Two Millionaires on the Worst Mistakes They Made Early

All right. It's a new year, but it's the same old us. And we wanted to do something for you guys. So we wanted to do a mailbag of fan questions. So people have written in questions. We are going to answer them. You ready to jump in, Sam?

Yeah.

All right, here we go. Question number 1: What is the biggest mistake you've made in your business that you have not spoken about publicly yet? And how has it shaped your decision-making?

Man, I've got a great one for this. Tell me if your experience has been with this. So I tend to hire ambitious young people and I take chances on them. And I hate to say it, but the majority of the time that is a horrible plan and it's significantly better to hire more experienced people and pay them a lot more money. And I get way better results.

So when was this mistake? Is this like I've been making this mistake forever or this is forever, man?

Look, this is like my mistake, it's like the American dream, you know, like, give me your, your, your broken, your weak and your, and your like ambitious young—

I can fix him.

Yes. And like, I always want to do that because I'm so, you know, I'm into the romantic idea of that. And just I recently, you know, at our, at Hampton, we've hired like significantly more experienced people and they cost like 2 or 3 times more than a young and upcoming person. But the results are like 5 or 10 times better.

Right.

And, and, and I just make this— I always— my— I get so emotional and I always find the people say hire high agency people or hire these people whose growth rate is really high. But in general, it's just kind of better to say, hey, you already did this at this other company. Do, do it here, please.

So we were just going through a hiring process. I wanted to hire somebody on my content team and we found this kid who was great. He sent in this like wonderful video, like He made this video application that was super funny and it was well done. And I was like, yes, this is my kind of guy. Young, green. Yeah, he used to do this, you know, he just graduated, but like, this video is amazing. I got to talk to this guy. I talked to him. I like him. Good dude. And right before we hired him, you know, we asked a very simple question, which is like, so we want this to go well, right? We want this to be great and we want this to work. And so like, Does it make sense to just go with somebody who has never done anything even remotely like this? Or are there people in the world who have done very similar things that we could go talk to first? And should we not like lean in that direction? And as soon as we had that like very simple sanity check, 'cause I'm like you, I fall in love with the, the sort of angel investing in people idea. It's like the, like the raw up-and-comer, never done anything, found this diamond in the rough. Why do I like that? It's not for generous reasons. It's 'cause it's like, I feel cool that I found that thing. Thing, right? It's like finding a needle in a haystack, the diamond in the rough. Um, but that's— it is like I have such a low hit rate with that, right? By definition, you're gonna have a low hit rate with that strategy. And if it matters, and if there are people who have done it before that are way more proven in this category, like, why are you not going in that direction? So I've definitely had that, that same mistake. Sometimes it can work, and when it does work, it's the best story.

It's the best. But like, check this out, this strategy that I've been doing, it's been working well. So I love hiring consultants and agencies, but I'll say I'm only going to hire you for 2 months and I'm going to— you're going to do the work for the first 30 days, but then the second 30 days it's just you teaching me what to do. And so I have found experience of like getting like a young, ambitious, high-agency green person and teaming them up with an agency. And I have had some results with that. But in general, just hiring more experienced people and paying them more money, it's just typically the way to go. And that sounds so duh, but I— that's the biggest mistake that I've made.

Well, most of business is just figuring out what are your own leaks in your bucket. And then of course, to other people who don't have that leak, they're like, what? I mean, obvious, right? But you have to know what are my biases. And in your case, your biases are like, I like to be cheap as hell when I build my companies. This was like how you were before with The Hustle, at least. It's like, of course, get the cheap office, put the, you know, get the free desk off Craigslist. You know, our dog will be security and, you know, like you're like, I'm going to build this the frugal way. And then secondly, what if I found a guy like me, just a lovable fuckup who could be fixed? And it's like, you know, so those are biases that would lead you too far in that direction. That's not to say you never hire a junior person, but too often defaulting to that. And so you got to know your own biases.

What about yours? Do you have one?

I wrote project selection. So my theory, my theory is this. If you are hardworking and you are sufficiently talented, then the only variable that matters is what project you pick to work on, right? Because if you're going to work really hard on it and you're talented, then either you're going to be a 10 out of 10 person working on a 2 out of 10 opportunity, or a 10 out of 10 person working on a 10 out of 10 opportunity. And I think I have picked some real dogshit projects in the past. So I tried to start a sushi restaurant chain. Which like restaurants are one of the worst businesses. Sushi would be one of the worst types of restaurants to do. And by the way, that makes no sense for me as a person to do. The second one, I tried to make the next hit social media app. I tried to make the next Twitter, the next, you know, Facebook, the next Snapchat. And I spent 6 years going after that as a project to select. And God, that is hard to do.

You try to make a hit social media app, which frankly, you don't really use social media. You use Twitter, but like seldomly, to be honest, even though you're good at it. And two, you eventually made a streaming video game, like, or that's who your market was. Neither of us know or play video games or like streaming or had ever streamed a video game in my life.

Dude, I made a, I made a craft beer app for craft beer enthusiasts. Dude, I can't spell beer. Like, you know, I like beer is gross. It makes me burp. I don't know. Like, I don't like it. So I just picked all these terrible projects that were bad founder fit, just weak market opportunities in general, right? So this is like very, uh, very poor projects. I started my e-commerce brand, is a clothing brand.

You've seen clothing. You love clothes.

You've seen me dress. You know what I'm doing. And that one worked, but it's such a grind because e-com and fashion and apparel and inventory, it's like, dude, one of the like worst projects you can select. So I think I've been together just those projects I just mentioned. And by the way, Those are just the, the ones I remember just off the top of my head. There's some other doozies in there. Those are 10 years of my professional life. I've only had 17. So the, the majority of my professional life has been spent on really poor project selections and, and everybody who's talented knows opportunity cost is the biggest cost. So every year I was working on one of those, it was a year I wasn't working on something that was a better fit for me.

The good news is, Sean, that even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and you've taken enough swings that it's worked out.

I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a money-making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my 4 rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, get rich quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth, things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started. And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document, and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode. So this is from Dan from L.A.

I've been a fan ever since the pod was promoted in The Hustle. I think that was, uh, 4 or 5 years ago. I'm dying for another Sarah's List episode. My wife currently works at Waymo, but time to jump to the next 5 to 10xer. I'm tired of waiting. Throw a brother a bone. Give me one company that you think would be perfect for the Sarah's List. Now, let's, let's tell the listener, here's what Sarah's List is. So my wife Sarah was looking for a new job and we came up with this idea where let's see if you can join a company that has something like 1,000 employees so you can make a great living in terms of like work-life balance because there's some stability presumably, and you can make a pretty decent salary. But even still, there's enough growth left where your stock can 10x and hopefully make you worth millions. In her case, it worked. She did that with Airbnb. She joined Airbnb when they were I mean, it was a huge company. It was like an $18 billion company with, I forget, 4,000 people. And it grew to be a, I think, $100 billion company. And her, you know, $250,000 a year stock grew to like $1 million a year stock, something like that. And so Sean and I have made maybe 3 different lists where we've predicted what the next Sarah's style companies are.

So we love this because you want to be a millionaire. Everybody does. I don't know. I haven't actually met anybody who doesn't want it— want that. But not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. That's huge risk. Not everybody has the winning idea. Not everybody wants to be the brilliant investor who finds the gem, uh, at an early price. And this path was basically like, no, you're not like the hotshot exec getting this insane package. You just join as a normal employee into a clearly good company that's already in a stable position. You're going to get healthcare. There's like you know, there's systems in place, there's a nice office to go to. So you didn't make any of those crazy sacrifices, but just by— even if you had a $50,000 a year stock grant, right? So let's say your total comp was going to be $180K, $150K, and of that, you know, $120K is, is cash and then the rest is stock. And you get that every year for 4 years, normal vesting cycle. Well, over those 4 years, that $200,000 of stock could become $1 million of stock just by the company naturally growing at the rate it's already growing at. And I thought, what a hack. When I saw that you— when you, when you said that Sarah did this and that you guys were somewhat intentional about what company to pick to go to, she worked at Facebook, then Airbnb. We decided to christen this as, uh, Sarah's List.

I think we came up with 30 companies. A couple of them were home runs. So I think Rippling, Figma, Andral, uh, I don't even remember.

Replit, Replit Tool, Cursor. There's been others. Yeah.

Now, The question is, is why haven't we done this again? I have an answer, which is my, my, and I think you're going to agree, it's so much harder to predict what the winners are right now because compared to Airbnb and Uber and Lyft and Rippling and these software companies, they were fairly steady growth. With all these new AI companies, it's impossible to predict, A, what's going to hit, and it's impossible to predict, are they actually going to have longevity, sustain?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The hot companies today are like they're, they're so proud to be the fastest growing, fastest $100 million in ARR. But it's like, dude, that happened in 4 months or 5 months. Like, that's not the same, like, sure footing that you could stand on. It's not a stable foundation where, whereas you could see these things that have been going for 7 years just compounding steadily, and you can predict that the next 7 years will probably be more compounding steadily. But I do have an answer. Do you have an answer for this, for, uh, Dan from LA? My—

okay, so it sounds so boring. There's probably two of them that I would predict. One of them I heard— I heard Scott Galloway make the same argument, so I'm just stealing his. One was your old— your alma mater, Amazon. I do think that you can get incredibly wealthy still at Amazon. Yeah.

That's a crazy pick, dude.

They've been—

Amazon. What is Amazon?

They've underperformed the market. They've underperformed the market.

And you're saying it's currently a $2.4 trillion company.

So you're saying it's going to be a $10 trillion company, the first ever Yeah, because I think that, um, when I use my Alexa, it's still so stupid. Like, it doesn't understand AI. Or when you, like, use Amazon.com and, like, search for stuff, the AI is still horrible.

Amazon is a wild pick.

I don't know, what else do you have?

Okay, here, I have two for you. I thought you— there's one, Alep, where we're both investors in this one company. I thought you were going to say that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one's pretty good.

Okay, so I'll give you mine and then I'll get— then you can, you can use that one too.

I don't know if their valuation is public, so careful what you say.

Though I think it is. It was. Okay, so my pick would be Neuralink. Okay. Why Neuralink? Well, first, I think if you're going to join a company, maybe join the company by the greatest entrepreneur ever of all time, which is Elon Musk. Undisputed at this point, I would say. And so the Elon index of companies has just performed at this absurd level, whether it's Tesla, it's SpaceX, it's, um, XAI now. Is now like a ridiculously valued company. Neuralink is what's next. So Neuralink is one of these companies that is doing something that very few— like, there's no— basically no comp— no competitors to this. There's like 5 competitors total in the world, and they're all way far behind. What is Neuralink doing? They're putting chips in your brain that today help a quadriplegic person be able to use a computer just with their thoughts. And by the way, this isn't just like a pie-in-the-sky idea. Like, there's a guy, you could watch him streaming himself playing video games on Twitch using his mind as the controller. And it's pretty insane. They're doing, they've done it in like monkeys now. They've done it in, I think, two humans now. And it's just getting better and better where it's becoming less invasive also. I think now he just tweeted out, there's like a, I think there's like a surface, more surface level implant that they could do that rather than going so deep into the brain.

Uh, can you even work here? Like, can you go— like, how do you get a job?

It's a company.

Is it? Okay.

So Neuralink, uh, I think when I initially said this on Sarah's List, it was like a $2 billion valuation. It's now at $10 billion. So it's already had one Sarah's List jump of 5x. It's going to have another. This is, this is going to be a huge company. Like, if you think about, um, computing. So computing went from computers to laptops to mobile phones. And the next one is probably some version of glasses or a watch, some version of that. That's what's coming next. And then what comes after that is the computer in your mind, right? Like just attaching yourself to the computer so that you can literally just think and, uh, you have access to the internet just from your thoughts. Now, some people will say this is dystopian. Some people say they don't want this. Guess what? Once the first people start to have the chip in your brain, you will be the equivalent of like a turtle if you do not. And so this is, uh, the game theory of this is that We're all going to end up with this because if anybody does it, they're going to be a god amongst men, right?

Dude, you're like, you're like one of these guys. I think you're like, you don't like taking— I'm going to make a prediction. You never said this. Are you the type of guy who doesn't even like taking medicine?

I don't take much medicine.

No, that's what I thought.

Don't take any supplements. Don't take medicine.

Yeah, exactly what I thought. The guy who doesn't even take medicine like Advil or something like that. You're saying you're going to be putting a brain chip in your brain?

Again, you have to, right? Like, Well, I already basically have the computer attached to my hand. If I'm honest, it's in my hand 8 hours a day. It's in my pocket, right? It's attached to my body at all times. If I don't have my phone on me, I kind of panic, right? So it is in some ways already a third limb. But where, you know, once this goes to the point where I can just have it, you know, in my mind, again, it's not really going to be that much of a choice because the people who have it are going to be like walking around like gods compared to the people who don't. And by the way, he's doing the Tesla model. So the Tesla model, the Tesla business plan was you first do the really expensive sports car, high cost, low production volume, sell it to just rich enthusiasts who want something cool, a cool toy. And then the cool toy becomes more and more mainstream and more and more, um, you know, eventually you get to the Model 3, which is now like a mainstream car. With Neuralink, he's doing it where first it's going to solve the problems for people who are quadriplegics. The next one he's going for is people who are blind and, you know, like people who can really improve the quality of life. And eventually it'll get to— it's kind of like a phone. It's like a consumer device we all just do for fun, right? But, but it's inarguable that you should not be helping people who are paralyzed, you know, have more, more function because, because of this technology.

They have a cool— so the reason I was like, can you even apply to work there is because I had never like seen their job openings. I thought it was, I thought it was like a project. I didn't realize it was like a proper company yet. Because if you go to the CEO's LinkedIn, he says like manager of a family office. But they do have a careers page and they're hiring for a bunch of roles in San Francisco or Fremont and, um, Austin. And their jobs page is pretty cool. It says you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work at Neuralink. And then it lists all the open roles they have. So that's pretty good. Okay. Yeah.

I'm on board. There's a content creator role. There's a junior accounts payable specialist.

Right?

You can work at these companies, dude.

I talked to a guy who worked at Facebook in PR. I think he said he was the 400th employee and he was in PR. And he said that they did things where, you know, at a large company, Amazon or HubSpot had this too, where you get— I forget exactly— you get a discount on the stock, or if you buy the stock, they match it or something like that as a perk, like $20,000 a year, nothing like crazy. And he told me he did that, plus he like just stayed for 10 years and he said he made $90 million. So if you're listening to this and you are an accounts payable person, this definitely looks cool. That is a good—

I thought you were going to say— I thought you were going to say Owner for your answer. So Owner, which is valued kind of in the billion-dollar range. I think the last round they raised was $1 billion. I'll just tell you two things. One, when I got introduced to the investment for Owner, the person who— my friend who introduced it said, by the way, this is the— he goes, hey, I think you should meet this company. Why? Well, it's the best founder I've ever invested in and probably the best company I've ever invested in. So I was like, okay, well, that's an incredibly strong recommendation. Within like 10 minutes, the CEO emailed me. And now this is normal. They'll say, hey, I'd love to set up a time to chat. Here's my calendar. Maybe we could, maybe we could grab coffee next week. We'd love to tell you about what we're doing. This guy Adam is a savage. He goes, hey Sean, great to meet. I just forwarded you our last 3 investor updates so you can get a sense of how things are going. And, you know, like, have you ever seen that slide that says if they don't have revenue, they'll talk about users, right? Or like, if they don't have profit, they'll talk about revenue. If they don't have revenue, they'll talk about users. If they don't have users, they'll talk about, uh, potential, right? Or products, features. If they don't have features, they'll talk about potential. And it's basically like the ladder of proof of like, what do you actually have? And I can tell you what you have because I can, based on what you choose to reveal. And so similarly, a founder that just says, here's the last 3 investor updates, was— it was just like, oh, let me just show you, I have, I have a straight flush. So here's my cards. Uh, because the investor updates will tell you all the numbers about the company. Because he sent me the last 3, I know the trajectory of how fast they're growing across those 3 updates. I can see how the CEO communicates and I can see what they care about, what their priorities are. So it's like I made the investment without ever talking to the guy instantly once I read those 3 updates. And since then, Every update is just like, hey, so we're crushing it. Here's, here's another gigantic number. Here's how much growth we had just this quarter or this just this month instead of like what most companies do in a year.

And check this out, this guy Adam, I don't know how old he is. I think of him as like a 22-year-old because I'm—

dog, he was born in 1999.

That's insane.

He was born during Y2K.

One time he like messaged me about his brother. He's like, my brother's looking for a project to do. And I thought it was like a kid. And he's like, yeah, he's a content creator. And like, his brother has 30 million followers on TikTok or something like that. I don't know if you saw that. But then he wrote this update yesterday. I read his update yesterday and I was reading it and he was explaining how it was— the company was killing it. And he was like, you know, we also had a little bit of churn in December and that really bothers me. And I thought like, okay, he's bothered because the product sucks or something. He goes, I'm bothered because that means that these businesses likely went out of business. Like these, like, so basically, sorry, Owner serves small, small restaurants. That's their customer. It's like an ordering platform for restaurants. And he was like, we had some more churn or some churn in December, and it was all because they likely went out of business because that's when these restaurants tend to go out of business, I guess, is at the end of the year. And I read that line and it was pretty cool because he's like kind of a Terminator. Like he says, like, here's where we said we were going to go. Here's how we exceeded it. Here's where we said we were going to go. Here's why we exceeded it, like constantly throughout each category of the company. And at the end, he was like, we had, we did have some churn and that is part of the bad news. And it, because they went out of business and that makes me, he goes, I think he said, and that devastates me. I'm so saddened that like these guys lost and it was, that was really cool.

Yeah. I ignored that. I was like, I'm just going to think this guy's a Terminator. I'm not even going to think of the human side of this that he actually cares too. Cause you know, you need both.

You can't have both. Yeah.

He also, you know, this guy seems very likable. You know, you can't just have everything. I refuse to accept that.

Let's do another question. Which one do you want to go to?

Let's do this one. I don't think you wanted to do this one, which is why I have to do it. Okay. Alex from Brooklyn says, Gentlemen, every culture has its quirks. The Japanese make you take your shoes off at the dinner table. The French chicks don't shave their pits. And My First Million is home for asking blunt financial questions. And Sam, you are the king of blunt financial questions. So it's our turn to return the favor. I won't ask you for the number, but is Hampton over or under $10 million in revenue in 2025? Alex from Brooklyn.

Uh, over. And that's all I will say because it's one of the businesses. It's my only company and I just want to. Shut up and just quietly build for the next decade and just keep on trucking. And maybe after 10 years I'll come out and reveal some more information. But yeah, it's done really well.

There you go. All right. Good job, Alex. You put Sam on the hot seat. All right. Next one. All right. I just watched the Jesse Itzler episode and Sean playing the piano had me kind of wowed. It's nuts what you can do in a year. If that was your misogi for 2025, what is each of yours for 2026? Dave from Mexico City. Yeah. Put some respect on an American living in I don't even know what that— CDMX, whatever that is.

That's Mexico City, you hillbilly. That's Mexico City.

CDMX? How does that stand for Mexico City?

I think it's some Spanish, like, I don't know. It's a Spanish way of saying, I don't know, the city of Mexico. Dave.

Sorry, Dave. I didn't pronounce your city right.

Dónde el barrio, Dave? I speak Spanish too. All right.

So by the way, did you have a misogi in 2025? Did you do that?

Yeah, I trained. So the point of a misogi— so here's the, here's the thing people forget about misogi is it's supposed to be so hard that you have a high chance of failing. And we don't talk about the failure enough. But yes, I trained for a 50-mile run and I just like fucking got hurt and destroyed my Achilles and I couldn't do it. So I did it and I failed.

Okay.

Now let me recap something. So on, 2 days ago, Sean put out this video of him going to Jesse Itzler's house. You prefaced it by telling what you did. So basically, Jesse Itzler, friend of the pod, amazing guy. You flew to his house in Atlanta and very— it seemed planned, but it was very spontaneous that you played piano for him and his wife, Sarah Blakely, a very famous entrepreneur. They were in tears. You told us about the video and then it finally got released. It was awesome. But I have a bone to pick. Everyone's saying how amazing this is and all this stuff, and they're like, you inspired me because you played this beautiful song and people were literally in tears. And earlier this year you said you're going to start playing piano. I'm pretty sure you've been playing piano for years and years and years. And like, you did not just pick this up from scratch.

Uh, no, I haven't been playing for years and years and years. I did as a kid, my parents did buy a piano and they probably got us, I don't know, a couple months of lessons when I was maybe 8 or something like that. But I had, by the time I'm 38 now, I had like forgotten everything. So when I started this year, I started from, I started from scratch this year, but yes, technically when I was—

but I remember you, I remember us being somewhere and seeing a piano and you sat down and I thought you like played a song.

I did know how to play two things on the piano. So I knew how to play the, uh, intro to James Bond GoldenEye, like the, like, just like the da na na na na na na na, like, like, but like a one-hand song type of thing. And I think I also knew the, uh, Beginning of Für Elise, which is like a kind of a classic piano song through muscle memory. But I couldn't like, didn't know how to read sheet music, didn't know how to do the notes, didn't know like what the key— I didn't know what the keys were called type of deal, right? I just had memorized because, you know, at some point some— my sister or somebody had showed me like, hey, watch, push these, push white, white, black, black, white, black, and like that'll sound like James Bond. Like that was the level I was at.

Well, it was very good. Okay. And so the question was, um, what was the question? What's your misogi going to be this year?

What's it going to be this year for each of us?

Do you have one?

I have one. I'm trying to figure out the exact way to frame it, but I think I told you this. I deleted all my social media apps, all the consumption. So I said, I'm, I'm going to go dark, uh, in terms of consuming. Like, I basically was like, how do I trade consuming stuff that people put 20 seconds of thought into Right? Like a tweet. People put about 20 seconds of thought into it. To doing things that people put like 20 years of thought into, which is books. And so I deleted Reddit, I deleted Twitter, I deleted Instagram, I deleted Facebook, deleted all those apps. And instead I just, if I open up my phone, I want to kill boredom, I have to open up Kindle. It's like the only thing left to do on my phone is Kindle. And so I'm, I basically made a list. I was like, all right, here's the 26 for 2026, right? Like the 26 books I want to read. In 2026. And I have kind of a hit list. These are books, honestly, I've probably owned for years, have thought about reading, I've heard really good things about, but hadn't actually read. And so I started that a couple of weeks ago. So that's going good. The only other one that might count here is I have this life bucket list idea of coaching a high school basketball team. And so like, in walking away from business, like not focusing on business for a season, which is 3 months, And so I started that last month, uh, and it goes— our season goes till, till, uh, end of February. But basically, take like— there's like a local high school basketball team, and I've become an assistant coach, and it's like, we want to go to the state tournament and, and win, and that's the goal.

I know your first game you got spanked. I think you said the second game went better.

Yeah, we are— what are we now, 6-3? Um, so, you know, we're, we're doing all right. We're getting better as a team, and, uh, right now it's all about like just can we improve? But I'm basically spending, like, I don't know, I'm at this, I'm basically going to practices and games, you know, 4 days a week roughly. And just me, like, I get my coach's whistle and my little whiteboard and I drive to this high school and then it's just, I'm doing it. I'm doing the actual thing. I'm like coaching this high school basketball team. I'm an assistant coach. I'm not the head coach.

I have a 2-year-old girl and then I have a 2-month-old. A little girl, and I have underestimated leading up to it how difficult it would be. And even though I have grandparents around and people helping out, my wife is helping and, you know, obviously running the show there, I have underestimated how challenging it was. And so frankly, I kind of feel like I'm holding on right now. My goals are simple. I'm trying to eat 200 grams of protein a day and get out of bed at 6:00 AM. So I have pretty small ones because I, um, I've always been, you know, ever since I got into fitness, I've always been good at maintaining a fairly fit state. Right now I'm at the lowest of my fairly fit era. And so I just need to eat my protein and going to, or going to bed early and waking up early. It's, this is so rudimentary, but it is just, has had the biggest impact on my day's productivity. And so my, I don't really want to set a big goal right now cause I am kind of hanging on.

Yeah. Although I do think those are big. I know a lot of people who have that goal and don't do that thing that is actually quite difficult to do both of those things that you just mentioned. If you actually did those, those are high-leverage things. Also, I'll say two things. One, I think it's great to acknowledge the season you're in. I think people want everything to be constant, and there are seasons where you're able to be full out. There's seasons where you're in recovery mode. There's seasons where you're in, you know, nesting mode, where you're just like, look, all that matters is like protecting the nest because there's like these baby eggs here right now. And like, that's all that really matters. I don't need to distract myself with a random hunt over here. I need to stay at the nest. And so I think knowing the season and, and, uh, not beating yourself up about that is something that ambitious sort of Type A people struggle with. It's like, you gotta give yourself some grace, you know, when, when you're, when you're so wired towards achievement of random goals.

You didn't do a good job of warning me though. You should have warned me. I didn't realize how challenging this would be.

Well, everybody says the same thing. It's like, oh, it's man-to-man defense now. There's two of you and two of them.

Like, I did not understand. Like, it's sometimes it feels like my wife is my roommate. And, like, like, I barely have gotten to know my little girl because my new baby, because I'm with the eldest, like, right? So it's my job to take care of her. And like, you got to, like, take her out of the house because she's going to grab the pacifier out of the mouth. You know what I mean?

It's definitely a second baby blindside for dads because the first baby is the one you think everything's going to change and it's going to be like, oh my God, my life's going to get really crazy. And then it's like, it's all right, I got this. This is not so bad.

Different, but not crazy.

So you get this false sense of security. And then when the second baby comes, it's like nobody— you had already given up. You'd already stopped worrying about it in a way. And the second one is the blindside, especially for the dad, because for the mom, who you didn't realize how much she was carrying the team, but now she has to focus on the new baby. And that means existing kid is your kid and all of their needs and all of their time is like, you know, on your clock. And that is very That's a big wake-up call.

Just getting her socks on. Like, that's like, it can be an ordeal. Like, just like these small things that I just kind of dismissed. So I'm frankly, I'm not drowning, but I, my cup is a bit full.

All right. There's, here's another question. So this is, what is it? GaryVee. It's the GaryVee one. All right. So I like this one. GaryVee wants to buy the Jets. Sam, you're working hard to grow Hampton now. Why are you doing all this? Are you trying to buy all the pawn shops in the US, brother? In all seriousness, what is the fu money purchase that you want if this is a home run? This is Tarek from the Bay. I guess that's the Bay Area.

So when I moved to New York City, I got this like really big, nice apartment and I love it. And I've gotten so much joy having family come and stay and be comfortable that I have my eyes set on— I do in the next couple of years want to buy a huge, like lavish you know, $15 or $25 million apartment. I do. That is something that I definitely want. But more than anything, I saw this photo.

A $15 or $20 million apartment is your goal?

Yeah.

Why apartment? For $15 to $20 million, shouldn't you be getting like a city block?

No, brother. It sucks.

Like, you don't get like one of the brownstones at least? Like, it's an apartment?

I don't want a brownstone. I've rented one before. I don't like them. I like having a doorman.

What's the like dream building? Is there a dream building in New York that's like the cool one to be in?

Well, it's different flavors. So like if like there's like this thing called Billionaires Row and it's like right next to Central Park and that's what a lot of the really rich like tycoons like Bill Ackman lives there and it's $100 million for the fancy apartment there. It's insane. It's just absolutely insane how rich some people are and how much this real estate costs. That's not my flavor. That's like opulent. I mean, it's all opulent if it's $20 million, but that's like you know, like you're the master of the world type of apartment and it's all clean and cool looking. But what I'm really working to do— I don't like Donald Trump, but I saw this photo of him working at his office and he, he was like, had just left a meeting with a bunch of his employees and his wife and two kids. The boys, I forget their name, Don Jr. and the other guy. They came up to him while he was working. And the cool part was that they lived in the same, you know, he owned the building and they, the building and they lived in the same building where he worked and the kids could see him working and he was just able to do stuff. And it was like a total life integration, work-life integration. That's my dream. That's really what I'm working towards. I really want to do that.

Wow. I never took you, Sam, to be the penthouse kind of guy.

I'm not a penthouse type of guy, but I guess I am. I just said I want to buy a penthouse.

But I think you just said that's your dream.

Yeah, I think by definition.

You're like, I'm not a penthouse type of guy yet. We used to have this funny thing on the pod where it was like, you know, we're just two entrepreneurs with big dreams. Sean wants to buy the Lakers and Sam would love to buy a lake. I feel like you were so much more likable then. Now, not like Manhattan Sam, you just lost like 30 points of likability with that answer. What are you doing here telling the truth over here, bro?

You know where it's rooted? It just so happens that I live in Manhattan, but really if I lived in like, let's say, St. Louis, Missouri, I would say I want the fattest house in the cul-de-sac that has like a soccer goal in the back and like a basketball goal and like all the kids play in my yard. Like, that's really what it sort of is. It just so happens that I live—

Yeah, that sounds so much better.

It just so happens that I live in Manhattan. In order to do that, you have to spend $20 million.

By the way, this, this GaryVee buying the Jets thing, I've talked about this before. To me, this is like a masterclass in personal brand. So I always say like for personal brand, you want these 5 Ds. One of the Ds is what's the dream? And if your dream is, I want to make so much money, it's like crazy. I just want to be a billionaire. It just sounds greedy, right? So what Gary did, which is brilliant, is he's like, I want to buy the Jets. Now, there's a lot of brilliance in this. One, it gives him the air cover to go try to pursue a bunch of money without just seeming greedy. He didn't say, I want to buy the Yankees. He wanted to buy this lovable loser, his childhood team, the New York Jets, that's never done anything, and try to turn them around. And so it's like there's like a nobility to the mission. There's this like, likeability to the mission where it's like a turnaround project. Everybody likes an underdog type of deal, and it's something a lot of people remember about him, like something he dreams of doing. And so I think that Gary doing that is yet another example of Gary really understanding marketing and personal brand.

Do you know how, so Sean and I like the UFC, and at the UFC, every, after every fight, Dana White does a press conference and he lists like 5 or 10 stats. So who got the fight of the night, who got the bonus, And then one stat that he always lists is how much money they made at the gate. And it's supposed to mean like, this is how many fans came to the fight, but the tickets are like $2,000. Like, I went recently and it was like $800 for bad seats. And it's pretty funny that he ran— he like is using that as like, look, look how many people are coming. It's like, dude, no, this is just how much— you're just charging so much money for a ticket. So you're like bragging. It's sort of like when Gary says, like, I've noticed Gary's videos. People would be like, help, let me help you buy the Jets and achieve your dream. That's so much better than people saying, let me put more money in your pocket.

Become a billionaire. $250 million net worth to $450 million in net worth. Yeah.

I mean, all right, let's do another question. Or do you have one of these, Sean?

I don't. It's got to be authentic, right? So like, I don't actually have one. You know, to me, I'm like, I bought back my time. That was the first purchase. You know, first important purchase, buy my own time back, buy my freedom. And then it's like you invest in health. So it's like, I got a trainer, I got a chef, I got like, doing everything I can for health for me and my family. And, you know, after that, like, I don't know, I've, I guess it'd be fun experiences. Like, I don't really have like this burning desire to go purchase some really expensive thing. You know, Morgan Housel wrote this thing in his book that really resonated with me. He goes, there's two ways to use money. Number one is as a tool to improve the quality of your life. And I nodded. Yeah, that makes sense, right? That's buying your time. That's buying a nanny. That's about, you know, getting a personal trainer or something like that. And the other is as a measuring stick. And I realized that like all the big money purchases, like the things you would need tons and tons of money for, they tend to be measuring stick things. Like I've almost run out of like money as a tool to improve my life ideas. You know, I've done a lot of the big ones, and so I guess I don't really want to switch into that gear of money as money as a measuring stick. Yeah, but you enjoy that penthouse, Sam. Yeah, I'm sure people will think you're very cool. All right, let's go to the next question.

Do you remember, do you remember the, the kids' house when you were younger where it was like the open door, where it was like a campus? You just, everyone can like hang out. Yeah, I've, I've aspired to be that forever. It just so happens that you have to spend a lot of money in Manhattan to do it. All right, let's do this one. Early on, you guys had a ton of friends on the show as guests. Give us OGs an update on the OGs. Where's Sully? Where's Ramon? Where's Jack Smith? Is there anyone else that I missed? So when Sean started MFM, the first 50 episodes, maybe a lot of people don't realize this, MFM is that like some number between 700, 800 episodes. I don't remember exactly. The first some number, I don't know, 25 or 50, it was just Sean interviewing people and all those people were being interviewed. And also you and I, when it was just— when I came on, it was just like 5,000 people listening. We basically just talked about our friends. And so for the OGs, they weren't—

or we had them on and be like, hey, what's up? What are you up to? You know, like that sort of deal.

Before we were chasing clout, We were just hanging out with our buds.

Once we figured out the YouTube algorithm, things changed. But, uh, before that, we invited our friends on the pod a lot.

Okay, let's do an update. So Suli, do you want to talk about Suli?

Okay, Suli is Suleiman Ali. He's one of our, uh, he's one of our friends. He's one of my best buddies. There's a question later that I think will be a good explanation of who Suli is, but he's an entrepreneur. He built a company called TinyCo, which was like mobile games. Uh, so think like Candy Crush. but he licensed the IP for Family Guy. So he made like the Family Guy mobile game, the Harry Potter mobile game, those, those types of things. Sold Tiny for a bunch of money, uh, 9 figures. He then, uh, helped his brother start, uh, and sell Native deodorant. So the Ali brothers are prolific and they've both been on the podcast. Sui did something that I really respect and admire, which was he was able to understand what matters. So he's like, Suli's in his 40s. He had been, you know, he's been super successful. And when you, when you're successful, like winners have options. You get deals put on your plate every day, things you could go invest in and make a bunch of money. You have people who want to come work for you and, you know, start companies with you. You have more knowledge about how to win in the game of business. And it is very tempting to just go and, uh, go get more success because success feels really good and you're good at it. And it's very tempting to do that because there might be other areas of your life that you're not so good at where you're not getting that same feedback loop of I'm awesome and this is awesome and my results are awesome. And what Suley did, which I thought was great, was he didn't make the mistake of just chasing more success. He started to look at those other areas. So first thing he did was he started working out religiously every day. Like, I started being like, hey, what are you like, what are you working on today? He's like, I don't know, but I scheduled my workout. That's the most important thing that I do.

Dude, he takes more workout classes than like a 23-year-old Manhattanite woman who works in PR.

And he takes the same classes that she takes also.

He introduced me to like rumble boxing and I think my first Barry's bootcamp. Barry's. Barry's. And SoulCycle.

So he loves the classes. So he started doing that. Then he was like, I want to have kids. Like, that's the next chapter. I want to have kids. So he just had a kid and he has resisted the AI wave to focus on having a kid for now. Uh, we'll see what he does. I think he wants to take a very big swing in the world of AI and robotics. We'll see what happens, but he, he's a first-time dad. So that's the Sully update. Ramon is doing a very cool company called Afina. If you've ever looked in your house and looked at the tap and your tap water and you're like, I don't want to drink tap water. I want to drink clean water. I don't want water that has heavy metals in it, chemicals in it. You know, a lot of people don't even know your, the, the water supply in most cities is like very interlinked with the sewage system. Like it's a pretty gross, thing to drink tap water, but we all bathe in tap water. We put it all over our naked bodies. And so Ramon has built a, uh, a company that's around clean water for the home. And so it's started with a filtered shower head. So how do you shower in water that's going to be clean on your skin and good for your hair? Uh, it's called Afina, and he's going into other categories, um, with clean water for the home. And so Ramon's basically gone back to what he knows best. Which is how do I sell stuff online? And he's just moved to more noble things. He started with— when he first came on the podcast was he was selling essentially soap opera, daytime soap opera spoilers. So like, what's going to happen tomorrow on The Young and the Restless? And he sold that company for like $9 or $10 million.

It was a blog, basically a soap opera blog. And he only— it was only 2 years old. He sold for $10 million. When we talked about it, this was like such a viral story.

A Dutch kickboxer. He's never seen a soap opera in his life, but he just loves to sell stuff online. He loves to figure out how to get traffic from one place to another and how to sell. And now he's doing— he's selling things that actually, you know, improve people's lives a little bit more than the soap opera spoilers.

So that's, that's Ramon right now. You guys should go listen to his episode, uh, early on. So basically, yeah, he started a soap opera business that he sold for $9 or $10 million. Then he started a dog ramp company. So like, if you're— it was called Sausage Dog Central. So sausage dogs can like use a ramp to get up in an SUV. And Sam grew it to $18 million. Now he's doing Athena. And he's a single dad and his son's about to go to college or getting geared up to go to college. And he, his, his kid is like the most well-mannered, well-behaved kid. So that's probably the best thing he's ever done is be— imagine he's been a single parent since the— his boy was 2 years old. Yeah. And now his kid has been but is still thriving. Jack Smith. So Jack Smith is our buddy Jack Smith. So on paper, he basically sold his company at the age of 29 or 28 for $850 million. It was called Vungle. Now, the intangibles are if you meet Jack Smith, very quiet. You'll have to, you'll have to pull anything out of him. He won't tell you anything. If you ask what he does for work, he'll say, oh, I, I like to play on computers. Like, he won't tell you. He's the— in terms of what you said, Sean, about people wanting to flex, he is the most non-flexing person I've ever met in my life. He's very special. One of my best friends. He now lives in Portugal and he's building He just bought 50 acres of land on the coast of Portugal and he's building a meditation center. That's what he's doing.

It's like digital detox meditation, right?

Yeah. So he bought 50 acres of land and check this out. He has like a mobile home that he mostly lives in. And this little— like, he— I think he has a house that he now— I think they've rented a house nearby, but for a little while they were living in like a tiny home, him and his kid and his wife. And him and his wife are both tycoons. They're both incredibly successful people and they live very, very modest lives and they're dedicating everything right now to building a retreat so people can like get into, I don't know, whatever you do when you meditate, self-awareness, calmness, you know, whatever those, whatever those thoughts are. Sounds like you'll be there soon. Yeah.

All right. I got one that's tactical, practical, business question. So it's a— this is, this is from Ben's brother. Ben's my business partner. This is from his brother Sam. He says, I've been a realtor for the past decade. I've had good success. I made $300,000 a year for about a decade, but I hate how it just doesn't seem to be compounding. So I've decided it's time to make a change. Everything is on the table. Buying a business, buying a franchise, flipping houses, getting a job. I'm not looking for specific prescriptive advice on what I should specifically do, but I'm looking for you guys to tell me how you would think about deciding the type of thing you'd look for next and how you would attack it.

Have you read the, uh, I think it's called The War— is it War on Art by Steven Pressfield?

War of Art.

War of Art, sorry. And, uh, he talks about this idea of the difference between, like, an amateur and a professional. And, like, an amateur maybe says that they have writer's block or that their creativity just hasn't come to them. Whereas a professional, they sit down at the same day and they get to work and they just write regardless of how they feel. You know, their emotion that day doesn't impact how they feel. They're a professional. You go to work. The things that I've noticed that have held a lot of people back is when they think about making money, or in Ben's case, or sorry, Sam Parr's case, of like what to do next. I think that they don't think of themselves as a company builder. I think that when you're like thinking about what to do next, you have to think, how do I get enough traction to hire people, to create a team and to create a proper company with a culture that solves a problem and has recurring customers? And I've noticed this like with a lot of real estate agents in particular because they're one-off people, you know, it's like a one-person business oftentimes with just like an assistant. And I have a bone to pick a lot of times with these one-person companies that we talk about online all the time. They're incredibly interesting, but in general, in order to build a lot of value for yourself, you have to create, in my opinion, a company. And that's sort of this like vague term. But in my head, what that means is like employees who are all working together on a mission and who are creating an asset that has a lot of value, not just creating something that pays your salary.

And so are you suggesting he take his current job where he's like, I put in hours and I get a commission out of it selling home and start to think about like, well, why don't I turn this into more of a brokerage? Or why don't I create a real estate team? And we're not going to sell— I sell 20 homes a year, but we could sell— why couldn't we sell 300 if I was able to hire other people like me, maybe even better than me at selling homes? And organize us all under one brand as a company rather than me as a broker.

John Rockefeller, who's I think the best businessman ever, famously said, I'd rather have 1% effort from 100 people than 100% effort from me. And I think that to be true, where the, the name of the game to creating a lot of value in something sustainable is to create something that involves getting other people organized and them doing a lot of the work. And that sounds very simplistic, but I don't think that's how a lot of people think about it.

Yeah. So I, my answer would be, it's kind of like eating late at night. It's like, are you hungry or are you just bored? And a lot of, a lot of what people think is hunger is actually just boredom. And so similarly, I think Sam wants to do something different. He's basically saying like, I've been a successful realtor for a long time, but I'm ready to buy a franchise, flip houses, like go go do something completely different. Whereas I think you first would want to question the, the, the question, the initial assumption, which was, I'm— he basically said, I'm making $300K a year for about a decade, but it just doesn't seem to be compounding. Well, why not? I've seen many brokers make way more money. If the goal is to make way more money or to work way less, I know many brokers that have done what you said, which is productize themselves or make a company out of what they're doing, make a team out of what they're doing and scale it. And so I think that would be the first instinct. But I guess my, my general advice for anybody who's trying to figure out what to do next is go talk to 20 people, because the goal is to work backwards from a specific idea, not forwards from uncertainty. And what I mean by that is you go talk to 20 people who you think are having success in one way or one flavor or another. Now, what does that mean? That means you go talk to friends or your friends of friends. You go talk to local businesses. Once you realize that everything around you is a product made by a business, then you can go find the owner of that business and you can just chat with them, or you can study what they do from afar. You want to find people of similar backgrounds to you, like other realtors who then pivoted and did something bigger and better out of it. What did they do? And you're just searching for a blueprint that you can copy-paste for yourself. And then you're going to— of course you're going to tweak it as you go, but you're going to sort of steal like an artist. You're going to find something that already works and work backwards from that. So I think that's the first thing is like, have you— okay, he's talked about buying a franchise. Go talk to 20 franchisees and see, is that like, do I want the life that they have? Does it seem like— do I want the inputs of the life, not just the output? Right? Because yeah, everybody wants success, but do you want to do the things that they have to do in order to get the success? Does that sound like fun to you? Does it seem like things you're naturally good at? Is that the type of work you want to sign up to do 3,000 times? Those are questions you got to ask yourself. And so I would go and try to look for blueprints. I look for first people like me, what did they do? And then, you know, maybe go a little bit further out on the weirdness scale and find other, other things. And then once you go look at those blueprints, something will scream out at you of like some combination of that looks fun to try. I think I could do that. I like the, I like the lifestyle that, that comes with, with doing that. And that will give you more direction on where to go. And so I think people don't really think about business as blueprints. They think they need to be original. And instead, I think you should largely look for existing blueprints that many people have done and say, which one of those do I want to do?

Do you know this guy, Sam Parr?

Yeah, yeah, I've talked to him a bunch. This is Ben's brother.

Well, I guess we're going to have to follow up them.

Oh, there's one other thing that— this is specific to Ben's brother that is a challenge for him. He doesn't make time to search. So every time I talk to him, I'm like, great, what are you thinking about now? And he's like, made so little progress in the time. And the reason why is because He's got his job. Then he also bought into like a restaurant. He owns a piece of a restaurant. He spends a bunch of time trying to make sure that restaurant doesn't fail because he doesn't want that restaurant to fail. And I'm like, so how much time are you dedicating to this? He's like, oh, like, you know, whenever I have free time. It's like, how much free time you got? Not a lot. And so I think you, if you want to actually make a change, you need to first clear your plate a little bit and create some space to actually work on the thing. And work on the thing in like dedicated religious time that's like as sacred as your work, as sacred as going to the gym, as sacred as other things you make time for. And so I think for him, he's got to find, you know, 2, 3 hours a day that he's going to spend doing this and specifically mark it off on his calendar and be like, I might sell less homes this year and I'm okay with that trade because I'm working on building the next thing. I think people don't really make specific concrete time. They try to hope that like in the extra time I have and this— you don't have extra time.

That's a great, uh, great answer. Can I pick the last one?

Yeah, go for it.

This is hilarious. This is a great one. So this is from Peter J. One of my favorite American traditions is that when you get arrested, you get one phone call. That has to be one of the highest stakes calls ever. I almost want to get arrested just to feel the rush of that one phone call rule when they place the phone call, when they place that phone in your hands. Anyway, what's your one phone call when it comes to business, when you need advice or you're in a tough spot? Who's that one call you're going to make and why? That's a good question.

And that's a great question, Peter Jay.

Yes, I definitely have one. Do you?

I have one. You go first.

Do you know who Barry Diller is? Barry Diller is the founder of IAC. You know, he's like a dealmaker or whatever that phrase is supposed to mean.

He's your phone call? Isn't he like 85?

He's not my phone call. He— but he's like a guy who like kind of knows everyone and he is just like he like is— he owns this huge conglomerate and he's just a little bit of a business savant when it comes to like numbers, a little bit like Ari Emanuel, where he just kind of like knows deals and he just knows numbers and he spots value and he organizes people around it. Austin Reiff is one of those two guys, but at the age of 30, Austin Reiff is one of my best friends. Austin Reiff started this company called Morning Brew. I had a company called The Hustle, both daily business newsletters. They were a little bit more finance. We are more entrepreneurial and tech. But when we were both getting going, I hated him. I wanted to kill him. Not because of him, just because we were competitors. We both sold our company and we both were in the same core group of Hampton. One of the reasons I moved to where I live is because I'm down the street from him. He's one of my best friends. I love him like family. And he is probably the smartest business person I've ever met because, A, I do think he is like genius level. I'm pretty sure he got like a perfect score on the SATs, but B, he approaches things with the perfect balance of something must have soul and you must love it and you must be passionate. But then for any problem that I have, he's very, very good at taking away the passion and the energy and the emotion away from the actual logistics. And he's very pragmatic. He's the best person I've ever experienced when it comes to asking advice on a certain issue. It sounds like very similar, honestly, to Suli.

Yeah, that's a great one. My answer is Suli. No secret here. My rule for the person you would call, right? If you think about the jail phone call, you would want 3 things. One, they have to care. I want this to be like the dad from Taken when his daughter is taken and he's like, oh, okay, it's on now, right? That you want the person when you come to them with your personal life problem, that it becomes their personal life problem. And Sully is like that. Like, uh, he had a friend from high school who was like a dentist. I think, I don't think he talked to him in several years. And he was like, hey, you know, I know you're in the business world. Like, you know, we've gone our separate ways since high school, but like, I'm trying to sell my practice. Like, any tips for me? And Suli like flew out there and made it his mission to help his friend sell his dental practice business and had this incredible outcome.

When was this?

This is a couple of years ago. 2 years ago, maybe.

That's incredible.

And so, second, they need to be wiser than me. So I want you to have seen 10 times more data points and be better at putting together those data points. So that when I come to you with noise and panic, you just see the signal. You know what to ignore and what to focus on. And then lastly, I want that person to basically live rent-free in my head afterwards, which is what I have now, which is if I'm— I don't even need to call him anymore. It's just, oh, what would Suli say? Oh, he'd say this. Okay, I'm just going to do that thing, right? That's as simple as it's become. I spent enough time with him to know what he would say in 90% of these situations.

Can I give you a fun— two fun facts about calling people from jail. I used to be a problematic person and I had to experience this a couple of times. The first thing that I've realized, you people learn this the second time they go to jail. You have to write down the phone number of the person you want to call on your hand because you don't remember any.

You don't know anyone's phone number.

You don't know anyone. So the second time I did this, when I was getting arrested, I looked at my buddy, I go, I go, hey, can you run and grab the Sharpie and write your number on my hand for me, please? Uh, that's what you have to do because cell phones don't show up in Yellow Book or, you know, Yellow Pages, White Pages. The second thing, here's the bad part. It might be different now. Thank God I've not had to experience this in over a decade. Most cell phones don't accept collect calls.

So just hit a dead end right away.

Dead end.

Dead end.

So you have to figure out how to make it work.

You got to call someone with a landline who happens to be at home.

I just Googled it. I think Verizon accepts it, but most do not. That's ridiculous. Maybe it has changed, but the—

also, I know a lot— most of my friends, you know, the real problem with this is most of our friends don't even pick up phone calls, so it needs to be like a text from jail.

It usually says it, it usually says it. It'll say like, uh, like, you know, like Bay Area or Sacramento County, uh, Correctional or something like that. Um, do you know, you know what's crazy? I, I think 1 in 5 American men have been arrested at least once. Do you have any friends besides me who have been arrested?

Yeah, of course.

Good.

You have friends in dark places. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you two times that, uh, Sully was this call, what I asked and what he said. The first time, I was trying to figure out if we should sell the Milk Road. We had gotten an offer to sell the business. and we were debating, should we take it? Should we not? And we were spinning in circles, basically writing these pros and cons lists of like why we would sell, blah, blah, blah. And then like why we shouldn't sell, or like we should sell, but only at this price or that price. Is this enough? Is that enough? Right? It was like so confusing. We were just tied up in a knot. So we call Suli and he just listens to us for 5 minutes and he goes, all right, how about we put away the pros and cons list? Because listen, you're selling your company. Do you want to sell your company or not? Uh, you should have a visceral gut reaction when I say you're selling your company. And either that gut reaction is yes or it's no. And if you don't know, don't do anything. You don't need to make any decisions here. And just simplifying it to you need a visceral gut reaction. What is that visceral gut reaction when I say this sentence? It became very clear to me what I want to do. I wanted to sell the business. So that was the first time that was like, a lot of clarity in a very short amount of time. The second one was my e-commerce business. I was like, hey, you know a ton about e-com. You know, your brother built Native Deodorant. You helped him with that. You, you, you yourself have done e-commerce. I want you to help me with strategy. Can we do like a call where I kind of ask you questions, pick your brain on strategy, and we figure out like, you know, I want to come up with a good growth strategy. And so here I am and I show up to that meeting. I'm ready to like have a strategy talk. And 5 minutes before the meeting, it just says, Suya shared a Google Doc with you. And the Google Doc is a list of 40 shitty things about our website, our email popups, our welcome email flow, our SMS sequence, our Facebook ad copy. Like, he just went and looked at our funnel and just wrote 40 things that we're doing that probably could be done better. And he was like, we get on the call and I'm like, oh, so like, uh, like, should we talk strategy? He's like, this is the strategy. The strategy is you look at your product, you figure out everything that sucks, you fix it, and then we do this again in 2 weeks. And we do that again and again and again until there's like not that many things that suck anymore. And like, that's the strategy. And that really just like shook me. And I was like, oh, that's how winners operate. Got it. I thought this guy's so smart, he's gonna say something brilliant. No, he just drilled in and looked at the details and was like, why are we doing this? This took 3 seconds to, to load. Make that faster. This is the wrong photo for this. We should put that photo up here. This copy is weak. Let's find better copy. You know, like that sort of thing.

Dude, the smart people I've noticed, or the people I admire, they tend to be like, I don't know if he would fall in this category, but he, it wouldn't surprise me if he's like in the traditional sense of genius level IQ, like, like a perfect score on the standardized test type of, but they're also really good at just kind of being a caveman.

Yeah, it's the midwit meme. Yeah.

Where they like are incredibly brilliant. So I've seen him talk about like some financial instruments and stuff in a very sophisticated way that I didn't understand entirely. Uh, where it was as if he had to like read a book on it, like a textbook on it, particularly when you talk about, about like tax structures and things like that. Like it's as if he had like literally has read like the tax code, but then he'll, he's also given me advice. He's like, why aren't you doing this? And I'll say like, uh, some like, you know, answer just like you did of like, well, do you want to sell? I think yes. Okay. Sell. Like that type of like, you like, he's done that with me many times where it's like just these rudimentary, like very like child, honestly, it's like a child, right? It's like you should do this because you want to do this.

There's a, um, a meeting I had with this, the now CEO of Twitch. Uh, when I was at Twitch, we got acquired. This guy became my boss, uh, for a period of time. His name's Dan Clancy. And I go into Dan's office and he, He asked me some questions. He tell you, he's, he's like, I'm the new chief product officer at the time. Now he's CEO, but he's chief product officer. Then I wanna tell you a little bit about how I work, how I operate. You know, first 100 days, I'm just gonna ask a lot of questions. I wanna go meet people at the front lines, not talk to managers. You know, some standards, kind of first 100 days stuff. And then he goes, and then from there you'll see me work like this. And he took a white, he put, took a marker and he drew on the whiteboard. He goes, do you know what a square line curve looks like? And I was like, sure don't. And he goes, you know what a sine wave is? I was like, yeah, it's kind of like an up and downy, like music-y, heartbeat-y looking thing, right? And he's like, yeah, yeah, that's a sine curve. And he's like, it's this like smooth round thing. A square curve looks like this. And he basically drew like a straight flat line. And he goes, I'll spend a lot of time at the 10,000-foot level basically figuring out like big picture priorities, what matters. Um, you know, what are the 3 things we need to do to win? Like, where are the key levers? What do we have to get right? What makes this whole thing work? And so he's like, I'll spend a bunch of time here. And then as soon as I find some problem, I go like this straight down all the way to a level of depth that you will find like confusing and amusing. Like, wait, why does he care about the pixels and the color and the copy and the this and the that? Like the details of this area. He's like, can I stay there for a little bit? And then I go back up. And he's like, this is how I work. I will be at the 10,000 foot. I'll drop down to 10 centimeters. I'll stay there. I'll go back to 10,000 feet. I'll stay there. And he's like, that is how I work. And ever since I saw that, I realized, oh, this is what Paul Graham and those people meant when they said founder mode. This is what founder mode is. Founder mode is being able to simultaneously hold in your head the big idea, the North Star, the vision, the direction we need to go. And then being able to dive down into the absolute most simple details of those areas that are problematic and like roll up your sleeves, solve the problem side by side with the team, and then go back up for air.

Would this guy want to come on MFM?

Yeah, we should have Dan on. That'd be fun, actually, because I'm—

you guys are listening. You got to Google this guy. First of all, he does not look like the CEO of Twitch. You would think like I would think it'd be like a Red Bull looking like bro. This guy looks like a— like he's 61 and he's got—

he looks like he's got all the t-shirts from like the Grateful Dead tours.

Yeah, he looks— he looks wise just because he looks older than the average Twitch user, but he's got long white hair, a goatee. He looks like he should be studying philosophy or like giving a lecture on like Man's Search for Meaning. But he's a Twitch guy. This is so fascinating to me. This guy looks awesome. I would love to hang out with this guy.

He's very wise. I talked to him, like, I remember once he was like, so what do you want to do? Like, it was like a one-on-one, like a career talk. And I go in and, you know, I just got acquired into the company. My career plan at Twitch was like, earn this vest check and get the hell out of here. Right? Like, that was just like the general mindset. I wasn't trying to think about my, my 10-year career at Twitch. That was like, that would be losing. So I walk in, I'm like, what am I going to say? Do I need to like fake the funk here and tell this guy like, I really want to get this promotion and in 10 years I see myself here as a senior VP, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like that wasn't true. So am I going to lie or do I tell him the truth? But then like, is he going to be like, fuck this kid and like, you know, check out on me, right? Because I'm checked out on, on the long, long term with Twitch. Short term I was going to try, but like long term I wasn't going to be there. So I told him the truth. I was like, Yeah, long term, I'm not here. He goes, okay, great. So we don't need to worry about this pile of stuff. So tell me, what is it that you do want to do? And I started telling him this thing that I had told many people before about how I wanted to start a university someday and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, yeah. And I had this very logical, in order to do that, first I need to do this and get the capital and the network and the skills. And then those 3 things are the core components that you need to be able to pull this off. And he just looked at me, he goes, Yeah, I don't buy any of that. I was like, oh shit, okay, what? And somebody who could call bullshit is generally like somebody you want as a friend. And he was like, I don't believe in the deferred life plan. I don't believe you need to do all these prerequisites to go do the thing you want to do. I think more often you're better served just going and doing the thing you really want to do if you really want to go do it. And if you don't really want to go do it, just say you don't want to do it. Figure out what you do want to do and go do that instead. And, you know, just immediately cutting through the BS. I had like 10 interactions like this with him where like I go into his office and I come out with some nugget of wisdom that really like shifted the way I think because this guy's just been around, done a lot of things. Like he worked early at Google. He worked directly with like, you know, Larry, you know, Sundar, who's now like, you know, the CEO was like a peer of his at the time. I was like in that circle of like 15 up-and-comers that were like one of them might be the CEO of Google one day. Like that's who this guy is.

I just think it's funny to imagine this guy having a meeting on like iShowSpeed.

Well, he's like gone on his stream. There's like videos of him like going and hanging out with them and going on their streams and stuff. And it's, it is a fish out of water for sure. But you know, but props to him for doing it. Cause it would be pretty easy to just retreat to the ivory tower and like try to be like this kind of corporate person behind the scenes. And, uh, instead he's, he's like, nah, I'm going to do this.

Dan, if you, if this makes it to you, we would love to have you on. I know I'm personally trying to learn how to like be a proper CEO and like, it sounds like You're amazing at all the things I aspire to learn. This would be awesome if you came on. This guy seems badass. I also want to know what he thought of you, Sean.

I also want to know that. There's one more I want to do. One more I want to do. So this question comes from Brian from Austin. He says, my guess is that there's been over 1,000 business ideas shared on the podcast. Don't need a list, just gut reaction. What is an idea you wish somebody ran with that has been said before on the podcast? You got 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go. And so I have one for this. I don't know if any ideas come to you initially for this.

You're going to laugh at mine.

What's yours?

So I like hardware just as a fan. I like gadgets. I don't know anything about them, but we like— people thought I was joking about like making a really good washer and dryer. That's one. But like we have seen— I have seen the Matic. Have you seen Matic? It's like a new Roomba.

New Roomba. Yeah.

It's a $1,000 Roomba that I absolutely love. We have seen like Figure, you know, with robots. That's like kind of like fits the stereotype of like these big things. But we've seen Nest. I've seen all these like really cool gadget companies.

Like gadgets. Yeah. Yeah.

Like the Dyson. They've done a good job with that.

I have a June oven. It's like this fancy convection oven.

And not all of them, like, like June hasn't, haven't totally hit.

I think it failed. I don't know what happened. I think it failed.

Yeah. But there are a handful that seem silly, like a Nest or like a, um, a Ring camera. Uh, but they actually were so cool and they did revolutionize an industry. And I always thought that could be one of them. And so I'm shocked no one has pounced on that. Um, what about yours?

Mine is not the biggest idea, but it's one that I wish existed and I think would totally win if somebody had the right amount of hustle. It's the youth sports combine. So professional sports have combines where you go, you get measured, your height, your weight, your wingspan, your vertical leap, your strength, your speed, all of that. Well, as I've had kids and as I've met most of my friends have had kids, I have seen the absolute money hurricane that is youth sports. And, um, so the idea here was to create a city-to-city traveling tour similar to Tough Mudder, but your goal is you go into a city and you say, hey, if you're a youth, youth athlete, if you're, you know, whatever, it could be as young as whatever, 5 years old, all the way up to 18 years old. Um, come get tested. Get your 40-yard dash, your vertical leap, your height, your weight, your body fat, your— all the attributes that go into becoming an athlete. Every city you go to, I think you could get somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 kids to show up easily. I think you could charge $120 a pop. I think you could charge a little bit extra for either, you know, printed photo or for like storing your data, you know, for the long term. If you just do the math on that, so 1,500 kids, let's say, uh, 2,000 kids, something like that. You're basically making $200 grand a weekend in every city you go to. You do that 50 weeks out of the year, you have a $10 million a year business that is, you know, that is going to dominate one angle. And I think you can upsell training and camps and the data and like there's a bunch of other things you could do on top of that. But to me, I can't believe this doesn't exist with the amount of money I see poured into youth sports. I cannot believe there's not somebody that's doing the fitness testing, the standardized testing, the SATs for athleticism. That I cannot believe that nobody's built. I really want to be a part of this. If somebody wants to do it, I don't want, I don't have the hustle to do it, but if somebody else has the time and hustle, I really want to be a part of that.

What sports do you want your kids to be good at? Every parent has this.

This is a great question. So there's, there's two factors here. One is what are the sports that I love? So basketball. And the second is what are the sports that I strategically would choose? So for example, baseball out. I'm out.

Yeah.

My son, I don't want him to know what a baseball glove looks like. I don't even want him to see it. Why? Because he's going to stand around for 3 hours. I'm going to sit around for 3 hours. Nothing's going to happen. That is like the worst sport for, for, for, you know, a kid to be in like that. I just took my kids skiing. Great time. Not going to double down in skiing. Skiing is like this weather-dependent, location-dependent, equipment-dependent, like injury-prone.

It's so dangerous too.

Expensive, dangerous. Impossible to access sport.

And so I'm like, I went skiing recently and I saw old people going down these hills and they go so fast. Yeah, it's crazy to me.

I get it, families have fun together. It's fine as a hobby, it's fine as a family vacation. I don't want my kids to be doing it as a sport. Soccer. My kids love soccer right now and I hate it. I want to get them out of it, but I can't do it yet. They love it too much. But the idea of soccer where like, dude, nobody scores in soccer. You can be like amazing and you're just not going to score. There's like, there's no— there's so little reward in soccer. It's crazy. I had a friend once whose parents sat him down when he was like in 7th grade and they were like, look, the Big Four, we're not doing it. You guys don't have the raw athleticism to succeed at the higher levels of this. You want to play varsity, you want to go to college, it's not going to happen. May interest you in water polo, may interest you in these, these niche sports where you're not going to compete against the best athletes. So I think there's a strategic part to it too. But of course, whatever my kids like, great. But I'm going to try to expose them to sports like tennis, which I think is a great sport for the mind and body. Tennis is, is, is one that, that we're definitely going for. Basketball is another because I just know it so well. And, you know, I love— I had such a good experience and I can't, I can't say no to that one.

Tennis is ours. It's one of the only sports where the men and women, like, appear equal in terms of, like, status.

Right.

And you could play it forever.

You could play forever. The best athletes don't go into it. Um, like hard work, it's not as super athleticism dependent. So like hard work takes you a long way there. It's a, it's an individual sport or it could be a team sport depending on how you want to do it. There's a huge mental component to it, like controlling your own psyche and being like both competitive, but like, you know, there's feedback loop every single point that you have to like recover from. Uh, so I think there's a lot of good things that you get out of tennis. Also martial arts would be the other one that I think is, is pretty cool for kids to be in for a period of time.

Yeah. If I could wave a magic wand, my kids would be very interested in tennis. And then I want to do some type of individual fitness sport. So that could be wrestling, martial arts, track and field, cross-country, swimming, something where you have to like— it's just you versus a clock and it's just totally objective and you just got to grit through it and dedicate a lot of time and just put in the hours.

Did you play team sports growing up?

Any? Like as a kid? Yeah. And I was all right at it. I was never like terribly— I mean, you've seen me like play sports. I'm not like terribly coordinated, but I always had attributes where I could just— I could always jump and run and I was strong, but I was never like good enough where I could like catch a ball and like learn how to like— like the skill part never— it was always very hard for me. You know, I always looked like a giraffe. I was always like, like a dancing giraffe. I wasn't very coordinated.

All right. That's it.

That's the pod.