I think I was 25 years old or something. And then I was asking to do like an affiliate deal with you. We didn't— nothing happened there, right? But eventually, like a couple years later, we met up, and then we met up at a mastermind too.

Yup.

And I think the key takeaway here is like, if you just keep Putting one foot in front of the other every single day, eventually you're all gonna cross paths. If you give up at any certain point, then, you know, you'll probably not cross paths with these people.

Yeah, I was listening to this Tony Robbins interview and something he said about, you know, Steph Curry and the amount of shots that he makes in private versus the amount of shots that he's made in his career. And the ratio is so disproportional, like millions of shots in private and then only a couple thousand shots that he's made, and he's the world's greatest shooter. And the quote that he talked about, that he said, and I was like, this is so powerful, is that you're rewarded in public for what you do in private. And it was just like that. You know, you keep doing one step at a time, and over long term, compounding is probably one of the most wonderful things that exist.

You had a phrase this morning. So we were working out, and it was the— there's a negative compounding phrase. What is it?

Well, it was a mental model I was talking about that I came up with. I call it the frustration coefficient. And I think it leads us to make irrational decisions that will interrupt compounding unnecessarily. And as the late, great Charlie Munger said, never interrupt compounding unnecessarily. And the frustration coefficient, it's as real as gravity. You don't see it, but it's happening. And the way to think about it is, let's say somebody did something. And it made you a little—you got a little annoyed. You didn't say anything. The next time that person did the exact same thing, nothing different, but your annoyance factor is x plus one, and after that is x plus one plus one, right? So it keeps going up by a factor, and one day you just blow up, and that can lead to a lot of negativity, relationships getting broken. Maybe you end up selling a business that you really loved because you were frustrated about the wrong things. Your perspective on it and your attitude towards it was not right. So frustration coefficient can be deadly and you need to be mindful about that.

So that's a situation where you should interrupt the negative compounding?

Absolutely. You need to practice radical candor and you need to, you know, be upfront and be transparent about what it is and, you know, clear the air.

Yeah. We talked about this maybe a couple years ago, but what is the— what is the right way for people to handle— okay, let me rephrase this. So let's say you have someone that you work with, right? They keep making the same mistake over and over. You learned over the years that it's not the right thing to blame the person necessarily. What do you do instead?

Well, one, it's important to emphasize to the other person is that you're on the same team and you're working towards the same goal and towards the same mission. And when you approach the situation that way, it's no longer a personal attack on the other person. And when you're talking about, hey, I care for you and I am giving you this feedback because I want to see you do better. So it's not about critiquing the person, you're critiquing the situation and learning from that situation on how we can do better. And that's what all of us are doing anyways, all the time.

You know, it's interesting. It works, right? It works to an extent, but some people, they take it so personally still, even if you say you're attacking the problem. And then it's just like, you just see them get more and more defeated. Others, they get more and more motivated when you do flip it, right? Have you seen that happen?

Well, I think, you know, it's hard not to take things personally because especially if you're a high performer and you take pride in the work that you're doing, and if someone comes in and says, hey, you know, there might be some opportunities for us to improve, One, you gotta take a step back and say, yes, everybody can improve and nobody's perfect. And that's just sort of like your self-awareness at that level. But when that happens, you have to stop, take a pause, and, you know, bring that centering exercise back. Hey, remember, I am not attacking you. I believe that you are very capable. You're a smart person. You're a high performer. And we're working on the same team. So our goal is not to tear each other apart.

Yeah.

The goal is to tackle the problem head-on, um, and learn from the mistakes that we're making or the opportunities that we have to improve. And if someone says that they have no room to improve, and I think, you know, you, you've hit an impasse.

Yeah. Let's, let's, let's, let's go with this one. So, you know, the air gets thinner as you continue to climb higher, right? And, you know, earlier we talked about the importance of masterminds and everything, but how do you maintain your friendships with other high performers? Because high performers like hanging out with high performers, right?

Yep. I think you always have to have something valuable to contribute to a group. If you are a taker, over time, your circle will get, you know, smaller and smaller. But if you give unconditionally, what it does, it compounds goodwill. I think that's probably the most powerful form of compounding is when you're compounding goodwill in the world.

Relationship capital.

Relationship capital. I just say compounding goodwill because There's no— I'm not expecting anything in return. If you ask me a question today about anything that's going on in your business and I, you know, share my perspective or my experience with it, I don't own any equity stake in your business. You know, whether you do that or you don't do that, it has no impact on my personal life whatsoever. But if it does end up doing positive for you, I think the world will be better. And that's the way I approach it. And I think when you approach it that way, and a lot of high performers that I've, that at least I'm friends with, have the same worldview.

Right. We used to be in a lot of different masterminds, but now it's like, okay, there's probably one forum, you know, one like, you know, like a peer, like a founders retreat, like what we do over here. What did you, okay, in your early 20s, how many of these groups were you in and how many are you in now?

When I first started, I was going to every conference because you have to do that when you're in the early days.

Nobody knows you.

Yeah, nobody knows you. You're putting your brand out there. So I was going to a lot of events. I mean, that's how you learn what works, what doesn't work, what you like, what you don't like. I was on the stage. I was speaking at conferences, thousands of people. I was doing a lot of that. Like, I don't even remember. I've attended hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of conferences over my career. Now I'm very, very selective about the groups that I'm in, the conversations that I'm having. I would much rather prefer to go on a one-on-one lunch or one-on-one dinner with a friend and catch up versus being— going to a 300-people event. I'd much rather prefer a 10-people event like the one we're at right now than larger ones.

Yeah, and what I'm hearing is you want to go deep instead of wide.

I think you learn more that way. When you are at an event, large event, everybody's talking about wins, right? Nobody talks about failures.

Yeah.

I think we learn more from failures than we learn from wins. I think one of our advantages at Osmotive, or basically any of my companies, is that we fail faster than other people. One of my companies is failing at something, and another one is failing at a different thing, another one is failing at a different thing, and it is my job to learn, you know, Learn from those, combine that knowledge, and distill it back out to all the different teams. I think that's probably our biggest advantage is we fail faster than anyone else.

So let's talk about Awesome Motive. So what does that look like now? It's it's to me it's a holding company of WordPress businesses, but you can go ahead.

I I don't like the word holding company, and it's actually not a holding company. What do you call it? It's a management company.

Okay. You know, explain that first.

So when I when I was starting out, I All of our businesses are completely separate businesses.

Wow.

Because I believe that you cannot build solutions to solve problems that you don't fully understand. That's very important. So when one company tries to do 18 different things, they're terrible at all 18 of them. But when you put relentless focus and go deep on that one thing, you're going to build the best solution. So all of our companies are independent. Independent leadership, independent operations, independent GMs, independent everything. No resource sharing going on in there. So, like, ultimately what Ossimotive is doing is it's a glorified management company where, you know, I will give advice. I'm an investor in many, many companies at this point. Some I own wholly, some I own majority stakes, some I own minority stakes in. And yeah, so that's how I think about Ossimotive.

Okay, and how many acquisitions, how many wholly owned acquisitions How many acquisitions did you do last year? And what else? We'll start with that first.

Last year, we did 12. We did 12 full acquisitions where I just bought the whole companies. And then I did 4 minority stake deals. I call them the growth fund. There's no other investor in my fund. So it's just my personal capital where I invested to acquire 30% or more. Minority stake.

Yeah. And so why? I mean, you know, people might ask why 30%? Why not go for majority 51%?

When you're working with founders, you realize that not every founder wants to exit the whole business. You know, they're really committed to what they're doing. I mean, one of the investments that I did that we actually just announced earlier this week is called GrooveHQ. It's a top-rated customer support software. And Alex, the founder, believes that the work he's doing in Groove is his personal legacy. He did not want to exit. He had offers to exit to a private equity company. He didn't want to exit. Rather, he wanted a strategic partner that has the same values. I'm a bootstrap founder, so I understand what the founders are looking for. And not every founder builds the business to make it a billion-dollar company. That's not true. Vast majority of companies are not going to be billion-dollar companies. So sometimes you're doing it, a lot of times you're doing it because you're passionate about what you're doing, and you wanna provide for your family at the end of the day.

Mm-hmm.

So we had a lot of alignment in terms of our life beliefs and so on. And he just wanted someone who can offer strategic guidance, marketing power, and so on. And that's what we did. So I'm completely okay, you know, coming alongside another bootstrap founder. And it's actually something I wished I had when in the earlier days when, you know, if I had found someone, I probably would have done that, because that would have helped me accelerate My growth a lot.

I know how your frameworks work, so you— but you feel free to share whatever you want to share here. But like, in terms of, because there's so many companies here, there are certain things that you look at to stay on track or stay on top of things, and then you'll proactively reach out if, you know, in certain situations. So how does that framework look if you want to share it?

Yeah, I mean, so every company is autonomous in that because I'm not a superhuman. I have 24 hours in the day just like everybody else have it. So the key is to have good fundamentals, good rules, good, you know, good vision, good annual planning. We use EOS in a lot of our businesses. And so you have a VTO, which is the Vision Traction Organizer. So those are like your guiding principles. And when there's alignment with the general manager or the founder that's running those businesses, they continue to grow. Of course, you have to make sure incentives are aligned, which is incentives and insecurities are the 2 most powerful forces that drive human behavior. So You have to make sure those are aligned. And after that, all what I'm looking at is the P&L, you know, and I will chat with the with the GM or the founder depending on how senior they are. Either I will talk to them once a quarter, or I'll talk to them once a month just to kind of be be add my input or offer any advice if they need it. But you know, if something is wrong in those metrics, then I'll hop on a call and say, "Hey." Uh, what's going on here?

And you're looking at like, it's like red light, green light, yellow light, right? Pretty much. You're basically looking at a scorecard.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that's the only way, you know, you have to— it has to be color-coded. And it's not super fancy, it's like a spreadsheet.

Yeah, and but they're— and all the spreadsheets are kind of all interconnected, right? At the end of the day, they are. Yep. Um, you just said a powerful phrase. It's incentives and insecurities that are the most powerful driving forces in, I guess, in humans, right? So what is that in shaping human behavior?

Yeah. So most things that we do are driven by an incentive. So for example, if you're working out every morning like we did today, that's because we want to live healthy. That's an incentive. But what's the real incentive? We want to live longer. We want to have a better quality of life. So those are the incentives. Now for some people, it might be that their insecurities might be driving it. Maybe they're like, I want to look good. Maybe they think they don't think that they look great yet. Maybe they're like, hey, I want to fit in. In better clothes or, you know, shape-fitted clothes or whatever. So it could be insecurities, it could be incentives, but almost always those are the 2 driving forces that are shaping human behavior. And I actually believe there is a thing called an insecurity score.

Oh, okay.

And it's invisible, just like the frustration coefficient. So you'll have in your company, then you'll find this is you have someone that's a very high performer at their job, and you both agree that they should be promoted because of course you want to reward your team members and you want to help them grow in their careers. And they go into the next role and they're crushing it. And then they go in the next role, they're crushing it. And then they go to the next role and all of a sudden the performance just tanks and you wonder what happened. What really is going on sometimes, maybe you hit the ceiling and maybe they're not skilled and, you know, Maybe you gave them a little challenge too big, at which point you can identify those. But what I have learned, a lot of times it is around insecurities. You know, they feel more nervous, the responsibilities are too high, the fear of loss gets so much that it takes away their confidence, and they're not making those decisions that they were making before at the same fast pace, which is, you know, hurting their output. So I call that the insecurity line. And then you need to make sure, okay, you make a fear checklist at that point. What are you afraid of? And you write those things down and you figure out how you can eliminate those so they can continue to make those decisions faster like they were doing before, so they can continue to be a productive member of the team.

Can you share a story? You don't have to give names, obviously, but share a story about how you did this because it sounds interesting. I'd like to hear an example.

Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, we at Awesome— at all of my companies, I really believe in promoting from within because I believe someone who's been with you for a very long time, they should be rewarded. They understand your system. They should continue to grow with you because what I would like to do is build a generational company. I want to work with people who I enjoy working with for the rest of my life, and I want to keep doing it till I'm 90, 94.

Generational to you is like till you die, basically?

Pretty much. Generational to me is pretty much till I die. And generation, I guess, is defined like 25 years.

Okay.

Right? That's like the definition of generation. So I want to build a generational, so multi-generations. Who knows, maybe our team members' kids are also working at one of the many companies that, who knows how many we own at that point, how many I own at that point. So as we're promoting, you know, one of the people, real rockstar, let's say in marketing, real, real rockstar. And we say, okay, hey, now you should lead a team instead of going from individual contributor to a team. There's some roadblocks there. Oh well, should I? Like you know, they're great at individual tasks, but not okay with giving feedback. So you need to you know provide them with training and so on on those things. But then there's insecurity, like hey, this was my peer before, and now the relation dynamics have changed, and I feel that if I give this you know feedback to that, my relationship might. be broken. And that's insecurities.

Yeah.

Because you're negotiating with yourself at that point.

Yeah.

You should never do that.

And so is this something, by the way, like, it sounds like this is the insecurity score. It feels like it's helpful to refresh for everyone in the company every quarter or something like that.

Yeah, especially if you're a manager and you have teams, you need to be on the lookout for that. And this is one of the things that EOS helps with. If you have the L10 scorecards, which is level 10 meeting. If you read the book Traction by Gino Wickman, it talks about that. But if you have those scorecards and the accountability pieces, you will know when someone who's a high performer, they drop. Usually when, when the performance drops for a high performer, it's because something external has happened. Maybe something's going on there in their life. Maybe, maybe something, you know, is impacting— maybe the role changed, this environment changed, and you need to be aware of that. And when you, you know, double tap on that, double click on And so, and is that you doing it?

Because you know us as entrepreneurs, like we're not the most empathetic people. But I have your personality score. I have mine too. I know how empathetic we are. But like it's we build frameworks. So who does this for you?

So you know I have to work myself to do this. I'm very straight shooter, right? I'm a busy. I like to say I'm a busywig. What you see is what you get. And I have to work on that and make sure that you know when I'm presenting the feedback or giving someone feedback, I'm conscious of. The feelings of the other person as well. But what's the most important part is that my goals are aligned with the other person. I care for the other person deeply, and I want them to succeed because if they succeed, that's how we succeed. You know, so one of the things that I, I believe is that I believe people should win. I believe people deserve more. I believe they should win, and they should win more often. And you know, those are my personal. values, and that's what are defining everything that we're doing. And I think these are universal truths, actually. These are not even values. These are universal truths that are going to be— that were true 50 years from now— 50 years ago, they're true now, they'll be true 100 years from now.

Dude, that's very presidential of you. You weren't born in the US, right? You can't become president.

I can't become president.

You can become governor, though. One powerful thing that you said was The phrase you use is people, people should see acquisitions as paid media. What do you mean by that?

Oh, that's a private conversation that we were having earlier. Yeah. I was talking about, there was a big shift that happened in my career. So I'm a blogger, which means you're, you know, you're a founder, you're an entrepreneur, you're running a media company.

He's much more than a blogger.

As they call it these days, you're a content creator, you have a media company, whatever. At the end of the day, you're a blogger. So, so I was an entrepreneur. I built one software company. And there was a shift in my mental mindset was going from an entrepreneur to a capital allocator. And I learned this from Warren Buffett, right? And one of the things he says is that I am a better investor because I'm a businessman. And I'm a better businessman Because I'm an investor, so at the end of the day, all what you're doing as a CEO is you're allocating capital, whether you're allocating it towards hiring, whether you're allocating towards marketing and whatnot, right? So when you start thinking about CAC and you're spending paid buying paid ads, some of the companies are spending like forward revenue on CAC, right? Or CAC and. At which point I think buying an adjacent company is far more lucrative because most businesses don't trade at super duper high multiples that you might read on TechCrunch or whatever, right? Most businesses trade at normal valuations. And when you do the math, the capital allocation towards acquisition of adjacent businesses work out to be better than PPC. Go on. It does. So example, example, you know, let's do simple math. Let's say you're spending $100 to acquire a business, okay, and acquire a customer, but you're, you know, but you're making $50. So you're spending 2 years because you know the customer is going to expand in value or whatever. You can buy a business at 2 times revenue that might not be growing, but they already have all the customers that you have. Because there's only 3 ways to grow a business. If you're, especially if you're in a subscription business, there's only 3 ways to grow it. You can get new customers, you can expand your existing customers, or you can reduce churn. Like there is no other growth levers. Everything else falls in between these buckets. And when you say, okay, well, new customers, How can you do it? You can make YouTube videos. You can buy ads. You can do content marketing. I mean, there's a zillion ways, but probably the best way is you can just acquire another business.

You buy a company, and then you can expand those customers too if you have adjacent services and products.

Absolutely. The math works out to be much better.

Yep. And how you have created— I mean, because you've been in the WordPress space for what, 23, 24 years?

No. So 17 years. I started in 2006. More than half my life. I'm 33 right now.

Okay. So more than half your life you've been in the WordPress space. And so you're known, right? How does that affect— how do you go about getting deal flow?

Well, now, especially in the WordPress space, when someone wants to exit, especially an entrepreneur, you have to think about what's important to them in the deal. Of course, valuation is important, but entrepreneurs want to make sure that the customers are taken care of. The products are taken care of because it's their legacy. Nobody wants to sell their company to a sleazy private equity company that's going to kill it. That's nobody's vision.

Nobody— it's ironic. The PE firms actually do a pretty good job at the end of the day. The good ones.

The good ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The good ones. I think there's a lot more horror stories than the good ones. Same with VCs. So I think that because of having a good reputation, all the founders reach out to us directly now. Of course, where I see synergy or if I see a strategic I'll reach out to the founder myself too. But having a good reputation helps. Having good relationships help.

You actually do a really good job of being not too front-facing, kind of behind the scenes a little bit. Like, you're seen just enough where like you're a known entity, right? And I think that's actually the best place because it's, it's best to become wealthy and anonymous, right? So, and I know you've been very intentional about it. So if people want to do that, how should they go about it?

I think my philosophy is that I should let my work speak for itself instead of me going on camera and you know touting my own horn kind of thing.

Okay, speaking of which, what are the economics of buying gas stations? Why should people buy gas stations?

Let me can I give you a story maybe? Okay. So when I moved to U.S., I was twelve years old in 2003. My dad His degree didn't validate, so he's a mechanical engineer by trade. But moving to U.S., he would have to go get recertified and everything. And you know, where there's three of us kids, and then one my brother was on the way. So the only job that my dad could find was working at a gas station. So not owning a gas station, nothing minimum wage. You know, gas station cashier. You know, also the janitor. Also everything. You know, that operator does everything on it. So my dad worked sixteen hours a day. Every day of the week, pretty much. On the weekends, he had a third job. So he had 3 jobs.

Gas station? What was the 2 and 3?

Gas station, gas station, and gas station.

Oh, double— oh, triple gas stations. Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was gas stations where he was doing this. So he would go, you know, one shift in one gas station, go to the next one, change in the bathroom over there, and then work that. Because that was the only way to make ends meet. But what I learned from that, watching that, was people go to the gas station. They're not going anywhere. They're in the corner. You're going— you're going to fill up your gas all the time. I was playing cricket. I love cricket. And I met this Pakistani entrepreneur and he was a sponsor of our team and he loved playing. And he's like, hey, you don't have to pay anything. You can just play for the team as long as, you know, everybody treats each other nicely. And I really was inspired by him. He became my very first mentor. I was 14 years old. And I asked him, how did you make money? Did you did you inherit it? You know, as a 14-year-old, I had no filter. Yeah. And and he and he said, no, I own real estate. I'm like, what kind of real estate? And he's like, I own you know gas stations, convenience stores. And he has like hundreds and hundreds of them, right? And I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. So I learned so much. I would just go to his house to watch cricket games, and in between breaks. I would just learn, you know.

How did you meet this guy in the first place?

Playing cricket at a random league.

Just like a random— okay.

Random league. Just, just, just for fun. It was completely out of the blue. Maybe it was meant to happen. I don't know. Um, so, you know, after the financial crisis, a lot of people in real estate, they're overly leveraged. By the way, leverage is what pretty much destroys any business, right? That's how you commit suicide.

You don't really— you don't do any leverage?

I don't do any leverage. I've seen people get completely wiped out with leverage.

Even a little leverage can wipe you out.

Yeah. If you're not— if you don't have good margin of safety. I believe in operating with very large margin of safety. So, so what I did at the time, once my online businesses were making money, I didn't spend anything, right? I was very, very frugal. So I went to him and I said, hey, I would like to buy a gas station too because I've saved up enough money. And he helped me find my first several deals because there were so many at that time that were being foreclosed on because somebody was either was going through a divorce during that time or had a lot of debt. I've also purchased— maybe somebody died and their estate is selling it, and that's when you can get a value purchase.

How old were you?

I was in my 20s, early 20s. So, and so I bought them because one, they're corner lots. I'm not operating those gas stations. I own the real estate and they're leased out to publicly traded companies like Couche-Tard, right, that owns Circle K and so on. Um, and they, they pay you rent and they pay for your insurance, they pay for, uh, maintenance, they cover everything, right? So at the— it's net, net, net. It's called triple net leases. You can look it up. But it's headache-free for the owner. And for me, I was not sure what my digital business was going to do because nobody in my family has ever had a business, considering I told you how hard my dad was working. I'm like, well, you know, if all of this goes away, at least I have this predictable income that will sustain my life. And that was, I think, was a pretty important shift also in my journey. Because once I had that peace of mind, I was no longer stressed about things. I'm like, okay, if something goes wrong, I have this as a backup.

Right.

I was able to make more bold moves in the business.

Got it. So let's say if you use simple round numbers, it's if someone invests like $100, what are they expecting to get back from, from a gas station?

I mean, it depends on what you're, what you're buying it at. I think most of the value is done when you're buying it, you know, most of the risk is covered when you're buying it, of what price you pay. That's how you protect yourself. I've seen gas stations trading at 4% cap rate, which basically means if you put $100, you make $4. But I think that's a pretty terrible deal generally. I mean, unless you know something else about that land that other people don't know. There's oil under it. Or maybe this is underpriced, right? So whatnot. But typically, they can be better than that. Like, everything that I bought was in the 8%, 9%. And now they're much more higher because the rent has gone up. That's amazing.

S&P level.

Yeah, yeah, because you— because I bought them low. Yeah, I bought them low at the right time, um, under the right circumstances and so on. I'm not going and buying in open market.

Yeah. By the way, here's the side quest over here. You're— I know you to be a really good negotiator. And so what is— what are your philosophies around negotiating? Because that's how you get these like 8%, 9% cap rate deals.

So Well, I think the most important thing in negotiation is your power to walk away and having no emotional attachment to it. And for me, that was the case with just about every real estate. I had no emotional attachment to that. I see it as a vehicle for my family's safety. And so like, if I can get it, I get it. If not, You have to stay disciplined. In investing, I think most of the mistakes that happen is when you lose those disciplines, when you lose those checklists. You know, and you say, okay, I'm a wonderful operator. I can turn around any business. I can do this. You know, after you have your first success, you think you can—

You think you're unstoppable.

You're invincible.

Yeah, yeah.

Right? And that's not the case. In most cases, I was reading a Berkshire letter from the 1980s. And Warren writes in there, it's like he says, you know, when you put, in vast majority of cases with few exceptions, when you put a highly reputable management team with a business that has a reputation of having poor fundamentals, it's the reputation of the business that stays intact.

Yeah.

So I think you have to stay disciplined and you need to know what your capabilities are and what your circle of competence is.

What else have they said? They've also said like, hire— make sure you have a business that where an idiot can run it because eventually an idiot will.

Yeah, they do say that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So speaking of frugality, have you read the Elon Musk book?

No.

So entertaining. The main thing is he's extremely frugal, right? And if you look at some of the best entrepreneurs, they're extremely frugal. So, What are your philosophies in terms of how you can actually continue to stay frugal?

I think our— you have to look into what's your desire for spending. Why is that desire there? A lot of times that desire is there because you're looking at external scorecards. You're trying to play a catch-up game. And you say, you know, I see so-and-so friend of mine, they're driving a Rolls-Royce. So, I also better get a Rolls-Royce. So you're trying to keep up with the Joneses mentality.

Yeah.

And a lot of times that's how the lifestyle creep happens, right? And you're, my salary is going up or my income is going up. I can afford more things on debt, right? Because you don't think about the actual value of what you're buying. You think about what the payments are going to be, especially when it's a very large purchase. You know, if you, if you're buying like maybe an expensive watch once or expensive clothes once, whatever, it's not, it might not be destructive to you. But if you're going and buying multiple real estate, you know, millions, millions of dollars of things, those can, especially when they're leveraged, can be destructive. So to avoid lifestyle creep, I have certain principles that I follow. I like to offset my expenses and depreciating assets that I might purchase with an appreciating asset. So—

You want to give the Sully example?

Sure. So my son Solomon, when he was being born, I was like, well, how much is this going to cost? You know, because your lifestyle expenses go up. I mean, anybody who has kids know that. Then there are diapers, there's school, there's this, all sorts of things. So I said, well, you know, if something is to happen to me, it's not easy to run my business. Like, because you have to spend half your life—

There's so much knowledge.

Right. There's so much knowledge that I picked up over 16, last 16, 17 years. So I said, well, I will buy a gas station and, um, free and clear. And the return, you know, it's for Solomon. And, and the return of that pays for any expense that is incurred for Solomon, and anything that's not incurred will be saved up for, for him to, um, you know, go to college or whatever.

Yeah, so for any new expense you have, you need to offset it with like some type of investment that will pay for that.

Absolutely. So if you're thinking about, you know, say if you're working and you just got a raise, 20%, whatever raise that you just got, And you're like, oh, well, now I can afford my next BMW payment. Stop. Don't do that. Invest that somewhere else. And then once your dividends from that investment gets to the point where you can afford that new BMW payment, that's when you can buy the BMW.

By the way, like in investing, it's about not selling assets at the end of the day because you don't want to interrupt compounding, right? But so here's the thing with that. It's what if, like, let's say someone's in college and they have, you know, money in stocks or whatever it is exactly. But then they need to pay for expenses. So what do they do there? Should they get a loan? What happens?

I think it's not quite that you should not sell. It's not quite that you should not sell. It depends on what asset it is.

Avoid selling.

If it's a wonderful asset, yeah, you should avoid selling it at that point. You know, you should find another way, maybe figure something out. But it's not— that doesn't apply to all assets. When you're buying a stock, you're buying the underlying business. If the fundamentals of the underlying business are changing and you have no operational control in that business, the wise investment move would be to take your profits and move on to the next investment idea that you have. So that's, that's the way I think about it. But let's say you own a great piece of real estate and It doesn't cost you too much, and you know it's lucrative, and you know this area is going to grow. They're not making any more land. Land were the original NFTs, I guess, right? Whatever. So they don't make any more of those. So you may not want to sell it. You can hold on to it if you have holding power. You can hold on to it over long terms of time unless you have a better idea. It's all about if you have a better investment thesis. Something else came up, and the opportunity cost of holding this is more than the benefit here. I don't think I've ever shown you this.

This I'll show you like once we stop recording. There's this this chart because when we were taught growing up, at least my parents, it was like oh, you got to own, you got to have a big home, four one k and all that. And you think most of your assets go into that, right? And so when you look at the net worth of someone that's under hundred k or million or whatever, even under ten million, it's mostly like the home, right? Maybe there's some stocks here and there. But once you go like $10 million to $100 million, it's mostly businesses, your business, right? So like, is is that how your asset allocation is is split up right now, or?

Well, I have a pretty diversified portfolio from my asset allocation perspective, but it will be it will be fair to say that vast majority of a large not vast majority, a large percentage of what I have is in the businesses.

Yeah, and the reason is because we can. Control it as much as we can.

Well, so I— in your investment, in anything that you're doing, you have to figure out what is your edge, what is your competitive edge. Because look, if I try to play basketball against LeBron James, I'm gonna lose, right? So I don't have any advantage in playing basketball with LeBron. But if LeBron tries to start a WordPress plugin business, I think LeBron's gonna lose because, you know, he has certain Sorry, he doesn't have the same advantages, right?

Right.

So you have to find what's your circle of competence, and you need to find what is your edge, right? Um, so that makes a, that makes a big, big, big difference. And I feel that in this small business software category that I'm operating in, uh, for a portion of, of the businesses that we have, um, I do have a unique understanding of that audience because I write the blog, you know, I talk to those customers, I'm reading the feedback that they're sending in and so on. And I feel like as a business owner, I also understand the problems. Like, one of the biggest reasons why I invested in Groove was because I'm really upset with my current help desk software, right? They keep raising their prices, uh, the platform is buggy as heck, um, it's not scaling for us. And I'm like, well, I should just build one or buy one. And then, you know, if I can buy one that's faster and better. So I looked around the industry and I talked to many people. They all had the same problem. Front too expensive, Zendesk too expensive, everything. Nobody's happy with it, their solution. I'm like, well, this thing looks really good. It does everything I need and like 30%, 40% cheaper. So like, let's go do that. So a lot of the solutions that I'm investing in are solving the problems that I am having in one of my many other businesses. So like take, take like Uncanny Automator, which is like, you know, Automator plugin for WordPress, um, is Zapier for WordPress. I'm tired of paying the Zapier tax.

The cost per— it's pay per task.

Yeah. Pay per task. I call it the Zapier tax. I pay enough taxes in my life. I don't need to pay a Zapier tax. So, so I said, well, this is, this, this cost is going up. I don't want this. Somebody has— this can't be rocket science. Somebody has to be doing it. And guess what? You know, these entrepreneurs, Ryan and Ken out of Toronto, they had built this for WordPress. And I said, I want to partner with them. So I invested in their business and now they have 150 integrations that does everything from sending the data from your WordPress website to a spreadsheet to sending data from one website to another site to another site. You can have all kinds of recipes, right?

Yeah.

And you don't pay the per-task fee.

Yeah.

So I feel that's my unique advantage as a business owner, as an operator, and especially in this space. I see the problems firsthand, and if I can find a solution that satisfies me and our needs, I'm sure it will satisfy many other people's needs because it's not really that big.

And that's the philosophy. That's your philosophy, and definitely you should stick with it. Yesterday, I was before we were picking you up at the airport. I was like, man, I think you know paper tasks. Zapier they've been doing that. Intercom has now switched to paper ticket solved, right? They charge a dollar per ticket. I'm like, man, is this going to be the rise of paper task? It's like I don't know, man. It's it's. I don't know, like, could be. That's how I see it. I don't know how you think about it.

I think people want to be billed fairly. Yes. Okay. And, and you have, you have to deliver the value if you want to charge for it. So if the ticket doesn't cost a dollar, right, and you, you want me to pay you a dollar, if at scale everybody's gonna move away from it.

Yeah, it can't be something like, oh, am I on the right page? Solved.

Like, that can't be a dollar. Yeah, no, no. So, so, so value, you know, value proposition has to be fair.

It's got to be commensurate with the value. And I think, you know, in the future with AI, you'll be able to quickly do that value calculation there. And maybe you can line item that all out, but we're far away from that right now.

Yes. With any new technology, what, what I've observed is that it— there's an adoption window, and that's always longer than us tech enthusiasts anticipate.

Oh, yeah. Internet took forever.

Internet took forever, right? And if you think e-commerce is huge right now, e-commerce is such a small fraction. If you think about the number of total retail stores that exist in the world, how many of them have e-commerce presence?

Not many.

No, not many. Vast majority of them don't. Like, I'm talking about super majority.

Like 90% plus.

Yeah. So—

And even the blockchain stuff, going to take a very long time.

Very long time. So I think same thing with AI. AI is very, very powerful. But if you, if you ask most people, they're maybe just using the basic ChatGPT for the very basic prompting and, and not, not to the scale that one would. So, so yeah, the adoption will take, take some time.

Yeah. So a couple more things from my side. I mean, we talked about some stupid investment mistakes even, even yesterday, right? So what are some stupid investment mistakes? What are some Syedisms that you got for this?

Balkyisms. Balkyisms. Oh man. Well, one, don't think that you're a turnaround king. That's important. I used to think that. Yeah. I think that's a lesson you only learn after you fail. Don't think that you can just go in any industry and really— like I thought, oh, maybe I should start a fitness blog because I'm clearly very good at pushing. Oh really? I did. And it failed. That's why I never talk about it. Wow. You're vulnerable. So yeah, so here's like— so I had WPBeginner doing well. I created this List25, like a listicle, uh, blog that went really viral on YouTube.

You got a ton of subs, right?

2 million, 2.5 million subs, half a billion video views. Yeah, huge, huge, right? And I'm like, man, I could go in any space.

You got the Midas touch.

Yeah, make a blog and, and go. So I'm like, you know what, fitness. Fitness is huge. I should go in fitness. Bust, right? So So you have to stay in your circle of competence. I think that's very important. The other thing is avoid overpaying for things, operating with a large margin of safety. So a lot of times people say, well, if you have cash on the balance sheet, that's not good. And you say, well, look at Berkshire. They're sitting on $150 billion in cash because patience is very, very important in investing. And that's a trait that is hard to learn, really, really hard to practice. The ability to sit there and do nothing. Like 2021, right? Valuations for businesses started going through the roof.

You sat pat. You didn't do much.

I didn't do much. Yeah, we bought one business or maybe 2 that year, um, and we just stayed on the sideline because it didn't make sense. So, so having, having that discipline is important. And the old me would have just said, yes, I want to be, you know, I have a checklist. I'm trying to impress other people. If I don't do Like, so we did 12 acquisitions last year, right? If I don't do 12 acquisitions this year, I'm not upset about it. I'm not trying to impress you or anyone else. Like, if I write my year-end review, that's one— the only blog I write on my personal blog, right? At the end of the year, the year-end recap. If my year-end recap next year says I only bought 3 businesses, I don't care. So it has to make sense. It has to be— so that's probably the biggest business mistake, acquisition mistake, investing mistake. That that people make.

I think there's a key thing here too. It's you learned your mistake. Like it's not like you were pro like immune to mistakes. Like you learned hey the power of focus. Also, you learned not to get too ahead of your skis with acquisitions when when everyone's like super hyped about things, and that's how you honed your patience.

Yeah, actually, it was it was something you sent me in in 2020 when the pandemic started. You sent me this this PDF. Which had maybe like 100 stories or something of entrepreneurs talking about the '80s or whatever, the big crash in the '70s, '80s, right? Yeah, yeah. And you know, there was one, one theme in that, uh, in that as you read, of course everybody had a different business, they had all failed, and they were writing a memoir, right? Um, the common theme was over-leverage. That's what killed them, every single one of them. Overleveraged because they did not operate with margin of safety. So the three most important words in investment is margin of safety.

M O S. Yeah, there you have it. All right, and by the way, because you and I we we both have these Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett bronze busts, like you have it right in back of you, right? What are your favorite some of your favorite Mungerisms, Buffettisms before we get out of here?

Oh man, I have I have so many so many of them. You know, the one that I really, really like about from Munger is to never interrupt compounding unnecessarily. Inversion, inward, always inward.

Always inward.

I look at every situation how I'm going to die. So like, I think there's only 3 mental models. Well, I use many mental models, but there's 3 that I use more than others. First principles, second order thinking, And inversion. I think when you combine those three, you you will avoid most things. You know Buffett's rule of investment: number one, don't lose money. Two, don't forget rule number one. I think that's very very important rules and just that discipline. You can listen to their annual letters over and over. You know the meetings and pick up new ideas.

Yeah, but Buffett's so Munger's it's more like phrases you can remember, right? Buffett's got like paragraphs of things, and the Buffett one I remember is more so like. Most people just don't want to sit around on their asses, or maybe it's a Charlie Munger thing, and just, you know, wait to get rich.

Right. Yeah, you know, compounding is— it takes time. The most— one of the most important, you know, factors in the compounding equation is time. You know, there's all sorts of compounding calculators. You can say, okay, if you set aside $1 million right now, and, you know, say it earns like 7% or whatever, for For 100 years, how much you think it will turn? Probably like close to like $800 million. If that dollar purchase amount was invested from the time period just in an aggregate, you know, index, if there was such a thing at the time, over the period of time, it would— and the amount of doubles and 10x's it would have done, it would be worth like far, far larger amount, an order of magnitude bigger Than the value of the entire Manhattan Island.

Wow.

So I encourage you to pull that up, maybe add it in the show notes or something. Um, I think there's always a different perspective.

2 more things over here. So you, I remember, so you, you invited me to come over to one of your growth fund meetups, right? And it's an annual retreat that your portfolio companies do. And it's awesome. Everyone's hanging out, everyone's having meals. So do you want to talk about that a little bit and kind of the benefit for companies to do stuff like that?

Yeah, absolutely. So, we do, we do this twice a year, generally March and September, so 6 months apart, where the founder or the general manager, basically the people that are leading these individual businesses get together. Because as I mentioned, they're operating autonomously, independently. So, they have their own thing to do. They don't have the time to sit around and talk to each other and so on. But as I said, one of our advantages is that We fail faster than other people. We're learning from our mistakes. So when you were there, I'm sure you saw we talked about, hey, what were some of the wins that you had? What are you, you know, what did you learn in this last 6 months? So we go around the group. It's essentially a mini founders network, mini leaders network. And they're sharing stories about from like 40 different businesses that are in that room. And it just amplifies the knowledge transfer. And I think that's a very big challenge that most businesses have, especially as you're growing, is a knowledge transfer gap. And the knowledge transfer gap continues to get bigger and bigger. And that's how the businesses stall, the growth stalls. And you need to make sure you're bridging that gap if you want to keep scaling. And the Growth Fund Meetup allows, allows for that.

It's all just communication at the end of the day.

Yeah, communication. Also, you know, like one of the things people say, well, you know, Syed, one company is promoting the other company. And that's not natural. That's not by default or design. Each of the general managers have full autonomy on what they choose to promote, whether it's our own solution or sometimes not our solution, right? So like, imagine if me and you get here together and I'm like, hey, Eric, I'm thinking about promoting PPC Agency to my audience. Because we're friends and because we are hanging out and I see there's alignment here, we might partner up and do that joint venture. Not even joint venture, just like cross-promotion deal. So that I call that alignment. So we set aside an hour and a half to 2 hours, you know, of the day. And I just call that time period alignment, alignment, alignment. So hey, GM founders, talk to each other, figure out where you see paths to grow, and they will talk and A lot of good come out of that too.

Do you want to explain kind of the setup for this? Like you have multiple houses, like the food and everything.

Yeah, logistics. Yeah. So, you know, it started, you know, it's basically every company that I own or I've invested in, I invite the founders or leaders of that company and we started paying for them or. Yeah. So those businesses, individual businesses pay for for that. Imagine if you were going to a conference, like you know your business was paying for themselves.

You're just setting it up.

Well, technically I'm paying for indirectly. I'm paying for all of it. Yeah. But but you know the businesses they respect.

Their P&L is paying for it.

Their P&Ls are paying for it. And so we started with just doing one house, and it was like maybe 8-bedroom house or something like that. And the one that you came, it was like 14-bedroom house in Orlando. And in that same neighborhood, we had like 4 other houses. Each of the other houses had like 5 bedrooms each. And we had like commuter cars that were bringing people into the main house. We've actually outgrown the houses now. That was the last one that we did. I think the houses were so intimate though. Yeah, right. But as you saw, the theater room in those big houses— Orlando, by the way, if you're ever looking to do a big thing, this reunion, um, place is called Reunion Resort in Orlando, and they have massive houses, like 14, 16-bedroom houses, theater room, etc. So we were using the theater room for the presentation, um, massive dinner table with like 26 people.

Food was good.

Food was really good. We had a private chef there. And everything. So, but that was the last one that we are going to do at those houses. The next one is going to be in Turkey, actually. Oh, wow. And we're going to do— Bodrum? No, no, in Istanbul. Okay. All right. In Istanbul. And yeah, so we're going to try hotels now because it's just very hard to scale houses at this point. Got it.

Favorite books that— first books that come to mind.

You can list— this is plural. Oh, man. So I Psychology of Money is the book that I gift to every, um, cousin kid in my family that's graduating high school. Psychology of Money and Atomic Habits, those are the 2 gifts for me when they graduate high school.

Yeah, that sets the base for the future.

Absolutely. Um, a book that I read last year from Morgan Housel, Same as Ever, was very good.

Is it really? I have it sitting on my desk.

Yeah, Same as Ever, a lot of good stories. Um, Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish was very good. A book that you— most people probably won't read or know about is, uh, I read the trilogy on this entrepreneur, a really great entrepreneur, Roy Thomson. So, so, so Roy Thomson, the Thomson family is the richest family in Canada, right? So Thomson Reuters, etc. And so he built a media empire and radio stations and newspapers and so on. And I just find his journey to be so fascinating because he did so many acquisitions along the way. So I think there's like Roy Thompson, the Lord of Fleet Street. Roy Thompson of Fleet Street, I think that's the book, one of the books. And then the second one is After I Was 60, and then the third one is The Thompson Empire. So that trilogy is, uh, is really good for those who, who like reading about, um, uh, amazing individuals, uh, from, from the past.

So let me set this one up for you. Okay, so, so basically you told me about these books. There's the Rockefeller one and then there's a Vanderbilt one. So How should people think about passing on generational wealth to their families?

That's a very hard, hard thing to think about because nobody knows how your kids are going to turn out. You hope that you're doing everything right, the kids have a bright future, but you don't have practice being a parent. So best thing you can do is learn from history, learn from others who are successful and who have done it and what went right and what went wrong. And then in America, the 2 biggest families, when you think about that, have stories, is the Vanderbilt family and the Rockefeller family. The Vanderbilt family basically wiped the whole wealth within second generation after that. So, so it was all gone, versus the Rockefellers continued to pass down that wealth for many, many generations. And the big thing that, that stood out there was the values that was imparted by John D. Rockefeller to his kids and then from there onward. And it was a lot around ledger keeping, you know, spend a third, save a third, give a third, to summarize the books. So one was called Fortune's Children. And then I forget the other one.

Becoming a Rockefeller?

Yeah, Becoming a Rockefeller. Being— no, Being a Rockefeller or Becoming Me, uh, something like this, something like that. And, you know, we can add that in the notes. But, uh, but yeah, so very starkly different, um, and, and, and ending outcomes. Yeah. So yeah, I, I haven't figured out, um, what that's gonna look like.

That's good, because you're looking at patterns.

I am looking at patterns. I'm looking at history. To give me guidance. You know, history rhymes and repeats, and there's so much we can learn from those events.

I think the final thing we can end off with is that a lot of the stuff that you're reading, a lot of stuff that most people read, are Lindy, right? Meaning that if they've been around for the last 100 years, it'll probably be around for the next 100 years.

That's true. You want to find things that are certain, that give you a certain amount of certainty among chaos, because there's always chaos. Things that look like chaos right now will be there tomorrow and so on. The chaos just sort of changed. We're always— once in 100-year events are always happening every other week. So it just depends. So I do like to find, read and find those patterns and also looking at annual letters. I do read those.

Yeah, pattern recognition is everything. So what is the best way for people to find you online, Syed?

Well, I think you can read about me on my blog, syedbalkhi.com. I write only once a year, but it's the best blog post you'll read that year. It has the culmination of all the lessons I learned, all the things that we did, and so on. You can find me on Twitter @SyedBalkhi. You can go to am.co to see all the various companies that we have and all the cool things that we're doing.

Cool. Thanks so much.

Thank you.