#83 - How the Koch Brothers Got Rich, Human IPOs and Why Snapchat Might be the Future

Hey, so here's the deal. Uh W at night I have this weird bedtime routine, I go to My First Millions uh podcast page on iTunes and I read all of the reviews. So Can you please? After this podcast, or even right now, just hit pause, go and leave us a review. It doesn't have to e it doesn't even have to be a five star review, just tell us how you think.

Or what you think. And uh It's really important to us because Sean and I look at every single review and we actually adapt to uh some of the feedback we get. So please go ahead and do that. And also we have uh thousands of people who are part of a Facebook group where we talk about the ideas we discuss on My First Million. If you go to Facebook.com on the search bar, just type in My First Million, you'll see the group. Uh there's thousands of folks in there who are all schemers just like Sean and I. Uh so come and join us.

Sam, what's up? Hey I'm looking at a email that I just got from Milk Bar. They have a uh Peanut butter and jelly birthday. My birthday in a few days. If anyone has a If anyone's thinking.

About me. All right, if someone's thinking about you, what should they do? Just buy me that cake. What is milk bar? Is this a brand of cake?

Yeah, it uh started because what's that guy in New York David Chang, he um He started the like Momofuku bars and they decided to open up a dessert area and now that's spun off to its own thing called Milk Bar and they make trendy cakes. I ordered one the other day. It's pretty good. How long does it take for it to get to you? A week.

Oh man, see that's the problem. Not I'm never a a thoughtful a week in advance. I'm like day of I'm like, I'm gonna do something, but I need something that can get done that day. It looks delicious. Can we talk about Austin? Yeah, you're in Austin. Okay, I've been in Austin for three weeks now, I'm gonna come home on Saturday.

Austin is Lovely. It is a great place. Sean, is ever like Is everyone in San Francisco gonna leave?

No, everyone in leave. But definitely some some people are leaving. I'm looking at so I have a place in San Francisco. I pay like five grand a month or something. Four to five grand a month. And I am I'm living in a place that's probably three thousand dollars a month and it's like a two thousand square foot house with a backyard and like furnished

I'm like, what am I doing? Yeah, but the thing is you can go even further with that because Like when I grew up I lived in a whole bunch of different countries. I lived in Indonesia, I lived in China. And there it's like Yeah, go to Indonesia, you live like a king, you can go live in Bali on the beach

With a cook and a driver for the same amount you're paying in Austin, right? So th this kind of this arbitrage of like cost of living, it really never ends. So be careful. Yeah, I'm just It's making me question my life. Uh I look on Zillow all the time at for buying a home in San Francisco.

And the prices are dropping like crazy. So it's like a hundred fifty thousand, two hundred thousand dollar cut off of everything. Are you gonna have to cut on your house? Hopefully not. If you're if you're the buyer listening to this, I'm not taking one penny less than asking. That's my position. Oh, do you have someone who's gonna buy it? No. No, I don't know. I'm not I haven't listed it yet, but Soon. Good. Um

And uh So your friends do you have a lot of friends leaving in San Francisco? I have friends who uh were already in the process of it. This just kind of accelerated it. So Um some people just lifestyle wise, ready to go. Some people when they're like, Well if I'm not working from home and commuting, I don't need to be here. So yeah, definitely this is

accelerated people out. Um But it also feels like things are opening back up. So I think that You know, things can change. People can feel differently as soon as life gets a little bit back to normal, you you never know what

What people will feel like. So Um we'll see as things open up. I'm very eager. So you wanna start you wanna talk about some interesting stuff? Yeah. You got one? Yeah, I got one. So

Jeff Bezos. Bezos, bezos. Amazon guy. He owns Washington Post. And

A few years ago he goes, Yeah, I'm gonna buy and I'll let the editorial do its thing and whatever else. I'm gonna completely stay out of it. But I kinda wanna take your guys's they built their own technology to publish their articles. Like I kinda wanna take that and make that like a huge business. And a lot of people try this and never and very rarely works. But what he did was Or he didn't do it, but he was somehow part of it. Uh they've created this thing called Ark Publishing, and it does a couple things. The first thing is c companies like me paid money to use it. But it's really interesting that you and I have talked about this idea. Um, but what Ark Publishing is doing is they're going to companies like BP. So the uh The oil company that has two hundred thousand companies, and they are saying, Hey, B P, you have uh, you know, two hundred thousand employees, we're gonna help you publish newsletter and articles and stuff to your

to your employees, which you already are, but we're gonna help you organize it, make sure it's read, things like that. And they're saying that in the next year or two, they're gonna hit a hundred million in revenue. Wow. Which mean which means Uh, I bet Washington Post probably does maybe five hundred million in revenue in total, but a hundred million in this enterprise SaaS revenue would be worth more than Washington Post is. And I wanted to get your opinion on a that's a cool idea. That you and I have been noodling with for a while, and they're just executing it in a really interesting way. And B, the idea of branching out.

Um from your main thing to doing more. And like so and a totally unrelated thing. In some ways it's totally a stupid I mean, so there's an argument to be to be made, like this is just a stupid idea, never do it. There's an argument to be made that a lot of people do it successfully. So what's your take on this? So first this I've never heard of ARC, so this is my first time hearing about it. Just to clarify. They give uh other brands or other companies the tools that Washington Post they sort of productize their own toolkit. But Is it always like the use case you talked about, like uh BP wants has fifty thousand employees wants to publish internally, or is it also external publishing?

Um I I think that they're still trying to figure it out and I think that they're building it for a variety of reasons. At first it was just for publishers and then B they closed this deal with B P and they I think to them they're like Huh. Maybe that's the way. That's the path. No, I think there's something to that because you know, when when I started the podcast, I used to go to this podcast studio before you guys built a dope studio in your office. Um

I was going to this like kinda rent a studio by the hour place. And I was talking to the guy who did it and he was like They had a sports radio station, a twenty four seven sports radio station. And then they were like, Well, we know how to build a studio, we built one for them. What if we turned a few conference rooms into

Broadcasting booths and we did pro we offered it to podcasters. These hipsters in SF, they love this shit. And so um they didn't say that part. And by the way, in San Francisco there are there there are no studios. They're basically the only one. It sucked. Yeah. And so I went there and Uh I was like, Hey, can I get eleven AM tomorrow? And he's like, No, we're booked up from eleven to three. I'm like, Shit, who else who are the podcasters using this? And he was like

Oh, this is Facebook. They um I was like Facebook. He's like, Yeah, they have a internal podcast that they do for their employees. Because Facebook has I don't know. Tens of thousands of employees, maybe fifty thousand, I don't know. But

They have managers who come in and record a podcast about managing at Facebook. And it gets distributed only internally. And I was like, I never heard of a Internal only podcast. But of course. You know, makes sense. People want it, put out content.

Um training, you know, different things like that, whether it's in text or audio form. That was my first time hearing about these like internal publishing systems that I had never really considered. And that is what Arc is trying to do and like Facebook that has

Fifth. I don't know, what do they have? 20,000 employees, tens of thousands of people. They need to create a lot of this stuff, like, hey everyone, so here's how we're addressing um This situation, here's what we're gonna say, here's the words we're using, um, yada yada yada. Uh or we're quitting this product here's why, yada yada yada.

Right. Um here here's how to use the internal software, yada yada yada. Uh it's a great idea, I think. And you and I had discussed uh a slight variation of this. But I want the listeners to tweet at me and tell me And I always hate the idea when people say like oh I can't do this, it already exists. But I just want to know, does this exist? Who is solving this problem?

Yeah, we've talked about it. We we've talked about a few variations of this, so let's go over them. So this is all in the bubble of the theme of what I'll call um I mean I wanna I don't want to internal publishing'cause that sounds lame as shit, but Basically intra company stuff. So uh I I'll think of a good name in a second. But

Basically we talked about Q and A uh sorry, all hands software. Comp uh big companies do all hands uh you know for their whole employee base. Also individual comp uh you know divisions will do all hands for their group. And

What you need there is Video streaming, you need chat or QA. uh functionality, but it needs to be private. It needs to be internal. It needs to be behind a wall that nobody else can get to this. So A lot of people already have video streaming services out there, but that's for mass, you know

It's like YouTube, it's Twitch, it's things for to go get a big audience, but this is for a select audience. It's a little bit different. So we talked about that one. We talked about when we were we were going over Hemingway. And how it makes you a better writer.

We were saying, What if you could do this for uh internal your emails inside a company, but also Just a mail chimp for your company. So How does somebody get the word out within a company?

How do they make nicely formatted, easy to read? you know, company announcements and bulletins. That come with the kind of tools that MailChimp has like tracking opens and clicks and that sort of thing. Um so so that's a internal mail chip.

Internal podcasting. What these guys are doing is basically internal You know Washington Post, which is like a whole bunch of different Um

features and functionality they have. The These guys have you know, broadcasting, like live streaming. They have blogging, they have You know, Are you reading the the website? Yeah, I'm going through their products. They they've a huge set of things, basically everything you would need to make watching post. So

I think that's just an interesting thing. What if you took the best in class products that people use to publish and broadcast. And you said

How? Uh Do companies need this just for internal broadcasting, internal um um announcements? Um, I remember my brother in law, he owns gyms. He owned like fifty gyms. And he was like, Yeah, dude, I just need a easy way to mass text all my employees on a text list.

the kind of numbers for the day and any key announcements about what we're trying to do. He's like, You'd be surprised it's really hard to like get this stuff set up and get this make this a part of the onboarding of my company so that everybody knows this thing. That's the S and B uh version. The small business version. Um which is also a good idea. And then the second thing you talked about is

Sh you know, when do you when do you do this? When do you take your eye off your core business and how do you expand into other Lines of businesses. I think that's, you know, generically a hard thing and it's a case by case thing. You have plenty of examples where It worked and it becomes a huge business unit. It let's call AWS being the best example of this.

where Amazon takes its own sort of server and compute system and services system. And makes it available to any company. And now AWS brings in Yeah.

Tens of billions of dollars a year. And uh so that's like the best case scenario. And then you have a probably, you know. hundreds of thousands of of other examples that you could come up with where Somebody does this.

It doesn't take off, it becomes a distraction, et cetera, et cetera. And you guys have considered this too. So how do you how do you guys think about this? Yeah, so when we consider it, everyone says the same thing. They go, Well, Amazon did it, let's just make AWS for them and I'm like, Well, you have to understand that Amazon did it like Ten years into the business when they were ten thousand employees and throwing two hundred and fifty people at that problem is ain't ain't no thing.

And so at my company it's like yeah, okay, I could hire a person Like I have no problem. A couple of people like doing it. But You do need to get like your main thing right first. That said, I struggle with it because I have ADD and I wanna I wanna do this shit.

Um So it's hard. Uh I I don't know. Wha the like Twitch I bet Twitch is in the same boat. They're big enough that they they can have these same projects and a lot of the infrastructure that they probably are built on, I bet they had to make a lot of it from scratch. Um I don't know. So Twitch is ten years into the business and you're right, they invented

Essentially the best in class, let's say live video streaming at scale where you can have hundred thousand people all watching one channel with low latency and it doesn't fall over and uh broadcasting around the world. Nobody else really had that problem, so nobody else built a solution. And so You could imagine that Twitch could say, Hey

We could make this available to others. And that they could spin it out as its own business unit. And I think that might be a good decision, right? Because Um you're taking an asset you've already have that you've resigned that you've refined. That sort of um

um battle tested and brandable. Right, like your sales pitch is hey, we use this for the biggest live streaming network, you know, out there. Um But at the same time it's a distraction and and they wouldn't have done it year one, two, or three. They you know could do it at year ten.

Because At that point your core is stable, it's not going anywhere, it's not gonna die. And so, you know I I always make these analogies and I don't know if my team really likes it, but I always talk about like You know, a startup is like a baby.

And like with a baby a baby just they need to eat, they need to sleep, they need to poop, and nothing else matters. Like you don't need to teach a baby calculus right now. You don't need to You know, do all this other stuff. And um but as it becomes a teenager or gets ready to go to go off for college you know, you don't have to watch it so intently. You don't have to worry about is it gonna you know uh keeping the baby alive every single day. That's the main objective of the s of early stage, but as you get later stage, you don't have to worry about that, which lets you invest why why don't they like

That's a good analogy. Why don't they like it? I think it's'cause I'm always like right now we just gotta keep the baby alive and it's just like sort of a dark a darker way of of talking about it. But uh like I did this with one of our companies in the idea lab. I was like We had one company that was already mature, it was already profitable, making millions of dollars, and then we had this other project that was totally unproven. And so any time you had to decide where do I spend an hour It always seemed like a good idea to spend it on the ch thing that's making millions in profit. Never to spend it on this super speculative thing.

But if we did that, we would have never invested in a new thing. And so I I made a decision. I said hey, we can't have the the baby and the teenager in the same room. Because they have totally different needs. They need different type of care.

And um, you know, one will always look feeble and weak compared to the other, but that one that's feeble and weak today has the most growth potential. And so we need to be investing in that too. And so let's split these two companies up and let's spin'em out. What about um You do you think uh you are like me where you have A D D and you like starting stuff, or are you the opposite where you like to run it? Uh, I have A D D in the sense that I like I I'm attracted to doing a new thing. I'm attracted to new strategies, new ideas.

But The second part of your question was, do you like to run it or not run it? Um Of course, in my ideal world, I don't have to run it. somebody else runs it, takes the idea to fruition, and I get to own the whole thing.

But In reality I found that that is Much harder. Um To implement.

Doesn't mean it's impossible, much harder to implement. Yeah, this is an interesting discussion. Um I was reading about um Uh. Uh Coke Land, about the Coke brothers.

You know what that is? I I know the Cook Brothers, I saw you putting this in the Facebook group that you were uh you were s sort of summarizing what you had learned. What is the TLDR? So all I know is Coke Brothers. super rich old white guys that I think support like

you know, the conservative party. So what what do w what do I need to know besides that? So Everything that you've just said is a stereotype about them. That um Ninety nine percent of people think it is about them. Um and the reason I wanted to read the book about them was it was just interesting. But what I learned is they're far more rich than that. Not in in terms of money, but they're a much richer character. Um they kinda get pegged

Now I'm not saying that they don't do evil stuff. Um but they get pegged as these old white guys who control the conservative party. In reality, they're quite libertarian and they actually um give money to all types of charities. I mean they give a lot of money to gay rights organizations because one of the brothers is is gay. They give a lot of money to prison reform because they don't want people to uh they think the criminal justice system is screwed up. And um they're very principaled and it just so happens that the Republicans definitely do a lot of the stuff that they want to give money to, but they go across the board. Um there and um The way that they got started was the father started an oil company and that oil company was Somewhat successful. Like it was making thirty million dollars a year in American uh sorry, in

Today's dollar in profit. So Like successful. Very successful. But The uh thirty one year old brother Charles took it over when the father died and turned it into the largest privately owned

uh business in America. And And so we took something that did thirty million dollars a year in profit to now probably like ten billion dollars a year in profit. And he got out of oil? What what did they do with the what they did was the They took their thirty million they they had a they own owned an oil refinery and they did a combination of things, including so the thing about oil is it goes through this tower and oil turns into gasoline. But then but then the leftover stuff turns into kerosene, and then the leftover stuff turns into Vaseline and the leftover stuff turns into propane. And so they just started like selling all the leftover stuff. And they took those profits and then um

But mm different companies. So they uh you know, bounty paper towels, they make those. a lot of the paper that newspapers printed on, they make that. Um A lot of uh It's called uh what's that?

Gortek? Is it called Gortek? What's like it's like a Lu uh and Lupra. Is it Lupra? That's a material that Nike makes shoes out of that's really strong. It's like that plastic. They make they oh they make that. So they just make stuff. That

originally started as oil but now it's expands, but it's still like making stuff. Um And their operations are basically This. Start a lot of start or buy a ton of stuff.

And it all started with one thing. And that's kinda w one of the reasons why I'm interested in this topic. I like that a lot. Uh A that was just a great description. And B Um that totally changes my um Like kind of like expands the stereotype I had out of the Coke brothers in my head. Um you know, I never b bothered to sort of look under the hood and be like, What is this? Wha how did they get rich?

Are they really just the sort of evil manipulators of the conservative party type of thing? Or is there more depth to it? So that's kind of interesting. I never think it's a little bit of a Well I'm not saying that they're Uh I I don't think they are evil. I think that they do some things that There some of the things they do, uh

um a lot of people, particularly liberal people, strongly disagree with I t I told you about my friend, uh my friend who who I'm like, this guy's gonna be a billionaire. He's like twenty two years old. I'm like this guy's gonna be a billionaire someday. He um He interviewed with the Koch brothers. to be their like head of investments or something like that.

And uh he was like pretty far down the interview process. And I was like, dude, do you feel like, you know, a certain type of way that it's Yeah, the Cunk Brothers or whatever. It was like He's he just laughed, he's just like is money green?

Okay, money's green. Thank you. That's all I care about. He's like, I uh he's so ruthless about the way he he looks at these things. I find it hilarious. Uh and ultimately he didn't do it because Either A, they didn't offer him enough, or B I think they're based out of like Kansas or Nebraska or something like that. Wichita, Kansas. Wichita, and he was like, Yeah, I don't know if I want to go live in Wichita for X number of years to to do this. So he ultimately pulled it out. Well, if he got offered and he didn't take it, he's an idiot, but I'm sure he'll figure out his way. Uh okay, that's uh that's pretty interesting. I like the uh anything else on the Coke brothers, I otherwise I like that. That's sort of I would say that's the billy of the week then in this case. That's that's what I've got. Yeah, I I'll I'll finish it up with I'm reading Coke Land and so that is a book that has a uh it's it's clearly trying to be negative about'em. It's still a great read.

And then there's Sons of Wichita, which is their biography, which tries to be objective. And then there's another book called the it's it's it's either called one of them's called good profit and then the other one's called uh market based management. G uh and describes the Koch brothers, um management philosophy and it's incredibly. Nice. Okay. I like that.

Uh yeah, I just started reading a lot more recently and it's like the best decision I made, which sounds like stupid. It's not even like worth talking about. But the reality is there's probably a lot of people like me who like to read go through these phases where you like intensely read and then like don't read anything for two years. Um And if you're that person, like just do it go back to the reading thing. It's great. I just did it and I don't regret it at all. I'm reading this thing called The Happy Body, um, which is like really interesting. It's about

Um These guys who study Weightlifters. They basically like, you know What what should you strive for with fitness? And they're like, Well, you should strive for these like three, four things that

Um You know, you don't want to be a bodybuilder. Where you're just strong, but you're slow and you're inflexible. You don't wanna be a baby where you're super flexible but you're weak. Uh, you wanna be X and they start to outline it and there's all these little tests. And so I'm always doing them and making my wife do them like Okay, stand against the wall. Awesome. Stand against the wall, raise your hands above your head and I'm gonna count the points of contact against the wall. Okay, here's how you are in terms of, you know, body mach you know, your your alignment or your posture or whatever it is. So there's all these little tests, which is makes it a lot more fun to read than

I'm gonna buy this. Are you doing this because you feel like you're getting old? Um I'm doing it because it came recommended. I think um somebody somebody said this is a great book. And then the other thing is I'm I basically believe that everything that s the the sort of common knowledge about food and fitness is just so

Like confusing and bullshit and like contradicts itself so so frequently. that um I'm looking for better like source material like not Sell me a fad diet or a new, you know, P ninety X. Um this book reads almost like a textbook.

And I find that a lot more appealing because I don't feel like I'm being sold to some program or some You know diet and products and shit like that. So that's why I like it. I'm gonna read it and we will have to do it. I got two ideas for you that are both uh based on Zoom.

Um actually I've a I have a better idea. Let me go to the better idea first. Okay. So Um Did you see today Snapchat did a like They did their like developer conference thing. And Yeah, tell me about that thing that they introduced. So they introduced us a few things and they were like, Hey, you know, last time we introduced games and games are doing great and they were talking about they were just kinda hyping up games to get more people to build mini games on Snapchat.

Um but they introduced other things called minis. And minis is actually I think a bigger Move by them. So minis are basically mini Applications. Um built into Snapchat. What they're doing is they're copying WeChat, which is the big messaging app in China.

Uh, WeChat has like A million little apps built in, like, oh, you need to pay your bills. You just do it through WeChat. And y how do you do that? Well there's this little mini website The the the you know

the utility company makes That'll just pop up in your WeChat and you hit pay and it's paid. Or you wanna do this, you want to buy tickets together. You do it within WeChat. Like we don't do that in iMessage. We don't do that in Facebook Messenger. But that's what all these companies would love to they'd love to be WeChat. Here in the States.

Um So Snapchat's taking a big stab at doing that and they announce like so for example, one of the minis is um head space. So you can do uh like sort of a quick meditation with anybody else on uh like one of your friends from Snapchat. They did a movie ticket buying thing. They did you know, so they did several of these.

What what's interesting here is that Snapchat's sort of in a position where They have to become a platform. To compete because Facebook and Instagram have sort of Just

declared like we will steal your we took your mojo already and if you come out with some new great mojo Like guess what? You know, Evan Spiegel, you're the head of product at Facebook, actually. Whatever you come up with, we're gonna put in our apps as soon as humanly possible. So their only strategy They've basically two core strategies. One is

Maybe they can create Snap glasses, these like AR glasses, and they can just sort of get off the cell phone game and get into the glasses game before anybody else. So that would be like a moonshine. What's it called? What do you call that? Um They call'em uh snap minis. And what they are are w little mini websites that that can pop up and be little like utility th things to do inside Snapchat besides message each other. Now

The second thing is becoming a platform because Facebook and Instagram um don't do a great job of letting other companies build shit on top of them. People distrust those companies. Um They've built apps on top of Facebook and Messenger before and gotten screwed. And so they don't have great ecosystems.

So Snapchat's kinda pushing their chips into the middle of the table and saying Come build shit on us. Um we'll treat you better than those guys will. You kinda believe it because it's really their only way to compete with Facebook and Instagram. So they kinda have to actually honor this. Um so anyways, a quick idea, so I in general I think that

being early to these platforms in these app uh in app ecosystems is a good thing. There's been several SnapKit apps that have been like number one and number two on the app store, so they've gotten a shit ton of distribution from it. Um what's a Snapkit app? Snapkit is basically the tool set that Snapchat gives you to build to build stuff. So it's like Okay, Snapkit will say you want to access their bitmoji. Cool. Snapkit lets you just type one line and you get their bitmoji character you can do stuff with. Um Snapkit lets you use their whole camera with all their lenses.

I'm doing this course with Gagan. Yeah. A lot of the a lot of the things we talk about are inflections. So what are what are infections and and there's a a variety of styles of inflections. There's um Technology. Inflections which is like basically like Oh my God, uh the internet is now in everyone's house. That is an inflection. Th there's an opportunity there. Or a uh uh belief inflection is like wow, people

really don't trust the media. What can we build to help? Um or people are afraid to be in groups of Thousands of people. How can we fix it? Um what we are seeing right now is a uh technology inflection or a platform inflection. It's really a tech. And this is it. This is like

When Pen so Pandora the music company Tim told me that the company was around for three years and it was doing horrible. They heard about the Apple store. For some reason Steve Jobs reached out to them and said, You guys might be a good Like place to put your shit here. I don't know if it will be, but this is

Potentially one of those. Yeah, these are asymmetric bets. Uh sure. Maybe most of the time these platforms either don't work out or there's nothing cool to build. Um and you'll waste, you know, a month of your time. Yeah. You might get catch a wave early and you might get to the top. So, for example, the very first episode of this whole podcast chain is with Sui. Um

And so we talks about he was working at Microsoft. And he realizes he wants to quit and go start a company, he quits, he moves back home to his parents for like Two weeks. And the first in the first two weeks he's kinda bored. And the day he quit, basically Facebook did their developer conference and said, Hey, we're making Facebook platform. Anyone could build an app on Facebook now.

So he goes home and he's like, All right. I don't know if this is gonna be a business, I don't think so, but He's like I just need to start programming again just to get my you know Get to get the rust off? And so he builds a Facebook app that was stupid. It was like a superlative zap, like which of your friends is most likely to end up in jail or whatever.

Boom, goes viral. Um he ends up with tens of millions of users. And that changed the trajectory of his life where Silicon Valley starts calling him And you know, Naval flies him out to San Francisco and wants to invest in him and shit like that. So He took a bet on the sort of day the platform launched.

If I'm a board developer today or I'm somebody who's got You know, the ability to code and You know. A weekend. I would be building something on top of Snapkit.

Um the thing I would build is actually so I think what's hard is when you want to build something that gets the user to leave Snapchat and come to your app. So you kinda have to build something that can actually do the whole experience. should just be on Snapchat and it should not Um compete with what Snapchat does. So here's the idea. Uh.

I call it cameo kit. Um so basically I think you could build the app cameo. On top of Snapchat. So you would basically came kit would just say Cool.

I want to buy a Snapchat. From one of these celebrities. And um I'll pay you right here through Snapchat. And then I wanna send it either to myself or to my friend on my Snapchat list. So basically Imagine I it's your birthday coming up, right? When's your birthday? It's in a few days.

Yeah, you actually bought me a cameo. You had Gilbert Godfrey caught me a dickhead. Right. So I did that last year, but but but th this year I could do it through Cambio Cape a little new invention of mine. So basically I would go in Snapchat, I would open it up. I would see a list of influencers that are that have Snapchat, which is like every celebrity in the world. I would

Request a video. And I'd pay right there. And then you would receive a Snapchat. From either from me or from them. uh in your inbox and the whole cameo experience could be built on top of Snapchat. without having to have separate websites, separate apps, all that stuff. And you can compete with Cameo very quickly. So I think that's a very simple idea that could monetize on top of Snapkit.

I think it's a great idea. Uh There this is a good spot by you. So okay, so here here's another one. Yeah, pay your rent, I think is an easy one because uh younger people who split rent They uh could use Snapchat or Snap Cache to just do it. And so that's kind of interesting. I I don't know exactly how much

That's integrated, but That could be s a problem that you solve. Um, I think that you could if you're a food delivery company, you should probably get on this because uh one of the little fun things I've been doing, another birthday thing instead of cameos. Um

Somebody on my birthday just sent me food via Postmates because they know where I live. And so they just ordered me food and just showed up at my door and it just said, you know, like this is from this person. And I was like, Oh, that was great. That's like a A twenty dollar gift. That is awesome and took them no effort. And so that's my new hack. I just send people postmates. Just for fun as gifts.

Um and so I think you could do something like that. Uh but here's another one. I saw a company that's called Moonshot. Uh very very fun company idea. What they did was they were like hey all

Everybody's working from home. Which is cool and convenient in some ways, but the one thing you really miss is the sort of camaraderie and interaction with your Co workers. Or listeners and me, what can I google to find that?'Cause I just searched Moonshot and I don't see it. Um Search moonshot escape room. So what Moonshot is, it's a virtual escape room that happens over Zoom.

So it costs uh I think I think it's like three hundred bucks. To do the experience. But it's gr you know, that as a team building experien a team building cost is nothing. Team you know, companies will easily pay for that for their for groups of you know ten to twelve employees to get together and do something. And so I I do escape rooms all the time with my team. I think it's really fun way to, you know

Go out and do something. And so this is done all through Zoom. They built the whole experience digitally. And I'm like, Oh, this is really smart because You know, escape rooms are

Actually pretty good businesses in general. But this takes out the one biggest cost of escape rooms, which is like, you know, the rent and the person, the human being you need to like facilitate a whole escape room. Doing this on top of Zoom is a really smart idea, in my opinion. This is great. I don't know I don't know if that could ever be huge, but it it could be good. Um

I'm looking at it now. It's who what what's Reason? Is that the company owns it? I have no idea. Uh How did she find this? Uh, this was on product time and then it got shared because again, this was sort of remarkable. Um, people hadn't seen something like this, so people started sharing it. It went kinda viral.

Yeah, okay. Uh So here's another one. Um in the last three months that we've been sheltered in place. How many Zoom birthdays have you attended?

None. Not you? What? Oh my God, I've had to do five of these things. Including my own. Uh

Oh my god, Sean, did I miss your birth what was your birthday? Uh my birthday's back in April. But but basically Oh wait. I didn't give you anything, I'm sorry. Oh it's all good. Don't worry about it. Uh over this quarantine period I've been to so many

uh Zoom birthday parties'cause people can't celebrate through uh you know the normal means. Now I don't know I don't think this will last very long, but if you could find some way to do celebrations over Zoom Um if you could find a way to make a Zoom. My co workers get married on Saturday. They're twitching twitch streaming I don't know, what do you call the word? They're they're streaming streaming it on Twitch, uh the wedding. Oh nice.

Okay, that's pretty good. Yeah, so I don't know how long some of these last. I I think the Uh. Cameo on top of Snapchat and I think the escape room over Zoom, I think that's more here to stay. I don't think the birthday stuff will last very long. But I like the idea of building stuff on top of Zoom and on top of Snapchat.

Especially now Yeah. People are st are celebrating occasions and looking for ways to socialize. Um remotely. I would do uh rent payment. Easy. No

That that's the first thing I would focus on. Um Great idea. That's a good one. You wanna do uh one or two more? Sure. You you got one or you want me to do a different one? Okay, so two weeks ago, or ten days ago

We had this guy named Mike and he started Uh liquid death. It's bottled water. I had a lot of people And a few people message up. Can't water. Message us and say they think that the water was bad.

Yeah, yeah. And I think the idea is kinda cool. I don't Um

I like him a lot. I think that guy's a winner. I think he's a winner too. And um I went into the thing being like I think this idea is kinda dumb. We had talked about it before, it was kinda dumb.

And I came out of it being like maybe I should hit this guy up to see if I can invest in this company. And the reason why is Um S sometimes it really just is that simple. So he's taking a mass product. Like

Bottled water or canned water is a mass product. Water is the like, you know The definition of a mass consumption product. Um then the second thing is If you just did anything different. In the water space.

And it latches on with any small percentage of that population. you're gonna have a meaningful business and I think he's doing something very different. compared to how the other uh brands were approaching it. And um I really do think this is gonna be a successful company, especially once I met the guy and I was like, Oh, this guy's a winner, and he understands what this is and what it isn't.

And that makes sense to me. Yeah, I would like to see how he like operates. I would he's the type of guy who I would be a little bit I would be a little bit nervous. I'm wanting to know him more because he seems like a guy that um Is r a little reckless.

And that could be both good and bad. And i that's a good call because he was talking about the previous company he built the the a brandy company that he built. And I think he's a great starter. And he he saw the opportunity, he starts it, he has a vision for the brand. and what the cult the culture wants

Now in terms of the blocking and tackling that it takes to just operate for like seven years straight. Um Probably not the best. In that other company he kind of he he was kind of vague about it. He's like I parted ways With those guys.

It's all good terms. You know I still have my shares. But basically it was like Okay, thanks. Thanks for the creativity, Bud. We'll take it from here. It's it seemed like it was kind of that. I could totally see that happening again with Liquid Death.

A person I admire. Once wrote that uh being artistic is the exact opposite of being of making money And or basically artists and capitalists are uh the opposite. Right.

I haven't decided if I fully agree with that, but I tend to I say I'm closer to agreeing with it than I am not agreeing with it, and that artists are the opposite. And that doesn't mean they're g good or bad. You know, I uh I I think a lot of art You should who gives a fuck about the money? It's it's great because it's Interesting. Um And sometimes when people are artistic, I think, Okay, you're cool. I don't think that you can make a P like run a a company that has to make and save money.

Right. Yeah. probably true that um you know if you have an extreme strength in one area you probably don't have the extreme strength in the exact opposite sort of skill set area. Um What I hope for is

You have to be just good enough to be dangerous. Um in the other area. So like Okay, you're super creative and you can you can build brands. Um You know, do you have just enough of the operational know how and discipline

um to execute on this. Like w you know, Sophia Emeroso, she when she was on, she was like she's clearly A great brand builder. She did it with uh Nasty Gal. She did it with Is it Girl Boss that was called? Yeah, Girl Boss. Um

Well, she's a marketer. She's definitely a marketer. And she and she d I think it's m I think it's a little more the marketing in the sense that Oh it it is marketing, but I guess it's like To identify what's in the soul of the customer and then be able to build a product or brand That taps into that. And so

I think she she was doing a great job of that. I think this guy Mike is doing a great job of that. Um you know, with Nasty Gal She w didn't manage the other side of it and you know, the train went off the cliff. And um And so you know, y y you have to know enough of that or you have to hire people that

that compliment it in that way. And uh If anybody has any wants to read anything about this, I just read this blog post that was called Pioneers settlers and town planners or something like that.

And it basically talks about like in any given company you have three types of people. You have the pioneers, Who are gonna uh you know they want to go breach new land They wanna be the first ones there and live off of, you know, what they can hunt and they can kill and then they keep. And then you have sort of the settlers who follow in right after and they start to set up you know the the the very basic systems.

um for for for life to continue. And they're not just looking for the next thing. Like the pioneers are. And then you have the town planners that can organize like at large scale systems. And so

N none is good and bad or cool and not cool. It's just a matter of like knowing who you are or knowing where you're at as a company and then making sure you have the right type of person leading. Uh based on what's needed. If you need innovation, you need a pioneer. If you need operations, you need more of a town planner.

Coincidentally I've read this article today called Managers The Difference Between Managing and Leading. And the idea was like People who are leaders are great in chaos. And they don't really they're like very comfortable with chaos, they're very comfortable with ambiguity, and that's important. And uh people who are managers are all about uh creating something sustainable that can operate each and every day effectively. Uh

And uh I'm for sure the leader For sure not the the manager. Yeah. Right on. Um okay, a couple other quick things that are that are kinda interesting. So I wanna get your opinion on this, just give me a a a dumb or awesome.

Um The website's called humanipo.app. Um These guys are doing a very fancy branding around an old idea. So what it does is I can go I can go do a human IPO. Um

So I'm Sean, I go public, I get a stock ticker. Which is like, you know. S H A or whatever. Um And I basically IPO off

a share of my time. So I can auction off up to five hundred hours of my time that you can book from me. At a certain price. And then if people think hey, you know, this Sean guy, he's on you know, he's on the way up. Um his time is gonna be more valuable. In the future.

I'm gonna buy unit of this guy's time. I can either hold it and trade it later at a higher price. I can Um I can I I guess use it to like book an hour of my time. So this is the the core idea. I'm on the website now. It's incredibly interesting. Tell me what you think of it. Uh

For sure interesting. For sure innovative and wild and Whoever invented this is a Nerd and I Fucking love those types of people.

Um Logistically, I just don't think it makes sense because Well So I can buy Brian's time. Well, so if it was I'm looking at their site now. I don't understand why they call it like they it's

They're really just rebranding just like n expert networks and consulting. Like it's just like dude, just let me have your time for So Definitely cool. highly unlikely to work. Right.

That's what I think. I think this is like an art project that's neat. This is I don't know. You're how did you find this? Um, I saw it on I think Product Hunt and I was like Yeah, I've been following I think I talked about this on one of the previous things. I've been following these

uh personal ICOs, personal co personal coins that people are creating in the crypto world. This This is not crypto, but it's the same idea. And I think it sort of has the same pros and cons. I think it's like kind of exciting in a way to like bet on people. And I think it's kinda lame in a way, which is like What do I get? I get an hour of their time? Like wkay.

This guy I just clicked on, you have to buy a hundred hours of his time at two hundred fifty dollars an hour, so what does that mean? Yeah, twenty five grand. Yeah. So uh but like I don't think like if I was this guy and I just sold a hundred hours of my time, I have a feeling that I would bail on a lot of that. Yeah, so one one piece is are you actually gonna fulfill The second is so what am I doing? It's actually basically like a freelancer selling blocks of design time or programming time or

consulting hours or whatever it is. Um Okay, that's cool. Um Maybe for s really special unique people that that works. Um

I don't think this is that interesting overall. The ones I think are more interesting are the ones where you actually get a p a piece of their earnings over the next X years. Um so it's like I would never do that in a million years. I know, but uh some people would. Some people would say, Cool, I'll take you know, it's like people who raise money for their company, right? They're selling off future earnings. uh for capital today. And some people might w instead of doing it for your company, you might do it for yourself. Um so I think it's interesting. I wanna see somebody like You know, I'm going to go to the city.

I'm just going to do it. Just from like a Innovation. Perspective. Weird and interesting.

I would love to try this. I like it. Um cool. Okay, so that was the that was the last one I wanted to do. Do you have any other stuff you want to go over or is anything else in this list interesting? I could I could I'm obsessed with my posture right now. Um'cause I've gotten like strong and um

fit over the last three months and that's wonderful. But I have scoliosis. My my Like my posture is horrible and it's making me nervous because I'm like, What's the point of getting strong if I'm like Um Crooked and not healthy. Yeah. And I've looked all over the place for like good scoliosis workout routines. I'm like, Man, I just want like a

Just something just like a posture doctor. Right. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. Like a a posture doctor's kinda cool to me.

Yeah, I thought about that. I went I went for a run the other day and I was like, I think I don't know how to run. I think nobody taught me how to run. And then I started running a certain way and then I got out of shape and I think I just run like shit. And uh I know I don't swim the right way or there's like a better way, more efficient way to swim also.

And I'm like, I need to I I I wanna clean all these up. I wanna clean up running, I wanna clean up my my walking, uh, you know. Cadence or or whatever you call it. And then also my swimming, but yeah. I'm I'm I'm similarly obsessed with these things. And you know, you've been getting jacked, which I think, you know, props to you for doing. Every time you send me one of these videos, Yeah, if Sam sends me these videos that are like

It's not nudes. But it's definitely more than what uh it's like more than friends, less than lovers. We're somewhere in between there and Yeah, he sends me the video and you've been getting jacked, and it's kind of amazing and um You know, so so that's you know, props to you for actually doing it. It's been a big change. I basically like

Just I I don't I don't know if I do a diet, I just eat Me? And only gre green vegetables and I just Don't eat breakfast and uh

I move every single day. Yeah. I don't know. It's it's been easy, but it has been awesome. Amazing. But you know what sucks, it's just sitting in a chair. It totally fucks you up. Yeah. And so this is why I want like a body doctor, like a like a posture doctor to like

I just I I'm I wanna be more like a wild animal. In this You know what I mean. In this book, The Happy Body, there's this picture of this like inversion chair. I I don't know if you've ever done one of them, but I have. Are they good? I've never done one, but when I saw it, I was like, Well, here's the thing here's a thing I'm gonna have to buy. Because I think I need to I think I need to do this. I think I need to invite but did they say that inversion chairs are good? Yeah. I just hate. I have a bar.

And I just hang from my bar. Yeah, but you need to go the other way. You need to you need to hang from your legs and so your back decompresses. That's what they basically say it's for is to decompress the spine. Hm. Oh, I'm gonna read this whole book. How long is it? I don't know.

Um all right, cool. Let's let's get out of here, but now we're just talking bullshit. Um Cool, thanks for listening. Uh share this with your friend. Um you need to just go on your f if you have a Facebook page or a Twitter or an Instagram You need to just screen shot our Podcast and then just say

This is the best podcast I listen to. And just post that. And you can tag me, that's also great. But even if you don't tag me, Definitely post it. If you're not gonna post it.

Delete your Facebook, delete your Twitter, delete your Instagram, because you're not using it right. That's what we need from you. Go post the shit. It's we'll call this game fifty fifty. Do that and tag me and Sean and you will either get a shirtless picture of me or Sean. Or a third party.

Yeah. Okay. How can you resist? Um, all right, excellent. Let's get out of here.

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