Back to School Special with Sammy & Noah Politis #EP112

This is my first time I'm a guest on my own podcast and probably the last time.

Hello everyone, I'm Sammy Politis.

And I'm Noah Politis.

We are David's kids. I'm 10, Noah's 12. Today we will be the hosts of this podcast. We know when you were our age, you always wanted to be a CEO. What or who inspired that?

What are a few of the hardest or scariest days at any of the companies you've ran?

What is something that you're still bad at?

All the CEO stuff seems like therapy basically to talk to other CEOs.

How do you define success?

The way that I define success Being able to meaningfully impact other people's lives while significantly benefiting your own life. This was awesome. I've been wanting to do this for a long time.

Hello everyone, I'm Sammy Politis.

And I'm Noah Politis.

We are David's kids. I'm 10, Noah's 12. Today we will be the hosts of this podcast.

Today's guest has been building companies for over 20 years.

He has founded a company called BetterCloud, which he ran for more than a decade and grew to almost $100 million in sales, helping thousands of IT people at companies all over the world. He sold that company for $750 million in 2022. Before that, he helped build Cloud Sherpas, which was bought by Accenture, and Vocalocity, which was bought by Vonage. He now invests and advises in dozens of companies.

2 years ago, he started Not Another CEO podcast in the corner of my room. People told him he'd quit after 10 episodes. Now he's made more than 100 episodes. He's talked to founders who've built multi-billion-dollar companies, investors who've invested hundreds of millions of dollars, and CEOs who've almost lost everything.

He wakes up at 4 in the morning to send emails. He says he has no hobbies. He claims he's an introvert, and we love him.

He has also never once been a guest on his own show. He's our dad, David Politis. Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast.

Oh, that was great. I hope you do that every morning for me, please.

The first question, question you are the one who always asks everyone. What is— what's the one thing you did at BetterCloud, big or small, that had the biggest impact that you'd absolutely do again if you start another company?

So the number one thing I ask, obviously I ask every guest this, and I always think about what would my answer be, and my answer would definitely be choosing a really, really narrow ideal customer profile. I say ICP, ideal customer profile. And the idea is like really choosing who you're going to go after as a customer and building the entire company, the team, the product, the marketing, everything to go after that very particular type of customer. So like for BetterCloud, we were trying to sell to IT, then we tried to sell to security, small companies, big companies, In the US, international. And what I learned is that actually when we got very focused about who we were selling to, it was much more successful. We built a better product, we sold more at a higher price. But you guys know about ICP stuff yourself.

Yes.

'Cause you guys have a business, right? You have a—

Yeah.

What's your business?

We sell basketball cards.

Okay. And who's your ideal customer?

We like to go to bigger card stores.

Yeah.

Look for the best card stores who would give us the, like, the best price on our cards, right?

We also started at the beginning, we sold to like smaller kids our age so that we could look for kids in the area to sell to, but it didn't work so well because they only traded, but we wanted to sell our cards instead of trade our cards.

Exactly. Literally, that's exactly this. That is exactly the ICP conversation. Because now I see you guys, you never really want to do the trade nights or anything. You just want to go to the big stores and you've gotten to know the people. You've gotten, you've built relationships, right?

Yeah.

I mean, we went the other day, you called before, you made sure that the guy that you know was there. You went there, you know what kind of cards he likes. You only brought those cards. I mean, that, that's literally the same thing. Like when I was building BetterCloud, we thought we're going to build a product that does this. We're going to build a product that does this. We're going to send people to London to sell. We're going to send people to Australia. And then we realized it's just, It doesn't make sense. You know, getting very focused makes— and I think it's a mistake that most people make with their businesses because they think that if we try to sell to everyone, we're going to be more successful, but it's not true.

We know when you were our age, you always wanted to be a CEO. What or who inspired that?

That was definitely inspired by Saba, who— what you call Saba, your grandfather, my father. You know, growing up, you know, I watched him always like building his companies. He was an entrepreneur. He had a bunch of companies and he would take me with him to work from a very young age, basically your age, maybe even younger. He would take me to all his, like the different construction sites he had in the early days. Then he took me all over the world with him for different business meetings. And, and for me, I just wanted to be like that when I, when I grew up. And so even like from as young as I can remember, I remember actually at school writing my first, I think, essay at, at at Rodef where I wrote an essay about wanting to be an entrepreneur. And that was— I was probably 9 years old, I don't know, 10 years old. So basically, that was it. I mean, even when I got to college, I always tell people this, but Saba would send me every email that he sent to people. He would put me on the BCC. So like, I would literally get every single email that he sent to the people he worked with so I could read it and I could learn about it. So that was really what I mean, it was just in my head, like, that's what I want to do when I grow up. Yeah.

That also was like work before your work. You kind of took notes at his meetings.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like, I would go to the meetings and he would give me the notepad and say, take notes. I didn't know what I was taking notes about, but I took notes. And then you learn just by sitting in those meetings. You know, I feel like when I came out of college, I was already ready to work 'cause I had already been in these meetings for, you know, and you guys have done that.

Yeah, we've done that with yours.

Yeah, at Reviving, right? Well, at BetterCloud.

We did.

And then you did it again when you came to Reviving in Brooklyn, right?

Yeah, I remember that. That was fun.

Yeah, I remember.

And you hear different terms, right? You remember? And you come into the office and you see how people interact, you see what people, how they're presenting the slides, you see all that stuff. So that to me is, You know, once, once I had that exposure really so young, I, that's what I wanted to do forever.

What was your first job?

My first job. It's a good question. My first job was as a mover for Big John's Moving Company, which is a New York moving company. And it was my first job that I had as a teenager. I, I worked for the moving company and it was during the summer. And I had to go in the moving truck, and then we would go around New York City. You know how hot it is, like right now. And we would go around and have to go. There was most of the buildings had no elevators. They had no. We had to do walk-ups, four-story walk-ups, and and and I did that for the summer. That was a very. That was the hardest job.

Didn't really have that much to do with like business.

Not nothing at all. Actually, nothing at all. The reason that I got that job is because it was the summer, and I needed a job. Saba told me. You need to go make money. And I said, okay. So I asked some friends of mine, what are you doing? And they said, I work at Big John's Moving. I can get you a job there. And I said, okay. So I went there for the interview, you know, and it was a very fun— because I came with my resume and everything. And the guy told me, if you can carry heavy boxes, you can do this job.

What did you learn from doing that that you still use?

I, well, first of all, I was so, you know, I always talk about work ethic and really working hard. There was no one who worked that I've worked with that worked harder than the people, the movers that I worked with. I mean, they were working, we would start in the morning like 7:00 AM in the South Bronx, get on the truck, go do a moving thing, finish the job at 3:00 PM. We'd get on the truck, go to a different job, do that job, get on the truck and do another job until 10:00 PM. And these guys were hustling because they wanted to get as many jobs as they could to make as much money as they could. And I remember that at the end of the, the, the summer, one of the guys that I worked with for the whole summer, he said— he asked me, are you in college? I said, yeah. And he said, well, why are you doing this job? Why don't you go get a job like an internship in business or something? I said, I needed to work. I needed to make money. So I came here. And he said, well, just try to make sure that this is the last job that you do, that you use your body to make money, that you use your muscles to make money. Instead, you know, go find something that you use your brain to make money. And I'll always remember that conversation. It was the last day. And so, but on top of that, I also learned how to carry a couch on my back, a refrigerator. The last day, they made me carry a refrigerator down 2 flights of stairs on my back by myself. They made me strap it to my back to show them that I learned, you know, how to do that.

Wow.

Because in the beginning, I was carrying one box at a time, like, up and down the stairs. And they said, just wait, just wait, we're going to teach you how to be a donkey. And by the end, they showed me how to literally put the stuff on my back and carry it down the stairs.

Sounds fun.

Pretend we're potential investors. Explain BetterCloud to me and why we should invest.

So the way I would explain BetterCloud, kind of at the peak of BetterCloud, which of course is not Today, this is years ago. The way I would describe it is, hey, you're there are companies all over the world that are using not two applications like Gmail and Dropbox and Salesforce and Slack—not two, three, four—but hundreds of applications across the entire company, and they have no idea which applications they're using, their users are using. They have no idea how much they're spending on those applications. It's millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars. They don't know which users they have that are accessing which applications, how they're accessing. it, how they're sharing Google Docs, sensitive information, confidential information. All of that was the IT teams of these companies had no way to do those things. So BetterCloud solved all of those problems for them. So the IT teams would use BetterCloud to make sure that all the applications their employees used, they knew what they were, they had control over how much they were spending, they controlled the users, they secured the data. So that was what BetterCloud did.

It seems like a very useful company.

Well, I think it was, you know, a lot of— we had thousands. You said in the introduction, I don't know where you got that introduction from. Maybe, maybe Claude AI. But, you know, that was, that was, you know, we had thousands of customers all over the world and some of the biggest companies in the world were— I mean, literally some of the biggest companies were using it to manage these environments. And so it's not You know, the most— I would say it's not the most sexy business, but it was something that people really needed.

You said that you made like a second generation or a second product.

Yeah.

What was the difference between that second product and the first one?

So, the first product only worked with Google Apps or Google Workspace. You know what you use for school? Like Gmail and Drive, and it only worked for that. The second product worked for any application, anything that they were using— Microsoft, Slack, like I said, Dropbox, Canva, you know, Zoom, anything. And that was, that was really the difference, is being built for one application or being built for any application. And the one application was how we started because that was my experience. That was— That was Cloud Sherpas. That's what we focused on. But to build a big company, we had to go across all the applications.

Yeah. And it seemed like— did it work? The second one?

It worked. It did not work in the beginning. So, when we first launched it, I thought, we're going to launch this new product, everyone's going to use it, it's going to be this huge success. And then we launched it and nobody bought it. And it was— you guys were much younger. I mean, this was 2000— 2017, 2018. So, you guys were much younger. I was 3. You were 3, yeah. And you were 2. That was a really— that was a tough time because we launched the product, no one used it, and we ended up having to really refocus the whole company about how to sell it, how to market it, how to price it, all of that. But when we finally did that successfully, It changed the company history. We would never have gotten to where we got to if we didn't build a second product. But it was not— in the beginning, it didn't do as well.

Did you miss running BetterCloud?

I miss it a lot. Mostly what I miss mostly is the people, the team, the BetterClouders. I miss that a lot. I mean, you guys used to come to the office all the time. You used to— I mean, you know, Yeah. So many of the people on the team and you guys also, you play sports, you play basketball, you know what it's like to be on a team and to work with a team on something. And I miss having that because I enjoyed that. I enjoyed having a group of people that it was hard work, you know, like again, like any of the sports that you do, it's hard. But when you go and achieve something together, it's— it feels great. And I just— I miss that. But on the other side, you know, now, I mean, I'm working with so many companies and so many different types of companies that it's interesting for me because I get to see all these different companies and I get to see different industries. I see big companies, small companies. You know, I work with that company in Germany, you know, a company that's bootstrapped versus a company that raised a lot of money, an early company, a late— all these different things. For me, that part is really interesting. When you're just running one company, you don't You don't get that exposure because you have to be every day focused on one company. So I miss the people, I miss the team, I miss building something with people, but I love the diversity. I love being able to see so many different things, so many different CEOs, so many different industries. I do enjoy that.

Because of the diversity, what are a few of the big things that you've learned from having so many interviews with different people? Working with so many companies?

The thing I think I've learned is that 80%, maybe 90% of the job of building a company, 80 to 90% of building a company, it's timeless. The strategies, the way you do it, the tactics, they're timeless. Meaning the same way you built a company 20 years ago is the way that you build a company today. The same way you build a company that's in the hardware business is the same as you build a company that's in the software business. The same that you build a company in the US is the way you build a company in Germany. I really believe that that's the case, but there's 10% that is not timeless. It's really timely. And that 10%, obviously, in today's world is AI.

Yeah.

But other than that, if you are a great CEO, you can be a great CEO of really pretty much— and you don't have to know the industry, you don't have to know the market, you don't have to know the product. Leading people, leading teams, focusing everyone, having an operating rhythm, motivating people, talking to customers, building product. These are things raising money, selling the company. All of these things—they're timeless. They're timeless. They—and that's been the most interesting thing. I mean, I've had people on the show that that have built—I mean, literally billionaires who built these huge companies—and when they talk about the way that they build their companies, it's the same that the startup guy who's got a small company of ten people, like the the tactics. that they, that they think about and talk about, that person, when they go from 10 people to thousands of people, they're going to use the same tactics, even if it's a completely different business. That's a good question.

Thank you. Are you excited or scared about AI?

I would say I'm both excited and scared about AI. I, I'm excited because You can do stuff with AI that I could just never even dream of before. I mean, in my life, I— for example, when you were born, I told Mama, I really hope that you guys learn how to be engineers, learn how to code. I told her that. I said, I hope that they learn how to code because for me, I always had this problem where I couldn't build my own company because I needed an engineer. I needed someone to code the product.

Yeah, that's, that's a hard job.

That is a hard job. But now, yeah, you guys built that product, right?

Yeah, we use Lovable. Yeah. Then we made basically this app that you just—

yeah, you could like put in like your mood, your age, how many people, and it would just like give you places to go, right?

And like How long did it take you to build that?

An hour.

You know how long it would take someone to build that 10 years ago?

A year.

A year. Actually, a year.

A year.

And you did it in an hour and you didn't even— all you did was talk to Lovable and it built that product.

Yeah.

How about that one that we built, the NBA 2K spinner thing?

Yeah.

That took 35 minutes, 45 minutes. I mean, those things, would've taken days, months, years before. So that's why I'm excited about AI. I'm nervous about AI because I think, and scared a little bit because I think that, I don't know how much I worry so much about it's gonna replace every single job. I'm less worried. I think there's gonna be new jobs that are created. What I worry about is it makes our brains, like we become more and more reliant on AI. They can't even write their own emails anymore because they just ask Chat or Claude to write the email. You know, they ask it to do all of their work. They're kind of losing the ability to think. If you read a lot of stuff, I mean, a lot of the videos now you watch on YouTube, all that garbage, all that stuff is like mostly AI generated. It's all— and that to me, that sucks. Like that, that I'm a little scared of that. But overall, I do think it's gonna change the world on a whole over a long period of time. I hope it changes it for the better. What do you think?

I think AI is going to take, even when me and Sami are adults, I think it's going to take a lot of jobs. But you'll just, I think we'll be able to, I think if you find the right jobs and if you're good at your job, I think you'll be okay. And I think that AI will help you be better. But I don't think it's gonna take over the world. But I think it's gonna, gonna help a lot of people. And it's gonna make a lot of people use it too much in their daily life. And they're gonna be like, AI is part of their family.

I think that's probably right. What do you think the skills are that you're going to need, like, kind of now because of AI? Do you think that there's a different set of skills you guys are going to need when you're adults?

Oh, yeah.

Like you said, that you can be a CEO if you— you don't have to know the market. You don't have to know the business if you understand, like, how to, like, make, like, give people like a, like help people do better and make a team, then like those skills will be things that like AI won't like replace and you will still need those skills.

Couldn't agree more. I think that's gonna, I think those are gonna be the most important skills. I think, I think that being able to communicate, motivate a team, put a team together, Come up with goals. I think no matter how good AI gets, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be doing that. I hope it doesn't do that.

AI won't be able to lead a team.

I don't think so.

Who's going to be motivated by a robot saying like, yeah, you're doing well. Keep trying.

Exactly. Some people.

I don't know if most people listen to a robot telling them that.

I hope not. I hope not.

I think that AI, because AI is getting bigger, I think that the, like, the older that, like, in like 2030, there's gonna— I feel like there's gonna be a lot less physical labor.

Mm-hmm.

And then with AI, it's gonna be a lot of just a lot of people are not gonna work. They're just gonna like put in a code into AI and then just gonna help. They're gonna ask it to work for them.

You think so?

By 2030? That's pretty soon. You think in 4 years there are gonna be that many robots?

No, probably 2050.

Maybe 2050.

Then— but are people gonna use that many robots? Like, AI is a different thing that you can just like access on your computer. A robot No, but like, how many people are gonna get a—

go like, I got an ad while I was playing video games on my phone and it was like, just buy this AI app and it'll just buy Bitcoin for you and then it'll just, just do your work. It'll just triple your money. And if you just buy the app, there's no way that's true. But, but if it, if it is true, yeah.

Well, I mean, you guys have invested in some AI. I mean, Nanogram is—

Yeah. Nanogram, which is like the TikTok of games.

Yeah.

It helps. It's not really AI that—

Well, they kind of— Yeah.

The AI helps the people make the games.

That's true. Right. That's true. That's true. It's more really helping to make the games.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What are a few of the hardest or scariest days at any of the companies you've ran?

Probably hardest. Well, there's a lot of hard days and scary days. I mean, there was one week, again, you guys were too young to remember, but in 2019, there was one week where on the Monday, We lost our biggest customer at BetterCloud. On the Tuesday, there was someone that I was hiring to be the CRO, the chief revenue officer of the company, and he was supposed to start on Wednesday. And on Tuesday, he told me he's not joining the company, even though he had already agreed. And I had planned for that. On Wednesday, I had— was supposed to— I was up for the award of Entrepreneur of the Year. And I don't really care for any of these awards, but Saba won that award when I was a kid, and I sat in the audience when he won it. So I really wanted to win it and bring you guys to that thing. And that day I found out I wasn't going to win that award. And on Thursday of that week, I tore my Achilles. Do you remember?

Yeah.

And then on Friday of that week, we were supposed to fly to Israel to see everyone and I couldn't go. And it was like the worst week of like, every single day of that week, I remember being like, it can't get worse. And then it was like, and when I tore my Achilles, I said, okay, I think I should probably not move for like, I should, and I had no choice. You remember? That was pretty bad.

Nice.

I think other than that, the really, really bad days was one time when COVID in March of 2020, March, April of 2020, we had to do a big layoff. To lay off, you have to let a lot of people go at the company. And we had to let go 65 people, something like that, in one day. In one day. And that was pretty painful because that was— it's business. We had to do it because everyone thought the world was going to end and everyone thought that no one was going to be— who's going to pay for anything? Everyone's going to stop buying stuff. Everyone thought— no one knew what was going to happen. And we were running out of money and we had to make a decision to save the company, basically. And, and that was the decision. But that day, that day was preparing for that and then getting on the call with everyone and having to tell them that that's what was happening. That was, that was, um, that was a terrible— any, anything like that is just really— even if you do it many times, which unfortunately I've done it probably 4 times in my, in my career, every time that's really, really tough. really, really bad. And it's— there's so many moments, but those ones where like you're impacting other people like that, you know, that's tough. All of that COVID, the early days of COVID you know, that was a weird— that was a really weird time because people— no one knew what was happening. People— we were scared of our— for our employees, their health. Like that whole period was a really— that was a tough time.

On that firing day, You must have had to fire someone that you really liked. How did you do that?

So I've fired, unfortunately, probably— I mean, I'm not— hundreds and hundreds of people over the course of 20 years. And in that course of 20 years, I fired a lot of people that I liked, actually. In some cases, people who were like literally good friends of mine. I mean, you know some of these people.

Yeah.

And that's a really hard thing to do. The way I approach that is— the way I try to approach that is I try to treat it a little bit differently where I have conversations with those people way ahead of having to fire them. As soon as I really see that they're not being successful at the company anymore, as soon as I see that they can't take us to the next level, I try to have a conversation with them and tell them, hey, This isn't going to be where you're successful. I'm sorry, but it's just not where you're going to be successful long term, and I want you to be successful. And I think because of that, you need to go somewhere else, and let me help you make that transition easy. I'm not going to just fire you one day and make you leave the next day. Let's work on a plan. Let's find someone to replace you. Let you get another job. So try to ease that that that kind of. pain. But I really believe this. I've told you guys this before. I really believe this, that people, great people, want to be successful in life. Obviously, they want to do well. And so, if they're not doing well at a job, it's better for them to leave the job. It's better for them to go find something else. It really is.

Yeah.

But that's a hard— still a hard conversation to have. But, but I'm still friends with those people. And actually, most of those people have gone on to do even better things than they were doing at the time because they just found a better place, better company, better— for example, there was a period of time when BetterCloud, as you know, was always in the office. And that was really important to me. There were people who lived far away and it took them a long time to get to the office, a long time to get home every single day. They had to commute an hour and a half every day. Good friend, someone that you care about, but it was getting very hard for them. And then, They left and they went and found a job where they never had to travel in and out of work for 3 hours every day. So, maybe that's better.

I remember we saw one of the people that you fired and I would think that if you fired them, they'd never want to talk to you again. But they actually said hi and gave you a hug.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I've seen that actually a lot and I'm still close with many of those people. In the moment, it's very awkward. But, but over time it usually turns out better. Yeah.

What is something that you're still bad at?

I am still bad at having— hmm, that, that is a really good question. I still, even with— this is true— even with Claude and all the AI tools, I'm still not I wouldn't say I'm good at building a product. I've tried, I've played, like I enjoy it. Like I enjoy now with all the tools, I enjoy playing with Lovable and Claude and all that stuff. But it's, I would still say that's not my, my real strong suit. Like being an engineer, that's not, I don't know why, that's just not how my brain works.

You're good at doing the leading and not really the building.

I would say yes. Yeah.

Have you ever been jealous of another CEO?

Many times. Many times. I think, you know, if you look at— you guys know, obviously, Instagram, LinkedIn, you guys have seen LinkedIn. When you look at LinkedIn, specifically because it's a business social media application, when you look at LinkedIn and you scroll on LinkedIn, And you see other CEOs and they're announcing that their company is worth $20 billion and they just sold the biggest customer in the world and they— all of this stuff. They raised a round of money at this valuation. When you read that as you're scrolling, you're like, how is that? I thought I was as good as that person. I thought my company is as good. My product is as good. And you can get very jealous if you're looking from the outside. Everyone else Everyone else looks like they're having a much easier time. Like everyone else seems like they're crushing it. Everyone else seems— it's the same problem with Instagram. You scroll through Instagram and you're like, wow, look, everyone's on vacation all the time. Everyone's always having such a good time. Everyone, no problem, no problems, no, no hard work, no. But in reality, that's not true. And, and actually, while at BetterCloud, I would say I was more jealous of other CEOs because Again, I was, like I said before, I was so in the weeds on BetterCloud that I could only see my own world. And as soon as now I start spending time with all these other companies, and these are great companies, and I see all the challenges that they have inside the company, but they don't post on social media like, I had a really hard time today. I had to fire this person on my team. This customer left us. Who's going to post that? Nobody. So you only see the good. You only post the good stuff. And you only see the good stuff. So yes, definitely, definitely. I have been jealous of many CEOs. And then a lot of times when I meet them— actually, by the way, the podcast has allowed me to meet some of the people that I looked up to. And when you meet them, they had the same problems, had the same issues.

Yeah. All the CEO stuff, it seems like Therapy, basically, to talk to other CEOs.

Exactly. I mean, that's what it is because you talk to other CEOs, they start telling you about their problems. You know, my problems are not so bad. And I think that that's one of the reasons I do that. Honestly, that's why I started the podcast is let other people hear the real stories, not only the great things that are posted on social media, but let people hear The, the, the real stories. Yeah.

How do you define success?

I love this question. Sammy asked this question at the live podcast that we did with Cass and Mike Lazzaro. Um, it was the last question after an hour and a half in that boiling hot theater, and Sammy asked that question, and you really stumped Cass and Mike. So, being able to meaningfully impact other people's lives while simultaneously benefiting your own life. So to me, that's how I think about it is if I can help other people be successful, for example, we're not going to name the name, please don't say the name, but you know the name. There's the CEO that I'm, that I'm working with that's about to sell his company for a lot of money. And he has been, you know, he's been hustling for a long time and he's had a lot of drama in the sales process. You've been in the car when I'm talking to him and all of that. And, but when he sells the company, it's going to change his life, his family's life, his employees' lives, his customers' lives, because I actually think the combined company is going to be better on the other side. All of that, for me, that's amazing. Yes, we'll make, we'll make money. It's a success. We'll, we'll make money out of it, all of that. I'll get another success on my advisor kind of list of companies that I work with. So, it's great.

You're also helping companies, um, do much better when you had BetterCloud.

Exactly. I felt that way. I would go and when we would sell to a customer, I really believed I'm making their company better. And the IT person, the actual person I sold to, we helped some people because they bought BetterCloud. They got promoted, they got raises, they became— they went from being like a junior person to being an executive. That for me It feels really good when we— when there are people that work for me at Vocalocity who I gave them their first job ever. I was also 22, 23. I gave them their first job out of school. They started. They—

They were like your age?

They were my age. Yeah. Because I was 22 when I took over Vocalocity and then I had to hire people. And so I hired these people. I had a friend of mine from Emory, Brian. I hired a bunch of people like from the local schools, Georgia Tech and Emory and all that stuff. And when they would come to work, they had no job experience. And I gave them that opportunity. And some of those people—

You helped them get off the floor.

Off the floor. And you know what? Some of those people have become so successful. And it helped me too, because it built Vocalocity. We were successful because of those people, but they were successful. And so for me, I look at that and I say, that's success. You know, there's some people that I know very well that have make so much money and they make so— but in the meantime, as they're doing that, they step on everyone else around them to do that. And they, they, they're—

They don't help the other people.

They don't help the other people because the number one priority for them is for them to be successful. So that's why I say the way that I define success is to meaningfully impact others' lives while simultaneously benefiting My own, and if you think about it, even like even this podcast, everything like I I learn from this. I mean, for me, I learn from this. I I learn every episode that I do. I learn every conversation. But I think that all the people who are listening, I hope at least. I mean, the text messages I get and the emails, people say, "Oh my God, that was so helpful that episode." This so for me, that is what success means to me. But that's been an evolution over. a long period of time. That's not necessarily how I felt when I was 22, you know, but, but as time has gone on, I realized that I enjoy that more. I enjoy the seeing other people, you know, be, be successful. And that's why this period of time is so, so interesting for me to work with so many companies, to send out my newsletter every week, to 35,000 people with the articles that I send out. All that stuff for me is, is success.

Yeah, that's a very good meaning of success.

Yeah, thank you.

In your user manual on Substack, you wrote that you have no hobbies and that all your energy goes to work and family. I believe that, but would you tell us to live that way when we're adults?

I think you should do. I— when a lot of people read that in my user manual, they read it and they say that's a bad thing. We— I have no hobbies, everything is about family and work. They read it, and I don't write it in a bad way, but they read it in a bad way. And for me, I enjoy that. Like, I, I'm not upset about it. I like work. I love, love spending time with the family. I love all of that. So for me, it's— there's nothing, um, more than that, that I, that I would like. Now, that doesn't mean you should do it. You should do whatever it is that makes you happy. You should do whatever it is that, that you like. If you have hobbies, you should. I think you should probably have some hobbies. It's probably not good to have zero hobbies.

Um, but you don't have zero hobbies.

Yeah, what do I have?

Uh, you go to the gym.

Yeah, true.

You help us with cards.

True. That's, that's true. That's true.

You read.

Sometimes. Not so much. But yeah, I think that— so anyway, my answer— that's a good question. And my answer is I wouldn't say everyone has to do whatever it is that makes sense to them. But for me, this is not a bad thing for me. I like it.

Is there anything you hope that we don't copy from you?

Let's say what I hope you do. I hope is I hope that I hope that one, I hope that you if you want to start a company, which you don't have to start a company, but if you decide you want to start a company, I hope you start it when you're younger than I was when I started BetterCloud at 29. That's I guess what I would say because what I learned is that so many of the skills that you need to build a company, you learn. While building the company, and so there's nothing that can. So some people you I have a lot of friends who say no when I'm forty-five and I've done this and this and this and this and this and this then I'll start a company. But I think that there's something about doing it earlier. You know, we've talked about I had the guest Ronen Harari, the one who invented Paw Patrol, you know, and he I had him as a guest on the podcast. I don't I don't know if I've published it yet, but I had him as a guest and. He wrote a book all about how you should start, you should do stuff like starting companies in your 20s. You should take bets on yourself in your 20s, in your early 20s. So, I hope you do that. The other one, which is maybe the biggest mistake I've made, is what Saba told me when I started at Vocalocity. Not when I started, when I became CEO at 22, he said, keep a diary of everything that happens and all the decisions you make and how you feel. And at the time I said, I'm gonna remember. Why would I need a diary to write it all down? And he was right that now I wish that I could remember how I felt at this moment, how this meeting with this customer, how did I get around that problem? So I'd say that's what I would say to you is I think that if you wanna start a company, do it early and also try to document.

Sure.

It doesn't necessarily need to be a diary. Maybe with AI it'll just document it for you, but try to document, you know, kind of the, the, the experiences that you have.

That's good. On the episode with Ronan Cohen that you had on this podcast, you told him that when I turned 12, on my birthday, you were looking at old baby photos and you noticed that you weren't in most of them because you were building BetterCloud. You said that you were missing when we started walking, that you left the hospital Right after Sammy was born for a VC meeting, and you came to the VC meeting with hospital bands.

Yeah.

And that in the photos that you were there for, you looked so tired. Then you said that you thought hard and that if you could have built it differently, you wouldn't have. Do you still believe that?

Yeah. I think that the sacrifice— you have to make sacrifices in life. You cannot build something great, you cannot be great at something. I mean, you guys know, right? All the Jordan videos and the Kobe videos and all the stuff where they're talking about what they did or when other people are talking about them, right? Like Kobe was—

Yeah.

In the gym at 4:00 a.m. at the Olympics and he was working out before anyone even came back from the party that they had the night before, you know. And you hear about all— and that stuff is real. It takes, it takes a lot of sacrifice. And, um, I would have done it the same way because I'm not sure I could have done it any other way. Now, the, now the only way I was able to do that is because Mama, your mother, would, uh, not— was, was so supportive. Because most people, when giving birth, if their husband walked out Like 10 seconds later would be quite angry. But she said, go, go, go, go to the meeting, raise the money. You know, like when, when, when, you know, she— when you took your first steps and I wasn't there and she sent me the video, she didn't say, where were you? She said, here's the video of Noah taking his first steps. And when I had to travel, you know, 100 times in a year, she, she was very supportive. So my point is, you need that support somehow. Somehow you need that support because otherwise it's very hard to do family and business and this, and it's very hard to do all of that at the same time. But I'm not sure. Look, all the people I've— in a crazy way, the most successful people I've had on the podcast so far, at least successful in terms of the size of their businesses, and the most successful made the most sacrifices. It's crazy. And I'm not— and that doesn't necessarily mean it has to correlate. But what I've noticed is that the most successful people have probably made some of the biggest sacrifices to their Personal life. So I am, I'm not saying that I'm happy that I missed all of those moments, but I'm saying that I would have done it again because because of all of that, now I'm able to spend more time with you guys. And do you remember those years when I Sammy? Do you remember when I left after you were born? Do you remember me leaving the no? No. And do you remember me missing your first steps? No. Do you remember me taking my first steps? So, all of that.

Being born.

Exactly. So, I think that that's— now, if I was doing all of those things today, today when you're this age, that would be very different. That would be— those kinds of sacrifices would be harder to make because you obviously remember. And so, at that time, it really wasn't— I still felt bad, but it wasn't— I don't think it impacted you guys as much.

Yeah. What do you want us to learn from watching you work this hard?

That if you put your mind to something, you can do pretty much anything. And I think that to be successful before AI, with AI, doesn't matter. Like, to be successful in life, if you want to be great at something, you have to work hard at it. I think that's the lesson. Again, like I said before, you don't have to follow everything that I do. You don't have to work hard if you don't want to. But if you want to be really successful at something, you have to work hard. That's just— I mean, you guys know, Sammy, what you— do you have a moment in your life already at 10 years old where you had to work really hard at something?

Um, when I was working— Noah also had this. Both we had to work to get our black belt in taekwondo.

How did that feel? Um, we—

it was hard, but it was also Fun. We liked taekwondo. We came like almost every day, but it was hard, and we also liked it though.

And how'd it feel? No, how'd it feel when you got your black belt?

It was so, um, it was so nice, and it— after nine years of working, it just felt like relieving, and it felt like all that work was. Very, very worth it.

So that's, that's exactly, that's exactly it. That, that I, I mean, the amount you were working for that test was great. I mean, that was, that was the most I've seen. That was the most I've seen anyone work in a while, both of you. And, and every morning waking up and recording the videos to send to Masteron and all of that stuff that you were doing. And then the test itself was ridiculous. You know, we were— I think Mama wanted Masteron to stop the test. She was so nervous about you guys because it was such— what was it, 4 hours, something like that? 3 and a half hours. Like, that was crazy. But then you feel amazing on the other side because you achieved something that very few people at your age or just in general in the world achieve. So that's what I hope you take away from that.

Last question that you always ask everyone: what is one piece of advice that you would go back and give yourself before you started your first job? Ever.

My one piece of advice for myself, if I go back, and I actually did a compilation episode of this where I pulled everyone's one piece of advice and then I put my one piece of advice, and it would be trust my gut more. It was early in my career, especially in those Vocalocity days when I was 22, 23, 24. I was sitting in meetings and I felt like I couldn't contribute to the meetings because I didn't know the answers. And I felt something in my gut, an answer that I wanted to say. And I felt like I knew the right thing to do, but I felt I didn't deserve— I didn't know the right answer. I didn't know, you know. And that has happened for, for most of my career, actually, where it took me a long time to listen to my gut and say, okay, I should trust it. Is it right every time? Definitely not. But is it right 90% of the time? Yes. And it's much faster to trust your gut than to take a long time questioning yourself. And so, learning to trust my gut on stuff, I'm still working on that, but learning to trust my gut was a really big something that I wish I had told myself early in my career.

But now, do you trust your gut?

I trust my gut so much more. I'll be in a meeting and someone will say something and immediately I'll have this reaction. I don't even know where the reaction— it's like a gut reaction just comes to me. And I used to sit on that, think about it. Should I say it? Should I not? And now much faster to say that thing because I do trust— again, not always right, but I trust it. And, and I find that that's for a lot of people, especially younger people. You know, you feel like you want to be careful about that. So that's one. If I had to choose a second one, it would be to get much better at public speaking much earlier. You know that. You're good at public speaking. Now I'm good. I was terrible. I was terrible. So that's one.

As a kid or like at the beginning of your business career?

At the beginning of my business career, I was really bad. I mean, really bad. I was a bad storyteller. I was a bad public speaker. And I think that that That's something that I didn't invest in until much later. I waited until probably 30-something years old, and I should have probably started doing that in my 20s because actually now back to this whole point of AI and everything, it's a big part of the skill set that being able to lead people, they want to hear from you. They want to, you know.

Yeah. You've taught us to be good at public speaking.

Yeah. You guys are great. You guys are like, you're as good as I am now as an adult, you are as kids. Like when I come to your school and you do anything, I'm always surprised with how good you guys are. So those are the 2 things I would say, trust my gut and work harder on that piece of my skillset earlier. Is that it?

Yeah. Thanks for being on the show, even though it's kind of your own show.

Just how did you guys come up with all these questions?

Us? Yeah. Mama and Claude.

Well, Claude really helped you a lot with these. These were good questions.

We came up with Claude, then we kind of edited it.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this was awesome. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and I'm happy that you guys were back from camp, back, don't have school yet. We had the time to do this and I'm excited to get this out in the world. So, thank you. This is my first time I'm a guest on my own podcast and probably the last time. So, thank you. I love you guys.