Native Founder Tells ALL: $100M Portfolio, Investment Strategy & Business Ideas

I texted your brother. I said, "Hey, I'm about to record with your brother," and he goes, "He got progressively more truthful." He goes, "Tell him I said hi." Then he goes, "Tell him I said honor the Ali name." Then he goes, "And tell him to stop." That was his his advice. So yeah, I've delivered the message.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road.

Let's travel now.

All right. We have, um, Moiz Ali here. You've been on the pod before. Uh, people know you because you created Native deodorant, which is sold everywhere I look in Target, online, in my wife's bathroom. It's there everywhere. So congrats. You built that. You bootstrapped that business yourself, uh, literally like off of a kitchen table to $100 million exit to Procter Gamble. You spent a couple of years there. You currently, uh, you invest in a bunch of e-commerce things and non-e-commerce things. You, Have a podcast called Limited Supply, which is great. And then you, um, you also do— you, you and your brother are sort of like business sharks. And so, uh, you know, if I just say, hey, there's like a, there's a hot dog stand going out of business over here, you'd be like, let me get my jacket. Let's go. Uh, you own real estate, you own a bunch of random things. And so always fun to have you on, man. Uh, thanks for coming.

Well, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.

Is that the intro you want, by the way? Or do you feel like I let— I didn't do you justice in one angle?

No, that sounds like more justice than I deserve.

Well, you're also good at one-liners. You have a lot of one-liners. You're very good with language. You've said a few things. You've said, my 2 favorite words in the English language, distressed asset. And then one time we were talking to this person, it was you and me and this person, and they were explaining what they do. And it was like a supplement company and how great it was going to be and how they're raising all this money. And she or them or he, whatever, walked out the room. And you said, that person's business is one Google away from me ruining it.

Yeah.

You have a couple other classics. I read an interview with you where it's where you said, you said, I forgot how you phrased it, but you go, I was put on earth to do one thing, raise earnings per share.

Earnings per share.

Yeah.

That wasn't me that said that, actually. It was the founder of some other company. I forgot what it was. And it was such a great quote. I loved it. So I stole that quote.

Yeah. You're like, I killed him and now it's mine.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

The other one that I attribute to you, I didn't, I wasn't there for this story, but I've told this story to like hundreds of young entrepreneurs and they get a kick out of every time, which is, I was like, yeah, Moiz started Native Deodorant. It's super successful now. And when he first had the idea, he told people, I'm going to create a natural deodorant brand. They're like, Moiz, like, do you know anything about deodorant? Do you wear deodorant, Moiz? What's going on? What are you talking about? You're going to create a deodorant company. And you said, yeah, I know nothing about deodorant today, but in 6 months I'll know everything there is to know about deodorant. And that—

That's right.

That attitude to me is like, that's at the core of what we do on this podcast. So I don't even know if that's a real story, by the way, but I'm going to keep telling it.

That's a real story. I remember I was in San Francisco. I was with one of my law school classmates, and it was her boyfriend at the time, now her husband. who told me that. And he's like, you know, what the hell are you doing here? He worked at Pinterest and he's like, what the hell are you doing starting a deodorant business? I've never heard anybody do something so ludicrous. And I still remember the bar we were sitting at where it happened.

All right, so let's do a little segment that I'm going to call Story Time with Moiz Ali. So, okay, cue the music. Okay, so I'm going to ask you a question. I want you to give me your answer. Moiz, what is the What is the worst way that you've ever made money?

Yeah, this is a great story I think we don't tell enough, or my brother and I don't tell enough, which is when we were growing up, we owned gas stations. And this is really a family way we made money and not my particular way. Anyway, we owned a bunch of gas stations and we would cash checks for people as a service. So if you brought in a check, Sean, and you're like, hey, look, this is my payroll check. It's $200 for this week or $2,000 this week. We would charge you a percentage of that check and give you cash for it, and we would take the check and deposit it into the bank. And by the end of our gas station careers, we were doing this at massive scale. Like, one of our stores would cash $250,000 worth of checks on any given Friday. Like, a quarter million dollars of cash was going through our hands. We'd have Wells Fargo coming over and giving us cash, and we'd be giving it— we had these crazy things. A bus full of Hispanic immigrants who were roofers would come to our store. The door would open, and it felt like 40 immigrants just came out to cash their checks with us. But a long time ago, what happened early on in our check cashing careers was this guy named FM Porter who came in with a check for his business, and the check was like $2,000, and we charged a lot because— I don't remember why we charged a lot, but We gave him like $1,900. We charged 5% of the check, and we were going to deposit the check and earn $2,000. And traditionally what happens is if you're cashing a check, this doesn't happen so much anymore, but it used to happen 15 years ago, you'd endorse the back of it and you'd deposit it at the bank, right? So he endorsed the back of it. We gave him the $1,900, we deposited it, and it bounced. And we're like, what the fuck? This was a ton of money for us. We were poor immigrants. We were working at this gas station. Probably in 1997, earning $40,000 a year with all 5 of us working at the time.

How old were you?

I was probably like 13 at the time, 12 or 13 at the time. And like, this was going on.

And so there's just— I just imagine like 13-year-old Moiz, like pacing, smoking cigars, be like, what the fuck, man? Like, is that what it looked like? I mean, just like, I imagine you being the exact same way as you are now when you were 12.

Well, yeah, I feel like I was the same way, but I didn't have as much confidence, so I couldn't take the cigar. I couldn't order people around. But anyway, the check bounced and we all freaked out. We tracked down this guy and we're like, what the fuck? We knocked on his door. I forgot where he lived. He lived in a small house, obviously. It was just the local community. We knocked on his door and we're like, what the fuck, FM Porter? This check just cashed. We're going to kill you. We're going to call the cops. We don't know what to do. We're broke now. Give us our money. He was like, relax, guys. The check was made out to his business instead of him. And so it took like 45 days to figure out all the rigmarole to get the check made out to him instead of to his business. And then we cashed it and we deposited the money. And I remember it went through the second time. We made $100 on 45 days of possibly losing $2,000. And I remember it went through and I told my brother, hey, it went through. And he's like, that was the easiest $100 we've ever made. And I remember it was like the worst $100 we've ever made. It was just cashing checks that were going bad and constantly being afraid that they were— this was early on in our career. We weren't sure if we should do this as a service for our business. It ended up being super profitable. When you cash $250,000 of checks on a Friday, you're going to make $2,500 to $3,500 on that just for your business on that day alone. But I remember early on we were taking all these risks and we were like, what the fuck just happened? We think that We're not going to be able to pay our rent for the apartment that my family lives in.

That's insane.

Were you just going back to math class after your shift? Were you going after school? How did you do this?

Oh, to the gas station, you mean?

Yeah, because you're like 13 years old.

Yeah, yeah. We'd go on the weekends. When I turned 16, I could drive, and I would go after class or on the weekends. I wouldn't go every day, Even when I was 16 years old, but I'd probably go at least one weekend or maybe both weekends of the, uh, uh, when I started having a car, certainly.

We're in the story, we're in the story, uh, part of the show. So let me ask you one thing that I don't know is true, but I want you to confirm it. So right by our office, the one that you and I shared, there was a cafe called Native Coffee. I think it was, it was the Native Cafe.

Native Juice. Native Juice.

Native Juice. It had the same color and the same logo as Native deodorant. Did you? And it was right by the BART stop, I believe. So if I'm imagining what happened, you went on, you were on BART and you were just walking around SoMa and you saw it and you go, there it is. That's mine now. Is that true or false?

That's false.

That's false. No, it's not.

It's not false.

Okay. This story, we got to put the picture up because they're identical. It's an identical—

yes. Like, if you're on your phone right now, to the listener, search Native Juice San Francisco. I actually think they changed their branding in the last 3 years. But you could still find old logos on their Yelp page.

Yeah.

So the quick—

it's a little funnier. Like, it was actually a block away from where I lived, so I'd walk by it all the time. But, you know, the color— I'm not sure if the color was the same. I know the font was the same. We actually didn't steal the font from them, although I readily admit we did steal the font. We stole the font of our website from Harry's. So if you look at Harry's font, it's the exact same font as ours. And if you look at the colors of our site, it was, and I'm not sure if it still is, the exact same colors that Casper had. So when I was launching Native, it took me about 3 days to do the whole website. And I was just like, okay, you know what I'm not going to do is hire a logo designer and spend a fortune building a logo and spending a lot of money on branding. I'm going to steal the logo that Harry's has, which is just their name written out in a font. I'm going to do the same thing. I can't steal their colors as well because that would be too Too blatant, so I'm just going to steal the colors of another website, which was Casper at the time because they were doing really well. And so that's how the that's how the font and the colors came together to be what Native is today. But I would walk by that store all the time, and like believe it or not, right next to Native Juice Co. is the post office, and I was packing all of the deodorants in my own apartment for the first six months or a year of the business. And so I would walk by Native Juice Co. with these bags of like you know. filled with boxes of deodorants. And I'd go to the post office and I'd hand them to the post office and they were like, is this from Nextdoor? Is this like the juice company? You guys are, it says Native on the packaging. And I was like, this is not the same Native. It's a different one. And then what would happen is like, you know, 2 and a half years into the business, Native Juice Co. came, like the woman who started that business came to our office and she's like, I'm getting so many fucking phone calls for your business for customer service issues. Where's my package? All this shit. People are just Googling Native San Francisco. We didn't have a phone number. I think Native still doesn't have a phone number posted. So she would be like, I'm getting 40 phone calls a day for you. This has got to stop. You got to figure out a way to stop this. And we're like, we can't. We don't know what to do. People just Google Native San Francisco and your name comes up. We're not saying call you. And so she came in several times. And then I told the doorman of the building, I was like, don't let her up any longer. And that seemed to put an end to it.

If she has juice, accept it, but don't let her.

Yeah, that's right.

All right.

But then the other part is we would still order juice from her to our office all the time. But I was like, I'm not sure if they like this or not.

Yeah, definitely. And you definitely drank a lot of her spit, I have to imagine.

Yeah, that's probably true too.

Yeah.

But the reality is we like— the logo didn't come from Native Juice Co. It came from Harry's.

She just happened to also copy the Harry's logo. That's what happened. She might've done the same thing.

That's right. Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. So you said you had some ideas for us. What business ideas do you have on your brain right now?

Okay. I've thought about a lot of these ideas for a while. I think the first idea that someone should start, if I were starting a business today and really excited about it, I would start with a stock market for all residential real estate. I would say, okay, I'm going to start buying residential real estate and selling shares of that real estate that's rented out. So I'd buy rental homes and I would sell shares of that real estate, sort of like a traditional LP would invest, but I'd make a really liquid market on my site. So I'd say, you know what, rents have gone up. You paid $10,000. You're waiting for us to sell this home. It'll be like, you know, if you buy an apartment building today, if you're an LP in an apartment building, you're waiting for the GP to sell the apartment building before you get, you can realize all of your cash back. You might be getting a steady stream of income every quarter, but when the GP sells the apartment building, that's when you get most of your money back. I'd just create a liquid market for all of these things, and I would slowly start buying every single house in a neighborhood. And I would say, you can only buy and sell shares of this house on this platform. And then what I would do is I would empower local entrepreneurs to buy and sell houses on the platform themselves too. I'd say, okay, you know what? Sean is going to buy a house. He lives in this neighborhood in California. He can buy a house, put it on this platform, raise money, and buy and sell, and other people can buy and sell shares of this house. through this platform. And then Sean will get reviews just like on Amazon. And if he does a really good job, people will give him 5-star reviews because they're getting a lot of money from him. If he does a really shitty job, people will give him 1-star reviews because he's doing a really shitty job. And then when you go to underwrite new deals, people will be like, Sean is trustworthy, Sean is not trustworthy. And I think people have tried this in the past with things like RealtyShares and a bunch of other shitty models of this. And I think they've done a terrible job, in part because they're not doing a good job underwriting. In part, they're betting on commercial properties, and in part because they're not creating a liquid market for it. And so I think that when I think of the biggest idea possible, I think that this idea could realistically own— 200 years from now, this business should own the majority of real estate in the United States.

So let's break that down. So you said the reason that the current buy a fraction of real estate or buy shares in real estate, which there's several, or crowdfunding for real estate, there's like Fundrise, RealtyShares. You're saying the problems that they have is, uh, let's take them one by one. So you said they're focused on commercial. Why is residential better than commercial for this?

Uh, way easier in terms of steady income streams. So like, um, if you build— if let's say you buy a building that Starbucks is using and has a 5-year lease on, when Starbucks leaves that building, it's unclear who will be a good fit for that building. Like, it's not easy to rent that thing out. While if it's a house, everyone in the world needs a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in a neighborhood. And so it's a lot easier to re-let properties that are residential as opposed to commercial.

I invested in the company somewhat in the space. It was called Dorsey. It was— it didn't work out. But the guy who started it previously started StayAlfred, which I don't know if you remember that one or not, but basically you could— it was like an— it was an auction website for homes. And they had 2 issues. One, it Which is, I'm shocked by this, but people just didn't want to buy a home online. It was just like a big, it was a, it's a big thing that they couldn't figure out how to address. Uh, I think someone will figure it out. But the second thing was negotiating the whole broker industry, which like, it seems like the broker industry, I know there was just like a big settlement like 5 days ago. The broker industry has like, has this industry by the balls, it seems. Uh, it's real. It seems really challenging.

Yeah. And it wasn't a settlement. It was a jury verdict of $2 billion that went against the National Association of Realtors. Like, yeah. Yeah. And so, like, yes, I think the broker industry is broken, but the, like, the liquidity market for real estate investing is huge. And when you think about it, like, you know, all these retail investors are now like, let me invest in a startup. You know how crazy it is for you to invest in, like, Native when it's early on? Like, I have no fucking idea what I'm doing. I don't know if I'm going to get hit by a bus tomorrow. I might just be like, fuck it. You know what? Like, I'm dating this crazy girl and she wants to go to Hawaii for 3 months. Fuck this. This is going to be way This is going to be way more fun than running a business for the next 3 months. So investing in, like, if you can invest in startups, what, like, you know, you know, it's way safer than investing in a startup, investing in real estate down your street where you're like, I know who's going to rent this house. I like, you know, I can monitor it. I can drive by it. It's a tangible piece of property. It's like, you know, if this guy doesn't pay rent, somebody else will. It's not going anywhere. It's way safer. And I think when I think of retail investors, I think retail investors would be way more excited about investing in the local community they live in. And being like, yeah, I own a share of this house, than they do being like, I invested in this Pakistani guy who really likes— and he seems not to be that reliable.

And so you, you have like, uh, this idea. Why do you think that the person who's buying these rental properties wants to do this? Just because they want the liquidity so they can go buy more properties? Uh, like, what, what happens here? And how much of the property you think would go on the platform versus they own? You know, like, would they In an IPO, they issue 20% of their stock or whatever to the public. What would it be for the house?

Yeah, I think it's really the GP can be like, look, I want to— the guy who's underwriting the deal and sponsoring the deal for better or for worse could be like, look, I'm going to put in— this house costs $200,000. I'm going to put in $50,000 of my own money, or I'm going to put in $20,000 of my own money. And in that same way that other— right now, if you invest in a much larger— if you invest in a private equity fund, One of the common questions you'll ask is the guys who are running the private equity fund, how much of their own money is at risk? Because that means that they care and believe in their private equity fund. Similarly, here it could be the same question. How much of your wealth or how much investment are you putting in this real estate when you purchase it? And the reason that the sponsors would want to do this is several-fold. One is, yeah, they want to create a liquid market. They want to raise money, right? They want to raise money from retail investors, and it's really hard to raise money from retail investors. 2 is they can buy and sell shares later on for themselves as well. They could be like, you know what? I bought $40,000 worth of this house. 5 years later, that $40,000 is worth $80,000. I want some cash off the table, but I still want some liquidity. I'm going to sell $40,000 of shares in this house and keep some money invested as well. So I think for the same reason that people want to invest in the stock market or sponsors invest in their own deals, sponsors in this would invest as well.

So Moiz, I'm gonna pitch you 3 other real estate ideas in rapid succession. And I want you to tell me your favorite to your least favorite.

Okay.

All right. Uh, the first one is this company I didn't invest in, but I regre— I regre— I don't know how it's doing. I haven't talked to the guy in a while, but I re— I regret not investing cuz I, I thought it was a good idea. It's called Home Options. So what he's doing is this guy goes to, uh, Sam. Sam owns a house. He goes to Sam and says, Sam, I know you're not trying to sell the house right now. But here's the deal. Um, I'll give you $1,200 right now. And all I ask for is that when you do decide to sell, um, you let me, you know, I own the option to be the broker on the house. So like, you know, I'll be your agent. And, uh, and actually what I do is I'm not myself the agent, but I partner with top agents in your network and they don't know when you're gonna sell your house and they don't wanna keep having to knock on your door and bother you. So I'll give you cash today so that they can be your broker, you know, and one of these top agents gets the right to be your broker. 20 years from now, whenever you sell. And they're just buying up options, the right to sell these homes. Because a home, when you sell, you know, the brokers take, let's just say, let's just say the sell side's going to take 3%. You know, they're, they're going to, let's say the average is $15,000 or something for that, for that sale. They're willing to buy that option today for $1,000. And so that's idea number 1, home options, going through and buying that. Uh, all right. Idea number 2 is—

Yep. I invested in it.

Oh no.

Fuck.

The only thing that could have made me feel worse about not investing in this is that Sam invested in this. Is it doing well? Because I, I, every like 3 months I think about this business. I think that's gotta kill.

I went through my email and I haven't gotten an update from them in like a while. So that's not a good sign. Yeah.

Which unfortunately means it's probably not, or it's absolutely crushing it. One of the two. I used to think that's always a bad sign, but then I started hanging out with Moiz's brother and he never— he's like, investor update? Why would I? I'm going to kill it in this business. Why should I tell you about how it's going? I need to know this.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Are you that way too, Moiz? Do you provide updates regularly?

Yeah.

One of our investors was this guy named Jeff Hollander from Seventh Generation. And he's like, you know what would be nice is a monthly or quarterly investment update. And I was like, Here's your money back. You and I will never chat until I call you. And if you're not okay with that, here's your money back. Nothing interests her anymore. Yeah, I was like, I couldn't care. I will never send you one piece of information about this business unless I want to, unless I need something from you.

But don't you think it's good hygiene to just kind of, even for your own thoughts, to be like, how are we doing? Let me take a step back here for a second and just write down kind of For my own clarity of thought, or no?

I think that is good hygiene, but I don't think you necessarily have to share that with other people, especially with other people. I think the 3 of us are probably investors in similar businesses. And oftentimes I walk around and people are like, here are the numbers of this other business. And I'm like, somebody has leaked it to them. And I try and be really careful as an investor to never leak information because I know I would never want my information leaked. But that information gets around the street and I've seen so many startups launch because they're like, I heard this guy was doing really well, so I should just do the same thing. How many competitors of Athletic Greens exist? Because everyone's like, yeah, we know Athletic Greens is doing really well.

What are the other 2, Sean?

All right, second idea. This is your brother's idea, actually. I don't know if he told you this one. Pipe for real estate. So I think I could share this now because he's talked about this like a year ago and didn't end up doing it. Pipe for real estate. The idea here is, uh, you're a landlord.

Yeah.

You're gonna collect rent every month. Uh, Pipe came through and was like, hey, let me turn those, uh, monthly checks into one annual check and I'll take an 8% fee off the top. So let's say you were gonna get $100 grand of rent from this property. Um, I'll give you $92,000 today. I get to keep the $100,000. Um, and you get, you get $92,000 that you can go invest in your next property. You get, or, or put into tenant improvements that will let you raise rents or something like that. Here's cash flow today upfront. So Pipe for real estate. Real estate's a huge market. Why, why do landlords have to wait to collect the check? No more waiting is our slogan.

All right.

Now, idea number 3, final idea. I did invest in this one. So Steady Capital. So steady.capital is their URL. So they were like, hey, look, everybody knows that most, most millionaires build their wealth through real estate. That's, that is a Time-tested, you know, approach to wealth building. Most people actually even want to, they would love to own a rental property and be getting a rent check every month. But most people don't know, don't trust themselves to find a property, you know, vet it, buy it, manage it, all of that. And so they were like, we'll do a Robinhood for real estate type of thing where you just decide how much monthly you want to put into real estate. You say like, I'm, I'm willing to put away $500 a month into real estate. And they basically let you take the $500. They'll put it into a real estate project that they are kind of vetting, uh, from like proven, uh, operators. And then they, every month they'll say, hey, here's an, you know, you got $112 of, you know, rental income from your property this month.

Yeah.

Uh, or you, you now own, you know, pieces of these 6 properties in 6 different markets and you're making $600 a month of rental income. Like I, I put $5,000 into one deal and I just get this check every month now. And it's actually, The first real estate that I've done that I didn't own because otherwise it just stayed on my to-do list. All right. So those are the 3 ideas. Home Options, Pipe for Real Estate, and Robinhood for Real Estate. Yeah. Steady Capital. Um, gimme, rank them from your most favorite to your least favorite.

Go ahead.

Okay. I, I, I wasn't like it. I was expecting, uh, Home Options would be number 3 when you told me about it, but in fact it's number 1. Uh, Steady Capital and then Pipe for Real Estate. And I'll tell you why. Pipe for real estate exists and it's just called a cash-out refi. Like, you know, that already exists where you're like, look, I'm getting real, you know, I'm getting money from these landlords, from these tenants, and I can take cash off the— out of the property. Like, you know what's not going to happen for Pipe for real estate is someone's going to come in and be like, wow, you're 100% levered up with this debt. Let me also give you more cash. You're already paying for the debt. You know, you're already levered. So I think pipe for real estate exists. And I think Mark Lore started this company and he just raised $350 million. Did you guys read this thing? I'm not entirely sure what it is, but it appears to be like a restaurant delivery business. And so I feel like, I'm not sure if this is the case, but it seems like that's sort of like a startup branding to something that kind of exists in this space. I feel like pipe for real estate is the same.

Mark bought Blue Apron.

Oh, he bought Blue Apron. I knew they sold for $102 million. I didn't know he was the cash behind it.

Yeah, he bought it. Yeah. So he is, I think you're, you've nailed it. That sounds like that's what he's doing, but go ahead.

Yeah. Home options is, look, I think the hard part about home options is right now, particularly in the last week, right now we don't know what realtor commissions are going to look like in the future. And you also just don't know how long an option this is. Is the $1,200 in the ground today for 20 years or 30 years? That's a really long period of time.

For instance, I think what he's doing is he's just reselling it right away, or at least that's what I would do is I would buy the option, I would bundle them up, and I would go sell them to the brokerage tomorrow and just say, hey, you can hold these. And I don't know if the economics all work. I don't know if the brokers are willing to do things like that, but I think that's the idea.

Yeah, I like it. It's innovative and different and unclear what'll happen, but you could revolutionize an industry that has been the same for the last 150 years.

Goddamn it. Sam's going to be a part of that revolution.

It could also be that 6% drops down to 2% in the next 3 months because the National Association of Realtors is almost certainly bankrupt at this point.

What was the settlement and what's changing about this broker situation?

Yeah, it wasn't a settlement. It was $2 billion. I'm not entirely sure what it was. It was price fixing across realtors, basically saying, hey, you can't be on MLS unless you agree to pay everyone a 6% or 5% brokerage. Something to that effect. I haven't gotten into the details of it, but like the judgment was $2 billion. And I read this Wall Street Journal article where once the judgment was had, plaintiffs' firms, you know, filed lawsuits against the National Association of Realtors in every single state. And they're like, we think that we'll get $40 billion in judgments as a result of this, which will certainly bankrupt that organization.

Can you talk a little bit about this Founders Card thing? Because I know you've been tweeting about that for like 2 years now, and I'm— and that actually surprised me that you were interested in it.

I feel like there's a club that I'm a part of, like a Founder's Card sort of thing that I'm a part of that I can't talk about the name of it because they would ask me not to. But as a result of paying my $100 a month monthly membership fee, I get a discount that's worth $800 a month to myself.

What do you get a discount for?

Just SaaS software that I really want that I have to pay for.

But do you have to be a new— a lot of those cards, you have to be a new customer.

No, this one you don't.

Yeah.

Wow. You just pay $100 a month and they're like, here's discounts to, let's say, Mailchimp and let's say Shopify and all these other SaaS platforms that an e-commerce company might want to be a part of or might want discounts to. And so then you go and say, great, I paid $100, I get all these discounts, and I'm going to go use those discounts for my business. And so you're never going to cancel that $100 a month subscription because that $100 is actually saving you $1,000 a month. And I don't understand why there aren't more of these for smaller niche industries. And I think e-commerce is a great one. You know what P&G does? They go to Snapchat and Pinterest and Facebook and they say, look, we're going to spend $250 million across our portfolio on your platform, but we need a discount because we're spending so much money. And they get that discount. They get it from Facebook for sure, because I've seen it. I'm pretty sure Pinterest and I'm pretty sure Snapchat, but I guarantee you they get a Facebook discount for Facebook because I've seen it. I, you know, I saw it when I was running Native as a part of P&G. And so I'm not sure why smaller businesses don't organize and say, look, we're spending this much. Let us also try and negotiate discounts with platforms. Why don't we all negotiate a discount with Yotpo or with Okendo or with Postscript or with Klaviyo and say, look, there's going to be 400 of us together. A lot of us are going to use this software, but we need a big discount. That's a lifetime, that's like a lifetime monthly recurring discount.

And so, sorry, you have one of these cards? This is not an idea. You're saying you have one of these cards, but you're saying, uh, it's like a secret? Like you don't, uh, they don't, they don't want more people to have the card or what?

Correct. They would not want me to talk about who they are. But yes, as a result, I get discounts to software that I wouldn't get otherwise. And it costs me $100 or $140 a month.

Why don't they want to talk about it?

Yeah, great question. I'm not entirely sure, but I'm sure they would tell me not to talk about it. Do you think they'd want $100 a month?

Well, like there's— yeah. Wouldn't they want more A Spidey, some Spidey sense is going off here. Uh, you know, like what's going on? Why? I mean, is this a shady thing?

Sam, this was, this was your idea. Um, like, uh, you, uh, not your idea originally, but like Sam told me, I mean, I don't know if 7 years ago when you were running The Hustle, you were like, I'm trying to think of a new product and you had 3 ideas. And I remember one of them was basically Trends, which is the thing you ended up launching. Another one was, uh, this idea for the Founders Club card or whatever, which was, I think you were comparing it to the AARP. You're like AARP for kind of like millennials or—

Yeah. And I can talk about the AARP in a second, but yeah.

That was, uh, the second one. What was the third one? You had, you had one more. I don't remember that third one, but, and I thought the card was the best idea. I was like, oh, you should for sure do this card if I had this on. And in fact, I actually, now I'm just going to do the card off of the MFM audience. Cause I'm like, this is way better and it's a win-win.

Uh, I, I might be a few months ahead of you.

Why didn't you do that card?

The reason why I didn't was I couldn't find, uh, I couldn't figure out entirely how to differentiate from all the other offerings that already existed. Um, it was also quite challenging to get in with some of the brands in order to negotiate bulk deals. The argument being, well, you know, these companies already spend with us. Why am I going to give them a discount? And I couldn't come up with like the perfect rebuttal for that. And that like, That is where I was trying to figure out how to make it happen.

And what is the rebuttal to that?

The rebuttal for that is your competitors are offering it, right? So you basically have to go get the number 2 of every space and say, hey, we can move you some customers if you make this attractive. And then you go back to number 1, you say, hey, number 2's offering this and their people are moving. You should match it.

Yeah. And like new people who get in are going to use number 2 instead of number 1 because they get the discount.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And we, we continue to have new customers and we're just gonna keep telling them, yeah, go with this company 'cause they offer, you know, a benefit.

Yeah.

And the reason why I was interested in it is AARP. So AARP, uh, I actually don't know what it stands for, but it's a club for people above 60 or 50, I think 50.

American Association of Retired Persons.

Yeah. Is this— so retired people. So, so I guess it's 60. Um, they do about $1.5 to $2 billion a year in sales and they have millions and millions and millions and millions of members. The way they make business revenue is I think they only charge about $100 a year to be a member. And like most everyone, when you turn 60, you get an invitation in your mail. And what you do is you get discounted health insurance and they make, another side of their business is making money. It's basically an affiliate fee. So I think they partnered with UnitedHealth and they have the UnitedHealth AARP plan, which is discounted plan, but also a plan specifically for whatever, you know, 60-plus people have. Uh, and they are, I think, one of the largest lobbying groups in America. It's a huge lobbying group. They, they, they basically, uh, like kind of shape the government in, in some regard. And so I thought that was super fascinating. It's a really fascinating company that's existed for decades and isn't going to go away anytime soon.

And there's already other businesses doing this. Like, think about Y Combinator. When you get into Y Combinator, I think they're like, you get, you know, $250,000 of AWS credits. You get a bunch of like Stripe processing charges for free. And those businesses are like, you're going to grow, we're going to make money at the end. But it also makes, when Y Combinator is selling you on giving you $120,000 for 7%, they're also like, here are the other benefits that you get in this business.

Right. So anyway, I'm on board with this. Do you want to do one more? Yeah.

What's the other idea? You had something around Shopify for high-end or something for high-end DTC. What was that idea?

Yeah, sure. Shopify is fantastic. I'm a big shareholder in Shopify. I love them. I built my career on e-commerce. The reality is it's wonderful for businesses going from $0 to $50 million. It's awful for businesses who are— it's not awful, but it's not good for businesses north of $100 million that are ready to spend a lot more on improving their conversion rate on a custom checkout page. And if the Shopify people were here, if the Shopify people were on this podcast with me, they'd say, that's crazy. We have big businesses like Figs and Allbirds and a lot of other big businesses on it. But the reality is there's so many lack— like, you can't customize so much and it's so difficult, particularly on the checkout page, that I think there is room for somebody to come in and say, I'm going to build my own Shopify. I'm going to build Shopify, but for businesses doing north of $100 million. And there's a lot of businesses doing north of $100 million that have left Shopify, you know, Away Travel, Ritual Vitamins, because they're like, look, we've outgrown this platform.

Where did they go?

Probably like usually a custom-built stack, sometimes with like this backbone of an old brand, of an old business called Spree, which I think was like this open source e-commerce platform when you were growing your business, but I don't think it's around anymore. But I'm like, you know, they'll often go to their own custom tech platform because they're like, look, we're doing enough business that this makes sense.

Which is a pain in the ass.

It is a pain in the ass. But like, you know, it's a pain in the ass is worth it when you're doing $500 million in revenue and a quarter, you know, a quarter percentage point bump in conversion rate on your checkout page is going to lead to an extra $10, $20 million in revenue. It's, it's, it's completely worth it then. And, you know, like Shopify is one, one-page checkout. Like they launched that in the last 6 months. That's been something that people have wanted for a really long time. Shopify subscriptions has been really bad. Like all the subscription platforms have been really bad until more recently. So I think Shopify's trying to catch up on that larger segment, but I think they've done that. That's not their focus. Their focus is you've decided you want to start a business. You go, you know, in the shower, you come downstairs and you start a Shopify store. That business is doing $100 million in revenue. You know, there are solutions that are competitive or more competitive than Shopify is, and they're worth it because small changes in your website are going to be worth so much and they're harder to do in Shopify than they are to do in other brands.

Yeah.

Candidly, like, you know, Native was a $50 million e-commerce business built on WordPress. And the reason we did WordPress was because it was cheap, way cheaper, and because it allowed us a lot more customization. We could do post-purchase popups and add-to-cart popups at a time where you couldn't on Shopify. We could do subscriptions that didn't charge us and aren't allowed to have subscriptions that you still can't do on Shopify. We could have our own servers, which you may or may not want based on Shopify. We could do instantaneous page loading, which you couldn't do on Shopify. And so there were a lot of benefits for a business because it was open source versus Shopify.

Yeah, you used the $300 a year WooCommerce, which is like the steal of the century and the miss of the century for WordPress.

Yeah, it's not $300 a year, it's free.

It's free. Is it free? Yeah. I mean, I, I used it too. Yeah. I thought it—

Yeah.

You know, all those features that he just said were benefits. Uh, that's not why he did it, to be clear. He picked it because he was like, $3,000 for Shopify? Outrageous. Over my dead body. I would rather this business fail than pay you $3,000.

I had a business that was doing millions a year and we used WooCommerce. And I remember it's owned by WordPress now, I think. And I remember like looking at WordPress's revenue. I'm like, okay, so WordPress controls a third of the internet. And Shopify makes this much money and yet they're giving this to me. What a bunch of idiots. You guys, like, like you're, it's a massive missed opportunity for WordPress and WooCommerce is great. You just need a developer sometimes to help you do some stuff, but it's still way cheaper than Shopify.

That's right.

But like, really, it just goes to show, like, you know, we could, we did a post-purchase pop-up at Native, which was after you click checkout, we showed you a pop-up saying buy travel size deodorant. We probably sold $700,000 of those travel size deodorants every single month. And made $400,000 in net profit off those travel-sized deodorants. And we could only do that in WordPress. We could not do that in Shopify.

You also had something, you were like, I would do Shopify apps for India or something. And I found this interesting because our Shopify app bill, now granted, I could go through and prune some apps that we're not using anymore that are probably still just recurrently charging me, but I think we spend like $10,000 a month on Shopify add-ons.

Do you really? Wow.

It's insane because whatever you want to do, they're like, oh, would you like to collect email addresses? Well, pay me $1,500 a month. It's like, for this popup? Like, what are you talking about? And they're like, well, your store's big. And it's like, that doesn't matter. This is an email popup. Who, what do you care how many people type into the form? Like Google Forms is free. What are you talking about? And like, um, every little thing, like we added a, um, a post-purchase upsell and there was like $900 a month and it was like, What's happening? Why, why would this be so expensive? Um, all the review platforms are crazy expensive. Shopify apps are, you know, an absolute like ripoff in the pricing.

Definitely. And I think that, you know, if I were, if I were a developer in India, I'd be like, I'm gonna hire a team of you guys. We're gonna knock off every single app and we're gonna charge $20 a month. And that's gonna be our entire business model is $20 a month. And like, you know, the other thing I'd say is the more apps you use, the cheaper it gets. So if you're using 5 more apps, instead of paying $100, you're paying $75. There is no reason that Justuno popups should be $1,500 a month. There's no reason that a post-purchase upsell should be a percentage of revenue and not $30 a month. And the reality is that everyone's tiered percentages of revenue because you can make so much money doing that. And this is software that could have been written within a week or a week and a half by almost anybody and should be $30 a month.

I talked to a guy, I tried to buy this one Shopify app, that all it did was it added a maximum to your cart, like a feature people don't even think of. It's like, why would I ever stop someone from buying more?

Sure.

And it's like, let's say you're doing like a limited edition thing. You don't want like the resellers to go buy all your shit. And these guys, you know, for like 7 years they've been doing like $2 million a year with $1.5 million of profit just on one Shopify app that just caps the maximum somebody could buy of a unit. And that's got to be like, you know, that should be like 2 lines of code or something. It's crazy. But there are so many of these that exist out there and people have smartly tried to roll some of these up.

Yeah. And how many of those, how many customers of that app are probably customers who don't look at their bill on a monthly basis and they're like, oh man, I'm getting charged $200 a month and I never think about it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because it's totally, it's built first. You never whip out your credit card. You just, Once you connect to Shopify, it's going to pay you through Shopify. That's right.

Yes.

And then it's buried in the billing tab under all this stuff.

Yeah.

So yeah, there's definitely, uh, there's like low, very low friction in like racking up those charges.

There's a massive business to be built here, which is cloning the top 100 Shopify apps and just charging a flat fee. Like, you know, it might be a longer-term business because you don't have a sales team and you're not going out calling everyone being like, switch from, you know, Yotpo to me. But it is, every single new business is going to go to you because it's way easier to use.

You have some controversial opinions. You have a lot of them. A few of them, data's overrated, wealth managers are just used car salesmen. You hate Twitter real estate. I want to hear some of your thoughts on those things. We'll start with an easy one of data being overrated. What do you mean by that?

Let's start with an easier one, which is Twitter real estate, if you don't mind.

Like, uh, wait, wait, say the unpopular opinion. What is it about Twitter real estate?

Uh, it's full of complete shit. Yeah, they're full of frauds. And they're like— I can't begin to tell you how many people where I like read their tweets, some deals I'm in, and I'm like, you— how is nobody calling you out on this? Like, um, you know, people are like, are you okay?

Give the listener perspective here. So you own maybe dozens or hundreds or hundreds, hundreds of either single-family homes or multi-family homes, is that right?

That's right.

Yes.

And then I'm an investor in dozens of real estate deals as being an LP.

Okay, so that's your perspective.

That's my perspective. I'm an LP in a lot of the people's— people will be like, did you unfollow me because of my opinion on the Middle East crisis? And I'm like, no, I unfollowed you because you're a fraud and you're pretending like you're a good real estate investor and you're a fucking complete criminal. And I know it because I'm an LP in your business. Even now, I can feel my blood boil.

They're tweeting out their returns.

They're tweeting out their returns. They're like, here are our returns. And I'm like, these are not returns that I've realized as an LP in your deal, as an LP in your businesses. And they have the audacity, I'll be like, hey, before interest rates were going up, I was like, we have floating rate mortgages. What the fuck is going to happen when interest rates go up? And these guys are like, oh, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. And now they're like, actually, we need more money. And You know, startups are one thing where you might need more capital as the business grows because you're trying to expand for some reason or another. Real estate is a business where once you own the asset, you should not need more cash. You're not like expanding the real estate in any way. You're operating an apartment building. The problem is what happens is when the interest rates go up and you have more debt to pay every single month because you're on a floating rate, you need more capital to be able to pay that debt because the rents don't service it. Rents are going down, interest rates are going up, and these guys who have promised, you know, making fortunes, are caught with their pants down, which is crazy. Then they have the audacity to say, hey, actually, our returns are fantastic. Then the other audacity that they have is they're like, okay, all of the deals you invested in within the last 5 years with us are bad because interest rates are up, but now we can buy things at a lower price because prices have gone down and interest rates are up. So buy with me now. Now it's a good time to invest with me. And I want to I'll fucking kill you is really the answer. Um, like, you know, I hate that type of bullshit.

You said, why isn't anyone calling these people out? Um, yeah, why aren't you calling them out? Would you like to name some names? We got a great audience here that would love to hear the names of some of these folks.

Yeah, I don't want to name names because I want that— like, you know, some of these people I'm friends with, and I'm like, I know your wives and your families, and I don't want you to like suffer. Like, I don't want to see you sort of suffering in that way.

You just want to kill them.

Yes, I do want to kill them. I do think that there are very few people I would ever invest again with in real estate Twitter. The one exception to that rule, I'll name the exception rather than the rule itself, is Moses Kagan, where I've invested in several deals with him and I'm like, this guy underwrites conservatively like I underwrite. And he's thinking about the game in a long-term way where he's like, I want to manage my reputation. I want people to make money. I'll make money when people make money and I would invest with him again. In a lot of other deals that I've done with people on real estate Twitter, I'm like, I would have to be a heroin addict to invest with you again.

You said last time you were on the podcast, you did a pie chart, which normally people do as percentages and you did as dollars, which I thought was such a boss move and really enjoyed. So I want you to tell me how it's changed since then. So you said at the time, this was 2022, mid-2022. So it's been about a year since then, a little more than a year. You said, I got $10 million in private equity, $40 to $50 million in cash, which is short-term bonds. I'm waiting for bond prices to come up, you said. Then you said—

That was so smart.

Then you said $25, $30 million in real estate that we own and operate ourselves, and then $10 million in real estate as an LP in other people's funds. said $10 million in startup investments and $10 million in the stock market. Um, what do you— has that changed? Have you, have you made shifts since then in how you are investing? And we should put that in a pie chart on YouTube just so people can follow that easier.

Yeah, sure. Um, good question. Uh, it hasn't changed dramatically. Um, I would say the $40 to $50 million in bonds is probably somewhere at $60 to $70 today, but it's still in short-term bonds, which are yielding a lot. I'm starting to get a little bit longer as like the yield curve starts to flatten. Like right now, if you buy a 1-year bond, you'll get about 5.5% interest in a year. If you buy a 10-year bond, it's a little bit under 5. You know, a year ago it was like 5, it was, let's say 5% for a year, but 4% for 10 years. And now the, the, like the curve was inverted and now it's starting to flatten a little bit. And as it continues to flatten, I invest in longer-term bonds rather than just short-term bonds. I probably have $15 to $20 million in the stock market at this point, heavily concentrated in Facebook and Shopify, probably, and probably P&G.

You tweeted out this funny thing. It was your IRR versus S&P, and you're like, you quoted Legally Blonde. You're like, what? Like stock investing is hard?

It's hard. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

And what was the returns? What was the comparison?

Yeah, it was probably up 30% for the year. Yeah.

Versus S&P was like 3 or something or—

10, 12 or something like that.

Yeah. But you didn't say what you owned. And in my head I was like, I bet that is literally just Facebook.

Facebook.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's a lot of Facebook. Facebook and Shopify and PG&E.

You and your brother kept buying the dip. Facebook was getting crushed, I don't know, a year and a half ago to up until 6 months ago or something.

Yeah.

And every time it went down, I remember your brother, and I think you also were like, hey, is everybody insane? Great. I can't wait to go buy more Facebook today. And the earnings, and psychologically it's hard, right? Earnings come out or, or, you know, big stock move happens, it goes down. And to be like, all right, woo, let's go. But let's buy in more, buy in more. That takes a totally different mindset. What's your, What drives the conviction? Because it's obviously not a reaction to the— you're not reacting to momentum. In fact, you're going, you're betting against the current momentum. So what made you believe that that's a place that you wanted to be investing?

I would say 2 things. One is literally every single business I know, if it's an online retailer, is entirely dependent on Facebook, whether they realize it or not. The best businesses in direct-to-consumer are entirely dependent on Facebook. The worst businesses are diversified, and it's that simple. If you're entirely— if you're like, my business lives or dies by Facebook, I'm like, you're going to have a better outcome than if you think your business lives and dies by YouTube ads, brick and mortar. Actually, brick and mortar is an exception to that, but YouTube ads. I'm diversified with my advertising strategy. I'm investing a lot in TikTok. That means you can't get the thing that works for everybody and is the biggest advertising engine in the world to work for you. You're going to miss out on a ton of opportunity. And so I'd say that is one of them. But the reality is, and this is a little bit of a longer story, when the financial crisis hit, my father, who had been conservative his entire life, he was probably like 70 years old at the time, and he's like, this doesn't make sense how cheap these houses are. And so he bought one house and it was probably like a 1,500-square-foot house and he paid $150,000 for it. And it just sold for like $225,000 a couple months beforehand. And he's like, there's a $75,000 discount after 60 days. And then 60 days later, that $150,000 was probably worth like $75,000. And rather than get scared and be like, oh fuck, I lost $75,000, and we don't have a lot of money at the time, he's like, this doesn't make any sense. Now this house over here that sold for $250,000 4 months ago is for $75,000. And so he kept purchasing real estate. And there was one half duplex that he purchased for $8,000, and it generates like $1,900 in rent a month today.

Wow.

Like within a year, we purchased back the entire duplex every single year. And he never lost conviction. He's like, this is a deal of a lifetime. And I've got the conviction that I'm right here. And honestly, people talk about my brother and I and how we've had financial success. The reality is that financial success is based on the idea that we will not need a lot of money in the future because he started purchasing real estate and created this steady stream of income for our family. That would be very hard to lose. We had the benefit of that. It's sort of the solid foundation of not worrying about money and being able to take a lot of risk because we could fall back on real estate. And that gave me a lot of conviction where I'm like, wow, it is possible to buck the trend here and say, you know what? These people are wrong. This is on sale. You're selling this incredible asset and it's 50% off. And I know it because I'm looking at 25 ad accounts on a daily basis. And seeing that these people are still investing ad dollars on Facebook. So how could it be 25% off? How could Facebook stock be 50% off? This is a buying opportunity, not a selling opportunity.

Of your portfolio now, what percentage of it came from Native? Did Native make up the bulk of it and then it's just, it's grown nicely since then?

I would say Native is, it's hard to answer that question because like a lot of these, so when Native sold, let's say I made virtually the entire amount. But my net worth is significantly higher than that now. But it's based on— I wouldn't own $50 million in bonds were it not for the $100 million I got from Native sale. So yeah, while the interest is— I don't know if the interest is attributable to Native or if it is not. Presumably it is. Certainly if I were getting a divorce and I didn't have a prenup, I'd say all of this is Native money. It all came from Native. Right.

That's pre-marriage.

And so the bulk of my financial net worth is a result of selling Native, but at this point, the cash itself from Native is probably less than a majority of my net worth.

When you talk about, oh wait, your dad saw that opportunity underpriced when Facebook stock is crashing, you feel like this is an underpriced asset.

What do you feel like are the underpriced opportunities or assets I think San Francisco real estate and possibly office real estate in a lot of other cities. But I do think that the question is, how do you want to get in there? When my father was buying this real estate in '08, I was an attorney. It must have been a little bit later, actually. It must have been 2010. I was an attorney and all these wealth managers tried to talk to attorneys. And so I was like, look, I need a loan for $500,000. My family needs a loan for $500,000. We bought $1 million of real estate. We just want 50% LTV. And Wells Fargo would be like, the only way we're going to give you a loan is if you give us $1 million in cash, then we'll give you a $1 million loan. And I was like, I don't understand if you guys know how money works, but if I had $1 million in cash, I wouldn't come to you for a fucking million-dollar loan. I wouldn't give you that. So anyway, we were strapped for cash and trying to deploy it. And then what my father did is he dollar-cost averaged into the real estate, and he didn't know that that's what he was doing. He was just like, okay, we got another $50,000 to spend, let's go buy a house. And he would get that $50,000 from rent that he was collecting. And so he just dollar-cost averaged his way in and it was really aggressive. If you were dollar-cost averaging your way into office space, I'd probably start in 2023 or very early 2024. If you were like, I'm trying to time the bottom, which is really hard to do correctly, obviously, I'd probably still wait 4 to 5 months because there are probably still some, you know, some deals that have to go, that have to light on fire before the rest of the world realizes, okay, my real estate is not worth $100 million. It's actually worth $30 million today.

Yeah, I agree with the San Francisco thing.

What do you think? What was your answer to that question?

I didn't have an answer, but I wanted to know your opinion on like some of these DTC companies that have just got smashed in the stock market. So like, you know, an Allbirds brand, which I don't know what the market cap is, but it's like $50 million or something. It's come down, come way, way, way down. Revenues over $100 million, market cap, you know, $50 million.

Today is $138 million.

Yeah. No, I think it has to go bankrupt before you can touch that.

And why is that? They just totally mismanaged it or it's too much debt? What's the problem with that business? I haven't looked.

Probably like real estate is probably not good. Their team is too large. They might have some like financial obligations probably to their suppliers that are really holding down their— they have a lot of accounts payable and you need to wipe that all out before you can get into it. You know, I looked at this with Honest as well and I was like, I talked to some serious people and I was like, hey, I want to buy, I'm thinking about buying Honest. And that business had different problems. That business had gross margin problems, which was if they sell a diaper for a dollar, it actually costs them 70 cents. And generally in this industry, it has to cost you like 30 cents. You should have 60, 70% gross margins. These guys had 30% gross margins. So they had a different problem. But I think with Allbirds, it's more severe. It's systemic. It's a brand.

It's a brand.

I think it'll have to go through bankruptcy in order to be fixed.

Do you look at things like AI? Do you pay attention to it? Or are you just like, I'm a merchant. I used to cash checks at a gas station and then I sold deodorant through Facebook ads. And now, are you like real estate, the only things I can touch and feel? Or do you pay attention? Do you get swept up at all in the kind of the crazes of the day?

I think I get swept up a little bit, but I'm probably more cautious where I'm like, I want to see how this thing makes I remember our last podcast, Sean, you were like, how much do you have in Bitcoin? Because that was one thing on my pie chart I did not talk about. And I was like, probably less than $500,000. And today it's probably less than $200,000. I like to know how I'm going to make money. And I guess I'm far more risk-averse than most entrepreneurs. And that risk aversion means that I probably won't invest in businesses unless I have a good idea of like, how does this business make money or who, who purchases this business or how do we exit this business 5 to 10 years from now? I need a realistic vision of that. If I don't have that, I'm probably less inclined to get behind it. And so I think that's made me shy away from Bitcoin. That's made me shy away from AI, probably to my own detriment.

Are you managing everything yourself and what tools are you using? Is it just a sheet, just an Excel sheet?

Yeah, there's a Google Sheet my brother and I share where we're like, here's your investment. If it's a fund, here's how much we've committed, here's how much we've invested. If it's a startup. It scares how much we put in.

Do you guys still have like one bank account? He told me once, he was like, yeah, it's kind of just like a family pot of money. I'm like, how does that work?

Yeah, a little bit.

A little bit. A little bit, yes. The honest answer is yes. Still, in very many ways, I think the answer is yes to that.

When you see him buying something stupid, you're like, you're spending our money, bitch. What are you doing?

Well, I knew he was going to buy you a gift one time and I was like, well, he's kind of buying himself a gift, right? If it's our money. You, you don't like— you don't like wealth managers. So do you manage everything yourself? Because, yeah, that's a full-time job almost.

That is a full-time job if you want to be good at it. And if you don't get like— if you don't want to be good at it, it's less of a full-time job. Like at this point, I'm mostly content with— if I'm not making a startup investment, I'm generally going to think of the S&P 500 or a US Treasury. I'm not like chasing the extra yield where I'm like, if I put a lot of effort into this, Instead of the US Treasury, maybe an Uber, like Uber bonds that are dated in 2025 are paying 6.2%, but you have to analyze what's the tax implication of this Uber bond versus a US Treasury to determine net yields. I'm not like that. I'm just like, gimme the US Treasury. The extra 1% yield isn't worth it. I'll go make a percent elsewhere. My wealth managers, I've been through several now. I've been through Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs, you know, I would like Goldman Sachs is like always consult us before you make an investment. We'll just give you our real opinion. And I did that for a while, and I was like, okay, I thought you guys were just going to be like, is this a good idea or a bad idea? But they're always like, no, give us the money instead. I used to tell the story. I told I told I went to like my Goldman Sachs's like my wealth manager's boss. I had her come over to the native offices, and I was like, look, I believe that if I told my wealth manager that Bill Gates was ready to give me a billion dollars tomorrow. if I let him borrow this pen and he signed a contract to that effect and put the billion dollars in a briefcase and give me the briefcase, you'd say, don't do that deal. Give us the pen instead. They would not let you loan a dollar to Bill Gates if he was going to give you a billion dollars tomorrow and he prefunded the billion dollars. They'd say, give us the dollar. We can do better with it. Let us earn fees on your dollar. Don't take the billion dollars. Let us earn fees. And I told my Goldman Sachs wealth manager's boss, I was like, this is how I feel at your organization. It is fucking horrific. And I still feel that way about them. I'm still angry at them. And then I went to this—

Tell me how you really feel.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll tell them. She was like, wow, that must be awful. And I was like, yeah. And I was like, if I had people working for me that made my clients feel like that, that made my customers feel like that, I'd want to know. And that's why I'm telling you today.

Still one of the funniest tweets I ever saw was you go, oh, here's a photo of every, uh, 3PL owner that I've ever seen. And it was a picture of the Hamburglar.

That's right.

That was so funny. That was so funny. Oh my God. And I couldn't even imagine what you were going through that would get you to the point where you're like, I'm going to tweet this out. And where's the, where's a picture of the Hamburglar? Because that's, that's how clown, clownishly criminal these guys are with how they rip you off.

It's so true.

That was so funny.

My last wealth manager was like, about a year and a half ago, was like, you should invest everything into bonds right now. We think the Fed is going to engineer a soft landing and everything's going to be perfect. And so you want this 3%, you'll get a 3% yield if you invest in a 5-year duration. So basically you'll get 3% a year, but you have to commit to that money being invested for 5 years. And so I put, I think it was like $5 or $7 million to that against that strategy. And then a quarter in, like probably 3 months later, I was like, you know what? I don't believe in this. Sell everything right now. I'm going to take a loss. I don't think we're going to engineer this soft landing. Interest rates are going to go up. Inflation is 9%. What the fuck are you guys thinking that we could engineer a soft landing here with interest rates staying the same? Interest rates remaining the way they are and inflation being 9 fucking percent, you think that I should get a 3% yield? And so we sold the $7 million. I probably lost $150,000 or $125,000 or $150,000. In that 3-month period doing this. 3 months, lost $150,000 because I bet against them and people started to realize interest rates would rise. And since then, I've just invested in 3-month, 6-month, 1-year treasuries to take advantage of the yield. And so the guys who are the wealth managers, their job is not to understand markets. Their job is to understand how to sell you an asset. They're just car salesmen. who sell financial instruments rather than cars. And they're just as sleazy and just as slimy and just as charismatic as well. And I trust— have you seen Seinfeld where George Costanza is in a car dealership and a car dealer's walking towards him and he's like, stop right there, otherwise I'm going to leave? That's what— whenever my wealth manager is like, let me sell you this asset, I'm like, stop right there. I'm going to hang up the phone. If we continue this conversation. VOO or US Treasuries. Don't try and sell me anything else. I know how you guys think. One time they were also like, we're a very large LP in Forerunner Ventures. And I was like, look, I understand direct-to-consumer better than a lot of other people. Forerunner invests a lot in direct-to-consumer. You guys are wearing that as a point of pride. I think that's a terrible idea. Don't put any of my money in Forerunner Ventures. And so it's been a fun learning experience, but it's also something where I'm like, There's no one doing this well. There's at least no one that I found that does this well. Everyone seems to be like, here's this product. We want you to fit into this box. Put in this much money in private equity, this much money in venture capital, this much money in bonds, this much money in hedge funds. We don't give a fuck about your— we'll think about your age and that's it, but that's about it. But we won't be sophisticated about this and be like, okay, you know what? Maybe you want esoteric assets that are more interesting. Maybe you're okay with your money being tied up for longer. They don't understand the market. I think that's a more fundamental problem. They're not like, we think the market is heading this way and we want to prepare you for that. Even in times of uncertainty, they're not like, we want to prepare you for uncertainty.

Are you ever going to start another company again and make that your thing? You missing it?

Yes, definitely. I think that I can't turn $100 million into a billion dollars. I can only start a business that sells for a billion dollars. So I think the answer is yes. In fact, I'm certain.

Hey, what happened to the guy on Twitter who said, uh, hey, money's not gonna make you happy, uh, it's your friend and your family and your— what did you say? You had some tweet about this the other day that I was like, did you hire a ghostwriter? Who's this? This is not on brand. This is not the guy who said, I was put on earth to increase earnings per share. I like the old Moiz.

Yeah, the guy who was like, it all could be true.

It all could be true, right?

You could—

he wants to get after it. You don't have to do it just to make you happy. You do it just because it's exciting.

And I think it all depends on the mood you're in, where you're lonely or spending a lot of time with friends and you're like, wow, this is great. And then I'll spend time with friends and this guy will be like, yeah, I started this direct-to-consumer business. We're doing $100 million. This is our second year, $20 million in EBITDA. And I'm like, fuck friendship. I need to get that. And so I think it's all like the grass is always greener. And so sometimes I'm in the, like, you know, I had this other tweet where I'm like, sometimes I want to be like a warrior and make a lot of money. And other times I want to be like a civilian and just spend time with loved ones. I don't have a good answer to that. I see a therapist and she doesn't have a good answer to that for me either.

Hey, no, there's a, what is it? Sun Tzu. It's better to be a warrior in the garden as opposed to a gardener in war. So, uh, you know, you could still be this crazy person and chill every once in a while.

Wow. That is a great quote. I've never heard that before. That's awesome. What are business ideas that you guys have? What's a business idea that I should start? If I want to start a business, what's one? You guys talk to a lot more people than I do. What's a business idea I should start?

Well, my honest opinion is that you now have new advantages. And so you could start a new business from scratch, but I really do think the thing you should do is take a huge slug of capital Buy something that is like, you know, already worth $100 million. Like you could, you could take something from $100 to $500 or $100 to a billion much easier than going from $0 to $500, uh, with like a new product in the marketplace. And so I think that's what I would, that's where I would start the process of thinking.

Yeah, I think you'd be very successful doing that or, or buying like, uh, I forget the guy's name, Nat, Nat something, the guy who bought, uh, the trading card company. Like, like an old, uh, what was it called, Sean?

Yeah.

Nat Turner? Is that his name?

Uh, Nat Turner.

Yeah, he bought like a trading card company and he's like, I'm gonna make this cool again. I think you would succeed doing that. But my read on you is that you are significantly more of a creator and an artist than you want people to think. And I think that you have to, because I saw how like careful you were about customer service and about the brand. And even though you want to act like this tough guy, like you were like, I'm going to answer 200 customer service emails and I'm going to like delight them. And I remember about the website, like you act like, oh, I just copied this, I copied that. There's a lot more thought and care than you, than you give that vibe out.

Absolutely.

And so if, if, if I had to tell you what to do, it would be, uh, start something from scratch and make it art. And then also have that 50% of you that, you know, only cares about EBITDA or, you know, or whatever. Uh, but I, I, I, my opinion is of who you are is you need to be a little bit more of an artist than you have lately.

I couldn't agree more. I appreciate that.

Yeah, I actually agree with that. I also think, uh, what I would not do is I would not do another DTC brand, even though you know how to do it and you could do it like, you know, in your sleep at this point. Um, just because you're playing the same level of the video game that you, you already beat. And like, you know, what's more valuable than the money you would make in that is like, you have like certain number of years of like, you're, you're in like peak mental, physical, like abilities right now. And like use those years wisely. Either go do just the funnest things you can think of, you know, around the world and travel and do all that good stuff. Or if you are going to do a creative project, make it one that like, you know, puts those to good use and to good challenge. You know, like if you, if you came to me and you said, uh, like, you know, I'm starting another DTC brand and it's going to be, um, you know, not deodorant, but whatever, some other thing, you know. Uh, yeah, I would be like, okay, that's cool. I'm sure it's going to be successful, but Um, I don't think that's what will make you more successful.

Yeah, but that's bullshit because Native deodorant, like I use the soap because like I trust the brand. Like he built a brand. I mean, it's a, it's a trusted brand. Uh, partially because I know Moiz. I don't know the owner now. So I don't, I don't know actually if they're sticking to what the promise.

You don't know Procter?

Well, I don't know if they're actually, it's the opposite. I think if they own it, they're probably going to ruin it. Uh, but like if you were to create like some type of food that is a healthy option, or something, baby formula, that's a healthy option. I actually think that that would start and look silly, but it actually has massive implications and would make— I don't like saying this, but it could make the world even a slightly better place. And you could find some fulfillment in that. And it would look just like another e-com brand. But as long as it's not like something stupid that doesn't, that doesn't matter to people, like, for example, another Allbirds thing, but something that I put in my body, you know, or something that makes my kid healthier, something like that, I think.

Yeah.

That could fulfill you.

I appreciate that. And I appreciate that inspiration as well. I think there's truth to both those things. I want to build something big. One of the reasons that I haven't really gotten excited about anything is because I want something to be 10 times bigger than my last business. And that's hard to do and hard to be excited about and hard to say, you know what, I'm going to spend the next 10 years of my life building this business. And that's what's made me really cautious about it, but in a way that I think is You know, making my mind less flexible than it was five years ago.

Well, you better get on it, man. You don't want to be a has-been or a one-hit wonder. I think tell me about it. I think that native is only it's a home run for everyone else. I think it's a base hit for you. But I'm I'm like every day I'm like what's he doing? What's he doing? Is he doing it? I'll see you tweet something. I'm like is that gonna be the thing? Is that gonna be the thing? Is he gonna actually fall in? You know, you're gonna be you're gonna be like Uncle Rico bragging about how you almost took state in high school. Like I want you know what I mean?

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What a nag. What an amazing nag.

Well, hey, look, it's not a nag. I'm saying you're, you know, it's a compliment. Look, it's a compliment. You're going to do great things, but whether you're going to finally nut up and actually do it, and that's what I'm eager for.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, my banker from the Native sale texted me yesterday and he's like, you know, November 8th is the 6-year anniversary of the sale. And so like, it's been 6 years since I've been out, you know, sold the business. And, you know, I think so far it's been my magnum opus.

Hey, Moiz, you want to feel some anxiety today? It's been 6 years since— you want to fuck up your day? Here you go.

You know what that is? He's doing home options for investment banking. He's like texting me once in a while, being like, hey, when it's time to sell this, your next business, don't forget about me. I'm still texting you.

What was the, um, what, what's the sales now of Native? I bet you that's doing $200 or $300 million a year now, right?

$500 this year.

$500 million.

Oof.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. No, I'm joking.

That's a lot.

I would've sold probably as well.

I don't think I could have done what P&G has done without that. They've made it an amazing brand. They think about product development. They think about shelf space. They think about things in a way that's really spectacular. And I'm not to say that there are things where I look at them, I'm like, ooh, I wouldn't have done that. I definitely see that once in a while. But ultimately, The reason that I sold when I did was I wanted to learn from people who are masters at something about how to grow something from 30 to 100 or 500. And I think I learned a lot of that while I was there. And so people are always like, do you regret it? There's not a day that goes by where I go to bed and I'm like, man, I shouldn't have sold. I'm always like, that was the right decision.

We'll wrap up with this one line that you told me. You were telling me about the sale process and they were like, So how are you going to expand? And you looked at them all dumbfounded. I go, are you? And you go, well, can you write the words Native on a shampoo bottle? How about on toothpaste? Can you write that? Okay. That's how you expand. And that's exactly what they've done. I actually don't use the deodorant, but I use the soap. You, uh, the soap is my favorite. You've even had like Melissa's Cupcakes soap and you have all this other soap. I love the soap. And so, uh, your, uh, the body wash.

Is that right?

The body wash? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And your body wash and you, um, your smartass reply was their strategy and it worked. So congratulations. Yeah.

There's like a guy in the back just taking notes.

Yeah.

He's going to call someone. Hey guys, can we write Native on this bottle?

Can we do that? It was bananas. I remember that.

Right on. Uh, Moiz, thanks for coming on, man.

And we appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much.

Talk to you next time. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

Uh-huh.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.