Sam Parr doesn't balance side hustles and his main job at Twitch, but his guest does by treating weekends like work days and hiring a small team with equity compensation. He spends $200-300k annually on collaborators and stays transparent with Twitch about his schedule, which works because he delivers results.
So I'm in the same boat. Uh, the question is directed towards you, but I'll give you my answer really quick, which is Sean, how do you balance side hustles while performing at Twitch? My answer to that, and I've said it before, is, um, I don't balance. I don't do anything on the side. Um, and frankly, I have no idea how you do it. Our good friend Ramon is able to do it really well. I get some people can do it. I personally can't do it and I don't even try. And, uh, I'm not ashamed about that.
Yeah, yeah. There's different ways to like kind of organize your time. Like you see this from Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey running two multi-billion dollar public companies at once as CEO, right? Like kind of a crazy thing that kind of seemed impossible before. And I would say I do it two ways. One is I throw more hours at it. So like I don't take weekends off. Like I work 7 days a week. I don't work all day, all 7 days a week, but I my weekend is just like my weekday. They're the same construction. So all of a sudden I got an extra 16 hours on the weekend where I can do things. Same thing at night. I don't watch a bunch of TV. I stopped watching NBA games, stuff like that. I basically was like, look, I can cut that out and that's 2 hours a night that instead I can create content, right? Or when I do the podcast, everybody else at the— back when we started this, everybody would go down to the cafeteria at Twitch for lunch. I would walk across the street. The studio was— your office was literally like 50 steps away from Twitch. I would walk 50 steps away, go to the Hustle office, and we would record from 12 to 1. Everybody else is eating lunch. I'm recording a podcast. Cool. I'll eat lunch on my desk, like, later. Doesn't matter, right? So there's these little pockets of time you can unlock. That's the first bit. Second bit is hiring. I bring on people. So when I say I'm doing X, it's rarely just me doing X. It's like Ben or Zach or Romaine or Chris, or I have a whole bunch of people that I say, hey, I'm doing this interesting project. Who wants to do it with me? And they're like, I find great people who want to do interesting things together. And I say, cool, what's in it for you? Do you want money? Do you want learning? Do you want like rep? You don't want to build your network? What do you want out of this? I'll make sure you get it. And they let me, like I said, be in two places at once because I could be doing this and they could be doing that.
What's your burn on all the, like, cause whenever I hear you say you got all these people, I'm like, damn, yeah, that's must be a lot of monthly. Yes.
My burn is expensive, but the things now bring in money. So it's, it's okay. It offsets it.
But like, uh, but the angel investing doesn't bring in money, and that's angel investing.
I don't pay salaries, it's only carry, so it's splitting the upside. So they have— they, they get it. They— I took some of my, my 20% carry and I took it down and let them have more carry. So, um, which, you know, for them is fine because they make money doing other things. So they're like, cool, this will pay off in 5 years, that's great. And I get to like learn a bunch about investing, I get to put together a portfolio. So if I want to go get a job doing this, or I want to start my own fund, I'll have a track record to point at and say, no, I did these investments before. I've been doing this for years. So that's kind of like what's in it for them. So I do have a significant burn. I would say it's like $200,000 to $300,000 a year of people cost to do these things. My goal is for them to break even. But if not, that's what money is for. Money is to be invested in things that will grow. And so I kind of just look at it like an investment. And it's worked out so far where The side hustles more than pay for the money I put in. Now, the last thing is basically an acknowledgment. And I talked, I was pretty transparent with the people at Twitch, which was like, look, I operate not on a 9 to 5, like, strict schedule. Like, cool, I'm just going to punch the clock for 40 hours a week. No, no, no. I'm here to do this mission. You want this job done? Great. I'm going to get that job done. Here's the trade. I can make sure this job gets done. You don't ask me how and when and where and why and all the technical questions. Like, not in such a confrontational way, but it's an understood agreement. They know what I do. I'm very open about, hey, I have a podcast, I have a newsletter. The CEO of Twitch subscribes to the newsletter and will DM me about it sometimes, right? I'm not hiding any of these things. They know I do these things. They know they take some time, but they're okay with that trade because I deliver the goods in my projects. And so my trainer told me this one day because I told him, I said, I'm feeling a little bit guilty. I wonder, I really like these people. I don't want them to feel like I'm shortchanging them. He goes, well, do you deliver the goods? I was like, well, yeah, like I perform, like they get the results they want. So, okay, well, you're that dude. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, they don't pay you to sit in your chair for certain hours. They pay you to deliver the results. And so just make sure you deliver the results. And if you're delivering the results in less time, that's because you're that dude. Maybe not everybody could do that, but you could do that. And I was like, oh man, what a pep talk. That was, you know, made me feel good about something that I was feeling, you know, uncertain about or uneasy about before.
And you're on paternity leave now, right?
Yeah.
So that helps too.
Yeah, exactly. And that's, you know, like big companies understand, like, look, you, if you have a kid, my first kid, I only took 10 days off, which I really regret. I should have, I should have took the whole leave. And so this time I decided I'm gonna make sure I take some off. And this time my family actually really needs me there. Whereas the first time I was like, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do here. My wife's kind of got it under control. Let me go back to work. And so this time I kind of realized that the idea of like, oh, this project is so important. And like, if I take this time off, then, you know, blah, blah, blah, let me do it. I'll take time off later. And later never came. And that was a big lesson for me. Like, don't put important things off till later. Do them now.
