3 Blue Collar Side Hustle Ideas From A $40M Founder

Can I just read you the menu of Shady Gators? Would you guys be interested in that? Yeah. Be very interested. Tell me all the variations of Tater Tots. You mean gator bites or ultimate tater tots or loaded loaded tots. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I'll put my doll in it like a day's all on a brightness. Alright, we're live. Uh we have got Saya Bratner. By the way, Sean, I

I don't know Sam that well. I think you think that I know him. Well yeah,'cause I don't know him. So I'm like, how'd this guy get here? He's uh he's here because Ari Talk to her, talk to him on the phone. We do these pre calls. And Sam, I gotta say, like out of uh I don't know, every 10 pre calls we do with people that we don't know. Eight out of ten are are kind of like a hey, probably not a good fit for the pod. She talked to you and she was like, You gotta have this guy on.

So I don't even know. What you did, but you did something, and you have some kind of story or energy or ideas that w that she liked. Yeah, basically what I know about you is By the way, you're like shockingly young. How old are you? Twenty seven, twenty six?

Yeah, I just turned twenty seven. And what I know about you is you had this company that was a sports betting site. You sold it for around forty million dollars to FUBO TV, like I think before it even launched. But you've also done all these other strange things. Like I think you bought Did you buy a riverboat casino or a river boat? Like you've bought a bunch, like you're into a lot of really strange things. And for such a young person, you've done like a lot of odd I mean

Just the fact that you've done a startup that you sold for a lot of money, that's already impressive. But even amongst the impressive people, you've done a ver a lot of like strange and unique things, right? All right, so let's start with that. You were you drop out of college And you start a company that you end up selling for can you say how much you sold for? Yeah, it was forty million. Okay, so you drop out of college, you build a company, you sell it for forty million. At that time you must have been pretty young. How old were you when you sold? Twenty three.

Okay, great. So eighteen to twenty three ish. Uh what was what was the idea and how did you make that happen? Uh so I had gone I was actually at the University of Missouri for a year. Nice Missous. So I was I was at Missous. Uh Enjoyed my time there. Was not for me though. Uh

Always wanted to kinda start a company. Uh When I dropped out, I didn't really have the exact plan yet. Uh But I did always play a lot of online poker. I was very active. I was the kid with twelve monitors, uh, playing online poker in the dorm rooms. So I kinda knew the community a lot.

Um And you know, started hearing whispers of them legalizing, you know, gaming nationally here in the United States. you know, lifting the federal ban, if you would. And I thought the market would evolve. shouldn't evolve much differently than it does overseas, where it's very part of the culture. You can bet when you're eighteen, sometimes sixteen, you're betting, you know, at the Arsenal game inside the stadium. But here there was like a stigma to it. You know, if grandma says she buys a lottery ticket,

Yeah. uh you're like you don't think anything, but if she says she took the bear's spread, you're like, ah Grandma, what the hell are you doing? So Um, I thought if that would be the case. I just sat down and essentially just wrote for hours how I thought

the market would evolve. And my conclusion was that Um There will be early players. You'll have DraftKings and FanDuel. They have you know audiences in fantasy.

But that it really would end up being dominated. by either the brick and mortar casino companies or the media companies, which is now just playing out with ESPN and stuff. And to date all the technology had been built overseas'cause it's been around for fifty years. But it was like built in the early two thousands where you had like these desktop applications to place a bat. And then to get to mobile, they just like compressed it into a mobile experience. They didn't like rebuild it. They didn't rebuild it native iOS. It didn't have any good API functionality to have ticketing and merchandising and these other things.

So I said, What if we just what if I just rebuilt all that? And then called these big companies and said, Hey, uh don't white label this garbage from Sweden, um, you know, uh and pay some huge rev share. What if we just do a deal? Can you can you pause that for a second? Yeah. So you're you're describing what sounds like a pretty sophisticated process. You're like I heard you know, that there's this inflection that there maybe it was gonna get legalized. So I started thinking ahead of that.

And then instead of just jumping right in with my two dumb friends and starting to build a product, I thought I wrote down how I thought the market would evolve. And then I realized that my good go to market would be to kind of undercut these Rev share competitors with a mobile first product on the platform ship. Dude, you're like eighteen, nineteen years old at this time. Yeah.

I I couldn't figure out how my night was gonna evolve, let alone how the how a market was gonna evolve. Like w was this your first Rodeo and why why were you so good at it at that time? So in high school I ran a snow removal business. Um which N natural pivot. Natural pivot.

And So I had been you could call in business in a very rudimentary way. We were plowing driveways. Um, but we had hundreds of houses. I kind of knew how to build a business. And when I realized although I learned a ton, I'm like fifteen, I'm learning what insurance is because some woman slipped on salt. I'm learning how to, you know, finance, you know, trucks to get plows. Like so I kinda had this business sense. And by the way, when you're talking about plowing, you're not talking about shoveling. You just said financing trucks. Yeah, like the plows you put on the front of trucks. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So you you so you were sophisticated. You're going door to door to get these customers from your snow business? How did you make it? Actually, it was me and uh

uh a good friend of mine, Ilya, who's now David Dobrik's right hand guy, Ilya Fedorovich. We went to high school together. I went to Vernon Hills, which is where they went. So Ilya and I built the snow removal business. And we'd be like at used car lots negotiating for plows, essentially. But How much were you making back then, fifteen and sixteen years old. I think we did like fifty, sixty grand for the winner or something like that.

So and I couldn't drive. That was a big problem. permit. I didn't have a license. So we couldn't really get anywhere. There was no Uber, or at least we didn't have debit cards. So like We'd like walk to like Mundaline, which is like the neighboring town to like Go look at the plows. It was

Complicated. But What I learned from that is You could scale that business. Um and actually do really well from a cash flow perspective, because candidly, most people don't want to be in that business, or they're like 60 years old and they've been just driving the same truck for the same couple commercial lots. But what I learned is there's no value.

It can't it can't. Scale that well that large. And I was just always interested in like how big can I make something? And I had that itch to do that. So then I thought, well

If it's easy, there can't be any value in it. If anyone could just get into it, well, then there's inherently zero value long term, like big if you want to build billion dollar businesses. So when I thought gambling could be big. it would have been very easy to be like, oh, we're gonna have a fantasy slight site that is slightly different and you can pay to play and it also includes NASCAR or something. And like all those things just to me, it's like Yeah.

How does that get to five hundred million in revenue? I don't see it. I'm not interested. So I knew I had to really sit down and think How will the market evolve? And then I literally just looked at what are the Piece of this pieces of this evolution.

that'cause it's such a headache or capital intensive, no one will ever want to touch. And then because of that, it should actually end up being a slightly less capital intensive because no one wants to do it. And then You have value. It was my thought, essentially.

And when you dropped out, was that a Easy decision for you to go do this gambling company? Was it hard? And basically, how did you live? Because I always wonder this when people drop out of college, you're kind of college is a very It's a bubble that's like, here's your bed, here's the bathroom, here's the library, you know, these are this is your place. And then when you drop out, you're like out of the system. You're neither at home nor are you in school. So What was uh I was definitely uh Uh my parents were not thrilled, as you can imagine. Um

Uh and When you go home it's like when you grow up Uh You're my son, I love you. And then when you turn your eighteen, you're like that guy in the house. You're like you're like, what are you still doing? Uh so uh I I went home and lived with my mom.

Um Although I essentially I went to Starbucks. Every morning and worked. Until from whenever they open, five or six AM until they closed at seven.

And then I go to lifetime fitness. And there were no yoga classes after eight. So I would work in the yoga studio upstairs at lifetime. And they had Free coffee, free all that stuff. So I kinda had like an office.

And It kinda got to the point where I started leaving my stuff as like a setup in the corner. And I think a lot of I think the instructors thought like, oh, that's someone else's class. And it was just like my laptop and monitor and computer. So I worked on a lifetime for like three like a year or so. Uh and it was cheap because uh you know, lifetime, whatever, I was under the twenty-eight age, so I'm playing like the reduced thing. Um And I would just kinda work all day.

So I lived at my mom's house. How did you fund the company at that stage? Uh come on, Sean, credit cards, baby. Uh I essentially went to the slop money. Oh yeah. Uh we had some cash from that, but Uh

Essentially like I knew I needed I knew You you literally you kinda have two options. If you don't have tons and tons of cash saved You essentially you can work a part time job.

Um Uh I was unwilling to do anything but spend every waking moment on the business. So I didn't want to do that. And so I kinda just went and opened credit cards and I've always been a zero backup plan guy. I perfectly I purposely failed every final before dropping out. So going back was not an option because I'd be going back at like twenty three years old as a freshman. So I'm always a put it all on the line and you will figure it out kind of guy.

And uh purposely failed their finals. Yeah, that's that's my that's what I say too. So so I came home when I dropped out. I came home. You know when you like you come home a little early and it's like you're surprised your parents and you're like, oh like Did you finish early? I came home early enough where it was kinda too early for them to believe that I had finished finals. So what that essentially meant is I didn't show up to the finals and I got zeros on all the finals. So going back was now out of the question. Which removed the debate with my parents'cause they kinda said, Well, you can't really go back. You ended up selling did you sell a company? I was looking at the the site on uh Web Archive. Did you sold the company before it even launched, right?

Yeah. Like eighteen months? But is that right? Yeah. Yeah about All right, so

W who who contacted you? How did they even know that you were up for up for grabs? What we had was Essentially every component to a gambling platform that you could want. So we were an authorized gaming operator of the NBA Major League Baseball. I just willed my way into convincing the leagues to do a deal with me.

Um, candidly, I think they thought I was like kinda crazy and kinda cool, and they're not used to cool and crazy. They're used to like Disney. So they were like, Okay, we'll do the deal with you. So it was like these Well explain that, yes. I would think if a nineteen year old's like, Yeah, I'm gonna go become an authorized gaming uh you know operator for the NBA, I'd be like, Yeah, it's not really gonna happen, man. So what's your what's your other plan? So uh how did you do that? Yeah, they they like offer you an internship instead. Yeah. Uh uh We had a couple of things. We

At that time, we did raise a little bit of capital, and it was from some venture funds in sports, media, and entertainment that the leagues knew very well. So they were like okay. Uh, this kid called us six months ago. He sounds kinda crazy, but now it seems like there's this article out. Um, the people that invest in them, um, seventy six capital also invest in a bunch of other companies we have deals with. So there's some significance there. Um, we also they were very familiar with our lawyers because our lawyers represent ESPN and a lot of other people. So you kind of just have to put the pieces in place.

that kinda give them some gut feel to they're not he's not just crazy. He's crazy and he has some people that we know. And so At the time it was like DraftKings FanDuel MGM Barstool. And then like Us.

And and the league was also like a little careful, like can we like uh we'll do this with you, just don't tell anyone right now and we don't really want to put out an article, but we kinda wanna do the deal. We think the platform's cool. So We kinda had all these assets. We were an authorized gaming operator of those leagues. We had market access, which I can get into, which is the licenses. We were through compliance in mostly all legal states. Now back then it was seventeen states or so.

Um now it's thirty five plus, I think. Um And at the time, if you wanted to be in the gaming business, uh, you have to go through regulatory compliance. Most public boards of directors have no interest in going through a regulatory process. They have to disclose their financials and all these things. So uh and they also didn't know the business enough. Um you know

you can be a big public company, but if you want to have a book in Jersey, you have to go down to Atlantic City and sit in an old room with regulators and lawyers and convince them as to why they should give you the license. Um, and so it was just like this old school process. uh that they were unwilling to go through and we kind of spent the money and went through the pain of building the platform, getting it through compliance, getting the licenses, getting the deals. And we knew That

What we really wanted was an existing audience in sports. Even if we went and raised a hundred million dollars, I think DraftKings at the time spent a hundred million dollars on corporate travel a year. So a hundred million dollars wasn't gonna move the needle for us to go to market without any users. So we started talking about a joint venture with a handful of companies. Uh and at the time Fubo TV had just gone public. They put on a proxy. They wanted to be in the gaming business. And my phone rang, um, and it was Fubo TV and they wanted to talk about a deal. So

Um, which and so they they they bought you for I think I I read the SEC filings like oh just about close to forty million. What uh what'd you do with the money? Uh I have it. What do you mean? Well, I mean that's a that's that's a lot of money for anyone to get, particularly for a twenty three, twenty four year old. Uh what you invest it in. Um

I'm mostly in the market. And then I have these small random crazy investments that I feel really good about. Um But I'm mostly in the market. I'm pretty long. Here's why I'm long the market.

If I wanna do other things with the money. I'll simply take a loan against my portfolio and then take the risk. If you sell the stock, now you have a taxable event, you get less than Like if you wanted to put A million bucks into something.

You can either sell a million dollars and have some huge taxable vet and a headache to deal with with paperwork. Uh, and then you invest and then if it goes to zero, you're screwed. Or you take a line of credit against your portfolio, say in the index fund like the SPY. Um, and if I need a million, I'll take a line of credit. They keep a million two as collateral. And then I get to take my million dollar shot anyways.

And if it doesn't work out Uh All I gotta do is wait. And in eight years I'll have the money back'cause the stock would have doubled anyways. Um you know, given what the interest rates are pretty low when you take a loan against like that. So I I have most all my money for the most part in the market. So yeah, I was down like

during COVID, like millions and millions and millions of dollars. But like if you're never selling then it just doesn't really matter. And if you don't need it. Like I kept what I needed in cash, like whatever, but other than that, I'm pretty in the market. But that's where your story gets kind of it kind of interesting. So like all right, selling for that amount of money at the age of twenty three pre launch, that's that's you know, one percent the one percent. That's pretty wild. But I read that, you know, when Ari talked to you she and I'm and I read in our notes, I read that you bought this river boat. What the hell is that? And that's one of your crazy investments. And you also were looking at vending machine businesses. This is wild to me that you would do this. Okay. So uh

When you're in the online gaming business Everyone who's in it for the most part is like the old Trump gaming people. All the regulators are the same. One time we got a document. And they had still they sent us the wrong copy because my partner Scott Butterra's name was when he was president of Trump. So they sent us a Trump entertainment resorts form. Like the regulators never change. So while the business is techie, you could call it the industry is not. So everyone you meet is like has been in this b casino business for fifty years.

And I stumbled into this river boat because Um To get a license. Uh unlike a cannabis.

license where you can just apply as a dispensary. You have to get what's called market access and the you are subleasing the licenses from the ones that have them. And the only people that have them are the brick and mortar properties. It's kinda like if you it's weird. If you wanted a grocery store, imagine if you had the sublease from Whole Foods, like a license. That they have the entry. The reason that's the case is because Uh

You know, we took land from Native Americans, we allowed them to have casinos on reservation property. Uh, then all of a sudden in twenty eighteen the government goes, We'll just legalize online gambling. Well then they were like, Well, no one's gonna come to our properties anymore'cause they can just log on DraftKings and you just screwed us. So you should give us the license and then we'll sublease it to them. So they did that.

And then MGM and Caesars and everyone went crazy because they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're the biggest tax revenue drivers in the country besides oil. So if if then if the tribes are getting them, then we get them. Fast forward. Everyone got them. River boats counted as properties. Brick and mortar properties. And before land based gaming in the early nineties, everything was on the water because it was illegal. And it started in the early forties and fifties. 'Cause all the trade happened up and down the Mississippi.

candidly, mostly through St. Louis and people would just like truckers pull over on the highway, people would pull over their vessels and they'd have makeshift car games on a barge, and then all of a sudden it transplants A guy like Sean doesn't know this, but I grew up in St. Louis. And so when you say you're going to the casino, we actually wouldn't use the word casino. So we would say let's go to the boat. And All the Oh they're not. Some of'em actually are like boats. Yes.

But a lot of them are just like properties that are somehow floating But they they're not like I guess technically they're floating, but they're like not really a boat. It's like they're the the boat is this like massive parking lot and then they built like a building on top of it. But when I was younger, we would say, We're gonna let's go to the boat. It's essentially a structure built on a barge is really what it is. But there's no engine room. It's just

floating there. It's like building a house and then shoving it out into the water and tying it and you meet the state standards. Yeah. So I was talking with a buddy after I leave. Subo. Uh and it

He was showing me this picture. of his grandfather in Atlantic City. And in the background are these river boats. And Um He said, You know, what happens to these things when they're done with them?

And I was like, What do you mean? He goes, Well, like where do they go? I was like, I don't know, like I have no idea. And so I hang up with him, I'm like Where do they go? It's kind of interesting. Uh

I'm unemployed. I don't have much to do. So uh I emailed the general counsel of a casino company that we had done a license deal with at FUBO to get the license. In Iowa. Uh Uh and Uh

they were a riverboat property. And I went to it a couple of times. We had to go set stuff up. Um and I called the general counsel and I said, Hey, Bill, I have a question for you. Your boat's really old. Uh, I heard you guys are thinking about building a property on the land. What are you gonna do with this cruise ship you have sitting in front of the property when you're done with it? And he goes, Well, you know When you couldn't build brick and mortar properties, uh there was a market for'em. You know, they'd sell'cause they were just operating casinos like any other property.

Because now no one wants them. So they kinda just end up in junkyards. And I was like, You're gotta be kidding me. He's like, No. These things are unbelievable. I go, You just scrap them? And he goes, Probably, who would ever buy'em? And

Um he just bought uh They had just bought two casinos in Baton Rouge that were both on vessels. uh but operating still, um, which they do in like places like Baton Rouge or Kansas City and stuff. And I said, Are there any near us'cause I'm in Chicago, he's in Iowa. Are there any near us?

He goes. Sam, if there were any boats near us, I wouldn't have bought them in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And then like almost like a movie, I'm hanging up the phone. And I hear like, Hey Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam and I'm like Bill, what's up?

And he said. We don't know where it is, uh but we think somebody Somewhere in Iowa has uh the catfish. And he was talking about Catfish Bend Riverboat Casino. And

Uh I said What do you mean someone has? He goes, Well they built a property like twenty years ago and no one knows where the boat went. I'm unemployed. I'm kind of like into this kind of stuff. I have nothing to do. And I was like, Okay. I have somewhere to be at like noon. It's like ten o'clock.

I'm gonna give myself an hour and a half or two and try and find this boat just for the pure fun. And if not, I'll never think about this again and we'll call it a day. And so First, I called every junkyard in the tri-state area in Chicago and Iowa. I'd call uh there was this place I remember in like Des Moines or somewhere, and I s and this guy answered, I'll never forget this. And uh I said, hey, quick question, who's the oldest guy at the junkyard?

Who's been there the longest? And they were like on speaker and they're all yelling like, Oh, it's Ricky. Everyone grab Ricky. Go get Ricky. Go get and this Ricky guy gets on the phone. And this was like, I've been on the phone for an hour with junk cards. And Ricky's like, catfish? He goes, he goes, I would never forget if catfish band came through this junk card. We've never seen. So I'm like, all right, Ricky. So I hang up, I talk to twelve Ricky. This boat has not gone to a junkyard. It is not an age. I and I thought to myself If they brought it down somewhere out of Illinois or Iowa

And it got junked in Missouri, so be it. I can't call every junk card in America, but we're gonna move forward assuming it's still still a thing. So Uh I found Uh I remember one time I got a ticket. on my uncle's boats and wave runners.

Uh and Chain of Lakes. And if you don't pay it. It ends up on the fishing and gaming or like the the fishing and hunting ticketing site. So I was like, all right, uh, whoever's goofy enough to buy this thing or have it definitely got like a moving violation or something. I mean, this thing is a cruise ship. It's not like a Crolla. So

I said, let's assume they have a ticket and they haven't paid it. So I went to the site And I sat there for an hour and I just clicked through hundreds of pages of tickets. But you don't even see the pictures of anything. It's just the entity name or the person's name. And so I'm looking for like a random entity, like some kind of sign. And on like a hundred and ninety four, page hundred and ninety something, I see like C F F

B, whatever it is, L C. It's like an acronym. And I kinda go past it and then like I thought to myself, I was like Catfish bend river boat Casiago. That kind of fits. And I clicked it. Boom.

Big vessel moving violation, twenty two thousand dollar ticket. um from the company that bought it at auction. And then I read the court filings and essentially Catfish Ben built a brick and mortar property. Left the boat to rot.

kind of like Icon left the casino in Atlantic City to rot, knowing that the city would pay for it to get cleaned up so he didn't have to pay for it. They then said all right. You have to move it, we'll pay for the fees, but You have to auction it off. And um so he auctioned it off in an anonymous auction.

to uh a marina construction company in northern Iowa. Mm. uh does a lot of work uh with the Army Corps of Engineers fixing submarines. So I thought to myself ooh, he p they probably want it for The engine rooms and stuff. Um, but all I had was like an entity name and it was like random.

And I called a buddy in Iowa and I said, Hey, what do you know about this Um X Y Z enterprises or whatever. And he said, What are you buying a boat? And now I've been on the phone for two hours trying to find this thing. I got like phone in the ear, I'm like notes from Ricky at the junkyard, and I was I dropped everything. I'm like, Whoa, how'd you know I was talking about a boat?

And he said, That company, he goes, they fix everyone's yachts. I was like, no way. So I called Like their websites from the nineties, then phone numbers floating like at the bottom of the website. And I just and I just called And I said, uh

Hey is uh I did what I did with the I go, who's the oldest person at this company? And they put this like ninety year old man on. And I said, I've got a crazy question for you. And I swear to God, he cut me off and he said Tell me you're looking for the catfish, baby.

And I said, Do you have it? And he was like, Yeah. He goes, I have it. I've been looking at it every day for twenty years. I said wow. I said, no one knows you have this. Like why like w no one knows where it is. And he goes, Yeah, like you know, we're quiet, like whatever. And he said, Why are you calling me? What do you want to buy it?

And I think my wife heard in the other room and she looked at me like you are not buying. This thing. And I kinda smiled, I'm like, uh I don't know, maybe. And he's like, Well why don't you come see it?

And I'm like, Okay. So long story short, I drew drove, you know, to northern Iowa. And Uh, I was sitting there in a quarry. Um

He had planned to use it for parts, became too cost intensive to get the engines out of the engine room. And uh I persuaded myself to buy it. Uh

So w but what's the game plan here? Well, okay, so here's the plan. Um it's First of all. It's forty it's three interior stories, all connected by elevators. The thing's a full blown casino vessel. Um It's forty thousand square feet of some of the most unique real estate ever. When you walk in, you think you just walked into Las Vegas with Elvis Presley. The walls, the floors.

When I bought it. All the blackjack tables, all the craps tables. So first I was like, could be a movie set. Uh. Could I am in I I know the gaming business. Maybe I could open up a casino.

Um, or maybe I'll turn it into a restaurant or nightclub or something like that. So I had some loose ideas, but nothing like in place. Uh so I bought the thing. Um Uh, had to deal with the coast guard, all this stuff. And

spent about a year going down the path to open up a casino. Long story short, there's not many Riverboat licenses left in America. So um You know, I was meeting with the chairman of one of the largest gaming companies in Goa, India. Uh, he controls uh Goa, which is like Atlantic City on Western India side. They have a bunch of vessel casinos. Um Long story short, became too cost intensive to get it there. Um, but he introduced me to a deal in the uh in South East Asia.

Um, where we had the deal on the one yard line. Long story short, uh Some of these countries in South East Asia are pretty Um Corrupt.

And they made a big ask and my lawyer said that ask is not happening. We're not talking about this anymore. Um, so now I'm kind of more pivoting back to Um, you know, partnering with someone to open up a really cool restaurant or entertainment venue and move it down south, somewhere like Florida or, you know, Nashville and Cumberland River or something like that. What did you end up paying for it? Uh I might want to tell you that off the pod. Over or under seven figures.

Can you say that? Under. Under, okay. Under. Um Yeah. This seems like a crazy thing to to be working on when you b are able to build websites for free or with just your time. Um

Uh y but you've done like you're you're kind of interesting in that you can root out these really uh off the wall ideas because you did another one with vending machines, didn't you? Didn't end up doing it. But yeah, so I everyone was talking about vending machines all over Twitter. Vending machines are the next gold. I'm like, Okay, what's about Well we we had a guy who like we were joking about this last episode. We had a guy who like was like, dude, I'm making fifteen so we talk about you know, like big hundred million, billion dollar ideas. And then we had this guy who was like, I'm making ten thousand a month on vending machines. And for some reason

That interests everyone because when you're Thirteen years old. That's like vending machines is like one of the things that you're fascinated by. And so yeah, we w I don't know if if we helped to make it popular or we pounced on it because it was already popular, but we saw that too. There's a chance I Heard about it on

on the pod. I don't even know. But all I know is there was like maybe it was a year ago or so, there was like this thirty day rush of It was like vending machines were like crypto or the next AI. Everyone in the world wanted vending machines. So I was like, all right. It seems like a terrible business. So why does everyone want this? And it's like high cash flow, like I get it, but similar to ATM business, you have to go there, it's physical, you have to replace product.

I was like, eh, that can't be that interesting. But like anything else, I always go down this path of like Before I say no, let me do some diligence. And I'm on like some One of those sites, biz buy sell, or one of those type of sites where you can buy a company.

And there's this rural company. uh in the middle of nowhere, like Lewiston, Idaho. Not even Boise. Like Lewiston. There's nothing there. And uh Uh Mm.

It did When I l I had looked at twenty companies and they all did about the same margins, whatever they were. I don't remember now. This company did like three times the margin. I was like, why is this company so much better? Like either they're lying and fidgeting these numbers or something's going on.

And Uh the broker convinced me to go. So I flew into this like remote airport in Lewiston, Idaho. Uh and I drive forty minutes. to this like warehouse.

And we open up and it is just like full blown operation. I have pictures. I have like so many pictures of they had hundreds and hundreds of vending machines that they didn't even have out there yet, that they have stocked. They had more inventory. You thought they like ran a hospital. There was so much inventory. And I was like, Okay, uh this is a bigger business than the numbers I saw. And so I said, There's no way that the numbers I read Is this business? And he goes, Yeah, they own five Regions.

And we listed one of them, but if it was the right person, we'd probably sell'em off. And I said, Okay. And I was trying to ask a bunch of questions. And he kept just saying like you just have to go out with

I'm spacing on his name. Um Roger or something. What whoever owned it. Um, you just have to go out with him and you'll know why. Everyone loves vending machines. I said, Okay. So I spend all day in Idaho in the pouring rain and we drive around Lewiston, Idaho. And I realized

There's no grocery stores. There's no convenience stores. There's no foxtrot coffee. They rely on vending machines. It's FedEx distribution centers. It's like This is where they do build all the turbines that go on the propellers for the fields. It's like It's like, you know, the workers part of America.

And Everyone's lunch break, they just go to the vending machines and uh warehouse I have fifty of them. Snacks. Cold food, hot food.

Everything they eat is out of vending machines. So I said Oh, like every meal of the working day is coming out of a vending machine. And so then when I dug into how the business works, usually you're buying a contract. Um from Coke or Pepsi.

And you're you're obligated to sell their product, they give it to you for a rate and you have to use their machine. Well, those are on like five or ten year deals. So then during diligence, I asked them to give me all of the contracts with Pepsi and Coke, because what I knew is that This local library or this local warehouse They don't wanna have to deal with getting new machines.

They don't want to deal with that. Um And so it'd be disruptive to the business. So I realized that all of his contracts with Coke and Pepsi were expiring soon. And I was like, Well, the only reason the margins aren't Absolute insanity is because I have to pay a dollar twenty for Frito's and I can only sell them for two bucks. But what if I got an alternative to Frito's and bought it for four cents? And then and then sold it for two and now the margins are insane.

And so I looked into like the legality of like do I need to renew with Coke or Pepsi? And the answer was no. I need to get new machines, but there's companies that'll finance them. So I was like, what if I just buy this company, wait for all the contracts to expire, renew none of them. And then go in without Coke or Pepsi. Now you have a little bit of a distribution headache because they'll bring them to Lewiston, Idaho. But Lewiston, Idaho, there's all these like

discount stores to buy product at. So it could work. And Near the end of diligence. Uh had just

kind of had the idea to start my next company and I came to the conclusion of I don't want to end up having to move to Lewiston, Idaho, because I bought a vending business and I need to save it. Um, and so while I think it's an unbelievable opportunity, I chose not not to do it. How how big do you think that could have been? It was five thousand machines. Yeah, but in dollars, what what do you think it would have done annually? I probably wouldn't have made like I don't know, a million two a year, million three a year.

But it would've I had I'd have to run it. I felt like I was gonna have to run it for two years or maybe a year and then hire someone, but the other thing is you're dealing with physical stuff. I need to pay drivers to go to the things. I need to have inventory. So everything had to be in Lewiston. And I'm like, what am I gonna move to? Rural Idaho, so

If uh if that business is doing a million a year in cash flow, what what does it sell for? Uh I think they wanted four million for the business, five million. So four times cash if or they measure it. So I went to a bank and then and they wrote up a loan, I was gonna finance it. Um And then I was like, Wait, uh What if uh I end up having to move to Idaho? This is a problem. Um so your due diligence on these things, well the reason you're fascinating is your due diligence on these things is pretty in depth. Like most people, uh myself sometimes included.

I will end with like I'll just do a few Google searches and it kinda ends there. You're I mean, multiple times you're flying to places and meeting these people. Yeah, I mean I do a lot of times within five minutes. I think we all on the back of a nap can know if a deal makes sense. But I usually try and figure out Everyone else thinks there's a mar a way to make this business marginally better by consolidating and rolling them up. But how do you make it five times better? And then the answer is If there's no answer, I'm not interested.

Um, because then I wouldn't do the deal. So then I only try to figure out how could you make this five times better when everyone tries to make it 10% better. And my thought was when I looked at the line item. The biggest line item, 90% of it was the cost of goods from Coke and Pepsi. I go, How can I just not sell that? Cause I can buy a store brand Twinkie in wholesale. For ten times less than I have to buy Twinkie for. And so I just read all the contracts and then I would call people. Like I'd call lawyers that I knew were in the vending business. And I said, Do I have to renew like here's the language. It's kind of like

And they said like there's always this like thought from Coke or Pepsi of like you don't really have to. but they give you the product, they distribute it, like it's names that people know, brands that people know. But I thought in my opinion People's willingness to buy Fritos. Uh

uh wasn't that much higher than a name brand because they have no alternative. Like Like so that was what I thought. Uh they're on they're at the job. And and honestly I could also lower the prices and those people would have been thrilled. And I talked to them. I go in, I'd be like, Hey, is it cool if I talk to your employees real quick? I was at like a distribution center and the guy's like, sure, just like don't take my vending machines. Like, that's all I was like, Okay. And I'd go up and I'd be like, uh, hey, do any of you guys care if it wasn't Fritos anymore? And then the guy said, Well, would it be fifty cents less? I said, Sure. They go, I don't care what it is. Like Fredo's are fritos. And I was like, Huh, interesting. So

That's where I think the value in vending is. If you're not just trying to build like some big cap like Like I just wouldn't buy a vending route or an ATM route or anything like that. to just try to improve it'cause I'm a better operator. Like

I think people think they're Subs like you can be the best operator in the world, but the business is the business. So Um That's kind of how I look at those things. Well, I love that you um go down these r random rabbit holes. So Riverboat.

gambling. Um Venning machines. I'm sure you've done more than we've just talked about in terms of thinking about ideas up you You seem like you're one of us. You d you have that switch, it can't turn off. And so regardless of what you're doing, you're always gonna be thinking of of ideas or you're gonna hear something that's gonna make you Curious and it shouldn't you say, Well

Maybe not for me, but th for somebody that would be actually pretty interesting. Uh, do you have a couple of ideas you could share that maybe somebody in the audience uh Get inspired by what are the other ideas, the silver metal ideas, things that you're not necessarily doing. Um or you're just willing to share. Um

There was another business. That would actually be a lot. In my opinion, a lot easier than the vending business in Idaho. Um

I was at uh about two summers ago. Um A lot of my friends, you know, they went to Mizoo, so we'll go to Lake of the Ozarks in the summer of J Fourth of July or something like that. And The Redneck Riviera, baby. Home of the uh home of the uh the the wet t shirt contests and and lost GoPros at the bottom of uh at the bottom of uh forty feet one. That's actually a good business, Sean. Um if you if you want to hire divers, there's probably millions of dollars of GoPros at the bottom of Lake of the Ozarks. So

I'm at Lake of the Ozarks and I hadn't been since I had left college, so it'd been a couple years. And we needed to get from our Airbnb Two, and I'm I'm sure Sam knows this place. A place called Shady Gators. It is it is

It is the Uh Sean, if you looked up on Google Shady Gators, uh I I think you would tell me you're not going is what you would say. Um it's like classic spring break. It's it's as it's as college spring break bikini wet t shirt contest as it gets. And unfortunately, the bridge at Lake of the Ozarks is on like the far side from where our Airbnb was. And the only way to get there is to drive all the way around the lake. Well, that's like a fifty minute Uber. And

Instead of that, they have water taxis. And I didn't even know about this. My buddy's like, Yeah, just call a dispatcher. Like they'll send a t a water taxi. What am I in Venice? I was like, Okay. So uh we we call this guy and like seven seconds later, he pulls up to our Airbnb in the water and we just get on. And all my buddi were drinking and we're on their way there and all I can think about is How? How much is this guy making right now? And I said to my buddy, I said, How much are we paying him? I whispered and he's like, it's two fifty. We split it between the five of us. I go, I'm sorry. This is like a three minute ride.

Three minutes tops. And I go and he just f goes around. And so I couldn't help myself I asked them, I said, Hey, um Do you like own this thing? And you could tell he like

He was driving it. But he did own it. But he wanted he didn't want people to realize that the owner was driving. He wanted to feel like it was a company. He has the brand on the boat, like all the stuff. And he was like, Yeah, we own it. Yeah, he said we. Uh and uh so all my buddies are like getting off and they're running in the shady gators. Uh And I am just locked on this guy. I go, Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I was like, it's two hundred and fifty dollars. It took ninety seconds to get us here.

And he's like he's like, Yeah, it's seasonal'cause it gets cold here in the winter, but he's like, We spew cash all summer and spring and summer. I said, What does spew cash mean exactly? And he said, Well, I have three boats. Um And he goes, All I do is I have a dispatcher and she sits behind a monitor and has like a live feed because they have like some they put like a drone up there with some things. So she can see where all the boats are and she has the GPS. And when people call, she can see their IP address because when you call into the dispatcher, it's like some platform that shows you. So they know where people are on the lake. And then she'll load it into their thing on the boat to go where to go next. And it a lot of these boats have like GPS, so you just click accept, just like you do on Uber.

And they drive around. And I'm like, okay. Uh and I said to him, I said, uh Would you ever like raise capital for this business or like do you need more like Uh, are there more people than you can get? And he said by ten to the Well how much does he make? Oh like h like

Every boat made him like about four hundred grand a summer. He had three of them. So he was doing like a million two. Yeah. And he's and he's from, you know, you know, he built this from nothing. Started with one boat, use the money to buy another boat. But he doesn't know how to Like he's not he didn't he would wait too long'cause he didn't know you could just like go finance about. He would just wait till he could pay ninety grand cash for a speed belt. It's like you can just put down nine grand like a car and you'd have ten tomorrow.

So but he didn't know how to do any of these things. So I said, If you had money Um And you had twenty boats. Would it be too many boats? And now they're sitting around. He goes, I could probably fill ten boats as much as I fill these three, but I don't want to spend the cash. I kinda use it to, you know, I

bought a house, we built a lake house, like all this stuff. And so then I was like Okay. That's that that's that precious mountain dew money baby. So then I'm like Okay.

What if I This is also post buying the river boat before my next company. So I'm still in like the vending mode of like can I blow up a business like this? And so I called him'cause we were talking about maybe I would invest in the company. And I said, uh, hey Connor, uh I changed my mind.

Uh, would you sell me this business? He was like, Sell you this business. I was like, Yeah. Because I never thought about that. Like I don't know what it's worth or anything. Um And

My thought process was What if I can blow this up to ten or fifteen boats on Lake of the Ozarks? And then go to Orange Beach, Alabama. And then go and then just start going around America and building up the water taxi business. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. You need to get from Tiger Stadium to

Yeah, Fred's bar, whatever it is. And then Water. is the only vertical that Uber doesn't have and Lyft doesn't have. And then I called people, executives I know at those companies, and they said it's so difficult.

It's so regional, the weather, all the stuff. We don't want to own boats. We have to dock them, all the stuff. But they kinda made a comment like but we'd buy it if it existed, but we won't build that. So I said, Okay. So now I have a willing buyer of this business. Um so I thought if I could do this, um Uh

He was taking most of the cash for himself. I would buy this business. I don't need any of the money. So I would take all the money and just buy more boats until I've maximized Lake of the Ozarks, and then I would go, you know, Lake Town by Lake Town. And Uh Lot of liability, a lot of logistical things.

Definitely think it's worth doing. But it didn't I ran all the numbers. I try to estimate forecast out what I thought this business could do. And

I just I had decided when I left Fubo that the next thing I was gonna do I had no interest in if it couldn't be worth at least a billion dollars in five years. And I thought If it could be it was the absolute ceiling and then you'd have to execute perfectly and hope there's no legal issues and weather and damage and like all this a very physical business. So I chose not to do it, but I think it's a big opportunity. And I think we'll see Uber buy some water taxi company in like twenty twenty eight. I think we'll see that.

Can I just read you the menu of Shady Gators? Would you guys be interested in that? Yeah. Be very interested. For the appetizer, Tater Tots. You mean gator bites or ultimate tater tots or loaded loaded tots. For me I'm gonna start with the shrimp happens. That's where I'm gonna start. Uh Sam uh for my friend Sam, he wants the Brazilian sizzle. Those are the appetite. This place looks phenomenal. This place looks like uh I think you were you you're focused on the boats. You needed to buy shady gators. Uh this is an institution.

You know, like you know when rich people go by like the Washington Post, this could have been your washbow. Yeah, yeah. You could have bought Shady Gators and been like I will protect this this uh this national treasure. Shady Gators will cash flow for hundreds of years to come. As long as there's boobs and there's white shirts, this place will stay upright. We we have to take Sean Sean's ever been to some of these places. We've got to take him uh on a tour to uh Floribama. Down in uh yeah, uh there's this restaurant, Sean. It's called Floribama. They even made a TV show about it. It was like the I've seen these all through the TV safely while I'm uh you know under a boy. Well for years that's where that's where I spent spring break. Floribama is right at the the Alabama, Florida line. There's literally a line. in the ground and this restaurant is half on each side. And it's where you go for just

Pure debauchery. When you are twenty one years old or nineteen with a fake ID. These places are wild. You have to experience a good floor bad. I had a buddy from New York who when I bought the Vessel. Uh it's in like rural Iowa. And uh

he flew into this private airport because he had to see this thing and he had never been Uh He he's we're like running out of gas on the highway. And he's like, We have to pull over, we have to pull over. He's like flipping out. And I'm like, We're good, man. There's a gas station in eight miles and we have like a reserve tank. Like, don't worry about it. Like he's used to New York Urs and like just getting him Uber blocks and like being in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, he was like panicking. He's taking pictures of like gas stations he thinks they're like

He thinks they're like uh monuments. It's like a safari for him. This is where people get gas pride. Yeah. So um you know what I wish? I kinda wish there was a Yeah. Well, in general I'll say this. You're like We have the segment on this pod called the blue collar side hustle.

You're like the walking blue collar side hustle, right? Like all of these ideas you're talking about are So middle America, I love it. And they're so um just uh, you know, hustle and ingenuity that I love it. And you're finding really interesting opportunities that are off the beaten path, right? It's like You wanna do things that The ninety nine. Like if you t if you say all right.

I'm not the smartest guy there is. Maybe I'm in the I'm in the top twenty percent of IQ. What you want is within that top twenty percent. You wanna then go look in places where Ninety nine percent of them don't look.

'Cause now you're, you know, you're you're operating in a field of your own. And it seems like that's what you're doing. I kinda wish this existed. Um nationwide. Because what what you're finding is you're finding a bunch of opportunities That You know how you would execute them? But now they're no longer worth your time or the the the schlepp that you would have to eat to do it. You were willing to do it with your first business, but now on your third business, you're not as willing to do that.

Um You know, T uh Peter Thiel did this thing called the Teal Fellowship. Where he was like, I'm gonna Pay kids to drop out of college. If they're exceptional, they might create big things. And out of that came

you know, Figma and Ethereum and some of the like kind of breakthrough multi-billion dollar tech companies. I kind of feel like there should be a blue collar teal fellowship where we just go and we we ho we post a flyer in a bunch of campuses that just says, um Sick of this shit? Drop out and make millions. And let's just see who shows up. And it's gonna be the person who's like, this is probably bullshit, but like I'm down. What else am I gonna do? Go to organic chemistry right now? Like I I gotta see what's here. There's gonna be like eight people at the seminar, and of the eight You know, five will leave halfway through'cause they think it's a timeshare presentation. And out of the three remaining, there'll be one person who's like

Oh, you're telling me that you'll help me go find a business within a mile and a half of this campus right now? That if I just like focus for three years can make me nine million dollars. All right, I'm in. I'm in I'm sitting in I already go to you know Boise State. Or I already you know like at the end. Where I went to school at Duke, there was this one bar. It was our version of Shady Gators called Shooters. Yep.

And if anybody went and bought shooters, it's like, guess what, sir? You now have a monopoly on the nightlife scene of Durham. Yeah. And uh every single student will come there and like this place just hasn't changed. And like, look, if if the mechanical bull just took Apple Pay, your revenue would go up ten percent. Like there's just a bunch of easy wins that can be had just by like thinking about things slightly differently. You know, the example I would give of shooters would be Cool. During the day this needs to be Essentially like a yoga studio. And at night it's gonna become the nightclub and now you're gonna go from, you know 10% usage to maybe 45% usage, and that will be a big that's how you do your your five X. Um

I feel like that needs to exist. I feel like we need to find the Sam Ratners. that are out there t they're out there right now in every college and they just need a little bit of inspo, a little bit of ideas and and a little bit of mentorship in order to Yeah, the problem with the businesses I've found is that If the value Is in the fact.

That is remotely located. Well then it's difficult because Other than finding another Lewist in Idaho that already has an operating business and has those dynamics of the town relies on it. You can't scale it out of Lewiston. Um but the reason I love the water taxi thing is'cause there's ten or twelve great water lake towns in America.

So I liked that a little bit better. But my concern was when I really forecasted it out, it'd be a big win. But it would take it would take Five to seven years. And I was like

Nope. Just not willing. Just just couldn't yeah. So that would that's always a problem. But for someone who has I don't know. I don't want to say it. Is only

Pure wanna execute and wants to retire and have twenty, thirty, forty million dollars. I think that's a great play. Well for a lot of people that's that's not necessarily where you have to retire, but it's like When you're at zero Seven million dollars sounds like all the dollars. And uh and then once you have seven million dollars and you're now twenty-four and your friends are, you know, still paying off student debt and you're sitting there being like, I learned so much. And I have financial freedom. I can do whatever I want.

They can do the thing you did and go chase down this riverbed for, you know, nine months where other people Wouldn't think to go do that, right? So it's it's a It's a gateway drug into doing, you know, more and more interesting things. What were the other investments? You said you made two investments that were awesome. I assume one of them was the the boat. Yeah. Um

I've invested Not a lot,'cause I really am focused on what I'm doing, but I have made some private investments into startups that I try to be as helpful with as I can. You said that you want to start something that can get to a billion in I assume you met exit value in five years.

You have a new company now. Is that the one that you think is gonna do it? So uh Showroom. So when I was at Um Fubo TV.

Uh, when I left, we were doing about a billion dollars a year in revenue. Don't quote me, the public we can find the numbers. I think about seven hundred million was the monthly subscriptions to FUBO TV. So fifty nine ninety nine. If you buy red zone, you're probably near a hundred bucks, whatever it was. Uh and then three hundred million uh give or take was the advertising, which is when you scale a streaming business, it's the whole business. So I thought to myself, why are these companies coming to Fubo TV? We're big, but we're not massive. Uh, so there's gotta be a play here that they think there's value here.

Um and what I realized is Traditional cable nationwide too expensive. Disney Plus, ESPN Plus and Hulu, um, all owned by Disney. Um kind of around a scale where pricing's probably similar to being national.

Um, and we were small enough that if you wanted six zip codes in Nashville. Uh, we'd give it to you. Um, and so what clearly the sentiment was from these companies was that Uh it's very hard to get in front of consumers. Uh, Google shopping, uh, while is okay for a user is unusable for a merch because no one's outbidding Calvin Klein for the word underwear or black denim jacket. It's become way too corporate. I think like eighty percent.

Or maybe seventy percent. Of the brands that buy keywords for e for fashion footwear on Google Shopping, I think in their last report. I think it was like one of like a few hundred brands. And there's tens of thousands of brands. So most of them aren't on there. And I was in a meeting once.

With The former CM CMO of like a direct to consumer cowboy boot brand. And uh She made this interesting comment in a meeting and she was like, Yeah, we waste like fifty cents of every dollar we spend on Google. And I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. Excuse me? Like stopped the meeting. I go, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. I go, Why is that?

And she said, because we pay about four dollars to own the word cowboy boots. And half the time someone looks up cowboy boots, it's a third grader looking up cowboy boots for their third grade presentation. They need a photo to like cut out and put on their poster. They had no intent of buying seven hundred dollar boots. So we waste fifty cents of every dollar. And I was like Whoa.

And she said, This is the first time I heard this. Concept. She said, That's why vertical search is so great. I said, What do you mean? And she had been an executive, uh, she was a C or I don't know if she was a CMO, but very senior at Cars.com.

And she said people look up Toyota on Google for all kinds of reasons. Photos, videos. They might be looking at Toyota stock price, but if they look up a Toyota on Cars dot com, they're a buyer or they're a seller. There's high intent. You're not just browsing around cars dot com. So I said That's interesting. So then I was like, Okay.

So those are really Google's competitors is all these vertical places to find what you want to find that has a better experience and more tailored than just traditional search. So I essentially uh do what I always try to do, like in the vending business, I called the lawyers who know the Pepsi contracts. I called as many engineers on the Google shopping team as I could get to agree to talk to me. Um And the sentiment was They said, Sam, we want Google Flights to be a really great experience for Google users, but not at the detriment of stepping on the toes of our large largest advertisers. Expedia, Kayak. They want them to pay and they want them to battle it out. They don't think it's not a

good business to be in. They would just rather them battle it out and battle it out means pay Google to be there. And my conclusion was, okay. Could this be done better now? And I was very anti crypto. Still am.

Don't like crypto at all. Never, never have owned it. Um And So when all this AI started coming out I had this initial sentiment of like, eh, this is crypto again. I don't believe in this.

I have changed my mind on that. Um And what I realized, I was like If I showed you two black T shirts. And one's from Lululemon and one's from Gap.

If we remove the brand names. The product descriptions, the actual copy is shockingly similar. It's just describing a black T shirt. Um, it's really inherent in the sentiment of the brand as to what that shirt is for. Lulu's shirt is for one thing, Gap's shirt could be an undershirt. And so

Um Your inability to have like a ongoing conversation. with a language model that knows every brand and product in the world. Um would be very limiting and you'd end up with Google Shopping. So what we've done is

Uh we've built This huge infrastructure. We have thousands and thousands of merchants, tens of millions of SKUs um that kind of organically come into this data set. We've trained a language model to understand nothing besides what's in that data set. And then th that can communicate

um to a user so they can have an ongoing conversation with essentially Think about like Not just Neiman Marcus or not just Macy's or not just a retailer who picked a couple hundred brands to carry, but you can essentially communicate back and forth. With an inventory of every brand in the world. And the reason why shopping's always had these big opportunities is because

Everything else has been dominated by Amazon or Alibaba. And they have their market share in the like cheap, fast fashion sector, but Gucci's not on Amazon. Burberry's not on Amazon. Every brand at Neiman Markets, Tacovas, Away Luggage, these companies like They might people might sell Nike products on Amazon. Nike's not on Amazon. So

That's why companies like Shoprunner had come along where they're like, We're gonna be the Amazon prime for everything Amazon doesn't have. And they scaled and sold to FedEx for hundreds of millions, the founders on our board at Showroom. So there's always been these opportunities in fashion for product discovery. And I actually think prior to language models, this is This is absolutely a business that would have been very, very hard. Because you lack that brand sentiment.

Um And so that's essentially what we've built. We're launching the beta here shortly. We have thousands of people on the waiting waiting list. We're really excited. We have revenue share deals with every single merchant in the platform. those revenue share deals fluctuating you know between five and twenty percent just depending on the brand. you know, Nike Pazia, you know, a point probably, but

you know, a a a direct to consumer brand is paying for growth, they'll pay you a fifteen percent revenue share all day. You're kind of doing what you did before, where the with the betting site you're like Well the consumers want this and I don't know if I can differentiate that. And so you went to the brand side. You know, if a if a marketplace has two sides, you went to the brand side. You're sort of doing that with with this, where you're like thinking, well, what's the problem for advertisers? But it seems like with these consumer products, the hardest part is getting the consumers. And once you have them. Oftentimes you can figure out

Not or I don't know if often's the right word. Some of the times you can figure out how do you monetize a huge audience. Are you are you are you scared that you're not gonna be able to figure out how to get the actual Users that we're gonna do. Inherent in the platform is the transaction. So then there's transaction fees, the merchants pay revenue shares. If you're a consumer platform

For like entertainment, social Entertainment's become a little bit of a commodity. That's why Netflix does these originals, but everyone else, like Fubo Hulu, ESPN, Disney. We all just had ESPN. And T and T and everyone has the same stuff.

And if you're social, you have to increase engagement. But if you are something where there's transactions, well now inherent in the experience is transacting. And that's where you can really make money. So that's why I think Companies like

The social the ones that get a big audience and then go social. I think's a huge mistake. Like Pinterest, big audience, and then they went like social. Not commerce. Um And to me, it's like, well, no one minds paying fees or having hidden fees into things that they were already buying. People might complain about fees on Airbnb, but they were already

booking something. And so I think the value is can you build a big consumer business that inherent in the journey is a transaction. And your product. is a one hundred times better shopping experience than what they had before. So I always just lean on focus on the consumer, forget everything else. If the consumer wants it, everything else is noise, you can push it through and consumers will want the product. So I want to ask you about The way your brain works.

And we always ask everybody before they come on, what are some of your strong opinions or life philosophies that you would you live by? And you gave us a couple, but I want you to explain them. So uh Number one. Never pitch twice. What is that? So Every investor I've ever had. The moment I pitch them.

And walked out of the room. Called me twelve times, showed up at my door in Chicago, and said I wanna this round. Um Same thing with employees. Everyone I've ever

You know, I'm always recruiting. Anyone who's ever wanted to join the company, the moment they wanted to join the company, they wanted to drop everything they were doing to join the company. In my opinion, raising capital is an informative process, not a persuasive one. Within five minutes of us getting on the call today, I think we all we had some preconceived notions of what we thought of each other, and then within five minutes I'd say you'd have a ninety percent cemented view of what you think of the person.

And so when I'm pitching Um, I'm going in and I'm Giving them my full attention. But I'm informing them of what we're building and what we're doing. Um

And it's one thing if they have legitimate diligence questions as follow ups or whatever, but I never ask twice. because I know that everyone who's ever really wanted to do it didn't need to be asked twice. They loved it. And so I would rather just move on to the next one. Um And

In my opinion. You give them the information. They've formed their opinions. If you're ever trying to persuade them, you're on the wrong side of the table from a negotiation standpoint, anyways. Um, and so I just don't pitch twice.

Um, I try to be as cognizant if I can that you always want to be respectful of like venture associates at the fund because sometimes by pure volume, if it's like a big fun like a Sequoia, they their principals can't take every meeting. They need some layers, that's fine. Um And if they have legit follow on questions, I'll get back on more calls and answer emails, whatever, but I never pitch twice. Because I know that If I need to kinda sell it again.

Then they didn't want it. And that doesn't mean that you can't have luck following up and being ruthless about the follow up and you there's no stories where you push it through, but there's thousands of funds. In my opinion, capital's pretty cheap. If you have a great business, you're gonna raise the money. And so I kinda just move on to people that are so excited by it that they are willing to get on a phone on Christmas. Um, because they know this could be a life changing opportunity for them. You know, so That's kinda how I view pitching. You've got this other one that is um

I don't know if controversial is the right word, but it's kinda uh a lot of people wouldn't agree. So you said The pit but the potential you see in others is not real. It's rarely potential realized so take everyone at face value for what they are today. Well there's one one key line in there is that you said. It's a mirror of what you would do if you were in their position. I have

thought about I always have like these I have like a massive, massive note list on my phone. And I have these concepts and s and I have another notepad of concepts that I haven't really figured out a way to explain it the right way. I always try to boil down this thought I have to like two sentences. And recently on Twitter I saw someone say this, which is the potential I don't know who it was, but the potential you see in others. Is it

rarely realize it's simply a mirror of what you would do if you were them. I have spent a lot of time in my life trying to I don't want to say change other people, but I I think they have such great potential. But I always feel like

It's like you're dragging a bag of bricks in your backpack to the office. It's like they just the if they don't want it on their own, you just can't change them. And what I see in them is really what I would do if I were them, but it's not what they want to do. And so I'm not saying you can't put in effort to coach people up and make them great

members of the team. But that's different than if they want to be there or not. If they don't want to be there. You know, if they don't want to box, they're not showing up to the gym and boxing for twelve hours a day to go beat Floyd Mayweather. They don't want to be there. And so if you think they're a great boxer and they show up every day, okay, you can coach them. But

I just feel like It's a wasted effort and you should take people for exactly what they are and what do what do those people love doing more than anything. As much as I love running businesses and building businesses and doing things like this, what do they love? As much as I love this. And can I get that task to be something in my business? Cause then they're gonna do great. But if it's anything other than that

They're just better off going to somewhere else where they want that skill set. And so I just think that You should pretty quickly know It's like if you're a trainer

Um, or you're a coach. Does the player want to be there? And if they don't want to be there, You can be mad that like oh they're six eight. They it's like in high school when your coach goes to the vol volleyball team, they're like Peter, like stop spiking volleyballs. Like you could play center, you know, at Duke, and they're like, Yeah, I like volleyball. He just likes volleyball. And any time they've ever gotten that kid to say, Fine, I'll play on the basketball team. He doesn't care. He doesn't want to come to practice. He's never very good. And you just don't realize the potential. But his potential, while it looked to you, if you were six eight on the volleyball team, you could be a great basketball player. Peter doesn't want to be a great basketball player. So it just doesn't work out. So that's kind of like my opinion on that kind of stuff.

Let's do one more. You have one on here that I'm curious about. It says uh The value is in the duck calls. Oh, that's a good one. And uh I think that's the perfect one to end on here. What does that mean? Me and um Who's um Best man of my wedding, Jonah Roberts. Uh give him a shout out, Jonah.

Uh, he's from Memphis. Sound like he almost forgot his name. Jonah. And I were no, no, definitely didn't remember his name. Um Jonah and I were in Memphis, Tennessee, uh in his hometown, and he wanted to take me to the Bass Pro shop, which there is like the holy grail. Um And

We're walking around which feels like hours and we cannot stop dying laughing. Every single aisle, every product you could ever imagine you'd need for hunting and fishing and home tools, they have everything. And Ah, right when we think we've seen every product that anyone's ever made. We stumble

to come around the corner to go to the like Where the back of the store is. And there's this Big almost like when you go to a guitar store and they put all the expensive ones in a room. There's this sign that says duck calls. And there's like this glass door.

And we open. And there's like what felt like a hundred thousand duck calls. They've got metal duck calls, polyester duck calls. They've got Stone duck calls. They've got duck calls with two heads. They have different colors. They have the it's like this whole economy of duck calls that we didn't even know existed. And So what I realized is the reason I dig into the vending businesses and the river boats and the m water taxis is because the value's in the duck calls. The value is in the things that no one knows about that are very odd, that have these niche ecosystems of communities and the people who love duck calls, trust me.

They love duck calls. They'll pay a thousand dollars for a duck call. They don't go hunting for Fed, they don't go without them. It's like a big thing. They collect them. And it's something I never knew about. And so whenever I hear about something that could be really big And then I hear a bunch of people I go, I go, I've never heard of that. Like who would ever want that? And then I go on like one random brands site in the duck call business.

And some random merchant I've never heard before has eight hundred thousand followers and does five million dollars a year. that like cements to me that all the values in the duct calls. If it's in the things that people don't know about or are too complicated to find. Or our regional or our niche. Or one of those things. So I always kinda s me and Jonah always kinda say the value is in the duck calls. I h I have a feeling, Sam. Well, first of all, are you gonna call your shot now, so your new business.

Um are you are you Are you gonna call your shot where in five years you're gonna it it's gonna be worth a billion dollars? Cause I what I wanna look back in five years, cause I think you're gonna you clearly have the if factor. Some you've already done amazing things, but something more amazing I predict is gonna happen with you. I don't know when, but is this gonna be the one you think? I do. And f are you gonna hit your five year goal, how your year into it, I know. Uh yeah.

I would say that would be the goal. Would I wouldn't I would not work on it. Every day I wake up, it's like Every day you own a building or you own a stock, you're choosing to buy it. And every day I choose to work on this, I think more and more uh that it's definitely gonna work. And the moment that I think it's going the other way, I will not work on it. So we're gonna look it back on this December two thousand uh twenty eight.

And we're gonna see if you if you nailed it, but I have a feeling you're gonna do something amazing. And uh we appreciate you coming on, man. You're you're awesome. No, thanks for having me. I've been following the pod since you started in nineteen when I was I I used to watch your videos out of the lifetime yoga studio. That's amazing. Uh awesome. Thank you for coming on. You're you're fun. Alright, we appreciate you and that's a part. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like a day So on the road less travel, never looking back

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