Billionaire Marc Lore on What He Would Build Today and Future of Ecommerce | My First Million #186

I want to create a company and I want to sell it for $100 million plus to Walmart or Amazon in 3 years. What opportunities exist in the e-com world or in the commerce world that Amazon or Walmart would buy my company because they desperately need something that I'm selling or some type of solution that I've created?

Would you like him to do anything else for you, Sam? The most specific question.

Well, no, that's actually not that specific.

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, never looking back.

All right, today we have Marc Lore on the podcast. This guy is an OG of e-commerce. He sold diapers.com to Amazon for like, I don't know, $600 million. He created Jet.com and sold it to Walmart for $3.5 billion. Good guy. He came on and me and Sam were pretty blown away. Like we, kind of little fanboys of his right now. So, so we enjoyed the episode. He had a bunch of good ideas. He talked about how to go raise a bunch of money to go after a big vision. He had some ideas in healthcare. Sam asked him a great question, like, if I wanted to start a company today that I could sell for $100 million to Amazon or Walmart, what product would you recommend I start? And he had a fantastic answer. So he had ideas at the, at the end. And at the beginning, he talked a little bit about his kind of approach to why he bought the Minnesota Timberwolves and how he's going to run the team, how he builds his team, how he hires people, stuff like that. So the beginning is more philosophy, the end is ideas.

And he also had a great, a great answer. I asked him, I'm like, when you bought the basketball team, you just like send a huge wire? Like, just hearing those details are really interesting. But we do a whole debrief at the end of this episode, which you might even find more interesting than the actual episode because it's always fun to like discuss Uh, like I always find the recap to be one of the most exciting, so give it a listen.

Yeah, but he was great. I think you're gonna love it. And we liked him so much, we want him to come back on. One hour was not enough. And here's what we ask you to do. Um, listen to the episode. If you're liking it, he said he's big on LinkedIn, so go to his LinkedIn. His name is Mark Lore, last name is L-O-R-E. Um, and just go pop comment on one of his LinkedIn posts and just say, hey, if I like, if you like the episode, just tell him love the episode, come back on. And I think if he gets enough messages, we will be able to bring him back on and go deeper on a bunch of ideas that we didn't get to do today.

All right, here's the episode. Enjoy.

Okay, cool. So we have a guest here. Sam, do you want to, you want to tee him up? Who's, who is on the line?

Yes. So e-commerce tycoon, successful billionaire, and as of 2017, is exceptionally jacked and bald. Mark, I have to ask you, which of these is your favorite part of Jeff Bezos?

Sam's been polishing that one up for the last hour.

No, uh, Mark, Laurie, we have, um, Mark, you've done a lot of stuff. You've started 4 different things, right? 4 different startups that have successfully exited.

The most popular one is probably a few more that are in stealth that I'm really excited about.

Maybe I can share a little bit about, but yeah, we want to, we want to learn all about it. But the biggest one was, um, Jet.com. That's one probably everyone knows. Uh, before that you did diapers.com, which you sold to Amazon for $550 million-ish.

That one might have been bigger because that was sold to Amazon very early, and Amazon appreciated a lot since then. So maybe that one— I don't know, you tell us which one is— which one ends up bigger. Is it the early, the early one, or Jet?

I think— no, Jet definitely. I mean, stock doubled, uh, over the last 4 and a half years. So that was, that was a good one.

I gotta thank you for that. When they bought you, um, I bought the stock because I was like, yeah, there's plenty of room to run here for Walmart e-commerce. And, uh, yeah, I feel like I was a part of the company. I won a little bit as well, just off the news.

And you, um, and then you also sold a company called The Pit, uh, which you sold the tops. That was like for $5.7, right?

Back in the day.

In the day.

And, uh, you, prior to that, you were, uh, you worked in banking, but then before that you were a runner. I, so I was a runner. I ran the 200-meter and 400-meter. What was your, uh, what I ran, uh, uh, high 21s in the 200 and Uh, 48s for the 400.

Yeah, same with me, almost exactly the same. Yeah, high 21s, high 48s, exactly.

Yeah, we're the same.

I got slower as the distance went longer, and 400 was, was sort of long. I was better at sort of the 60-yard and, and, uh, and 100 and 200.

But yeah, what was her 100-meter PR?

Uh, 10.74.

Wow.

And was that FAT? Did they do?

74, yeah.

Wow. Well, that's pretty, you're moving.

I didn't have the endurance to keep it up, you know, in the 2 and the 4, but yeah.

So you've done a lot of stuff. You've done a ton of recent, you've done a ton of stuff in the past, but even the stuff you're doing now is also interesting. You just, you guys made a bid for the Timberwolves, right?

Yeah, we actually, it went through. So we signed an agreement. So yeah, we're just going through the NBA approval process now and then hope to close like probably in like 6 weeks.

And was that a dream? Like, you know, I've had this dream as a kid, you know, own an NBA team. That's the point of doing business.

You know, as a really small kid, it was like play professional sports.

Of course, that's where you start.

Every kid, you eventually realize, okay, it's not going to be that sport. It's not going to be that sport. You know? And then I was like, oh, maybe, you know, it would be decathlete, you know, and go to the Olympics. And I was like, okay, that's not going to happen. I'm like, all right, forget it. You know what, I'm just gonna like one day own a team. That's what I'll do.

That's amazing.

That was the dream, you know. I was a huge sports fan growing up, followed every sport, watched every game, you know, was a huge Knicks fan. And then, you know, I had two kids and, you know, life happens and you sort of get a little bit detached from sports. But I love it. I'm excited to like dive back in and have a reason to.

It seems like back in, it seems like, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, the sports team thing was like, you've made it. This is your, it's like buying a car, right? It's like, I buy my toy. I always wanted this toy. This is kind of like lifelong dream. And I think it's obviously still like kind of a passion thing, but also the business merits of buying a team as an investment has actually become a pretty big deal. 'Cause these franchises have appreciated like crazy because there's only whatever, there's only 30 of them. And there's sort of more billionaires than there are teams. So give me a pie chart. Is this— what percentage of this was just, I just want to have it, it's like art, uh, versus this is actually a good business decision? How do you think about that?

Yeah, it's probably 80% the former, 20% good investment. Like, yeah, it's, it's not so much about being a great investment, just not going to lose money. And I'm going to have a lot of fun. Anytime you can have a lot of fun and not lose money, like I love going to the horse track. You have a lot of fun, but you also make a lot of money. I kind of like this, you know, where it's, it's have a lot of fun and maybe make a little bit of money too. It's like perfect. But I'm excited about, you know, just innovating, using— I think there's a lack of like real innovation in sports in general, like applying sort of a technology mindset. Like, how do you bring augmented reality to the entertainment experience? How do you move to like dynamic announcing so you can choose your announcer? Dynamic real-time ticketing. I want people to be able to move to any open seat in the stadium at any time. Like, I've got all these like tech ideas on how to augment the experience, and it's just fun to have a platform to be able to, you know, buy these things and try and— and even, you know, what's the Moneyball version of— of— in basketball too, you know, like as a mid-market team, how do you win? What's the strategy? Thinking that through. How do you apply the same techniques of Vision Capital people? What's the mission? What are the values? What do you stand for? How do you show up every day? How do you live those values? Treat it like a real startup. And to date, I've talked to a lot of people. It doesn't really seem like anybody's sort of gone down that path yet.

And are you just going to run this like a company? I mean, because you're incredibly successful at running companies, but I mean, you know a bit about sports, I imagine, but this is totally outside of everything that you've done. You've done e-commerce—

The other thing is I love the challenge because every business that I get into, I don't know anything about it when I start. I didn't know anything about retail when I did diapers.com. I didn't know anything about The Pit when I started that. I've started a bunch of startups recently. I don't know anything about that. I'm starting and building The City. I'm doing a reality TV show. I'm doing these things. And you know, it comes down to vision capital people. It's, you have to have the vision and you just think about it, share it with people like a piece of clay. You keep molding the vision, molding it like, wow, this is a big vision. Everyone agrees. This is freaking huge. Okay, great. How are we gonna capitalize it? Great. That's what I do. Raise money. I have lots of connections with investors. I've raised over a billion dollars. So like, okay, we're gonna capitalize it. And then the third part is the most important and the hardest to get right is people, the P part. And it's finding a great CEO and a great executive leadership team, setting the values, setting the mission, the corporate culture, getting the org structure right, getting the right people in the right spots and creating a culture where you get the very best out of each person that you bring in. Then you kind of just sit back, then you're there as a strategic advisor. I think if you try and decide, you know, micromanage and make decisions, Um, when you don't have the experience, that's where you get in trouble, you know? So if I were to come into the team and say, you know, I think you should draft so-and-so, and you know, why are we doing this? And we should be playing, you know, this, and that's not gonna work. I just don't, I, I think who is the very best, you know, uh, person in the world to, you know, run this part of the business, to run that part of the business, to be the chief people officer, to bring in the very best talent and create a great culture. Who are the best people in the world? And get them in the right spots and the right positions. If the vision is right and everybody's clear exactly where you're going, what the North Star is, and you've got great people and they're happy and they're empowered, great things will happen. And that allows me to do multiple things at the same time now because, you know, I'm not getting into the weeds of it.

A lot of your companies, or how much do you guys raise at diapers.com?

Diapers raised $55 million.

Okay, so that's a lot, but not close to— I mean, Jet was what, like a bill— I mean, you guys—

Jet, we raised, uh, uh, yeah, like $800 million.

So substantially larger, although both were quite large. This idea of being able to hire the best in the world and being able to hire people to do a lot of the, uh, work that they specialize in, could you have done that if you were bootstrapping your companies?

No. I mean, that's why we started, Alex and I, A-Rod just started a venture fund called VCP, Vision Capital People. We believe that there's a really big hole in the market for people with big visionary ideas to get a big infusion of capital early, like when they have nothing, so they can go out and hire the very best team in the world. I think a lot of startups, it's a little bit of chicken and egg. How do you get the capital unless you have the team? You can't hire the team until you have the capital, but you don't get enough capital until you prove it. And so you get $1 million, then you get $5 million, then you get $10 million. And each step of the way, you're sort of on a tight wire.

Tight wire.

Right. You know, you're basically like, one little thing goes wrong, suddenly investors lose confidence, or you overpromise and underdeliver. Lots of things could go wrong. We basically say, no. Vision Capital people, you have a big vision. We know this could be a really big idea. We know somebody's going to do this. It's the right time to do it. Um, let's not undercapitalize it. Here's $10 million seed. Go out and hire the best team in the world. That puts you in a position to have the best shot of a really successful business. And if you got the best people, you got the capital, and you have the vision right, you're a player now. You're kind of like, worst case, you're gonna exit this. Somebody's gonna pick it up because you've got great people and it's the right time and it's a big vision.

So what do you, what do you think when So there's the case where Jet, where that clearly is what happened and it worked. And then you see like Quibi or something like that raised, you know, clearly successful people at the start, raised a bunch of money, raised a billion dollars or so, more than that, I think. Big vision. Hey, we're going to rethink Netflix for mobile and didn't quite hit it. And they're burning a lot of money. So even though they raised a lot, their burn still left them with, I don't know how many months, you know, the same sort of time, you know, 2 years of runway or whatever it was that like a normal startup has. So how do you think about that? Do you think it's, hey, look, it's just a numbers game. It doesn't always work out. Or do you think there's something different in the strategy that maybe they could have done or you've done differently that leads to better results?

Yeah. I don't know that Intermillage, you know the story, and I do think that's probably more the exception than the rule. I mean, I think, hey, listen, startups don't all work. So some of them aren't going to work. Do I think it had a higher probability of working because it was a big vision? They had a lot of capital and great people. Yeah, I think it does. Specifically why it didn't work. The only thing from the outside looking in was, were the most talented people in the organization fully committed and all in to it? That's the only thing I wonder. I don't know, obviously you had really talented people, but were they dedicating their life to it? You need somebody in these businesses that's sort of like, I'm running this business and dedicating my life to it. Doesn't have to be necessarily the person that's doing the VCP at the top, but who is that person? And, and, and, and, you know, do you have the, the right team to support it? So I don't know the answer to that. That's where I'd probably wonder.

And so me and Sam talk about this a lot because, uh, you know, we think about, all right, what's next for us? We got, got some money in the bank, we got time, we got, you know, we got all these dreams about what we might wanna do. And one of the paths is similar to you where you as an entrepreneur, you sort of can see these opportunities and it could be that you can be the spark that helps start them, but you're not necessarily gonna be the day-to-day operator in the weeds, maybe like you were with your first startup, right? And, um, and some people like you seem to be pretty successful with this model. And it seems like it's dependent on those 3 things you talked about: having the right vision, shaping that first, getting the capital in, and then recruiting the right people. On the people part, take us into a job interview with you. So, um, obviously there's the standard stuff, you know, you ask what they've—

let me tell you, I, I've hired— I've tried to calculate it, but over 1,000 people that I've personally interviewed in my career. And I've honed over the years and it's changed. My thinking has changed on hiring people, resumes, and I've gone from early in my career when I first started, I just wanna feel like I wanna have a beer with this person. And I realize how wrong that is. And people make that mistake today and it leads to all kinds of unconscious bias and things like that. It's the worst possible thing to do. I spend an incredible amount of time upfront on resume reading, which I never used to do before. Used to be like, hey, this person's great. Oh, they, they were a CFO. I'm looking for a CFO. You say they're great.

Come on in.

Let's interview them. I, I don't listen to what people tell me necessarily about people because there's always somebody out there that'll say something good about everybody. And so I kind of just discount that for the most part. There might be a select couple people that I really trust that, like, you work with this person, trust me, they're They're top 5%. Okay.

Right.

But that'll show on the resume. And so when I look at the resume, like, I'm looking for a demonstrable level of success in whatever they do. So I'm think— I get into their mind. I start at the beginning when they graduate school, and it doesn't matter what school they go to, but they graduate, they go into a company. If they're there for a few years, did they get promoted? Like, what did the trajectory look like? And then the most important part, when they leave that company and go to a new company, is it something that a top 5% would do? Top 5% is moving a certain way that you start to learn, machine learn these, these, you know, trends. And top 5%, top 10% of the elite people, when they move, they move in step fashion. it'll be a bigger title, much bigger role, or a better company. And they'll get in that company and they will be promoted multiple times and then they'll leave and there'll be another step change. And so I'm looking for that, like, multi-company movement within the company and big step changes. Any kind of deviation to that, I just don't even want to even interview. So a lateral move out, right? You know, move from a Google to Kmart. Sorry, Kmart. But out. Like, I just— I— anything, any little, like, tap that says not top 5%, and somebody could say, hey, but that's not fair. Like, I'm actually good, or this person's great. I'm like, you know what? I'm not going to interview because you know what? There's a chance I get honeypotted, right? Honeypotted. Everyone's— everyone experienced this. You basically bring somebody in for an interview. The resume is maybe not ideal. They come in, you spend 1 hour with them, and you just really like them. And they throw some buzzwords around. They've got experience and you're like, hired. Think about that. I mean, you're committing to like hire somebody and keep them in your company, hopefully for years, to be an important part of the company. And like you have an hour with them. Maybe you have multiple people spend an hour, but it's still a pretty small amount of time. And so I don't let myself get honeypotted. I've been honeypotted many times in the past. And I, unless that resume screams superstar, which Again, it's only 5 out of 100 resumes if you say top 5% or 10 out of 10 and 1 outta 10 and be really like, say no, no, no. It's hard because you're tempted like, oh, they have good experience, this person, whatever. No. So when I interview someone, I know that they're a superstar on the resume, and so I can focus primarily on core values and their SPOTIC traits. So SPOTIC is an acronym I come up with for traits I look for in people I hire. Smart, passionate, optimistic, tenacious, adaptable, kind, and empathetic. And the last two are really important. Kind and kindness and empathy. I found over the years that you can get somebody that's super tenacious, passion, they'll run through a brick wall, but also run through people and over people. And they're not— you find somebody that has the passion, they're optimistic and tenacious and adaptable, cuz you need that in startup. But at the same time, they're very kind and empathetic, and you get that person that's able to balance that. That's magic. And so those are the things. And, and the interview questions have nothing to do— I won't ask one traditional interview question. They'll all be questions to open them up to, to try to get at what makes them tick and do they exhibit these traits.

And you know, I, I have this theory like, uh, I've now— if you work in tech, you meet so many smart people that smart becomes kind of like table stakes. Great. Everybody's super intelligent. Well, now what? And, and clearly smart isn't just the only thing that, that leads to success. You need a whole bunch of other things that you mentioned. And I sort of found like what's in rare supply. So which of those traits is in most rare supply? I'll give you my kind of opinion, which is I found that two really simple ones tend to be, to me, the lowest in supply and have a pretty outsized impact in startups. And those two are energy or enthusiasm. I think bringing energy to the table every day is quite contagious, and you need it at the beginning when you're starting something from scratch. And so it seems like one of these, duh, anyone can do it. Yeah, anyone can do it, but most people don't. And the other one is courage. So the courage to either build something new, say something that's on your mind, to not let something that's below our standards go go. Courage, I feel, is in extremely short supply.

What do you— allows you to take risk too, right?

I call it boldness. We call it bold at our company. But yeah.

Do you feel like when you meet people, is there something you're just like, ah, I wish more people had X? What is X for you that you feel like is in short supply?

You know, I mean, what you said there. So when I say, you know, passionate and optimism, I think optimism is, you know, uh, the sort of the optimism that allows you to be bold and take risk. And it's that optimism that you believe not only great things can happen, um, but also believe that people are good. Like your starting place is that it's just an optimistic view of the world. I think that's really important and it allows you to trust, which is one of the core values and, and, and in, in, in all my companies. I think trust is really important. If you wanna create a culture where the company trusts the employees and the employees trust the company, that's really important to create an environment where people are happy and feel empowered and they feel a sense of ownership. Trust is— so I have this idea that a lot of people say, oh, trust, of course, trust but verify. And I don't believe in the but verify.

Right.

I think you start out trusting people and until they prove otherwise, and it's very, risky because you can get burned, but I've seen the power of the upside of trusting somebody before they've necessarily proven that they deserve it. It's incredibly powerful motivator. And I've seen it in my personal life. I've seen it in business. People wanna, they wanna run through a wall for you when you're like, wait, you trust me? But you can, I can burn you. I can. Yeah. But I trust you. Are you gonna burn me? Of course not. You know, you're trusting me. I'm not going to burn you. That is an incredible value that I've learned. It's trust, transparency, being really open with your employees, not hiding, not secretive. Here's the cap table. Here's the rounds of financing. Here's the numbers. Here's all the information you need. I'm an open book. What do you want to know? Like, there's no secrets here. You work at this company. You're an owner. You have stock options. Trust, transparency. And the other one is fairness, that it's really important that people feel in order to create an inclusive, a diverse workforce, you have to create a safe work environment where people feel safe coming to work. They have to feel like it's fair. They, there should never be this feeling of like, that's not fair. That's why I have an open comp system where everybody knows what everybody else is making and everybody at the same level makes the same amount of money. So women, minorities, everybody makes the same. There's no like this idea that maybe it's not fair. My colleague, why is my colleague that I do the same job, why are they making more money than me? That sort of thing, which is usually a big reason why people lose trust and they don't feel like giving you everything they've got. And so I kind of take that off the table. And so those are the 3 primary values. So you have the values of the organization and how they live them. And then the traits that you look for in people you hire. And when you kind of get that right, I think it's magical things.

Where did this confidence come from? Because like having the confidence to hire the top 5% is a pretty big deal.

His high school track days, Sam.

Yeah.

Same place your confidence comes from.

No, no, it's actually just trial and error, failing a lot early on. It's, you know, just somebody I wanna have a beer with. It's making those mistakes, it's getting honeypotted, it's, uh, you know, hiring a person and having go through the pain of having to let them go and replace them. Like, it's so many lessons. I, I, I make so many less mistakes now than I did earlier in my career because I, I see everyone makes the same mistakes. It's, that's why I like to talk about it. 'Cause it's like, it is the same mistakes. And people say, yeah, you know, I guess you're right. Like there was, you know, the resume kind of did, but I was kind of like, well, the person said they were good. I liked them. And so I hired them. You have to be really extremely focused and selective in that. The other thing, by the way, it does help with unconscious bias too. If you're inclined, when you go through the resume and you bring them in and it's not about whether I like the person, they've already like, you know that they're rock solid and you really can focus on on Spotiq and sort of help there.

So I wanna ask you about, I mean, I think we should ask you about ideas, but before we get to that, I wanted to ask one quick question. So you left banking in '96, right?

No, it was '99.

Okay. What, and then I'm looking at some information here on your timeline. You started this thing called The Pit.

The Pit was a, it was in the internet marketing Yeah, it's basically a sports stock market. We used, uh, to avoid gambling, you know, we used baseball cards to proxy for the athlete, but essentially it was meant to be a sort of sports stock market where you buy and sell players like stock.

And you sold that for like $6 million?

Yeah, that was right after the, the whole NASDAQ crashed in 2000. I don't know if you guys remember, like went down like, I don't know, 80% or something. And, uh, you Yeah, there, there was no way to raise any venture money and we only started it maybe 10 months earlier and we're able, we raised $5 million and sold it for $5.7. Everybody's like, yeah, do it. This is a great exit. And we're like, okay, well then we'll do it again. Let's, that's great. We'll sell this and get the next idea.

That's what I was gonna ask you is how you could sell for $6 million after such a short amount of time. But I guess the answer is, well, because you, you, you raised a fair bit, at least for a $6 million exit.

Yeah, it was just, I think it was just, you know, the Tops at the time was interested in, in the people that we'd hired. We hired a great team. We had a, we had a vision for what we wanted. Um, and they were there to provide some capital. So, yeah.

So, so let's talk about some ideas that you would need optimism about now, right? So, uh, so I think we could talk about Jet, for example, like take some courage and optimism to, to go after that price and basically compete with the, the, the empire of Amazon. Um, so, but we'll come back to that. I want to start with, where do you need to be optimistic today? What are you optimistic about? What ideas are, are, I know you've talked about startup cities. I don't know if that's the one you want to talk about or if you have some others, but let's shoot us some ideas of what you think is exciting that you're optimistic about that maybe the whole world isn't, you know, it's not, not proven yet.

I mean, I gravitate toward, tend to gravitate more towards B2C businesses, business to consumer. I just like consumer businesses and I think it's easier to understand some of those businesses than more like if you were like a biomedical company or something like that, it's harder to wrap my arms around. I think there's more. So most of the ideas and things and thinking I do is in the B2C world across lots of different industries. I've made a number of investments and I'm involved with a few companies that I'm really excited about. Um, one is Archer, which is the— basically they're like passenger drones. So I think, think it's like basically an autonomous electric helicopter, um, that basically flies passengers, you know, around. It's, it's safer than a helicopter.

Is this a SPAC that you did?

Yeah, yeah, did a SPAC a couple months ago and, um, going through the SEC process now.

That's crazy.

Super excited. That was a great VCP. So the, the two founders, you know, came over, actually sat on the couch right here, and they said, we got this vision for these flying cars, these, these, these, these drones that carry passengers. It's the right time. This is why it's the right time, Mark. This is how big the industry's gonna be. This is why it's gonna work. This is why the technology's right. And I was really taken by the vision. I thought they had it nailed. And they said, hey, we need $5 million now. We're gonna hire the best engineers in the world. We're gonna take 'em from the best companies. We're gonna go raise $50 million and build the state-of-the-art, the latest and greatest of these aircraft. And I thought the two founders were exceptional. So great start to the founding, to the P part of the VCP. And I thought, okay, I'll give them the $5 million and I'll help them, you know, hire this team and I'll help them raise the $50 and then you're on your own. Right. And that's what we did. I put $5 in, we helped raise, you know, helped hire the engineering talent. Helped them raise $50 million, and that was 2 years ago. And then they just raised a billion through the SPAC. And so now it's a $4 billion, $3.7 billion market cap or something. And it was really an idea on this couch 2 years ago, but it shows you what I was saying before about rather than going through this process of like seed, can't hire the great team, the chicken and egg thing. It's like, here's 5 and then let's get the team and simultaneously go and raise 50. So very short order, they had $55 million and they had the best team. And I do think they've built the very best aircraft in the industry right now and they're on their way. Like it's a massive TAM. And so I'm looking at opportunities like that and I can tell you some other ones too.

Yeah, go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, another one that was in the news is basically mobile kitchens. So looking at the trends in food delivery and millennials and Gen Z not wanting to cook and want food delivered and things. You know, I just saw that, you know, it sort of takes a long time to get it delivered. It's inconsistent. The quality suffers in transit and, uh, it's expensive. And I thought, oh, if you can solve those three things, um, and how do you do it? Well, what if you cooked in a mobile kitchen? If the restaurant basically came to you and it cooked in your driveway, hot, much faster because the, the truck's already on the road. And so they're, they're likely just minutes away. And, uh, and so I made a pretty big bet, uh, on that company. And, uh, you know, it's still in stealth mode, but I'm really excited about it. I think there's a—

how's that different than a food truck? So, so it's a mobile kitchen, but it's for multiple types of food, or how does it work?

Each mobile kitchen is a different restaurant, different cuisine.

Okay.

Um, and, uh, the idea is to, is to get the best restaurant of that cuisine in the country and sort of bring it to a central place. It's high-quality food that's piping hot, that's delivered to your door fast. That's an exciting, I think, a big TAM, big market, food, that's where the puck's going. I think there's lots happening now with laws changing in sports gambling and things. I think there's really big opportunities there to maybe bring back some of what I did before.

What was that exactly?

What you said?

You talk about the pick? Yeah.

You said bringing it back before.

No, just in the new— now with the gambling laws changing things, I think it's an opportunity to create a true sports stock market and do it right. Like where it really feels like you're buying and selling players like stock by leveraging some of the changes in gambling laws.

Have you seen something? I mean, Sean was really into this. Bitclub. Have you, did you see that?

No, I didn't.

You don't know what Bitclub is? Oh my gosh. Uh, Sean, you wanna explain? I mean, it's pretty much what, it's kind of what you're describing.

Um, what they did was they basically took Twitter and they turned it into, um, a social network where you don't just follow the person, you can invest in them. So the, the cool thing about this was what they did was, let's say on Twitter, I have like, I don't know, 140,000 followers.

Mm-hmm.

So from day one, they, what they did is they took the top 10,000 Twitter accounts. and they had raised, I think, $150 million from VCs here in Silicon Valley, and they used it to basically pre-buy and invest in all those accounts. So on day one, when I walked in, they said, hey, if you sign up for Bitclout, if you claim your account and verify it, like, basically meaning you tweet out that, hey, this is my Bitclout. I walked into like $75K worth of my own coin, right? Worth of my own stock. And others were already buying it because they were saying, hey, if Sean joins, we think that he might, you know, continue to grow his following. And so we want to invest. So the idea being, we've all had this experience where you discover a band early or an athlete early or a content creator online, a blog. And if you see them before they're huge, but you really like their stuff, you can buy their coin. It's like every single person gets their own little Bitcoin basically. And then as they get, as more people buy it, yours appreciates. So as a curator, as a fan, you get to sort of go along for the ride along with the star themselves.

It's pretty cool content. And what do you think is its value ultimately? I think that's the key. A lot of these things fall down in the end. So they don't have a ton of intrinsic value.

They don't have a ton of intrinsic value. The one thing that it does have is now as the creator, so I have all these shareholders, right, that own my coin. Some people own tens of thousands of people and a thousand people and $100 of my coin. I can then basically reward my shareholders. So in, you know, in the stock market, you give out a dividend or, um, you know, that you, you can reward your shareholders. And this, I could do the same. So I could say, I could do it literally a dividend. I could say, hey, for whatever I earned this month, my shareholders are going to, you know, get their proportionate share. I could also say, hey, we're going to do a version of this podcast that only my shareholders get to listen to, right? Like an OnlyFans or these different products that sort of say, if you're a subscriber of mine, then you get the content. So you can kind of paywall the content.

It's like a dynamic membership, almost like a membership that can—

I can come up with whatever the perks are for my members. And so then the creators all jockey to offer better value to, to their holders because their stock appreciates the more incentive incentivizing they make it. Now, this is a 1 in 100, 1 in 1,000 idea, but I do think there's something interesting.

I think there's something interesting. Yeah, it certainly sounds interesting. I, I tend to shy away from things where I don't see like the, the, the 20-year, 30-year, like the intrinsic value, like how it ultimately— this could be a great exit. And yeah, like I, I think with gambling laws changing, there's a way to give players intrinsic value. So you basically say at the end of somebody's career, I'm going to pay you based on their career stats X. And so you know this rookie comes up, you know it has real value because the exchange, the stock market is giving it intrinsic value by giving you a predetermined amount of money based on certain stats over the career.

That's interesting. So you could say, so the house basically sets the line, right? Let's say Zion comes into the league and we say, okay, the house believes that Zion, you know, the market, the line gets set that Zion's going to be a Hall of Fame player. And maybe that means X, Y, and Z stats, this many MVPs, this many points, whatever it is.

You think it's better than that? You buy, you buy.

If you think, if you think that's not going to happen, you don't buy. Are you short? And basically the careers that, so you get to predict the player's journey. And then the better— then it's like a super fan, basically. As the better they perform, you feel like you're being vindicated and you're actually going to economically benefit from having identified somebody who's going to perform higher than what the market thinks. That's cool.

Yeah, exactly.

What, um, I, I think I read somewhere that you like to look at Google Trends a lot, like you're, you're— and, and because you're a serial entrepreneur, you invest in a lot of stuff, you're always looking for trends, you're always looking for what's popular. What I want to know is, what, what do you use? Like, what signals do you look for to figure out where you're going to go to? And also, what signal told you that Jet was interesting? Because a lot of people probably said, don't even think about doing this. Like, you're, you know, you're— I imagine a lot of people are like, Amazon or Walmart or someone already owns the space. What are you, crazy? This is like an impossible feat.

Yeah, no, it's two different things. I mean, I think with Jet, I had been intimately involved in retail, you know, with diapers.com and Wag and selling it to Amazon and working inside Amazon. And I just felt like huge market, huge tailwind. It's the e-com's gonna continue to grow at double digit for the next 5, 10 years. And I just believe that there wasn't, you know, it wasn't a winner take all, that there was room for another player. And I thought we can raise a significant amount of capital and hire a great team. So, we had this really big vision with this tailwind, raise a ton of capital and have a great team. I thought if you do those 3 things right, good things will happen. I don't know what's going to happen. Either it works, your exit, a strategic wants it. Like if you're in the right market at the right time, you have a great team and you've invested the capital wisely. You've got an asset that in worst case is going to be worth more than the capital you raise. That's, that's my mentality with these things. Um, in, in anything you do, right? It's like there's the worst place to be is sort of in that no man's land where like you, you spent, um, not a ton of money. You don't have the best people, but you spend enough money that it's kind of expensive for somebody to buy it as a strategic. It's not really worth it. You know, people tend to buy, it's the barbell strategy. They'll buy the Aqua Hire. You raise a million bucks and you bootstrapped it and you have like 3 good people and somebody will say like, oh, this is great. Like, here's $10 million. You're like, oh, that was like not a bad exit. Made a little money. I'm gonna work for this company. There's that, and then there's like, you can, uh, be big enough to matter to a really big company that has the capital to put down hundreds of millions or billions in an acquisition. There's a lot of people in the, like, the, in the middle, and that's what VCP is. That's why it's like, no, $10 million, $50 million. Let's hire the very best team. If it's the right market, there's going to be a buyer for it. Right. And that's kind of the strategy.

What's interesting is, so when I sold my company, we never revealed the price, but let's just say that like, hypothetically it was like $30 or $40 million. Um, I noticed that hypothetically, a, a deal— I, I just, for sake of argument, that a deal in that size, it seemed like it was as hard of work as if I sold it for $400 billion.

No, it's harder. That's hard. I think it's harder.

It was harder because I was doing a lot of the work. I actually didn't hire a banker, so I was doing most all the work, and it was Hell, but it's not just the work on your side.

I think what he's pointing out is that the price tag is significant where the company can't just cut the check real quick, right? Like you could with a small acquihire, but you don't have enough of an asset that they can say this is a big strategic bet that they're making. You're in the middle. And I think that's— forget the entrepreneur side. It's always hard as an entrepreneur.

Really tough place. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I'm saying that that's just one of the reasons why it was hard.

But also it was hard for many reasons. Really hard. You must be a really good entrepreneur because it's really hard, I think, to exit in that middle ground. Like, it's hard to exit. Most companies in that middle ground, they don't exit successfully. You know, it's easy to do the acquihire, and I think it's easy to do the big, the big acquisition of a big company. It's tough. That's sort of like $10 to $100 million. And the entrepreneurs I know that have exited in that, in that space there, they're strong. They're like really strong.

Well, so that's kind of an interesting thing because I think that me, well, younger, like even just a few months younger me, as well as most people would think that, well, as far like if I could sell something for 20 to 30, that's like bite-size-ish. That's like, you know, some company would buy us without having to get like board approval. Like, oh, it'd be a no-brainer for them to do it. And what you're kind of saying and what I experienced a little bit is it's actually probably easier to be a little bit more audacious.

Yeah.

And, raise money and go after it. Or I would actually say the other way around, it's easier to do that. Or in order, if your, if your goal is to build wealth and have a good life, it's probably best maybe not to raise any money, uh, and never sell and just try to like build the company over a long period of time.

But, um, let's say you were you, um, but you don't have your brand name, right? So let's, let's bring you back. We give you youth, but we take away your reputation, right? So we're gonna take you back. You're 21. But you don't have the reputation, uh, but you do have the same sort of mindset that you have today. You have the same knowledge, let's say. What spaces would you be going into, and would you also be trying to do the same type of bet? Like, do you think you could raise the large amount of money just through charisma and hustle and, and vision, uh, without having the reputation? So take us, take us through a scenario. What do you think you would be interested in working on or building if you were 21 again today without the reputation?

Yeah, no, it's a great point. And I think, you know, early on and a lot of people I think share this, you feel like it needs to be something like really original or something nobody's thinking about and nobody's doing or something niche or like, and that's kind of what it is. It's niche and the venture capitalists are like, nah, it's not that interesting. You know? Um, and I've learned that it doesn't need to be something like niche or super inventive. It could be just find a really big TAM. Like just say something like, okay, healthcare. Okay. And what's a really big idea? Like where's the puck going in healthcare? I would study where the venture capitalists are investing, what types of companies. I'd do the research, like where is the money going? Follow kind of the money, 'cause that'll kind of give you some idea of where some of these trends are right now. And, you know, with artificial intelligence and telehealth and things, there's like a lot of money pouring into that. So just, I would look at the landscape, I'd study the different companies, who's getting funded, who's doing well, and think about, is there another angle? Is there something not like inventive or super original, just like a, just a little hook of something different that's not being done and put together a big vision that requires ultimately hundreds of millions of capital and work backwards from that and say, okay, you know, that we think this is gonna be a multi-billion dollar opportunity. We're going to start with $10 million. We're going to hire this great team. Here's the vision. Here's how we're going to get there. Work on that plan and that pitch deck. I'd spend hundreds of hours on that deck and on the vision and mapping it out. And somebody will bite because it's the right time. It's the right space. If you're really good and they feel like you've got something and you've got this big plan and there's a good chance you'll get that that $10 million seed check to go hire a great team.

And you've talked about— you've talked about where's the puck going? Give us more. What do you—

where—

what are some other— so you talked about food delivery and you talked about how— what the next evolution of that might be, the restaurants on wheels. That solves a bunch of problems. You talked about transportation, right? Huge TAM, flying cars. That might be where the puck is going. We see that Google funded, you know, Kitty Hawk and, you know, Uber was working on it. A bunch of people working on this. Maybe there's something there.

I'll give you a couple more. Yeah, give us more. So one, I think conversational commerce. So in retail, I think the next big step change is the idea that you would use text and voice to order anything you want in a very conversational way. So imagine talking to someone that is as knowledgeable as the most knowledgeable person in that area on the showroom of a specialty retailer. You want to buy a TV? It's like you're there at Best Buy talking to the TV expert, and you're just conversing. And somebody at the same time who knows you as well as your best friend. So hyper-personalized, this idea of getting to one best answer. The idea of like search engine 20 years from now is going to be laughable, like the cassette tape. It's like, wait, so Dad used to like go, you wanted to buy a toaster and you typed in toaster in this like search engine and you had 10,000 responses. And you had to like read reviews and look at all this and search and filter. That's not the way it's gonna be done. You're basically just gonna say, hey, I need a toaster. How much? I don't know. What's a good amount? $200, you get a great toaster. Really good. Okay, great. Wanna make a recommendation? Boom. Buy it. And it just ships it, right? Like it's gonna be very conversational. And we talk a lot about personalization in retail, but nobody's even close to doing it in a way that it's going to be done in the future. And I think voice requires one best answer. Otherwise, voice doesn't work. It can't give you 100 things. It's voice. It's got to be like, if you were asking your best friend, hey, I know you know toasters. What should I get, man? That kind of thing. It should be very on point.

Who's doing this now?

That's exciting. I like that a lot.

What companies are doing this now?

I mean, there's a lot of companies that are like, again, early stages of it and stuff, but there's nobody again that's, if you said like, who's got the world-class team, who's raised, you know, significant capital, you know, nothing.

But is there a, is there a product I can go look at and be like, oh, I get it. I understand what he's getting at. Like, I understand why Mark is obsessed with this.

Yeah. I mean, we had something called Jet Black when I was at Walmart and we, um, it was basically this for New York City. Primarily parents, and it was gangbusters. I mean, it was like, you know, people stopped using Amazon Prime. It was, they just dropped it. It's like all the shopping, the entire, the entire wallet share, uh, was, was given to Jetblack and it was multiples of what they were spending on Amazon. It was deep into the tail. It was everything. People loved it. And it was a great test. It was very expensive because in order to get the commerce to see the conversations, um, sorry, you need to see a lot of conversations to have it automated. So in the beginning, you have humans in the loop to sort of bridge between the time that, you know, there's the AI learner.

Past tense. Did it go away or that still exists?

No. It went away. But I think— Gotcha.

Because it was expensive.

Yeah. It was expensive and there just wasn't the right time for Walmart. Right. But I think if for in a startup world, yeah, I think, I think it's totally different because Walmart maybe doesn't want to invest hundreds of millions or billions, but a startup, totally different. Doesn't hit your income statement. Everyone gets the gate, knows it, you put capital to work and you build something great. So there's that. I think in healthcare too, I think like things I was talking about with telehealth and all this stuff's coming together. I think the idea of like people taking control of their health with home diagnostics and things.

Yep.

Like there should be a dashboard that exists. You can look up, I put in my name, okay, Mark Lorie, here's my dashboard. I've got a number of gadgets in the home that I do on a weekly, monthly basis. Like you brush your teeth twice a day to take care of your teeth. What are you doing every day to take care of the rest of your health? Like you don't do anything. Yeah, there's all kinds of devices and things, you know, monitor, you know, a little prick of blood and monitor blood sugar, you know, do the blood test once a month, get all your things in there, look at the trends of what's happening with your PSA. Do you have this issue? And then it basically, through machine learning and through all the data, to be able to see like, okay, you should see a doctor here. You should do this then, you should do this. So here's the probability of dying at this age. Here's the heart attack risk that you're running. Your cholesterol's too high. If you get it down, here's your probability of heart attack comes down. Sort of make it more transparent. Right now, it's like this black box. You go to the doctor once a year, do some tests, and whatever. Like, it's just kind of like a black box. Like, oh, you know, here's some medicine for your cholesterol. You don't know what's what or why or how it impacts your odds and like whether you should be really worried, a little worried. No doctor will ever give you probabilities about anything. There's no diagnostics. It's like you have to go to the professional. There's no home stuff. I think all that's going to change in the future. I do think people are going to like really take control of their, their health in a completely different way, and they're going to be doing things other than brushing their teeth to take care of themselves on a daily basis.

That's who do—

I just had a daughter, and I feel like when she's my age, she's going to be like, Dad, how are you even alive? Back then you guys had— you didn't know what the hell was going on inside your body. Now we have this thing that we wear that tells me everything that I need to know. I know when I take a bite of this, my blood sugar goes up or down and I know like how stressed I am. I know, you know, I think it's going to seem like cavemen how we operate today.

I agree. There's got to be certain things you get tested certain times. You know, my daughter had celiac disease. We didn't figure it out until she was 9 years old. Like, that's, I mean, it's not that rare of a disease. Like some doctors should have been like, hey, here are the, here are the things you do. Here are the probabilities of what's what. And you know, these are the tests you need.

I was asking my mom. My mom has celiac as well, and she found out when she was like 50. And, and she's like, yeah, as a kid everyone was like, oh, I don't know, you just have an upset stomach all the time. She's like, you know, I'm a kid in India. I'm sure I had this my whole life. It's just like nobody ever knew. And I was like, super— I never gained any weight because I couldn't like process any of the food I was eating. It took till I was 50 when I found out.

Exactly. Everyone should have genetic profile. You know, that gives— changes your probabilities based on genetics. Everyone should have that. It should be, you know, test certain times that influence your odds and probabilities and certain ways to, you know, structure everything that's more organized. Like right now it's not organized. I don't know if you guys feel that. I feel like it's not organized at all.

Yeah. Well, you got like a Whoop and then an Oura Ring and then I have a smart scale. I've got like a glucose blood, a continuing glucose blood monitoring. I've got a smart bed. Like I've got like 18 different smart things, but they are quite siloed. Yeah, but they don't actually tell me the answer. They just, you know, like they don't actually say like, this is what this all means.

Yeah.

You know, maybe they'll say like, you're extra stressed this morning, sleep more or don't work out as hard or your body fat is too high. But it's kind of limited to like pretty high-level stuff.

Yeah, it should, it should be way more structured. You should have— be much more in touch with it. Like sleep apnea is another thing. I don't know, so many people struggle with this. They're like, all these things. And the doctor doesn't just say, like, you know, it takes a long time before the doctor's like, you should do a sleep apnea study or something like—

Totally.

There's things you can have, devices that are listening near your bed that can know it sounds— that sounds like—

Well, I always thought it was weird. Like, a lot of cancers you can cure or are okay. Like, if you can get a certain type of cancer and be perfectly fine so long as you catch it early enough. And it's kind of outlandish. And archaic that like you can have a cancer and not know for, you know, many months or a year. It's like, what the fuck?

A year? Yeah, many years.

Yeah, you could have known this like instantly, you know? And that's kind of like crazy to me.

Well, MRI, by the way, there's MRI scans and you do a whole body scan and they detailed look at, you know, anything cancerous and then stitch it together. Every year you do it and you can see micro changes and things that exist now. It's just not made available to, you know, the, the people because of the, the cost of it. But nobody even has the option of even knowing that that's available, that I should do that. You could imagine like a system that basically says, hey, here's the probability of cancer. You can take this test. It's a couple grand.

It's up to you.

But at least you know, okay, wait, maybe I should just spend the $2,000 because it'll increase the probability of catching it X number of years in advance. And I know, okay, it's healthier. No, we just wait until we're sick.

Like you said, with cancer, it's like, all right, now it's, now it's, you know, I like asking these questions because I like knowing like what meets your standards. But basically, who in this space are you looking at where you're saying that's kind of promising? Is there any like one or two companies?

Yeah, I, I don't, I kind of, maybe I should more, but I, I really spend a lot of time just thinking about like a complete— sometimes, sometimes I— if you know too much about a space, it's hard to clean slate and invent because you kind of like get tied too closely into what, what people are doing. So I like the idea of just thinking about it through the lens of a, of a consumer on what is— you know, these trends are happening, telehealth, AI, you know, these trends are happening, and then how do you stitch it all together? That's just thinking. Sitting and thinking every day, like, what's the big idea? And when it's really big, you do know nobody's doing it. And then you can reverse engineer and go back and say, are there any people that are working on certain things that could be helpful to it? But you gotta go so big that you know that nobody's playing there. And that's where I think the opportunity lies. It's like, yeah, it's gonna need billions of dollars to pull it off. You're gonna have to prove it in a, in a, in a, in a small area. Uh, it's gonna be very expensive, but then when you prove it, it extrapolates out to a trillion-dollar business, like market cap opportunity.

Let's say—

yeah, yes, I don't, I don't, I couldn't tell you, like, I'm not like tell you all the different little components that exist right now.

Something that you said earlier was basically you kind of like were reverse engineer a little bit from like you'd be like, I'm gonna find where the money's going, then I'm gonna build this deck and I'm gonna raise money and then go build the thing. What's something that— let's say that I said, Mark, I want to create a company and I want to sell it for $100 million plus to Walmart or Amazon in 3 years. What opportunities exist in the e-com world, in the commerce world, that Amazon or Walmart would buy my company because they desperately need something that I'm selling or some type of solution that I've created?

Would you like him to do anything else for you, Sam? The most specific question.

No, that's actually not that specific. I mean, a lot— I'm not— I don't work at Amazon.

I don't work— I'll give it to you. 100 million in 3 years. Yeah, no, I—

Well, you said one, personalized shopping.

Conversational.

That's not— Sorry. I think that's not likely 100 million. That is like way bigger or it's not exist— Like that's a little bit more binary. I don't think 100 million necessarily, possibly.

Sorry, 100 million was just some— No, but it's good.

You gotta put a number. No, it's good to have a goal.

That's what I'm gonna answer.

3 years, I think it needs to be a sort of a niche technology that could— that's where the puck's going, that's gonna be helpful to differentiate. It's gonna be something— 3 years is fast, so it's gonna have to be tech more than having shown real market traction. But it's gonna have to be a technology that's probably hard to build that involves, you know, AI. The thing that comes to mind would be like Fit Analytics. This idea that you're going online and you're buying a dress and being able to see it fit on you without having to get it delivered to your home. Return rates on apparel are 40%. It's very expensive for retailers and it's a pain in the— for people to buy stuff, bring it, try it on, have to send it back and things. So the idea that you know my body dimensions and use artificial intelligence to know the inside dimensions of the garment to see exactly how it's going to lay in my body without having to try it on to cut down return rates dramatically. There's billions of dollars that you can save retailers there. And apparel is definitely an area where there's a lot of focus. And like, that's just one example off the top of my head.

I love that. That's a great answer.

That's a great answer. There's— I saw this guy in Japan. He's a billionaire entrepreneur, and like, this was like his third or fourth swing, but he created a suit that had these ball— like these dots on this black suit, and he would send you this bodysuit for $20, and these, these white dots on this black bodysuit would, uh, you know, like in a video game where they motion capture you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what it was. And it would— the camera was able to tell, uh, differently than if it was— you weren't wearing this suit, and he would use that to try try to upsell you on proper fitting clothing. I saw that. It never went anywhere. Yeah. But I was like, oh, that's kind of an interesting idea.

I mean, listen, for every idea out there, there's hundreds of people trying. That's why it's never really about the idea. It's about execution. It's about VCP. So were they undercapitalized? Did they have the best team in the world? Like, and Quibi, I know you said that in the beginning, but are there examples of, you know, big vision, right time, massive TAM, like raise a lot of capital and have the world-class team that's like all in. There's not that many examples I could think of. In fact, when I think of those examples, they usually are examples of things that have worked. That worked.

Yeah.

I don't experience that many times where you have a world-class team, ton of capital, and a big vision at the right time. Those companies get acquired because like DeepMind was a good example of this.

Uh, DeepMind got— DeepMind, it was an AI company, got acquired by Google for $500 million when no usage yet. It was just vision and team. And then I think DeepMind, they said that once they've plugged it into— they do the fun stuff, like they will go beat the best Go players in the world or the best chess players in the world. So they show kind of its power. It goes, flexes from time to time, but they also apply it to the Google AdWords machine learning. And I think it's generated incremental multiple billions of dollars already for Google just on the slight optimization of AdWords. And then on the other side, you have Magic Leap, where Magic Leap would probably be the current example of raised like a billion bucks, huge idea, looks awesome in the demo, but they haven't executed it well enough where it actually works.

Yeah. Or you could argue also a little, little bit early.

Yeah.

Um, that same exact company, like today going forward, right, could be totally different game. So it is kind of interesting. It would be great to, to map out BCP against companies that have worked and didn't work at the see what the hit rate is. Right. Sorry guys, I'm realizing I have a 4 o'clock.

Yeah, you gotta run. Okay. Now, where, where should people find you if they want more, if they want more plug, how people can follow you, find you, contact you, whatever you want?

Yeah. I mean, LinkedIn is, is my primary where I'm putting out a lot of business advice and things like that. So I would do LinkedIn. I just recently finally just launched Instagram and, and start becoming more active there. But LinkedIn is probably the best place right now. Yeah.

All right, Mark, this was great. Thank you for coming on.

All right, thanks guys.

Thank you. It went way too fast.

Yeah, it was good, but, uh, it ended quickly. I wanted— I had so much more we could have talked to.

I had so much more.

I think we should actually hit him up and be like, dude, after, after this episode goes out and he gets some love, uh, we should ask him to come back because I need a part 2. I had like 5 other things.

I had so many. I had so many questions. He seems like a great guy. He is, man, he's really charismatic. I get like why, I understand why he's successful.

He would be describing an idea off the cuff and I'd be like, you know what, this makes so much sense. I would like, I would back you to the hills. Yes, this makes sense. I could see why he's been able to raise so much money.

Yeah, I asked that confidence question because he just oozes with that. With charisma and confidence.

So let's talk about— okay, so first, uh, I really love that cover. I thought that was great. I thought he was—

I agree.

I thought he was great, and I thought he made for a great guest, um, especially the second half.

His setup was bad. I cannot stand when people— I think he was talking to us just on a phone or a laptop. With someone who's so successful like he is, why do they not have awesome Zoom setups?

Yeah, it's crazy to me, uh, but I think they're just like on the go all the time, so they're like, I don't even have— like, I don't even hold my phone. This woman holds my phone for me. And, uh, you know, I, I just sort of speak out loud. I don't even type anymore. That's my, that's my, uh, Abreu just said he doesn't own a computer.

Was he?

I think he was on that. True, Abreu, or you just bullshitting in the chat?

That's, that's what I was told. He doesn't own a computer.

See, that's what I was saying, dude. I knew it. I knew he's in that ultra rich. Wait, so there's the mega rich. So all the, the most rich is they don't own a computer, nor do they even touch a computer. Their emails get printed out for them and they either handwrite or just say things out loud and people go relay the messages. I think he's one notch below that where he doesn't own a computer and he just does shit off his phone.

That's weird to me. I mean, not weird because I mean, if you're a baller, go ahead, baller, ball out. But like, what if you just want to type a long essay or doesn't want to, or if you want to just like us can understand the feeling where you don't need to type nothing ever, or you just want to like search the web and like go on Reddit. Like it just seems like easy to have.

If you take my computer away, forget the work, I would be so bored. I like need to like, you know, browse the internet.

Yeah, that's crazy. So he doesn't own a computer. That's pretty cool. Yeah, the guy's awesome. He said he had a few really good ideas. I wanted to ask him, so he sent us these notes ahead of time. And he said this thing about million, the difference between a million and a billion. And I was like, oh, come on.

We gotta save it.

Yeah, I wanted to know what he was gonna say.

I think we slow played it a little too much at the beginning and just That was my fault. I should have gone into one of these, but okay. So a couple of things. So here's my takeaways. Here's my, like, I don't usually do takeaways because I don't think it, like, I don't know. I just don't bother. Usually it's not like I really learned so much that I really want to do takeaways. I was just kind of entertained. But in this, I actually did have a few takeaways. I thought I'm just going to rattle them off. Insight number one, the barbell of selling your company. It's very easy to sell at the small end. And even at the high end, the hardest path is actually that middle ground where both of us actually sold our companies. And I think that that's true. It feels very true from my experiences. And I've never heard anybody like kind of say it out loud. So I thought that was a good insight.

I liked that basically what he— I don't think you summarized it or I don't think you said everything. Basically, he said it's easier to sell a company for like, he actually said $10 million or under or like hundreds of millions.

Right, exactly. And the reason why is, you know, the small one, you can kind of cut the check just on talent. The big one, you're buying like kind of a fleshed, more fleshed out asset of technology or traction or talent, unique talent. And in the middle, he's like, you've usually raised enough money where like your price, your asking price is too high for them to just, just do it without blinking. But you don't have enough proof and enough of an asset that they can like justify, you know, a big strategic purchase. And so that's actually the hardest one. And I think he was hinting at something that I think is true, which is that entrepreneur who's done that is the most dangerous entrepreneur because they have enough money where the next thing they chase, they're going to go bigger. Um, but they didn't get enough where they're just satisfied and going to go chill on the couch or on an island somewhere. And, um, they've been through it, but they're not, uh, they're not done. And I think that that's what he was kind of saying, which is like, those entrepreneurs are the ones you want to bet on. I also, when I invest, that's like a great signal to me is when somebody has had a small win under their belt. or a medium-sized win, I should say.

Yeah, I had, um, uh, Andrew Chen, very successful, uh, Andreessen Partners, said some of the most— he just said the most dangerous, uh, entrepreneur is someone who's, uh, somewhat wealthy enough that they, uh, that they're set, but they have a huge chip on their shoulder.

Exactly. And he goes, for example, Travis before he started Uber, uh, you know, he had Red Swoosh, which was like a kind of tens of millions win. Um, Ev Williams before Twitter You know, he had Blogger and, you know, that was a good win, but, you know, went for more. And there's a bunch of examples.

Mark Cuban did the same thing.

Right.

Okay.

Some other things I thought he was interesting. So his model, I didn't realize this beforehand, but his model is basically, it's kind of like moonshots. It's basically, he's anti the traditional playbook of Silicon Valley, which is raise in small steps. So raise a little bit of money, make a little bit of progress, raise a little more money, make a little more progress. Raise more money, make more progress. He's sort of like, find the biggest market you can go after, raise a bunch of money and go make the boldest bet in that market. For example, what he did with Jet, he's like e-commerce, huge market and growing double digits. I thought it was interesting. He was saying like, you know, you don't need this like brand new novel invention. It's like the bet is going to be on execution. And you do want to have like a new hook or like kind of like the 10 to 20%. That's that's innovative, but like 80% is the same as other players in the market. And so he was saying, do that, basically go raise a big chunk of money, recruit the best people, the best people make great product, and then go raise a huge amount of money to go for, you know, go for the home run shot. And I thought that was interesting. Most people don't use that playbook or don't talk about it. And that's like his specific lane that he did as an entrepreneur and he's doing as an investor. I thought that was cool.

He also, I asked him a question that you laughed at a little bit, but I thought it was a great question and he had a great answer.

Well, the reason I laughed, it was a great question and he actually gave a great answer, but you asked like, what's a company I could start and in 3 years sell for $100 million to Amazon or Walmart? It was like so specific that I was like, it's almost like, hey Mark, like I don't wanna think, just tell me what to do and I'll go do it. Like it was such a, such a solve my problem for me. I just laughed.

Well, it was— what was the word that you said the other day?

Orthogonal.

Orthogonal. It was my orthogonal way of asking, of asking what is a problem that big e-com businesses have? Yeah, that they have. What are problems that need to be solved? A pain point. Yeah, that was my way of asking that.

He gave a great answer.

He gave a great answer. The answer— he actually gave a previous answer where he said something like Conversational commerce, which is a really cool thing he'll explain. But the answer that he gave for that was, oh, fitting.

Virtual fitting.

Yeah, virtual fitting. So he gave a ton of really cool answers. And the guy, this guy, Marc Lore, who was the— he started Jet.com, which he sold for $3.5 billion, and then he was the CEO or president of Walmart e-com. And then he— before that, he had sold the company for $600 million Amazon. So like his, his, his, his perspective is like about almost as great as it can be.

Yes, exactly. Um, so I thought that was really strong and I liked, um, I liked some of his stuff on the interview, kind of like job interview side. I think, I don't know how much people will love that content because it's not as fun and it's not as junk foodie as ideas, right? But as somebody who ever, if you ever actually have to do that, I thought there was some good, good insights in there and even though it was a little bit like safe, like nobody can disagree that things he was saying were good. I didn't feel like it was just cookie cutter. Like, I think that— I think he genuinely believes it and that's genuinely his approach and it matters a lot to him. And I think that came through during that part, which is cool because you always wonder like, this guy's doing this and this and this, how is he doing it? Well, it's like it's always— he's got great people underneath him doing all those individual projects on a day-to-day basis. All right, well then how do you find those great people to actually make the difference between failure and success of the same idea is having, you know, that great operator underneath. So I thought that was pretty good. What'd you think of that part?

Yeah, I wanted to ask him more about it, but we didn't have time. But basically it sounds like he's not totally in the weeds of his businesses, which is the way to go. Um, you know, like if you can, if he can go out there, I don't wanna be in the weeds of anything.

I don't wanna be in the weeds of my marriage. I don't wanna be in the Weeds of parenting. The weeds are the weeds, bro. I don't want to be in the weeds.

I only want to be in the weeds of the things that I want to be in. And when you start a company, there's so much stuff that you think you have to do. And it's cool. I wanted to hear his perspective of it. He's like, look, I have the vision. I hire the initial people and I raise a ton of money and I just deploy that money and make everyone else specialize in what they specialize in. But we didn't get to ask him about it.

Well, one thing he did show was sort of like when we were— you were like, how do you, how do you figure out what that vision should be? And he talked about a couple of things. He's like, I look at where the trends are, where's the puck going, right? He's like, one way I do that is I see where investors are pouring in money. Okay, that tells me that these spaces are probably big or these technologies are breakthrough technologies. And so it's either like a technology like AI, machine learning. Okay, cool. I can apply that in another industry, or everything's a bunch of people pouring money into e-commerce. Okay, e-commerce is probably really big, or education, healthcare is really big. All right, that's a big space. Now how do I go create the most bold vision that has a slightly novel hook? And I thought it was cool that he was basically like, I don't get bogged down in the details of what is this player doing versus this player versus this player. He's just sort of like, how should it be? When he was talking about healthcare, he's like, I should just wake up, I have a dashboard that says, here's what's going on in your body. And it recommends that, hey, you should get this checked with a doctor or you should improve this. And, and I thought the kind of like just from a mind of a customer instead of like industry research, I thought, yeah, better. That's a big Amazonian thing to do is that which is like you just start with the customer and you say, here's how their life should be. That would make them really happy. All right. Now I have a pleased customer. Now I'll go figure out how to make that happen. Instead of the other way around, which is what can I do? And then, oh, does that partially satisfy customer? Okay, that's good enough.

And I wanted to ask him about, about Amazon and working with Bezos and things like that. I wonder what his opinion will be.

Or buying the Timberwolves. I feel like there's more we could do there because he bought a sports team. You know, one thing, there's a crazy story that I'll just share here. I didn't get to bring it up with him, but, but Ben found this when he was doing some research for this was he goes, when Jet was growing, or early on with Jet, they had a contest. I don't know if you've seen this article, but they had a contest about who can acquire the most customers for Jet. You become a marketer, you go spread the word, whoever gets the most customers gets 100,000 shares of Jet. And some guy went and did it. And he basically just did like kind of like paid marketing in a unique way. He spent— the guy invested $18,000 into the paid marketing, won the contest, and his 100,000 shares became worth $20 million when it sold. And so this guy turned $18 grand into $20 million as a fan of the company, outside the company, probably made more than anyone else in the company besides Mark, which is amazing to me.

I remember that story, and I was one of those people trying to— this was like—

you participated in this?

Oh, definitely. You didn't participate? Like, you would just— It was basically— so Robinhood did a good job of this. I believe it was Robinhood. Clubhouse has done a pretty good job. But like basically Robinhood's campaign right before they launched was you're on the waiting list, refer 5 people to move up a spot, right? This was Jets version of that, although Jets was first, I believe, then Robinhood before Robinhood. And it went incredibly viral. If I remember correctly, I think they had billboards promoting this.

The contest.

I— yeah, do you remember that? Uh, when you would—

I think we should have asked him about this. All right, we'll save this one for next time, but I thought this is an amazing story.

Yeah, I could spend about 2 more hours with him easily, so I hope he comes back. Let us know in the reviews what you think. Oh, and quick update, uh, we're going to Miami, I think, in, uh, 8 days or something. June 4th. Uh, we sold 300 tickets.

Uh, that's great. I think we have, we have a few left. We're releasing maybe what, 80 more, 100 more, something like that.

Yeah, we moved it to, uh, 400. It was 300, we moved it to 400. Um, we'll see what happens.

All right.

If you want to come see us, if you want us to autograph your dollar bills, bring them to Miami, uh, June 4th. Uh, I don't know how they should find the Eventbrite.

Just go to, uh, MFM Pod or My First Million Pod. So MFMpod.com, uh, and put in your email, we'll email you the details, right? Yeah. And there'll be a link on there. If you go to MFMpod.com, And also, if you just follow one of us on Twitter, you could definitely see the links where we're promoting it.

And do us a favor, if you liked this episode with Mark, when we post it, um, we're gonna post it, I don't know, or I guess go on LinkedIn and we— I want to shower him with love of people being like, dude, this was great, come back on, and then he'll come back on. So, uh, we'll— we need to game LinkedIn a little bit. I might have to dust off the old LinkedIn password to go and, uh, and because that's the thing, when guests come on, they— I've consistently heard this from the very beginning of this podcast, which is, dude, I get way more messages about this podcast than any other podcast I've ever been on. I don't know why that is. I don't think our audience is bigger, but something that works. And when they get that, that magic moment, that of, of people emailing them being like, it works. That was amazing. It works. They're, they're down to do whatever and come back on or do whatever else.

And you only need about 10, 20, 30, like you don't need a significant amount, right?

20 emails in one day being like, I love it, I love you, is a lot of emails for most people. It feels like— it feels like a million.

So Mark's name is M-A-R-C space L-O-R-E. Look him up on LinkedIn and just whatever his recent thread is, just click like comment and be like, just saw you on the podcast. So good.

Yeah, saw you on My First Million. Amazing. Yeah, go, go, go hammer his LinkedIn comments or something like that.

Uh-huh. Yeah. 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, never looking back. Life.