#122 - Not Getting These Jobs Cost Us Millions

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like no day song On the roadless travel never looking back Alright, we're Gucci. What's up, Sam? How are you? Hey. We are checking in with him. The summary it seems like is we

Except for Sean, many of the crew is gonna be in Austin in the next Two weeks. Three weeks. Yeah, that's exciting. I'm kind of rooted in here now. So my my own family lives here, so I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna move for like tax reasons or whatever reasons. I wanna be around my family. If your family's not here, then there's no point being in the Bay Area right now. I think that what I've learned doing this whole Airbnb thing.

I'm in Nashville now. I was in Utah. I was in all these places. Having your family and friends around you is significantly better than being in a cool place by yourself. For sure. Absolutely. People always ask me because I I lived in all these different cities where I think I've lived in like 10 or twelve different cities around the world, whatever Jakarta and and Australia and stuff like that. And uh people are like, Oh, which one was your favorite? It doesn't matter. It's just based on like who my four friends were when I was there. That dictated my whole experience. It's like city's fine, you know. You lived in China. I would be interested in China. I would be really interested right now in moving to Japan for a little while, even if I didn't know anyone. I think the Japanese are so cool.

You you didn't live in Japan, did you? No, but when I l lived in and Beijing I played sports and the weird thing when you go to international school, I didn't realize this, but you don't like play sports against other schools locally. You play against other international schools. So when we would we'd have like a away game, we would go to Osaka and we would go play against the Osaka international school or we'd go to the Philippines for an away game. And you would go and you actually live with the family of the player on the other team. So you live with them and then you play against them in their Two or three times and you fly back together. It's like an amazing thing.

So last episode. You said something that shocked me. You said You referred to corona as like the Chin Chinese virus and you made a couple of slights towards China. You've lived in China. Are you anti China? No, I was mocking I'm anti Trump. I was just mocking Trump.

How long did you live in China? Two years. So like we're not talking about the Chinese, obviously. We're not talking about the people in general, because obviously of course you're not anti that. But are you I just come out as racist on this episode. I'm like yeah, I haven't told you guys yet. But are you um Are you uh

I mean I'm I'm relatively anti-Chinese. I had a same thing same thing I was saying earlier. I had a amazing time when I lived in Beijing because I had amazing friends and we had a blast. Were they Chinese or international students? They were other international students at that school, some of which were Chinese and some of which were from Sweden and other places. If I was gonna go live somewhere, I'd never go live in Beijing, right? It's like super crowded, super polluted. There's no like natural beauty really in the in kind of the surroundings, no like kinda oceans or beaches or or or mountains to then you can really See or speak of the And like the food is hard, the language is hard, like it's just it's like a not an easy place to go live, whereas like Australia was like

completely pleasant and easy and like it felt like a vacation. So I would be anti going and living in China again unless I had a really strong reason to, but I had a blast when I was there just'cause of my kind of social situation. When uh Covid started getting popular in December I had this Chinese intern Name Hung, who worked for us. And

In December he was like Man, my parents live outside of Wuhan and they're telling me about how bad this is. It's gonna come. It's gonna be here. I go, Huh. Okay, whatever. And then in January he goes. It's so bad. It's gonna be here. I go hung.

This is America, okay? We don't have SARS and bird flu. We don't do this. We don't wear masks. That's a Beijing thing. And then You were right about that. We don't wear masks. And then in uh February, he goes, It's here. Watch. It's gonna shut it down and I go, Whatever, you're so wrong. And then finally in March I was like hung.

I'm sorry. You were you were so right. And he would tell me he goes, My mom and dad are texting me from Wuhan, they're telling me all about it. I go Whatever, dude. It's like a the cult. It's like a call. And anyway, it was pretty funny. So we like he totally like predicted this. You want to get into some ideas? I am scared. Oh love it.

I can see you you're you added a bunch. All right. Give me one. Okay, so I got into this idea of tiny homes. I've been very fascinated with it. It's not like a particularly new thing. When I was younger we'd call'em trailer homes'cause that's what my grandparents lived. They lived in a trailer home. It was just a Home map. was prefabbed, pre made, and they dropped it off on a trailer and it was just

It's kinda like what poor we were poor. It was a poor person thing. Now I think that these are gonna get quite big and a new startup called a Bodu. A Badu A B O D U. They just raised uh a few million dollars. A bunch of these tiny home businesses have raised a few millions of dollars. And now that I'm

Thinking about like homes. It seems like a pretty interesting alternative. You can buy a five hundred to fifteen hundred square foot modular home. And it's kind of a cool idea. And I've actually met people who are buying plots of land and putting it on outdoorsy and they're like making money off of it. And now I'm like, man, I should do that with one of these modular homes. And and here's why. There's this new startup called Getaway. Have you heard of Getaway? No.

Collectively, Getaway uh looked this up, but Getaway I think has raised forty million dollars and I've had family that have went and stayed at it and they love it. It's a tiny home. in a small plot of land outside of New York City, outside of Austin, outside of San Francisco, outside of Chicago, whatever the popular cities are, and millennial people go and they get away from the city and they spend two hundred dollars a night or whatever it is. And It's like a cute Instagram home.

Right. They're doing well. And anyway, I think this is a really interesting market and I'm I love it. I like this one as well. I also I like how when you go to Getaway.com it's like escape from. Like that's instead of like where you know like where you travel from. It's like escape from Atlanta, escape from Boston, escape from New York. Yeah, we've seen this trend. There's also rent the backyard. So I think it's it looks like Ubodu and Rent the Backyard are doing the same thing, which is their pitch is not like outdoorsy or whatever. Theirs is put a little prefab unit in your backyard. You know, your own little in law unit that you can use to live in or rent out.

And um So you can turn your backyard into an Airbnb without having guests come into your house. And we've actually written about this on trends. I mean we wrote about it. When did we write about this? We wrote about this September two thousand twenty. So somewhat recently, very recently. And um we were looking at uh back link data. Where we were looking at searches, so it was something like a quarter of a million people were searching for modular homes a month. There's Duelito, which is an online marketplace for modular homes recently launched. There's just a bunch of interesting stuff about these modular homes. We call'em the cute name for millennials or young people, Gen Z is Tiny homes, but

Where I grew up we call them trailer homes. I think this is so cool. Maybe I should do it. Buy a plot of land in Austin and get one of these modular homes. I think you can get a mortgage on them too. Yeah, they're not that expensive. How much are they? I think they're like hundred grand, fifty grand, less? Two hundred thousand dollars for this new startup one. And if you look at Dualito, it looks like these are like eighty grand, uh, roughly. I was attracted to this is you know Kid Rock. you know Kidrack. I remember reading this article about him when it was pretty funny. He bought this huge plot of land in rural Alabama on a lake and it was like beautiful plot of land. He's like I just wanted to get away because he lives in Nashville. He's like I just want to get away and have my own plot of land and he goes I was going to build this big old house And I was just driving on the road and I seen a trailer park Like a modular home salesperson.

Like a lot that sold them and he goes, I'll just buy one of them. to put on my land while I wait for my home to be get built. And he put this fifteen hundred square foot Trailer home there. And he was like Living in it and he's like.

Oh, this is great. This is perfect. I don't need anything else. I don't need any more space. This is exactly what I need. And I was like, damn, that actually is pretty cool. Maybe we should do that. I'm with you. I like this trend. Personally, I wouldn't build in this in this space because I don't know enough. And I just think that it's like There's an authenticity that comes from people who really like this lifestyle or have a background in this lifestyle or want this lifestyle. So I personally wouldn't build in it. What do you think are do you think there's any opportunities here? So what where would you get let's say you're like like you you're into this trend. So you're like, okay. I might buy one of these. And live in it slash rent it out. So that's like a simple opportunity. Would you start a startup in this space? What do you think are some of the open open opportunities? Yeah. So there's a couple. The first is backyard offices.

That is very, very cool to me. There was this company. Call the Phone booth, maybe? Ryan launched this guy Ryan Peterson from Flexport actually launched it on the side and they made it foam booths. For your office, because those are really expensive. And then when Covet hit, I think he was like, Oh, let's just make backyard offices. So I think backyard offices are amazing.

I think I would totally invest in that space or if I didn't have a job I would For sure be interested in that. I think that there's Always like I don't want to sound like some startup douchebag and be like, Oh, this is totally new. This is like I said, this is trail a trailer home. This is not new. But I think there's a lot of money to be made in

repackaging something in on an old thing cute. Yeah. I think there's a lot of opportunity there just to start one of these businesses. Yeah, I like it. Uh I like backyard offices. I think that's pretty pretty smart because that what you could do there is basically You could have one and then you could make it a co uh you know, a mini distributed co-working space. You could sell the the backyard office. And then you could basically make it where you have the outdoorsy type of landing page. Where somebody can come and search for a backyard office near them that they can go work out of. And uh you can turn people into little mini we work, you know, landlords.

I also need to check my perspective. I don't know if it's because I'm doing it and therefore I think everyone's doing it. And I don't know if it's because I'm Where these like yuppie uh city dweller startup nerds and a lot of people are doing it. But

I do think that there's this idea of people our age or younger not wanting to permanently live somewhere and not wanting to buy a home and not wanting to own a lot of stuff. Yeah, I think there's in general been a move towards rent versus own, not just in terms of housing, but like Why would I own a car when I can just Uber on demand and use get what I need when I need it and then not own it after that, not owning stuff. Uh but in general, I just think there's so there's just so many people, right? So like if you're in this lifestyle category, there's plenty of others that are in that category, even though I'm the opposite, right? Like got a kid, you know, I'm not trying to be moving every three weeks. Like I'm living the exact opposite lifestyle as you.

But it doesn't really matter. There's a lot of people like me, and there's a lot of people like you, and there's a lot of people in all these other categories too. There's enough that you can serve them, and that actually is where some of the opportunity comes is where Somebody's doing a generic catch all solution and you say, huh, I'm gonna build for this lifestyle segment. I think there's a lot of people who are like me who who wanna do this. I agree. And then for the listeners and you, Sean, there's this town that I I almost invested a small amount of money in and I didn't do it. It's called Cero Gordo. C E R R O Space G O R D O Cero Gordo.

And Nathan Barry, the guy who owns Convert Kit. A few of my friends that I've just met over the years. Just internet entrepreneur type folks, Ryan Holiday. Do you remember a ghost? It went viral in two thousand thirteen or fourteen. It was a ghost town that went viral on all the blogs and it said you can now buy ghost town in California for one point two million dollars. Do you remember that? No, but I've I heard about it later. I I didn't hear about it at the time. So my friend Ryan and all these guys, my friend John was like the ringleader, him and Brent, and they were trying to get like ten thousand to twenty five thousand dollars ahead and we were all gonna pitch it and buy this town and I backed out.

But a lot of people did it and they bought this ghost town and it's like four hundred acres. It's like four hours from LA and it's very hard to get to, but it's beautiful. It's so beautiful. And there's it's an old ghost town from the nineteen Probably eighteen eighties is when the it was built. And uh it's so beautiful and pretty. Well anyway, the guy named Brent Brent runs this thing called the Daily Stoic with Ryan Holiday. It's a cool business. He has been living there, I think, for the whole bit of Covid. So starting in March, he went out there.

And he's currently retrofitting it by himself in the middle of nowhere, turning it into like a getaway town. That people can rent. And I think it's really interesting and fun. And he has a YouTube channel that you guys should all check out and you could watch it in real time of what he's doing. It's so fascinating. This is amazing. I love the story and

I wanna go watch that. And see What's going on? You haven't been there yet. No, but John Byer who has asked me to come on this podcast. We'll have to get him on. He's been asking me constantly, but did you see the photos of what this place looks like? Well I see the photos where it was like a ghost like I see these black and white photos. I don't know what it looks like now. So one of the places burned down, unfortunately, but this guy It's such a like romantic story. Is that him?

Brent Underwood. Yeah. So he's Ryan Holiday's business partner. Ryan Holliday's an author who does all the stoicism stuff. Brent is his partner. And they have good uh good little business, whatever. This is like his vocation now. He's like dedicated to restoring this town and he's doing it live on YouTube and you could watch him do it and his YouTube videos probably have millions of views. And the day that they're able to host people there for money, he's gonna knock it out the park. This is amazing. Uh also a quick update. Remember we talked about

Um Nathan Resnick from Sourcify doing the bubble hotels. Which I bailed on. So this guy, Nathan, he has his business. He pitched a hotel business Where it was like a bubble that you could rent. And it's pretty cool, but I didn't think he was gonna focus on it full time, so I bailed. But go ahead. So the Indiegogo campaign just launched. So they had this idea of the bubble hotels is these cool like sort of like glamping This camping experience that you're in this like little bubble dome kind of thing instead of a tent.

And you know, you get to sleep under the stars and it's like in Joshua Tree. It's amazing. So he just launched his Indiegogo and goal was twenty five thousand and he's at two hundred eighty six thousand. I checked it last night. It was at like a hundred and fifty thousand or something like that. So you had like a hundred thousand dollars today so far on this thing. So it looks like it's got a lot of momentum and basically he's pre-selling like And he's basically gonna bootstrap and fund pre sale and fund This entire hotel in Joshua Tree, which I think is kind of amazing.

So the way that I would think about this is There's this idea called um I'm stealing it from someone. I didn't invent this called the four fits. Which is a growth th this idea for ideating a company. And the guy who invented it, his name's Brian Belfort, he helped make HubSpot popular.

And he has this thing called um Channel market fit. Not product market fit. And channel market fit basically just says You need to think about where's your product gonna get popular and then adapt your product. to fit that pot like where you can get popular. And when I think of this bubble hotel

We all think the same thing, which is Instagram and Pinterest. This is gonna be so easy to get customers. Well, here's another kind of like channel market fit example. The music industry is changing because of TikTok. To make like shorter catchier songs, the average song length has actually gone down. Why? Because Spotify just pays you per stream, not per minute streamed. So instead of five minutes for a song, they're doing two and a half minutes per song because why would I want a long song?

And uh the second thing is TikTok. So a lot of songs are now being written. Working backwards from okay, if this was gonna go viral on TikTok, how would I do it? Well, I need to make it have a dance baked into it. So the song is saying like put your right foot up, you know what I mean? Like they're trying to engineer the song so that it's gonna spread on TikTok. And I think that's a great example of channel market fit. I think that's the that's like a very simple way to understand the importance of what that is. What else you got? You have uh okay, I have one here. So I saw a tweet from somebody whose Twitter handle is Tommy. I don't know who this is. This is T O M I

Okay, no bio, but at T U M I. And um the tweet said You know, what what like it's kinda about the stock market, right? So the stock market Most people. Who invest in companies they will invest

You're not in just investing in what's a great company. You're investing in What will the market think of this company? So it's called a like a Keynesian beauty contest. You are judging the beauty of an asset. Not based on how beautiful it is to you, but how beautiful you think it will be to the other judges of the contest. And so that's how the stock market works.

And so Tomy had this tweet, which was just like, you know, what if there was a market where you can bet on the fundamentals instead of the price? So instead of investing in Tesla today, because I think that Tesla has all this like retail momentum and price is gonna go up. If I was just betting on How many cars will get bought by Tesla in the next six months? And if I'm right, I get paid. And if I, you know, so it's like over or under this number.

And if it's over, then I'm right, but I but it's on the fundamentals. It's on real world. business metrics and not perception and kind of like random price fluctuations based on investor moods. I think this is kind of cool. Yeah, maybe there's something like this that already exists. But I actually provocative like

simple idea that to me has legs. This is sort of like what we talked about with the long-term stock exchange. as like, oh, this is a cool different model for how a company might want to might want to be listed where it's not subject to the swings of the moods of the market. What do you think of this? I think that you love these ideas and I struggle to grasp them because they're very innovative and they're very not

Straightforward. To me that's hard to understand. Can you explain to me more? So let's say the hustle. Let's say the hustle is a publicly listed company. Instead of people betting on the hustle based off of instead of buying your stock because I think your stock price is gonna go up and I think it's gonna go up because other people are gonna buy it and you know, you're gonna announce some new products and all this good stuff. If it was literally just a prediction market that says Will the hustle have over or under fifteen million dollars in revenue? And then you just say like this year, for example. It is a verifiable, measurable

uh metric. And if I am bullish, then I think the hustle's got a great team. I think this product they launched is gonna do really well. I think they're gonna go over. I can bet on the over. And somebody else can bet on the under. And then I can make money. On the hustle, you know, as a prediction market rather than as a stock market. How is this any different than just gam I mean, this is just gambling. It's gambling, but it's gambling on the outcomes of companies rather than on horses or sports. Right. You can't do this today. You know, so it's an old solution to sort of an old problem in a way. But then why wouldn't I just buy stock in Tesla if I'm betting. So so this is the big gripe a lot of people have about Tesla, because they're like

Okay. Tesla can literally report a bigger loss this quarter and the stock goes up and they're like what the fuck? What is going on? Like did you not read the numbers? Like just because Elon Wenton did a cool presentation about some You know, self driving and he says it's gonna be here by Christmas and everyone goes and buys it like It would have been better if you could actually smoke weed on Joe Rogan. Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Why is the price fluctuating based on these things rather than how many cars got bought?

And um, you know, it and so you don't want to value the whole company on that, right? Because there is a Some companies have such high prospects that you'll you'll say, Okay I will bet that in the future they'll be worth more than they're producing today. So it's not like you you don't want their valuation to be based on it, but it would be nice to be able to just bet on this, which I think crypto is trying to do in a way there's these different prediction market things that are really complicated and I like that.

I think it's cool. I'm into it. I think that's pretty innovative and pretty interesting. That's cool. I think that's a it's a hard ass business to make happen because you have to Yeah, I don't even want to talk about it'cause I'm so Ignorant, but I guess you just have to be really good odds makers, or do you Well yeah, so you you could you could be odds makers or the marker will also settle, right? So if a whole bunch of it's just like normal odds. So a bookie tries to place the n place the bets, place the odds at a marker that will draw action.

And then it corrects. So if everybody's betting the over. Then the lo the num the number goes up, right? Automatically. So then less people start bringing them over because the number went up. And so you so you would just need to do that just like a normal betting service. That's interesting. Who's this Tommy guy? I have no idea. There's no bio and uh but got a four letter handle with a verified check. And fifty thousand followers. So probably this idea can't be. This idea could go viral and I would do it immediately if I was g ever gonna do it because the Robin Hood nerds who are Into this shit are like rabid right now.

Right. Uh which is hilarious. There's a great little blog post, by the way. That I recommend you check out. There's this guy, he actually works at Amazon. He writes this thing called the flywheel. It's a sub stack. He did this great article about breaking down the Robin Hood business model. Check it out. Like I do you know how I think you know this, but I would say most people don't. Do you know how Robin Hood makes money? No, I I don't I don't know anything about They came out and they were like, you know, free trades, right? That was like kind of like the initial thing. It was like, Oh, wow, you're you're a man of the people. Thank you. You're giving us free trades while those other guys gouge us. And so then the question was like, okay, well, how are you going to make money if you offer free trades?

They do is this thing, I forgot what it's called exactly. It's called payment forward order flow or something like that. Which basically is When you place a Trade. They basically sell that trade data information. in real time to hedge funds and quantitative traders who want to know what retail buyers are trying to do. So if a whole bunch of people, average people with you know, thousand dollars in their Robinhood account.

or going and buying Tesla because they saw some good news today or or whatever from Elon. Before that trade gets executed, the order flow is sold to hedge funds and um quantitative traders. Who want to front run the market. So they want to actually go place a bunch of bids before that retail trader's bid even gets placed. And there's a small pennies that they can sort of take per trade as an advantage by having that advanced information by front running. So

I'm not criticizing them, but on first instinct my bullshit detectors alarm just goes off so hard where I'm like Ch like why overcomplicate things? Why like can that actually work? Why not just charge the retail investor money? Because their hook to get users was hey, it's free to trade here, right? That's how they grow. Yeah, but my whole thing What I thought they were gonna do was just do that for a while and then be like, all right, now we're charging you money. No, because this is more lucrative. They made like two hundred million dollars last year on order flow data. It's crazy. So they make seventy percent of their revenue or something like that from this payment order flow. If you look, it's kind of they get criticized because The traders, the buyers of this data, they'll pay more for options trades because options trades are usually like these high leverage, high risk trades.

And so an option trade is worth more than let's say if I'm just buying Apple stock. Buying Apple stock doesn't really that data is kind of useless. But if people are buying option trades on small stocks, that data is actually really important because you can swing a small stock or you can kind of make more on these high volatility stocks than you can on. random Joe buying 10 shares of Apple. That data's worthless. So the reason this gets criticized is if you go in the Robinhood app. The button to like buy options is above the button to just buy the normal stock, I think. And so because'cause you know, their business model depends on more people buying options. So they'll do like, hey, you want to buy options? Most people don't even know how to how to buy options. It's like most people don't even know what the fucking option is. You know what's funny? I I don't know what an option is. I have a very loose understanding. I've I've made and lost a few thousand dollars doing it, but just for fun, but like I don't I don't try to do this.

But what they do is they're like, hey, you can already borrow this much margin, right? Because for an option trade, you put down a dollar, but you're buying or selling four dollars worth of the stock or ten dollars worth of the stock. And so that loan essentially that you're taking, Robinhood is like pretty f happy to give those out because they want more people doing options training. Do you think that Robin Hood is a net positive or net negative to the world and do care? I don't care. At all. I think it's

Like everything it's got positives and negatives. I don't know where that's out. It's hard, hard to say. If I was gonna bet, I would say It nets out positive because I think that I'm of the mindset that look It's on the person, not the platform, to make decisions for themselves. And if people go and they make bad decisions, like I don't blame the casino. For people losing money gambling. I'd like to agree with you, but that doesn't mean I want to support it. Yeah, sure. You know, that's a that's a personal so I don't know. I would invest in Robinhood, for example, like

I would have no problem investing in Robin Hood, just like I'd have no problem investing in a casino. Speaking of investing and making money, let's play a game. It's gonna call How much money would I have made if I weren't an idiot. Okay. In two thousand and eleven, I emailed the CEO of I forget who, the founder, one of the founders, Joe Gebia. A bear being B.

And I somehow got an interview, yada yada yada. I got offered a job, I think it was June two thousand twelve. I actually and then the day before I was supposed to start, they took my They fired me because I had a criminal record and I wasn't truthful about it. And they found it on a background check.

I wasn't not truthful. It's I was still on trial. For a reckless driving ticket. And They found out. How much money would I have made if Airbnb when Airbnb goes public in two thousand and twelve? I think I would have been the three hundredth employee. So I don't think significant, but maybe significant. So you do you remember your job offer?'Cause they would have said like here's how much stock you got. Do you have like an email that's like here's the stock you got, here's the strike. I can go No, I've deleted it. I I

Yeah, I know. It was because I was using I was using um GoDaddy as like my email service provider. And like They have like a

One gigabyte limit. I can maybe find it. I was twenty one or twenty two, so I uh I think I was using my Belmont University Student ID or whatever. Anyway.

I think I was getting paid an hourly rate of twenty five dollars an hour and I don't think I would have gotten Stock. But I think I would have eventually when I got that job, my mom and dad were like What is Airbnb? This sounds like a scam and does it have health insurance. You know, I didn't know anything about anything, but If I got in there, I probably would have figured it out. You think I would have made money off this?

For sure. Um If you had stayed. No, you might have gotten itchy and left. So I think that's always a piece of it. I had a very similar situation. I think I've told the story where I just pulled up the email, so September twenty twelve.

I did the first job interview I've ever done in my life. I've only done I think like probably three total in my life. And this one was with Stripe. So Stripe in twenty twelve. So basically I interview because I thought, hey, Stripe, this seems like an awesome company. I think this company's gonna do well. I interview and I I reach out and the guy who gets my email to reach out. Turns out like on my uh resume that I had sent in, I had like a few references. I was like this guy's my mentor.

And he was like, that guy's my mentor too. I call him. And he speaks extremely highly of you. And this guy, this mentor guy, loved me. Like he put a blog post out that said. This guy has the highest bias to action of any entrepreneur I've ever met, or something like that, or any entrepreneur I've met in the last five, 10 years. So I had like the shoe-in of shoe-ins and then I like totally blew the interview. Like they had this, you know, test of like kind of like sell me this pen and I fucked it up. I think I've told the story before, so I'll skip it now, but I think at that time I don't know what stripe would have been worth. I have it. I have it up. Okay. So what what month was your um September.

Okay, in February nine, two thousand twelve, they raised eighteen million dollars at a hundred million dollar valuation. I don't know if they raised immediately after that, but let's just assume that It was a hundred million dollars. What are you saying worth now? So they're worth about thirty five billion now. So three hundred fifty X. So

Let's pretend a hundred thousand dollars worth of uh a stock, you know, round math, uh, you know, there's dilution and there's there's all kinds of other things, but that's thirty five million dollars right there. Which is like, you know, if I had worked there for four years. would have, you know, got my whole grant and probably like you know, like if I was doing well, I would've been getting promoted and getting new grants along the way. So like It is reasonable to believe, let's just be conservative, it's reasonable to believe I could have made ten million dollars off that job. If I think they had like I wanna say forty employees at the time, but I don't I don't know. I can't remember for sure.

It might have been like a hundred forty or something. Okay, so I don't feel as bad as mine. I just Googled mine in October two thousand twelve, Airbnb had a valuation of two point five billion. So they're already. big, but if they go public at fifty, that would be um Twenty X. So low seven figures. I think if you worked there that whole entire time, I think you personally wouldn't have made ten to twenty.

Yeah, which is crazy'cause uh that job wasn't like some sick job. It was like I was gonna be like a biz dev person on the like sales t outbound sales team or some some shit like that. Like Yeah, but what would happen is you would have gotten in there, you probably would have excelled and then you would have climbed your way up. That's what I I would like to think. I think probably I would have just stayed on that path because I would have been like wow, this this is easy. Yeah, let me keep doing this. But it doesn't matter because I blew the interview. And honestly, like, you know, nobody can offer you a job. No, no, that's what I'm saying. I had the biggest shoe in going into the interview. It was like to me, it was like a formality.

And then I fucked up the uh interview so badly that like he was like, it's not a fit. How many people work there? I don't know. I think it was like fifty people, but it it might have been a hundred or hundred and fifty people. I think interview with the with the Collision brothers. Collison and uh Collison, what's her name? I thought it was collision. Fuck me. That would have been cooler. Uh no, I interviewed with this guy, Benjamin. Um

But ask Ben how much money he made. I actually DMed him the other day and I was like, hey man, uh And he didn't reply, I think. I I I DMed him and see what I said. I said, Hey, you're still at Stripe, that's amazing. You probably don't remember this, but I interviewed there six or seven years ago. You know, I've been referred by our mentor shared mentor. And I said it didn't end up working out, but you know

You know, it was all for the best. I I went on a totally totally different journey. Just wanted to say hi. And then he this fucker didn't even say hi. Uh what's going on here? So the guy who fired me at Airbnb And by the way, his thing says he's on sabbatical, you know, that's that's like you've been at some company that that did really well for five, six years, and then you're like, Yeah, I'm going on sabbatical for a year. The guy who fired me applied to work at the hustle. as an executive and uh

I'm I was cool with them. It's my fault. I I got I I lied and he caught it and he was like I have to do this. But uh I'm still buddies with the guy who fired me. What were you saying about you? Uh September twenty twelve stripe at thirty two employees. I thought I was missing out on like a five million dollar prize until this conversation, and now I realize it's probably more like a twenty million dollar prize. So in two thousand and eleven, I had heard about this company that was making like a cab business. It was called Uber Cab. And they have this job position called a city launcher. And I was like, dude, I'm so competent. I could you could they could send me to Germany and I not know a single person and I will get people to use this thing. I was so confident. They didn't interview me, but in my head I'm like What would have happened if I got that and then by the way, we'll play this game one more time.

I actually interviewed at Vungle. I interviewed with Jack Smith. Of Bungle and Zane. who are Jack Smith's now my best friend. And I interviewed at his company and he sold it for eight hundred million dollars. We became friends three years later. He didn't even remember interviewing me and they turned me down. He said no. He he said no. They they I got to the final interview and he said no. And I didn't get the job and now we're best friends. And that's so I always joke with people, I'm like, if you want to know a good company, good startup to invest in, just figure out where I apply, then I get turned down and just invest there.

Right. Yeah, exactly. Uh and you know, there's a Naval has this great quote where he's like You know, I I want it to be where where you could um You could drop me anywhere on earth with you know butt naked with no possessions to my name. And ten years later I want to be rich.

Um, he's like, I want my skill set to be of as such where I don't need to get lucky to be rich. Like if I played this game of life. thousand times. You know, nine hundred ninety eight times I want to to end up successful. you know, each of those times I might end up with a different amount of success, but like That lines up with a with a view I have, right? Like when I worked with Michael and Zochie Birch, a lot of people asked me, like, are they smart or did they just kind of get lucky? Cause

You know, they sold Bebo, made eight hundred fifty million dollars. But like Bebo's not around anymore. So was that kind of just like a fluke or w what happened? And what I always said was like Them being successful. was inevitable. They were gonna be successful. They actually were successful even before Bebo. They became millionaires on the previous businesses.

But The magnitude of success is highly variable. So like I think I would have If you played out the so that's that was ten years ago, right? Roughly eight years ago, we're talking about twenty twelve? So if I played out the last eight to ten years of my life. A thousand times.

I think I probably on average End up with more money than I have today. So I think I actually the real world scenario I've neted out less than I would have on average. But I think In ninety percent of those circumstances, I would have ended up s successful. Or you know, richness is successful either way, because

And that's I think the goal is to get yourself to that point. So you take luck out of it to the extent that you can. I think we're probably both on this, maybe I don't know if me more than you or you more than me, but we're both on this idea of like Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get it done. And I think that you can brute force your way to some Sort of Financial success and happiness.

Like I think that if you spent ten years and took a risk and worked hard, you will make a million dollars. Right. But I will be the first to acknowledge that some number beyond that, which I don't know what it is. It is Very ver you it's luck. There's a lot of variants, right? Like even just if I think about when we sold the company.

The number could have been zero. It could have very easily cut crapped out at zero. Or it could have been double what we got. And I think we I think we ended up on the high range of like where we Like I think we maximized what what could have been or should have been out of that. But I'm like, man, that is just one scenario of many

you know, many rolls of the dice that I've done in the last 10 years. And these situations, they like they've such a huge amount of variance. And the good thing that I take out of that is like, well I wanna develop myself and my skills so that I'll I'll have some level of success if I stay at it for for ten years. And then I don't want to stress and compare myself to others because look, there is a huge amount of variance and luck that's outside of your control. And so, you know, don't get fixated on the exact numbers. Just keep playing the game for for as long as you can and eventually the luck just keep, you know, it'll it'll break your way if you play for long enough.

Yeah, and I completely agree with that. Do we wanna go over anything else? I have one more question that's sort of like that. The only scenarios I can see myself not being as successful is if I Had stayed on a more traditional path of just a job path. Um, because I think it's very hard to get wealthy from a normal job. We're talking about oh if I took this job at Stripe. Well Stripe was like

Probably the top f four or five investments. uh of the last decade. So like yeah, being an you know average employee being a biz dev rep over there, I still would have somehow ended up with a lot of money there. But most jobs that I was could have taken would not have done anything like that. Do you think It was inevitable that you were gonna be an entrepreneur. Like did you know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? I kind of feel like I fell into it. I didn't I didn't really consciously decide it until I was already doing it.

Yes. I would have done it no matter what. But I would not have done the internet. I would have I think that I'm I would have owned a small store, like a corner store or a gas station or um Uh what what switched your path to digital businesses in your episode. So when YouTube came out Did I tell you about this? I used to make fifth dollars a month.

Because I would I feel horrible saying this, but I'll be honest. I think these videos because if you typed in the word yeah, I you would type in words and it would auto fill. So one of the words I don't know how, I typed in the word black. autofill to like black guy beats up white guy. And then if you autofill if you type in the word white, it was white guy beats up black guy. And so I would make these YouTube videos that just had a plain picture and then

I would make ad money on it and some of the videos got millions of views. And so once I made fifty dollars a month doing that, I was like Oh, the internet's cool. And then I met a guy named Casey Smith and he taught me how to buy my own domain name. And then I created an online store and was making money, and that's when it changed. But prior to that I was I would use eBay and Craigslist to sell stuff. And I would imagine that I would have opened up a restaurant or In some type of small town.

thing. Yes. I would have done it no matter what. Because that's what my mom and dad did. You know, my mom and dad, their business that they still own to this day, it started as a fruit stand and eventually be something beyond that. But and they were always encouraging me to do this stuff. So that's interesting. So you knew okay, owning a business or starting a business is the way your parents did it. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, but they by the way, they didn't call it like starting a business. It was just this is just what you do to make a living. Right. Every single person in my family, every aunt uncle, uh except for I think one has a job and almost all of them were like engineers who got an engineering job at some company and it was like question wasn't what are you gonna do like are you gonna start a business you can do this it was like what job are you gonna get And is it a good job or a bad job? And so

I didn't even think about starting a business until it was like I had accidentally started one. And then I was like, Oh shit, okay, this is this is cool. And I started to meet people who did that as their life. And that like you know, my version of Casey Smith. But like isn't it funny how like Casey Smith, who the hell is Casey Smith? And like what if you hadn't met Casey Smith on that day? You know, like a lot of this stuff feels inevitable, but it really wasn't. Yeah, and

I was just listening to this um Tamoth. What's that kind of name? Is that his name? Yeah, Temon probably have to do. He was talking about like the thing that changed with him was he had he was like an intern at like a multi billion dollar company. and he was walking to work and one of the VPs saw him walking to work and picked him up in the car and it just so happened that the VP was carpooling with the CEO and

he got to they're like well they're like, hey, we'll just drive you to work every day. And Tamar says like And like the word billionaire.

Shamat is like, what's a billionaire? You can have one billion dollars. And that is when he like, that changed my life. And I think about that all the time and I'm like Having a community is so important. And you have to be purposeful about it. Or I mean you could get lucky like I did and what he did, but having a community like these Gen Z mafia people, that's so important that they have that community. Yes. We should probably move this to the beginning because it's gonna be this is gonna be interesting. I should have started with this. Uh something very interesting happened to me that I wanted to tell you about.

I gotta be careful about how much I say. 'Cause I can't say too much and maybe I'll have to bleep out some later. So a very interesting opportunity came my way. In the last Yeah.

Okay, so what's the situation? So close family friend. has a very, very Large. Collectible card collection of

A type of card that I had never even heard of before called Do you know what that is? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they have a card collection of of a lot of that plus like, you know, Star Wars and Simpsons, like a whole bunch of like collectors. Collect your stuff. Collectible items, mostly cards.

And um We're talking like uh multi-million dollar collection of millions of cards. And due to the person's personal reasons, so you know, health and other, they have to off all this. And so you know, because as a close family friend. Long story short, I have the opportunity to sell this very large collection of items.

Are you gonna buy them or you're gonna help him is it like the person's not an internet person and you're just gonna help him sell them and they'll give you a cut? Yeah, something like that. So basically the the idea is How the hell do I sell this collection that if you if you so if you went in and you took the best cars and you sold them individually on the internet. If you just look at the eBay mark value right now, this is like a Dollar collection. What?

Yes. And so you can't sell All these cards. Like it's just too much. So you can't sell them all at the eBay mark value, right? Like you know, that's You know, if it's like if you took one card that sells for ten thousand dollars, he has like of that card. And so you you know you can't sell them all at the ten thousand dollar card price.

So almost certainly it'll sell for a fraction of that, but the question is what's that fraction? And also, how the hell do I sell this? And so What comes to mind, I don't know, help me brainstorm. I can only say some limited details there. So help me brainstorm how would you Go about this. So you have three choices. One, you totally ignore this opportunity, it's a distraction, you move on with your life. Number two. You look into it and you try to see

How might you actually get some value out of this? How would you actually like sell this collection? And then the third is like you go balls to the wall and you're like, I'm gonna find a way to make A few million dollars in the next few months off this. Lucky bounce.

Let's go with the easiest option, which is An auction. So you'd I would use heritage auctions or Christie's or Southbees. Is it called Southbees? Sotheby's Sotheby's. Um I would use one of those three auction. Houses. But you would probably not get a premium because it's a bulk thing, but it would probably be the easiest.

Right. And also because we're talking Cards. They're not like graded as they say or m or you know, they're not all verified and graded yet because It would cost you

An absolute fortune to grade a million plus cards, right? And this is like more than that. And it would take a long time to do it. So these are like You know they're good because this person's been a collector for twenty years. They're like a stable in the community, but you know, when you sell these items, you typically need to go get them graded first. So even just grading like how many items does he have? in the collection. So even just holding the collection endeavor. Uh, they've been doing this for a long time, they put in a lot of money.

Oh my God, what an interesting problem. Could you go to so like uh y you kinda alluded it to being maybe more than just You sell it back to the tops company. Uh maybe. Okay. So that's like one option. Uh although Yeah. Okay. So that's a that's an option. What else? What else could you do?

Have you seen what Logan Paul's doing with Pokemon cards? I have seen that. So what's on your mind about you? So I mean Kinda doing something like that where you sell random cards to people. And

You know, maybe they might lose a few thousand bucks, or if they get the big names, they might make some money. So that's what he was doing. He was selling packs for a hundred K. Um and you might lose your money, but there might be like a holographic Charizard in there that's worth a hundred K. Let's go down that path because I have thought about that of like what if I just sold these as mystery boxes? So Look, I don't want to go through the process of grading and marking these. I know that there's X millions of dollars of value somewhere in this. And I'm gonna sell them as individual mystery boxes. Now the challenge I thought of was

How do I get the word out, right? I'm not Logan Paul. Why can't you be? Like this is such an interesting concept that Why wouldn't this get popular on YouTube? I don't know. It would take a lot of time and energy to like make a big ruckus about this, right? So I'm looking, I don't want to spend months of my life doing this. I'm looking to see is there a a simple path? Like I don't wanna pay for a bunch of ads to try to get people to buy this because that's gonna be expensive in and of itself.

But I think you would need like let's say you're doing a hundred dollars Hundred dollar mystery box, you might end up with one of these items that has that's worth ten grand or twenty grand inside. That's the game. If you did that, uh, you know, you'd need to sell like fifty thousand or a hundred thousand of these mystery boxes at a hundred bucks a pop. How would I do it? Did you have like an inper just like could you make it videos about around this just like the Sarah Gordo guys did where you just document this whole journey and then be like, We are gonna auction this off. in person and digitally on this date. Everything's gonna be gone in forty eight hours. Yeah, I could do that. Like it's a forty eight hour bonanza.

Come in person and on the phone. Kind of like uh there's this car company that I love called Barrett Jackson. They probably do this for all the auctions, but I watch Barrett Jackson. They do it live on TV and I always watch the uh The car auctions that you could call in and and bid. Yeah, like maybe there's just a live stream that I do. From the venue and just selling it right right there live for I would have the simplest thing though of calling Christie's or one of the auction houses and be like, guys, here's what I have. Get your ass out here and give me some opinions.

Do you actually think be conservative, what is this person's collection worth? But it's hard to say. Until you go through the inventory in more detail than anybody's ever done. Because you know, was bought ten years ago and it's just been in a case.

You have to go, you have to look at the condition of it and you have to create graded so that the buyer feels good about it. And then you have to, you know, figure out how you're gonna sell these things. And I know nothing about cards, I should say, so so I am a tool. Is there anything more you could tell about the story of the person before you but without Revealing. No, it is very interesting, but I cannot say. And this person is a fan.

A fan would have been a fan. Like they just been doing this out for love. I've love. Yeah, the collector. Oh my God. Do you want to answer this question? Do I know them? You don't know them. Do you want to uh dedicate an entire episode to this on Monday? I don't know how much I can share is kinda the thing. So I gotta ask the person. I'm measuring my words right now.

Can we give the person like a voice cover up? And talk to them about it. No. Is would this be tax at capital gains or in income? For the person.

Yeah. Yeah, it would be like a long term. Uh capital gains. Wow, what a weird situation. Uh so okay, I'm gonna have to run. I gotta go now. But if you think of anything.

And let's have people tell us in the podcast reviews what they would do. Right. And before we publish this to Jonathan, our editor, let me think about let me just make sure I didn't say anything I'm not allowed to say. Okay, wow. Yeah. All right. All right, we'll see you.

Okay, see you later.

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