Turning the Tables! Michael Girdley gets interviewed on the Next Gen Podcast - The Michael Girdley Show Episode 29

Hey, Michael here. You will now hear some episodes of the Michael Girdley Show that we had branded differently, called Unusual Profits or some such like that. Same show, same person, just me interviewing people and producing content that could be helpful on your journey and mine as well. So with no further ado, here's the episode. Hey, Michael here. Sponsor for today's show is actually a product that I'm a part of called DM Bridge. And what DMBridge is, uh, is a service that we built, uh, to solve the problem that Twitter's direct messaging functionality is a total mess. So we built DMBridge to help you fix that. Um, a lot of the other solutions, uh, do things like requiring you to install a whole nother inbox. We didn't want another inbox, so we created DMBridge. And what it does is it takes all of your Twitter DMs and has them appear inside of your email inbox. So you can reply to them just like it's a regular email. You see them just like it's a regular email. You can search them later like it's one of your regular emails, all just by using DMBridge. So, uh, we're currently live with the product. Uh, would love for you to sign up and become a customer, uh, and check it out. So you can find that at dmbridge.app, uh, and go on there, put in your name, uh, and be either part of the beta or join us as part of the live use of the product. And again, check it out, dmbridge.app. Hey everybody, Michael here. I have something pretty special for you this week. I had the honor of being a guest on one of my favorite podcasts, The Next Generation Podcast, which is done by Connor and Gio, the two hosts. And they spend a lot of time talking about entrepreneurship, especially for younger people. So, you know, that's really something near and dear to my heart. I talk about a lot, and I was so excited by what came out of that session that we did that I asked if I could repurpose the content, bring a copy of that episode and publish it here on the Unusual Profits Podcast. So I'm very excited about it, excited to share it with you today. And if you have a chance, go subscribe to the Next Generation Podcast. Very cool, especially if you're a younger entrepreneur wanting to get into it and figure out, you know, the world of entrepreneurship. So thanks again to those guys, had a ton of fun. And without any further ado, here is the episode.

On today's podcast, we have Michael Girdley, who is the owner of a holding company based out of San Antonio that actively buys, starts, and operates companies. During his career, he's worn several hats ranging from chairman and co-founder at Dura Software, the second largest software company in San Antonio, to co-founding less tech-enabled companies like Red Runner Coffee and Alamo Fireworks, which is one of the largest retailers of consumer fireworks in Texas for over a decade. Honestly, if you just head on over to Michael's website, girdley.com, you'll be able to see all of the other businesses he's working on, but we'll hopefully dive into all of them and more on today's episode. Michael, welcome to the show.

Excited to be here.

We're happy to have you on here. I am somewhat kind of overwhelmed trying to figure out how to describe you and, and your background.

Like, what would you—

what do you tell people you do on like a day-to-day basis?

Yeah, like the core kind of process of like what I do is, you know, incubate businesses or, or put deals together, um, you know, bring them to reality. And there's all kinds of different challenges that can happen in terms of what it takes to take something from an idea to, to be, you know, a proven kind of concept. And then the third step is really I set them up to operate autonomously. So I'm, I'm not really the CEO of anything other than running that kind of process repeatedly. And so that means that, you know, I'm sitting on boards, I'm partnering with other people that are operating businesses, and then, you know, my job is to support them, you know, as they continue to grow.

So are you coming up with an idea and then getting an operator in place, or is it more of a, "Hey, this is an interesting company. I'm going to take, let's say, minority stake investment and help them strategize and operational side of that"? Yeah.

I'm 47 now. I think I've learned that I'm not wired to just be a minority investor in stuff. I've done that a lot, I found that it was really not rewarding. I always felt like there were 3 or 4 times a year when I was a minority investor that I was just like, "Oh, here's a hard decision we need to make and we're making the wrong side of this decision and we should be doing it my way." So my business coach actually refers to that, that I'm happiest when I have the 0.1%, which is the 50.1%, or it's just like, "Okay, we're going to always have consensus, but those few times when we don't," I have the ability to say, "This is what we're going to do." It doesn't happen that often because I'm a consensus-based and consensus-driven person, but I don't want to be a minority really anything, so I generally say no to anything that has me as a minority.

Typically then, most of these companies you have some majority stake in the actual equity side?

Yeah, that's definitely a goal through it. Of the ones we mentioned, there's two of them where I'm a minority, That was just because that was the way the opportunity played out, but I started out as majority, and both of those just have been diluted over time through outside money coming into the company. I think one of the things that I enjoy is I come from a background of tech, but then also from non-tech, and that's kind of a unique skillset. So I've organized things in a way that I really want to be able to be flexible to work on all kinds of different stages of stuff, all kinds of different categories of stuff. So sometimes it may be working on a business that bringing it to life is acquiring that business and then restructuring it, or it might be starting something totally from scratch and then getting it set up in the right way and staffed the right way and then helping it. So everything in between are things that if the opportunity is there, I want to be able to be reactive in terms of how to structure it, in terms of how my role is and how we approach it.

We've had two guests on the podcast in the past who come from totally different ends of the spectrum that I believe you know both of them decently well. The first is Chris Powers, and he just talks all about how like, if you want to go and build something to be very large, you have to go in and focus entirely on one thing. Like make that your one thing, make that your priority and grow that entirely. The other guest that we had was Stephen Ulmann, and he basically kind of said like, hey, listen, from my standpoint, I recognize that if I want to grow something to be as big as possible, that all I— like, yeah, going and focusing on one thing is probably the right way to do that. But for me, I run 11 different businesses. I'm a minority in some and a majority in others. And for me, it's just more fun that way. And I recognize that I'll probably have to go a little bit more slowly if I want to go and really grow them year over year. From your standpoint, you've got about 8 different companies, if I'm correct here. Do you kind of focus a little bit more on what Stephen's saying, where like, you're like, hey, listen, all I'm looking for is like not that 100% growth year over year on really any business, but like 20, 30% consistently and compound that for decades. Because for me, it's not about like building this 10-figure business or anything. What I want to do is build several 7, 8, maybe 9-figure companies over a long time. And it's more fun for me to kind of operate this way.

Yeah. Well, I think both of those guys, and I'm friends with both of them, both of them are looking at it through the right lens, right? Which is instead of thinking about, you know, what is the right, wrong, or right or wrong way to do this for the universe, right? And what some jackass is telling you you in terms of advice, they're looking at it through the, what is the right life for me to live? Right? And Steven knows himself really well. Right? He's like, I'm a curious person. What's going to give me the most fulfillment is, you know, being spread across these different things. And then you have Chris, who like has a clarity of purpose and focus that I do not have either. Like part of, part of the way I've designed stuff is I want to be able to be involved in multiple things because that's how I'm wired. Right? You see what gives me joy? I didn't talk anything about deploying CRM systems. None of that gives me joy. Like, I don't really want to be part of that. So, you know, so what I've done is, is really, I think, agree with both of those guys, which is, yeah, I want to be involved in different stuff. I want to focus on the things that I do really well and the value that I feel like I can add. But ultimately, just because it looks like I'm in 8 different businesses, I'm really in one business, right? That I described to you kind of the core process. All I do is birth help, and then support companies. That's it. That's over and over. That is the one thing I'm doing. That's the thing I'm going to do for the rest of my life because nothing gives me more joy than that process of creation, support, and then supporting the right team as they go on.

Robert Leonard When did you realize this was the structure that you're going to spend your business career doing? When did you decide, hey, it's not going to be one company, it's not necessarily going to be two, but it's going to be this? This incubating and this growing and operationally scaling a lot of other companies.

Yeah. I think that it's interesting. I reconnected with a buddy of mine who lived in San Antonio and moved away about 15 years ago. He's gone on in his career. He's done a great job in figuring out his next thing. But I talked to him about, "Well, what do I do? What's my model?" He recounted to me that 15 years ago, we'd be driving down the street here and I'd be talking about random businesses, even though I was running one. And so he's like, "Yeah, what you're doing right now is what I heard you talk about 15 years ago." The process that happened in between then and now is I'm kind of a wimp sometimes. I'm not very courageous. As a younger person, I didn't have the confidence to step forward and do what I'm doing now with the level of conviction that I have. And so it took me getting involved in a bunch of stuff and getting exposed to it and realizing, "Oh, this is definitely not for me." I love dealing with companies. I don't like being a 0.1% investor in some rocket ship VC company. That's not as much fun as it seems. I don't like being on the board where I own 10% of the company and some other guy gets to be the 0.1%. So it was going out and getting exposed to all this different stuff that really gave me more and more conviction year after year. But if you talk to my buddy, he would tell you 15 years ago, I was telling him this was my dream. Maybe it came across with more conviction at that point than maybe I really had.

And your background growing up, because I know at this point, what is your stake or your role specifically with Alamo Fireworks?

Yeah, chairman of the board. So my brother and I own it together and we have a great management team that does all the day-to-day.

And if I'm correct in saying it's a family-owned business that's been through generation after generation, my guess is maybe your grandfather, great-grandfather started it?

Yeah, grandfather started it in 1946. They came back from the war. He was in the Navy. They started importing fireworks from China. Specifically then, you actually had to take the fireworks from China, export them to Hong Kong or Macau, relabel them, and then bring them to the US. So he was the first person to import fireworks into the state of Texas, and the company formally incorporated in 1962. And then my father got involved in the '70s, and then he retired early 2000s. My brother and I have been owning and running the business since then.

That's really cool. I tweeted this out earlier today and I would love to get your take on this because it's a theme that I've really noticed a lot from some of the entrepreneurs we've interviewed over the last year and a half or so now, where basically the tweet said that everyone always talks about how affluent families will go and grow up and have this huge privilege and advantage and totally agree with that, The thing I was basically saying is if your goal was to be entrepreneurial or to go and think about other creative ways to go and make a lot of money, there is no bigger privilege and advantage, and this is coming from where Gio and I also come from pretty entrepreneurial families too, than having your family and your parents run their own business from an early age, because you can see how that works and see the difference in lifestyles. Would you say that that played a pretty significant role in terms of getting you where you are now? And if so, How do you think it's maybe shifted your thinking from maybe some of your peers in high school and college?

Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think that the one nuance that really does happen that you didn't mention there is those dining room conversations or the kids are in the backseat conversations, or my kids just started a cookie delivery business. So they sell they sell cookies to the neighbors and like, and coach— they get free coaching. Yeah, they get free coaching. Like, well, okay, like, do we give out free samples? Like, how does that work? Like, what's our, what's our addressable market? Like, do we want recurring revenue or do we want transactional revenue? Do we want recurring revenue? Like, how do we put— create a business model there? Like, how do you make the sales process frictionless? Like, they're learning all kinds of really cool stuff. But that's just because that stuff gets discussed at the dinner table when they're like, Hey, like we had 2 customers churn. What do we do? I was like, well, let's talk through this. Like, so there's a lot of that that just happens through mere exposure. And you see that in the numbers of who turns out to be entrepreneurs. Um, same as if somebody turns out to be a carpenter, like there's a pretty good chance their dad was a carpenter. It works out that way. Um, pretty well. So yeah, I mean, I think that's where, if you look at my background, like I wish I was more of a rags to riches kind of story. But the reality is tons of privilege, right? Graduated college with no debt, had parents that were entrepreneurs, had a family business I could come back and take over rather than starting one. Those are all huge, huge favors the universe did to me.

Michael Gayed I think one of the first times I ever tried making money was selling duct tape wallets. I went around the neighborhood and I started selling a bunch of them. And I was all excited. I came home and I was like telling my dad about it. I was like, oh, I sold this one for $2, this one for $3. He's like, oh, that's wonderful, but you didn't make any money. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, like, you know, how much does the tape cost? The hours you put into it. And I sat down, I was like, wow, okay. Didn't even think about that. So to your point, I mean, yeah, it becomes immensely helpful to get, you know, the perspective. How do you look at that from someone that thinks either, A, they want to become an entrepreneur, they want to go the business route and they might not have any of these opportunities? Is there a way for them to put themselves in a place where they can get exposure to some of this stuff at an earlier age? Michael Gayed Yeah.

Well, you mean earlier in your 20s or earlier in high school or even younger?

Robert Leonard I don't know. Some teenager that realizes they want to become an entrepreneur but don't have family members or anyone like that that they could reach out to.

Yeah. I would also say maybe for the sake of this audience, because I don't know how big our teenage demographic is, if they are coming out of college, for instance, right now, that's kind of where the bread and butter of our audience is, what would you give to them?

Yeah. Well, I think that it's important to go spend time with other entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs. And that to some extent is why I understand when young people who are ambitious move to New York LA, Austin, right? Because those places are magnets for other entrepreneurs. You can go to the coworking spaces where people are at. We have one here in San Antonio that's been transformative to my life. I've met most of my business partners through a place called Geekdom, which is a tech coworking space designed to bring all the entrepreneurs across a 3 million person city and put them in one building. That's been magical for me. As somebody who partners to make things happen, That's all there. So I would pursue that. How do you get in the right city? How do you get in the right coffee shops? How do you get in the right coworking space? How do you get in the right network on Twitter, for example, to get exposed to this other stuff? Because Twitter wasn't around in 1997 for me. I remember graduating college and I did not go to an entrepreneurial style undergrad. Everybody went to go work at Anderson Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers and all this stuff. They all looked at me and they're like, "Why didn't you get a job like we all did? We're going to Chicago for training." And I'm like, that sounds terrible. That's not me. I'm going to go like figure something else out. So, you know, I think that's the ultimately the number one thing. Like, how can you go find that culture of people that are pursuing entrepreneurship, whether it's online or in person, uh, in a combination of that stuff? Like when you start to catch the entrepreneurship mind virus and you look, look at these other people and you're like, wait a second, this doofus is making this much money. Like I could do that. Um, yeah, I kind of, I kind of think that's my number one contribution to San Antonio is they're like, I want San Antonio to be a more entrepreneurial city. I think part of it is just people look at me and go, "Wait, that guy did it? I could totally do it. I want to get into entrepreneurship." That's what I would say is the number one thing, and it has been transformative for me.

You're very much a proponent of getting your hands dirty. I think you had a tweet about not reading the Rockefeller book, which I took a little personally because I had to put Titan down.

That was right next to me on my desk. I subtweeted you.

What, what do you kind of recommend in terms of, you know, do you have specific either business ideas or strategies for that person? Okay, I'm gonna go to a city, I'm gonna go meet all these people. Should I start an SMB and start washing windows? Should I go the tech route, kind of pick something I'm interested in, get my iterations through, fail at a bunch of stuff? Or do you have a more refined, like, hey, these are some categories where I recommend first-time entrepreneurs test out, you know, their skills. Yeah.

So I think that there is, um, there's a common misconception where people are like, there is one way and that's the right way. Like you'll hear the, oh, you should do a sweaty, you know, SMB first. Oh, like go to San Francisco and do a VC thing. Oh, go get a job first. Like, I think all that's actually wrong. Like it's, there is no one path, just like most things. And it's this idea that I talk about a lot where people want like entrepreneurship to be like playing Bach, right? Or Mozart gives you the music. And in reality, it's like playing jazz. Um, cause the world is changing like all the time. So, you know, I think people should start and invert that lens of saying, okay, like there isn't one path to do this, but let me start with like the life and the person I want to be and just go try some stuff. Right. And if you, if you feel emotionally, like if you had to guess right now, based on what you know, that going to do a high-tech startup, is the best path for you, go to the right city and do that. Move to Austin, move to San Francisco, move to New York and go make it happen. If you think that maybe you're the right person to go window wash, go do it. Go to Southern California and wash people's windows. They'll pay you money for it. I think those are all options. I think it's a disservice or maybe just not even a disservice, it's just not deeply thought through if you're like, "Oh, this is the only one way to live the right life. There's just so many different ways and it's up to you to decide what life you want first and not for me to say, "Oh, you should go start a plumbing company." I don't know, maybe that's for you, but who am I to tell you what to do? I'm not going to do that.

Nobody should.

Robert Leonard You had a really good Twitter thread the other week about unconventional advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. I want to say there were 20, 30 things on this thread. I basically, before this podcast, just pulled out one of my top 5, and I think you actually already addressed one of them, which was just to simply surround yourself with other actual entrepreneurs. So I do think that makes a really big mindset shift, but I'd love to chat about the other 4 while we're here and get your thoughts and maybe expand on them a little bit more. The first one I thought was really interesting was give yourself 18 months of cash before you actually go out and do that thing. I'd love to know why. Yeah.

So my experience there is when people— and I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, and being one— when you can set yourself into the right mindset to think long-term, it becomes immensely powerful. You can start to build things of even greater impact and meaning. If you have a shot clock that says 3 months from now, I got to have an idea, or I got to have a salary, or I'm going to not be able to pay my rent, that puts you in the entirely wrong mindset to be able to do this stuff. You start to make decisions that unfortunately optimize for the short term rather than the long term, which is what entrepreneurship is all about. So yeah, that's the idea. Like, go get it to where you're not worrying about if I'm going to make my rent 6 months from now, because you saved enough to get there. The kind of meta reason to do it is like, there's the old kind of Stanford marshmallow experiment. You guys know about that?

Okay.

So—

Yes. But for anyone listening, maybe you explain that.

Yeah. So Stanford marshmallow experiment, which has been debunked, but it's just kind of idea that there's one marshmallow and two marshmallow people. So the Stanford experiment, what they did is they put these little kids in, in a room, they put a video camera on them and they— an adult comes in and says, here's one marshmallow. If you can make it 10 minutes without eating the marshmallow, when I come back, I'll give you a second marshmallow. Right? So you become kind of a two-marshmallow or even a three-marshmallow thinker. The study's been kind of debunked, but like the idea is kind of the same, right? Entrepreneurs are people that are comfortable with sacrificing near-term pleasure for long-term gain. Right? And so that ends up kind of being this idea of the two-marshmallow thinkers. So if you also say like, "Okay, most people are not wired to do entrepreneurship," which is totally fine, but let's say 95% of the people in the world should just get a job and maybe 5% should do entrepreneurship, or maybe it's 99 to 1. A good test to know if you're part of the 1% or part of that 5%, let's say, of people that are wired to be entrepreneurs is, do you have enough self-discipline to save up 18 months' worth of savings to give yourself the runway to go build something? If you are, well, that's a good sign. You probably are a two-marshmallows thinker. If you're not able to do that, maybe somebody should give you a W-2 job, and there's nothing wrong with that. But this is a way that I advise people to do this. You can save yourself a lot of hassle in the long term if you just like, "Okay, well, do you have the discipline enough to do this? Okay. Well, if you don't, then you certainly don't have the discipline to go build a business over the next 5 years." Robert Leonard Yeah.

I think one of the things I recently wrote on one of my blogs, on this topic is I think when a lot of people quit their jobs, at least I'm thinking personally from some friends that I know who quit their jobs, they immediately will go out and say, "I'm now— Look, my number one goal is to go and build a very big company now. I just quit my job. I'm going to go and build this $10 million, $50 million, $100 million a year business." I think really where a lot of people mess that up is that their number one priority should be, "How can I go and stay unemployed as long as possible?" And whether that's with a longer run rate, a lower burn, something like that, finding ways to go and essentially pay for your lifestyle is the number one priority. And then you can use that extra time, that freedom, that peace of mind of saying, "Well, I don't have to go job hunting again in 3 months from now," to actually go and build that really big business that you want to build.

Yeah.

It always takes longer than you thought it would.

Absolutely.

That's the other nature of it. It's like, "Okay, well, at least now you know." you're going to have enough time and runway to solve some really interesting hard problems.

The next one I have here that I think is very counterintuitive to what a lot of people always talk about is around staying stable. So people often talk about the ups and downs and the roller coaster of entrepreneurship, but the biggest advice you had here was really just try to stay as stable as possible. Is that basically just saying from an emotional standpoint, or is that kind of back to the financial piece?

Yeah, I think it's both. Um, so, you know, number one is just like the, the best emotional way to approach entrepreneurship, which look, when something bad happens to you, it just feels the worst, right? Because it's like, not only, not only like, is it costing you money? Not only are you letting other people down, but like when something bad happens in a business, 99.9% of the time, it's your fault. Like you were just stupid. And I'm somebody who doesn't like to feel stupid. So like, that's just a great, like, it's just the perfect storm of like, what makes sense and what doesn't. So what I learned over a number of years is this roller coaster, you need to make it like a sloping road that you're going up and down. Never get too high, never get too low. I don't take the good things personally. I don't take the bad things personally. Just keep it all in perspective going on there. So that's kind of point number 1 of it is that's sustainable. I hear these people and I read a lot of books where it's just like, people leveraging themselves to the hilt, running themselves ragged until their health and their hair falls out and all that kind of stuff. And I'm just like, "You're doing it wrong. This is not how it's supposed to work. This is about running a marathon, not you killing yourself in order to prove to the world how cool you are in the hustle porn." And so that's why there's a number of pretty famous business books where I'm like, "Come on, guys. Have some emotional perspective on this." So That's point number 1. You're better off just picking not too high, not too low, and just staying in that band day after day. Then that's the second thing that most people get wrong about business is the media is designed to make you think that building a business and all this stuff is these big home run swings where you're like, Mark Zuckerberg's in there pitching you, and do you give up the $400,000 or not? That is sensationalized stuff. It doesn't actually happen that way. The way great businesses get built is just you showing up and getting like 0.25% better every single day, grinding that out. It's not these 50% mega deal type things. It's just like in and out. How do you make that financial statement 5% better? How do you coach that employee just a little bit better? How do you improve that hiring process? All of that ding, ding, ding, that's how it really happens. That's that grinding. It's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to be these big stair-step improvements. It's going to be just a little bit, and that ties into that emotional original idea as well.

See, uh, overnight success, it took 20 years story.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, like, even Zuckerberg's stuff, who was like— like, I look back at the timeline and it's like, you know, he's building stuff in his dorm room, and then like by the time the media was talking about him being like a huge success, which by all means the business has been amazing, it's more than anything I've ever accomplished in life, um, for good or bad. But, um, you know, that's something where it's like, you could— there were a lot of years of just kind of toiling away in like some crappy office that they paid a guy to paint for right? Some stuff. So there's a lot of that that happens. And you see that in everybody. Like Chris Powers, he did a picture of his first house that he flipped 7 or 8 years ago. So yeah, it's a long road to be an overnight success.

Robert Leonard I want to quickly touch on the point of those ups and downs. And I think what I've noticed, and I think Connor's probably in a similar vein in terms of when you look at it from a having like a partner there with you or someone else you're doing stuff definitely helps ease, you know, the lows aren't as lows, but the highs are still as high, right? It's still exciting when you have success, but it helps on the— when things go wrong, it's helpful to chat with someone and be like, all right, at least, at least I'm not the only one that has to deal with this massive issue. How do you kind of view partnerships in terms of, you know, you said you typically try to get 51%, but How do you look at that from what people bring to the table and making sure that those kind of go correctly in the long term?

Yeah, well, I think there's, there's a bunch of design principles. I wrote a thread about like how to do partnerships well, and there's like a bunch of, um, it's in my, on Twitter, in my, in my pinned, uh, pinned thread on my, my tweet. And there's a bunch of things that you can do right, but fundamentally they all kind of talk around these ideas of number one, like partnering with people who have complementary skill sets to you. So that takes a lot of introspection, like understand where you're good and where you're bad. Like what, what do you bring to the table and what do you need help with? Like, that's kind of number one. You know, number two is like, how do you think about aligning interests so everybody's rowing in the same direction, right? So many times you see these partnerships that get set up and I'm just like, oh, this is never going to work out. It's because, it's because like strategically, like one partner is, is getting equity and the other one's getting like interest payments and salary. Well, like, that's not going to work. Right? So, so those are kind of the two main themes as you think about putting together partnerships that are important from like a tactical standpoint. And then there's the bigger stuff as well. Like, do you like each other? Do you have shared values? Do you want to spend time working on something for the next number of decades with this person? Because, you know, the average business partnership and VC investment is going to last longer than the average marriage, right? Is this somebody you want to be spending time with? And the last thing I really advocate a lot is when people get involved in partnerships, and this is going to say the least romantic thing, but you actually want to start to plan out what the divorce is going to look like before you even get married. So actually, I've learned the hard way, you actually want to sit down and have an agreement with the people like, "Okay, if we're going to partner together on this, it may not work out. Let's just be realistic. We all change as people. I'm a different person at 47 than I was at 37, different at 27. You may be a be a different person 5 years from now, or something may happen to you. How are we going to pre-negotiate what the divorce is going to look like if you decide to leave or I decide to leave and what those scenarios are? The funny thing is if you're able to have that level of trust with somebody when you work into a partnership and be able to have that discussion about, "Hey, let's be real that this is business and this is what may happen," those are the relationships that end up being the strongest for me. The ones where people are scared to talk about the divorce, those are the ones that I'm always worried about.

And on the realm of business partners, you had one piece of advice that I really liked too, where it basically said, "Never take on business partners who don't have any skin in the game." Can you elaborate what you're talking about there?

Yeah. So skin in the game is this idea that they have a level of commitment. And so in startup world, there's the typical— I don't know how many pitch decks you guys have seen for startups recently, but typically there's the type of startup that comes through where it's like, One slide is founders and they're the people committed and they're working in the business. And the next slide is like this BS, like advisor slide. I don't know if you guys have seen that. It was like 15 advisors and there are all these people who got free equity in all these different places. Like as an investor, you know, in my previous career as a VC or even looking at anything now, like I'm not interested in— I totally segregate the people that have commitment versus the people that are just involved. And so that skin in the game is this idea like Okay, the best way you can prove to me that you're going to be a good partner and you're truly committed to making this thing work is if you have some skin in the game. Did you work for free for a period of time? Did you put some money in the deal? Did you lend credence? Did you invest in it? Those are all kind of things that you can see if somebody is truly committed to it or if they're just along for the free ride. The free ride to me just means so little. I want to work with missionaries and not mercenaries. Those free ride people, I don't need them. If you have a business partner who's not willing to commit anything or not willing to sacrifice or even can't even take a salary reduction in order to join the company, those are huge red flags to me because eventually things are going to get much tougher than they are at inception, and you're going to be potentially in a situation where you've got some dead weight on your cap table, and what are you going to do about it? It might kill the company, and it does all the time.

Robert Leonard Where do you think you grasp most of your knowledge from? I guess I'm assuming a ton of it's obviously from experience. Along the way, were you the kid or the guy reading all the business books as well and the online courses and diving into everything? And was that, you know, a significantly helpful aspect of where you are today? Do you think it was pretty much just hands-on experience, throw the books in the trash, they don't matter? How do you kind of view the two different areas of how you can become a better business person, a better person, etc.?

Yeah. I mean, I think the core of every great business person is a combination of curiosity and humility. Like, one of the things I focus on all the time is like, how do I make sure I continue to have a beginner's mind in approaching stuff? And you'll actually see it on my Twitter. Like, even some jackass comes on there and trolls me and says like, you're totally wrong. Even though I think I'm totally right. Like, I'll ask them, like, explain to me why I'm wrong, or like, tell me about this thing, or, oh, hey, there's this thing I don't know, because I see that as presenting a learning opportunity for me. And so then once you kind of have the right kind of mindset around that curiosity and beginner's mind, right? And you stay humble enough to keep changing your mind. That's where then you can then go and say, "Okay, well, here's how I can start to pick this stuff up." Right? So I think there's 3 real kind of ways that you do that. I try to do all of those things. So number 1 is reading, reading books. I've got a thread, a tweet thread coming out soon where I just talk through like, "Okay, here's the 20 books I would read if I was 25 and I wanted to learn how to be an entrepreneur." to know what I needed to know about this basic stuff. I've read almost all those books, right? Not the books on my list. I won't recommend books I haven't read, but you see what I'm saying? I've gone and read Drucker. I've went back and read Alfred P. Sloan's memos. I've gone back and those are the things, the Buffett letters, all that stuff is stuff that reading is great for me. I'm not a course guy just because I want to go fast when I want to go fast, and I want to go slow when I want to go slow, and courses take you at their their pace a lot of times. So reading is super important. That's number one. It'll get you part of the way there. Number two is finding the right mentors. That's why I talked about getting into an entrepreneurial community, whether it's working for an entrepreneur or being peers with them. I spent a lot of time hanging out at Geekdom, which is this entrepreneurial community, or the right coworking spaces, or going to the right cities and finding those right mentors across those people. So that's number two. And then number 3 is really finding the right mentors. I still have people that I'm like, "Oh, this person's really super duper smart." And how do I listen to what they're saying and try to internalize the learnings and use what they're saying as ways to probe my own thinking and revise it appropriately? The cool thing is Twitter's become an accelerator for me of all 3 of those things. I have mentors on Twitter where I'm like, "Oh, this guy's talking. I'm going to listen to what they have to say." Or, "This guy's talking. I'm going to do the exact opposite of what they have to say," which is the other type of mentors that are out there. So I think those are all there, but I don't mean to duck your question, but if you create in yourself this kind of insane curiosity about how to improve yourself all the time, and it's just like in a business, how do you get 0.1% better every single day? Look at all those vehicles and follow your curiosity to them and use those to solve the problems that you have. That's kind of what I do. I've been doing that for 25 years, right? There's pictures of me sitting on the beach. I was the kid that would show up with a business book, a financial modeling book to the beach while everybody's playing volleyball. And they'd be like, "Why are you doing that?" I'm like, "Because I'm really interested in it. It's really interesting." So yeah, that's the long-winded answer to your question is pursue it all.

Robert Leonard On the topic of improving yourself, it's probably pretty apparent at this point, but the majority of our audience is in their 20s. And so they're constantly in this state now where it's like you just finished college, the quote-unquote part of learning in your life is supposed to be done, when in reality, like, this is where I think a lot of people can kind of separate themselves and, and really like stand out. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people in their 20s making in regards towards trying to get ahead in their career or trying to become a better entrepreneur?

Yeah, no, totally dig it. Well, look, I think your 20s— 20s is really about optimizing for experience and getting exposed to a bunch of stuff. You know, the reality is from a scientific standpoint, your brain's not going to stop growing until you're 25. You've never really done much except maybe go to college or go to trade school or whatever you've done. Like, like, I think we do a huge disservice to people graduating college and expect them kind of to pick the rest of their life at that point. And you could see that in like how many miserable 55-year-old lawyers, you know, like hate their job because they wish they had chose something else, but now they're addicted to the paycheck, you know, 30 years later and they can't get paid for anything else. So, you know, in your 20s, which I reflected, I didn't realize I did this. Like, I went out and got exposed to like 15 different careers, like all this different stuff, everything from working at a government contractor to starting a business to working in marketing, engineering, working at a big company, working at a small company. Like, by the time I kind of sunsetted towards the later part of my 20s, like I had seen a lot of stuff and I could check off like, okay, which of these things made me happy and which of these things didn't make me happy? And the mistake I kind of see people do is They box themselves into a lifestyle in their 20s where they think they want to be an entrepreneur, but they're chasing the dollars rather than chasing the experience. How do you get exposed to a lot of stuff? Try a bunch of different things. Go say yes to a bunch of different things in your 20s is the key thing I would do, as opposed to how do I get $110,000 a year salary as opposed to a $95,000 a year salary? I see people making that kind of mistake all the time. When they should be thinking about, "How do I optimize for experience rather than how do I optimize for getting another $1,000 a month right now?" Super well said.

I think the last question, at least that I personally want to go and wrap up on and we can get into anything else that Gio might have, is it's just been pretty apparent in the last couple of months that just from following you and reading some of the stuff that you're talking about that you've definitely grown your audience quite a bit on Twitter. And it seems like maybe at least from my perspective, you've taken that element of your professional career a lot more seriously, like creating content, growing all of that. What have been some of the best parts in doing that? And what have been some of maybe the worst parts that you maybe didn't foresee when, when starting off and creating all that content?

Yeah, it's a super, super good question. Well, I mean, I do it because I'm playing the long game on Twitter. Like, I've just realized and seen it that the more I give in terms of content to the universe and help people be better, either through agreeing with me or thinking more about what they're doing and disagreeing with me, the more the universe pays me back. So that's why I'm like, "Okay, this is my approach to it. I'm not going to try to directly sell anything to anybody. I'm just going to give this stuff away and then understand that two-marshmallow idea. It's all going to come back to me in the future." I think the most disappointing thing, and this is just being totally honest with you, the number of times that I have written something that I'm like, "This is so good." Yeah, everyone's gonna love this. This is 10,000 likes, definitely 10,000 likes. And then it's like 100 likes and it's just like, ah, like, like, and I know that's wrong to be driven by like the like count, but like the low self-esteem part of me is just like, oh, nobody liked what I wrote. Like, how dare I? So, I mean, I've had some high highs where it's like, honey, look at this thread I wrote. Like, can you believe I'm getting not paid for all of these people to read it? Like, look at that, you know, it's going viral in Nigeria. You know, like those high, high moments are so good from the dopamine hit thing. But like, I'm ashamed to admit the low lows of like, oh, I can't believe I revised this 8 times. And it's— nobody likes it. So I would say that's kind of the most disappointing thing.

The amount of times Connor's probably heard me complain about putting effort into threads and like the stuff you think, or, you know, you put a lot of time and effort into writing, takes a couple hours, well put together.

Yeah.

Doesn't, doesn't hit. And then you spend 10 minutes, 5 minutes throwing something together. Um, and, and it goes viral.

But the difference too with Gio's examples versus Michael's examples is that you said, oh, I think it's gonna get 10,000 likes and it gets 100. Gio's like, I think this is gonna get 100 likes and it gets 1.

You gotta start somewhere. Come on.

So, so the cool meta thing about this is like most people, most people have finally got their head around kind of the Pareto principle, like 80/20, right? Like 20% of things give 80% of the benefit. But like most people, and it's, it's only in the last, last 5 to 7 years I've really internalized this well. Like most people do not understand the level of power law impact in their lives, right? So power law is this idea, like if you have If you have 100 things happen, one of those things is going to comprise 99% of the outcome. It's like this Pareto principle, the 80/20 principle, but just on steroids. You see it in VC funds. You see it in life decisions. Then Twitter is a place that teaches you this. If you go look at— I'm at 72,000 followers, 72,157 followers today, not that anybody's counting. Um, like probably 80% of those are like from 4 threads, 4 tweets.

I was gonna say, it's funny you say that cuz yeah, I'm, I'm a fraction of what you're at. I think probably like 13,000 or something like that. Um, but 2 tweets that I made that were just like totally random one-off, like I'm driving in a car, oh, I see something and randomly tweet it, uh, that were like thoughtless have probably driven 50% of that. Um, so it's, it's very weird.

Yeah.

Over time it's a consistency thing. But the whole point of it is the consistency builds up those reps and you don't know where the grand slam is going to come from, but if you're consistent with it, it comes from somewhere. Yeah.

Well, the, the story I like to tell people is if you need to be convinced that, you know, life is a hits-based business, go down to your local Barnes Noble or your local music store, go get the unabridged Beatles songbook. Right. And it's all of their songs put into a book and it's like, it's like 2 inches thick, right? Hundreds of songs. You open it up and you're like, Man, John and Paul, so those two guys that were the main songwriters for the Beatles, wrote a lot of stuff to get one Hey Jude. It's something that gets really dangerous as a creator is once you get that taste of a hit and a taste of excellence, whether it's creating a business or creating a thread or creating a video or a song or anything, you start to get scared because you think that the world is expecting you to keep producing that one level of quality. But in reality, you got to just keep pushing forward. And going from there. To some extent, you see that in why so many people create one business, but then never manage to create a second one. Their second startups never aren't hits, but a few people manage to. I think that mindset of, "Oh, I'm still just the same person I was before, slightly smarter, and luck is going to play a big part of this, and I just got to be patient and keep being prolific." That's the mindset you got to have. Otherwise, you just scare yourself out of trying stuff and you never get hits.

I think to your point before about enjoying reading some of those books on the beach, I think there's a superpower for people that I think probably fits most of us as well in terms of like genuinely enjoying trying to get those hits and coming up with ideas and just doing it, seeing if it works. And if it doesn't, it doesn't matter because most of it doesn't work. But every once in a while you find, yeah, you find something that, that clicks. And in the back of my mind, it's always, you know, when when do you know when to, when do you know when to kind of cut it, right? Like, okay, you came up with one hit. I guess it'd be interesting from an artist standpoint, how long do you keep trying to go for that next song? I don't know if there's an answer there, but it's an interesting dilemma.

There's a cool video I shared on Twitter and it only got like 3 likes, so it must have been really good anyway. But it's It was Andre 3000. You guys know Andre 3000 from OutKast? Maybe. By the way, I'm at the stage in life where I'm like, "Oh, have you guys seen The Big Lebowski?" And I say that to millennials and they're like, "What is wrong with you?" I was in a meeting yesterday, by the way, at 47, and they asked us to define what was the seminal song for Gen X. What do you guys think it was, by the way? Do you have a guess?

For Gen X?

Yeah. So Gen X is people that are born between '65 and '80, so we're 37 to 52. What do you think is the seminal song, like the most important emblematic song for our generation?

Um, I, I, I would have watched it on MTV on cable.

So anyway, your faces is amazing.

I'm, uh, yeah, I'm thinking like something Green Day or something like that.

By the way, that's what the millennials said. They said, "Time of your life." I was like, "That is the worst song ever." Maybe throw in like an Eminem song or something. No, it's—

Eminem song? Definitely not Eminem.

No. Okay. It's grunge. I'll give you a hint.

Okay. Yeah. That doesn't help.

Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Ah, okay. Okay.

Yeah.

Anyway, I got us off topic, but yeah. So I'm at this age where I use cultural references and millennials look at me like, "What is wrong with you, old man?

Of course we haven't seen The Big Lebowski." Grow up.

For what it's worth, I've seen The Big Lebowski. Good movie. 10 out of 10.

Yeah, there's a beverage here, man.

The dude. Cool. Michael, this was an awesome episode. I personally, I got all my stuff answered. Do you have anything else you want to kind of run through?

I have way more I want to run through, but we should probably call it.

Okay. I did that bad, huh? No, no.

In terms of, I feel like I could keep going on for hours.

I love these conversations.

And so So I think we probably found a pretty good stopping point.

Robert Leonard Well, Michael, if people want to go and follow you and everything that you're working on, the businesses that you're building, where can they go and check you out?

Michael Girdley Yeah. Follow me on Twitter @Girdley. And then in the next couple months, I'm going to be hiring another round of associates. So those are— we talked about this kind of gulf where you graduate college, you maybe work for a couple years, then you want to be an entrepreneur, but you don't know how. So I hire people to come work with me, pay them a salary, and they work on my projects and also new projects. If you follow me on Twitter, I'm going to post about those soon. But yeah, if you know people that are feeling that gap and want to accelerate that learning process, take a look out, and you can do that by following me on Twitter @Girdley.

Awesome.

Well, we'll link to everything below in the show notes so people can check you out. Thank you again for coming on.

Right on.