Your Best Employee Is About To Quit. Here's The Fix.

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

Yes, why?

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

And that's my problem. It's like the A players have this issue where they worked too much and you got to actually pare it down a bit and be like, no dude, slow down here. You need a balance. You know, I was talking to one of my executives and he was, Literally before I came here. And he was telling me how he wants to buy a house in, I think it was like Mexico or somewhere like that, and how they have some immediate family who lives there and they want to spend more time with them. So they want a house down there. And he was just trying to figure things out. And he's just like, yeah, I need this kind of— he's not looking for much. This guy is more frugal with money than than most people I know, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I was like, dude, you should just go buy something nicer. And he's just like, oh, 'cause expensive or whatever. And I was like, dude, it could all be figured out. Just go do something that you enjoy so you can spend the time. And when you're in that house for 3 months out of the year, you actually enjoy being there versus just being miserable.

Mm-hmm.

But some of these people are just working and he's just like, yeah, when I'm there, I want more space so that way I can just work under, Uninterrupted for 3 months out of the year. And I think it was a vacation home. And in this country, homes aren't as expensive. I was like, you should just get oceanfront. And it's not that much more, like maybe $100 grand or $200 grand, but this is executive. Like they can easily afford it plus more.

They make good money.

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

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

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

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

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

No.

It's a waste of your time.

Yeah.

You're only a single founder.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know.

20, 30?

No, less than 20 for sure.

Okay, so let's call it 15, okay? How many of those founders are still with you today?

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

So 13 of 15.

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

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

Uh-huh.

Okay.

What kind of companies do you want to buy?

Not right now.

None?

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

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

Go ahead. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies. Or a global organization. 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.

Your single brain is getting good brand recognition. I hear it enough, and I hear enough from people who don't really know how well I know you or don't know you. These are— a lot of these people don't listen to the podcast. So some people would be like, hey, have you heard of this Single Grain thing? Do you know this guy named Eric? He has this company called Single Grain. I actually hear it more often if I look on a quarterly basis. My traveling's not consistent every single week or month, so it's just easier to look at quarterly, but it's a drastic improvement on how many times I'm hearing Single Grain. I hear Single Grain way more than I ever hear Single Grain. I'm not trying to throw a diss at you.

No, no, no, you should.

I'm telling you reality, okay?

I have a response for that.

Go ahead, go ahead. Okay?

Yeah.

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing or—

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

Or any of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think the future of your business is in Single Brain, which I think you already agree with and you already know, and you knew before me, hence you made that change.

Yeah.

But, and here's the big caveat, I think the one thing that you're lacking that I would focus on over the next 6 months if I owned Single Brain, finding that guy who worked at a SaaS company as a CEO who grew it from $3 million to $100 million or $5 million to $100 million, literally was there, helped it raise money, has the relationships to bring in customers and knows customers who'll sign on right away, enterprise customers with big checks, and have that guy go and help run it because they will drive revenue. In essence, you're bringing the person who will go and bring you the large enterprise contracts because of the relationships and they were in a related enough field, you can't be 100% related because it's new tech, but it's related enough where they know the decision makers for your exact company because their old company that they were at was selling into that same exact person.

And he has the relationships or she has the relationships.

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

So, you know how I said in my 3 recruiting, so that's in there for the recruiting. And I think that's a great idea and I'm glad you called it out. And here's the thing, when people talk to us about Single Brain, oh my God, so much excitement, ready to do that. How do we do it, right? On the Single Brain side, right? I was listening to some of these client calls when I'm just like, yeah, you know, just when I ask our little brain thing, it's like, when we do things that are off, right? When a client's about to churn, what's happening? Not proactive and not urgent enough, not creative enough, right? But like the ironic thing is all that is just downstream from hiring good talent, right? And so that's why recruiting's so big for me right now. But I also look at recruiting kind of as marketing, 'cause I'm just like messing around with these flows that tie into sales outreach or marketing outreach or just recruiting outreach. So this is why, by the way, let's talk about GrokBot for a moment. So thank you for that. But GrokBot, it has taken X by storm naturally, 'cause Elon owns X, right?

Well, it's also really cheap.

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

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

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

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

By the way, you know what's funny? So I was with Syed and Yaniv, right? And we're all on the same page. We're like, Yeah, we're gonna wait for that shit. Not that shit. It's a great stock, guys, but we're gonna wait for—

It's SHIB. S-H-I-B.

Yeah, we're gonna wait for that SHIB to drop to $70. Yeah, drop to $70.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it's a lot of money right now. It's $1.85 trillion or whatever it is right now. It's not worth that right now, but they will become worth way more.

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

Me too. For the next 20 years.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

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

I just hope Elon stays safe, you know?

Yeah.

And, and yeah, and he doesn't say— I hope he stops saying stupid— I think he said another stupid thing this week.

What did he say?

I, I think it was something along the lines of, uh, God, here, let me look it up real quick.

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

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

Oh, the movie.

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

I thought he was talking about the other—

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

No.

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

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

There's enough for him to focus on.

Yes, and I don't know why he has so much time. And like, told kids, Twelve kids. I thought yeah, sixty.

Six sixty?

Yeah. How many?

How many kids Elon? Elon has. Let's see who gets it faster.

This can't be fourteen. I thought it was a lot. I thought it was like fourteen. Fourteen.

Fourteen with four different women.

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

Yeah. Griffin Musk, Vivian Wilson.

Or was it sixty? The guy who created the what Telegram? I think it's the Telegram. Telegram.

Did I show you the founder number? Did I show Did I show you the YouTube—

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

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

He was laughing at the guy with 1 wife? Oh, because he thought in his culture, it's not a good thing.

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

It's, you can have multiples.

Yeah. Like 4 plus.

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

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

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

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