Why Hire People and Get Out of Their Way is BS Business Advice

All right, so Neil and I were just talking and the question is, should you be, as a founder of a company or leader of a company, should you be talking to anybody you want in the organization?

Even if they're not a direct report?

Correct.

Or as you scale up, should you just deal with your direct reports and should you just deal with your direct reports and let them deal with everyone else underneath you?

Yeah.

And? I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer, but you know my personality at this point, because we've known each other for more than 10 years easily. It has to be way more than 10.

15?

Yeah.

I was just telling Noah yesterday before you go, like I was at a, we did an EO forum dinner yesterday. This is the group, I'm not an EO anymore, but Entrepreneurs Organization. And one guy in the group, I met him when he was 37, he's now 51.

Yeah.

I was like, damn, I was like 26. Like time goes quickly.

Time goes by quickly. And it's hard for me not to be involved in the areas, and I'm going to give that little disclaimer, in the areas I want to be involved in. You know me where if there's certain things like HR, I don't really deal with HR, never get involved in HR. And when you have a company at scale, there's always some HR issue. I'm not saying anything bad, but like, if you have 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 people, someone's going to complain about something.

Yeah.

It's just question one.

I'm not saying I don't want people to be happy.

It's just more so there's certain departments that I'll spend my energy on and certain departments that I won't. Not saying HR is not important.

You're just not good at it too.

I'm not good at it. It's not me. But things like finance, I get heavily involved in. Not everyone likes that. Things like dealing with leaders in different regions, I'll get involved with.

And when you say dealing, you mean working with them, managing. You don't mean like, you know, Like problems, like them being a problem.

It's more so if I have questions, I'll just call people and I don't care to wait for a report or for something to be projected or whatever. And the same goes for if there's someone, it doesn't matter what level of company, they can be a new employee or they could be someone who's been at the organization for 8 years because we're 8 years old now, or we will be at the end of this year. I will get my hands dirty if I think I can fix something and it has some sort of impact on the business. I'm not talking about a small impact. I'm talking about what I think would be meaningful enough where it's worth my time. And I'm not saying my time's more valuable than other people's, but the way I operate my businesses, I think about what are our goals? It's obviously more growth. What percentage do we want to grow? Where's the biggest potential?

Yeah.

lever or impact or area I could go to or spend my time on to actually help achieve that. And I think when you hire operators, like we have a hired CEO, we have a hired management team, I think they're, at least for my organization, they're amazing and they do things a lot better than me for 98% of tasks related to the organization. But the 2% that I'm good at, or 5% that I'm good at, I like getting involved and spending my time and giving my feedback, whether people want it or not. And I don't care if they want it or not, but if I think my way is better, I will do it. And a great example of this in my organization, my CEO was actually right on this. So years ago, when we started expanding internationally, he's like, this is going to become a really expensive endeavor. And he said it would be cheaper to acquire. And the math on, we have X amount of leads, like a funnel, X amount of visitors, X amount of leads, average close rate, this is what it'll be.

Yeah.

It didn't always work out that way. We've improved it a lot over the years, but we did burn a tremendous amount of money. But when him and I talk, M&A probably would've been cheaper. But I think I still would've done it this route all over again. I would've acquired in certain countries where it's harder to start in because of cultural differences, but I still would've done it. And even when I talked to him, he agrees that our international expansion has really helped the organization and we were both on the same page on it. It was just more so he, you know, from his experience was like, if we just do M&A, it'll be much cheaper. Yeah.

And, but to be clear, first you started NP Digital, you start from scratch in Brazil and you start from scratch in the US.

And then India.

You start from scratch in India too?

Uh-huh.

I didn't know that.

And then the UK and those regions, because I had people on the ground in Brazil, India, a lot of the people speak English and I have a big base of visitors from there because I'm also Indian, which helps quite a bit. The regions we started with, like the Australias, the Indias, the Canadas, these regions worked out really well because they're pretty much just English-speaking languages. We had a harder time for non-English speaking languages outside of Brazil, and they actually did work out. It just took longer than we expected to work out. Are you following me? So when you're projecting out expenses and burn, if you think it can work out in a year—

Should probably be conservative, 3 years.

And it, and, or we didn't think it was going to be a year, but let's say if we project 2 years, I'm making up the numbers and it takes 3 years, that's extra years worth of added expenses because things can go wrong in the business that you can't control, like lose losing a client and then you expand for them and you did these changes specifically for their growth and their requests, and then it starts burning money and you lose that client, like you're screwed, right? But yeah, all I'm getting at is, you know, the example I'm giving here is my co-founder Mike got involved in sales with our international expansion and it helped improve the numbers. But if I had to do it all over again, I would've done a mixture of what I wanted to do and what the CEO wanted to do. And if I really look back on it, I don't think the CEO told me this, but I don't think he was actually telling us to go and acquire in Australia, Canada, or US speaking.

Yeah. It's just, you interpret it in that way. You just interpreted what you wanted to do.

I interpreted it to whatever I wanted to do. And if I had to go back on it, He was right. We would've saved money and we would've been a bigger organization if we did it his way. So in this aspect, I would say my involvement cost us more money, but then there's been other aspects like with software or making marketing changes that have caused us to make more money. I don't win every single time, but I do like getting involved because it's my name on the door. I'm an entrepreneur. If I don't get involved in the stuff that I enjoy and I'm passionate about, What's the point of having a company?

So here's how we can encapsulate this. So this is why I believe that why hire people and get out of their way is BS business advice because one, it's your company and that's not saying your way is the right way, my way is the right way. I'm just telling you, I'll share my story here. I've tried this hire and get out of their way 4 times. It has failed all 4 times. Whenever I'm involved and my bookkeeper, one of the bookkeepers said she can tell when I'm involved again. And the numbers just go up, right?

Yeah.

And I'm not saying I'm the best thing since sliced bread, nor are you, right? And we make a lot of mistakes and this will go into the next topic. But my take on everything now is just really just 2 words, it's focused involvement. And that might not make, you know, some of our executives happy. Like I know that someone on my team recently was like, hey, like, so when are you ready to let go? In like a year or 2? I'm like, never, I'm never going to let go. And meaning that I'm going to be involved, I'm going to ask questions where I want. And some people on the team, literally this is happening to me recently too, They don't like it when I'm going around asking questions. But you know what? I get more information faster. That's why some of the biggest companies like these CEOs, I forgot which company this was, but I think it was maybe FedEx. He would always go and like, or UPS, he would actually go to the ground and then, you know, stop UPS drivers as they're going and say, hey, like, tell me how things are going right now. Because he'd hear things from people that don't want him to talk to the line people, but it's really the people in the trenches that know what the heck is going on. And If you are the one that's making these big decisions, then like how you need the most information you can get, why would you not in your own company try to get that information?

Dude, totally. And let me ask you a question. Your bookkeeper can tell when you're involved. Funny enough, mine can as well because I usually burn more money instead of adding. I'm like, invest, invest, invest, growth, growth, growth. And it doesn't always work out. Yeah, but I would say my batting average overall I'm not actually a baseball player, or I don't follow baseball.

It's okay. Did you watch the game yesterday? It was so good.

I did not. But overall I would say if I keep doing what I want, I make mistakes and I lose money, but overall my wins outweigh the losses.

What do you think your batting average is? Because this actually goes into my next topic on Amazon's batting average. So you go.

So when I get involved, I would say 3 out of 4 things work out, 4 out of 5 max, but I would say probably 3 out of 4.

75 to 80%.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really high. But here's the thing, I think as I go into the next topic, maybe there's a different way of measuring this. And maybe we think our poo-poo don't stink too. So that's another thing.

No, no, no, mine does stink many times.

Many times? All the time.

Yeah.

Poo-poo always stinks.

No, no, or what I'm getting at is me getting involved a lot of times creates issues because I'm okay with chaos and I thrive in that environment. But I'm assuming when you say you getting involved, and you enjoy it and your bookkeeper can tell. Yeah, I'm assuming you're not batting 100% either.

No, no, I don't think— and I think I'd have to think about it. I think whatever answer I give you right now, I'm probably just making it up. But I would say actually, so your, your, your brother-in-law and your, your ex-co-founder, still co-founder actually, Hiten, he posted something this morning about good chaos versus bad chaos. So good chaos is where you have anxiety, but things are going in the right direction and bad chaos is like you don't know where things are going, right?

Yeah.

So I like chaos where it's like, Sure, I might feel some anxiety, but I'm like, no, there's progress, there's momentum. Bad chaos is when I talked to you 5 years ago and everything was, was like on fire, right? That's bad chaos. And then you just have to get through that. But what do you think Amazon's product hit rate is?

60%?

20%. So there's actually a chart here.

Products they create?

Correct. Yeah. And so this is a different way of measuring because like all the things you're talking about where you get involved, they might be micro things. They're not like launching a new product, right? No. Yeah.

Mine is only micro stuff.

Yeah, so if you look, I'm just going to pull this up. You can't see this, but I'm dictating out to Neil over here. Okay, so they, remember obviously Fire Phone failed, okay? So that didn't work out.

They had a tablet too?

Tablet worked out for them.

Really?

Yeah.

Kindle Fire or whatever it's called?

Okay, so let's look over here. So Whole Foods Market was an acquisition, it's green, so that one worked out. They have Amazon Go, cashierless retail tech in stores. They count that as a win. Ring counts as a win, that's an acquisition. But they had all these other ones. Amazon Dash Wand. I've never heard of that. That's an Amazon-enabled barcode scanner. Amazon Spark, Instagram-like shopping feed. Amazon Inspire, TikTok-style shoppable feed in Amazon app. Amazon AMP, live radio app for creators and listeners. So they've tried a lot of different things.

Dude, even the buttons. Do you remember the buttons that you would push and then that Tide product or whatever would come delivered to you?

Yeah, yeah. So that's a lesson, right? Because look, these companies, like this actually tells me that there were Whole Foods 365, like they tried all these things and only 20% worked. But when you think about some of the best companies in the world, like back in the day, Kodak used to be like, people say, oh, Kodak actually went bankrupt because they were not fast enough for digital photography, right? They were actually too ahead of their time. And the Palm Pilot was just too ahead of its time, right?

Yeah.

And so there's a lot of these situations where it's like, hey, for product things, which are actually a lot of micro things built up, a lot of them aren't going to work out, but you just have to keep going. And that ties into Just how business works, right? Even when you think about CRO, conversion rate optimization tests, what, like 12% success rate? You're going to get a lot more failures than you are successes. Yeah.

But when I look at Amazon's hit rate and I look at that a little bit different from what you and I are doing, Amazon's constantly releasing new products. You and I are getting involved in areas that we know we can potentially improve within the organization. I think launching new products is much tougher. And you and I are both so much smaller than Amazon that we don't have to continually launch new things or buy tons of companies to grow because our base is so much smaller.

Yeah, I would say, by the way, as you were talking, I was thinking through the last 12 months, like the hit rate on, on some of the bets that I made. And it's probably like, let's just call it 60, 70%. Yeah. To be conservative, it could be a little higher when I get unlucky years. But yeah, it's, it's They call it a gut feeling for a reason. Your gut feeling comes from experience. That's, that experience is the wisdom comes from experience, right? And it's a shame for you not to use that if you've been in business for so long, 20+ years or so, right? How many years do you think it's been?

24.

24 years. Okay. So for me, 11. Yeah, 11 years at least for Single Grain, right? And so like, it, it's weird to just, sure, you hired amazing people. But you hire amazing people to collaborate with them, not to just let them do everything carte blanche.

Yeah.

Yeah, so.

So, but no, when I look at, you know, just business and the biggest thing that I've learned over the 20 years is hire people that have already done it before multiple times and that'll increase your odds of success. Listen to them, but keep in mind that they have a way of doing things and there's nothing wrong with sprinkling in your own opinions because there could be new ways of doing things that can help them out. And what I found with good leaders, they're very receptive to those new ways. You just got to provide them. And the winning combination for me at least has not been you just hire people who've done it before and let them go and run on your own. It's you hire people who've done it before, you go and you let them run on their own, but then you provide feedback on new ways or technologies and stuff like that. And if you're hiring the right people who are cultural fit, they'll be receptive to ideas. They won't use them all. And they'll even tell you when you have your own ideas, which ones could be good or bad. And sometimes they'll be right. Sometimes you'll be wrong on both ends. And, you know, that's how we learn and progress forward. Yeah.

And by the way, the last thing on this is it's at the end of the day, it's your business. It's my business. I remember I was talking to someone recently, so we just brought on a new recruiter and I was kind of onboarding her. I was like, hey, look, the way we give feedback is very direct, even in public. She's like, well, you know, I'm of the mindset. I was like, don't get me wrong. I pointed to Warren Buffett. I have a Warren Buffett statue in the back, right? I was like, look, Warren Buffett says to criticize, you want to criticize Criticize privately, praise in public. Like I used to love that, but you know, I'm also Taiwanese. Jensen's Taiwanese, Nvidia, right? And look, I'm just, what works for me is like we do criticize in public and people criticize me in public too. That's just how we do things. And it's not a fit for everyone.

It's not a fit for everyone.

Just like for you, like when you're recruiting people, it's like, hey, like if it's an executive, I might be calling you in weird hours. Like seriously, I am going to call you in weird, like seriously, like I'm going to do that. It's like, are you okay? And a lot of people say they're okay, but they're really not. So, but what we've learned is like, as we've gotten older, just like, hey, like it's our company, it's not for everyone. And that's okay because that's a good thing if it's not for everyone. Yeah.

But the key is to make sure that even if it's your company, you, at least I've found when you don't have venture capital, the winning combination is to figure out how to reward your team. And the reward could be bonuses. It could be Equity. There's a lot of different options. I'm not saying one is right or one is wrong. And if you can end up making it where it's everyone's company, and if you win, everyone wins, and if you lose, you know, people lose to some extent, I think it creates a good incentive model.

Here's what I want to say about incentives. So Charlie Munger, Warren's partner, and then I want to move to this Jeff Bezos $1 trillion framework. You'll like this one. But Charlie Munger always just, used to like to say that, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. At least it's attributed to him. So I'm of the mindset, same as you, you want people to win together, right? Here's the thing I learned maybe 10 years ago, maybe Noah's part of this too. You can set the best incentives in the world, but if your hiring is geared towards 80%, you're going to take shots on people versus like people that have been there, done that. All the incentives in the world, the best programs aren't going to do it. They're not going to do anything, right? You need to have people who are competent with the best incentives program. So as I talk to new people joining the team right now, it's like, yeah, absolutely incentives. But also, absolutely, we need to hit numbers. It's not just like, oh, you know, we're just going to randomly give bonuses everywhere and they become an expectation, right? We want— we got to win together. So that's how it works. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side. Do you want to know about that Jeff Bezos $1 trillion framework?

Yes.

Okay, so Jeff Bezos, because this is related to what we're talking about, Jeff Bezos early in his Amazon's day, he had a VP that called him out. This VP is like, Jeff, your ideas are going— you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon. And then Jeff was like, Like, what do you mean? The direct feedback, right? Directly to the CEO. And this guy was like fairly new as a VP. And this is— Jeff Bezos said, this is a shocking idea. He's like, as a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. I would hire these experienced senior executives and I'll listen to them. And what this guy said, this is a VP—

Wait, did you say they don't listen to him or he does listen?

He would listen to them.

Okay.

Yeah. And so this VP said, Jeff Wilk, I believe, you have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it.

Uh-huh.

Right? So again, I'm gonna repeat that. You have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it. So this is releasing the work framework. And so basically Jeff Bezos, there's 2 Jeffs in this case, Bezos says, every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog of work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction. This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. And this was a profound insight for me. So I started prioritizing the ideas better, giving lists of them and keeping ideas to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And entrepreneurs, you and me have this problem. I have a boatload of ideas. You have a boatload of ideas.

Yeah.

But the problem is it overwhelms the team. And that's why we talk about barrels and ammunition. You need to have as many barrels as possible to push these ideas forward. If you only have one barrel, you can only do one big idea at a time. And that's like when you're starting the company, maybe you're the only barrel, but that's the point here. I think it's a, This whole concept of releasing the work, and you, you guys saw earlier, like Amazon tried a bunch of different things, but as he, he then realized that he needed to build the right team around him to make sure that these things move forward and that they have the right infrastructure to make sure that they can push these things through. Because it doesn't matter how many ideas you have if you can't execute on them.

Totally agree. And if you have too many ideas and they start working on a little bit of all of them, then all that's going to happen is you're releasing nothing and you're seeing no results, but you're spending a ton of time and money.

And it stresses out the team.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you and I have both seen this. I think I've been guilty of this many times and so have you earlier in your career for sure.

Dude, this is why I introduced you to an agency that potentially wanted to sell a month ago, month and a half, maybe 2 months ago. They ended up doing a transaction.

Oh, they did?

Yeah, I got a text message from him and then he introduced me to another company that I could buy, right? And when he hit me up with another organization, their revenue's decent, call it a few million bucks. But the moment he sent it to me and their numbers, and I was just like, it's growing at, you know, a decent clip, not a great clip.

Yeah.

The profitability isn't great, but we talked it over with our team. You know, we spent maybe an hour on it max and going over the pros and cons. And it's the same thing. I looked at it and I was like, ah, this is a distraction. Not—

Meaning the transaction he did?

No, no, no, no.

Okay.

So he did a transaction. Uh-huh. I congratulated him because he texted me.

He opened my email last week.

Okay.

Yeah.

He emailed or he texted me saying he did a transaction. I gave him a congratulation. He's like, by the way, I want to introduce you to X, you know, XYZ, some person. And he's like, they have a company that could be a good fit for you. So I was texting back and forth because he had us in a text thread. I talked to him on the phone really quickly, talked to my team, but I was like, do I really want to have my team do all this work for a few million bucks in revenue?

Meaning it would be a distraction for you.

It would be a distraction for us.

Got it, got it, got it. Okay, got it.

Even though it's in our space, they do something that we could do a little bit better at and they have a unique angle. I'm like, We'll get there naturally and it'll take my team 6 months of time. Maybe like 3 months I can wrap it up. But even if it was free, let's say they just don't want the company anymore, it would still cost me at least $500,000 of internal resources, time, and legal and all this stuff and accounting to buy a company when it's not going to— make really any difference to the business 5 years from now. So it's like, we have so much on our plate. Do I really want another distraction? And I was like, it's not worth it. But on the flip side, if it was— there was a company that I would've loved to buy that I didn't know about until the transaction happened. Do you remember Huge? Huge Inc.?

Yeah.

The big design and kind of digital transformation, more design, creative. Shop, like they do the McDonald's kiosk, you know, the digital ones. So they do some really cool stuff.

Yeah.

They weren't doing well. I believe it was like Omnicom or IPG or one of them that owned it, spun out. It was another digital transformation shop that acquired them. My guess is they were losing money. I would've loved to buy that business and I would've paid for it and I would've spent the time because I don't know what they do now, but it was a 9-figure agency, probably still maybe low 9 figures in revenue. Amazing clients, amazing logos, amazing talent and work. They just need time to fix and repair and heal up. And I would've gave them the money and I would've been able to, I would've been willing to do it because they do something we don't. And it would've been a perfect cross-sell for their customers to ours and ours to theirs.

Yeah. So by the way, I mean, it would be fun if you did that one, but I'm going to, with this transaction, by the way, so it's interesting because I sent him this, this guy, we're not going to name names here, but he opened—

His email doesn't show up on camera, right?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, all right, you're good. Keep going.

He basically, I, when Neil introduced me to this guy and I asked him some very specific questions here. So those of you that are trying to negotiate to do a deal here, expect these questions. Who would you say are the star players on the team? Who would you not want to lose under any circumstance and why? This person has a heavier salary. What is she tasked with delivering monthly? What's the most repeatable scalable channel you've found beyond word of mouth? If you stepped away, who would own sales and top of funnel growth? Keep in mind, this is a smaller company. Do you have numbers for your assets such as newsletter subscribers, community audience, podcast downloads, etc.? And then also, what would you need to change for gross margins to be 55%, 60% instead of 20%? That's a tougher question, right? And then do you have any liabilities not visible in the P&L? Can I see the last 3 years' P&Ls as well as a balance sheet? And then basically these questions, right? And so this guy opened my email, It looks like 15 times here, and every week he was opening it, so meaning he was considering it heavily. But the thing to consider in negotiation too is that my best alternative to a negotiated agreement, my BATNA, is I don't need to do this deal, right? Like it's—

What's BATNA?

BATNA is a best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So if you and I are negotiating, right, if you want leverage, the biggest leverage is you don't need to do the deal, right?

Yes.

That like the one who cares less Has the leverage.

And this was for context. When Eric's asking these questions, there's many more questions he would've asked as he got the information. So it wouldn't have stopped there. He would've looked at churn and retention and all that kind of stuff. But this was a distressed deal to give people context.

Correct.

Which is why some of his questions at the beginning were these kind of questions.

Correct. Yep. Yeah. So I think, look, there's great books on negotiation. I think it's Power Secrets Negotiation. That's the best one that I've read. And then there's a Chris Voss book on negotiating. So check it out. Obviously you need to get there. The book's not going to help you. You need to actually get in the trenches. So yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, by the way, we were just touching upon Amazon. So I saw this post from Matt Diggity. This can be the last thing we talk about with Amazon here, but a small brand just showed up next to Amazon and ChatGPT shopping results. So zero ad spend, pure organic traffic, direct buy buttons. After 16 years in SEO, this is Matt. I've never seen an opportunity this big get ignored by so many people. So basically what he's saying here is when someone's searches like best wooden jigsaw puzzles in ChatGPT, here's what happens. ChatGPT searches Bing for product recommendations. It analyzes multiple review sites and comparison articles. It aggregates the most recommended products. It searches exact product names on Bing again, and then it displays a product grid with buy buttons. And so right now, small brands are appearing alongside Amazon and Walmart. Zero ad spend required. So he just says, look, you got to master the keyword layer, optimize for Bing, structured product. I mean, this is like traditional SEO stuff.

Yeah.

But he's just saying like implement product schema markup, still traditional SEO, build review and comparison content, still traditional SEO. AI shopping isn't coming, it's here. So this is just a reinforcement, guys, that look, we can talk all we want about AI SEO, GEO, AEO, whatever. Traditional SEO, still useful.

Traditional SEO is still very useful. But yeah, and you and I are on the same page. ChatGPT has been getting a lot of press. I see more press about their Nvidia deals and AMD deals, and not that many people in the marketing community talking about how they have the Etsy integration, the Shopify integration, Stripe integration, and they're just like, uh, okay. But that's a huge untapped opportunity, and I don't know why people aren't leveraging it more.

You know what we should talk about too? So, um, I want to talk about this new distribution channel with 800 million users. So you want to know what it is?

ChatGPT?

Yes. So what's interesting to me, this could be completely off. We can debate this, right? My take on this one is that open question today is ChatGPT just came out with its apps, right? And so what you think about iOS when it first launched its App Store, there were 6 million users. ChatGPT has 800 million. Now, this, some people are saying like, look, this is just as important as Steve Jobs announcing the App Store in March of 2008. What I'll say is this, this could be a complete flop, but in my opinion, the risk-reward ratio, if you don't, at least try this a little bit. And then what happens? The first apps on the App Store, what happened?

They started gaining a ton of traction.

Yeah, and they held that ranking for a while. It's almost like the old days of SEO, right? Correct.

Now a lot of those are disappeared, but yes.

Correct. Yeah, but in my mind, I'm like, dude, if we can hit this quickly, so I was talking to my CTO about this, I was like, okay, let's just play around with this, right? And then we started floating this to clients as well. Like, why don't we do this? Because we're trying to embed ourselves more with the clients and they're down to talk about it. So my point is, If the risk is like you might spend a couple weeks building this and if it's a flop, it's a flop. Okay, maybe you lose that time, but if it's a complete hit, then you're going to gain for a little bit, like a year or 2 years. Yeah. What's your take?

I think it's a huge opportunity. I was talking to my team about this earlier this week. I think it was actually yesterday.

This week, yeah.

I think it was yesterday that I was talking to my team. So not earlier this week about it. But they were showing us some of the stuff they ended up doing, but they were telling me something like they're not approving apps until the end of the year or something like that.

You might as well get ahead of it, you know?

Yeah, we're already ahead of it. The problem is we just have to wait till the end of the year.

But like for you guys, obviously there's like all the integrations you could do with Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic. Like you just, you pull the data, all the, by the way, all the data visualization stuff you have, like how do you just integrate that in there? Right. And then, you know what's fascinating to me too, With Sora2, did you see that there's one creator that generated 1 billion views in 6 days?

Is Sora2 the app like Instagram where you can see other people's AI? I haven't actually used it.

Oh, so get this. So before I talk about the one creator that got 1 billion views, Mark Cuban, right? So Mark Cuban has Cost Plus Drugs, right? So whenever you use his likeness, he always inserts an ad for Cost Plus Drugs at the end. Whatever you use it for, it's like Cost Plus Drugs, Cost Plus Drugs, right? And he's getting a lot of impressions. But Jake Paul, So Jake Paul got a billion views already in 6 days because everyone's using his likeness. So imagine if you put up your Neil Patel likeness, like even like the people that love you or the people that hate you as well in the SEO space, right? Imagine how much like that to me is like good.

Does it have to get approved to use the likeness?

No, I mean, you just log into it and like I have my own Eric Siu likeness. You should just go do it. You should just do it today for the fun of it. And like people are going to make funny things for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I just, I think this could be interesting for people. Like you look at college football, NIL, right? The name, image, likeness type of stuff. I think this is gonna come into play here. And for me, like, dude, if you can get a billion views, that's insanity.

I'm shocked they haven't gotten sued yet for it.

Well, I think they approved this. So you remember Jeffrey? Jeffrey, who's partnered, the Asian guy that was at my event in Miami. Remember that guy? He's partnered with Jake Paul. So Jake Paul tweets— Yeah, yeah, yeah. The VC. Uh-huh. So he's like, I'm a proud OpenAI— so Jake Paul tweets this, I'm an OpenAI investor with Anti Fund with Jeffrey Wu, and he's been advising the Sora team. And so, That's why they got a bunch of these celebrity NIL Cameo users. And I think this is going to get a lot bigger. And I think definitely we should push our Cameos a lot more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, I get what you're saying. I just don't care for the views because in B2B enterprise, it's not going to be that useful to get a billion views on this kind of stuff. I get the Mark Cuban thing because if you're using Mark Cuban and you say cost plus drugs, he's consumer. Consumer. And almost everyone in this world eventually takes some sort of drug, whether it's Tylenol, or Advil or, you know, some people get vaccines, some people don't. But you get what I mean. People use medicine and they need it.

Yeah, I think I'm more—

So it's applicable.

But the way I look at this is you're probably more— remember I had that conversation with Gary Vee. You're more on the data side and then he's more on the like, you know, creative side. Right. But he has— so you have like we look at it as 2 parties, like you have a red party and a blue party. Right. But I look at it as it's purple. So I'm probably more in the middle side. I'm like, my take is like, I would like to have more views anyway. Right. And so that's not to say I don't care about conversions. I definitely care more about conversions. I think for him it's just like as many views as possible. Mine's like, you know, I'll take some more shots. Like, for example, I saw one of your Shorts yesterday on YouTube. You were telling a story about Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates on like how, you know, Ballmer— Bill Gates should have been worth a lot more, like trillionaire, right?

Uh-huh.

But like, these stories are interesting, right? So like, by the way, like you listen to the— you don't listen to this podcast because you don't listen to podcasts, but The Founders Podcast, top 10 podcast, and all he talks about is like just business people. And I'm like, For someone like me, and I know you love stories like this, what type of people listen to these podcasts? Like the— even Ivanka Trump was talking about how like she listens to The Founders Podcast. All these people, Michael Dell listens to it, right? So I'm just like, how do you capture the ears of really smart people?

Well, on that one you just advertise.

Huh?

And for that podcast, just advertise.

Well, no, you can't because the Invest Like the Best network, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, I don't think he just pushes his own stuff. He's like portfolio companies and all that stuff. So he owns that.

Got it.

Yeah. Anyway, you can pick one because I have so many here.

I'm curious on this one, and you have it in as Google is a Berkshire Hathaway of tech.

Yeah. Okay, so this one is interesting to me because Berkshire Hathaway, just for people that, you know, don't know, that's Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's— that's their investing company, right? So they've invested in like GEICO, for example, Apple, like they're Buffett's known as like the Oracle, one of the best investors of our lifetime, right? So Google is the Berkshire of tech. They own 14% of Anthropic, so of Claude. They own 8% of SpaceX. They acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

They own 8% of SpaceX?

Uh-huh.

I didn't know that.

They acquired, I think Google Ventures or whatever you call it, acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. That's a backbone of Google Ads. Most people don't know that, right? You and I know that. Acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion in 2006, worth hundreds of billions today. They do more revenue than Netflix, okay? Acquired Android in 2005 for $50 million. the world's most widely used OS. Acquired DeepMind in 2014 for $500 million. Huge AI lab with almost SOTA models. I don't know what that means. And great research team. We do like, guys, just FYI, DeepMind was ahead of OpenAI. OpenAI just pushed the consumer faster. They run X, which is the moonshot factory incubator of radical ideas. Waymo. We see Waymo all over here, right? I made you sit in a Waymo with me in SF. It was good.

Yeah.

Wing Drones. And through Capital G has invested in Stripe, UiPath, Airbnb, Lyft, Databricks, CrowdStrike, Duolingo, Robinhood, and more.

And then they bought a lot of companies, but I don't know if Google's like the Berkshire Hathaway of tech. I would say most of the large tech companies are like the Berkshire Hathaway because Amazon has done a ton of acquisitions just like Google. Some of them work, some of them don't. And so is Microsoft. And Microsoft's also been an investor in a lot of companies. Think about their Apple shares. Think about their Facebook shares.

Of their OpenAI shares.

OpenAI shares.

Yeah.

Right. The amount of companies Microsoft has bought. Same with, um, uh, Apple doesn't actually buy as much, but they do buy. Amazon's bought a lot of companies over the years. Uh, but a lot of these tech organizations have so much money, they just buy.

These acquisitions are some of the best here. Okay. So I actually think we should look at Microsoft and Facebook.

Instagram, WhatsApp, 2 amazing acquisitions as well.

What else did they buy?

Oculus.

Oculus, I don't know, we'll see if that pans out. We'll see if it pans out. Okay, but look at these acquisitions, okay? We forgot to mention Wiz, security juggernaut, the Israeli company, right?

$30-something million, I believe.

Yep. Waze, right? Waze was used quite a bit in the past, but—

It still is, you're talking about the navigation.

Yeah, I think it's plugged into Google Maps now. Yeah, it's back onto the technology. Look, DeepMind, acquired DeepMind, acquired Android, these are huge, like acquired YouTube, right? Acquired DoubleClick, these are— Urchin was Google Analytics. Yeah, it's like, It serves, so the TAM is like everybody basically, right? With security, you gotta have security. Waze is like, you know, that's for everybody as well. So is Google number one in this area? Like you look at Microsoft now, what did they buy? They bought Skype, they bought, did they buy Minecraft? They bought Minecraft?

I have no idea, but I know they've bought a lot of successful companies like GitHub. That was a huge win for them.

Yep. Microsoft. Top acquisitions.

Yeah, I was about to Google it.

I'm, I'm grokking it.

Let's see. Acquisitions. All right, let's see. LinkedIn. That was a great one. Activision Blizzard. That was really good. That's a good one. Yeah. Zenimax. I didn't know they paid $7.5 billion for that.

I don't even know what that is.

It's a gaming publisher. Mojang, developer of Minecraft.

Yeah. So they bought Minecraft. Yeah.

Hotmail. I think that was really amazing.

That was good.

Yeah.

Back in the day, Hotmail was like—

Aquaniv. That was the DoubleClick style. It was their version of it. Nokia Devices and Services, 2013. They probably made an ROI from patents just on that one. But yeah, they had a lot of acquisitions over the years.

Yeah. Anyway, I think the point here is that we're maybe trying to make here is that You know, in a lot of these cases, you know, Facebook as well, sometimes it's better to buy than build.

Yammer?

Oh yeah, that's a good fact.

That's a version of, you know, like Team Slack or whatnot.

Yeah, back in the day.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. So anyway, sometimes it's better to— sometimes you can build, sometimes you can buy, but in a lot of situations when they need these capabilities, they're going to buy.

Dude, I'm going through a list on Wikipedia of acquisitions. It stopped counting. Oh, 276 acquisitions that they made.

For Microsoft?

Yeah.

I believe it.

Anyway, so, and then there's a whole slew of stakes, like investments. Dude, this list just keeps going on forever.

Yeah. You know what I'll say? You know, I've noticed smaller companies, for example, they talk about like, let's say they're doing maybe like, you know, like beginning 8 figures. Okay.

Yeah.

And they're talking about starting a venture arm and all these things. I think at that level, it's too early to start like making all these bets. I think if you're doing like billions, maybe you can think, or hundreds of millions, I think you can start to make these bets, right? But I think people get distracted again too early, 'cause it's like, oh, you hear all these people talking about it, it becomes exciting. I was certainly very distractible. In the past.

So yes, but speaking of acquisitions, you know, people say private equity is dying. Was it Chamath who said that? And I don't know the stats or the data. I'm not as smart as he is when it comes to investing or anything like that.

I actually have some graphs I can show you.

But I still think acquisitions is a great way to grow a business. And I know a lot of people in private equity who still make money hand over fist, and they probably will. It's easier when you're dealing with smaller sums of money and it's easier when you're doing smaller tuck-ins that you don't have that service or that product, but all your customers want it and you can cross-sell and you can cross-sell their products to your customers and your services to their customers. I still see it working really well. I think it's hard when you're managing like $100 billion, $200 billion of returns just go down because of the— Large of loss.

Law of large numbers.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I have, dude, I clearly bookmarked too many things on X. This is, but I'll pull it up in a second. You can pick the next topic while I pull it up.

Oh, and on a side note, Microsoft, you know, Expedia?

Yep.

They sold their shares in, according to Wikipedia, for more than $1 billion. So they've had a lot of, I would say, successful outcomes. All right.

So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil, agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. So people like to talk about moats, right? Do you want to say something? No? Okay. So people like to talk about moats, and moats are defensibility. Like Warren Buffett used to like to talk about moats. Like when you have a castle, you want moats protecting it. So it's not as, you know, it's more defensible, right? And so—

Do you want to describe it in, How big is the castle?

Yeah. Okay. So like you have a water moat around the castle. So like you have the drawbridge that's up. You can't just, you know, you can't just attack the castle and scale it, right? So this is back in the day. Now, now today, founders, businesses, they like to talk about moats, you know, or if you're trying to raise investment, people are like, oh, like what moat do you have? Like, how is this defensible? How come, you know, OpenAI can't just kill you, right? But people have described a moat as what? A noun. But a moat actually, Neil, is a verb. And so Gary Tan said this from YC, it's a verb. So popular belief says startups win because they have one big game-changing insight. But the Windsurf CEO argues that's a myth. Every single insight that we have is a depreciating insight. Okay? So if I tell you this new idea with ChatGPT, it's already depreciating right now. In other words, the value of your insight declines fast. Competitors catch up, markets shift. What was once novel becomes table stakes. So yesterday's amazing was today's average, right? Nvidia as an example, even at trillion-dollar scale and 70% gross margins, they still have to innovate or AMD catches up, right? The real advantage is continuously generating new insights and executing on them. So it's not about the insight you had one year ago, it's whether you can compound that advantage over and over again. And so a moat is not a noun, it's a verb. So you have to move very quickly and that speed is actually a moat now. Like people will say, oh, switching costs, that's a moat. Branding is a moat. Your processing power, like Toyota for example, that's a moat. But speed, something that you've always had, Speed is a moat, right? And—

It's hard though, 'cause the AI, everything moves so much faster.

It doesn't, like, okay, even though let's say I read more than you or whatever, you're still, your speed is really quick. You have a different way of learning. You're calling people all the time. You're still pushing ideas through. And so we have different ways of pushing through our speed. And remember the AI called me out? It's like, yeah, you're an F1 driver and you just need to build a system that's like an F1 car.

What did it say? It's an F1 driver in a—

You're an F1 driver in a what car? You're an F1 driver in a Honda Civic right now, right? I was like, oh, Good cars though. Good cars. Motherfucker. So, pardon my language, but, and I shared it with my team too, and we're laughing about it because it's like the system will scale, right, over time. And earlier it goes back to how much capacity does your system have? Does your team have, right? And so for you right now, like, sure, you might have a bunch of ideas, but that is the moat ultimately. Because if you start to slow down, if you start to say, I'm going to get out of these people's way, I'm going to let them do their thing, You think they're going to move as quickly as you are? You think they're going to have the same urgency you're going to have?

So if you had to pick, okay, what do you think the moats are right now? If you had to pick from everything that you described, what do you think the main moats are that are still remaining?

So this is cheating. There's a great book I read called 7 Powers. And so here are the moats that I remember, okay? Speed is actually not included in that book. It should be included, but there's 7, okay? One is brand. So Coca-Cola would be an example.

I agree with that. I think that's actually the only moat left in marketing.

Could be. Now you have another one, switching costs. So you see this, the more services you build in, if you can even do it at 70, 80%, that's still more superior than someone doing one service at 100%, right?

Yeah.

So switching costs, process power. I just mentioned Toyota. The reason why everyone's like, why is Toyota so successful? Why is Tesla so successful? Manufacturing, their process power. That's argu— I mean, Elon has said arguably the hardest thing was actually the manufacturing piece with Tesla. Okay, then you also have network effects. So you look at, you know, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever, right? The more people use a network, the more powerful it becomes. And then the other ones, those are 4. Yeah.

So the reason I like marketing, I mean, I like brand and why I believe it's the only moat, whether it's moving fast or whether it's spending money to try to build a network effect, Or optimizing systems and processes. Some people can figure that out, some people can't. Money may be able to potentially solve something and same with time. But brand is that weird thing where either someone has it or they don't and you try building it and either it works or it doesn't and it doesn't matter how much money you spend.

Yeah.

You know, Peter Thiel talks about this a lot or he's talked about it in the past. I don't know about a lot. It's that weird thing that's really hard to put your finger on and being like, this is the way you create amazing, successful brand. And it's just like, it's just something that kind of happens or it doesn't. And it has nothing to do with how much money you spend. Because I've seen people spend an arm and a leg and their brand still sucks and people spend barely anything and people love the brand.

You know, Steve Jobs said this. Steve Jobs says that once you sell to someone, you have a customer, but once they talk about you to other people, you have a brand. Yeah. Yeah. And so let me, let me give you the other one. So we talked about network effects, we talked about switching costs. Counterpositioning would be another one, right? So it's like, and I think this is a weak moat actually. Sure, you can counterposition yourself and say, remember when Apple was counterpositioning versus the PC? I don't, I think that's like, that's kind of weak. It doesn't stand on itself that well.

Oh yeah, the ads. I'm a PC. Yeah, I'm a Mac. Yeah.

So like, by the way, at that point Apple wasn't as strong as they were like today, right? They were like still coming back and then cornered resource. So like, for example, if I have all the uranium in the world, Guess what? I win, right? So building nuclear power.

You see all the natural earth minerals, all the stocks that are booming right now because the US and China are trying to buy everything up.

Yeah. Yeah. And they do, by the way, you're going to need like $3.25 trillion to meet all the electricity demands in the next, like, you know, couple of, of like next decade or so, maybe even a little longer than that. Branding power, we talked about process power, we talked about scale economies too would be another one. But these are kind of the main ones. But I think speed goes into this one. Speed should be one of the 8th power, because I do believe the reason you've been able to be successful, and even me as well, over time, over long periods of time, like there's no doubt, like we'll get, you know, we'll do fine is my point, right? Yeah. But it's because of speed and it's because of urgency. And it's hard. Like the reason why startups do really well right now is because I remember I talked to that Lindy CEO, he's like, oh yeah, we're 996, we're in the office all the time. I mean, you look at some of these AI companies, they're working there 7 days a week. You can't do that forever. But there's a speed advantage there.

Yes, there definitely is a speed advantage. It is harder to be fast when you have a big organization.

And when you're remote.

Yeah, and when you're— and I don't think remote has been too much of an issue for us. What I found is we just create smaller teams and we can get a lot of stuff done. It doesn't matter if we're remote or in person.

Yeah, actually I backtrack too, because with our— I would say the high-performing people that directly report to me, we're just huddling each other all the time. On Slack. So we just call each other directly.

I was like, huddle?

Yeah, it's basically a phone call. Yeah, like a team— you do it in Teams, right?

Teams call? Yeah, we do Teams.

Yeah, I mean, not we, but you just call them when you want to call them, don't you?

Yeah, I don't even—

You don't have everyone's phone number.

I have everyone's phone number. I don't do a Teams call either. I've been on Teams calls, but what I found is what's interesting, because I was with Heathen the other day and we were just talking about Slack, Zoom, and Teams, and even like the Google Meets and stuff like that. He's like, oh, in the Bay everyone uses Zoom.

Yeah. Oh, interesting.

And then I was like, really? And I'm like, I find everyone in my world using Teams. And he's like, really? He's like, no one in the Bay uses Teams. I'm like, well, what I found is most enterprise businesses are on Teams globally. I don't know too many people who are on Zoom.

Dude, I mean, this is the switching costing with Microsoft. Because they have the distribution there and it's cheaper to just use everything. Network effect.

Network effect. Yeah. And it's cheaper because they give you that shit for free.

Yeah. And brand, you know, they're not going to screw around with your security too, right? So they have multiple ones. Yeah.

And I do think they charge now, but originally when we were on Teams, it was free and we're like, okay. And people complained. They're like, oh, I want this in Zoom and it's so much better. And I'm like, it's free and we're already on Microsoft. Everyone's using it. And I remember our organization, a lot of people hit me up being like, I don't want to switch from Gmail to Outlook.

And this is where you're like, hey, I have no decision here. Even though you do, even though you do.

I had a decision.

Yeah, but you don't want to engage is my point.

Oh, I didn't engage. I just said whatever the executives and you guys decide, you should. Exactly.

But it's your decision.

Well, I didn't care because I'm still on Gmail.

Yeah.

Because my email is neilpatel.com.

It's your cost.

No, no, no, no. So if you email people on our company, it's their name or first initial and last name, whatever it is. Some people have first name like Nick because he was early on.

Yeah.

At like npdigital.com.

On Outlook, right?

It was on Gmail. Eventually they got switched to Outlook. My email has always been neil@neilpatel.com.

I know. Yeah.

So I got to stay on Gmail so their switch does not impact me.

Yeah. But my point is you do care about the cost. Like you're saying—

Oh, I care about the cost.

That's what I'm saying. It's kind of your decision still.

Yeah, yeah, and the cost was large enough where I wanted the savings, and I was okay with the pain because this sounds bad, but I didn't have to experience the pain because I'm still on Gmail.

I always— this is the thing, I always knew you would never switch on anything. So like I had a sense that even though you guys were switching to Microsoft, I was like, you're not going to change anything.

Yeah, even Teams, like people send me like this Teams thing, I can join Teams calls, but if like they're chatting me on Teams, I'm like, dude, I don't see it. I'm like, you need me, just call me.

Dude, speaking of calls. Okay, so I got— here's a good one. So do you think voice memos are rude?

No, I do voice memos all the time. You're talking about like when I go on WhatsApp and I'm on a thread and people are typing stuff, I just click a microphone button and talk and then they'll type back an answer to my question.

Not even that. When I say voice memos, I mean an audio message. So if I send you an audio message for 2 minutes, you have to listen to the whole 2 minutes.

Yeah, but that's what I just did. So on WhatsApp, I had a question with some lawyers. Yeah, I straight up put an audio message. They have to listen to my message. It's not transcribed. Yeah, and then they'll text me back.

So here's my take on it. I used to believe that voice memos were rude because it takes more time for the listener to listen and it's way convenient for me. But I've kind of changed my stance now because I drop a lot of voice messages. It includes my intonations, my voice, my vibe, and I'm basically— I can tell a story too to get them convinced, right? Whereas I can't do that with a just just typing everything out. So I used to care about, hey, like it's equal for me if I typed it out and you read it, it's the equal pain, right? Now I'm like, no, screw that. Sometimes I need to communicate a story and it's way more effective if I send a voice memo. So I have backtracked, especially in business now. I think voice memos are good, but I will never send a voicemail to you, memo to you. You've never sent one to me either. Like I won't do that.

I don't mind voice memos if you have something to say like a story. It's the right time, right place to send a—

The worst is when And with dating, when they send me 10 at a time, I'm just like, dude.

So when you're dating people in today's world, keep in mind, I haven't been dating in a long time.

Especially when I was living in Miami.

You're saying someone would just send 10 voice memos?

They're used to, because in their, like different cultures, right? They're used to just like, sometimes I'll look at their text, it's all voice memos.

But why wouldn't they just send one voice memo?

Because they have a lot to say. So yeah, that's my point. But in business, we have to be concise. So, but I'm just saying, my point is like, I'll send videos on Friday. Like before I came here, I recorded a video saying, hey, here's how we're trending towards the mission right now. Here's what we're working on. Here's the thing. Like, I think it's important for people to see the leader and to hear from the leader as well. So.

Yep. My problem is I'm a really like audio, like a phone real-time or FaceTime type of person where I'm just like, let's just go and solve this right now if it's important. If not, You know, I don't care to deal with it because if it's not, if it's, if I don't need to deal with it right now, it's not that important where it's going to impact the business much and someone else can handle it. But if it's super important, I just want it solved right now and I don't care and I'd just rather get on the phone over a voice memo.

Yeah, it certainly gets things done faster, but there's always trade-offs too, right? Like, obviously, like sometimes you might try to push something and then you realize, oh crap, I should have slowed down maybe. Like what percent of the time has that happened to you?

That I realized I should slow down?

Uh, be honest, be honest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I'm actually going to be honest. It's not the answer you're looking for though.

I'm not looking for any answer.

No, you, you're like percentage of that time where I should have slowed down.

Uh-huh.

I look at it as zero.

Okay.

I push and I don't realize I should slow down because my nature is just push, push, push and not let go.

Yeah.

And then they'll tell me I need to slow down or I'm pushing too much.

And do you I do.

Yeah, but I usually— my personality type is I'm gonna push really hard and then people will tell me when I'm wrong.

Yeah.

Versus I don't know how to not push. Yeah, that is a weakness of mine to not understand that. Yeah, but I tend to push and I don't know how to stop pushing.

You know what's interesting? So I, I'm similar, right? Obviously we have similar personalities and I push, and I especially— we push ourselves really hard, right? Yeah. And I used— I think I used to care a lot more when, um, people were they're just like, people are like, oh my God, it's too fast for me, mate. I can't take it, right? Now my mindset is like, hey, maybe it is too fast for you and it's okay. Maybe we can work on something where maybe you adapt or maybe let's help you find something else. But my mindset before was like, oh, I'm going to try to change my personality. Whereas you always just had the same personality. I'm just like, as we get older, I'm like, I just can't change it.

No, but years ago, People did tell me I pushed too much and I should try to slow it down.

Did Kamo tell you that too?

Uh, no, he never really told me that. Kamo would tell me I changed my mind too much. That was a big problem in business. And I think I've been really good about not changing my mind in business, but you know, my personal life.

Yeah. You're either bad in personal or business, not both.

Yes. But my personal life used to be good. Now my personal life, I change my mind a lot. Business, I'm much better. You agree with that, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm pretty consistent. At least my executive team tells me I am.

You got pretty there with acquisitions. You started to get a little shaky with the acquisitions, but then I think right now it's pretty good.

No, acquisitions, we were pretty picky.

You were doing a lot for a while.

No, but even then we've been picky on what we actually sign.

Yeah.

And our diligence process was so long, we, none of our acquisitions actually fell through.

So that actually protected you from being too fast because the diligence was so long.

Acquisitions, none of them were ever fast.

Yeah.

They were always slow. Just because of the process. And it was to protect our capital because you make a mistake like that and you spend tens of millions of dollars or even millions.

And the time.

And the time. But we had an acquisition team, so them spending the time, that's part of their job. And that's what our acquisition team does. They should be spending the time on that. And that's why we got one. But what I found back in the day, people would be like, oh, you're pushing too hard. People are going to quit. You're going to irritate them. You're going to make mistakes. The organization, when you push people too fast, that's when it costs you a lot of money. And what I found is when I slowed down on pushing, I noticed a direct effect of not growing as fast, just hands down, because I can't understand— this is just me. This is one of my faults. I can't understand when to push and when not to push. What I found works better is just to push. And the executive team or my co-founder will tell me it's too much or they'll tell people to just ignore me. And they're like, oh, we'll talk to Neil. And that has been, I wouldn't say a balance on my end, it's been a balance for the organization because I have other people who will get in the way and stop the pain that I may cause from pushing too much.

You know what they call that?

In the wrong area.

They call that managing up. So people know how to work with you now. Now you have enough scale where it's like, yeah, they know how to tell other people how to manage up. Up and manage your personality basically. That's managing up.

Correct. So they'll say, oh, I'm pushing too much. But if I believe my push is the right method, like I remember when we were trying to expand globally, they're like, you want to expand to how many countries, how fast? They're like, this is going to be expensive, this is too fast. We don't recommend it. I push and I push more than what my team wanted and I got less than what I wanted. So there was some sort of balance there, but I pushed and I did not care. And it's paying off today. And if I had to go back, it would've been more painful. And they were right on that. I would've pushed for more knowing what I know now back then because it would've created a bigger organization in today's world.

So you're saying if you could go back in time, you would've pushed even harder, even though you kind of regretted pushing that hard? Uh-huh. Yeah.

Because, and I get why my management team was like, you can't just keep pushing. It's a really expensive endeavor that you're about to embark. I would've personally figured it out.

Yeah. Well, it's also, it's your money too. Yeah. So, yeah. By the way, this is interesting. So you remember Bill Parcells? He coached the Giants, the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys football. Bill Parcells, legendary coach. Okay, here, let me get, I think he coached some, somebody.

Okay.

But you know Al Davis from the Raiders?

Yeah.

Owned the Raiders, right? Okay. So I don't know if there's—

Or Jerry Jones coached the—

Jerry Jones Cowboys. Yeah. So there was a legendary coach, I think it was Bill Parcells, but he went to Al Davis at the time, Raiders. And then he was just like, dude, we're having all these problems with injuries. We're having all these problems with maybe just players in general, right? And then Al Davis was on the phone with this guy. It was just like, nobody cares, Bill, just coach. And that applies directly to business as well. We can talk about all the problems we're having, whatever. but nobody cares at the end of the day, just go, just do it. So if you're a high performer, high performing leader, if you're working with someone like you're working with the owner, you're working with the founder, like nobody cares, just figure it out. Like, and I think back to the like, okay, you know, you having multiple businesses, but me working at that one startup back in the day. So, oh, CEO pulls me aside, hey, if you don't hit numbers in the next month, we're going to have to fire you. And I was like 3 weeks into the job, right? I was like 25 years old.

That was the education startup, no?

Yeah, and in that scenario, it's like, what am I going to do, bitch about it? What am I going to do, cry about it? Nobody cares. Just do the job. And those are the people who get paid at the end of the day. I'm not saying I'm amazing or anything, and I've seen that time and time again in my career. The people who figure it out and don't complain and just carry it, those are the people that get everything that they want in their life. They end up starting their own companies, all these things, right? You've seen it time and time again too. Nobody cares. Just do the job.

That's why I love my CEO at NP Digital. He doesn't come to me with problems unless he needs my help. And if he comes to me, like, I'm there to help and he can come to me anytime. But he just goes and figures it out. And he brings things to my attention where I can add value versus, or a better way to put it is in an organization, I hate people or not hate, that's a strong word.

You hate when people do this.

I hate when people do this. And that is they come to you with problems and they don't even try to provide any solutions. And if you can't provide any solutions, that's okay. You could say you at least tried or whatever, or you thought about it, but you know where Because if they give you something, even if the something is, I thought about doing this, but I know that won't work, it allows me to come up— it provides more creativity to me, right? It helps—

You at least get 60, 70% of the idea.

Yes. And it helps like spur more ideas. Exactly.

Yeah.

So I love when people come with ideas and when there are problems like players getting injured, and I'm the owner, if I was hypothetically a sports team and there's nothing that could be done about it, just coach, I would just, this is my personality, I would just want to know about it because I would want to have a discussion on, hey, what are potential solutions?

Yeah.

Should we trade these people and we can have a better year, or do we call the year a wash and we just cut costs and we try to maximize our profit because we know next year is going to be our year and this year is already too late. And if we trade, Short-term, it would be great, but long-term for the next 5, 10 years, it'd be terrible for the organization. I'd be like, cool, optimize for profitability.

Yeah. So by the way, you brought up something really important. And so at our organization, so if people are required, if they go to their manager, if you bring a problem, you're supposed to bring, you know, you talk about the problem and then offer a couple solutions, right? 2, 3 solutions or whatever, and then pick the best one. Now, that being said, if that is a requirement, that's not enough. Yeah, they actually, if they, if they've tried it already and made an honest attempt, that's still fine. They should still bring it to the leader, right? But sometimes they might not have the solution. That's okay. But like, at least make the leader aware of and say, hey, like, I honestly tried. That part's important. You can't just expect them to come up with a solution every time. Otherwise it's like, then what are you here for?

Right?

Totally agree.

In addition to that, when there is a problem, people should bring it up as quick as possible. And if they haven't thought of a solution or they don't know of one on the spot, they can say, I'm going to work on some potential solutions and come back. And if you have solutions as well, you could just be like, no, no need. Here's a potential solution. What do you think? But what I found in an organization is if you require people to come up with a solution to a problem when they address it to you, a lot of people won't address the problems to you and it starts compounding and it makes things much worse than knowing when a problem is happening right then and there. Exactly.

So if someone's a leader, right? And if they let a problem sit there and they don't bring it to me, and by the way, it's even worse when I come and I start solving the problem for them and they don't like it when I come solve the problem for them, right? it because it's like, well, that's a problem you should have solved. It's the actions. We want to criticize the actions at the end of the day. It's not necessarily the people, but happens all the time.

So— It just hit me. I actually think ChatGPT is right. You're a Formula 1 driver in a Honda Civic. You need to fix the business and processes and systems. And there's nothing wrong with the Honda Civic. I drive a Honda Odyssey, but I get where it's getting with this. You got a great business, you have a lot of ideas, And if you can build up your team—

Are you just getting the expression now?

No, no, no, not getting the expression now. When you said it was your business, I'm now actually just thinking about your organization and your products that you have and where you're at. Like, I see it. It's actually giving you a spot on your ass.

It's a very simple calculus. It's, and you're just saying it right now. It's a very simple calculus. It's just how do we continue to upgrade the team? How do we continue to update the systems, right? And you just do it for a very long time. Eventually the car will become a camera. And then we mentioned it would become a Sienna. You have a Sienna, right? And then eventually we'll get into an F1 car, right? Let me ask you this. What car do you think you're in right now?

Me?

Yeah.

Maybe a cheap Mercedes.

What do you think you need? I like how tough you are on yourself, but I think it's a good Mercedes. I think you have a solid Mercedes, like S-Class.

No.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

I think my management team is an S-Class or a Maybach or a Ferrari. I think I have amazing management team. S-tier, you mean? S-tier. S-tier?

Oh, so S-tier, there's A-tier, B-tier, C-tier, S-tier, special tier. Special tier is the highest tier. I think that's what you're trying to say, right?

I think my management team is best in class for my space. I think the business is too small for the management team. I have a management team for where the business should be 5, 10 years from now. And it doesn't mean that they're bad in today's world. It's they're used to just doing things at a much bigger scale. They do well in this environment as well because we're not a startup, but I hire people for a billion-plus-dollar revenue organization. We're not there yet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you have a couple more notches to go, right? But I think what you're trying to say is your management team is maybe the F1 drivers and then you need to upgrade the car. Right? Because in F1 you need to have a good driver, like a Max Verstappen, but if his car's not good enough, he's still not gonna win, right? So we gotta upgrade the car.

I think we've done pretty good on the staff end, including management. I think I look at it as not a car in this analogy. I look at it as time. You're a brand new F1 team, even if you have the best team and all the capital you need, and we don't have unlimited pools of money, you just need time.

Yep.

For the team working together, fixing things, working out the kinks and the bugs.

Yep.

Getting used to the new car, the technology. And I think our business is 8 years in. I know they say things really change at the 10-plus year mark, so we need 2 more years, but I don't think that's enough. I think we really need 5 or so years and then we'll be humming on, you know, all wheels.

The way I see this is for us to—

Or all cylinders.

To get to an F1 car, right? It's, you nailed it. I think it's just a matter of time. As long as you're focused, you're moving quickly, and over a long period of time you continue to upgrade your team, you continue to upgrade the car, you're going to be fine, right? And that's why like, I don't think there's anything wrong with private equity or venture capital, but they're on different time horizons, right? If you own a VC firm, sure, you're actually on a 20 to 30-year time horizon 'cause you could just keep making bets. That's the name of the game. But their bet is like, you have an outcome in 5 to 7 years. So it's like the incentives are at odds, right? But if we're playing for, you know, 15, 20, 25, 30 years or so, inevitably it should become an F1 car, otherwise something's wrong.

So here's a question for you. Speaking of private equity, you said you had some charts to show.

Oh yeah.

Was that related to private equity? You wanna pull 'em up?

It was, yeah, I'll pull 'em up. But I do, here, I'll give you a topic to chew on while I pull this up, okay? So Jason Lemkin tweets this, I wake up, have some coffee, answer a few emails, and then I fire up Replit and we just pick up right where we were yesterday. No complaints, no arguments, no forgetting, no sick days, no BS, no drama, no pretending, no quitting. The reality is this is the way we all want to work now or will soon. We'd rather work with an AI agent is easy to work with than a human that isn't. If an AI agent can do it, we'll prefer it, even if it's not great as a great sales exec, marketer, developer, etc. A B AI SDR over a B+ human with a lot of drama, an easy call for the AI SDR. It's not enough of a delta. What do you think as I pull the private ideas?

I agree from B to B+, but I think the real delta you get is from hiring A players and you have to go and find those people. And I think that's what makes a business or organization amazing. It requires work. It's not easy, but it's worth finding those A players. And I think the combo is, is you give those A players AI and then your business is really going to start growing.

Yep. So, okay, here's what I got for you. I have 2 things I saved this week on private equity. So this guy on Twitter, his name is PE Operator, Private Equity Operator. Okay.

He wants to be anonymous, I'm assuming.

He's anonymous actually. Yeah. So good call. So he tweets this. This is not the charts. I'm trying to find the charts. But he says private equity is the doctors and lawyers of 30 years ago, high achievers looking for the highest floor path. And then this guy says, my prediction is LMM and what's long-term management? Is that what LLM? Not LLM, LMM.

I don't know, dude.

So my prediction is LMM will succeed and megas will succeed.

LMM?

Yeah, I think he probably means lower middle market. There we go. Lower middle market. There you go. See? Private equity operator over here. So his prediction is lower middle market private equity will succeed and megas will succeed, which is what you're talking about. The largest firms that we know will continue to win, but all the ones like, just like all these VC firms that just spun up out of nowhere in these last couple years, they're going to be in trouble.

So he's saying the lower middle market is what's going to do really well and the big masses won't.

And the megas. Yeah. Yeah.

Because the masses won't focus on lower middle market.

Correct. Yeah, and so—

And you gobble 'em up, you combine 'em, and then you sell 'em to the massive ones.

Yeah, and you just, but it's like a, you just keep like packaging these things, sell it to the next one, and sell it to the next one. And then like private equity, like I was talking to, I hung out with a private equity guy on Monday for lunch, and it's a big firm around here. And he was like, dude, you're in the agency world? Oh my God, I see a lot of trash all the time, right? He's like, dude, all these private equity firms are just trying to gobble up agencies. And I was like, so where do you think that game goes? He's like, oh, they're gonna move on to another game soon. But it's like they just keep finding a game to play.

I think they already have. Not too many private equity companies are buying agencies anymore from what we see.

So he looked, they come across his desk, but he doesn't even look at them really. He looks at like other, like, you know, technology companies and things like that. So anyway, we have 5 minutes more here. So here's one thing. So I'm going to be at the Ahrefs conference next Tuesday. And I thought this was an interesting prompt here. So the question here, Neil, is SEO still a relevant career in this new world?

Yeah, I think it's actually a very booming career in this world, as long is you adapt. I was at an event in Denver a few days ago. I think, what day's today? Friday, Thursday?

Yeah, Friday.

So Wednesday, Wednesday I spoke in Denver. And when I was in Denver, someone asked me a question because I was talking about AI SEO or GEO or SEO, whatever you want to call it, but that, you know, doing it for ChatGPT. And they're like, I have a question for you. Isn't it the same? And I responded with 2 different things or 2 points. The first point was I said, how was SEO 15, 20 years ago? Put in some junk keywords on a page, you write copy, you know, that isn't the best. You build some links from high PR sites and you rank much better. Call it 15+ years ago, maybe 20. And he's like, yeah. And then I'm like, over time it evolved. You had to start writing good content for humans. You got to update the content.

Can't spam as much anymore.

Yeah, can't have duplicate content. Like can't have 5 pages on the same topic. They want want you to merge and prune your content. Schema markup starts mattering and a lot of other things. And I'm like, it evolved, right? And they're like, yeah. And I'm like, and now it's evolving all over again. You're creating content for humans, but packaging it for AI. Links matter, but brand mentions matter just as much. And you don't always need people linking to your site. Well, with SEO, brand mentions didn't help you as much. And I'm like, there's a lot of nuances and differences, right? And he's like, yeah. So I'm like, SEO is just evolving over time, just like how it has been. And you can call it SEO if you still want to. So that was my first point. And he agreed with that. The second point was, if your customers are all calling it AEO or AI SEO or GEO, I'm like, it doesn't matter what you want to call it. If your customers want to call it something else and you don't want to adapt to them, you're probably not going to get the business. So I'm like, I'm not disagreeing with you that it should still be called SEO. But I'm like, but if my customers want to call it something else and I'm trying to pitch them and generate revenue, I will adapt to whatever my client wants to call it. I wouldn't deceive them and tell them that I'm going to do this new thing that you've never heard about before, right? I would not be unethical or anything like that. It's more so I'm willing to change my vernaculars for the customer. And I may even tell them like, yeah, some people call it still SEO, it's just adapting. But sure, let's call it AI SEO for this conversation or geo or whatever you want to call it. Because at the end of the day, the customer is always right. I know that's a saying and they're not always really right, but you got to adapt with the customers. It's just like when everyone in corporate America years ago was like, oh, we need a growth hacker.

Yeah.

And you remember the debate being like, this is just a normal marketing exec, CMO or whatever.

Yeah.

People don't really say we need a growth hacker anymore. You agree with that? Right? But back then, if you didn't adapt and you were trying to work for a startup, you were less likely to get a job. Do you agree with this?

Yep.

So you kind of had to adapt or else you're going to be—

I became a growth marketer. Yeah.

Yeah.

Now they're called growth marketers today.

Yeah. So you kind of have to adapt and if you're not willing to adapt, then you're going to be displaced.

The way I see this, is SEO still a relevant career in this new world? Yeah. I mean, here's what I'll say, like the SEOs that adapt or the business owners who adapt, it's no different than anything. You just have to adapt. Yeah. Like, by the way, what SEO worked back in the day? Oh, Yellow Pages. Oh, how did you game it? Oh, AAA. The more A's you had, the more you showed up number 1, right? That's how you— that's how SEO was done with the Yellow Pages. People don't know what the Yellow Pages are today. And then eventually, oh, what happened? You started spamming excite, Lycos, you started spamming a bunch of keywords, you know, maybe you hide it in the, you know, the background text, right? And now it's got more sophisticated. Now LLMs are multimodal. They're looking at a bunch of things.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'm not— I think it's— there's no sacred cows when it comes to, you know, having a successful career. You just— the most important thing is that you're curious. The most important thing is that you're adaptable. And the SEOs who complain, the people that you see on X complaining all the time, these are people who haven't adapted. Oh, we should, you know, we should go after Google for this. Oh, they're being unfair to us, this and that. Like, that is no different than people in the world who complain all the time about not getting what they want, right? Because everyone wants to win. Nobody wants to prepare. So as long as you adapt, Yeah. As long as you prepare, as long as you are curious, you will win. It's still a relevant career. I think more relevant than ever today if you really look at it. So that is it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.