#36 - Data Privacy Tools, Food Franchises & Silicon Valley Mistruths

Let's talk about food. I just handed you something. You're not gonna be able to see this on the podcast, but it's a tiny little pouch called Super Fat. So I discovered this at HulseCon actually, so you probably already know about it. Yeah, so the story behind it started by David Hauser. David You you don't know him but I don't know him, but I have heard him talk once'cause he started Grasshopper. Yeah, he started Grasshopper in Boston. I really admire him. I look up to him. He's a very small angel investor in the hustle. But more so a friend and someone I admire. And he started Grasshopper. scaled it to I think thirty million in sales, sold it for One fifty or two hundred something like that. Him and his partner owned it all, other than five percent that they'd given a father one of their dads for like loaning them money with like ten or twenty thousand dollars when they first started. Very savvy, very frugal.

Moved to Nevada before the deal happened, saved a bunch of money in taxes, and now is starting new projects, one of them being super fat. Keto peanut butter, I think. Yeah, kind of. It's basically like a little snack or breakfast. I use it basically as a breakfast replacement. Th I like it a lot, actually, but the only downside and you're gonna experience this now, which is that it's like kind of dry and like it it turns your mouth a little bit like 'Cause it's so dense. So it's like a it's not like the easiest thing to sort of palate. But So I buy them as well. Taste is good and the health is good. I like it, so I told David this, I go, David, I hate these tops. Yeah. I don't like the tops. It definitely does look like baby food for adults. Which in some ways is okay. But it's really hard to get the food out sometimes. It's very it feels it makes me feel uh like not like a man to eat this. Right. The way it's set up. Like I feel like I don't want to eat this in public. Yeah, I feel like an inadequate

Toddler'cause I can't can't do it. But It's cool. And I buy it as well. I bought the variety pack to see like to try out the flavors, which is smart. I like That's smart decision on their part to s have a variety pack first and then now I know which flavor I like, so I'm gonna go in. Uh but I like food. What what else you got on food? Um you wanna talk about food? Okay, so I think I come prepared with ideas that are really big.

And hard to pull off. And this was one of them. And you have a little more practical zero to one. But let's talk about this one. Okay, so I'm into fast food restaurants. I don't know if I told you. I've been reading a lot about'em. Do you know White Castle? I don't think you grew up with White Castle, do you? I didn't grow up with it, but yeah, I'm familiar. Okay, so background is it's ninety three years old. One of the first fast food restaurants ever. I think it's the first, but like McDonald's and them were doing it at the same time and they didn't know each other. But I believe White Castle's first. Family owned, one hundred percent family owned. Six hundred million dollars in sales in the last couple of years. Flatlined, twelve million in profit.

Big company, no growth though, shitty margins. And the average manager, the CEO said that Not one person who reports to him has been there for less than twenty five years. Wow. And the average manager and like throughout the company is twenty five years.

Which is not good if your sales are flat. And it's the thirty eighth most popular fast food chain in America. And why are you looking into the fast food chains? You just like to know the economics'cause they're all kinda available or what? Because I think that nostalgia in America is really cool. And like things that you and I thought were cool when we were eight, nine, ten years old, now that we have a little bit of money, we'll spend a lot of money on that stuff. Gotcha. And so a lot of these nostalgic things Some of'em have done a really good job of transitioning, so

Levi's has done a really good job. Some of the car companies have done a pretty good job. Great. Oh Taco Okay, so I was reading about Taco Bell, bought by Private Equity, did an awesome job of transitioning. They've like lean into the stoner late night thing. Right. Wendy's all about social. I think is Wendy's own I think Wendy's is owned by the same company. Yeah, maybe they own a bunch. And they do the same thing where they say like funny not P C things on Twitter and it works. Right. Taco Bell is in the news with a hundred thousand dollar salary thing. So we wrote about that and that's why I got interested in it. Gotcha.

I'm interested in Chick fil A'cause I go to Chick fil A all the time and I've never seen a busier restaurant than Chick fil A, so I started looking at it and basically Chick fil A has the highest sort of revenue per store of any fast food chain. They do like two and a half million, two point four million, or something like that per store, which is insane. That's cool. And then they have a pretty cool model, which is you can't just get a Chick fil A. So one of the reasons why the quality's so high is they f did franchising differently. So if you want to be a franchisee of Chick fil A, you have to like apply You have to go to this like thing. You cannot do it as a side business. So you can't be like, Oh, and I own like you know how Shaq owns like twenty five wavies or whatever it is. You can't do that. If you own a Chick-fil-A, that's your business. So just good quality control. So g so good quality control because just a few like nuances. One is you have to be the operator. You can't do this as an investment. Second is like I think they filter pretty aggressively, so it's like, you know, harder to get into than Harvard type of thing. And then they reward you know, they they sort of really train those those franchisees differently. So they've gotten Pretty phenomenal results. And I wonder why more people don't just copy Chick-fil-A, because Popeye's got famous recently for trying to release their own chicken sandwich. But it can't be that hard to just copy their chicken sandwich formula, right? Like I I don't understand. No, I don't think it can be hard. It's definitely a good branding thing, though. So if you look at I was reading about I sound like an old man, Gen Z

I went to a conference and they're talking this is makes me sound very old, even though I'm not, but Gen Z, the number one place that they f spend their money on is food. And the number one place is Chick fil A. And it it's kind of interesting because Gen Z is arguably the most open minded generation. Like they uh they don't mm mm like when we were kids, like it's easy to like call someone gay or something. Like I don't think Gen Z does that at all. They're they're not into that at all.

Which is Chick fil A has got a lot of crap because they're a uh you do A if you want to compete with Chick fil A. You copy their chicken formula. I don't know why everyone's not doing that too. You stay open on Sundays and you don't do the whole religious angle because That might you can just do it with a different value set.

Three, you can go where they're not. There's not a lot of Chick fil A's outside of like let's say South and you know some some different things. The closest one to where we live right now in San Francisco, I think is thirty or forty minutes away. Yeah, about thirty miles away. Exactly. I can't get it delivered. I gotta drive across a bridge to go get it if I'm in San Francisco. Uh but also just internationally, like these food chains do really well when they go to Asia. Uh they have to change the menu a little bit, but I'm surprised people aren't doing Chick fil A in other places without the religious sort of like weird social stances And staying open on Sundays. Like that just seems to be a little bit more. White Castle's one of them. Maybe Whataburger. You know Whatabur? Yep. Uh I think they actually just got bought by PE, so whoever's buying them might likely be doing the same thing. White Castle's definitely one of them. Yeah.

Where it's like even if you don't like their food It's so Oh, it's really polarizing, which is always great for a money making point of view. And anyway, I was thinking a ton about White Castle. for all every reason you said because Chick fil A is just booming right now. Yes. Booming. Even though They've done many things that you would think, like, Oh, I'm not gonna go there but then you're like

That stays okay. Yeah. So that's what I'm thinking. If I I'm not interested enough to ever actually do this. Maybe one day. If I wanted to, or if I was into it, I would one hundred percent put them as a target of They have to sell the private equity. let it a young ish CEO who's in their forties un run it and do a taco bell and chick flag did. Right. If you're starting a fast food chain, which you're probably not, but if you are

I wanna know about it because uh A, that was the first business I ever tried to start was a sushi related sort of fast casual chain. Uh so I know a little bit about it, but B, uh I just think that there's more to do there. I think there's a lot more to do there. Also now with all the delivery apps. If you started today, you would start with that in mind as like one of the main ways you're gonna get your food to your customers. So Rather than drive through. To wrap this up You know uh Caviar? Do you use caviar? We use caviar. Are they sold to someone square square um

So The I believe it's the founders who are doing this. There's a bunch of new restaurants in this neighborhood and I start seeing them all over San Francisco. One's called Rooster and Rice. Have you seen it? I've seen it, but I I don't know anything about it. One's called Bamboo Asia or Asia Bamboo. Those are owned by those guys, I believe. And what are they doing it? So just restaurants sold? Yes, what they're doing is they've looked at what sold best on caviar and now their restaurants are Brewster and Rice. They only sell or sorry, chicken and whatever it's called. They only sell chicken and rice and broccoli. That's all they have. And when they serve it to you, it's in a

Paper takeout box. So they're clearly setting this up to be delivery. Profitable for delivery. Right. The bamboo Asia one. So

Piggyback off what you were saying. Yeah, I like that. Uh you also had the Ramen thing, you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So I am an angel investor and also friends with a guy named Kevin. He started this thing. It's gonna be live in six months. It's called um Emmy. M E Eats I M M I Eats. Dot com He sent me the mock ups.

Very bullish on that. When I invest he just said Keto ramen. Yeah. In that may or may not be a good idea. Right. I also did it because he's a friend and I trust him. I just saw the mock ups. The doing this like Momo Fuku

brand that I like it's like it's like a cool hip brand. They're not using like the millennial pink, which is you know what everyone does. I'm very bullish on that. I have no idea how they're gonna m how do you make a keto ramen? I don't know. Yeah, the he what he told me was that you know you go and you work with these things called flavor labs And you tell them what you're trying to do, like, look, I'm looking for this outcome. And then the sort of food scientists are the ones there who are like Is Flavor Lab a company or an idea? No, it's just like it's just like saying you go to a uh a factory, you go to a manufacturer. So if you want to make food, a new food, you go to a flavor flavor house or a flavor lab. And I think I think they call them flavor houses, actually. And uh there they have food scientists will say, Okay, you're trying to create this palette, like this flavor on your palate. But you want the macronutrients to be like this, or you only want to use these types of ingredients. Okay, and then they do batch one, batch two, batch three. So these guys go through a very painstaking process to figure out, okay, how do you with you know pea proteins and these other things, how do you make it high protein, low carb. Because Ramen's this huge category.

But All ramen is like real shit for you. And so if you make good ramen, that's not shit for you, I think that's a winning formula. How much do you think of one of these what's it called a flavor? What flavor house. Flavor Lab was w where do you where are those? No, this is like in LA. This is like, you know, uh nearby here. And so I had a guy with Podcast who started he started Fit Aid, the energy drink. Oh yeah, yeah. And you know, hundred million dollar beverage company And he was same thing. He was like, Yeah, I went to a flavor blah blah blah flavor house

And I told him like look, I wanna have these vitamins in it,'cause I know that these give you energy boosts, but I don't want to have be high caffeine and I don't want to have this like sort of acidic taste that Red Bull and others have. I don't want to taste like metal. And they were like, Uh, it's not really possible what you're asking for. How do we make it healthy and really palatable like that? Those don't go together usually. And then he's like, Okay, I guess I'll go somewhere else then that can do it. And then finally he got to one there where they were like Yeah, we could do this. And so he that's they created his beverage formula. That's badass. Yeah, that's how you do it. That's great because I I'm not in this space, but I would have thought I had to do a lot more work to like I would have to like be in my kitchen making that shit. Yeah, I that's what I thought too. And then when he said that I was like, Oh, of course.

Of course. And I actually think that food scientists are sort of in short supply right now. That's cool. And so there's sort of like these niche professions that I think you could you you could do like a lambda school type of model for to pump out You know, uh we we kinda know about programmers and data scientists, uh, but I think food scientists could be one that's sort of in short supply given the way the world is going. That is awesome. And how valuable like Taco Bell and all them, that's what they do too. They basically work with these they work with two things. Well they own their own thing, I think, you know? Well they work with ad agencies who come up with like Dude, Dorito Taco. And then they work with the flavor they have their own flavor house, but they work with the flavor house to be like Try twenty f twenty thousand zany combinations this year and tell us if any of them taste good, type of thing,'cause they're constantly trying to do food innovation. That that's badass. Okay, that's cool. I didn't had no idea about that. Uh okay, let's see what else I got. Okay, couple of things. I had this tweet that went viral that was basically it's my most successful tweet. So th I did that in twenty nineteen, uh at the end of twenty nineteen. Thousand likes and it it struck a chord because what I did was it's not gonna sound that genius. Basically anytime I see an ad on Instagram now that I'm like, Oh, that looks kinda cool.

Maybe I maybe I should buy that. It's like there's this posture correcting brace. I saw this. And then uh I basically just go to AliExpress and I just type the same exact thing in, or I could do a Image search. And you can find the same item. So the the the brace was selling for like whatever, forty bucks, fifty bucks. And I found it for like a dollar eighty on a spoof. I didn't buy it. I I like'cause I didn't I didn't necessarily want it, but uh this is the hack. Like most of the things you're gonna see in the Do you wanna explain AliExpress? Yes. I don't even entirely know. It's one of those things I feel is like it's underground and I'm like, Wait, this is Alibaba. So some people have heard of Alibaba. Alibaba basically is like it's like eBay, but On eBay you're buying from like, you know, a random mom in the Midwest.

In Alibaba, you're buying from a factory. And so you you don't buy one unit, you buy like five hundred, a thousand'cause it's you're buying it to for your business to sell. You're buying wholesale to sell retail. So that's what how Alibaba got big'cause they had all the manufacturers in China who didn't have a big online presence. So they put them all in one marketplace and now you can find them to source products. AliExpress is Is it takes some those same products, but you can buy one.

One piece. Uh this is how Wish is powered. So Wish is just a layer on top of AliExpress, essentially. Because the only catch for AliExpress is that you're gonna have to wait like three weeks for it to arrive. And the quality might be bullshit. And if you go to the website, it's very poor English, like the descriptions. Well AliExpress is actually a pretty good website, but the listing might have like yeah the you know the listing's by the shop owner so you don't know what It's it's low trust, low speed. Low cost. Right. And so for some people that's a dope trade, right? And uh Wish made a sort of m better interface. That's what I mean. When you go into a product description, you're like This person definitely they're not a English first speaker

What am I getting myself into because it seems too good to be true. There's also weird things like every like if you're looking for one product, you'll see a bunch of the same photo. So you know they didn't actually make that. They're just using the the the photo, so you don't know what you're really gonna get. But but it is kind of amazing. Like I went and ordered I think like twenty five products and my bill came out to like seventy five dollars'cause I'm just testing different products. So all the express is kind of amazing because you go and for like three bucks you'll be buying items that like cost thirty five or fifty five bucks when you buy them in the US. And so anyways, the the hack is if you see an ad, uh sub D to C pro big the probably just drop shipping from AliExpress and you could just go straight to AliExpress and get it at one tenth the price. So how big did that how many people hollowed at you?

It had like over a thousand like whatever. Retweets or likes or whatever it is. My friend did my cousin did this too where he uh shout out to Ron he listens to the pod. So he did it with Theragun. So you know that massage gun. Yeah. So this thing sells for like six hundred bucks. I know when I was CS I saw the knockoffs. He went in AliExpress and got it for fifty bucks, had to wait two and a half weeks for it to arrive, it arrived and he's like It's fantastic. And like Wait, did he say it's as good, you think? He was like, It's really good. Now it might break down or something, you know, the long term quality might not be there. But you got it at a tenth of the price, so you could literally buy five of these and still be all you know, still come out. So remember when I I went I told you I went to C S and there'd be like the Theragun booth. I don't actually know if they have theirs, but there'd be like one like that and then the Chinese knockoff right next door. And some of the

Stuff was not as good. Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure there's a there's a quality drop. But okay, so that's just like a random thing. From trends I liked this. Uh AirPod accessories, so Crazy. AirPod sales are going like this. I'm doing a curved line with my hands. And Now like let's

put math on that. We we had a cool stat. What was I exact revenue. It is multi billions in revenue like a product line for Apple. I believe it's a faster selling product than iPod iPhone or iWatch. So it's doing phenomenally well for its first, whatever, two years of Existence. Oh, I know. It was something like if AirPod was own company, it would be like bigger than Air B and B or something like it was like it like put it in context. Right. And so if everybody's getting AirPods, you know, I'm sure there's already uh there's not a new idea. There's po probably people doing this, but the sort of Like I bought a AirPod replacement case'cause I've lost three sets of AirPods. So I bought a case. This time I bought like a twenty five dollar case on you know non Apple brand off of Amazon. And it was just whoever's doing that sort of Amazon FBA business that has the number one rank for

You know, AirPod replacement case. So AirPod replacements, airpod replacement case. aesthetic things that you can do to like You know, make your case look better, make your airpods look different. I think there's just like a lot of random niche things, but because this is a product that

Pretty much a once Apple removed the headphone jack. Everybody needs Bluetooth headphones now. And so I just think being in that space, you could take a tiny piece and do quite well right now. I agree. Yeah, I'm I'm into that. And now they're actually selling I never thought Apple would do this. They're selling non Apple Brand AirPod cases at the Apple store. Oh really? Oh they shelve other

People's cases. I went there the other day and they had other people's cases. That's interesting. Okay. You got anything? Wait, when? So Tough Motor I don't know what this means. It says like involuntary filing for bankruptcy, which I Just assume it's bad. The guy who started Tough Motor is a Harvard business school grad, so maybe he's doing some savvy. Yeah, that's kinda there's always a thing with bankruptcy where sometimes it's like just a shrewd business move. He's a former banker, so he's probably a shrewd guy. But let's assume for a second, let's take it at face value. Let's assume for a second it's doing poor Actually, this doesn't even matter. Basically, somebody was bringing up what are these other sort of experiential events that people will go to, pay a hundred bucks to be at. They feel like they got a sort of different experience than they normally get in a weekend and they get a bunch of photos from it. One that I think is interesting because I'm in the world of esports is essentially a tough motor for esports. So most kids play video games, so like more people play Fortnite than play basketball in the world. Uh you know? Yeah. In terms of playing. And so you know, they've seen people compete, they've seen tournaments, but it's very hard to like do your own tournament or have a tournament nearby. Because it takes a lot of overhead to like set up a bunch of computers, get the networking to work, blah, blah, blah. So if somebody did these sort of pop up

Pop up. f you know, like e sport tournaments in the same way that Tough Martyr made it fun and approachable a thing to do with friends. I'd be interested to see if they could take off with it. We wrote about something called Sandbox VR. Have you heard of that? I know about yeah, I know Sandbox V. And uh So explain for somebody who doesn't know. And apologies, the heater's gonna go off just i it'll that'll stop. Yeah, I feel like this room's haunted. What's going on behind me? It's that we have like a the radiator that the building controls, we don't control it. So it's just gonna be for Thirty seconds. Sandbox VR. I think it's only you're only allowed to have six people in a room.

Maybe seven. But you pay a fee of twenty to a hundred dollars and you get to run around in a room playing Oculus games. Right. So the room is like Four walls that are all green screened. It's like a I don't know. Fifteen by fifteen room. And you wear a backpack with a VR headset on.

And you're yeah, they then they create these experiences like and it's a team game. So you'll go in with a bunch of people and it'll be like, Hey, zombies are coming at you guys from all angles. Shoot'em. And then it shows you who's shooting more and who's shooting less. And it's pretty cool. The downside is I think the games are only okay. Yeah, the games are only okay. But the idea's cool. Idea is cool. It's fun to do definitely once. You know, this will get better and this will be a thing down the road.

But for now it's like a novelty. Yes, I agree. So experiences so tough funders going out of business. So but the so I think the e sport one is is interesting because I think that for teenagers who want to do something and I I think I think that

Esport festivals, e sport tournaments where you get to come and experience playing in a competitive tur gaming tournament. That's gonna be bigger and bigger over time. I have two more of those. Yeah, go for it. You went to one, you already know this one. House of ice cream. Some ice cream, yep. They raised Twenty five million dollars at a two hundred million dollar valuation.

A lot of people mock them. Um by the way, I went to it Underwhelming. Underwhelming? Underwhelming. Always a line. There's always a line outside of it. Yeah. Doing phenomenally well. How much you do? I don't know, my friend bought my ticket, so I I don't actually. Yeah, you and Sully and you guys want your kids. Yeah. Yeah, it's always a line. And their real estate's prime time. I don't know if they own that place or they lease it. Yeah, it's a cool idea and there's cool things, but man I was like, Man, they got away with like

Not going I thought it would be like walking into Willie Wonka's factory. I I don't know, maybe my expectation was crazy. I just thought it would be really well done. And it was like No You just felt cramped. Each room is like just like this hot little small thing and then you sort of move on. So basically what it is is it's a sh it's a ten thousand or five thousand square foot room with multiple rooms. It's like a museum. Yeah. But it's all ice cream stuff and you could like play with it. Eat and take photos.

Which is genius. That's genius. Yes. Um another one of those is called um It's based in Arizona. One of my investors invested a lot of money into it. It's called Meow House. I think it's called Okay. The name it has to do with cats. It's either like cat house or Meow House. And so you have to look this up. It's not popular here because basically what they do is I think they raised money at two, three, four hundred million dollar valuation and they're making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And basically what it is is this guy was an artist and he lived in a house full of artists and he goes

We're not making money. We gotta make some money here. Let's do something. And they made their house cool. It's almost like you walked through like a a haunted house where you like would walk through this house and there's like interactive things. Very similar to what you're talking about. But these guys are based in Arizona or Nevada, a place where you can like We get a huge space. And anyway maybe it's called Meow Wolf. Anyway, they do like two hundred million dollars in sales. Wow. Ticket sales. Or multiple houses. I think they only have a few.

They only have a few. But they're huge, but like How much hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of people a year go to them. And they charge thirty dollars or something. Right. And now that I have a kid, my daughter's too young to go to Chuck E Cheese, but my nieces go. And I don't know if you've been to a Chuck E Cheese in like twenty years. A Chuck E cheese is like really garbage now compared to like I guess like at the time trashy. At the time where the standards were, or maybe I was just a kid, it seemed all right. Now that I go back, I'm like, man, this place is trashy. And uh but the need is there for something where kids wanna go

Play games, eat pizza and ice cream, and feel like they're in a mini Disneyland that's nearby your house instead of going to, you know, Florida. Well, David Buster's uh kind of did a good job, but that too is pretty trashy. But I also think that's more adult. I still think the kids, you know, kids need this, kids need a place for birthday parties, that sort of thing. So there's all these other ones. There's like a house of air, which is a trampoline park. If you're like a brick and mortar type of person, I I really believe this out of home entertainment, whether it's like museum by ice cream, whether it's like a new age Chuck E cheese, it just seems like there's a lot of Uh, that amazes me that that Tough Motor went out of business, by the way, because I think they bootstrapped to a hundred million in sales. Yeah, it's very strange. We should look more into it. Should see.

You were talking about privacy companies. Uh I love privacy companies and I'll explain why. Tim Westergen, someone I like and look up to. Started P Pandora. He started Pandora. He was a CEO for a a while. Like he started it. He I asked him what's something that you think is gonna be big soon, and he goes, At Pandora. Well we noticed

And Pandora isn't like a hip company, like average people use it, not like Silicon Valley nerds. And he goes even like Mom's in Missouri, where I'm from. would care about their data and privacy. And I think that's actually really gonna be a big thing. And so what are some companies that are interesting here and w where do you think there's opportunity? VPNs are intriguing to me. I'm also looking for more. I'm really I love this space. I love Duck Duck Go.

Do you use it? I started using it because I did start getting nervous about this. When I heard about Duck Duck Go a few years ago, I thought it was so stupid. Right. I saw their they make all their the the number of searches they get a month they make public. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. They growing like crazy. I love DuckDuck Go, I love VPNs. Other than that, I oh I like privacy.com. Do you know privacy.com? I like privacy.com a lot. I love privacy.com. What else th but there's not that many There's Brave Browser, which is maybe doing okay, it's hard to say. They say good things, but they're basically making a private more a privacy focused browser, a privacy focused search engine. That's DuckDuckGo. A privacy focused sort of like checkout experience. That's privacy.com. So I agree with you that pendulum is swinging back in that direction. People care about the stuff, and if you can make it convenient.

If you can make it easy. To Control the stuff. people will adopt it, but you gotta make it easy and I think that's where you know If you make it hard and expensive

Only sort of the really like conscious folks will do it. Yeah, and the thing that I don't like about this space is the majority of people were like, Yeah, you just sign it for this and then you get all your data and I'm like I uh like I y I don't know what that means, man. You're not making this like Actually apply to my daily life and making me benefit. Right. You're just making me feel a little better, but you're not it's a really hard. Yeah, I yeah, exactly. I think

I don't know where the next sort of opportunity is in this space. If I did I would Yeah, go for it. I'll tell you one. Yeah, go for it. It's still vague, but I think about it a lot. You know Safeway or Kroger or Target. When you type in you know how they ask for your phone number every single time? Why? Why the hell do they do that? Well, they do it Because they want to know all the shit that you're buying and your profile. Right.

And have you read The Power of Habit, that book? Uh no. There's a great story in there about the habits are so ingrained to us that target There was I have no idea if it's true, but the story's cool where a father saw they were getting mailed ads about Pregnancy. Pregnancy. Right. And he was like, My daughter's sixteen, she's not pregnant. I wouldn't know if she's pregnant.

And he went and complained to them and they go, No, no, no, y we think your daughter's definitely pregnant and he finds out a month later that she is in fact pregnant. And Target knew that. So about so anyway, when I think about that stuff, I this is like I said, it's fake. There's gotta be something there's something there that I think about. Yeah, very leaky. You know, people say things like you know, you have to sign this Uh but my signature's everywhere. You can l literally m electronic signature, you can copy paste my signature exactly as as is and and forge me. My credit card is you know, you give it out over the phone sometimes, you put it in every e commerce site. That's like trivial to to sort of like And your email. I don't want to give it to you. And they're like oh shock. They're like we have to I'm like No I don't

Right. Yeah, it's really crazy. And it I feel like there's sort of no going back. You almost have to start the system from scratch again. I should bring on my friend Furcon who he has his own workflow for sort of price uh personal security and privacy. But he's like an extreme. He's a programmer, so he's like, Oh cool. I built this little extension where every time it asked me for my email, it creates a burner email, puts it in there, forwards to my real email. I have a s a separate financial email inbox that only I know about uh so even if you access my personal email, my financial email is your opportunity. And so he wants to like he's like, dude, I think I could charge five bucks a month to just make this workflow like Two clicks for people. I completely agree, and I'll tell you insight with the hustle, we have loads of people that their email will be Sean plus So if you put the plus plus sign a lot of people don't know. So if you put the plus sign in front of a like Sam plus Nordstroms at the hustle dot CO.

Whenever Northstrom sends me an email, I'm gonna see Northstrom in it. And if and if I get a Email from Jake Crew and it says Sam plus Nordstrom and then I'm like Oh, that's where my the leak was. Right, Nordstrom gave him my email. Yeah, we see that all the time for our audience. When they give us emails, it'll be Sam plus hustle at Right. It happens all the time. Private privacy focused uh people there that are doing that's cool proactively. I'm into that. I I yeah, I I and I I'm very into that. And when we asked in the trends group, I think we got thirty replies. It was really cool. I wanted to tell you about something. There's a group of people. That have created a venture fund

Off of the insight that People have this weird attachment to their university. Do you know about these guys? No. So basically I see Instagram ads all the time saying, hey, Tower View Ventures is investing in Duke startups. So Tower View is a a street and a like known building at Duke Campus. So they name it, they they they create all these like subsidiary funds. Uh so the one for Duke and Duke alumni is called Tower View Ventures. It's like, hey, we invest in Duke, you know, Duke related entrepreneurs and companies. We've got, you know, twenty five million in in assets or whatever it is. You can come in for as low as five grand and be an investor in your alumni, you know, fund. And they do this for every un they just programmatically created this for like every university. One company did? One company owns it for all these university funds. They advertise on Facebook. I forgot their parent company name. I'll have to look at it. I think it's a legit V C, but it's just a smart like when you normally want to go raise a fund

Most people stop because they're like, Well, I don't have access to super high net worth people or If I go pitch this, you know, most uh partner most people who invest in V C funds are are uh institutions like pension funds and uh you know you know, school endowments and things like that. And so you know, they're gonna pick the best VCs. They're not gonna pick an up and comer that has no track record. So these guys got really clever and were like, Well, what if we just got like twenty five K or fifty K from all the wealthy alumni of one school? That's how they raise the fund. And then they say they invest in uh entrepreneuri from that school, but I don't know how strict it is. It might just be like Well Sieva did something like this. Yeah. And they would

These guys basically scaled that idea. So s our friend Sieva did this for he you know, he's at Wharton. He created he went to he looked up the Wharton alumni database, which is like public information, basically, for if you go to the school, and just started cold emailing. I was like, hey We are gonna invest in MBA entrepreneurs, you know, business school graduates of Wharton, Harvard, and Stanford. How does that sound? Those guys seem to do pretty well. And uh they raise money from alumni of those three schools. So what these guys did was that

Every school and they did it programmatically through Instagram advantage. So what's the opportunity there? Are you saying Oh, you're saying that's cool. I'm just saying it's cool. Very interesting. I'm I think a very interesting approach to Yeah, very non traditional approach to doing this stuff. So when once I figured out what their model was, I was like oh that's fucking So for anyone who's listening who wants to start a company and raise money, I think the takeaway here needs to be And this is something that it's hard to know your first time. The it is so eas there's so much capital right now going on and so few places to put it. That people are doing these things.

Like I so I think that entrepreneurs, people who want to start a business, they undervalue themselves They don't realize that there's just people seeking out they like we have to put this money in somewhere interesting. Right. And what school did you go to? Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. And who who's like do you know like any of the badasses from that school? One or two. I feel like this is been the reason I thought about this today was'cause Plaid just sold to Visa for six point five billion dollars and the Plaid founder is a Duke undergrad guy. And so I reached out to him and I was just like, Yo, congrats. But really I was just thinking, man, the like

I paid all this money to go to school and I don't care what school you went to, like I think Duke's got a pretty big alumni network that's doing things. But really any school, I guarantee if you're listening to this, you've not tapped into The value you paid for, which was to get the stamp and get basically a free intro, a free foot in the door with anybody who's successful and from that school. I agree with you, but I don't think that that value is high for most schools. So I agree with you that most people aren't Using all their value.

But when I have kids and they get older, I'm gonna tell them, Don't do what I did. You have to either go to a Duke Harvard. You have to go to a top twenty university that has a brand name. Or you have to go to community school or a cheap um state school where you can

Get the experience and grow. If you go to a Belmont University that costs I I got a little bit of a scholarship and I also was lucky where I didn't have to take out debt. If you go to a school like I went to, that's like not even a top one I don't even know if it's top one hundred. It's not good. Right. It costs thirty five grand or forty grand a year. That is not good. Do not do that. That is a horrible decision. So I think it's so and I married a woman who went to an Ivy League school I see the network and I know the network or I don't know your network, but Duke. I mean when I think of Duke, I think of the University of California school system. Totally. I guess my thing is I don't tap into it enough. I think most people don't tap into it at all. And one of the questions I get the most, I think because of the podcast, people are like, Man

Dude see your network is killer. That's why you're able to do XYZ. Bullshit. They don't realize that your network and my network came from cold emailing people. Exactly. I'm like, Oh, you want that network? Here's a trivial way to do it. And and then I still don't do it most of the time, but It's way easier than you think. And of course you gotta ask, like, where did this come from? This didn't just come from nowhere. Like the thing, uh to me, there's two principles on network. One is you gotta be interesting. Like the reason you you know, when the founder of Pandora meets you, sh you know the way you got there was the cold email and people don't realize I call emailed him literally thirty times over a year. Right. And he never answered. Now we're homies and uh w uh me and my wife we got dinner with him. Right.

And so like there's the cold outreach part and there's a science to that and there's a persistence that has to come with that and the volume you gotta do. But on the other side, be an interesting person, like the reason they wanna hang out with you, like yeah, they did the favor after the cold email. It's like all right this guy emailed me thirty times, I'll I'll go talk at HustleCon, but it could have just died there. The reason they like you is'cause you do interesting shit. And you actually do this more than I do. You from the other side of someone who you have young people holler at you and you actually take them under the under your wing way more than I do. You have like a pretty cool alumni network like both ways. Of people who Well yeah, you did this with Michael and a few others, but you have people who email you and you're like, Okay, come hang out Yeah. Like we went to uh we did a Spartan race with those two with that one young guy who

Like you do that all the time. I do it all the time. Uh I do it selfishly. Like I don't like giving back. But a selfish thing is like Young people are more like dynamic, interesting, fresh, and and doing more interesting stuff. And so I need to actively like my my friends are now thirty or thirty one or thirty five or whatever. I need to actively do something if I'm ever gonna hang out with a twenty one year old. Right. And so that's what I try to do. I try to like curate a really well And I asked them like who are you hanging out with? And then we like hang out.

And I that excuse of And this uh leads into one thing I wanna bring up. Well, Sean, your network's really good. It's like Dude, my net it I didn't have a network. I just called email them.

People. I ha in my wedding I had six groomsmen. Like five of'em I met via cold emailing. Right. I met you, we became friends. There's so many people who you know

That you just know through Twitter. Right. It's crazy. People don't understand that. So I organized this thing called the Twitter dinner. Have I told you about this? No, that's awesome. So basically, uh there's a whole bunch of people I followed on Twitter that were interesting and I was like, all right, I'm always just thinking, What's an excuse to hang out with cool people?'Cause that's fun and I'll grow and like doors open when I do that. Twitter. The podcast was one of those. I was like, What's an excuse to I have all these dope people in my life. What's an excuse to hang out with them? Uh what if I did a podcast? Same thing with the Twitter dinner. I hit up all these people. I said, Hey, you know how you follow people who are cool on Twitter, but you've actually never met in real life? I host this thing called the Twitter dinner where I just invite eight people that I think are cool that I've never met, and we all get together for dinner I want you to be at the next one. I think you told me about it, but you told me about it like half an hour ahead of time. Yeah. And so I've done three of these now, and each time it's not only awesome, but everybody's like, Man, thank you for doing this. I also have experienced that where there's

Cool people on Twitter who don't know in real life. No. P no, they pay for themselves. I'm gonna do a Twitter dinner. Good idea. Do you have more ideas? I have two follow up questions. Are you still paying to freeze your sperm I paid to do it and I mailed it too late after I gave the sample and it got denied. Dead sample, okay. So um I'm looking for another place to do it. Yes. Long story short, yeah. Okay. Uh that's my other question. I just wanted just just now. And I like I was an idiot. I like mailed it.

Maybe a Friday. And I didn't realise it had to be a twenty four hour. So I went through the process. Okay, give me your idea. Little

Live podcasts here at this office uh two months ago, maybe a month ago. And someone said something that was very San Francisco and they said like I don't remember exactly, but something to the line of like you gotta be passionate and solve a problem. And you and I both looked at each other like no you don't like or they're like you can't or they said something like you can't just care about money if you want to like really get rich. You gotta like care about like the problem. And I and you and I both looked at each other and we're like, No, that's not true. It's not true.

You can totally do it that way. You can do it that way. But you can also not give a shit and just be the best plumber and make a fuck ton of money. Right. And I thought that was funny. And I was thinking about that last night, and I was like, That was so funny how we both were like uhuh 'Cause we know so many people that just m kill it on random shit. And so I was thinking of things That are not true. That we all say they are because it sounds really good to tweet about it. Great, love this. Okay. I'm excited. Okay, and so there's a few.

The first, which I just mentioned, is passion. Like you have to like You really gotta care about the the uh the problem that you're solving.

So in this list is for things that you can make a mild Amount of money. Okay. So I think that to have the outliers, like the huge ones, I think that a lot of these will not be true. But to like just make it to get your a a really good win. These uh this can happen. You don't have to be that passionate. You really don't have to. The second thing is the best product does not always win.

Oftentimes the things that are Make the most money. They fucking suck. Right. Okay, so your unfortunately your product doesn't actually have to be that good. The third thing, people say you gotta hire the best people.

A lot of times you don't. And if everybody thinks they're doing that, by definition you're not, by the way. Yes. And and look, I'm not saying don't hire the best people you can find. What I'm saying is I have seen proof and I've talked to people that say, I don't do that. And they have made Tens of millions of dollars. So I'm not saying to do this, I'm just saying it is possible. And

There are some people and they're like Man, my team's just okay. Right. We just do it every day and it worked out. Or I just am putting every this whole thing on my shoulders and I'm This is a another good one, design.

A lot of people have slick ass design on their pages and stuff. You'd be shocked. There are so many websites. We you talked about Ramon. W Ramon was on the podcast. Ramon's a guy who had a soap opera. News news website that made I don't know, four hundred thousand dollars a month in profit. Yep.

It was littered with ads. It was not pretty. Right. It was a forty nine dollar WordPress. It was horrible. People freaking loved it. The the customers loved it.

Not the design. We have a friend who's doing a DDC business. I can't say what it is. You know, we'll probably do fifteen million in his first year, a first full year of existence in revenue. Fifte million. And when I looked at the product, I expected, I was like, Oh, well, it's probably so sweetly packaged. The brand is just on point, and that's the innovation. And I looked at it and it looked like You know, uh if you're at a pharmacist, uh you know, in in the back, they have these b you know, these things that are unlabeled. Uh that's how bad the packaging is. It's like you would never expect that this is the brand that's crushing it, and it totally was. It definitely defies that. That assumption. It totally does. Now, I think like to be great to be great, great, great, great, great, like all time great.

You that you do have to have all these. Right. That's the caveat to all these, right? Hiring great people is a great thing. Uh being passionate about what you do is a great thing. Great having great design is a great thing. But what pe what trips people up is they think it is a requirement to success. It is not a requirement. We have seen we have exact examples of That defy those rules. It's like the Black Swan rule. It's like nope You're telling me that's a requirement? Here's an example where we did not have. Okay, so there both this this works in both cases. Sometimes

Which we the same people we're talking about. There are people Who Everyone else who works there is just customer service and just handles busy work and this person does everything and they don't delegate a thing. I we I have seen success to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars this done.

The exact opposite. has been true as well, which is I just came up with the idea and I had either had a little money or convinced people to do it and I delegated it all and I just check in with them weekly and I focus on other stuff. That has worked wonderfully as well. Right. A lot of people don't understand that. I didn't understand that. When I f started my company, I thought I had to do everything. Now I realize Oh my God, the business can keep growing. I actually don't Like I don't need to be involved as much as I thought. Right. Or

You know what I mean. Okay, and the final thing is brand. Okay, so branding and You would be shocked. Like everyone thinks that brand means it's gotta look a certain way. Or it's got a feel. They're like, I care about the user experience. I know so many people that go, No, fuck that. Like it looks fine, but I'm just when I when people sign up to buy my product and they don't buy and they give me their email.

I'm gonna blitz them with emails and email fucking five times a day. And like they don't give a shit about user experience. Oftentimes in these cases it works. Right. People are shocked by that. It's so but this is a very like It uh come from a place of fear. So I'll tell you one blog post that uh explains why these are true. Have you ever read this blog post by this guy, Paul Bukhite, he's the creator of Gmail. I know who he is, but I've not read the blog post. The bl the blog post is called If You're Great, You Don't Have to Be Good.

And what he said he he gives the example of Apple. He's like, uh when the iPad came out. And he shows the links of people who just bashing the iPad when they announced it on stage. They were like, Oh my God, this thing, it's a it's a tablet, but it doesn't have you can't do multitask. It doesn't have a USB port, uh, it doesn't have a keyboard, it doesn't have like a this attachment, it doesn't do this, it doesn't do that. And he's like The iPad does a couple of things really great. He's like it's super lightweight. It's basically like a browser. So you can just like browse the internet on the on you know on this little thin device and it you know, one other thing. And he's like when we made Gmail, same thing. Everyone said when we were launching Gmail, dude, you gotta have an address book. Of course you gotta have a contact book that's really good. It's gotta be great, blah, blah, blah. Didn't even have the feature at launch. He's like, Well, we we decided we're gonna be great at three things for Gmail. We're gonna be blazing fast, we're gonna be unlimited storage, and we're gonna have threaded conversations. And he's like, We're gonna be great at those three things and we're gonna be literally non existent or dog shit at the rest. And he's like, When you're great at the right things, you don't even have to be good at the other things. That's cool.

And uh I love that. And if you're designing a product or a business, you overthink it often and say I need to be great at all these things. All these things sound important. Branding sounds important. Marketing sounds important. Product sounds important. Engineering sounds important. Oh, I gotta, you know, my back office has to be important. And reality is pick a couple of things that you need to be great at to your customers and internally and you don't even have to be good at the rest. And that's really hard to Take that advice because you're like you just have

Like you have to say, like, I know this one part sucks. I'm gonna let it suck. And that's hard for a lot of people'cause I get Fearful. But it is very true. And If you like

Go to the top of the Fortune five hundred. you go to like the top ten brands and like of course Apple, their products actually are great. Most people think they're great. Their brand is great. They're very thoughtful. But go all the way down to like maybe a fortune one thousand and look between five hundred and a thousand or Even like the top twenty, but not the top ten, and you'll be like, Man, H P like it's not that good. Right.

Or like like but so why does it exist? Like and you're like they're just Kinda good at a bunch of stuff. Right. Okay, I want I'm gonna hand you my phone. This is in line with what you're talking about. Trying to be great, not good here. So I want you to just click go. I I typed in the address already. So I we over the weekend we made a website, my first million podcast dot com. And we've been talking about no code. We went to the extreme of no code. So what you're seeing when you go to this website is a very

Uh is the extreme hack. So we were trying to make a website. This is a Google this is a Google site. It's a notion it's a notion doc. That's awesome. So we were trying to make a website and we were like, Oh, should we use you know Should we hire a programmer? I had a bunch of people reach out to the podcast being like, I'll do this for free for you. We could have used a WordPress guy, an upworker. I was like, No, no, even simpler. Should we use webflow? Should we use a no code tool? I was like, No even simpler. We basically had already in Notion this like Notion's like a document editor type thing, like a text edit. Just like a sauna. Yeah, it's just like a this is literally like a word pad, an Evernote. And so we went in Notion, we already had like an outline of what we wanted the website to be, and I was like

What if this was just a website? Can we make our website just load this? Because this is super easy to edit. I've wanted something like this forever. And so we found a w I I tweeted the founder of Notion. I was like, Hey, can I do this? Can I make a website? That's my domain name, but it just loads a no a Notion page. He's like, No, we can't do that yet. I found a workaround online that let us do this. So over the weekend we built this where now My First Million podcast. Check it out. It's so B it's so budget, but it's so amazing. Dude, this is better than a lot of websites. I I agree. I agree.

And so it has like the embedded player, it has the transcripts of the podcast, it has like I shortlist like my favorite episodes, like stuff like that. That's better. And it was so easy and like literally zero code. Yeah, and I just hate when people say the excuse of I gotta hire a designer, I gotta do this like You don't. Right.

That looks good, I think. I actually Think that looks great and that will work really well. But I was thinking about that time when someone said it to us, and you and I completely looked at each other and were like uh uh

That's not true. Like I could give you ten examples of people who show that that's not true, and I felt like we were crushing his soul a little bit. And uh I almost felt bad, but I'm like, just so you know that's not true. Yeah, because if you come to the live show, it's like I look up to these people, I kinda wanna hear, you know, things that are in line with me. And I think he looked at us and was like, Oh now that doesn't mean you should like if you have those, I actually think you will be better. Of course. But you actually plus if your goal is to like I I you could make billions of dollars actually just being I Totally.

I the w the way I look at it is you gotta bring energy to whatever you do. So if you're gonna do something, you definitely have to have the energy and enthusiasm to push. Uh, but for some people that energy enthusiasm comes from being really passionate about the problem. For some people it comes from I just like business. For some people it's like I want this type of lifestyle and I'll run through anything. If it gets me this lifestyle of Financial freedom. I don't care what's giving you the energy, you just gotta have the energy. And

It actually oftentimes doesn't even matter matter what problems you're solving because or if you're even solving a problem. I know a a a handful of people and they make twenty million dollars a year off these scammy bull shit. I think they provide no value and I would never do it'cause I think it's stupid, but they crush it financially. And it's like a click to download our toolbar and install it in your browser. And they're like, Yeah, we do twenty million dollars in sales with three employees. And I'm like, Yeah, you're you're if that's what you care about, you totally can do it by doing this bullshit arbitrage. Right.

Yeah, there's many ways. And I'd actually sho I'm not hating on it. I think it's stupid, but I don't hate them for doing it. Um there's this great company that I like called the Wonderful Brands. Do you know them? No. Stewart and Linda Resnick, they're in their late eighties.

They own Fiji water. They own Um That palm drink. Oh no, what's that drink? It's like pomegranate juice. Oh the palm, yeah, yeah. The palm. And then they own Pasta like a pistachio brand that you've maybe heard of. And then they own like twenty that you probably don't even know what they are.

And the way that they got started was they started selling like memorabilia, like those fifty dollar like quarters that like Or like it's like a President Trump wasn't elected in two thousand sixteen. Here's a memorabilia coin. A fifty dollar quarter. Um that's how they got their start that's how they started making it. And they still do that. And looking at all their brands, these are great brands. So they have the halos, oranges, fee water, palm, pistachios, almonds, these two wine things. This is great. Yeah, and when they first start they're billionaires. When I think they're the they got in trouble because they're they're in the news because they you were using too much water for their almond farms. During a drought in California. And

I started reading about'em and I'm like, Okay, these brands Fiji Water, that's a good brand. But I started reading about their other brands and how they got started, I'm like These are all just okay. But these this family's worth like five billion dollars. Right. And it

that's kinda when I originally started. I'm like, Man, you don't actually have to do like Y y you don't gotta build the Facebook or you don't have to build like an Apple. Like you can build like pretty okay stuff, but be really savvy at operations and also have high perseverance. And do it for fucking Forty years.

Yeah, yeah. And I if if I'm reading you right, you're saying this not because you're s you're not trying to say build shitty products. What you're trying to say is Don't overthink it. There's A whole bunch of things that you can do to win and you don't have to do all of them at the A plus level in order to win. We know successful cases where You have to get some things right.

But not all There are a thousand different ways to get it done. And what a lot of people tell you is you have to have a product that's ten times that's what Sam Altman from Y Commerce says. Your product has to be ten times better. No, it doesn't have to be. Maybe the likelihood of succeeding Or like being a huge outlier will be higher if it is ten times better.

But there are examples of something being actually worse. But it wins. Right. And I just don't want people to take and I have taken I ex just accepted everything that I read. And now that I'm I've been around a little bit, like experience a little bit more with business, I'm like That's wasn't true. I wish I didn't believe that. And a lot of my friends who didn't believe it I are better off.

I o I'm always wary of advice where if you just looked at the person giving it And if they say this, do they look better as a per as a human? Right. Like does this signal does this virtue signaling them to look better? Because I always discount that advice. And if I hear the opposite, if I hear someone advocate for something that I'm like, wow, that actually doesn't make them seem more virtuous and good and sort of holier than thou. I sort of elevate I'm like, wow, if they were brave enough to say this, they must really believe this, because it's not benefiting them from a signaling perspective. It is only benefiting them because they just think it's freaking true. I had a guy at HustleCon who had a huge company that you mo many people don't know And his talk was all about his employees and how he empowers his team. And afterwards he came off stage, I was like I know you. You're really aggressive and a lot of your employees hate you. Why did you say that? And he said, um

Because that's I think that's what people will want to hear and it will make my employees feel good. And I was like, Do you really believe that? He goes. I definitely believe it, but not as much as I he's like no, I'm way aggressive and I just want to fucking win. And I was like

Man, I wish we we we missed a mark on that one. We should have been honest and like told the truth. I think people would appreciate that. But if he thought that and he he only told me'cause he knew me So many more people would think that. Right. Cool. You got any other uh I'll save the rest. We'll we'll we could talk about the Casper S one another time. Okay. We're back next week. Oh if you happened to listen to this whole thing Maybe we could do a tweet about it. We know how many people listen to the whole thing. We're gonna consider doing these daily or more often than weekly. And I would like to hear people's I think we're also gonna bring in some guests to do this with us. Uh to do the brainstorms with us. So I've ha I've been having a lot of fun with these, and what I realized is the interviews with guests are good. Like

I the last one we did with a peak design guy, I think, was actually a really good like story and interview. But they like these the most and I actually think it'd be fun to bring in some people who either already were on the podcast or Forget telling your story, just come do the brainstorm. And Well,'cause you can just give like a three minute background. Like this person does this, they do this. Right. So what do you I'm gonna what do you think about this? You know, like you can like cool. That's it. We're done.

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