MFM #168 - How to Reverse Engineer Businesses, The Indonesian King of Coal & the Story of Adidas

This Chinese Indonesian guy was a politician?

No, he was the guy. He was the middleman. So what he realized was, because I was like, okay, cool, we have this coal, what do we do with it? He's like, oh, we just sell it immediately. As soon as we sign the paper, we have the coal, we sell it to Exxon. And I'm like, oh, okay, so how does that work? He's like, well, I bought all this coal for $2 million, and then we— I bought all the coal for $2 million, and then we sell it in blocks for $20 million each. I'm like, well, that's like $400, $500 million. How are we We're turning $2 million into $500 million? And he's like, yeah. I'm like, well, that's amazing. Like, why didn't Exxon— why don't they just go and directly buy this?

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.

I just got vaccinated.

That's pretty cool. I got a new toy. You want to see?

Yeah. Oh nice, Sam's holding up a gun.

I was, uh, just, I just drove by a, a Bass Pro Shop and I walked in and I was like, I was just walking around just to look at like beef jerky or something and I just saw it and I've never even remotely owned anything like that and I was like, hey, those are cool.

You didn't need to like get certified or like Do a background check or something? You just walk into a Bass Pro Shop and buy a gun?

Um, yeah, I mean, I just walked up to the counter and I go, oh, those are handguns, those are neat, what's the deal? Like, how do you buy one of those? And they go, well, just give us your driver's license and we'll run a background check and you can walk out in 5 minutes. And I go, huh, sick, I'll take that one.

You just held it up that way? Like, you didn't hold the gun part, you held it with 2 fingers and like it was pointed sideways?

Yeah, I still have to learn how to use it. I don't even have ammo for it, and I have like a lock on it. I'm like pretty paranoid. I got to figure out how to use the damn thing.

Um, very Texas.

So we have something— we have— why, I'm a, I'm a, uh, Texas resident now. We have something cool happening on Wednesday. Yeah, we are going to interview Jake Paul, which might be, in terms of just like famous people, might be the most famous person we've ever interviewed.

Probably the most famous person I've ever met.

Um, I met the Pope once. Um, and I met Bill— I met Bill Clinton when he was in office.

All right, you peaked.

So, but Jake— Jake, I did that— both of those when I was, uh, like 8 years old. So Jake Paul is like number 3.

But when you say you met— what does that mean? You saw the Pope? You, you shake hands with the Pope? What is— what does it take to meet the Pope?

Uh, shake hands and said hi in a busy crowd.

No, that's pretty good. All right. You shook hands. Let's see who is the most—

or did we like more like a high five? It was more like a high five. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. I shook his hand and like said, hey, what's your, what's your real first name? And he goes, William. And I go, hey, why do you have white hair? He goes, because I'm old. And that was— so I met him and he asked my name. So I actually, I actually met Bill Clinton.

You really shot your shot with Bill Clinton.

Well, I was like 6 years old. What year was that? What year? '92, whatever it was. I was like 4 or 5.

Lewinsky, Was Lewinsky? What was going on?

Uh, pre.

Yeah, pre, pre, back when he was still young Bill. All right, um, that's pretty good. I met, uh, the closest thing I ever got to that probably was— well, I have this really long Orlando Bloom story that's very funny, but I'm not gonna tell it. Uh, but it's like, if you're my friend, you've heard me tell the story 10 times because it's just a go-to. It's just a winner of a story. Uh, you know, those stories that you just like, you just have in the bank if you ever need to be like, you know, the life of the party to impress someone. Um, but then I also, you know, the, you know, the Duke, uh, Duke Andrew or something like that. I forgot his name is Duke Andrew. I don't know how you say his name.

I know the name. Is he the guy— did he get in trouble with Jeffrey Epstein?

Yeah, he just got in trouble, uh, for that, or maybe for other things. I don't know, some— something happened that's not great for him. But he was doing a tour of Silicon Valley, and so we got word that, oh, the Duke is coming to our office. Uh, Prince Andrew, Duke of York. Yeah, that's right. Uh, he was the Duke of York. So I got word, oh, in the morning The Duke of York is coming to the office today. Can you give a presentation? I didn't know what the Duke of York was. Still don't really know what the Duke of York is. He's just like, not in the prince lineage, but whatever. So anyways, first, a full security detail comes, sweeps the whole office the morning just to make sure they get the whole layout. They know where the entrances are, they know where the exits are, and they're like, okay, this place is secure for the Duke. And he shows up at 4:00 PM and I've got this presentation I've been working on. I threw my whole day away and I just started working on this presentation for the Duke and explaining what we do and why it's so great. I gave my all and the presentation— you've been to our office. Our office has couches, not kind of chairs. It's a very comfortable couch. So he sits down on one of our couches and is just flanked by security guards. And I fire up the first slide on the big projector. And I start talking and I see that he's asleep. He is passed out by the— before the first slide even starts. He has fallen asleep in his chair. And now I don't know what to do because I'm giving this presentation to this one guy who's asleep. It's all my employees who know what the heck we do. They don't need this presentation. They all see that he's asleep. I see that he's asleep. The security guards are kind of like not saying anything. They're not doing anything. And so I give the presentation to the sleeping Duke of York for the first 20 minutes.

Oh my God, how cringe.

I was so lame.

That's actually really cringe.

Well, I'll finish the story with one thing because it's kind of relevant to what we do. So at the end, because we were an idea lab and like this podcast about brainstorming business ideas and talking about, shoot the shit about business ideas. So I basically paused at the end and I was like, okay, I could keep going, but like, It would be more fun if you actually joined us in doing what we do and you kind of brainstorm some business ideas. And so we asked him a bunch of questions. We're like, do you guys, like, what apps do you guys use? And he was like, we don't have phones. We're like, what? He's like, we don't get to use our personal cell phones. I guess at that time, I didn't know exactly what he's saying, but there's some limitation where they don't have, they don't just have iPhones with normal apps and they could do whatever they want. It's like very pre-installed use this phone, use what it has, and if you want more, go to IT and they'll help you or something like that. And then I go, what business ideas you have? He goes, there needs to be a fact checker so politicians can't lie. I was like, what? He's like, we need to hold politicians to what they say. There's so many politicians that just lie and we need them to— and everything should be on the right. Everything should be on the record and be fact checked at all times. It should be public if you're lying. That was his idea number one. And then he had something else. I was like about like, I don't know, like digitizing paperwork or something like that. And I was like, all right, thanks, Fritz.

So there's actually— wait, I could riff on that. There's this thing called Politico. Politico. Uh, what is it? Uh, I actually don't know how you pronounce this. Oh God, everyone makes fun of me for not being—

Politico?

No. Uh, Politi— uh, P-O-L-I-T-I-Fact. PolitiFact.

PolitiFact.

Okay. Have you ever heard of that?

No.

So what it does is it looks at, like, when there's a big, big election, they analyze all the major speeches done by some— by someone. So in the case of Trump or Biden, when they were doing their debates, they would— they have a meter that says true, mostly true, half true, false, right?

Okay, I've seen this.

Pants on fire. And they actually check all the stuff they say, and they say, this is or is not true, here's why. And it's kind of cool. Uh, uh, PolitiFact, I guess it's called. It's by the—

I like that it goes to pants on fire. That's a nice touch.

It's pretty cool. Um, I like that. Uh, so your, your boy was on to something. Not a great business, but it, it does exist. There is something that does this, right?

Um, um, okay, wait, one more thing. You said, uh, we got on this tangent because you said Jake Paul's coming on Wednesday. So why is Jake Paul coming on and what are we going to do about it?

So Jake Paul. Okay, so I am basically copying Sean and I started investing in some companies and Jeffrey Wu is a friend of mine. I think he's a friend of yours too. Yeah, I'm mildly close friends with him and he saw that I was investing and I saw that he was investing and he goes— and we were just shooting the shit. I go, what are you doing? And he said, what are you doing? And we exchange ideas. He goes, Hey, you just want to do a phone call? I'll bring on my partner Jake. And I was like, oh, aren't you partnering with Jake Paul? He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll bring him on. And I go, all right, sounds good. So we just do a Zoom and I'm sitting there with Jeff and Jake. And Jake's like, hey, what's your cell? Let's just have a text chat, like a group thread. And by the way, I love My First Million and I know the hustle. Like, can I come on? The podcast? Or I was like, yeah, sounds good. So here we are. It's kind of weird, but kind of funny.

All right, that's pretty legit. Uh, I also want to know from him— well, I'm going to ask him, but like, Jeff is like a tech founder, sold a company, uh, started like a company backed by Andreessen Horowitz. It's like a keto company. And, um, and then somehow, somehow like partners with Jake Paul. Like, I don't even know how they became friends. It's like, how did this Asian dude from the tech world become like good enough friends with Jake Paul where they start a business together? Like, do you know that?

No, I don't. I know that Jeff moved to Miami, and Jeff's like a manly man. Like, Jeff's into guns and fighting and big muscles and whatever men are supposed to be into. And I— Jake, I, I assume, is also into that stuff. So they, they must have met. And Jeff's real, real smart and savvy, and I have a feeling that it's a good shtick, which is like Jake's the famous one, gets access, and Jack is Jeff is the straight man who, you know, makes sure the—

knows how to do it.

Yeah. And that's historically a great partnership. It's actually— there's this guy named Brian Lee who does this, and he's partnered with Shapiro. I forget Shapiro's first name, but Shapiro was the lawyer for O.J. Simpson, and they started LegalZoom together. And Shapiro was like the celebrity. And then he did it with Kim Kardashian, and they started ShoeDazzle together.

Wait, weren't— wasn't Kardashian's dad? Uh, Kardashian's dad was the lawyer.

Uh, well, O.J. had like 8 lawyers. Robert Shapiro is his name.

O.J.

had like 8 lawyers, so it was like Kardashian, it was, uh, Johnny Cochran, it was, uh, uh, uh, whatever, yada yada yada.

And she was— was he the one who also partnered with Jessica Alba for The Honest Company?

Yeah, so this guy named Brian Lee, uh, I guess he's Korean, he's a Korean-American, um, and I guess Lee's Korean, I think. And, uh, he partnered with Shapiro for LegalZoom. And Shapiro was supposed to be like the face and the famous person. Turns out Shapiro, I mean, he's a really successful, he's a savvy business guy. So Shapiro goes, let's do this with some more celebrities. So they partner with Kim Kardashian and they do ShoeDazzle, which raised a bunch of money, but I think kind of flamed out. Uh, but then they do it, uh, with one other company, and then eventually they do it with Jessica Alba and Honest Co, Honest Company. And it's the same thing. Jessica Alba was supposed to be like Shapiro, kind of like the face, the famous person. Turns out she's pretty savvy apparently and good at, you know, whatever, whatever it is she's good at, I guess running a business. I don't know what her role is, but she's great. And that's what he does. And so partnering with celebrities can actually work out quite well.

This company is a, it's a big company. That's like a, that's like a big, that's like a billion dollar company. I think the Honest Co.

I think, I think many.

What do we want to talk about today? I got a bunch of random, random topics. Do you want me to start? Did you have one you wanted to start with?

Well, I actually was researching a fair bit of your things because I found them to be a little bit interesting. Do you want to talk about Turned Yellow? Is that interesting? Or how about you lead? I'll let you lead everything and I'll follow, but I researched all your stuff.

Okay, we can talk about Turned Yellow. So we'll start there. Um, this is a cool business. So this is in a category that, uh, our friend Ryan Beagleman said this word. I, he was the first one I ever heard say this. I don't know if he started it or he picked it up somewhere, but it's the term drop servicing. So people have heard of drop shipping, which is basically like You market on Facebook or wherever else, you sell a product to a customer, but it's a product that you don't hold in inventory. The, you just, as soon as you get the order from a customer, you place an order with your manufacturer. The manufacturer ships it directly to the person. So it's a way to do e-commerce without having to buy and hold inventory because you're just directly shipping to customers straight from the factory and typically kind of like lower margin, but it's a great way to get started if you don't have any money in e-commerce. That's kind of like the idea behind it.

Turned Yellow is actually one of Jack Smith's Jack might be an investor, but I know he's a huge customer of Turned Yellow.

Right. So what Turned Yellow does is similar. It's a drop servicing company. So instead of shipping you a physical product, they do a service for you kind of on demand. So Turned Yellow are actually a friend of ours. I don't know if you know the guy Alex, who's behind it, but he bought the company recently and I won't share any like the numbers or anything like that, but Alex, who really uh, Volodarsky or something like that. V-O-L-O is how you start the spelling of his last name. Um, you can find him on Twitter. He's @volodarsky or something like that. And he also started this like '90s theme kind of like, uh, party or parade or thing that used to happen, like '90s Jam Fest or something like that. It was just all nostalgia, which I thought was cool. That's why I first reached out to him. And then I found out that our mutual friends Xavier and Sieva helped, you know, invested in him when he bought Turned Yellow.

Oh, sorry, it wasn't Jack, it was Sieva. I'm, I'm an investor in Sieva's fund. That's how I heard about this. Yes.

Okay, exactly. So what Turned Yellow does is they basically— it's a great gift. So you can, um, submit a picture of your family or your friend and they'll send you a drawing, uh, like an illustration of that same photo or that same person turned into what looks like kind of like a Simpsons character, like turned yellow, like, you know, all the Simpsons characters are yellow. So they make, they cartoonize any picture for you. So it's like you, you went and got this custom made for your friend. So it's this great gift and, um, simple, simple business. They basically on one side, they have a whole bunch of artists who can crank out these like illustrations in this one art style. And on the other side, they just advertise on Facebook or whatever. And their, their number one advertisement is this like, uh, picture of Howie Mandel holding up his turned yellow where he got turned yellow. And that probably made them Millions of dollars.

There's so many replicas. So if you keep your ads on and type in Turn Yellow, so there's TurnYellow.com, which is, I guess, I think the original. Then there's Simpsonfy.me, then there's Art of Yellow, and they are all complete total ripoffs, the exact same website practically. And, uh, that's kind of interesting. I would have thought this would, would have— you would have had to have had some type of licensing or Blessing from Simpsons. That's the thing.

I think it operates in a slightly gray area because they don't say anything about The Simpsons, but the art style does evoke that idea, that look. And I think that's part of why people are buying it for sure.

It's 100% The Simpsons. I mean, they're sitting in front of the company.

I know, he's my friend, so I'm trying to say it a little bit softly here. But anyways, the cool thing, what they were doing was they bought the company. The company was doing well, had all these competitors because everybody was kind of doing the same. Everybody was trying to clone them. and then they brought on this badass licensing guy who has been like in the licensing business for decades. And the idea is that he was going to go and actually talk to all the different IP holders of Simpsons and Futurama and Harry Potter and any other brand and basically say, hey, we would love to cut a licensing deal with you so that we can do this and do it like totally above board. You make some money from this. We, we lose a little bit of money, but we can kind of like knock out all these competitors who are doing this and they don't want to work above board. They all want to be under the table here. And so that was the business plan. And I don't know exactly how it's going now, but I thought this was really cool. It's a cool business that does, you know, very good revenue. And there's a whole bunch that are like this. And right now what people do is they just do this for every popular theme. So it's like you can do one, like a lot of people like Rick and Morty. That's like a cult phenomenon now. So people are doing this with the Rick and Morty art style. and then people are doing this with another art style. And this reminds me of what our friend Sully did where he got the rights to Family Guy and made the Family Guy mobile game. And he made a version of Candy Crush that was themed Family Guy. So he took a proven game, Candy Crush, that's like super addictive, amazing at monetizing, and he just skinned it with the Family Guy branding and got Family Guy to help promote it. And Family Guy got millions of dollars in revenue from the success of this game. And then eventually the same thing with Harry Potter.

Yeah, he did the same thing with tons of stuff. But how do you think you even— like, I wouldn't even know the first thing. What do you do? Do you find someone, uh, who happens to know someone who knows someone and they introduce you to someone at Fox? I mean, like, I don't even know. That seems really hard to, to make happen.

Yeah, well, I think that's why they brought on a guy who's done decades of licensing, because he has the connections already. He maybe worked with these same brands to do a different licensing deal, maybe putting faces on t-shirts for Bud Light or whatever, right? Like, uh, so, so I think that's one thing is like there is a network aspect to it where you can get your foot in the door. But I don't know, did you ever listen to the first episode of this podcast with Sully where he explained how he got the Family Guy rights?

No, I, I, yeah, I listened to the episode, but that was 2 years ago now. What happened?

Yeah, basically he was like, all right, uh, first, why did he need this? They were just making normal mobile games, but distribution costs kept going up and up and up because Facebook was getting more more expensive to advertise on because all the game developers were all competing against each other, bidding the prices up. So he's like, shit, we need a way to stand out. We need a way to acquire users without paying for as much in ads. We need a more efficient way to acquire users. So he had seen that The Simpsons did a mobile game with EA and they made like Simpsons, like the Quest. I don't even know what it's called. Like some Simpsons game with EA. He's like, oh, that's genius. That's what we need to do. And this is before the Kim Kardashian mobile game and before Others started copying this playbook. So he's like, okay, what's the next franchise that we can get? Family Guy. So Family Guy is also owned by, I think, Fox. And so they have Simpsons and they have Family Guy. They get in touch with, they Google around, they get in touch with the person who's in charge of the stuff. And they're like, yeah, okay, I don't know. I've never heard of your startup, but we're going to probably just go with EA. I mean, we just did The Simpsons with them. It was pretty successful. EA is a big name, trustworthy. You don't get fired for going with EA. I might get fired if I go with you guys. So they're like, okay, fair enough. But they didn't give up. And so what he said was he had decided the company was screwed if they didn't pull a rabbit out of a hat. So he just put all his chips into this one strategy and was like, okay, every morning when we come into the office, we just have a whiteboard. The whiteboard says, how do we go get the Family Guy rights? It's like, what can we do? And they would just come up with some ideas and then they would try it that day and then they would fail and they would come back again the next day and the next day. And then eventually His number two, it was only him and two other people who knew about this plan in a company of like 50, 60 people, I think. And so the number two guy was like, dude, we've exhausted, we've, we tried this, we tried this, we've, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so eventually Mark Andreessen was on their board, who was their investor. So they had asked Mark Andreessen, hey, do you, you're super well connected. Do you know, know the guy? He said, yeah, I'll make a phone call. So he makes a phone call. They get the meeting, but the meeting again is like, I don't know, guys. So he says, all right, how do we pull this off? He goes, first, we're going to economically make this like a ridiculous deal for them. So we're going to offer them this ludicrous upfront guarantee of X millions of dollars of you just get that money from day one. Number two, you're going to get this awesome fat royalty on the back end if this game is successful. And so that was kind of lucrative. And they were like, okay, we're into that. And by the way, he didn't have the money to make, like, he didn't have the money to give them.

Yeah, it was a bluff.

Promised it and was like, I'll go raise the money if they say yes. Was his plan. And then the last thing was they found out that the guy, the main guy who's the decision maker, his like mentor or was like a family friend of Marc Andreessen or something like that. And so he's like, oh, talk to the mentor guy. So they talked to the mentor. The mentor is like, okay guys, I hear what you're saying. I like your spunk. Like, I'll help you out. And they put him on the board of their company. They're like, dude, we'll give you shares. We'll put you on the board. And he was like, Guys, don't eat it. It's okay. And he put in the word and basically that got the guy to lean their way of like, yeah, give these guys a chance. They're legit. Don't worry about that. They're not a big household brand. In fact, these guys will go all out for you. It's life or death for them. And that's what you want in your partner. And so that's how they ended up getting the pitch to work and got the rights to Family Guy and saved the company.

Do you ever think, at least I mean, I think of this and do you, when I think of stories like this, I think to myself, like, why wouldn't you just go to this person with the job and just be like— and just say all the obvious, which is, dude, you don't want to get fired. You also hate your job. Uh, I'll give you $100,000 personally. I'll wire you $100 grand. Can you please just— like, like, what's stopping just, like, total cronyism? I mean, I guess not what's stopping it. Maybe I should rephrase this. It's pretty mind-boggling that that's not more like—

that there's not more.

There's not more of that.

So, okay, so let's, let's answer both. What's stopping it? Well, usually the person you want to bribe is in a pretty high-up position, so they're doing well already. Maybe hard up for money.

Maybe. How much do you think the person makes a year who's like in charge of licensing for Family Guy? I bet you not.

I bet that guy's— I bet you that guy's easily pulling in $300,000, $400,000. Okay.

So that's not stupid money, but that's good money.

Good money, right? So he's not like, you know, he's not desperate. Let's put it that way. Second thing, uh, you know, in a big company, I don't know if you've had yours yet now that you got acquired, but there is like a whole like anti-bribery training you have to do. They really put it in your head like, hey, look, even just like taking any gift over $50, tickets to a game, you know, a dinner, you need to report it. It could be bribery, blah, blah. So you get, it gets put in your head and you start to think, okay, Do I want to risk it all? Because if I actually got caught doing this, I would basically not be able to have a career anymore. So you kind of have to pay me so much that I'm willing to risk the odds of me getting completely blacklisted from my profession where I've worked so hard to become a VP after 30 years.

And I'm not saying, by the way, I'm not even remotely implying that I'm into this. I'm just saying, I'm actually—

Of course, you're saying some other guy might be into this kind of thing.

What I'm saying is I'm surprised that this doesn't— I'm surprised it doesn't happen more. It's just crazy that we all agree. That was, uh, we, we mostly all agree what's right and what's wrong and we kind of stick to it. Um, because like if Sully had been like, look man, I'm going to give you this deal. If you get fired, I'll give you a job. Um, but I'm going to pay, I was going to pay your company $10 million. I'll give you just a million of that. I'm shocked that this didn't happen.

One is somebody said this the other day. They go, so how many employees does Amazon have? How many employees does Facebook have? How many employees does Google have? Huh, I wonder how many foreign spies work at these companies.

A lot.

It sounds crazy, like foreign spy, what is it, a movie? It's like, no, no, no, of course it's not zero. Of course there are people working for China, for Russia, for different countries as foreign agents. And there's actually been cases of this where guys basically took the machine learning model out on a USB stick out of Google and basically went back to Russia. That's a thing that has been found. to be happening in these companies. So one is it's crazy that that's actually happening, that, you know, I've probably worked with somebody who is actually like a foreign agent, which is just like a bizarre thing.

Agent on behalf of Google. I mean, how many times do you think that there's someone who is a Facebook employee and they're like, hey, look, I'm gonna fire you and we're gonna act like we're not friends anymore. I need you to get a job at Snapchat and I'm gonna funnel you money. And I need you to tell me everything.

Everything.

Yeah, that totally exists, which is kind of funny.

That has to happen. We don't talk about that. So then, so, okay, so then, um, then I was at that exactly that. So I've had this experience where I thought, honestly, I didn't think anything was wrong with this. But again, this is where maybe my moral compass is a little screwed up, but I was like, oh, for example, when we got acquired, we had talked to 5 other companies while we got acquired. And for each of them, they're laying out their map. You know, how, what's their strategy, how they're going to win, how we fit into that strategy, you know, where they're strong, where they're weak, what the numbers are. So when we finally got acquired, I was, I walked in and I was sort of like, guys, congratulations, you got me, you got my team, you got our codebase, but you also got a little bit of intel. No, they were like, I talked to them. They had no interest. I didn't even say anything, but I was like, nobody asked me anything. That's insane. I was like, I know I would have if I was in that company's shoes and I acquired somebody who had talked through the strategy with the CEO of all these different companies. I would've been like, so like, what'd they say? What do they plan? Like, what, how do they view the world? And not even for like, tell me their secrets. It's just like, what were they saying? It's like, not, it doesn't even seem wrong to me, but the fact that nobody asked me tells me, huh, maybe they do think that would be wrong to ask. And maybe my compass is screwed up. What do you think?

Well, this is my whole point, which is most, and, and, and I just want to say this again, incredibly clear. Like I'm not saying I do this or support it. I'm just saying I'm surprised it doesn't exist. But the moral of the story is most people are actually quite ethical. And particularly if you're in a room full of people, they're going to be extra ethical. And so I know I'm not surprised that they didn't do that. But as an owner, I would have been like, hey, come here. What?

Yeah, exactly. I wouldn't— especially when I was like at a startup.

I act, but I wouldn't start.

I have nothing to lose and I have everything to gain.

But I wouldn't say like, tell me their numbers. I would say like, I would, I would just be like, what do they like? What motivates them? Um, are they cool? Does it seem like they have their act together? Like these like fluffy questions. And then if you—

okay, I can say honestly, I totally would have asked for their numbers. I would have been like, how big is it? How much revenue are they doing? I was guessing, you know, $500 million. Is it $500 million?

You have to ask those other questions first. You got to like see if they're going to bite the bait.

You got to see if the person's cool with it or not.

Yeah. You don't want to make them uncomfortable, but I am a bit, I am surprised. Um, we, you and I know someone who was involved in a lawsuit because they were hired at one company, a large tech company, and previously they had worked at the competitor.

And we can say the names. This is public information.

All right. It was Anthony Popoliano. He worked at Facebook. This is all public. This is— you can read the deposition, or I believe it's deposition.

He didn't tell us. I read— I read the deposition like a nerd, and that's how I know.

Yeah. And basically, according to the records that we read, he worked at Facebook. He decided to work at Snapchat and they said something like, here's a piece of paper, write down the organization chart and tell us how it works and then go and recruit those people. And he, according to the deposition, said, no, that's, I'm not a chance. And they fired him. Snapchat did, or they like butted heads or something like that. And so yeah, I do.

Yeah, they butted heads over that. Yeah.

I think this stuff happens actually a fair bit, but I'm actually shocked it doesn't happen more.

Right. I, I, my only concern in that situation would just be I don't want to make my own person, my teammate uncomfortable. If they don't feel like sharing or they don't, they don't want to share, they feel like that's wrong. Okay. No problem then. Um, but if they were down to share, I would 100% be asking all the questions. I'm thinking from my startup brain at a big company, you sort of have more to lose. It's not really worth it. Uh, you're not like in a, like sort of, you know, life or death situation of a company. Like you don't need the information. But I really have been surprised. Like, we will hire people who are like from YouTube or whatever, and they, and wherever we're at, we're like hypothesizing, like, well, you know, like, how do other companies handle this? Blah, blah, blah. What could we try? I'm like, that dude worked there. Why don't we just ask that guy? Like, hey dude, what did you guys do?

How did it work?

What was it like? Is this retention number good or bad relative to what you saw? Like, and nobody asked the question, which is like, maybe it's just not in the big, big meeting settings, but I have been surprised at that. And I know if you're working like overseas, there are other companies that don't have that same credo. I worked for a guy in Indonesia, my first, first job I ever had. It's kind of like a summer job. And my dad hooks me up with this guy. He's like, oh yeah, this guy is known as the king of coal in Indonesia. He owns like all the coal of Indonesia. I'm like, oh sweet. Okay. So I'm like, I go do this summer job with this guy.

Was it, was he an American or an Indonesian?

He's a Chinese guy living in Indonesia, a 5th grade dropout. Can't speak any English, pretty much, very broken English. He had 4 women just doing his email on giant TV screens in his office because I don't think he could even type. And he would just orate, he would just say out loud what he wants to reply to every email, and that's how he would do his business. And so as I get there, I'm like, oh, cool, you're the king of coal. How'd that happen? What'd you do? And basically what I realized pretty quickly was This guy's entire business model was big companies like Exxon and BP and Chevron. They all wanted land in Indonesia, and the land was owned by the local city province. They had the rights to it, so they had the thing. And the local guy would just only— the only way to do business with this guy was to bribe him. That's the only thing this guy wanted was a bribe. The local politician wanted a bribe. If you give them the bribe, you can have the land rights.

So this Chinese Indonesian guy was a politician?

No, he was the guy. He was the middleman. So what he realized was, because I was like, okay, cool, we have this coal. What do we do with it? He's like, oh, we just sell it immediately. As soon as we sign the paper, we have the coal, we sell it to Exxon. And I'm like, oh, okay. So how does that work? He's like, well, I bought all this coal for $2 million, and then we like— I bought all the coal for $2 million, and then we sell it in blocks for $20 million each. I'm like, well, that's like $400, $500 million. How are we— we're turning $2 million into $500 million? And he's like, yeah. I'm like, well, what? That's amazing. Like, why didn't Exxon— why don't they just go in directly, buy this? He's like, haha. Like, well, if they could, they would, but they can't, so they won't. And basically what he was saying, like, those companies couldn't get their hands dirty. They could not risk bribing foreign, like, politicians. So what they did was they let this guy bribe the foreign politicians, get the rights, and then they would cut a commercial deal with him. And this guy knew nothing about the coal. I'd be like, "Oh, is this a good asset, bad asset?" He's like, "Doesn't matter. We get the paper, they pay for the paper. We don't have to do any of the work. We don't have to extract it, mine it, don't have to do anything." And now, by the way, this guy's in jail. That's the end of the story.

He's in jail for other things.

What was his name? Can you say his name? Yeah, his name, well, I don't want to risk personal harm by outing this guy. We're a world away, but this guy's kind of a gangster, so I'm not going to say his name. You could use what I said and Google it.

Your dad got you an internship with a gangster?

Yeah, me and my sister, by the way, both of us.

That's crazy.

Like, I remember we were in his office one time and he had a friend come in and his friend is like, kind of like, you know when it's his friend because it's just like alcohol, like starts pouring, women start showing up at the office. Like, what's going on here? Who are you trying to wine and dine? And it's this one sleazy looking dude. And I was like, oh, like, what's, what's your business? He's like, I work in Singapore. Uh, I help companies on the Singapore Stock Exchange. And literally this was just straight insider trading. So I'm sitting there and I'm just hearing this guy be like, yeah, these are the 3 companies you need to like buy. They're like dirt cheap right now, but they're going to like, they're about to announce XYZ and they're going to pop. And then they would just like toast their whiskey and then they would buy this stock on the Singapore Stock Exchange or Hong Kong Stock Exchange. And like, sure enough, the numbers would go crazy. And I was just sitting there being like, wow, this is like insanity that this is how like loosey-goosey these guys are with business.

Well, what I was going to say was, I think that like, and, uh, uh, even though like people make Amazon or whatever to be like evil, uh, you just said no, like we would never even ask this ex-Googler about X, Y, and Z. And I was going to say, that's like a very American thing. I have a couple friends who I worked with, uh, who run Chinese companies or, you know, they're Chinese and they're either based in China or are now American, or they're Chinese American now. And I have a bunch of Indian friends, um, and they're like, yeah, that's— we, we don't— we operate differently than you. Our opinion of, of the right and wrong way is a lot different than you. And it is far more unadulterated capitalism of just, uh, well, why is copying wrong? Like, and, and they're kind of right, right? Like, why is it wrong? But anyway, it is quite interesting.

Yeah, totally. Anyways, I don't know how we got on that topic. Do you want to talk about First Versions? We can go back to— Yeah.

What is that?

So I saw this website. My guy Chris, Chris, who's my apprentice right now for content, he sent this to me and I haven't actually spent a ton of time on it, but go to firstversions.com. Check that out. And I'm pretty fascinated with this. I think you are too. We both are like internet archaeologists. We like to go find the OG thing. What did I did this blog post that got like tens of thousands of views once before I had any audience. It just went viral because it was what did the first web page look like for these 10 big companies? And this is kind of like some common to do, like Uber's homepage back in the day, Snapchat's homepage back in the day, the first Facebook homepage, the first eBay homepage, first Amazon homepage. And these things look like, you know, so basic and rudimentary and like really just It makes you realize, like, dude, you need to launch. And there's that quote, if you're not embarrassed by V1 of your product, you launched too late. And all these companies definitely fall into that category. So I thought firstversions.com was a cool little archive of stuff like this.

I think this is so cool. So I actually just sent you a link to an article that I wrote. I think I wrote this in '16, 2016, years ago, '15, October '15. And I, you could It probably doesn't even work entirely. But anyway, I, what I love to do, and I've always loved doing this, is I use, there's a few different websites, WebArchive's the easiest. And what I like to do is I will get a Google Doc and a spreadsheet and I'll map out the whole journey of a company. So I'll look at what, when Airbnb started, and then I'll read all about 'em of like, all right, here's when they announced they had this many users. Here were they, here's where they announced this much funding. Here's where they said they had their first 50 employees, and then from 50 they actually went to 1,000 in only 2 years. And then I'll take screenshots of their website, and in doing that you can actually see what— like how the, the evolution. So progression. Yeah. And I'm just starting— I'm just making this up with Airbnb, but it could be like it started as airbed and breakfast and it was about renting cots inside of a living room. Then, oh wow, they actually changed their, their positioning to travel like a local, and they started, um, taking higher-end pictures. I don't know what it is, but, uh, and when they started actually taking higher-end pictures, that was actually right when they— right before they raised their $100 million funding. And so anyway, you can actually track the progression really nicely by doing this, and I love doing that. I love it. And so you can actually see, oh, Uber, UberCab.com, they were only black car services. Oh, when they raised all this money, they actually got rid of the black car. The black car became secondary. So actually, the black car didn't work. Like, uh, so they switched to this, you know what I mean? And so it's kind of cool.

Yeah, you can totally reverse engineer a lot of the stuff. So some of the tools we use to do this, the Wayback Machine, which is the Internet Archive. So, uh, just Google Wayback Machine. That lets you put in any domain name and then you go back in time and they took screenshots of what the website looked like on June 12th, 2010. And then that, you can go back and you can see Uber's, what did Uber's homepage look like back then? How were they describing themselves? Another one I do is TechCrunch. I go to TechCrunch, I search for a company's name, and then I reverse sort it by the earliest mention of it. So like, you can go Twitter, you can see the very first article is Mike Arrington being like, the buzz at the party this week was about Twitter spelled without the vowels. Basically, it's like the short messaging service was kind of fun. You do this, but who cares? People are just tweeting about their breakfast and it was all through SMS. Then you can kind of see what was going on then. So I like that one. That's, that's a useful one. Another one I'll do is I'll go on Twitter and you can Twitter advanced search. So you can type in anyone's name and you could do things like Twitter doesn't make this obvious how to do it. There's like a format of how you write these in, but you write like @TheSamParr before 2011.

Yeah.

And then you say minimum 300 likes and I can kind of go see your most popular post at that point in time. What were you talking about? What was working for you? What wasn't? So I've done this with a whole bunch of people and I kind of like, I really am a big reverse engineer type of guy. And it's not that you can copy it, but it's just data points. It's a way to fast forward experience because experience the hard way is slow. It takes like decades to get good at things and to learn and to like figure out what's normal, what's not, what's fast, what's slow, what's good, what's bad. And a better way to do it is to like download a whole bunch of data points quickly. And it's not perfect experience, but it's better than being blind and just kind of like going off only your personal experience.

So those are some ways I would actually go as far to say you can copy it. Um, you, you can, you actually can copy a lot of stuff and I think you should sometimes. So for example, this first, by the way, firstversions.com, this is a wonderful website. This is such a good website. Uh, I, uh, this is so cool.

I wish they don't even, by the way, what they do is not just internet. Like what, like what we're talking about is homepages. Cause that's like kind of our niche, but they'll be like, this is the, yeah, this is the first version of Tom and Jerry, like the very first pilot. And like last night, I don't know why, for whatever reason, before I went to bed, I was watching the very first pilot episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm before it was even a show. And I was, I just love seeing that OG, OG, the first pilot of Always Sunny in Philadelphia where they're using the handheld camera. I like seeing that because it just, as somebody who is frequently starting things, it's important to go see that your favorite things started with very humble, simple, kind of shitty beginnings. And then you sort of can see how much better they got over time.

This is so good. I love this. I'm going to link to you something, link something to you. So in 2013, I created this thing I called The CEO Doc. It was a stupid name, but I sent it to you and you could actually see that. It's so funny that you do this because I mean, it's, it's so funny that we're similar and we've been doing this for years. So I created— oh wait, is it not working? I created this document where I would take— I think I had a list of 500 people and I would make timelines for each of their lives and I would say started there. It was broken into apprenticeships. First hit, and then the self-actualization mode. So for example, uh, Jack Dorsey started apprenticeship at age 22. From 22 to 28, he basically was like this poor nobody who worked as a dispatch service for a taxi cab company. 28 to 31, started Twitter at 28. Uh, it actually became a pretty big hit really soon at, uh, 29. And so I have timelines and then I have average ages average age for each person. And so I love doing that stuff and it works so good for, for just seeing like what's possible.

Right.

So we're actually quite similar. I've been doing this as well for a while.

Yeah, it's great to nerd out about this kind of stuff. Okay, so first version is cool. I have another kind of cool thing. Okay, here's a, here's an idea. I would say this is not a business. It's probably a very bad idea. Maybe this is something that You reminded me of it because this thing that we're doing is like, the thing we're talking about is extremely nerdy and probably most people don't do what we're describing, kind of like go back and map out the evolution of companies or people or whatever it is. So similarly, I want a tool that I'm calling Business Pocket. So Pocket is this Chrome extension, it's this app or service where you, if you see an article you like but you don't have time to read it, You just hit Pocket and it's like you put it in your pocket for later.

Do you think, uh, I think it used to be called Read It Later. Do you think Pocket is going well? I bet you it's going pretty badly. I bet you that'd be a cool company to buy.

Yeah, I don't think it's going well. It got really big and it raised a bunch of money and then like it's just been around for so long without like an exit that you wonder, did it just get like become obsolete somehow? Um, along the way, but anyways, it was just a way to save articles. Now I actually want something what I'll call business pocket. So I have this bookmark thing in my Chrome that's called Companies to Watch. It's basically like anytime I stumble across a company I find interesting, I've been doing it, it's like this thing is like 10 years old now. I find an interesting company and before it used to be, I want to see if this will be successful or maybe I should, if I was an investor, I would invest in this. So I want to flag this and then I'll come back later in 3 years and I'll see how it turned out, whether I would've made money or lost money on this thing. And so I've just been collecting this for a long time now. In reality, I bookmark it and then I never go back and go recheck those because who's got the time? But I would love a service that's almost like a programmatic newsletter where I can just flag either people or companies that I say, I want to keep a watch. I want to keep watch on this company or this individual and the CEO, or maybe this company, the startup. And then I want it to basically take the 10 that I've flagged and send me anytime there's interesting news about them with some filter. They raised new funding, they got a new job, they announced this thing, they're on TV, whatever. And my 12 that I'm tracking might be different than the 12 that you're tracking, but we might have 3 that are the same. And so this company that's underneath that would just need to set up a programmatic way to watch for the news around certain names and then turn it into an automated newsletter. That was kind of just like a random idea. I don't think it's a business, but I think it would be cool.

I disagree. I think it's a business. When we were getting ready to decide if we wanted to launch Trends or launch launch something new. I wrote a landing page for this product. I forget what I called it, but something involving the word spy. And I put like, the headline was like, we're your secret spy, spies that track your competitors and tell you everything that they do. So, you know, and we deliver it to you via email. And, uh, I think this actually could have worked wonderfully. And the reason I came up with this idea was I had a friend who worked at Rocket Internet. Rocket Internet, Google it. It's a It's a guy, it's 3 brothers named Ollie, Alex, and something else, Sam, where brothers, and they started this thing called Rocket Internet. And basically the way it works right now, it's a large publicly traded company. They had this like guy named— he was like the chief scientist. And what they would do is they would research fast-growing companies in America and they would clone them and they would deploy that company in Africa, in Asia, different parts of Europe. Things like that.

Brazil.

Brazil. And so they cloned Uber, but in Mexico. They cloned Pinterest, but for Germany. They cloned Zappos, but for Germany. They did, um, Amazon for Thailand.

They own like the Amazon for Brazil, I think.

Yeah. And they also own the Amazon for Thailand. And they would pick a variety of companies. They would do like the Wayfair for Nigeria or something like that. And they had this guy who was called the chief scientist. And all the clones of the Amazon of this country, that country, that country. There'd probably be like 8 clones and he would send an email every day. This is, this is a story I heard. I don't know if it's true. He would send an email every day and it'd be like, hey everyone, Amazon, uh, actually just moved on their homepage. They moved the clothing from, uh, 8 or, uh, 100 pixels to the left. Uh, it probably means that clothing is a little bit more popular now than furniture. So, all right, make sure you move your clothing thing, or hey, they, uh, they changed their color of this button from this yellow to this orange. Go ahead and do that. And I thought, that's pretty awesome. I would love to have that. I would love to track my competitors because I would do research on my competitors. I would say, oh, which ads are they using? Oh, I wonder why they're using this ad. Maybe, maybe they're using this ad for this, this reason, that reason, that reason. I'm going to go and copy it. And I would use a variety of SimilarWeb. Facebook Ad Archive, Ahrefs, and a few other things. And I would just, I would be like, oh, here's where they're succeeding and here's why they're succeeding. I may copy them, I may not copy them. And I just know what's working. And I think that that 100% could be a service that you pay $100 grand a year for and they'll tell you the 5 nearest competitors and every month you meet with their team and you say, all right, your competitors, They're doing this, they're doing that, they're doing this. Here's what's working, here's what's not working. Here's a hypothesis as to what all this means. And I think actually you could charge a six-figure annual contract for all of it. And I think it would be a really cool company.

Right. Yeah. I told you about my friend who I nudged in this direction to do this for e-commerce. Uh, I'll give him another shout out here. He said he got a bunch of sales last time I mentioned it. So I'll do it again. Shopifysalesdata.com, basically a way to track your competitors, um, and how much they're selling and what new ads they're running and stuff like that. And, um, just in the niche of e-commerce, and it's, you know, I don't know, $100 a month or something like that. And, um, I pay for it. I'm like, this is great. Uh, you know, it's a valuable service. And so you could do it in a niche or you could do it, you know, more broadly. But, uh, but yeah, I think that's cool. Um, Let me give you a different topic.

You want to do one more? Did you want to do the pets thing? You've had that here for 2 weeks.

So this is actually like a really— what I thought was a really random idea. And then I saw an ad, I saw a commercial for it on TV yesterday and it's like totally a thing. So it's just going to sound stupid because it was like a stupid— basically I was like, kids love having pets. Pets are like a pain in the ass maintenance-wise. And, you know, kid wants it, but they're not going to maintain it. I was thinking about, like, that's why people get fish, because it's kind of like self-contained in this little tank and you don't have to do anything most of the time. Just feed it. Fish die all the time. It's really sad for the kid. And so I was like, why is there not just like AI pets? Why aren't there just like robo pets for kids? And I was like, oh, a fish would work because it just needs to swim around sort of aimlessly. You don't touch it. So even if it was mechanical, it wouldn't feel cold. Like a mechanical dog, I don't think will feel great. But, um, dude, that is so mechanical.

Fish, you, you hit home runs. This is such a dud. This is such a dud. You, you're a home run hitter. Today's a strikeout. This is a stupid, stupid idea. You are—

I saw the commercial for it. It was called Robo Fish yesterday and I was like, oh, this exists. No way.

Oh my God.

So I'm going to go check. You see if you can see the Robo— I think it's called Robo Fish. I saw the commercial. Tell me they do $100 million a year and prove that this is not a dud. So anyways, that was one. And then there's a related one, which was there's a medical thing that's going on for, you know, like pets are sometimes labeled as like kind of like an emotional support dog or whatever. It's like anti-anxiety, that sort of thing.

You know, that's total bullshit too, right?

Well, I know most people use it for bullshit. I don't know if there's any medical, like, uh, like there must be some like cases where it helps or something like that.

No, I agree that in some cases it is true, but, um, a lot of like, like people like, oh, they're certified in emotional, like there's not like a certification process.

Yeah, there's no, yeah, exactly. This dog did not get trained. But anyways, I saw this company that was doing this for people with dementia and Alzheimer's. They were giving them this weighted— it's the equivalent of a weighted blanket, but it's a pet. So it's a pet that sits in your lap. It's heavy and like a weighted blanket, but it feels like a pet and it moves like a pet. Now, if you're like totally— if you're just like an adult who has no health conditions, you'll be like, oh, this is like clearly a robot. This blink is like not really fully natural. And this dog's obviously not running anywhere. It's not a real pet. But to somebody with dementia or Alzheimer's, they found that this is extremely comforting to them. Now, they're really expensive right now. They're like thousands of dollars for this really kind of realistic feeling thing.

What's it called?

But they're going to bring the price down. I don't know. I met this guy who, through my wife, she was consulting for this company that was doing it, and she was showing me the videos and stuff like that about this thing. So I thought that was kind of cool too. But I think that we will see more and more either genetically engineered pets or just straight up kind of like mechanical AI pets. Because if you can get 60% of the benefits with 0% of the work and maintenance, I think there's a whole class of people who will take that trade that today just don't own pets because it's just too much cost and too much work.

So, man, I called your thing totally stupid. I think for the average—

Oh yeah, hold on. Receipts. Abreu, come in and tell Sam, tell Sam about the robofish. I mean, I don't know if this is what you were talking about, but this company in 2012, they sold 15 million of these at $8 apiece in the first year.

Well, first year.

That's right.

All right. I'm both. I kind of take back and I don't take back. So you're wrong in that you're saying like, oh, pets are so annoying. Just give them a robot pet. Like, yeah, I think that's actually silly. I don't doubt that people buy a robo fish. I think that's just like a cute little widget that's fun to have.

But dude, you were the one who was like, oh, these AI girlfriends are great. It's the same idea. It's the same premise.

Okay. Okay, well, look, I'm open-minded enough to like, uh, challenge my views, but I— you started talking about this Alzheimer's thing, and that's actually quite interesting. I just Googled it. I wanted to see which ads come up. I like— because like, so I Googled this thing. I'm— I— it's kind of— I don't really like looking at this. I feel a little sleazy, but there's this— oh, I actually don't like the name. There's a name called— I just said it to you— the Alz Store. So A-L-Z Store, and it stands for the Alzheimer's Store. And they call it the All Store and they sell like these Livestrong bands that have your name on it. So if you— when you forget your name, remember, and they actually have a robotic therapy dog. And this website actually looks like it's like an entrepreneur who's just looking for a moneymaking niche, which a little weird with, with this type of thing, but people seem to love it. It's a whole store dedicated to Alzheimer's products. I have zero idea if this is like actually what Alzheimer's patients love and need. But this is incredibly fascinating. And I'm looking at their similar web traffic. No, I actually think this is legit. They have videos of them, of the founder talking on like the Today Show about selling all types of products for Alzheimer's stuff. And I'm looking at their similar web traffic and it's incredibly popular. What a fascinating business, all about Alzheimer's. Yeah, no, this is a legit company. I'm looking at the about page. This, They have a good background story of the, the father has Alzheimer's, so now they create all these products, yada yada yada. It looks pretty interesting. Can you believe that this exists? The All Store, right?

That's wild. I had no idea. Um, but makes sense, I guess. Uh, I guess it does make sense. I have one more. Can I do last 2 minutes? A Billy of the Week story.

Um, a second Billy of the Week story.

I learned this, I tweeted this thing, I tweeted this out and this kind of blew my mind. Okay, so I was doing some, you know, Shoe Dog is like super popular about the founding story of Nike.

Yeah, you did one on Adidas.

I did one on Adidas and I was like, okay, Nike, great. What's the story with Adidas? Where did that come from? And so I just started Googling for a second and I didn't go so in depth, but okay, here is the 60-second version of Adidas. So tell me if you knew these things, just give me a yay or nay if you knew it or not. So Adidas, when you were a kid, did you not hear that this stood for All Day I Dream About Sports? Yeah.

Soccer. All day I dream about soccer.

Soccer. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Not true. Uh, basically, you know, the guy's name was Adolf Dassler who started it and he went by Adi Dassler. Dude, uh, so it's just Adidas.

I was in Germany one time and someone, a German was like, do you like Adidas? I'm like, I don't know what that is. Is that like a German brand? They're like, oh no, it's Adidas. You don't know Adidas? I go, no, I've never heard of it. And they started laughing at me. Adidas, I guess.

Yeah, right. You— I'm sure you corrected him about his own hometown.

Yeah, I know Adidas now. I don't know what Adidas is.

So, okay, so the story is kind of crazy. So, uh, two brothers— basically, dad owns a leather shoe factory. The two sons are like, okay, shoes are cool, but we want to do sports shoes, not these like leather shoes. And so they spin out and they create the Dassler Brothers shoe factory. And what they do is they're like, we're going to, you know, Adi, you're going to design the shoes, and Rudy, you're going to sell the shoes. You do sales and marketing. Two brothers, they do that, right? It's like a 10-year grind, you know, building this thing up. They're growing, but they're growing slowly. And then finally, 1936, the Olympics come to Germany, and they are— a whole bunch of the athletes from Germany are wearing Adidas. But they also get a little bit, you know, they go and they hustle and they get their Adidas shoes in the hands of some non-German athletes also, one of whom is Jesse Owens. Jesse Owens goes on to win, I think, 4 gold medals at those Olympics. And so Jesse Owens is a Black guy who basically wins gold and beats the Germans in front of Hitler, who's like promoting white supremacy at the time. And so it's like, you know, a big deal for that victory at the time. He's wearing Adidas. And this is kind of considered the first time that an entrepreneur used sports to promote their products or their businesses. And he kept doing this, right? Like, you see photos of Ali versus Frazier. They're both wearing Adidas because he was, like, hell-bent on getting Adidas into the hands of all the iconic athletes that they could, which Nike went and took that strategy and did even better with that strategy over time. And so they, you know, business is going great. They, you know, after that Olympics thing where they get all this exposure, Next 3 years, they sell like, I don't know, 600,000 pairs of shoes. Business is great. 1940 hits and World War II starts and the factory just gets seized by the German military. They're like, this is now a war factory. We need to produce war goods here. No more shoes. And hey, you two brothers join the army. So they get enrolled in the army. So the business just goes on break. Adidas just goes out of business for the whole World War. Okay, World War II ends, the brothers come back, uh, you know, Adi's like, all right, he gets 50 people together. He's like, we're restarting the factory. We're going to do this again. And somewhere along the way, the two brothers break up. So I didn't know this part.

Yeah, I know that.

The other brother goes on to start Puma.

Yeah.

And so one brother starts Adidas, the other brother starts Puma, which I just thought was like, you know, the most baller shit. You knew that already?

Yeah, I know that they got in an argument.

Is that well known?

Yeah. Uh, well, I don't know, but I mean, you're talking to me. Uh, I think that, uh, yeah, they got into an argument. One of them started Puma. For some reason I thought that he, he like— did he move to Africa and start Puma? Is there any part of that?

No, I think he like literally moved across the river and like started a competing factory within like earshot. That's, well, that's the way I read it. Maybe I read that wrong.

Yeah, I know. And, and the two brothers, because they got into a disagreement on how to do— oh, Bray said Reebok started in Africa, so I guess I'm getting confused. But, uh, yeah, yeah, I knew that.

So they, they restart the factory after the war, and now they're using all the war, like leftover war materials in the shoes, like rubber for the soles and like certain design, like the look of camouflage and different things like that. They come up with the three-stripe logo. And so anyways, business does good. And then like there's this crazy run of death. So the Puma brother dies. 4 years later, the Adi dies, you know, from Adidas. He dies, his wife takes over, she dies 6 years later, the son takes over, he dies 3 years later. So there's just like this run of early deaths. It's like, you know, the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. Nobody can like hold this thing. And so finally now the 2 daughters own the thing. They sell it for pennies on the dollar because Adidas has just been declining for years now at this point. They didn't have the right people running it, I guess. And so they sell it for $500 million, um, uh, you know, to, to this French guy. French guy tries to turn around, he can't do it. It's on the verge of bankruptcy. And then they sell it to this guy. This is the actually the Billy of the week. Uh, it's this guy Dreyfus. And, um, I think his name's Robert Dreyfus. Oh, do you know who—

you know who this person's related to, right? No.

Uh, his dad was rich, but I, I don't know why he's rich.

Uh, I believe it's Alaine from Seinfeld. That's her.

Oh, oh yeah. Julia Dreyfus.

Yes, I believe, uh, I believe that's her grandpa. Wow.

Okay. That's crazy. So this guy grows up kind of rich, goes to like Harvard or whatever, uh, buys this thing. His, his tagline, I love it. He goes, I'm a gambler and I like turnarounds. That was kind of like his business philosophy. So he takes a gamble, takes the lead role at Adidas. And he basically is like, all right, we're doing 3 things. We're moving the factory to Asia. We're cutting the payroll, we're cutting jobs, cutting 2/3 of the jobs in this company so we can get profitable. And lastly, we're going to take that money we were spending on people and we're going to spend a shit ton of it on marketing. And they were like, wow, you took it from the brink of bankruptcy, 3% market share, and it came roaring back and became the number 2 brand. How'd you do it? You must be a genius. And he goes, he was in Time magazine. The quote is, It didn't take a genius. You just had to look at what Nike and Reebok were doing and do that. He goes, it was just easier for somebody outside the company to see what was obvious than somebody inside the company who had all this baggage and they couldn't do it. And so he turns it around, retires a billionaire in his 50s, I think. And that is the crazy story of Adidas today. I thought that was wild. I had no idea.

So there's two takeaways of this for me. The first is a question that I should start asking myself, and you don't actually need to to follow through, but how would a PE firm run your company? I actually think that's a great question to ask yourself, which is what would a PE firm do if they were— if, if they owned this right now? And that's kind of an interesting way to get ideas because it would— you kind of say to yourself, oh man, I'm being such a punk, like I could be so much better.

The second thing, and, and the opposite, and the opposite would be what would, you know, Larry Page do? Google's, you know, CEO and founder at the time.

Um, yeah.

But yeah, they took this small thing and they just kept expanding it. Like, no, we need to do Google X, we need to do moonshot projects, self-driving cars, satellites into the sky, giving people internet. They had unbridled ambition and were like, what if you just blew the top off this thing in ambition? And then the other one is the PE, the ruthless operator way. What would they do? I think both are valuable questions for your business.

And the second thing, and this is actually something that I've been thinking a lot about because I've been thinking about Louis Vuitton. Not that I don't even own one Louis Vuitton thing. I'm never going to own a Louis Vuitton thing, but it's pretty fascinating that I, in my head, I stereotyped fashion brands as just like trendy and they're going to come and go. Like, but in reality, I would bet that some of these fashion brands like Adidas, Puma, Louis Vuitton, they're actually some of the longest lasting companies I imagine I could think of. And that's pretty fascinating. That a brand like, uh, Adidas that went through near bankruptcy, went through multiple owners, is still relevant and kicks ass. And that's actually pretty cool to create something that can last that long. And, uh, right, it's kind of cool. I think that's actually inspiring that something, uh, withstood all that nonsense. Like, it succeeded in spite of—

especially in fashion, especially in fashion where everybody wants to do it. And fashion, like, literally is kind of like in and out of fashion. It's like a fad. Type of, uh, type of business where things go in and out of style so quickly. So just to last there is pretty impressive.

But what I'm saying is there's some stuff that it just, it has lasted for many, many decades. So, uh, Louis Vuitton luggage, I, I imagine existed at the turn of the century in the 1900s. Same with, um, the, uh, I'm right now I'm wearing Nike Cortez. I just looked at the, uh, the website that we were talking about earlier, first versions, and the first version of Nike was the Nike Cortez, and I'm still wearing the same damn model. And it's kind of interesting and inspiring to create something that can last 50, 100, 200 years. And that's kind of a cool part.

That's how I feel about like Altoids or Coca-Cola.

Yeah, I guess you could do it. I mean, you can do it a lot more than fashion, but there are a bunch of fashion brands that have done it successfully. And I think that's pretty damn cool, you know, like Rolex or Tiffany's diamonds or something like that. It's kind of neat.