The 12 Awards Of 2023: No.1 Unsexy Business, Wildest Predictions & More

All right, now we're ready for part 2 of the Millie Awards. We've got a bunch of categories like breakout company or product of the year, the who is the craziest slash most delusional person we met this year, uh, as well as things like our favorite content, books, podcasts that we consumed. What is the best of the best? And, uh, one of my favorites is unsexy business of the year. So what's a business that on the surface looks maybe boring or it flies under the radar, but actually secretly crushes it. Each share our own. So enjoy part 2 of the Millie Awards. All right, next category that we have is the craziest, most delusional person that you met this year. So somebody who is kind of out there, they broke your frame a little bit, and it can be good delusional crazy, it could be bad delusional crazy. There's, this is just saying this person thinks way differently than you and, and they're, they're a bit like they're living in their own world. And so this was a tough one for me. I was a tough category. Sam, who did you have?

So the easy one was Elon Musk. Do you guys, we already forgot about how Elon and Zuck almost got in a fight. That was hilarious. I think Elon's insane, but I didn't want to pick him because that's too easy. So I chose this guy named Val, who I've met via Hampton. You probably have seen him on Twitter. His name's, uh, so like basically Val was under the radar for years and years. I mean, he's probably 45 years old, so he just started using Twitter, but he built a bunch of businesses. He was a Soviet Union, uh, immigrant, came here to America age 19, built a business that made $10 million in profit in year one. I started hanging out with him and now he's got this massive set of businesses that probably do like $150 or $200 million a year in revenue that he owns. He's never raised money for any of them. I invested in, right when I met him, I invested into one of his real estate deals and he was new to it and I got a great return. And so I did another one with him and I started talking to him and he is like, yeah, we own this many tens of millions of dollars of Brooklyn real estate. And I was like, Val, what the hell? How'd you figure out how to do this? He goes, well, I just did the math and I did this and I did this. And he was so logical and yet so calm about it and he was comfortable with the risk. So I gotta give love to Val. And here's a fun fact about him. I started talking to him even more. He wakes up at 4:00 AM and he starts working at 3:00 PM and basically works until 4:00 AM and that's his life. And I'm like, there's so many reasons why that's bad. And he was calmly just saying like, yeah, but it works for me. And he's got 5 kids. I love people that got tons of kids. So this guy's the best. He seems like a good dad, a good husband, but he does crazy business stuff. Just absolutely crazy, but he's so calm about it. So he's one of the craziest people that I've ever met.

Andrew, you want to go next?

Sure. So I actually struggled. I think I said Bryan Johnson. He was the person that comes to mind. He's really, really nice, interesting guy, but definitely crazy. All the health stuff he's doing. Elon Musk is another obvious answer, but I actually couldn't think of somebody that was crazy. And so I actually inverted it. I said, who is the sanest, calmest, most boring person? And Chris and I got to meet Michael Dell this year, and Michael Dell is worth $65 billion.

That's insane.

And we sat down with him. I'm going like, okay. I'm going to crack this guy open, right? Like you read his book, it's all very tame. His public persona is very like, you know, serious and calm and nice and all that kind of stuff. His book is literally called Play Nice But Win.

And so me and Chris, we go into this office, you know, sorry, go ahead.

So, so we go into this, this huge gray, like office park. We're in this boardroom and he sits down with us and Chris and I just walked away. We were like, oh my God, he's like the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter of billionaires. Like he's just like steady Eddie, super nice. And we're asking him, we're like, dude, what do you do with your money? Like, you know, have you gone like, have you, you know, do you own 20 houses? Do you own, you know, a bunch of planes? Do you do anything crazy? And he's like, nope, I just love, you know, operating my business and growing it over time. I own two nice— I think he owns two nice or three nice houses. Obviously they're very, very nice houses. One plane. And that was it. And we couldn't get anything out of him. And he told us this anecdote. This is how much of a baller he is. He goes, yeah, so about 20 years ago I took $200 million and I started a family office. And in the family office I wanted to make like a 10% return. And so I hired these really smart guys and they started doing private credit. And I don't know if you guys know what that is, but usually it's lending to people that the bank won't lend to. So it's higher risk lending. And one of the people he lent to was a, I think, a billionaire who owned a hockey team, I think in Dallas or something.

When you were saying that, I just, I was thinking of like your cousin Dom down the street who's like going to go buy like a rookie LeBron card and flip it, I guess.

Totally.

So he goes, he goes, yeah. And then one day I just got a call and they said, well, you own the Dallas Stars now. I think it was the Dallas Stars, but some professional sports team. And he had just literally just owned it because he had lent the guy money and the guy defaulted. Like, that's how much of a baller Michael Dell is.

Dude, he totally SBF'd your ass. He Elizabeth Holmes'd you. I bet you Michael Dell is just way more vicious.

Dude, the basement's got something crazy in it.

This guy is lying to you. Michael Dell is, in order to get there, Andrew, you know more than me, but in order to get there, you have to be the sharkiest of all sharks.

I don't, I don't agree with that. What?

There is—

I think you have to be, you have to be very aggressive, but I do think you can, you can be a— you have, if you have to be a wacko, right? You have to go, you have to be a maniac, you have to go extreme. But I think you could be nice.

I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application.

Every team can stay aligned.

No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases.

HubSpot. Grow better.

Dude, have you ever used a Dell computer? A Dell computer is the technology equivalent of what you just described. It's like the, uh, the most can't believe it's not butter of computers. That, that, by the way, I don't even know what that analogy means, but I love it.

It just made sense when he said it.

It's kind of an insult, I think, right?

No, it's like, he's just like, he's straightforward, you know?

It's, it's like saying someone is a, you know, They're the missionary position of, uh, lending. And it's like, exactly, you just diss me. It's like, no, missionary is great, everybody loves it, right? And it's like, yeah, but you don't want to be called missionary.

Yeah, he's the dad genes of billionaires. Uh, Sean, what's yours?

Like, nicest guy ever.

Yeah, right, dude. No, no, I swear to God, right when you walked out the room, he was probably just like—

here's how I know, here's how I know. You can always tell whether someone's like a psycho or scary based on how their employees talk about them, right? Their employees love him. They gush about him. There's, he's so nice. He was so respectful to everyone. Someone came in and brought water to him. He looked them in the eye and said their name and said, thank you. Like, he is a nice guy. Wow.

That's a profound story you just told. That was amazing. I thought that was going to be something crazy.

All right.

Um, so this was kind of tough, but then I realized I had an answer. So I did a call the other day with a guy. Ben was like, you got to meet this guy. I met him at a brunch, and Ben's thing is he always says, this guy's got the juice. I was like, he's got the juice? He goes, this guy's overflowing with the juice. I was like, all right, I got to meet this guy. So I get on a call.

You don't seem like a brunch guy. What were you doing?

I wasn't at the brunch. Ben was at the brunch. Oh, okay. So when people used to fight back in the day and they'd be like, I nominate my second to fight for me. That's Ben. Ben does all the fighting. He gets out in the real world and meets people. So anyways, he's like, you got to meet this guy. We get on a call. And the guy's like, he starts talking and immediately I love him. Why? Because I love the Middle Eastern accent. Anyone who's like Persian, Iranian, my friend, I'm like, oh my God. I love, like, they could tell me any story. They could tell me that same Michael Dell story and I would've felt like it's an HBO documentary. Like it's so good to me. So anyways, he, he's got the accent. Point one. Point two, he goes, love your podcast. Look, look, I have a podcast too. He holds up these headphones. He goes, me and my wife, we get high and then we record it. And I was like, okay, all right. And then he's like, that's just how we started. We hadn't even said anything yet. And he's like, I'm like, so what do you work on? And he's like, I, he's like, American food is shit. And I'm like, I think I agree, but okay, where are you coming from with this? And he's like, I, he's like, I'm a super smart guy, sold my last company, decided, he's like, I went back to Turkey where I'm from. And I ate a banana and I was like, this is what food is supposed to taste like. So he is like, I realize I can use AI to grow better crops. Like I can literally grow better food. Uh, if I take everything in machine learning, he's like, I trained a dataset on all like scientific papers. I scraped all the scientific papers from like the journals and I trained a version of GPT only on that. And I tried to figure out what can I do to get more minerals in the soil so that American food, which is like, It's the same food. It's a banana, but it tastes bad and it doesn't, it doesn't taste like as rich as it does in other places. And it's like deficient in all these minerals. And so he's like, I'm gonna, um, grow more mineral rich food. He's like, I have the best. He's like, you like dried berries? And I was like, I kind of love dried berries, to be honest with you. And he's like, I'm going to send you dried berries right now. He's like, these are the best berries you ever had. And he's like, one serving of this is 60% of your daily vitamin C. Intake. And I have like, we buy Whole Foods, whatever. You go look at that. It'll be like 5%. Like, it's like nothing. And he's like, no, no, this is 60%. And he's like, we grow it without soil. And I'm like, I don't even understand what that means, but okay. He sends me these berries. My kids are obsessed with them. They taste so goddamn good. And I'm like, you know, getting all these minerals. So I'm like, this guy actually might not be full of shit. Then he's like, I'm like, okay, what's, is that like your main thing? He's like, yeah, it's that. He's like, but I also love to give back. He's like, you know, I immigrated here. It really changed my life. He's like, so I'm going to bring 10,000 Turkish engineers to America, engineers and lawyers. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, my business plan is I'm going to bring 10,000 engineers and 10,000 lawyers to America from Turkey. And for those people in Turkey, it's going to change their life. And for America, you're going to get high, you know, super smart talent that's going to come here and work. And I was like, how, why is that your goal? And how do you even do that? And he's like, basically had figured out an entire, like, by-the-book way to get people visas systematically and programmatically. And he's like, and he created a model where he's like, basically he brings you over and you have a little income share. So you're going to start making $100K plus a year as a lawyer or an engineer. He takes the income share of that. He invests it in bringing the next engineer over. He's like, I basically have to fund 10 of these guys. If I fund 10, I can get to 10,000. And I was like, this guy is thinking on a totally different wavelength. The way he worked out this plan, I thought was great. His overall energy was great. And he was not just working differently than most people are thinking differently. He just worked on different things than anybody I know. Like, I don't know anyone that's trying to grow like mineral-rich berries and bring 10,000 people, immigrants into the country. Like, that's what this guy's game plan was.

By the way, I got to share with you guys a funny conversation I had. I shared it with Sean and I'll read it here, but basically I didn't want to bring this guy up because I've talked about him so much and I get made fun of, but I invested in this guy, this guy's company named Brett Adcock. He's like my, my, I have a man crush on him and he's got this robot company and he sent me a picture of like the robots and how they're like moving and it's amazing. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. You've done all this stuff in 18 months and you've not raised a lot of money. Is this like a business that you can like not raise a lot of money for and you can own a lot of it? And his response is a perfect example of why crazy people exist and how I'm just absolutely not one of them. He says, well, this is verbatim. Well, it's going to cost a little under a trillion dollars to ship 10 billion robots. So I don't think it'll work without raising. Uh, and I was like, yeah, fuck me. Right? Like, what do I know? Uh, I'm going to go tweet. I'll be BRB.

You basically went to this guy who's building AI robots and you, you asked him the equivalent of like, Hey, have you thought about just doing a newsletter about it instead? You're like, do you think you could just bootstrap this and not raise any money?

He's like, I need a trillion dollars. I felt like such a little bitch when he said that. I was like, yeah, yeah, you're, you're, you're right. All right, what about best and worst investments for the year?

Yeah, this is my favorite category. Andrew, you've had the best stories in this. I think you have the most, you're the probably the most prolific investor that comes on this pod. So Can you give us yours? Give us your best and worst.

So, um, yeah, my best was I, I was in New Zealand. I've been working on getting my New Zealand citizenship for the last 2 years or so. I had this— yeah, yeah, they have this, um, there's this— as part of the program, there's this mandatory conference that I had to go to, and I was absolutely dreading it. I had been traveling a whole bunch. but I, I, you know, I got to go. I had to go. And I was thinking about it and going, okay, well, who do I know in Auckland, New Zealand? And I realized I'd met this guy, Matt Buchanan, about 10 years ago at South by Southwest. He ran a design agency at the time, and he had started this website called Letterboxd. Do you guys know what Letterboxd is?

Yeah, it's like a movie thing. What is it?

So social network for film buffs, and it started out really, really small. It was just like, you know, hundreds of people at first. Just discussing films. And then over time, and especially over COVID, it had grown like crazy. And so Matt and I met up for coffee and I just asked him about, you know, how everything was going. I wasn't at all thinking about investing or buying it. And he started telling me that they had 10 million registered users, that it had grown like crazy. And at the end of the coffee, I literally just blurted out, do you want to sell? And he was like, well, I hadn't really even thought about that. Uh, and I was like, throw me the craziest number you can think of. And so he threw the number out and I said, okay. And I sent him an offer within 48 hours and we just bought that business. We didn't buy all of it. We bought it, I think 60% of it, uh, about 3 months ago.

Did you buy it for the number he said?

Uh, yeah, the valuation, I think, I think it worked out to about $60 million valuation, something like that.

And there was 3 guys.

Yeah, no, it was about, I think there's about 10, 10 or so employees, all in New Zealand. So totally bootstrapped, uh, New Zealand-based, um, designer and a developer started it, like incredible business. They're going to keep running it. But, um, it's, it's an example of, you know, we bought a business called Dribbble about 8 years ago, uh, which is a social network. And social networks are just incredible businesses. I call them like airports. You know, if you own the airport, you can put a, you can, you've got this group of people that's going to congregate there on a consistent schedule and you can sell them, you know, all sorts of stuff. You can sell them a book, you can sell them a hot dog, you can sell them a massage. And as long as you don't mess with them and you keep the community happy, you know, you can do some incredible stuff. So I'm, I'm super excited about that.

Dude, this is your in for, for Zuck. You can go back to Zuck. Hey, Mark, uh, I told you it was a good idea. Social— fellow social network owner. Oh shit, you got one, I got two, but who's counting? Uh, happy to meet—

I finally got my in.

Yeah, you guys can start your own little Facebook group of social media owners. Yeah, social media owners. And your best one last year was Girlboss. Your worst one last year was Venture Capital in general. What's your worst one this year?

So my worst one this year, it was an investment I made about 5 years ago And it's a great example of shiny object syndrome, lack of focus, and what I call a money bonfire. So I bought a podcast player called Castro about 5 years ago, and at the time I was really hopped up about podcasts and subscription podcasting. And, you know, it was around the time I started coming on MFM actually, and I bought the business because I was excited about the space. Not because I had a plan. And so the business basically, um, just languished. The founders left. Um, I couldn't find anyone, uh, you know, the, we couldn't find the right person to run it. And just every month, I, you know, I, I think I bought it for a million bucks and it just lost $10,000 to $20,000 a month. And it was a small enough number that blended into all my other stuff. I just didn't really notice it. It wasn't like an urgent thing. And so this tiny little ember turned into a money bonfire. And so I think I lost $2 million or something over the last 5 years on this business. Um, and now I'm in the process of selling it, but anyone want it?

Good pitch.

If you too would like a money bonfire, maybe, maybe someone who wants to get into podcasting. Um, but anyway, it is, it is one of those things where, uh, I've done this so many times where I start something and it's a runaway train. And I just don't get the right people in and it just slowly burns money.

Dude, unless you're like a Huberman or, or, you know, a host like us, I think podcasting could be good. I think podcasting as like venture capital companies mostly is shit. It's a very hard business, I think, to build tools for. We get pitched all the time on like people who are trying to make podcasts more discoverable or this or that. It's a hard business. That's a hard industry.

Yeah. Yeah.

100%. Uh, Sam, what you got? Best and worst investment of the year. All right.

I don't remember what I said. What did I say last year for best? You know, did I say— so tell me that in a second.

But all right.

My best investment, man. One weekend I was talking to my wife. I was like, hey, we're going to have kids one day. Do you want to keep working or what do you want to do? And she was kind of telling me and I was like, well, I'll tell you what, to make your decision a little bit easier, I've got this idea for a little copywriting thing. I'm just going to put it together because it's fun and it's how I taught my team how to write and it's how I learned how to write. I'm just going to do this for fun. And if it works, Maybe one day you'll want to quit your job and run this. Turns out she doesn't want to, but I made it anyway. Yeah. So it didn't work.

I run this.

Yeah. So I made this thing called copythat.com. I just did it for fun. I did it over the weekend and that one little thing that I made, it pays for my living expenses. I don't really do much for it. I don't do anything for it. And it pays for my living expenses. And for some reason, like some of my other things like this podcast or Hampton, like when things get a little bit bigger, you can't really deviate or move quickly. And I just use this and also I have partners. So I've got like Sean's my partner in this podcast. And then with Hampton, I have a business partner and I've got customers and things like that. I can't really do what I want all the time, just like on a whim. And so I use this as like a little bit of a playground to do whatever the hell I want. And it's been fun. And so I've really enjoyed it. My worst investment. So, So far, Shawn, I've invested about $1 million into companies via angel investing. I have seen not $1 back since I started doing it in 2016. I've got a lot of markups that that $1 million is maybe worth $5 million on paper, but paper don't pay my mortgage, at least not this type of paper. And I, it's pissed me off because I knew what it was going into it, and I just don't like having to have the patience or not having any involvement. And so that's probably been my worst so far. I don't think it's going to be worse in terms of ROI, but I think it's worse in terms of I just don't enjoy it.

You know what's interesting is I've got a friend, um, he's an angel investor, and he sold his company like you, and he said, I've always wanted to be an angel investor. And so he invested in um, 5 companies and 2 of them paid him back 10x within 2 years. And so he learned the wrong lesson, right? Because that's not most people's experience. Then he doubled down on angel investing for 5 years, didn't see a single return for 10 years. And so I think it's like anything, if you try something the first time and it, it gives you a win, you love it. Like, I guarantee you, if you have already gotten $2 million back, yes, it's awesome. You'd be like, I love angel investing, it's the best, right? But What you've really done is you've gone into the casino and gambled maybe with like a slight edge, but you're really gambling. And I feel the exact same way. I have barely seen any money.

Have you seen any money back, Andrew?

Yeah, I have, but it took 12 years for the first one.

Well, was it significant?

Uh, yeah. So I put in $75 grand into a business, um, and I got $800 grand back. And then I put, uh, $250,000 into one and I got $3 million back, but I also over the next period invested in like $20 or $30 million into venture. So it canceled out all the other gains and it all comes down to like when you're investing the, you know, the year you're investing, right? If you invest in 2020 and 2021, like it's just everything's out the window.

Yeah.

Well, we'll see. Sean, have you seen any money back yet?

That's the year I started my rolling fund. Same here. Which is ironic actually. The first, the first batch of investments we did were, uh, so far are the highest performers. The first like 6 investments we did were the, were the best batch, um, which is kind of interesting.

Well, you've picked a handful of winners. I know a few that you've picked, and you've got a couple really, really—

but it's like you said, you know, you don't get the— you don't get liquidity until— if it's a winner, it's going to run for 10 years, right? So it's not a good thing to do if you need cash, you know, today, which is like, you know, I've got winners.

I mean, it's going to be good. It's just boring. Just lame.

Well, okay, my best and worst investment. All right, so my best— I had a couple more interesting examples, but I'm just going to say the one that's actually the best. So the truthful answer is clearly hands down Shepherd. Um, so I had this idea mostly inspired by you, Andrew, which was, wow, this guy does really well And he doesn't have to start and invent the next big thing. So, you know, you buy businesses that already are working and then maybe already have a tailwind, so they're going to just keep working at a greater rate in the future. Like when you got into like the, say the Shopify ecosystem with e-commerce, I was like, oh, that makes sense to me. Buy something that's already working that has a tailwind and hopefully you can accelerate it or make it work better. But even if you don't, you can still make good money. If you buy at the right price. And we got like a, basically like a, it's a crazy result so far out of the Shepherd deal. So had this idea, which was let me find a product that I use, that I like, that I kind of believe in of a business that's already working. Shepherd fit the bill, buy in. We buy in this case a minority stake, not a majority stake so that Marshall would keep operating the thing and keep growing it. The tailwinds were behind us. Basically, first it was COVID, so people went remote. That was one big tailwind. Second tailwind was when the economy started to slow down over the last year, everybody started to realize they need to be profitable. Well, one way to be profitable is hire talent for 5 times less than you're currently hiring talent in the United States. And so hire offshore talent became like a very obvious thing for business owners to do if they wanted profits. And so Shepherd just takes off. And the third piece, which was, can we accelerate it? And we had done a couple of experiments of like, look, we have this big audience, right? Between Twitter's almost half a million people. The podcast is way bigger than that newsletter. We have a different, we have not just a big numbers, but like big trust that has been built up. So if we pick a product that we actually believe in, I think this will work. We, in the last, I don't know, we've only owned the, owned our stake in the business for like 6 to 9 months or something like that. The business has tripled. And it was already big to begin with. And so this is just like an incredible result.

What, how much of that is because of you?

Well, we could see it because when people sign up, they either sign up through our link or they sign up and they say where they found it from. And so that's a minimum. Like there's some people who may have heard about it on the podcast, but don't click the link or don't whatever. And, uh, Nick does a great job too. So I don't want to like, you know, take away from that, but like in the last 6 months, we drove like 50% more of the leads to the business. It's like a pretty insane, uh, you know, value driver. And so. Now I'm like, oh, I have an unfair advantage. I don't need to do 10 of these. If I just find a couple of businesses that are already standalone good businesses that I believe in and I do the same thing, if I can add millions of dollars of ARR to this business, I basically can't lose. That is a completely unfair advantage to have. And now all I have to do is choose wisely. And so that's what I've been doing. We only did one deal this year and we saw maybe 60 or so, but I think we picked the right one because that investment has paid off. That business has added probably that one deal he did. Like I thought I was getting in at a good price, but it has added at least $35 million of value just to that business. Just based on the growth. And so that's like a crazy deal for him too. So, you know, good on Marshall for cutting that deal.

It's interesting because like, I think, I assume that he did it as a secondary or something like that. He wanted to de-risk, take money off the table. But effectively it's like a primary still. Because you've injected, call it $10 or $20 million of free marketing as part of the partnership, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Super smart. And it goes back to that idea. I think I've talked about it on the pod, but 1 1 100. You can take a mediocre business, and I think Shepherd's a great business, so better if it's a great business.

Well, that's not how math works.

No, it's not, right? But this is math. But you can take, you can take, you can take something, you can take a product and you combine it with an influencer and you can get an incredible outcome because you basically have a free $50 million a year marketing budget as a result.

Well, people had talked about this, but like, you know, when I think of influencer, I think of like Kim Kardashian or like, you know, MrBeast. It's like, yeah, obviously, you know, if they promote a product, it's going to go really well. It turns out that there's a thing like B2B influencer, right? There's like a person who is respected amongst business people who is essentially like, you know, I'm not saying my ass is big, but like, We're kind of the Kim Kardashian of business influencers, right? Like there's, you can, you could promote to a community that, that, that understands what you're doing. And if you, again, if you pick a good product with a good business, it will actually take off. If you have a shitty product or a shitty business, they'll try it and then it'll leak out, right, right away. And so it doesn't really work.

Literally, this is what HubSpot did. HubSpot looked at The Hustle and they said, well, right now they're making, call it $20 million. I don't know what the number is, $20 million of ad revenue, but how much are those advertisers making off that $20 million of ad spend? Maybe it's $30 million or $40 million or $50 million. And so they can pay up to buy this business and then they can just direct the traffic to themselves and make all that money.

And I've seen the numbers. I think it's a good— I think it works for them.

And let me tell you a crazy thing about this Shepherd deal I haven't shared before. So the way we structured this deal was Beautifully done. So I was like, look here, the business is good. The business is already spitting off millions of dollars of profit. So it's like, cool guys, I can bring you guys capital, but you kind of already have like a cash cow that's spitting off millions of dollars of profit. So like, I don't really want to, that's not really the value add. Clearly the value add is going to be that I can help grow this actual, grow the customer base, right? Because, because of the audience. And so Essentially, I put a very small amount of money down and then the company lent me the money to buy my stake in the company.

That's insane.

And I was like, what? And I was like, did they type this wrong? They're going to give me the money to buy the business and give me the money to buy the business. Like, all right, deals. Where do I sign? This is easy. And it was a great deal for me. But again, like I said, the valuation of the company has grown over $30 million. Just in that period of time. And so in like less than a year, so like I thought, dude, I'm getting an absolute steal here. It turns out they got actually even a bigger steal than I got. Uh, you know, it was like win-win. And so that's deal structure. 'Cause that's another thing I've learned when you, when it comes to buying companies, like in venture, there's no structure. Venture is you put in money on a safe note or a priced round. It's not even negotiating on really the terms unless you're the lead investor and you're doing something really funky, but it's not standard at all. When it comes to buying companies, structure can make the difference between a good deal, an incredible deal, or a terrible deal. And structure really, really matters. I learned a ton about structure this year negotiating a bunch of these deals.

So Shepherd kicked ass for you. You did great. Let's move to the biggest L that you took this year. What was that one?

Last year, at the end of the year, this time last year, I was like, hey, tax optimization. Why don't I sell a bunch of my crypto for tax purposes? 'Cause with crypto you can wash trade, you could basically sell and buy back the next day. You could book the loss 'cause crypto was down last year, let's say. So you could book a loss on any crypto that you had bought higher than that. And so crypto was crashing, crypto went down to like, I don't know, Bitcoin went down to like $16K and I had bought a bunch of Bitcoin at, when we were doing the Milk Road, probably closer to $30K. So I could book a, you know, big loss and then I was like, great, I'm just going to buy right back. I believe in crypto, right? But there is a funny psychological thing where, you know, catching a falling knife, it's like I could buy back in, but like, should I buy back in now? Is it going to go lower? You know, should I just kind of wait this out and see how it goes? Maybe I'll just do this other thing that, that, that thing's hot right now. Crypto's cold right now. So let me just wait. I'm going to do it, but I'll do it, you know, at the end of the month. And I said, I'll do it at the end of the month for 10 months straight. Just enough time for Bitcoin to rip back up another 35, 40%. And I bought back in and, you know, it's my tax savings cost me a lot of money. So that was a big L that I took falling into a bunch of obvious psychological traps that I could have pointed out for anybody else that I fell into. Now, luckily for me, I didn't sell all of it because I bought a bunch lower than that. So it wasn't like that part wouldn't have been a tax loss. But, uh, still dumb.

That's the second time you've done that, that I know of.

Buy my course. Sell low, buy high, right? Like, that's basically what I executed to perfection this year. Um, I have one more that was like a big miss.

Wait, what is it?

So we talked about angel investing and angel investing. We're talking about like getting returns. Everyone's— the game of angel investing is you're going to invest in 30, maybe 50 companies, and it's going to be one or two that are like the runaway winners. That's really what you're playing the game for. It's like, You are not trying to have a high hit rate. You're trying to have a huge slugging percentage. So a few just absolute grand slams. And I missed 2. 2 is a lot. 2 is the number you need to win. And I missed 2. The first is a, the realization here was it's not, it's not about bad investments you make. It's the ones you miss. It's about the incredible investments you miss. And that's in venture. That's what that that's how it goes. So I got introduced to a company called Whatnot that I don't know if you guys have heard about this business.

We talked about it on the pod. You were early talking about it. It was like eBay.

I talked about it. I believed in it. I was like, dude, I was at Twitch. It's basically live video streaming. And it started with baseball cards and sports cards. So basically people would open up a pack live, but you would buy the pack. So it's like live, they're sitting there, they got all these packs on the table. You would buy one, he would open it up and he would be like, you got a Luka Dončić rookie card. Wow. This is amazing. And the chat's going wild. And you could just keep buying packs. And so it was like this, like kind of live video, sort of like casino. I like all those words, live video and casino. So I was like, all right, I want to invest. And the guy's like, I don't know, man, we're, we're like pretty oversubscribed. I'm like, but it's me, it's your pal Sean. We just met, uh, please. And he was like, all right, let me think about it. And I didn't, he was like, I don't think so. I don't think we have space. Let me, let me go talk to some people, see if I can make space. And I made a big mistake. I waited and I didn't chase. And Whatnot is now valued, I think, at $10 billion. So that would've been by far the best investment in all of my angel investing. I was there early on and I believed in it and I wanted to invest and I just did not fight hard enough to find a way to get into that company. And so, you know, it's in angel investing, it's not about, oh, I made this one bad investment and I lost 1x. It's that I missed out on, you know, a 200x or a 500x return on that one deal. Right? Like that, my $150K check that I wanted to get into that would've been like a $30 million position at this point.

So one, one question, was it, when was it valued at $10 billion?

I think it is, it, it might've been at the kind of peak time.

July 2022, they raised at $3.7.

Yeah. So, okay, so maybe it's at $4 billion now instead of, instead of $10. So anyways, you know, basically that would've been a multi-billion dollar, you know, it's a multi-billion dollar company now, which is all you're trying to do in investing. Same thing happened with a company called Shuffle. So my former intern who came on the pod, I did an episode where I was like, my old intern became a millionaire. When we were hanging out during the pod, I was like, so what are you doing now? And he's like, oh, I'm doing this again, this crypto casino overseas. And I was like, I like all those words when it comes to making money. That's, I wouldn't want to take the risk myself of running that company, but if you're going to run that company, I think it's a great investment because these things, you know, we've talked about Stake.com. That is just this absolute juggernaut. Stake is issuing like billion-dollar dividends a year. They have so much cash flow and these guys were building like a Stake competitor and I wanted to invest. And then our lawyer and back office was like, yeah, but they're based out of this country, so they're not going to provide the K-1s in time, blah, blah. And I was in a fund and I was like, I can't put my fund money into this because again, it's like this overseas crypto casino thing. And the fund cost me, this thing is going to be a total winner. It looks like their volume is growing like crazy. I think they have like, I don't know, I'll look up the latest numbers. I mean, it's just painful every time he tells me the latest numbers where it's like every day is their biggest day and they're doing millions and millions of dollars of daily betting volume and they're profitable.

And I'm like, shit, you know what's interesting is like, you might feel like you've missed the boat on that, but one of the things I've learned is like, think about Amazon.com, right? Amazon.com launched in what, 1994? And you, you, you know, you basically had until 2012 to buy the stock, right? Now obviously it's publicly traded stock, easier to get into, but I bet you could go to him and say, hey, remember your old pal Sean? Can I put $100 grand in, or whatever it is, and just suck it up, right? Don't get caught up in the fact that you could have invested at some low valuation. That sounds like it'll be a winner long-term, right?

Yeah. And I mean, who knows? That's a super high variance bet. Like they could get shut down tomorrow if like wherever they're based in some little island somewhere gets like, you know, seized, you know, uh, who knows what's going to happen with that. But that's a rollercoaster I wanted to be on. If you're going to do angel investing, you need high variance bets that can become absolutely massive or go to zero. You don't want things that are low risk, low reward. That's not how angel investing works anyways. So those are my two worst investments. They're mis— Missed out, not lost money.

What's yours, Andrew?

So I'm a designer. Like, I like, you know, I like things to look nice. And I think every designer has this dream of building their dream house. And so about 7 years ago, I bought a piece of property and I started building an amazing house and I hired amazing architects and interior designers. And I'll just say now, if you think you want to build a house, Try it. It really sucks. Uh, you know, everyone has this fantasy, but what it really is, you know, you think it's going to be about approving like beautiful exteriors. What it really comes down to is you are choosing where the electrical outlets go. You are approving what, you know, what color tone all the lights are. And so you make 10,000 decisions and eventually you get decision fatigue and you start making bad decisions. Or if you delegate, you delegate to someone else and someone else is just, you You know, they— delegation is great in a company, but when you live in this space, the things bother you. And so what I found was I, because I was building my forever home, I would approve. They'd be like, okay, do you want, um, this marble? Or there's this really, really, really nice marble that you can get where it's got, you know, nicer designs or whatever. And I'd always choose the more expensive option because I was thinking, this is my dream home. I only get to build it once. And so I massively overbuilt. I massively overspent. I ended up not being happy with the actual house once I was done.

Wasn't the house like 8,000 square feet?

Huge. I had everything I could have wanted, a gym. I had a movie theater, all sorts of stuff. And I ended up not even liking the house when I moved in because I'd just walk around the house going, God damn it. I remember making that decision. You know, why did I make that beam that height? Why did I put that light there? And anyway, so I ended up getting divorced a year and a half ago, and neither me or my ex-wife wanted the house. And so I had to sell it. And I took a 30% loss on this house that I'd spent, you know, 5 years building and spent tons of money on. So that was my, that was my big loss. And my big lesson is, I remember my dad said, you always want to be the second owner of a hotel, right? You want someone else to go crazy and build it out and then go bankrupt, and then you want to come in and own that. I think the same thing is true with houses. Just go buy a nice house that someone else built.

That's a great line.

You had an even bigger one though written down here.

Yeah, the other, the other thing that happened to me this year, so this, this is, this has happened to everybody but no one feels it. So this year, uh, my net worth got cut in half on paper, right? So I went from my, let's just say what's publicly available, so my tiny stock was worth like $750, $800 million, and today it's worth about half of that. And it's really fascinating, like when you're, when you own a private business or you own a real estate portfolio, you don't have a ticker, right? If you own a million-dollar house and all the houses in your neighborhood go down by 20%, you don't see that. You're not reminded of that. And one of the crazy things about having a stock, a stock ticker is every day you can see your net worth go up and down in radical ways. And so yeah, that kind of was pretty, a pretty insane experience to see that happening over the course of. 6 months.

I would never text you this, but I remember like seeing the stock and every once in a while I'd be like, not— I just want to be like, what does that feel like? You know what I mean? Like, because there's been days when it's gone way up and there's been days it's gone way down. And I'm always curious that I'm like, he knows what's going on. I want to— I'm going to stay out of his hair on this one.

It's really weird. I mean, Warren Buffett has this great anecdote where— or metaphor where he says owning a business is like owning a farm. Let's say that your farm makes $1 million a year of profit. And some, some yokel comes to your fence and he starts yelling, I'll buy your farm for $100 grand. If you know your farm is worth millions of dollars, you just ignore the yokel. And so there's all sorts of different people shouting different offers on your farm at all times. And so that's kind of the approach I try and take is I just go like, you know, I know my business, I know what it's worth, but yeah, it's pretty weird seeing big swings like that.

My worst thing this year was my biggest L was partially inspired by Andrew. Andrew, you make a huge mistake when you're talking to me. The mistake is you say, oh, it's just easy. You just hire a CEO and then, and you miss out on two things. One, it ain't easy. There's all, it's always harder than you think. There's always more challenges than you think. The other thing is managing them. You know, how, how should they manage you? How should you manage them? The thing with my company Hampton, my CEO Jordan, he's awesome. But it's heavily based on my reputation and I'm heavily involved in the product. And so when I want to be involved in the product, I've made mistakes where I'll just go directly to certain staff versus like understanding the chain of command. And so just like understanding like how to, uh, like work with the CEO effectively has been a little bit of a challenge with me. I've, I, it's going great and things are going good and I've made a lot of really good decisions and he's wonderful. But just learning how to like understand that relationship has been a challenge and I've gotten in trouble a few times. Partially I, I take blame for a lot of the, the instances, but I wish we would've talked more about how to manage them tactically. We've talked a lot about how to hire and fire and things like that, but not how to like work with someone on a daily or weekly or monthly basis.

Yeah. And I, lots of learning there, 'cause I think it's very tempting to see a mistake and jump in, but it's, it's similar to delegation, right? When you first start delegating to an employee, You want to correct the errors as you see them. But at the end of the day, the hardest part about having a CEO is that they can ruin the business if they're not careful. And you ultimately have to let them make their own mistakes and learn from them. I think I've shared on the pod, like, we've had a couple instances where a CEO wants to spend $1, $2, $3 million on R&D, and we don't believe it's going to work out, but we let them because we go, if we don't, they're gonna resent us. They're gonna say, Andrew and Chris were holding us back. We couldn't make our bonuses because we couldn't execute on this strategy. And so we always say we want non-fatal errors, not fatal errors. We'll intervene when they're fatal, right? So I think for you, like intervening when it's something that's gonna ruin your reputation, you should jump on that or ruin the business or imperil it. But otherwise, the hard part is you just kind of have to watch them make mistakes and realize that over the long term they'll make more, make more good decisions than bad.

Yeah. And it's just an emotional, these are emotional issues, but that's mine. Sean, what do you want to do now? Which one?

Let's go to one of my favorites. So unsexy business. So what is a unsexy kind of under the radar, maybe simple business that stood out to you that you really liked?

Let me go first on this one. I've got one that's interesting. So there's this guy I went to high school with named Chris, Chris Hoffman. He just started posting content on Twitter like 3 months ago. So basically he posted a story, but I had known what his father did. So his father owned a heating and cooling company called Hoffman Bros Heating and Cooling outta St. Louis, where I'm from. He posted, he goes, in 2016, we took over my father's company. I bought it from him and it was doing $13 million in revenue. And he goes through 2016 all the way up to 2013 where he explains the changes they made and how much revenue the business is now doing. So in 2016, it was $13 million. 2020, it was $40 million. 2023, it's going to be like $140 million in revenue from an HVAC business that he owns. And he's, and he like tweets out all these interesting bits of content about things he's doing. Like, for example, we're giving an additional holiday off and here's how I think that that's going to impact the business. Or we created this thing called Hoffman University, which teaches people. We had to buy a whole building for this much money. It's been very, very fascinating. Heating and cooling companies, that's going to be the new storage business. We're going to see lots of people going on and doing that because of this guy, Chris Hoffman. Really fascinating stuff.

Yeah, so mine is really, really boring. So, uh, in every fashion house or graphic design studio, there's a book of colors called Pantone. So you might see these, they're these big fat books, and you can literally just flip through them. You look at different colors. And what they've done that's incredibly smart is they've trademarked colors. So they have intellectual property where it'll be like burgundy blue, sapphire orange, you know, whatever. And this company, I found out, makes over $100 million a year of revenue. And one of the most genius things about it is they give you that book and they say you need to buy a new book every year because the colors fade, right, from being in the sun or whatever. And so they're just constantly reselling these books. People are licensing these colors and the entire fashion and graphic design world is standardized on Pantone. So it's, it's just so boring and wonderful.

Well, we talked about WGSN, their competitor, and how I think it's publicly traded, but they're trying to sell it for like— I think they're trying to sell it for like $800 million because I don't think they're competitors.

This is like the lower level. This is literally the colors. It's not saying which color— WGSN's like, we're going to research and reports will tell you which color. This is like—

Pantone does that too. They do like, they'll do like color forecasting and trending and all that kind of stuff too.

Where do they make the money? Is it on the books? Is it on the, the dyes or is it on the reports?

I think all of it. And then if they use the color, so they'll say like this color of red is going to be in next season or whatever. And if you want to use it, we have some IP around.

So WGSN did $50 million in EBITDA last year. And they've been around for like 30 years. We, I've been like obsessed with this space for a minute. I remember, Sean, you remember I used to bring this up, I think at our old office. I've been loving this stuff. Pantone's a good one. And I think it's WGSN and Pantone like own this space. It's basically like when Starbucks is going to come out with their new uniforms or their new like Christmas sleeves or the cups, they refer to each of these companies to figure out which colors are gonna be popular in 6 months. Yeah, it's a really fascinating company and they've been around for a long ass time too.

Love it. All right, let's do next category. So next category is content of the year. What are the either books or blogs or TV shows or podcasts? What was the best of the best? Right? We're all inundated with so much content and we all kind of want a little bit less content, but we still want the best. So what was the best content that you consumed this year?

What was yours?

Okay, I'll give you one. Uh, so on the TV side, The Bear Season 2, Episode 7. You guys seen this?

This stressful, but that's a great episode.

I've tried to watch it so many times, Cyjax. I liked Breaking Bad. I love stressful shows. There's something about the way that that show is cut where I just can't watch it. I get too stressed out and I have to turn it off.

It's It's like Uncut Gems.

Yeah.

I heard about this for the show so many times. I started it. I, I, I wasn't stressed. I was actually just kind of like, cool. It's kind of slow, you know? Like, I'm, I'm not like, there's not really that much going on. It's like almost so real. It's like the, you know, a restaurant is not that exciting. But I kept hearing about this episode, so I powered through. I watched the whole first season, the whole second season just to get this one episode. And I, by the, by the time I got there, I was like, there's no way this is worth it. Totally worth it. That is one of the best episodes of television I have ever seen. It is such an emotional, you know, high. I love that episode. I remember where I was sitting when I watched that and just thinking, whoever made this, you are incredible.

And it teaches you a ton about business. Like everyone after watching that episode went and read the book. What's it called? Like Great Hospitality. Yeah.

Un-something, Unbelievable Hospitality or something.

Right. It's, so there's a lot of business takeaways. What was the other one, Sean?

I'll give you one more. So I'll give you a book that I, I liked this year. It's called, have you ever read this? It's called Talk Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln.

No. What is that?

So I go down these random rabbit holes while I try to get better at, let's say storytelling or public speaking or, you know, things like that. This is one that's on speaking and storytelling that I really liked. Didn't expect to like it. I like the title though. Talk Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln. And it's a very simple book and a lot of it is kind of obvious things, but I found it to be a very useful book. And it is, it's about how to speak better and how to carry yourself better in different situations. Sam, you'll love it. There's a whole, there's a whole chapter on dress, how you should dress and why you should dress the way you dress. There's a whole chapter on that and it's very short chapters that are on simple principles with a ton of examples. And it's a very old book. So like, I don't think a lot of people will read this book in general. And all of the examples are from old presidents and stuff that happened before 1950. So I think it's just like a, I don't know, it's like an old book or uses old examples, but it's a good one. I recommend it. It's not the best book I've ever read, but again, I just found it a very simple, useful book for anybody that wants to get better at how they carry themselves and how they present themselves.

That's a good one. All right. So there's this idea with, uh, Stoicism, that philosophy of Stoicism. I forget the exact term, but basically it's where you imagine all of the worst things have happened. They say you've got cancer, your kid's sick and dying, your parents are dead. Now open up your eyes and none of that's true, and you're grateful. I love that idea. And so this year I went on a spree where I read books about people's hardship. So I read The Wager, which was a 10 out of 10. It's about a shipwreck. And these guys are stranded for 2 years. And I read like literally 4 different shipwreck books. I read about Lewis and Clark and how they spent 2 years going through America in order to find the other side of the country and all these hardship, because it makes my life feel better when I'm just complaining about like a blog post. So another thing that I really got into, it's on Netflix, it's called World War II: From the Front Lines. And there's 2 things that I've been obsessed with this year. A, hardship. And so seeing like these soldiers and the Jews and what they went through through the Holocaust and the soldiers on D-Day. It makes me so much, so thankful that I don't have to do that. And I'm like, oh, this shit's easy. This money stuff's way easy. The other thing that I'm obsessed with is charisma, even evil charismatic people. So I got like, I read all these books about Charlie Manson, about Hitler, about Lincoln, about George Washington. And I love seeing this. And you see that in this World War II documentary. What they do is they take real life footage from that era and they colorize it. And you see like, uh, you know, Joseph Goebbels, one of the, um, One of the folks and one of the guys who led propaganda for Nazis, you see him giving a speech and you see all, you see literally a million people in the crowd, like being convinced to do all these evil things. And I find it so fascinating how cult leaders like use their charisma to do, to force people or convince people to do bad stuff. And so World War II from the Front Lines, it's on Netflix. It's awesome. That's probably the best thing that I've consumed this year. What's yours, Andrew?

So, um, like everyone else, I've been freaking out about AI and I go through these phases where I try not to think about it too much, and then I go down a rabbit hole. And I decided to read two books at the same time that kind of counterbalance one another. So one book is called The Coming Wave. It's by one of the co-founders of OpenAI. And it's really fascinating. Usually you've got these kind of like think piece analysis books by academics or professional authors. And this guy actually is, you know, he's been on the front lines for the last 15 years. Um, built DeepMind and has been at Google, uh, working on, you know, their AI programs for years. So, um, and he, he has a very, um, extreme view that effectively AI will disrupt all work and that the second and third order consequences are just endless, uh, and we can't really contemplate them. And he kind of argues for regulation and containment. And then on the flip side, at the same time, to counterbalance the anxiety of reading that, I've been reading Morgan Housel's new book, Same as Ever, which is about how things don't change. What are the things that stay the same over the long term? You know, people still eat the same candy bars. They still enjoy reading a book. They like going for a walk in nature, et cetera. So those have been two books that I've absolutely loved. And then I second the book The Wager. Like Sam, before I go to bed, I always read books about people in terrible situations or in worlds that are very different than the world I inhabit. And The Wager is amazing. I'm just at the part where they're going around the horn, so I'm pretty early, but oh my God, it's amazing.

It's hard to put down, isn't it? That's one of the only books I've ever read in one sitting. Wow. Sean, you gotta get on that shipwreck train. I've got about 3 more shipwreck books if you want.

I never bought into the stoicism, the negative visualization stuff. I didn't enjoy that. I do like reading about hardship or like kind of like people who went through things just to give yourself perspective more than it, more than to make myself feel good. Although that's a good side effect, but I think it's more important to have a broader perspective than just the little narrow stuff you see in your day-to-day life. But doesn't that stuff just kind of like bum you out? Like, you know, I feel like I get the same effect of feeling good just by, you know, being thankful for what's going good and imagining things going well. And I can sleep easy doing that. Am I just—

One of the most relaxing things for me is when I'm really, really stressed, I watch a show called Survivor Man. Have you guys ever heard of this?

Yeah, the guy who like just is on his own for 7 days and he's got to figure it out.

This poor bastard, they put him in like, you know, the Antarctic with no— you know, he doesn't even have a hatchet or anything.

He's like a harmonica himself.

He doesn't even have a film crew around. He's got an emergency beacon if he's almost dying, but he films himself surviving. And you see this guy like drinking his own urine and eating rats and digging, you know, digging shelters under the ice and all this stuff. And every time I watch that, I just think how remarkable it is that I live in this amazing warm structure.

He's got like a sleep mask up on his forehead, his like toes tucked into the duvet as he's watching Survivor Man.

Reading his printed emails.

Asking in the glow of my Peter Attia red phone.

Right? He's like, ah, shit. I saw blue light 2 hours before bed.

No, he's gotta eat the rats and drink the piss.

And you're reading the wager and like, don't these pussies know that they'll just, they just have to eat a lemon and they won't get scurvy. What a bunch of morons. All right. Wildest predictions. What's yours?

Dude, I didn't, I didn't do any here. Andrew, you gotta carry us.

Yeah, so mine is that I think assistant and admin jobs could go away or change radically. I think that, um, if you think about a lot of the tasks that personal assistants do, um, I think a very well-trained Google AI that understands your Google Drive, your calendar, and your email, um, will be able to do probably 80% of those tasks, maybe more. And I think that's coming in the very near term. Um, you know, these things are just progressing at such an exponential rate. And so that's something I've been thinking a lot about and I'm, I'm excited. You know, I think it frees up a lot of people to do, um, you know, more interesting work, but, uh, it's going to be pretty wildly disruptive.

Well, we got to read our predictions from last year, right? That I think that's where we got to start for this one. So Andrew, your prediction for 2023 was that we would see a lot of copies/competitors to GPT-3/AI, correct? You said Google jumps in, correct? AWS has something and Azure will have something. Azure did the big, you know, Microsoft did the big deal with OpenAI. So you were pretty spot on. Sam, yours was Elon dies or gets canceled in a serious way. And then you said OpenAI gets regulated.

The inputs happened. The inputs for Elon Musk were there. The output was not.

Dude, he's, he's getting kind of like a long, slow cancellation, you know, progressively, uh, through.

And by the way, that's my same prediction for the, for the next year. I think Elon will admit that buying Twitter was a mistake. Although I think he's already acknowledged, he's like, this is a hardship that I didn't necessarily need. But I think that like with all the advertisers leaving, I've been buying ads on Twitter. I tested it. Like the cost per click are like stupid cheap. I don't even want to mention that on here because it's going good.

Cut that shit out.

But basically I think, I think that the Twitter experiment, I think it's going to live, but not under Elon or something in a drastic way. So I'm extending my '23 into '24. Okay.

I like that. My prediction was selfish. I said, this is the year that I turned the corner and actually get shredded up. So get ripped, get in great shape. And then I also said I would start a company that's special or maybe a legacy company. Definitely did not do the second one, but I also didn't, after that podcast, I stopped thinking about that completely and I made actually my goal to not start a company this year. And then the getting ripped, I actually got to my fattest this year. But then before the end of the year, fourth quarter was, you know, the clock was draining and I came through in the clutch and I'm now down about, let's see, 13, 14 pounds. And I've been eating clean for what, 45 straight days? Like perfect, perfect eating. Exactly what I want to be doing. And to put that in perspective, 45 days probably doesn't sound like much. It's a month and a half. Um, probably the longest I went of actual perfect eating where I'm not eating a bunch of chips or, um, you know, ordering a pizza or something like that, you know, one night when I'm tired or stressed. By probably the last time I did a stretch would have been like 7 days would have been like the longest I had gone just of actual clean eating. And now I'm at 45. So it's going great.

Is this with Ozempic or without?

He hates it.

No Ozempic, baby. I'm on that no Ozempic plan.

Daddy.

He, uh, and in the YouTube comments, you— every video is commenting either your skin or your look. So it's working. People are, people are loving your, uh, glow up. What about coolest moment of your year?

I have a fun one. So, um, last year my coolest moment was all about me. This year it's all about somebody else. So I have a buddy who I went to college with, my buddy Dan. And Dan, um, we started our first business together straight out of college. So we were like, The Three Amigos. But then we, you know, that company wasn't really working out and two of the three of us went to Australia and had this really cool opportunity. But like, there wasn't really a spot for Dan on that boat. Meaning like, you know, I got a spot and I was able to get one other guy a spot, but it was really too much for me to like convince this Australian billionaire why I need two of my friends to come with me to go do this thing that was like kind of this unspecified project. And I felt bad about that. And I felt bad about that for like a decade. And I was like, damn, I really wish like, even if he didn't come, that we had gotten him into a good landing spot before we made that decision. I felt like we kind of left, you know, no man left behind. We kind of left a man behind. And I felt bad about that. I carried that guilt. He did totally fine, by the way. He went and got a job at Facebook and he, uh, when he was at Facebook, he went from like the bottom to the top. The bottom was his job at Facebook initially was to like make sure that like no penis will show up on our newsfeed. He's like building like penis detection, like systems to like make sure that you never, and by the way, you ever logged into Facebook and see a penis?

Never.

Dan did a great job. And so while he was there, he went and enrolled in the Facebook developer bootcamp and like taught himself to code. And then he became, then he went out in the marketplace, did a genius thing. His job application, he's like, well, I could say that I've been an engineer for 2 years. That's not really going to get me that good of a job. So he's like, instead he went out, he He reframed it. He goes, um, I'm a Facebook-trained engineer. I know how to do engineering at Facebook. I can make your engineering team run like a Facebook engineering team. People loved it. He got a job as CTO of a startup that, uh, went on to raise, you know, B round, C round, D round. But unfortunately the startup fizzled out and I catch up with Dan and I say, um, he's like, hey man, you know, unfortunately my options that I thought were gonna, you know, make me a bunch of money didn't really work out. You got any other, like, kind of, I'm looking for a job, let me know. And I said, yeah, I met this guy Andrew Wilkinson and then I met this guy Said Bulki and I've been listening to this podcast that I create and it's all about, there's a bunch of these people that are buying businesses. I said, Dan, have you ever considered buying a business? He's like, I don't even know where I would start. And I was like, I'm going to help you. And I was like, I don't know a ton about it, but I know more about it than you do. So let me be a blue belt and help a white belt here. And so I basically helped Dan do this search process. I had no stake in it, no investment in it, except for this is one of my best friends from college. And Dan bought a business. He bought a, uh, so after 6 to 9 months and several like close calls, but you know, last minute we said, no, no, this is not a great business. Don't buy it. Um, he buys this business and he buys this bag manufacturer, a bag, like bag sales company. I don't even know how you describe it. They don't make the bags. They, they, they get them made. Uh, but they sell them to big retailers. So like if you go walk into like a, like an Ulta, all the bags at Ulta, that's my boy Dan's company. And this guy had been running it for, you know, years. He had no contracts with any of these companies. He kind of ran it off pen and paper. Um, and so he, my friend Dan was able to negotiate and buy this business at a great price. And he just texted me yesterday saying that he's only owned this business now for like 3 or 4 months that in the, just in the sort of 5 months that'll be this year. He will, out of the profit of this business, after paying all the debt that he used to buy the business, he will make more than he made at his highest paying job as CTO already in the first 5 months. And he's like, dude, the lifestyle is great. He's like, I'm kind of working more, but it's totally different, totally different feel, right? Like I own my own business. I come in every day. I'm excited. He's like, I see this path where we're going to grow. He's like, I'm the bag. I'm Dan the Bagman. And he's like, I can, I could do this. And this can be like my, you know, like my asset that I build because like He's like, you know, even though I'm making more than I did at my job, it's even better because you can't ever sell your job. But with this, I know if I build this business up and it's making more profits, one day I could sell this business and cash out like a life-changing sum for me. And I feel so good that I got to, you know, sit shotgun for him while he went on this ride.

Kudos to Dan. What's the name of the company? Can you say?

I don't know, but if you email me, uh, I'll intro you to Dan. If you need bags for your business, Dan's got you.

Mine's a bit— mine doesn't have any great story. So Andrew, I saw what you put. That is also mine, but I'm not going to say that one. I'll go to the next one, which is actually the most important one. I had a kid this year. That was my— that was the coolest moment this year. I think, Andrew, you, you told me— what did you say? You said you're going to feel so much dopamine every morning when you look at your kid. And I get it now. So now it's my turn to gatekeep people and tell people like, oh, you'll understand when you have kids. You'll understand it. I understand a little bit, and it's been awesome. So that's mine. But, uh, Andrew, you do yours.

I think I said, um, it's like liquid MDMA gets shot into your brain every time you look at your baby.

Yeah, it's awesome, man. It's— and it's brought me closer to my wife too. I have more, you know, I've already— I always respected her, but now there's more like of a, of a spiritual respect. It's kind of funny. Um, but what's yours?

Totally. Um, so Yeah, we had our first ever live MFM in Vancouver. Uh, what was that, February, I guess, uh, this year? And I kind of put it on, like, so I, I like, you know, texted you guys and I was like, hey, we want to do this event, let's do it in Vancouver. We rented this huge theater and I remember getting the photo of the theater and sending it to you and we were just like, holy shit, like, how are we going to fill this thing? Or I was really nervous about it and, uh, we, I remember we were backstage and we were like peeking out and the entire theater was packed. There was a line down the street. Like it was really, really crazy. And this was like, it's a massive multi-level theater and 1,200 people, 1,200, 1,300 people or something. And I remember Sam was like, we're backstage and he goes, I don't use Facebook, but I do today. Cause I want everyone in high school to see that I filled a theater and he's supposed to photo of, uh, of, of us on stage.

I just love that.

That was such a great moment there. I remember, uh, Sam, you posted this photo of Alexis Ohanian with Serena Williams and he just looks like a pasty white nerd with this beautiful Amazon. And you go, the nerds win. And in that moment I was like, okay, the nerds won.

He didn't like when I said that, by the way, he was not a fan, but it was awesome that we sold out that theater. That was a really exciting thing. And you did the dumbest thing ever. You made people pay pay, but then you gave the money back if they showed up, people would've just paid.

Yeah, I know. In retrospect, we should have charged.

Um, let's go to breakout of the year. Sean, what do you, what do you have?

Yeah, mine's real simple. Um, breakout of the year, I think has to be Ozempic. I feel like Ozempic kind of changed the world. Um, it's not just like a tech thing or a business thing. Like Ozempic is everywhere and, and there's, I, I don't know, the jury's still out on it, but there's a lot of evidence that even if Ozempic has, you know, maybe side effects or you gotta stay on it to maintain the gains or whatever, like that people not being obese and people not being sort of controlled by their cravings, whether it's for food or they're even seeing maybe effects for, for alcoholism, that seems just like a really, really big deal. And I kind of, It's kind of the cliché idea. It's like, what if, what if there was the magic weight loss pill? And now there kind of is. That's mind-blowing to me that there— we did it. There is a magic weight loss pill.

Well, I was picking between Brett Taylor and Ozempic. And so, Sean, do you remember how you first heard about Ozempic? I think it was June of 2022. I texted you and I was like, there's this drug called semaglutide. It's— I'm in New York and it's like kind of popular amongst like only a small group of like weird biohackers. I'm gonna try it. And I tried it and I remember messaging you, or maybe I even said on the pod, I'm like, for some, you know, I've got, I had drinking issues a long time ago, but I was like, for some reason I even feel like, I think this might like cure that too.

You called it 100%. Not only do you show, you showed me a picture and I was like, wow, that's incredible. You go, I started this semi-glutide thing. I was like, dude, you like never heard of this. Like, you're like, yeah, I just inject this thing in me. And I'm like, bro, you just inject random shit into you? Like, that's not smart. But you were totally on it. And then you said the, I think this is going to cure alcoholism. And I remember literally, like, I didn't want to laugh in your face, but I remember laughing inside being like, dude, that's just like, sounds like a crazy leap. Uh, you know, you can't just say that shit. There's no evidence of that.

I just felt it. I could feel it when I, so I don't use it anymore, but I tested it for a small amount of time. And this is semaglutide. That's the name of the drug or the, uh, I don't know how you even explain it. The, the, the root drug. And then there's Ozempic is the brand name. But I remember like putting that in my body and I'm like, I think this is going to cure alcoholism because you don't crave anything. And I think what's going to happen is in 10 years we're going to see downsides to this drug because right now there's like very few, or at least it's impacting only a small amount of people. So I think that like there's still going to be downsides, but I think that what did Scott Galloway said? He goes, it's not ChatGPT, it's GLP-1. That's the big thing. GLP-1, this drug class is going to be way bigger than ChatGPT. And I, and I agree with him. I think that's a breakout of the year. What's yours, uh, Andrew?

Yeah, that's like antidepressants or something. Um, so mine, mine is pretty boring. It's a company called Snipped and it's a podcast player. And I don't know if you guys have this problem, but often I'll be driving, that's when I listen to podcasts most, and I'll hear something incredible like a great quote or just a, a great line or something I want to follow up on later. And until recently I've either, um, just forgotten it. Basically, it goes out the other side of my head. Or occasionally I would pull over my car and I'd make a note or something like that. And Snipped basically solves that. So what Snipped does is it has an AI that basically takes the transcript. It does like voice recognition on the transcript of the podcast. It pulls out all the key moments. So, A, let's say that you want to listen to a Joe Rogan interview, but it's 3 hours and you only really want to talk hear them talk about stuff that isn't MMA, you can jump in or whatever. But then also when you hear something interesting, you can tap a little button in CarPlay or on your phone and it'll actually grab the text for whatever was just said. And I've found that incredibly useful. And all my nerdy friends that are into like journaling and Readwise and all that stuff are going crazy for it. So I love that product.

You're on the homepage. Um, uh, a testimonial from you.

That's cool. Oh, really?

Yeah, they apparently, you must, I haven't invested or anything. You've tweeted it out and they use their tweet. And I think MFM is, yeah, MFM is on here too. Um, that's pretty cool.

Sam, you had, you had a snipped moment last pod where somebody was like, yeah, Varda is this crazy company. They, uh, and we were like, what do they even do? I go, they go to, yeah, they're manufacturing drugs in space. Sam goes, there's a pause. He goes, Why? Like, what's wrong? Why do you have to manufacture drugs in space? Like, what's wrong with Massachusetts?

I still haven't gotten a good answer. I'm sure it exists.

What's wrong with Massachusetts is just, that is incredible, incredible content.

This is the end of the Milly Awards. Congratulations, folks. This is, uh, the end of 2023. It's already 2024, which is crazy. I saw someone say, um, A professor was like, hey, you can use sources in your paper from the previous century. And this person, the student wrote in and she goes, hey, I was going to do something from the late 20th century. Is 1996, is that too old to use? So if you're born in 2000, you're already 24. I can't believe we're going into that year.

Dude, that's us now. Too old to use.

Yeah, it's crazy. Well, that's it. That's the pod. Congrats, fellas.