We're live Sean and pump you guys in a podcast together on pumps podcast I actually did it last year in New York or this year before corona happened Sean who is this guy? This is pump known as known as pop's names Anthony pump. Oh, yeah close enough. Yeah, no No, let's say it how you would say pop me on a pop.
Okay, great. This dude's everywhere man If you don't know him, you don't know us probably that's kind of my real thought this guy's ever on Twitter Investor x Facebook guy big time in the Bitcoin world everybody knows him if you're in crypto And again if you're not equipped I probably don't listen to podcast So I was gonna ask you how it's going but really all I want to know is who was better me or Sam on your podcast Question Well Sam got a cheat because Sam got to do it in person and I can't remember if we live streamed or not But so he's your in person. It sounds like you're saying Sam and that's all right I actually think I'm the audio down like you're beating Sam in the first couple hours. Okay, great.
I'll see you back and look That's all the matter now. Now. See if you get competitive. Well, so I just looked at the someone already commented and they said I they called Sean a goon and I was like gonna hop in but it was actually compliment They said I listen to this goon and the bigger goon say I'm par on my first million Hands down the best podcast out there.
Sorry pump. You're my second favorite. I think that's fine The second place you guys is perfectly fine. I was telling Sam on the last episode I was like dude I prepared for this podcast interview I did I was like I've sent it by email being like hey You know here's a bunch of shit we can talk about because I know if I'm the host that's what I want to get and so Hopefully turn out good.
Anyways everybody should go check it out go to a podcast. Yeah, listen to us talk over there We did a bunch of I basically took Sam I don't know if you heard it I took a point yeah, I was listening to it for this I took a bunch of our best ideas over there and I was like here's a bunch that we brainstormed and then you know We just shot the shit after that. Yeah, my favorite part is that you sent me that really detailed email Which I told you and I'll repeat again was incredibly helpful and then I didn't return the favor. So sorry.
Yeah, well, you know Not everybody's me not everybody can put in that prep work This is like you know one of the things I was talking about Tom lazy But then when I do something I go like really over the top with it So I just either don't do a whole lot of things I should do like for example, you know now that I was on your podcast I see all the smart little things you're doing It's like oh it gets posted on to LinkedIn and it gets posted multiple times on Twitter kind of like hits the different Time zones. It's like these are you know basic blocking and tackling best practices, but I know I'll never do and so We will never get the gains of that. I don't think Sam's gonna do that either If you want to yeah if you want to understand I think of it in terms of batches It's like you got to do 50 episodes and then you've earned the right to like learn you know one-on-one course stuff Then like you know 50 now you've reached a hundred episodes now you unlock like 201 learnings And so as you keep going like there's things that you know these folks have done thousands of episodes They understand it way better than you guys are myself Let's just get to a thousand episodes and then somehow we magically learn that stuff too. Well, this is episode number 100 So this is a big milestone.
Yeah, so I'm you you are known for this podcast you have now and you're known for being a Twitter personality, right? I mean, that's like a high level to be honest I don't know how that happened, but yeah, I think a lot of people that's actually healthy nobody was just pretty crazy How many people listen to your podcast roughly so far this year? We just last week crossed over ten million downloads for the year Wow Wow, so you were and before that you worked at snap and you worked at Facebook were you an executive or a product manager? I was a product manager at a Facebook and I think this job at snap dude I feel like you went from like, you know normal person at Facebook to you got a pretty big job at snap And I know a bunch of shit my dad so I don't know if you talk about all of it But can you talk about how you even got that job?
It was a pretty legit role for what you had done before that, right? Yeah, I think a lot of it is one just the progression of people on the Like changing the color to a button can lead to you know 15% gain or whatever it is And so very quickly just became like hey, there's this game of growth and you seem to be pretty good at it So like let's move you around internally and kind of do a bunch of different things And then I think really just reputation spreads from there I got one question from Tom Facebook So on the brain storm when we do the brain storms We have all these different kind of like themes something like we just find that a bunch of ideas fit in the same buckets It's a one of the buckets I was talking about is what I call the export bucket Which is like if you're ever at a big company you see a whole bunch of problems and solutions and so you see problems that you didn't know existed It's like dude, we would import a solution we would buy a solution for this if somebody could solve this problem for us We would have bought and then on the other side It's like we had this problem We kind of made an internal tool man If this should actually export every company should have this tool and I think Facebook is probably the most popular one where that has happened Where they just people have left Facebook and just took the Facebook internal tool and made it a sastool for everybody else Is that something you've seen like can you talk a little bit about that? I don't think most people know about that. So definitely that is a one strategy There was also although many of them I think I've left at this point There was this like little angel investor mafia at Facebook and it was kind of like the right of passage if you were leaving to go to a competitor They weren't excited if you were leaving to go to like a non-competitive large tech company You know, hey, well, which is and if you leave a sort of company you basically have like go see the mafia Right in kind of a very nice, funny way really was just you could walk out of the door with angel That's right.
You kind of have your pre-seabounder seat around done. So through that process is a lot of people who just say hey I'm gonna go build you know ex-company. It's like why internal tool but for everybody else and everybody gets it right away They're like, oh, yeah, I use it every day, right? So I'm one of them that I I'm sure it's out there I haven't seen it but was a huge factor to Facebook's growth was internationalization is the way they described it But the way they did it was really key early on Facebook looked at other companies like how do you get international markets?
I said different language and so most people would go and they would like translate their site and do all that kind of stuff Facebook actually took the opposite which was they just open sourced it to something great They basically said hey if you're a user and you speak both like you know English and whatever the national language is like Can you help us and all of this support poured in and so they're able to basically tap into the user base and get all of the translations done and also get it done much more accurately faster kind of more scalably whatever and so I've always Won that mechanism of just like how do you have a tool that you can ask your users to do the work for you? So it creates a better experience for them and all of the other users on the platform That's like a really interesting mechanism and then the second is specifically around translation You know, most companies now that the internet has become much more kind of adopted around the world Literally just getting into new markets by translating could lead to one of growth. So that's kind of an immediate What was your title? It's a match up officially.
I think it was actually I remember either head it head of growth or growth lead I can't remember basically it was like hey, you're gonna come and run the growth team awesome Okay, what do you want to do? I just put random shit as my title and LinkedIn that doesn't match my internal title because my internal title is like a real technical Like it's like 10 words long and I'm like no, I think what I really do is I lead international growth So I'm gonna say I'm the head of international growth There is no such a role inside of twitch, but I'm the clue if there was one I think I might be that and it pieces people often know and but I'm like dude This is one of those things it can't be enforced or nobody's gonna really enforce it And it's just really funny how people do that everyone's like a VP on LinkedIn and internally they're like junior associate So one of the things that cracks me up, you know I grew up on the East Coast went to the West Coast and there was definitely like this culture difference between kind of East Coast Companies but also like the Wall Street versus Silicon Valley type thing and so now back living in New York And what you see is like every single person like you know exactly where they are the org structure by their title on Wall Street, right? Are they an analyst or they a principal or they managing director or they have EP like it's pretty well documented and kind of You know, it's a level set, right? Yeah, and it's like and by the way people really want a title in Silicon Valley It's like literally people you know, I'm a chief janitor Like they could care less about the titles, you know It's just kind of like joking around and it's much more about kind of work products So I don't know just an interesting tidbit that I've noticed going back and forth between the two coasts And you're known as like a Bitcoin guy.
I mean, that's like one of your one of your one of your worlds, right? You guys are coming up with every label possible. It's like hey, you're the Twitter guy You're the podcast. Well, I'll be the big one guy.
You're the investing guy You know how like Sean's the framework guy Sean loves framework I I tend to like I like the label stuff and I like to put it in these boxes because it helps me understand even though I know that it's not the whole truth it's just 91010, well, somebody will come on and they'll be like telling about their experience What is your business do we ask as you should they explain for like two minutes? It's like I'm gonna say like in stupid words Basically what you guys do is you charge a whole bunch of money for people to read your news or whatever, you know, like some random Like simple oversimplification. It's great. That's a super powerful skill to have is take complex ideas and get them into simple language Well, it's like it's like I know not like I'm gonna insult you But you're basically like I space but you're like a little better and different correct.
So what is your using that logic? What's your description of the hustle? I usually say we're like Wall Street Journal, but like 20 year old dudes who are interested in entrepreneurship Yeah, that's not the down version. That's that's still like kind of congratulatory.
That's the sales pitch We write a bunch of business stuff and some people pay money to advertise and other people pay money to access the information I don't know. It would just be like every morning we send out like I send an email with the news and shit So people read it like that's fair. That's what I say calling you a newsletter business is kind of simple But okay, I just my you're giving me my own medicine, but what you're you're known as I mean you do you do a lot of Bitcoin stuff, right? Yes, okay, I'm just trying to give the audience perspective here.
So yeah, right? So basically here's how the way I think about it is I was an army I then built two very small technology companies that essentially were failures But I like navigated nicely. Yeah, exactly like, you know Did way better than I should have then went to Facebook went to snap and started investing full-time and started out kind of full generalist early stage investor and then like double and triple down on Bitcoin and crypto and all that stuff and You know, I still do some things outside of it But for the most part that's pretty much it and I think it's like one of those innovative areas And did you make enough money at snap and Facebook that you're using your own funds to invest and stuff? Is that how it worked or did you raise money?
So in the beginning one of my partners and I we started out with personal capital and we did I think it was like eight deals so it wasn't a lot of money that we kind of put out there But it was definitely enough where we kind of like hey Do like we know what we're doing right like can we like find a deal can we negotiate the actual terms like well Investure take our money like all the basic stuff that like if you're really kind of insecure when you're first starting something new You want to make sure like if I'm gonna lose money is gonna be mine not somebody else's and it also is helpful When you've got a partner who he sold a company for almost half billion dollars. Yeah, that's like yeah So he like is a is a little bit more wealthy than most people but when we're doing this It was just like hey, do you know we're doing and once it was like, okay, like these are like interesting and like we could like show other people like hey Here's the first thing that we did like we'll put these into a fund if you put money into the fund too And then like we'll like be partners and the LP So that's awesome and so literally we did that and then what we started to do again because we had no cool We were doing is we would go to a founder and we'd be like hey your company looks awesome You're awesome. We want to invest but like we're like raising the fund as we're writing the checks So like I want to invest but like let me come back to you with a number once I like go talk to the LP And then we'd go back and we'd be like hey if you put money into the fund then we can do this deal like here's the actual deal Isn't this a great deal? That's an awesome deal, but okay cool like if you guys a hundred K No, we're gonna put hundred K in this company plus you get exposure all the other deals in the fund And so he's like oh, this is awesome and they give some money and we do it And so like that's like very like hand-to-hand combat fundraising type stuff But when you're starting out literally you'll take like 50 hundred K checks for like a pre-seed fund It's just the only way that you can is to like build a track record, right?
And then what you're gonna work. Oh, yeah, yeah, so I probably can't share the financials But people about people so we invested in in per-produce in the I'll call see you around it It's like 12 million valuation that company has done incredibly well. We also invested in a really wellness. That's there like do you run Okay, so Julia, I think we invested like 15 million valuation.
They're absolutely crushing it. What else is in there? These are all early stage completely agnostic like what was really interesting is we live on the East Coast in North Carolina We were doing remote investing only there wasn't the cool term for it at the time It basically was like use your computer and try to be smart and like out work people because you don't live in San Francisco New York at the moment and so we ended up investing I think it was like 12 or 14 cities or something like we literally didn't care where people were located because it was all virtual And the second thing was 25% of the founders were female, right? So 25% of the kind of female founders is right when I say it but that wasn't a mandate It's like after the fact like all the me to stuff happened like all that we like Oh, what are how many you know female founders?
We have an art portfolio like to the math and I do think that this whole idea of having like investing remotely Just naturally like broadens the horizon you're willing to kind of invest in other geographies other types of people whatever I'm so interesting to see kind of the covid impact it so we say investing all right today's episode is brought to you by Tempo tempo dot fit is the website I actually use this I've used this for a few months now And it's this machine that has a touchscreen in this three sensor and what it does is they give you weights like 115 pounds of weights And it's for strength training So what it is is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting It sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in what your heart rate is It's pretty amazing And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what the lift how many to lift what workout to do whether you want to do a 20 Minute 10 minute 50 minute workout. It's pretty amazing But the best part is the leaderboard the other stuff all the features that they have that's cool But I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing And you can compete with other people who have taken the same class So it's maybe what a work harder live more weight or have more endurance It's just pretty frickin fun And the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer and this product tempo It checks that box for me So the rest monster today if you use the code tempo hustle you'll get $100 off So tempo that bit is the URL and tempo hustle one word you'll get $100 off So check it out. I use it if you look me up on Twitter You'll see I'm always filming videos around talking about company Say I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard because I actually love this thing And I use it all the time so check it out and then the last business I'll mention is a couple of cub coats This one's awesome. I know those guys.
Yeah, okay. Well, I met him and then other friends I told me about cub kids since I'm out because he was always doing little internet Basically, and I was like, it's got smart. Oh, man What is it? So we invested was called jacket pads at the time and jacket pets was literally the idea of this kid I was at park who I remember correctly.
He like basically was not a guy Yeah, he like go to people be like Sam you got an awesome product I'll put on Kickstarter like I know the formula and we'll sell like $10 million on Kickstarter And he did this like multiple times and it was just like hey I'm a dancer myself And so jacket pets was take a stuffed animal kids don't want to leave it behind and so let's put a zipper in the back And then when you unzip the stuff animal you can like turn it inside out like press it inside out and it'll turn into a kids jacket And so like you're like that's kind of like a crazy idea But like this kid understands Kickstarter like I'm sure he could like you know come out of the gate and then we showed a couple of LPs Who were already in the fund and everything one of them was like my wife would buy that tomorrow or like my husband thinks This is a great idea, you know, whatever for my kids. Okay, this might have legs. We invest he One kills kick from every other metrics But like you know knocks at the park to then he goes and he starts licensing So he does like licensing deals with everyone from like major sports leagues to like the Disney Marvel's of the world Whatever and then he gets them into retail. He's selling them I'm like he just like explodes the business is one of our best performing investments is like you know It is it is eight figures from revenue.
We'll put it that way. Wow. So it's a real business right? It's not like a hey We sold $300,000 on Kickstarter and like we're like it's like a legitimate business where Kickstarter happened and then they built a scalable business on The back end you able to reach on Okay, I want to talk about some ideas Sean is okay.
We get into it. I've never said no Okay, before we do well, this kind of an idea I want to I'm writing down my notes of what you're talking about I want to talk about this export stuff from Facebook, but I'm currently traveling pop I'm looking for where I want to settle down and there's this great book I'm reading and I'm learning about called tribe. Have you heard that tribe? Yeah, and I'm not okay It's called tribe and it's all it looks like what makes tribes and one of this guy's one of the points The guy makes is that and Israel the rate of PTSD for soldiers is like 1% but in America It's like 25% because soldiers go and do the thing and they shockingly were this shocking for me as someone who's ever done I think like that they are depressed when they come home because they love being in a tribe in the military and they even though They're risking their lives and they were drinking like you showed being non-alcoholic beer And there were so many reasons to be unhappy because it was hard They felt wonderful Well, they felt camaraderie and that would give them fulfillment and it's like they are in the trenches to not really serve their country But to help their their peers their partners in the military and it gave them purpose and in America We do a really bad job of like, you know, we go to our suburban home and it's like off my property or you know stay away from my home This is mine.
That's yours. Did you sense that when you came home from sir? You were in Afghanistan. You said right Iraq I rock.
Sorry. Yeah, so for those that don't know I was the most area for six and a half years ended up when I left the military as a sergeant infantry did upon a tie Rockin to also nine was in Taji which is like 12 miles north of Baghdad So I never heard it described as the tribes and I'll read the book I know what I think about that specifically But one of the things I've always told people is people are like weird and they always have like ask like stupid questions And so they'll be like why don't you have PTSD? I guess we're gonna have that conversation People ask like when the first 20 minutes of you and you really have no filter But the way that I've always like thought about it is I went from playing football in college Which is like a pretty violent sport all dudes a lot of camaraderie like all that kind of stuff So then I got deployed when I was a junior so I literally got pulled out of school got deployed to a much more violent situation Right? Obviously there's guns full of small balls and stuff But still all dudes and a lot of camaraderie and then when I came back I actually went back and played football So my transition back was not like in Iraq two weeks on transitioning back and then like working at you know One of my friends at Home Depot, right?
Like that's like a really really black and white contrast for me It was going back into playing football violence for right camarie guys Like all of the ingredients were there they just wish to wear guns, right? And so I've always credited that with like the transition being much easier and it makes a lot of sense in this tribe's kind of framework Where we probably could be much better if we literally just kept people tied into something or it's an identity or whatever Do you feel like you and your wife congratulations by the way you and Paulina right? Do you guys you live in Manhattan now? We do do you feel like you have tribe a tribe at all in a high-rise building?
So in the building no, I don't even think I could tell you a single person that we know in the building by name But you know I mean you get like easy stuff like the doorman and stuff like that We talk to you every day whatever but we got a lot of friends right that are kind of all throughout Manhattan You know we generally are our social to some degree and trying to kind of meet up with people every weekend or whatever So I think that helps is just not you know building specific The reason I'm bringing this up is because this is a business podcast and I think that there's a ton of opportunity that's gonna happen I think that Gen Z and now our generation because we're remote I think there's gonna be a massive massive problem with loneliness and men in particular above the age of 30 who are single have a huge problem Meeting people and I was reading the stats and it's crazy that since the 1950s right after World War two As we moved to the burbs and as we got a little bit more stoic like we're men aren't supposed to you know talk to me Men with a sense of love although I think that's improved a lot recently But anyway, I think men are gonna be crazy lonely more lonely than normal in the next handful of years and as someone who's ex-military I don't hang out with military guys I was like I want to experience that because there's some opportunity there I think so two things I would say is one I definitely think that businesses that are able to build the communities not just have customer bases are gonna do incredibly well coming you know coming out of this whole thing and then also just in general in a digital age and Some of it is like addressing the loneliness and then some of it also is just the internet provides you the ability to find people who have Some are interested right and that's really hard to do if you didn't have the internet and you lived in Manhattan But you basically have to go to bars and find like okay Where's the people who like my sports team right or like where's this whatever the internet you just like go to Chicago Bears.com even though they're not very good team because they're trying to better but you know It's like that's kind of one piece and the second piece also is I still think that there's a ton of innovation to happen around meeting people So you see some of this with like the what is it a lunchtime.ai or something right? Or lunch buddy or something like that. Yeah, whatever it is You see this with like the clubhouse kind of the drop-in audio whatever But it's just like I think a lot of people think of that category specifically is like oh, it's over right? Oh, we have Twitter We have like I actually think that it hasn't even started yet and even if you go to the extent of serious idea for you dating apps What's the number one problem with dating apps and if you guys had to guess if you went and talked to a lot of people Do you think their biggest issue would be?
For women creepy men, I guess and appropriate men. So along those lines one of the things I've heard people talk about over and over again is like the False promotion right like oh this guy look like he was gonna be so hot and attractive or whatever and like I met him He looks nothing like his photo right or like man this girl like I was so into her And then like we met for a date and she had like a squeaky voice and like I didn't want to like hang out with her Which is not right or whatever and so I think that one of the opportunities I've literally pitched this to so many people and nobody will build it So I whoever builds it police reach out to me is to create a dating app just called authentic and all you do is you hold down the screen Right? So there's no profiles There's no text or anything when you open the app you just hold down the screen to create your profile and a random question pops down And it's the selfie video you've got to answer it on the spot Just like you would it you know a date or an event or whatever and you can review it afterwards But you can't save it so you either get to choose right then and there I want this to be public or I want to discard it and if you discard it you hold that down again you get a different question You don't know the questions are it's completely you know kind of authentically you there's no filters There's nothing it's video so I can hear your voice I get to see your manner is I get to see if you're smart or not Whatever and not only do I think people would create the content imagine the consumption experience It would be like watching you know American Idol audition tapes, right? You can just see there just keep there and just keep scrolling so do you but would you but would you I would never invest in the dating Space would you I think that again going back to people think that categories over I think it's probably one of the most ripe categories for not only disruption But also to those businesses make incredible amounts of money went Correctly, but yeah, so few of them are done correct like there's it's like one of those It seems like one of those spaces where there's a few winners that kill it and then everyone else dies Do you have a name of space is not like that right?
What space does not have a handful of winners and then everybody else dying right? Plumbers clean it Like are you gonna go invest in a plumber like what is a plan? I mean like I don't know what I mean is with a plumber it's like a dating app to marketplace you need everyone That's the type of investing he does you put in you put in a dollar and you're trying to get over a hundred back and like the only types of companies I can return hundred thousand X are gonna be Things where there's a few winners that that win that win big right? Hold on do you guys know what muzz matches?
Yes? No, I don't tell me these guys are gonna love the fact that we've been mentioning They've never remembered I talked to them three or four years ago It's a dating app for Muslims Muslims have the largest religion in the world and there are a number of intricacies and nuances to date So please God hopefully I don't get a this wrong But like little things like are you halal or not right like what food do you consume? Are you willing to move to another country if you meet the right person on this app right like all of these little things that are very specific to That segment of the world population they created an app and it's the largest dating app in the world for Muslims And when I first heard that I was like really got like 50,000 users like no it's a massive business And I haven't talked to him in literally two or three years So I don't know how it's played out, but I still see them all time online mention It's like that so it's like you can go do that for every single religion and I think people have done that You can go you know city by city you can do all these different things and so you can take an industry and just segments it And then just rebuild the same infrastructure with a different kind of skin on it and and probably do pretty well I have a friend who did almost exactly that. I'm not really a friend I mean I met the guy and he came to one of my kind of like founder mastermind things and it's like cool What are you doing?
It's like just a handful of people is like I'm gonna build this dating app for any people I was like oh great I was a single Indian person like great talk to me And I realized it's definitely not for me because he was like the name was in him He was Bill Mill which means like hearts meeting or something and then basically what it was was like I was really wanted to get married so it's more like the match that combo whatever I remember you know the thing you're talking about where every group has like these small nuances that make a huge difference Then he was he did like login or sign up with LinkedIn I was like what the hell is this? He's like dude any people care about like what your profession is if you don't have a job like you're not a candidate like you You should not be in the pool if you don't have a job That's straight up. That's how like how old two many people think it's like number one You know good job good family fair skin tall like these are the attributes and if you can miss one But you can't miss like job for example. There's farm.
There's farmer dating. Yeah, what is that farmers or whatever? It's something like that. Yeah, so there's all these niches So he sold it so anyways, I remember that day being like this is interesting actually that could work and then he was I really stubborn about one thing and I was like okay, I want to invest in this guy He's just so stubborn he was like really insistent that you would only have seven seconds to look at profile and decide and I was like Cool like that's an interesting mechanic, but like also might be total shit and like you might throw away No trust me.
No, and I was like alright. This guy's just like way too stubborn Anyway fast forward a few years you sell that this year for 50 million dollars to I think one of the conglomerate groups Like match or whoever like I see all of these Yeah, they own all the big apps because he picked a segment and like, you know Just drove that segment home and knew how to acquire users who had that particular problem That's pretty badass. I love that idea Like and by the way, this is like a recurring theme is if you go and if you ask a bunch of people Like what are the verticals that are played out like those are actually probably the best ones to go after right? So everybody has written off at this point.
Yeah, it's just like consumer social 18 to 24 months ago Actually, like pretty good time to start and you see the rise of tiktok all of a sudden you see, you know All these things like explode. It's just right when everyone thinks it's over like here. We go again So Sean has kind of like invented this export business topic that I want to bring up in a second So think about like what could be exported from Facebook or snap or whatever? I can give you an example of one that was that I heard of well Yeah, tell your example Sean and then we'll go to one topic and then come back So I think so the export example there's a company called LaunchDarkly.
I even really with them I have not basically at Facebook and many big companies they have obviously you know Yeah, billion users if you launch a feature that sucks or is buggy or is gonna decrease engagement like, you know Leaving a feature that decreases revenue by 1% can be you know, tens of millions of dollars for these companies You have to be really smart about how you roll out a feature and especially with the app store You don't want to roll something out and then have to go through app store Reapproval and take seven days like this how it used to be so Facebook built a system internally from what I understand that was basically like It lets you launch a feature with a feature flag meaning it's off by default and then the engineer from the back And can turn it on for a subset of people you could say I want 1% of users to see this only and if it goes Go to the 1% then I'll turn my knob and I'll get to 5% etc. So this is like a standard feature that big companies have but small companies We're never gonna build the infrastructure to do something like this It's a long start. We was like, you know a couple of next Facebook people spun out and they're like, hey, whatever I forgot the internal name of that tool that Facebook is like let's call it whatever code name a dalian It's like oh, we're taking medallion and we're making available to every sass company that exists and these guys have crushed it They've raised over $50 million and it's it's a sort of a known no quantity that you're taking the R&D of Facebook The infrastructure Facebook and then you're saying no other company no small company could afford this investment We'll do the investment once and we'll sell it to every small company for a small monthly fee And so they've been tremendously successful with a small feature like that the first time I ever heard of this and I'd never heard of this export You know framework is because that's fucking trademark. It's like boys original You know people forget like before you go work these big companies even in I joined Facebook when it was 3,800 employees like 4,000 there and when I left like basically two years later It was already 12,000 like like literally right when we were really really scaling and you forget like life beforehand because you walk in Like a bunch of these tools are there you're like wow I can like go 1% and then 5% Oh, I can target based on geography and we should go to New Zealand to do zoom in English and reporters don't you know nobody reporters They're so no features are getting tested, you know, whatever But the first time that I started to help a friend after Facebook I was like oh well, you should obviously just figure out like what is your hook that I did a five for attention And he was like what do you mean?
I was like well I Facebook like I think I've never been like if you get 10 friends in seven days or something Right if you like friend 10 people then like there's an 85% change where the number is yeah But like that thing's forever an early stage company like of course I think we've got four weeks to get like any interesting data So I just got to figure it out now well and what they would do is one you've got to have the system to do the testing right Two you got to have enough data over a long enough period of time to actually know did it lead to 30 90 to your attention rates All that kind of stuff and the third thing is you have the engineering capacity to change your product around to test all different things So I remember being like oh, it's gonna be so easy like you know, it's like an internal tool whatever and he was like What do you mean? I have like a one engineer? You know, it's whatever was he was like I can't do that It's like googling around and there was a company amplitude which I think now is like pretty popular actually But I was like one of their big early selling points was like hey We can basically look at a bunch of your attention data and tell you like here's the thing that is the highest signal as to having a retained Userbase and then you can like basically manipulate your products like make everyone go do that thing So for Facebook, it's you know if it's funding Let's force everyone to give us their contacts their emails like whatever we could possibly do suggest the right friends once they hit their 10 friend, you know quote or whatever then we can back off and let them enjoy Facebook But like we're super aggressive in the first seven days to make sure that they hit that right every product There's some thing it's like as like your I think it's thousand messages was the was the milestone It's like once you get past a thousand messages You'll never turn off slack or something like that a bunch of companies have their their magic moment where it's like once you pass This magical threshold we know we got you you hit core value. You understand what this is all about and you're gonna have a great experience Absolutely.
So well, I want to give you a second to think about that because all right because Sean put you on the spot a little bit And or we both did but let me tell you something that I heard this week. There's a guy named Nick Hoover I think I his name is that I met I was driving doing and doing a live Twitter thing and he like started talking I go dude Let me talk you now and you like call my other phone and we did like live interview on Twitter It's kind of cool and he was like so what this guy did was he was in a service business And then he started to buy storage companies and put software on it and he's consolidating them That's cool But he was like the thing I learned about a service business is that it's it's not a problem about having too much demand because if I'm Providing a service that's popular like I'm always gonna have customers who want it the problem that I found is that I Can't like the people who want to work in this industry It's hard to train them and I need to and he's like a real problem Is and I didn't want to solve this problem was I need to come up with the training system that I teach a fifth grader How to do x y and z and have a repeatable and make it work well Have you guys ever heard of this problem? I mean I don't know any about services But have you heard of this problem before Sean? Yeah, I think this is the limit of every service business is how do I have enough people?
I can't scale my time. I don't either want to or I can't anymore So can I get other people to do what I do without losing the magic of what works for me? Like that's the biggest issue and so I started researching this There's and there's there's a few things that do this the first is there's a company called health stream health stream is publicly traded It's based in Nashville. I think it does 300 million in revenue and they teach nurses how to do the latest procedures So if it like for corona, it's like all right the new procedure for welcoming people is to do x y and z And they just have like is really they just make videos and everyone logs in and watch the video What are some interesting businesses that this could work for?
You know, it's a and I'm noticing with my company even like training people to do this thing is actually hard Like I just create this Google doc and I'm gonna read this even though to make their job better Well, it's two problems right? So one is the people who know how to do the task like when they've got to be good at documenting it and then two is you've got to get people to Actually consume the content as well, right? So there's two full problem and I got to imagine that there's a big business in every single regulated industry, right? So for CFA's for nurses, you know, just go down the line where you mandate the training So like oh, there's some regulation or oversight committee or you know Whatever the thing is that forces everyone to you know be up to date on whatever the latest stuff is and if those rules are in place Then basically the demand is you know infinite because it's just how many nurses are there in the country?
They all have to take this training and so like I just go to the business I know that I can walk in every hospital and they have to buy from either me or one of my competitors, right? My buddy is in the like I don't know if you're talking like he's a professional speaker or something like those workshops and his He basically has three types of clients is one is like high-end company like Ferrari or you know whatever Chipotle like a big company You know MasterCard will hire him to come in and talk and then half the time when he's on the road He's like yeah, I'm at the Iowa Middle School District Well, I'm like, oh cool You're doing like a pro bono thing and he was like no like dude these schools pay more than the companies and I was like what? He's like yeah, they have this like professional development budget that they have to spend and then they have these like Whatever the like kind of target is of the year like he's like for last year was all about growth mindset And so I'm the best guy for growth mindset and so every single school district wanted me and had thousands of dollars Throw me to come talk to seventh graders or fourth graders about you know about this and the teachers also that you know They have they have a budget for this. It's like in the next year It'll be around you know social emotional learning or like whatever the top level says hey This is the mandated thing you all got to learn it's kind of like your nurses thing It's like we all got to learn this procedure or this technique or the business best in class and then some you know Some speaker somewhere is like oh shit payday this year.
I'm going on tour like Lady Gaga And that's what he basically does it's incredible But I also think masterclass is like a version of this right it's it's unstructured training is not for a specific job It's like the self-improvement professional development Whatever like there's a lot of people that buy that the other element is like who's paying right? So like that nursing training the nurses and paying for it's from one of these budgets or whatever But I do actually think that there's gonna be and not like the there's kind of like the sleazy like let me teach you make money on the Internet Type stuff but much more like hey, how do you start a podcast? Hey? How do you you know create a successful newsletter right like if you guys came out with that tomorrow?
It's like you would sell a lot of whatever that is Okay, there you go, right? So like but it's just like as you kind of go down the line You could look at what are all the successful things that people have done on the Internet And if you understand how they did it or you go get them to do it if they just document their process Like there's somebody in the world who wants to be that person or have that type of business and they'll be willing to Pay for it. It may not be a billion-dollar business But make a million bucks a year just selling you know training manuals on a million Internet jobs, right? My father-in-law is in the moving business.
He owns a moving business called Eagle Transport where you live in Manhattan It's a great company and I'm like why haven't you like it's a cash flow thing? It provides him a wonderful living and I'm like why haven't you expanded expanded and this is a common thread because my father owns A old school company as well. I'm like why haven't you expanded? He goes I don't want to train these people like it's too hard like it's just a pain and you work with like a I mean, I'm just gonna sound like a dick you work with a lot of like lower-end people like they're like have issues You don't want to fucking teach them and they're always a pain in the ass and I'm like, why don't you say I don't want to deal with all these people?
This is just enough already and I'm like, what can I what can I do? Just teach this is this is a it's not about training. It's about actually replacing and automating like this is the training is an intermediary step That's never gonna be good enough and what's happening so I have a friend who's big time investing in automation That's his thing. So he's always telling me like I invested in this pizza robot company I'm like, oh cool.
It's like some sexy consumer things like no like basically They're just trying to get a pizza that can make perfect pizzas 24 seven that they'll sell to dominoes and dominoes replace four employees And they'll take dominoes these this machine never gets sick never complains never checks its phone while at work And this machine will just spit out the same pizza all day 24 seven. How does that sound? How much we pay for that? And then they're basically like, oh, you know, how much money do I have?
Let me give it to you And so there's automation like I don't know if you've noticed there was this there was a head fake early on with like kind of like in restaurants Like digital menus kiosks and stuff like that and then it fucking happened both in airports and in restaurants Like you'll see the kind of order here kiosk tablets. There's a company called toast that I think it crushes it with this I'm like I don't want to say a number but there's a lot of revenue every single year and it's all because they can do the math and basically say Hey, we save you to to to account worth and when I say that you also need the manager because the manager spends what percentage of the headaches of people know showing or not not performing or training or whatever because you know These people switch jobs all the time and so like Sam the solution to your thing I think in most cases actually gonna be a form of automation when you just get rid of the human in the loop altogether I agree. There's also a macro trend here, which I think is Chamartan I had this you know epic podcast episode where he basically outlaid a very simple framework was which was simply the United States economy has pursued efficiency over resiliency and so we basically ran around the world trying to find the most efficient Lowest cost way to produce things we became really really good at it and then like this pandemic basically exposed the fact that we gave up Resiliency for efficiency and so his argument is that like we're gonna swing the pendulum back Maybe not all the way but like in some direction where resilience is gonna become important again And you see this with like American companies want to you know onshore their manufacturing their supply chains and whatever the number one advantage that the American human Labor worker has had is the fact that automation hasn't been able to replace them right? That's their biggest moat is the fact that like a machine hasn't been able to do their job And so therefore when these companies bring back those manufacturing facilities of those supply chains now the tech's actually getting pretty close Like 3d manufacturing automation like whatever it is And so if you just read if you just brought back your facility to the United States and try to use American labor at the cost You would like four to five acts the labor cost you have compared to Southeast Asia or wherever So like it almost would be like cost prohibitive to do it But if you can instead use automation and 3d printing or whatever it is now You can actually bring back to the United States increase your resiliency and keep some like barrier of efficiency as well And so I think I wonder if this rise in popularity of automation and 3d printing But also there's gonna be a lot of people who like gotta go find new jobs, right?
And so like how long does that take what do they do? You know we can get it all that but it's just like that trend I think it's gonna become really really really important as we come out of this COVID stuff Is there any space where you've seen that your shot is not automated? I mean like everything I mean it's a thing where like we all overestimate We all overestimate like we overestimate what we can do in one year like if you literally think of almost every single job I think that we all believe is gonna be on the economy How many people thought you know cars were gonna be automated and self driving at this point? Like there's a lot of people right?
How many people thought that the segue would eventually turn into the like automated robot that goes around the office buildings and make sure that you know It's access to security guard right or there's some level of shutting off the lights when no one's in the room So it saves on the energy bill, but right now There's she was a little walk around a big office building like shuttle lights on like stupid little things that each one of those applications Probably ends up being a business at some point and then you get the like bundling of okay Like I'm just gonna be the guy who goes and buys up all the businesses that optimize the operations of a commercial real estate building So let me buy the security robot company Let me buy the light company, you know, whatever and then they build a big conglomerate and then somebody 20 years from now Like unbundles it all right and says hey, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna compete whatever So it's just I think business cycles in general play out that way and you know, we're on the start of There's an export one that's sort of related what you're talking about Sam Yeah, they have this developer boot camp, right? So like I have a friend who he was my buddy He was like a finance guy kind of thing went to Facebook worked in the front apartment And then he went to the Facebook developer boot camp that they have internally Which is like hey like eight weeks or so you can learn to be an engineer at Facebook He'll start at the kind of the bottom but then you can grow from there and and now he's like CTO sub-tech company in New York And he basically, you know after a few years at Facebook So he did the boot camp work as an engineer at Facebook for two or three years and I left and then went to the company that was like a Well-funded well-run company was like they're like kind of doing the interview his pitch was so simple so beautiful You just I make your engineering team work like a Facebook engineering team He's like I know that process. That's how I work. I'll just use that like I will take our blue our playbook over there And I'll make it work over here What's that like saying like you know, I'm from the Navy seals?
I you know, I'll come to your gym and I'll train you like a seal and it's like oh shit. Okay. Yeah, yeah Yeah, that's what I want and so he's now to see if some company and so that same thing though Like what Facebook did which was not like just some online course you can click a button and take or go to Linda.com And we bought you six credits It's like no There's a physical place in the building where you go and you get to do that for eight to nine weeks You get paid and then you walk out, you know with a certain set of skills that's Lambda school inside of a company And so Facebook can afford to do it. I don't know how many I don't know if Google has the same I'm sure there's companies have variations of this But there's gonna be a central company that does that as a service to every company So PwC and Deloitte and all these other people they'll have a boot camp run by like, you know, whoever I think general assembly was trying to do this At one point in time But like somebody who specifically focuses on upskilling people for coding or upskilling for like using no-code tools I think those will be like that's a note If I really wanted to run a kind of a people and service heavy business But still make big bucks I think that would be a way to do it is to go to big old-tool companies and say look we put the Facebook boot camp inside Visa And we will train you train up some people here and we'll train up like the Facebook Facebook and that would be a dope business people don't understand how crazy that training process is like as a product manager I came up for those four or eight weeks But when you first get to Facebook like you have a team like they're like hey, you're gonna go here for like four weeks Or whatever it was and they like teach all about product management Facebook But it's not just product management It's like product management at Facebook like here's how we do things here's why we do them here Here's all things you need to know whatever and Chris Cox who was a chief product officer that left and came back He talked to every single incoming class of employees like it was like this is serious to us Right, this wasn't like a here's a one-day indoctrination Like here's where the bathroom is you know here's where your manager is and like if you have any problems like you know Send an email to HR like this was like a real thing when I got to twitch the first day onboarding It was that the first half of the day was like hey, you're gonna get your laptop And then my guy like I think I was like hey, so I were short on that top So I'll get yours tomorrow So I'm just sitting there while everyone else boots up and then it's like alright It's lunch time your lunch buddy someone who works at the company will come get you guy never comes and I was like cool Onboarding complete that was the whole that was the whole thing like this is a this is a multi-billion dollar company And so some companies have this like very very rich process like the Facebook car wash They put you through where it's like you come in as like, you know, you know smart kid from wherever Harvard or whatever you are But you're still gonna go through that six week car wash and come out like you know Facebook product manager number three four three four three And you know that works for them.
So I'm gonna read you guys Let me see if I can find it So you guys know Gartner so I I mock Gartner a lot because I think it's kind of a it's I think it's a little bit of a scam I'm not everyone agrees. I think it's kind of scammy how they do things, but Tom Do you know what they do? Like, you know, it's like the research they pull people and do all stuff right? I feel like you mock them, but you're just it's like second graders that tease each other, but they actually like each other It's like yeah, no, I have a lot of respect for them.
No, I totally do But I was reading this breakdown of how they work because Gartner They've been around since I think the 70s maybe it's worth like 15 billion dollars And a lot of people are like how does Gartner do it because their research is like only okay But I was reading a breakdown and they're like their sales training is the best sales training in the industry and that they purposely turn like 25% a year Of their sales people because they want to cutthroat They want to be cutthroat and when you first sign up they do two months of training and they fly you to a isolated Florida hotel When they split you into teams that compete against one another in high pressure sales names every single day and around 10% of her class Was fired within the first two weeks but the others who made it bonded over it and they shared trauma and they considered themselves an elite cohesive sales Organization of highly like a highly-covemented team and that's how and they do it's an eight week That's like the back of the DVD of like taking three It's like I have a set of skills that I've been trained for It sounds like boot camp like military boot camp They give you coronavirus on day two just to see if your immune system can survive Well, it's actually pretty interesting because when you think about a company you think well, it's the product It's amazing, but like as someone who only works in small businesses I'm like I forget that it could be just like this crazy interesting It's not even that interesting like you're like oh obviously do that but don't do it including me So about these like really good onboarding techniques another company I did was trilogy software which we've talked about on here Which a lot of people know about but they were considered like as good as Microsoft in the 90s And they would do the same thing where they would they would train developers like in a crazy good way And that's how they became so valuable and so that's kind of interesting an interesting idea here I don't know what to make of it, but it is something that I didn't previously know that's for sure that stuff also I think it becomes interesting because I remember a Co-cove knives I think it's how it's called whatever like basically go door door they sell knives or whatever I know a lot of kids in high school or college who would do it for money But in the back of their head they would say to themselves like I'm learning a skill because the training was so extensive about whatever And then like when I get done here I'm gonna have to skill forever I bet right I don't know for sure But there's so much people who go to Gartner to be the sales program for two years and they know they're not gonna You know spend their career there But they just want to get the experience and skills and they leave and so like that is a fantastic recruiting tool as well And if you're gonna get rid of 25% of people anyways Like you actually probably lose the top like 2% who are like your best people and then you lose like you know You're bottom 25% or 20% or whatever it is So I tend to think that like the organizations that spend a lot of time on the training like word spreads like hey working There's good, but the training you get will like serve you for the rest of your career and it helps on the recruiting front So back to the import export thing is there anything at Facebook that you think is all about this I find it so interesting I mean only 13 or 15 or however many tens of thousands of people do work at Facebook But they are more classic so many different things what yeah, let's do snaps even more mysterious to me Well Facebook is the easier one because I think that people understand some of the tools and it's probably more It's a better comp to like what most people are building and so I would say three things come to mind The first is the data science team at Facebook is absolutely world-class and they understand better than anyone in the world Kind of the pursuit of truth and so if you look at the people who have left there everyone from you know the chemos of the world Whatever like it's just a pursuit of like I don't care what opinions are like show me the data And I'm gonna set up the test frameworks in order to actually get to the truth and it all boils down though this one key insight that I had when I was there and I didn't have like a ureecum I'm like they already told me that they were like hey when you run these tests There's two things that are really important one you got I've had very clear goal like what are we going to measure success and failure by and then to whatever the test is has to be executed perfectly and If you don't execute it perfectly and then it doesn't work You're left asking yourself like was it because we ran the test wrong or is it because actually we should go spend our time doing something else? Right, so it's like the perfect execution component and so I think like this testing framework There's been tons and tons of tools but very similar to what Charlotte about kind of like hell make your software team like Facebook just teaching the art of data science and testing and like the pursuit of truth I think there's a massive business to be built there consequently There's a lot of software that you can build around this as well like you can see yourself you go in you do the training And they're like oh by the way like you know here's all the watches underneath my jacket like you know Here's my analytics tool. Here's my screen recording tools. You can watch user pathway Here's my data science tool You know here's my way that you communicate with customers like you could just walk down every single touch point that that that Grotein would have with a product and then just build your own piece of software It's almost this like consultative sales piece where you're making money up for my training and on the back of your following it with A software and kind of getting more ltv out of it.
I have a funny story about this. So I met a guy This is unconfirmed. So this might be total bullshit. I don't know but I like it already.
It's definitely true But it's not gonna be true. So exactly so I'll just share it to you know hundreds of thousands of people because you know Why not so this guy works at Facebook high up and he uses these tools you're talking about the testing tool specifically I believe that there's a tool Maybe it's called Titan. Maybe it's not called Titan. I don't know exactly But there's a tool that basically when you run a test it tells you not just did your test work like oh we made the button blue That made you know that people click that button, but it says hey Here's every other KPI also so you didn't fuck up something else while you're trying to fix one thing You actually dropped another thing so it's you see this like really great way to analyze the whole picture not just your specific thing Anyways, I don't know much about this tool, but here's what I heard.
I heard that this person was like, okay I'm gonna spin this I'm gonna export this idea. I'm gonna go make this its own startup They recruit a couple of people from internal like hey leave with me. Let's go do this They raise they actually raise money they go they rent an office everything and they get some you know goes into the office to tell Zuck like hey, you know, thanks for everything, you know, but like peace out. I'm gonna go do this and Something happened in that meeting that I don't know but we believe here's what ended up happening the startup never take never get started the office rent They just pay it off They don't ever go move into the office person keeps working at Facebook And I believe what ended up happening was that Zuck basically was like, you know, you could go do that But like here's just oh a giant bag of money that I have with me Like how about this instead and like how do you stay and you take a bag of money and we forget you ever said anything about leaving?
And then the guy was like no, no, no, like I really wanted this actually I told my family I rented an office space I'm already two feet out the door and he's like oh cool. Okay, so So we're not gonna let you do this company actually we're gonna have to produce some action against you But again, there's a bag of money and this is great role If you just want to stay with the bag of money the great role you tell me which way you want to go And so I don't know exactly how the conversation went down But from what I have heard there was a conversation like this that happened again I might have been told bullshit, but I love the story either way and I choose to believe that this was true and this part is still workspace Did you guys read the the message? Yeah, so Sean like is obsessed with this and I got me obsessed with it Where he was like he like goes in like emails the founders of huge companies like hey forward me the emails when you were describing the early Idea of your company. I love seeing the evolution and I want the raw text I'm like a fucking paleontologist looking for the original source material.
It's pretty cool I like it as well. He's got me into it and so to listeners last week this this some type of chat Transcript got out of Kevin's system the founder of Instagram talking to a friend who was talking to someone who I think was an investor They have Instagram, but who also worked at Facebook. I think yes I'm not cold or he was early at Facebook and he's a big and they were chatting back and forth and Kevin was like Hey Matt Zuck messaged me like he wants to he said this I think he means this and then they were talking back and forth about what that could mean And they were like he's gonna crush you so like if you don't do this right like he doesn't care He only he's gonna destroy you so play ball the exact quote in their Ask he's like if we say no will he just like go into destroy mode. Yeah, he's like yeah, probably What do I say that will not trigger destroy mode?
He's like maybe we could just say oh we're just trying to do this little filter thing We don't really see ourselves as like you know becoming a social network and he's like yeah, he's also really smart Like he's not He goes he's too smart. He's like well should we tell him that we're gonna sell to Twitter he goes you could help destroy you I thought it was amazing. Did you and I know we're about at time. Did you ever have moments of that we're like oh God This guy's like a gun is gonna he's gonna destroy I don't remember how many times I met with Zuck But was always in a group setting so it's never like a one-on-one But I was fortunate to work on this very small team that was specifically trying to help figure out like how do we grow?
Mark Zuckerberg and Charles Samberg's personal Facebook pages, right? They didn't want to like manipulate the product right? You could I remember we were like one meeting and like one of the ideas at one point was like Well, why don't we just like put it in your special be like everyone follows up like kind of like Tom my space style You know type thing and then part of the beauty of like a diversity was like somebody else was like no Like I grew up in a country where like the president used to like come on you know television and like take over the screen and like with his like You know message of like conquering the people basically and he's like like there's certain places in the world Like you don't want to do this right and so what they ended up saying was like okay Like we're just gonna have to do this without manipulating the product I'm like that's like the most fair way to do it And so we beat these meetings and the thing that always struck me was like you've got a guy who runs a you know Multi-billion dollar business and working on a long time and he could be talking about like super long-term company strategy And then immediately like there's a presentation up and he would like zero way on a screenshot be like Why is that buttons pixel like what you're like dude? You just went from like a hundred thousand feet to like ground floor, you know level feedback back to a hundred thousand And then shifted like left or right on various products and we've been in here for seven minutes Like you were capacity in terms of like ingesting information and also being able to like sift through high signal low signal stuff It's just like bar none and so I was telling somebody in trying to come back Look first you have to remember like he has the most context here Like he's literally been at the company longest and so like he seemed like he's erasure So the product he remembers the conversations before they got launched that things went right that things went wrong like whatever But it was still this thing of just like man this dudes on it And so like I'll read articles even today and people like say whatever they want about this up They've like never talked to him or whatever met him or whatever and I'm like do you think he like built a multiple He's an idiot right and the thing that I'll leave it with on Zuck is a friend of mine was talking about them When they first announced Libra going into crypto and he's like there's a lot of people who probably don't like Zuck But there's not that many people who thinks he's dumb right and so like you may not like him for whatever your personal preference You know reason is but like if he's going to do something a lot of people are gonna Be like wait why is luck and Facebook going to do it right?
They were talking specifically about crypto, but I think that's generally true across a lot of different things And so if all of a sudden people here like you know, they're making a huge investment in VR There's a lot of other people like wait why is he doing that? Like what does he know that I don't know and you know they try to start looking around the corner But I think what you saw I didn't see the text messages But I saw some emails or something. I think from an Instagram thing It's just like look he saw the future right or at least like where he thought it was going and he like pretty much was like Directly correct. We're just pretty impressive.
Yeah, that's crazy. I love those stories. Thank you You should go we should go we should wrap this up time damn I feel like we're just scratching the surface, but this was this was great. Thanks for coming on man.
Hope you can come on again I think people really like you and your your thoughts. So appreciate you coming in absolutely thanks guys for having me We'll definitely thank you