Best of This Week: Feb 4th

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like my day song On the road less travel never looking back Hey, welcome to another episode of My First Million, Best of the Week edition. This is Ben Wilson. This is just some of the best clips from our episodes throughout the week. If you've already listened to every episode, there's nothing new here.

But it's just bringing out some of the best content in case you didn't get to listen to every second of every episode this week. We got a great one for you today. We had some really great guests on this week. To start off with, we're hearing from Ryan Breslow. Ryan is the founder of a payments company called Bolt.

He has been in the news for writing a Twitter thread where he called out stripe and white combinator. And then we had him on the show the day that he resigned as CEO of his company Bolt. And here's what he had to say. About the whole controversy.

Cool. And and so let's talk about this Twitter thing. So you came out the other day and you you basically said look um You're like Bolt, uh, you know, we we've become successful now. But uh it wasn't uh without kind of some some challenges. And there's like the normal business challenges and then there's sort of the like The challenges of the powers that be. And in Silicon Valley, there's two kind of like

very powerful and in in most people's minds you I think you pick to fight with people that Very few people had bad things to say about Y Combinator and Stripe, right? Stripe is probably like the most beloved Start up in Silicon Valley, respected, beloved, whatever. And uh and Y C is also, you know, the most powerful sort of sort of like a brand in you know it's like basically if you're gonna pick on a college you pick on either Stanford or Harvard if you were going for the top.

And uh And you basically told the story about them being the mafia. And so I want you to kind of Quickly, uh, can you quickly bullet point the the what your argument was for people who aren't nerding out on Twitter and aren't seeing it, because this all the audience we have here is Not gonna have seen it. So bullet point that and then I got some questions for you.

Yeah. So the point is My motivation here was to open people's eyes to what goes down in Silicon Valley. Where it's not all sunshine and rainbows. It is very fierce. And there's fierce competition.

And there's also games that are played. With Powerful. Institutions and You know, groups of people.

Who uh, you know, help each other out. And so If you're starting a company, especially in payments You've likely failed.

There's You know, the only ones that have been as successful have been internationally. Um And we Probably should have failed five times over.

With investors pulling out of term sheets. When we're about to run out of money. And so we I'd say Bolt. Almost didn't exist.

Because of the powers at B. The powers that be. And You know, I think there are a lot of other companies that would have existed today if it wasn't for the powers that be and so You know, now I don't blame These institutions.

You're you're I I I I don't know if you're doing this on purpose to be kind, but you're kinda being vague. Is it possible that you could like what does institution mean? And gain are you able to like actually out, right? There's There's fair Fair uh you know, fair business game games, which is like We're competing against somebody, that's fair. They can compete with us fiercely.

There's Um Investors just deciding Uh, the space is too competitive or Stripe's gonna win. I've just gotta I'm just gonna back away, right? So perception thing. That's kind of like

Nobody would say that that's unfair. Talk about the specifics of what you felt was unfair or where you know some some uh Some there was some heavy handedness to it. Yeah. So

When we would be pitching Investors. And get interested. They'd say they want to invest. And then they would talk to somebody at Stripe.

Someone related to stripe. And either be told they can't invest. Or they shouldn't invest. Or Somehow the conclusion was

They were dissuaded from investing. But how do you know that that's what happened? They might just come to you and say, We're not just The strip would always come up. Somehow in that conversation. So many of them pol me directly. I've investors say directly.

I got a call by stripe. And they told me I can't invest in you guys. I is that bad though? I mean w what if they if they're already an investor of Stripe? I w I understand I have a conflict of interest. Like all the big names in Silicon Valley invested in them.

Fine. I insulated intentionally. But every single You know, tier one firm on their cap table. And they've even stuffed them with small checks. They're like everybody's on their cap table.

Right, and so You know, for And then they say you're conflicted out. Right, that's a competitor of ours. You're our shareholder. Right, exactly. And I didn't even

You know, consider ourselves a direct competitor at the time. But I think they're very guarded about anything in their periphery. So I've heard the same story from companies. You know, doing card issuing. I've heard the same stories from companies doing subscription payments. And then Stripe would want their own product next.

So it's almost as if They have these feelers out. Anything that's tangential, they make sure that doesn't get off the ground. And then they go and build it. Um And so

Is there any is but is there any side of you So the way that you're phrasing it and it I would like to Figure out. What what my opinion is, I don't have an opinion yet, is is like that's unethical.

But one maybe could argue and be like, Well, that was just s a savvy strategic move to like get everyone on board. And you know, that's just like that's just a that's a That's fair. Is uh do you do you see that side of it at at all? Or do you think that like the way they went about it, their intentions were The intentions matter here.

I've never Pull the single investor, you can't invest in somebody. Right. And so to me Like everything is fair competition. And if someone wants to invest in a company tangential to me, I tell them go for it.

We've even invested in tangential. I invest in Tangentral. I think Іно innovation is good. I have a very long term perspective. So when you're calling that say you can't invest in this company?

Like even if they're not on the st striped cap table is investors too that are not on the stripe cap table. To me, that's just not how I would do business. And I also Want Found the next generation of Founders. to go into building with an eye their eyes wide open.

Cause I invested eight years of my life into this business and not Knowing about the games that go on. Right, and so the most important thing I'm exposing here. Is if you're coming to Silicon Valley You have an idea.

You're quitting your job. Putting a lot on the line. Like get ready. For war. Like it's it's it's serious.

And there will be people who do not want you to exist and you're gonna need to be ready to battle that. And so one of the things you say is that, which is They basically hurt our ability to fundraise. By telling the first they they they kind of played good good game theory, right? They they got every inv every big investor to get a little piece of stripe because every investor wants a piece of stripe. And then they said, Cool, now you're conflicted out of investing our our competitors. Okay.

Some might say that's that's shady. I personally just I I'm an investor here, I'm a fan of yours. I personally would just say. Okay, there's nothing unethical about that. You may not like it, but that's competing uh that's like a It's a strategy. It's a s it's a harsh strategy. Okay, fair enough. In the same way that like I don't think it's cool that Mark Zuckerberg just copied stories or whatever. I don't think that's like

You don't get bonus points of respect from me. But I also don't think you did anything illegal or crooked completely crooked, right? That's that's you copied something that was copyable. Okay, fair enough. The second thing you said is That They could uh that Y C, which a has a huge stake in stripe.

Um control they own hacker news. And that on Hacker News, people would be posting about Bolt. It would get Some play it would go up the ranks. But that somehow there's some, you know, editorial shenanigans behind the scenes where all of a sudden

The post about Bolt would disappear or get deranked and then a post about Stripe would be up higher. And so you posted some examples of that. Now That's I think I think that's the summary of what you said. Uh as that was happening, did you f uh is that a

Suspicion or you're like, I know that that's what happened. Pretty sure. That's what happened. Um Yeah,'cause We had uh some posts, one in particular.

That You know, I'd written, catered to Y C audience, it was an unraveling of how we do fraud detection better and guarantee it with your payments, which was radical and new at the time. It had organically gotten To number one. Held there.

We had a ton of comments. on it just like very active people very interested you can go read all my comments And then striped pose, I don't know if it was there before. It seems like They said it got posted technically before.

But anyway. Laughters got to number one, their started to rise. And ours just started to fall and then disappear. And so I don't know if those editorial there's also this down vote.

Functionality. And so you can also just Have a bunch of your employees. Going down vote or have a bunch of your friends. So

You know Whatever it is They're able to get us off of there pretty quickly. The the guys who started Stripe, the Collison brothers, I don't know them, but they seem um From the outside.

Like good dudes. Do you think that Is that Do you know? And is that a is that a character a characterization that you'd challenge? Yeah. I mean

I'm that's exactly what I'm doing. So You know, let's they don't meet my standards for good dudes. Uh and so You know, good dudes is not what you say publicly, it's what you do privately.

And so uh Yeah, I I just think that like Right now you're like a loose canon and I love it and I find it incredibly refreshing. Because from the outside, you've raised money from amazing people at a fourteen billion dollar evaluation. You are like the guy right now. And I'm just sh I think it's cool and I'm shocked, but I think it's cool that you're that you've just said that. I uh I think that that's I've never heard that before. Me and Sam both have uh definitely like a rebellious streak in us, and we've told some stories on the pod about situations where we're

We do kind of like not Keep it muzzled. All right, next up we have a segment from an interview with Nathan Barry. Nathan is the founder and CEO of Convert Kit. an email marketing platform.

He was telling us about billion dollar creators, how to become one. and how to just do a better job of monetizing your audience. So you basically have these four rules of building A billion dollar audience. So

I guess like first, why did you even want to do this? Like kind of like What got you? interested in this and then let's walk through the four. Yeah.

So the article asks a question, like the whole premise of it, and that is What is the most profitable Place to direct attention. Right, so everything we do right, we're recording a podcast now, whatever you're doing on on TikTok or if you're a movie star or everything else, right? You have attention.

And brands want it, they're willing to sponsor. You know, all this stuff. And so it's like okay. You have the opportunity to point that attention somewhere. What's the most profitable Way to do that long term. 'Cause you look at people.

You know, maybe who are taking sponsorships. Right. Five grand uh You know, to sponsor the newsletter or you know, five hundred bucks for a sponsored um uh Instagram posts or anything like that.

And That's actually not that. Profitable. And then we when you dive in You learn that the most profitable thing to do

Is to create your own product. And to drive that attention to something where you actually build equity long term. So it's like a longer yeah Article talking about that. But like the richest movie stars. You know, like take Jessica Alba for example.

Right. She has made a lot of money from movies. But the bulk of her wealth is from starting a company using You know, being the spokesperson for her own company. And then my other favorite example would be Ryan Reynolds.

Who You know, he's doing ads for other people and Probably getting paid. A million bucks here, ten million dollars there. You know, that kind of thing. And at some point he goes like forget that.

I'm going to by my own companies with Mint Mobile. An aviation gen. And I'm gonna be my own spokesperson. So I don't get cash. I get equity.

And so You know, you just watch this process of people doing it over and over again. And that's actually my hypothesis with Convert Kit. Right. I have attention on the internet through running a blog.

Um And a newsletter and all of that. W how do I want to monetize it? Sponsorships. E books, membership.

A bunch of things. I'm like, nope, I wanna monetize it through Convert kit, building a SaaS company. Like that's my Version. Of the billion dollar creator.

So that's the whole premise of the article and you have a couple examples. So okay, so rule number one is you have to build more than a personal brand. So what does that mean? You give the example of Jessica Al. Mark from Primal Kitchen. So what what is the nuance here? It's like it's not just your face, your name. You need to actually Create a brand around

Around your lifestyle or your interest, is that it? By the by the way, Sean, Primal Kitchen is The sugar free ketchup company that I like. So this guy named Mark He's like

Kinda looks like the sixty five year old version of me, but like even more jacked. And he like has a health and health blog and he starts selling ketchup and he sells that for like three hundred million dollars. Yeah, so I mean what Mark did, uh with uh I mean his blog was called Mark's Daily Apple and it was like the leading You know, like paleo uh kind of health blog in that space.

And a blog like that, you know When he was doing this. Two thousand six, two thousand ten, that kind of thing. You can make a million bucks a year off of that blog, and he was. Right, but You play that forward.

And that's it's all about him, all about his name. Oh, but right his name is in the name of the site. But I mean you can build substantial wealth that way. What he did instead is he started Primal Kitchen. you know, kickstart of this whole brand.

by saying like I have the most popular site in the space Let me You know, make these Paleo friendly. Ketchup, mayonnaise, that kind of thing. Do you know how big his audience was? Do you know how big his traffic he had at the time or

It it wasn't huge, huge. Like it was no bigger than ours. Yeah, a hundred thousand subscribers in the kind of like Audience size. To kick kick off this thing. Yeah, you gotta remember audiences were a lot smaller. Like even just

twenty fifteen, twenty twelve. Like that kind of time frame. But yeah, then he sold sells it to craft for two hundred million dollars. You can't sell a blog. To g like a blog doesn't sell for two hundred million, you know?

Like all of these things. And the crazy thing is he still owns the audience. Right. the kickstarted this whole product. He still owns. He can sell off the that whole brand talking to him at a at a conference, you know, he's just on to the next thing, figuring out what he wants to do next.

He didn't have to sell his his name and wh whole identity with it. So And craft is Kylie Cosmetics is probably the biggest one that people know about because you have Tons of attention through Instagram, TikTok, whatever. The TV show, whatever. Yeah. And

Instead of just saying, Hey, I'll you can pay me Is it people will used to say, Wow, you have to pay twenty five thousand dollars for a tweet from Kim Kardashian or Then it that was twenty five thousand. Then it went up to like two hundred fifty thousand. Then two million dollars for a Instagram post. From It it got it got into that range where it was like either hundreds of thousands or low millions to get like a an actual like endorsement post from from one of them.

And And so then y you know Cool, you can make a lot of money doing that. You can You could stack up quarter million dollars at a time. But Kylie Cosmetics was a billion dollar brand. So it's like, well

Who wants to Who wants to pay me? To promote their products. Well, it's mostly like skincare products, makeup products. Or for Kim Kardashian, it's her shapeware. Like you know like And Chloe Kardashian, it was like, you know, fashion or whatever. So Chloe launches

True American genes. Kim Kardashian launches, I think it's called what was it shape is? Skims. Skims is like the Shaper brand. Sean. Kylie. Kylie Cosmetics. Kanye, Yeezy Shoes, right Lair is like

Uh they all turned to say who whoever is the m the most willing advertiser Actually, you become my competitor, and I'm gonna launch my own brand, my own equity, and have my own equity in this thing. And there's a guy in the NBA who gets made fun of for this. Which is this guy Levar Ball. Uh I don't know if you guys know this guy, but Basically he has three sons, all three wanted to make it to the NBA, and this guy's like loudmouth guy. They got like a reality show around them because They're sort of like the like

You know basketball version of the Kardashians. There's three brothers and like a Kind of an overbearing parent who is like are architecting their business strategy. And when they were gonna the guy was gonna get picked second in the draft, and Nike offered him a contract and Didas, and instead

He created Big Baller brand, uh you know, Triple B. He created his own shoe line. And like the shoes kind of sucked and like, you know, he didn't have the full business plan. And people were making fun of him for like, oh wow, you turned down a guaranteed ten million dollars from Nike to like launch this thing. Ten million dollars a year or whatever. And it's like

Actually that was the right move. Now maybe his execution was slightly poor, but That was actually the right move and and A lot of these NBA players would have been better served had they done that themselves. Well how how's it going? So the shooting's not going good. Basically the guy they had running it like was like kind of stealing from them. So they fired him. That was like a a a black mark on it. The second brother never made it to the NBA. So that was like a little bit of an issue.

The first brother kinda underperformed his potential at that time. And actually now that it would have worked'cause the the youngest brother The one who was like the the the one who's kind of like He was kind of like Fuck boy a little bit. He's you know it's like

Had a gold, you know, like a diamond grill, had like a Lambo at 15, and was like, you know, he was kind of off the reservation. He actually turned out to be the best one. He's actually a star player. And if they had kind of built it properly around him, it probably would have done a lot better. So I Nathan, you'll get a kick out of this. So like three or four weeks ago, we did this thing where we said, We're gonna give five G's To one or two, three people.

Who take our clips, download it, post it on TikTok, and get views. There's this kid Who did it? And I don't remember how many views he got, but like our hashtag I think got thirty million views in like two weeks. And this guy accounted for a lot of them. And multiple of his videos got a thousand or sorry, a million views. One video got so big that we drove thirty five thousand new members to the subreddit Fat Fire like

And they complained. And I was like reached out to this kid. I'm like, Who are you? And he replies back with like Michael at umichigan.org. Or just something like that, or dot you or whatever it is. And

I'm like, wait, dude, are you in college? And he I he calls me and I FaceTime with him and he's in his dorm room. And He's young. He's in still in college. He's doing his university thing and and he's really cocky. Not in a bad way, but he's like He's got Hutspot. He goes, Man I knew I was gonna do this. I wanted to prove to you guys that I could do it. I want you to pay me money to do this now and I'm gonna do this for other people and we're gonna change the media game.

And I'm gonna raise money. And I was like, Okay, hold on, dude. Hear me out and he goes, I'm gonna I'm gonna go raise money for this thing. Do you want to invest? I go, Bro, listen. You do not want to raise money for this. Here's what you should do.

You are so talented at this. That don't raise money for this. But get it big and start launching other stuff on top of it. And if you want to raise money, raise money for that stuff. And own all the He owns this thing called like

I forget what it's called, future, but he's got like eight handles now that have like A million something follow followers. I'm like, no, no, no, don't raise money for this thing, man. Own that forever, and that's your piggy bank and your audience. Raise money for like this other thing that you wanna do and funnel it through there. But don't sell that thing because I raised a little bit of money for my thing, which was like that, and I I don't regret it'cause I got the outcome that I wanted, but I do regret it because it definitely

Han you're massively handicapped because of it. Yeah, well and that's I I think such a good point because you can have that platform to launch whatever you want in the same way that you know Mark Sisson can use his platform to then go launch the next thing. Right. He probably has contracts that say he can't compete in the exact same space. But he could do a fitness thing or he could do Connor McGregor's right. You have the ability to make an example. Connor McGregor is doing this pretty brilliantly in the UFC, so like

UFC gets knocked a lot because of the of they have like low fighter pay, right? Like the the percentage of revenue that they give to their fighters is way lower than other sports. NBA's fifty percent, N F L is like fifty percent, UFC is like I don't know, fifteen or twenty percent. So the fighters are Yeah, they go out there, they get their, you know, face beaten in and they're they'll they'll make twenty thousand dollars off that fight or forty thousand dollars or eighty thousand dollars and then They only get to do that two or three times a year. So it's like a pretty brutal sport for a low pay. Wonnell McGregor did was

Instead of selling the attention try to try to make money as his kind of like service fee. He created a brand around literally every part of his lifestyle. So he's like, all right. This thing's gonna get me famous. But then

Okay, what am I famous for? People like my suits at the press conferences. Cool. I'm launching a suit brand. Okay. I'm Irish. I'm gonna launch an Irish whiskey. Irish whiskey, I think just sold for I don't know if you know San Four hundred, five hundred million. Yeah, like he's like

Cool. I'm super fit because I'm a UFC fighter. My body's amazing. Here's my P90X program. It's called McGregor Fast. You can you can buy my program and subscribe to that and you can get fit with me. Oh, you're getting fit and uh Guess what else do I do? I recover.

Okay, here's a recovery spray that I spray on my leg that's like, you know, like Makes my leg. Recover faster after workouts. And the guy is literally just selling like Every piece of his lifestyle as a

independent brand like You know, I think at one point he was thinking about launching a sports bending exchange. It's like What is the best business like who wants to pay me? Oh, DraftKings wants to pay me? Hm.

Maybe instead of DraftKings is McGregor Kings now and I've I'll launch a competitor. He just he just opened up in black. What else do we do? Irish stout. Okay, I'm gonna So he bought a bar. Not that the bar is that good. It's like a bar in his hometown and a bar's not gonna make a ton of money, but then he used that bar as the like basically the backdrop.

To film Him creating a stout and now he's gonna sell a stout as a n new like alcoholic beverage brand. And uh I it's kind of amazing. The guy's gonna become a billionaire And fighting is gonna be the lowest part of his income stream is my guess, which is insane. But I bet you

I bet you McConnor Connor McGregor I bet you Well he might make a billion, he might lose a billion. Alright, lastly we're playing a clip from our interview with Ryan Holliday. You might know Ryan from his social media presence on the Daily Stoic. From his many appearances on the Tim Ferris show Or from one of his many books, like The Obstacle Is the Way.

Stillness is the key. Or trust me, I'm lying. Here, Ryan talks about why he works with a traditional book publisher and how he manages to stay a top selling author. From the outside, you know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel this way. It's like, oh, publishing, you know, record labels and book publishers, it's all just middlemen and they're They take advantage and the authors see so little t you know, blah blah blah.

And someone like you, you have a A lot of business sense. B, yeah, now have a track record. C, you have an independent audience you could sell to. So there must be some reason that you say, No, actually people don't get it, that you do want to publish it for these reasons. W what is that? I look at it on a case by case basis. You're just you're really doing the math. Well the what they're paying for it plus the royalty

What are you Thinking you will earn, you know, in a short amount of uh of time or or you know, in a certain amount of time. So I j I just do the math on each project. So every time I think about a book, just because I have a publisher, if obviously if no one was interested in publishing it, it would be a different story. But I I you know I conceive of what the book is. And then I take it out, my publisher has a first look deal at my books.

I and I see what you know, what they what they think Вот they're willing to pay. And then you know, I have an agent and so We obviously try to get that number up as high as possible. And then once I have that number, then I think, okay.

What would this look like if I did it myself. So what would it cost me to do it myself? What am I likely to sell myself? How much work is that gonna be, how much of a distraction is that gonna be. And Ninety percent of the time, you know, the math

The math tends to go towards traditional publishing in my experience. The the kids book that I did The publisher just wasn't

It like wasn't in their wheelhouse. They didn't totally get the project. So I did it myself. It's been great and really fun and artistically fulfilling. But also just an incredible amount of work. I mean like the coins I sell directly From my store. Right?

The manufacturer makes them, they drop it off at the warehouse. They get shipped. Fulfilling books through Amazon is like in an like And then also the thousand Independent retailers in the United States.

Plus every international edition. You know is extraordinarily Logistically difficult. And I remember you you gave this talk one time that was awesome where You showed a chart of the sales of your book versus the normal book. So a normal book

You get a peak. And then it pretty much is Kinda goes away, but then for some of the classics You get a peak. And then it goes down a little bit, but then it kinda quickly comes up to the point the word even like it's pretty steady throughout.

like a catcher in the rye or something like that. Or even sometimes it'll it'll it'll suck early on and just slowly get better. Your books, if I remember correctly, they They popped just like everyone else. They went down a little bit, just like everyone else, but then they like raise and were s pretty steady with daily sales. And you're like, that's because I make shit that can last a long time and this was actually

for when you're writing perennial cellar, I think you're like proving this point. Is is is that still the case and considering all of your other businesses Is book is making books still where you make the majority of your income or are you just using that because you love it and it happens to make money and you but you make the bulk of your money from other shit? Yeah, it's it's most nonfiction authors make more money from speaking than from books. That's because speaking can be more lucrative, but it's also because most authors don't sell very many books.

Right. So I I'm in an unusual space where My books do sell consistently and I have a lot of them. So I I make a good living from that. But probably make more money from stuff other than books than books. Dude, that's crazy.

That that you're like the man and yet still it's like the other Like the Well that that's that's another reason to traditionally publish, right? So so like your a publisher does not take any percentage of speaking, does not take any film or TV adaptations. does not take any ancillary products, any merchandising, anything like that. So really this the book is It's not a loss leader. Because uh

People pay for books and and and books have value to people, but like The the the ideas in the book Everything else is downstream from whether that that takes hold or not. Does that make sense? So if the book doesn't land, all the other stuff

You know Doesn't really matter, but if the book works. all the other stuff happens and then the success of the book is slightly less significant. I think um What my so so in publishing there's the front list and the back list. Front list is anything within one year.

that like the year of release, that's considered a frontlist title. And then it becomes a a backlist title after a year. So most titles stop selling when they leave the backlist. When they leave the front list and become on the backlist, but almost all of the income in publishing. is from the backlist.

Wow. So so for me it's about like I'm tr I've tried to create that in my own my own catalogue of like titles that sell every year. As opposed to

Like a big book that comes out gets a lot of attention, then then three, four years later, I have to write another new book'cause the other one is like not relevant. It's like it's like Michael Bublet or or Mariah Carey writing a Christmas song. You know, you you want that Christmas hit. You want that annuity. Yeah. Yeah, I mean so so like My book The Daily Stoic, w when when my agent was like, We should do a page you should do a page a day about stoicism and I was like, I I don't know. And he was like, It will be your best selling book. And I was like, There's no way. That doesn't make any sense. Every new

He's like it will and he's right. It the book sold uh more copies this already this january than last january Alright, that's it for the week. If you have any comments Uh you can tweet any one of us, tweet Sean.

At Sean V P Or Sam at the Sam Par. Or me Ben at Ben Wilson Tweets. Thanks everyone and have a great weekend. I put my law in

So Travel never looking back

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