The Exchanges

Q know, the hiring manager or the company. My first question is, you know, typically in a, an interview process, a candidate, if they go far in the process, will talk to many people, and oftentimes early in the process, they'll talk to someone from HR. How should interviewees Prepare specifically for interviews with HR professionals, and how does that differ from, say, other professionals in the business that interview them?

A Well, probably for an HR person, there's going to be a strong emphasis on culture. So the way that an interviewee can come in prepared and feeling like they have all the information they need, do your research, look up online if it's possible, you know, any social media presence or online presence that the business may have. So you can have questions prepared that can speak to the culture and typically, or at least it should get an HR person excited to share with them. And then also do your research on the actual person themselves. So HR is, is a pretty wide function, but learning what the history, um, whether it's career progression or even just personally, what the HR person has gone through that you're going to be speaking to, asking them about their own journey and how that translated into where they are today is a great question to start and have open for them.

AI assessment note: “Well, probably for an HR person, there's going to be a strong emphasis on culture.”

Q and how investors should be thinking about it and positioning themselves for it, but I want to talk about the other side of the inflation coin first, which is rates. Rates haven't been this high since I was eight years old. I don't know what grade I was in, but it was 22 years ago. How do you see this impacting current and future investments with where rates currently stand?

A Five and a quarter to five and a half, so the Fed thinks of it as a range of a quarter point. And a year and a half ago, the Fed was at zero, zero to a quarter. So it is one of the fastest, most aggressive rate hiking cycles that we've ever seen. And, you know, it was for good reason, of course, and that was the inflation that came out of the reopening following the pandemic, and there were other reasons for it as well. And the way we think about it is, again, in real terms, right? So If the Fed is at five and a quarter to five and a half, and the expectations are that the Fed is either done raising rates or getting very close to being done, and you take that TIPS break even, and again, the TIPS market doesn't have to be correct necessarily, but that's the collective wisdom, if you will, of the financial markets, um, and, and that wisdom or that collective opinion is saying that inflation will be around two and a half percent for the coming five years or so, So you subtract two and a half from five and a quarter to five and a half, you get real rates of plus three. That is about where the Fed generally goes in terms of a hiking cycle, right? So the full cycle tends to be five, six percentage points from two to three below what we would consider a neutral rate, which is generally thought of as about three and a half percent or so, to about two to three percentage points above. S…

AI assessment note: “the way we think about it is, again, in real terms”

Q Alex, how does that make it any different than any other beverage business? Like, vitamin water is just water with some colors and a cool, you know, Coca-Cola. Like, the story of Coca-Cola is literally water with some, a few additional ingredients and then marketing.

A Yeah, but there's at least, you know, there's some differentiation to the taste. There is literal zero differentiation here, yet somehow people still think the taste is different, and I will go to the grave believing that every water tastes the exact same. Before we hop into the actual show, this is like the prelude. Two unbelievable marketing campaigns that Liquid Death has done recently, and they've done dozens of these. First was, in the last few days, Uh, they partnered with Martha Stewart. I don't know if you guys saw this, and they went and they created, uh, great, we got it on cam, a severed hand holding a liquid death as a candle. Just the most random thing ever. If you were to ask me to drop, who would the, the ideal collaboration be? It would not be Martha Stewart, but it's great. The second one, and this was a little while ago, is rather than going to athletes or celebrities to do endorsements, I don't know if you guys ever saw this, they went to Waterboy's, So they did a 100,000 dollar endorsement with a professional, uh, team's water boy, and then they created a YouTube video of water boys and water girls running 40 yard dashes with liquid death in hand. So is this company worth seven hundred million? I personally don't think so. Is it gonna have the staying power, uh, the brand staying power given it is so sexy and cool right now? I don't know, but I think it is a…

AI assessment note: “There is literal zero differentiation here, yet somehow people still think the taste is different”

Q Well, I, well, I think that brings up a really good point, which is something you've talked about, um, is kind of with any employee, you just keep trying to expand their scope as much as possible until it basically breaks. Why do you believe that's an important thing to do in a company?

A Well, basically, this is how you, uh, totally just undiscover a talent pool, this critical density of talent that Peter has identified, um, into a functional organization, is you want to challenge people to the limits of their ability. So this is a lesson I've actually learned from David Sachs initially. He had this philosophy, very explicitly as such, in early 2001, and articulated it to me, is like, take everybody on your team, I'll keep pushing along. The envelope of what they can do until you see where they're struggling. And then everybody will have a natural limit, but keep pushing until you find it. And then you're going to get people to achieve things and achieve things for the company and succeed in ways that you never would have got. So it's like constantly like push, push, push, push, push, push, and monitor, and then keep, keep pushing envelope until you find like a natural limiter. So I borrowed both, I kind of borrowed both of these philosophies, combined them from Peter and David.

AI assessment note: “you're going to get people to achieve things and achieve things for the company”

Q Yep. Last question on this, and then I'll kind of punt it to you to, to talk about any other trade-offs or kind of, um, sticking points you've run into as you've built this model. But the, the other one that stands out to me is culture. Like, can you have culture? Whatever that means with this model or not really? Like, how do you think about that?

A I mean, I think you always have culture, right? At the end of the day, you have some degree of something has brought you guys together in a Slack, right? And it's like, we did a retreat in Rome. I hadn't seen most of these people ever. And it was super fun because people have all these shared interests. You don't know what they're going to be. And humans are humans. Like we're all very similar compared to like snakes and stuff. So we're like, we all get along roughly, you know, pretty, pretty well. Obviously like there's probably like people have crazy opinions in their own heads. People are coming from all their different own cultures and family histories and backgrounds, but like, it's fun to hang out with people. Uh, it just, it's just fun. And so I think we do that. We, we do in person. I still think that's important. I just don't do the fake stuff. Like I just like, I don't want to hang out on zoom and do happy hour. Like that's just not that compelling to me. I'd rather, like, fly to Rome and hang out and grab a drink. You know, like, that's really fun. We're even thinking about getting an office in New York so we can, like, do stuff every once in a while together, and that would be really cool. Um, I do think there are other trade-offs. Uh, I think recruiting is hard. I think the culture isn't that bad or missing, in my opinion, but It's scary to people who haven't exper…

AI assessment note: “I think you always have culture, right? At the end of the day”

Q dollars. You've raised more than that. How do you think about like fundraising as this tool for ultimately realizing the vision of the business? When does it make sense from your perspective and how are you actually backing into like You raise around that big. It's like, it's almost like hard to think about raising that much money. How do you think about the right amount to raise and when?

A So, um, the real answer is what are you going to do with that money? Right? Like if you should raise money, if you have a way to provide a fantastic ROI on those dollars, but also the responsibility of those dollars, right? It doesn't come for free. And so my view on it is like, if you think you have a fantastic opportunity to go after some big market and You're, again, speaking of like an execs finance guy, like a sources and uses, like you know what you're going to do with it, and you have a vision, and frankly, you're taking a little bit of risk on what you're going to do. I think you should raise that money and see what happens. The flip of it, you just got to realize you're bringing on partners, you're bringing on expectations, and you're bringing on, um, frankly, some kind of timelines in terms of when you do it and how you do it. Um, but I think it's got to be coupled with like, where are you going and why do you need this money? Um, if you're just doing it because you can, I think some startups fall into that where, like, particularly that Zerp environment, they're like, let me just pull up my balance sheet and, like, dump cash onto it. But if you're not doing anything with it and the company doesn't grow into it, then it kind of screws everybody. Um, and so I think having a deliberate thesis around why you need that kind of capital and what you're going to do with it a…

AI assessment note: “having a deliberate thesis around why you need that kind of capital and what you're going to do”

Q Yeah, and so you, you said, you know, 20 to 30% of your time is, you know, kind of vision setting. 20, 30% of your time is, like, planning and getting ideas up from different parts of the company. What else are you spending your time on?

A Yeah, so that's cultural thing. Last piece is evangelizing what Kajabi does, to be honest. So our, Market position, um, is we always put the creator first, and sometimes it's to our detriment, right? Like, you can go into a website, you have no idea it's powered by Kajabi, and it's making a ton and ton of money. There are other companies out there in our competitive landscape who kind of put their brand first slash whatever, and that is just a different orientation we have, and so for my job, a lot of it is now evangelizing the power of this platform, right? Like, it's talking to other companies, trying to figure out strategic partnerships that unlock value for both. But a lot of it is just like telling our story, telling our customer story, and making sure people know this is a viable option for them to build these businesses. That isn't necessarily a tip of the tongue, because structurally, we don't put ourselves out there the way a lot of people do it, but we think that over the long haul, that's the right position. It's always putting the creator first, even if it's a detriment to our brand, because we think they'll tell our stories a lot better than we will. Their success will be so obvious. It's like, my God, why did I do this? Before, but that's again, the kind of a longer term view than man, a branded awareness wasn't awesome last quarter. We watch it, but we don't frea…

AI assessment note: “Last piece is evangelizing what Kajabi does, to be honest.”

Q were thinking about this business, going back to, like, idea generation, What was kind of, like, what was the calculus of how you got to this? Were you like, I just want to solve the biggest problem humanly possible, so let me think about the biggest markets? Or was it like, let me just think about the biggest problems that are plaguing society? Like, how did you arrive on figure?

A There was definitely a feeling like this is the right time to make it happen, even though it's not probably clear that this is, like, possibly the right time. This was, like, a huge, enormous industry, and it was a technology that, um, once matured, could unlock just, like, This, like, hopefully a really great future. Like, there's obviously this, like, it could be really bad, like, but we really hope that's not the case, and we're trying as hard as possible to make that not happen. Being aware of, like, you know, areas of robotics and AI, it's like, we gotta be very thoughtful about how we're developing stuff, how we're thinking about safety, all these different aspects, but to the extent this works in a good way, like, we think it's just gonna be, like, one of the most, I think it's gonna be one of the most revolutionary companies ever built. When I was looking at starting this company, The more and more I started looking at more like the details, like, okay, where's a battery and power density for, for robotics? What does the AI roadmap look like for perception, for semantic behaviors, for prediction, for planning? What does the control stack look like for this? Um, how fast do we need to run the control stack? Um, you know, what are the other dependencies of the business across the stack? Uh, how much capitals is going to need? What are the first applications? Uh, how soon …

AI assessment note: “all of that work basically was done in a nutshell, um, really early”

Q And so for me, I think I saw her tweet something exactly along the lines of this idea of like, how do I deal with imposter syndrome as a first time CEO?

A Yeah. People flipping, you know, I need to know everything. I'm supposed to be the expert. And for me, I like when we started Connie, I was like, I don't know what verticals this is going to work for. I don't, in our pitch deck, by the way, raise money. It says our target market is one to Shopify stores. And then we started selling to them and realized, God, it's hard. The product isn't quite self-serve enough. And we closed a couple bigger guys. And it's like, these guys can leverage it. They have the team to use it. Like we needed a person inside the content. And so I didn't, we didn't know. Right. And, and so I think that's the most important thing is like, I don't know is a really powerful statement and phrase. And I was like, I don't know what the market's going to be. I I'm going to go learn. And I'm going to do the way I learned that I'm going to sell. I'm going to see who use it. The one thing I made, I made it sound like the customers just said that this is my problem. We had customers use the product, right? And the ones that have loved it have gone into those use cases. So it's not like there's people spending every day in Kahani and they're using it for those purposes, which told us that that's what the, you know, the problem was they were trying to solve. So it's just super important to, to be like, I didn't know. I don't know. I don't know. I had no idea. And then…

AI assessment note: “that's what's kept me calm because I don't expect myself to have the master plan”

Q And are you a crier? Like, do you cry often?

A No, not a huge one. Uh, but I do. Um, and no, it hit me. I mean, it hit me big time. And I think like, even the, it's a little surreal of it not being ours anymore. It's been such a big part of my life for so long. So it was like, kind of like feeling a little bit like feeling for your cell phone and it's not there anymore or whatever. Like there was that feeling of it just being a normal part of things. I'm still in a couple of the Slack joint channels. So I'm like, hi guys, I'm still here. Um, I said, I miss you then the other day on, there's like a business development channel. I was like, I miss you guys.

AI assessment note: “No, not a huge one. Uh, but I do.”

Q And just to bring that deal to its fruition, do you still own that business? Did you sell it? What's, what's kind of the last chapter?

A Yeah, I don't own that business anymore. Um, I own lots of other laundromats, um, and other car washes, but since then, you know, what kind of happens in buying, I should have kept every business I've ever owned probably just like real estate. I did an analysis the other day that was horrifying, which is like, don't do this if you're listening, but if you've ever bought real estate and sold it, Like pretty much a bad idea. You know, you should always try to hold onto your real estate and businesses are typically like that too. As long as it's a good business, you can continue to have, you know, the business actually appreciate as long as the business fundamentals are sound. It's called the Lindy effect. If it's been in existence for a long period of time, it typically stays in a business for a long period of time. And so I probably should have kept them, but at some point there becomes this level where you're like, all right, my first house is a studio that I'm going to buy. And then I'm going to buy You know, a little condo, and then I'm gonna buy a townhouse, and you stair-step your way up, and that's what I've done in businesses, too.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I don't own that business anymore.”

Q and I've talked to my co-founder about it and other founders is like, they try to under, we try to understand like, are we good at hiring? And, and there's different levels. Like, are we good at hiring executives? Are we good at hiring kind of non-executives? What do you think, like, the rough batting average should be for founders in thinking about, are they good at hiring or not?

A So, there's two characteristics, right? There's a lot of hiring, you want to say, and then there's, you know, is this person a barrel or, like, a Tinex engineer or whatever, you know, because basically when you're hiring, it's smart enough, and so you've achieved, like, Let's say success, whatever it defined is. Um, real positive momentum with accumulating advantage is kicking in. You need people who create value. Yep. And value creation is very different than optimization and value protection. And so, to some extent, that's the definition of success changes over time. Like, there are people who can do the job very well, but that doesn't mean they're really gonna take you from A feed startup to a two billion dollar company. Like, those people are rarer, so I don't think you can, you know, I don't think he'd grade every hire and say, is this one of those people? That ratio is going to be low. But on the other hand, you also don't want masses, like constant masses, and so you have to monitor, like, are you, what are you aiming for? I think a ratio of barrels of 10% of an organization would be phenomenally high. Five percent would be pretty damn good. Now that said, I, I think you want, like, an 80%, at least, success rate of hiring, where the question would be, if you can make the hire all over again, what would you do it? Like, that's the easiest way, simple, there's lots of fan…

AI assessment note: “I think you want, like, an 80%, at least, success rate of hiring”

Q I think my question is, is, um, how do you know if you have kind of like the right or a good lawyer that you're working with? Uh, and how early did you involve them in just say your new business with Carrie?

A Yep. It's really hard. I've also separated a different time tweeted about how The most frustrating profession to deal with in the world is, is, is high expensive lawyers, because the whole industry is, you know, predicated around sometimes what is, in my opinion, not the fairest billing practices. Um, so honestly, it's tough. I think it's important to not skimp on the things that are important. So for us during our, our acquisition, it was important to make sure we get that stuff right, because the difference is quite material. In terms of finding the right lawyer, I mean, I think it's, ideally, you want it to feel like a partnership, and you want it to feel like you, just because you text them, they're not gonna, you know, rack up a thousand dollars every time they respond to you. So someone where they're ideally bought into your mission, they believe you're going to be a large company, and they're, you know, biding their time to actually make their money later on. Like, I think what happened with our council at Teachable is, Honestly, we didn't pay them very much through most of the company building journey, but they received a fair amount at the end when they helped us through the M&A transaction, right? So it kind of worked out for both parties, and we're trying to do that this time too. With that said, not naming names, we don't love our current corporate council, so, you …

AI assessment note: “ideally, you want it to feel like a partnership”

Q Exactly. On the culture piece, just before we move on to the next thing, what does it actually look like in practice to codify it and to live those values? Like, do you have any examples, like even within carry right now, like how have you codified the culture and how do you incentivize based on the culture?

A So we're very customer centric. And I think that's something that we're trying to get every single person involved in either talking to customers directly and wherever possible, like it really does come down to you as a founder. Like I replied, I joke with people that I'm very, very bad at email. If you want to reach an email right now, you would struggle unless you emailed support at carry money.com. I see that. I see that all day and I'm replying to those tickets all the time, right? That is the, I use that email inbox more than anything. So that's a way of, if you do the thing, the team will do the thing. So there's no better way than by your own example to actually do that.

AI assessment note: “I see that all day and I'm replying to those tickets all the time”

Q into action, because I love what you do in concept, but, um, maybe this is a story that I tell myself, but it feels like a lot of work. It feels like it'll take a lot of time to track your time. One, is that the case? And two, you If I wanted to start doing this, like, what is the system for tracking in the way that you do?

A I think one is starting by being proactive, which is the, the biggest, the biggest thing to do is to get rid of your to-do list and put all of your action items on your calendar. Block off the amount of time that you think it's going to take. You have a to-do list. Everyone has a list of things that they want to do, and just translate all of that into time on your calendar. And then as the day progresses, check your calendar, see what you're supposed to be doing right now. A lot, there are a lot of failure modes with this. One from somebody I was talking to recently is he found that when the time came to do task X, he just didn't feel like doing it, and then he would bump it to the next day, and then he wouldn't feel like it, and he'd bump it to the next day. I think that's, that's not a problem of the process. That's a problem of you trying to force yourself to do something that you don't want to do. This is a, you're, you're trying to solve An upstream problem with tactics. Really, if you don't like doing a certain thing, like writing investor updates, it means that you should probably have somebody else do it because clearly you're not a reliable person on this specific type of task. I, I tell my team this all the time when they ask me, okay, Sam, we need you to do X, Y, or Z. I say, look, I can do it once, but you cannot rely on me to do this because I'm going to find this …

AI assessment note: “get rid of your to-do list and put all of your action items on your calendar”

Q didn't have a chance to really dive in, but at least from 2019 to midway through 2021, When I look at the distribution of time, obviously things vacillate, but by and large, the two biggest buckets look to be network and then information processing. Can you talk about what those actually mean in practice? Like, what you're actually doing in those buckets and why they're worthy of that much time?

A Yeah, network is a tricky one because it's, it's in many ways a catch-all for interpersonal engagements that don't have a specific agenda. So, like, I met with a founder this morning, and we were just talking about industry stuff. I might be able to connect him with a couple other people who are looking for their next roles, but there's no specific agenda there. Um, a lot of those, if I was to retroactively update this, which would just be way too much effort, but if I was to retroactively do this, it might, it might turn out 20% of those are actually recruited in retrospect, because they ended up joining, or You know, 15% ended up being investor relations, because in retrospect, I now know that that person became a levels investor. And so it's sort of a, an ambiguous bucket of no real intent.

AI assessment note: “network is a tricky one because it's, it's in many ways a catch-all”

Q work. But also I think we were lucky in a lot of ways. Um, when you think about finding kind of like Your version of Tyler Dank within Beehive in the early days, how did you try to find those people? And even if you like, think about who are your, uh, few best early employees, what are kind of the, like the, the patterns you identify in those people?

A Yeah, I'd say there's a few things. One, like me and my two co-founders are all technical. So our core founding team were three engineers who you kind of have to like, same way you would hire in terms of priority and like what needs to get done today. The first thing you need to do is like build the actual product. And the fact that we didn't like bring on people who might be good at marketing and partnerships in the future, but like the zero to one is nothing but 12 months of building. So me and my two co-founders were heads down coding for the first 12 months to build the one and the MVP of the product. Um, I think in terms of like having an ownership mentality, I think you kind of hit it on the head in terms of like the contract to hire something I'm a huge fan of. I'd say probably about a dozen of our hires now that are full time started on contract. Doing some sort of work for us. Um, but with, like, I think it de-risks entirely, right? You get to see exactly how they work. You get to see how they communicate in Slack, how they respond to feedback, and what they would be before you actually go through the process of offering a full-time job. Um, so we've done that with a ton of hires. And then also, like, equity is kind of like the startup, like, golden nugget that I think everyone talks about. Um, that's, like, what really does turn employees into owners, quite literally.…

AI assessment note: “about a dozen of our hires now that are full time started on contract”

Q What were the other ones, by the way? What were the seven other businesses?

A Sure. Uh, so I did an e-commerce store where we, like, put your dog's face all over these pajamas, and that was called Pups and PJs, and that was just, like, did not work for Facebook ads, and I did not know what I was doing. Um, another one was a social media app called Gaggle, and it just died because of the pandemic, uh, because it was, like, you know, we were using college campuses to market it. It barely launched two months in. The pandemic hits, everything closes, and I can't market it anymore, and I need to give up. Um, I've done, like, a fintech app that just failed. Um, I just, I've tried everything I could think of, and it was always, like, the average lifespan was always eight months, right? So, like, I, I'm, I'm, like, even today in my business, we find these things that are, like, produce hyper-sized outcomes, because we're willing to try everything, and as soon as it feels like this is not going to work, or it's too hard, we move on to the next thing.

AI assessment note: “an e-commerce store where we, like, put your dog's face all over these pajamas”

Q Are you a solo founder by choice? Like, do you prefer being a solo founder and what do you view as the pros and cons of doing this whole journey by yourself on your own?

A I think the biggest con is, like, sometimes you feel like you're insane because, like, nobody's gonna get you, right? Uh, it's a lot easier to be a co-founder. Just, that's a very, like, point blank accurate statement, I think, for everyone that's done this solo that we'll agree with. Um, I think the biggest benefit is I get to do whatever I want, right? And I don't have to argue with somebody about it. But it was also, like, twice as hard. And I mean, I remember, like, end of last year, like, I almost, like, broke down. I was just, like, I was packing stuff at the warehouse because we did, like, too much, too many sales. We were sold out for two months. Um, this year we've actually been sold out until, like, today we did a restock today.

AI assessment note: “I think the biggest con is... I think the biggest benefit is”

Q power in starting something, you know, operating it as a different, different sort of animal, which I think is part of the question here, which is, do you have to, do you, can you sell it? Do you, can you sell entrepreneur it? Do you find other people to run it? Like there's all these other questions, but there is a distinction between getting that thing going versus operating it.

A Yeah. And I think the biggest thing is just realizing there is no right or wrong choice here. For the longest time I was in this mental loop of there is There was one definition of success in entrepreneurship, even though it sounds so ridiculous and irrational to say, like, my subconscious guided me to make decisions based on this idea that I would not be a successful entrepreneur unless I ran my business forever. I stayed in the CEO role forever. I took my business public, and anything short of that would not be a success. And I, I think just to use the example of Pieter Levels again, like, There's a lot of hard stuff about him being a solopreneur. Like, he had posted, or he had tweeted that he's started a bunch of business now, and his hit rate's five percent. So like, it takes a ton of at-bats, and it's exhausting. This guy's coding all of his apps. But on the other side of it, it's like, I think this deserves airtime, because I think if people just have this perception that Elon, this incredible guy who owns Twitter, and Tesla, and SpaceX, is The North Star for everyone. It's not realistic, and unfortunately, I think it'll disappoint people when they realize that their body's at odds with kind of that dream in their head.

AI assessment note: “realizing there is no right or wrong choice here. For the longest time I”

Q I feel like, you know, every, I feel like every good deal as it relates to laundromats, Car washes and self storage have been sucked up from the planet. So first of all, do you think we're in ending five or six, or is that a wrong take? And what are you attracted to right now? And what do you want to stay from away from as much as possible?

A It's a really good question. Well, I think we're in the first part of a recession. That'll probably be a double-dip recession and we'll actually see inflation come back up again. That's my assertion. Um, which means that I think Businesses are still too expensive in the private markets because, meaning these small businesses, because they have not had the public market flush that a lot of the publics have just had. They haven't seen, had to, you know, go out on their earnings calls and start to tell people that they're going to miss expectations. And so the, the private markets typically follow the public markets. So we haven't had our full public markets pullback, which means we, we definitely haven't had our full private market pullback. There's good deals all around always. But I am very thoughtful about the valuation I'm buying businesses at. So I think you're right. I think we might be in more like inning seven or eight, and inning eight or nine is coming over like this next couple year period where it's going to be really gnarly out there. I think it'll be really gnarly, and a lot of people will get into a lot of trouble, which is super sad, and then during that period there'll be a lot of businesses that, um, It will come back full circle basically. So now is the time to learn. I'm not sure now is the time to allocate immediately. Um, so, so that now the ones that I don'…

AI assessment note: “I think you're right. I think we might be in more like inning seven or eight”

Q clubs. I also think there's an interesting world to think about of like, is there a way to almost do an honor system or a system where people can pay and it dispenses It unlocks the clubs and balls for you where you don't even need someone there at all times because also mini golf has like set holes where do you really need maintenance on it during the day?

A Yeah, I agree with that. I think the reason why it's probably 300 K does, I mean, I would assume that they have somebody that operates it. Like you don't want to get the call when little Sally like wax her ball across the, you know, whatever pond. And so that's gonna, that's gonna cost like a hundred K probably to have somebody who You can inherently trust who will handle everything. Like, do not call me. I am on your do not disturb list, except, you know, when we talk strategy. And so usually that's like hundred, 150 K for like my businesses. Definitely. You could get them for cheaper, but I kind of prefer good to super cheap on that. And then payroll is probably just things like plumbers and electricians and like these sort of one-off staff, like, you know, maintenance for the website, Google ads, that kind of stuff.

AI assessment note: “I would assume that they have somebody that operates it”

Q Well, it's going to be the morning goo. Obviously, but, but so even for say peachy babies is say the business is doing ten million dollars a year. Let's just say it's 70% margins on this, right? So they're doing seven million dollars a year in profit. How do you think about what you'd pay for this business?

A Yeah. Well, so, and a couple of things. So the way that I got to the revenue numbers were basically each order size. She said publicly, I have to do a hundred to 300 individual batches or, or whatever these are called boxes of these. And so then I did that by the number of slimes she drops each week, which you can also see that you give me the 200 K number. So I think we're probably pretty close on that. I mean, for these types of businesses, I'm cheap. I like to buy businesses at anywhere from two to six X. I really try for the two to three X, but I typically buy boring businesses that don't have a lot of profit. Excuse me. Yeah. But this has a lot of growth trajectory. So I guess it just depends. You know, if this young woman is still loving doing this, then you're probably going to have a hard time getting it for two to three X. But my bet is like, could you imagine she's been doing this since 2016. Could you imagine hand doing slimes every single day for like weeks? She's gotta be like

AI assessment note: “I like to buy businesses at anywhere from two to six X.”

Q and so I think people create this association, like, how do you build a business when that is the relationship? Because for big creators that are making most of the money, why don't they just hire their teams to do this if they have enough money? And for the long tail, how are these people making enough money to power a business? Clearly, you've been able to figure that out.

A Yeah, I mean, you know, even when I talk to a potential creator to get on the platform, a lot of them will be like, oh, I got, like, It's 300,000 followers on Twitter. And I'm like, that's great. I'm like, that doesn't necessarily translate into an awesome business, right? Like not all followers are critical and what that equation is, nobody really knows, right? What we found is you can have like 5000 people following you on whatever platform you want, or just frankly have their email and you can build a six figure business on the platform, right? So people, I think all this, it's a, it's a really good point you made. Like people kind of get lost in the race of you got to increase your follower count. It's like, What are the actual, of your followers, of your audience, what is, who actually cares about what you're putting out there, and who would actually pay for what you're putting out there, that enables you to build a life around that. And I just think YouTube and all these places sometimes give you false positives, that people, again, might find you interesting or entertainment-y.

AI assessment note: “you can have like 5000 people following you... and you can build a six figure business”

Q autonomy and freedom to build how you choose. And then also just the decision to sell, you know, things inevitably or likely will change when you sell a business. And so people often ask the question of like, when is the right time? How did you know is the right time to sell Vetteri? And what is your general mental model for when is the right time to sell businesses?

A Yeah, I mean, listen, I can tell you about the experience I had at Vetteri. Uh, It was either, you know, we need more capital to skip, keep scaling the business. This was not a, Hey, let's like, let's, let's like, you know, let's slow down revenues. Let's get the profitability. Let's just like, this was a land grab. Basically we were launching in. 18 cities in the first 24 months. It was a marketplace model. Marketplaces generally do better when there's supply demand that has a lot of liquidity or transactions across the platform. So basically we were trying to increase liquidity as fast as possible. Think like Uber type scale. You really want to get there fast. Get everybody using it. And then you basically want to draw prices. You want to make it, it'll continue to basically induce demand on both sides. And then, um, and then basically it scales. So it's, it's, it's a land grab business. It was, you know, so we knew that from the start, uh, it was either series B raised the capital, tons of like, you know, blocking rights on M and a tons of board seats, like going down that route, which is, we had a, you know, a fairly large series B like term sheet, or it was like, okay, we have a chance to sell the business to a really Big strategic, and it, it could be time to reset. And I felt like in my time as a career, like I felt like at that point, I didn't want to spend the next 10 …

AI assessment note: “I didn't want to spend the next 10 years in the recruiting marketplace business.”

Q business? And you can take that question however you want. And also how do you not get behind when my visual of you running your business is like, you've been put on like the world's Fastest, strongest Bronco, and you're holding on to the reins, just trying not to get whipped off of the thing. Like, how do you stay on top of the business when it's moving so fast?

A I mean, number one thing, which sounds so obvious, but people don't do it, is focus, right? And, you know, one of my favorite lines is, great companies die from indigestion, not starvation. They take on too much. They say yes to too many things and they forget what their core business is. And I think one of the reasons to be clear why built works is number one, you have to have the right product market fit, right? Does your product actually solve a problem at scale where there's enough people who care enough about the problem you're solving, right? To want it. Two, and by the way, investors tend to be pretty good at asking that question today. Two is, does it have good unit economics to make it sustainable, right? Where you're not relying on hoping that if this works, then you can make money on that. And you know, those businesses are very hard to scale, right?

AI assessment note: “number one thing, which sounds so obvious, but people don't do it, is focus”

Q right way so that their kids aren't entitled? And you've, you've spoken publicly, right? About the fact that, you know, And you, you just, you come from background, you have a family now where you have so much privilege, you have so much opportunity. How did your parents parent you such that you weren't complacent when you, you didn't have to be doing what you're doing right now with Bill?

A I mean, it's funny, right? Like, I've shared this story, I think, with you over drinks, but You know, so I guess the, the hustle, if you will, really started at like 10, 11 when, you know, here I am getting into middle school and we still had this like immigrant Indian culture where, you know, anything for education, it didn't matter if they had money or not, they figured it out. But anything beyond that, like, good luck. Good luck. Right. And so I remember I was, uh, I was almost 11 years old and I was in middle school and I went to a small school and I really, really wanted to get on the basketball team. I thought like, that is how I'm going to be cool. I'm going to get on the basketball team and meet people. And that's the game. And I like, I thought to myself, if I could just show the team that I could dunk them, I'm a skinny little Indian, 11 year old, you know, and I was like, if I could just dunk the ball. Meanwhile, I'm like five, five at the time, you know, then they have to put me on the team. So I saw a TV ad. I remember for these things called jump souls and they were like plyometric work.

AI assessment note: “anything for education, it didn't matter if they had money or not... anything beyond that, like, good luck”

Q Ankur Jain is Silicon Valley's rising power broker. And then like, you ended up, uh, winning some award that was like the most connected 21 year old in the world. All kidding aside, like, how, what are specific things that you've done? Like, or just like, what is your always on mentality for just be having kind of the ear of some of the most powerful people in the world?

A I know it sounds so silly, but I love to learn. And I'm so interested in different problem spaces. Like I have, I'm that nerdy kid who spent the last, like last weekend, I spent six hours using chat GPT to learn about DNA computing through chat GPT and how it compares to artificial intelligence. And I'm just like a weird nerd and I love this type of stuff. Right. And so the irony is like, My inherent curiosity to learn about this stuff has led me to meet a lot of these interesting people. And I think it's just the fact that we, they see me genuinely sharing and something they're passionate about on top of the fact that I then have a platform for them to plug into that allows me to support their work. Right. And it's like with you, with morning brew, like You get to learn about the coolest things every single day, but you also have a platform for folks like me to get support the work I'm doing by talking with you, right? And I think that combination has just been an incredible way that I've gotten a chance to meet some of the most incredibly intelligent and smart folks like yourself through my business.

AI assessment note: “My inherent curiosity to learn about this stuff has led me to meet”

Q But how do you value that business? Going back to your point, like, how do you value this thing that doesn't have deposits anymore?

A I don't think, I think they get, they, you know, People get to keep their jobs and, and maybe some comp packages or whatever, like nobody makes any, like the shareholders are zero or near zero. Um, or like you just buy it for zero and then some shareholders will sue and they'll get settled. But like, I mean, that's like, you know, Bear Stearns was bought out for two dollars. Merrill Lynch, I think was given, right? Bank of America was like, eh, you better just give this to me because I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take it otherwise. So, and that's like the crazy thing that it's kind of a funny, you know, financial institutions don't, They don't really make anything, you know, and so, and so they rely on trust and relationships and credibility and all these different things, and it is pretty sad when you zoom out. It's just kind of like how everyone turned on them, and even like as someone who kind of semi did that, right, like we took out what we could. It's, the challenging thing is it has nothing to do with them from my perspective. It's like, again, everyone else. It's just like one of these classic panicky situations where you're like, well, I don't want to be the person left holding the bag. Like, I don't want to be the, the boy scout here that Get screwed over by other, other people panicking, and so it just ended up being this situation, and it's just sad that it, that it …

AI assessment note: “the shareholders are zero or near zero. Um, or like you just buy it for zero”

Q Yeah. How old were you when you started? Do you remember the exact age?

A Well, here's a funny story. So the name Ampush, you know this, but the audience might not know this. It's, it's the first two letters of the founder's last name. So Chris Amos, Jesse Poogee, Nick Shaw, and our first company, we started sophomore year of college. We were super douchey and it was called Amos Poogee and Shaw Inc. It was like, and it was our t-shirt business. And You know, one day we were looking at the forms for it and Chris, I think came up with it. Chris looked at it and he goes, man, that spells ampush. And they're like, immediately we jump on Google. Like, is that domain available? Uh, and it was available. So we've owned the domain and I've kind of used that name for various things since 2004.

AI assessment note: “our first company, we started sophomore year of college.”